Latest news with #Wallace&Gromit
Engadget
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Aardman's Pokémon show is a delightful-looking romp that follows Sirfetch'd and Pichu
We knew that Aardman, the animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit , was prepping a Pokémon show , but now we have some juicy details and actual footage. Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch'd and Pichu , as the name suggests, follows the sword-wielding Sirfetch'd and the baby pre-evolution of Pikachu. It looks extremely charming, as one would expect from Aardman. The trailer is on the shorter side, but shows the dynamic duo getting involved in some cutesy shenanigans as an oblivious Wooloo relaxes in a field. It makes sense that the footage would highlight a sheep-inspired Pokémon, given that this studio also made Shaun the Sheep . The show takes place in the Galar region, which is the UK-inspired land first introduced in Pokémon Sword & Shield . Aardman is a British studio, so this is a nice match. The program looks to focus entirely on pocket monsters, and not humans. This contrasts with the Netflix hit Pokémon Concierge , which follows a human protagonist . Now for some bad news. Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch'd and Pichu isn't coming until 2027 and there's no streaming platform attached just yet. The trailer dropped during today's Pokémon Presents livestream which also gave us footage of the second batch of Pokémon Concierge episodes and a full hour of Pikachu DJing for some reason.
Scottish Sun
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Ultimate UK guide to everything you can do for FREE in the school summer holidays… from tennis lessons to cinema tickets
Huge McDonald's, Harry Potter and cinema freebies await to ensure you and your family have the best summer ever - for nothing! HOL YEAH! Ultimate UK guide to everything you can do for FREE in the school summer holidays… from tennis lessons to cinema tickets THE summer school holidays are nearly here but keeping the kids entertained can be a challenge - and expensive. A new study found parents spend as much as £1,000 a week on their children during the six-week break but there is a wealth of free family activities across the country that promise a brilliant summer without breaking the bank. 4 Channel your inner Andy Murray with The Lawn Tennis Association's free lessons Credit: Alamy From sport classes to screenings and festivals, there are hundreds of free opportunities to try. Here's our pick of the best... 1. Free government-funded clubs The Government's Holiday Activities Fund (HAF) provides for completely free holiday clubs across the UK, run by local authorities. The clubs are targeted at children who have ever been eligible for free school meals in their schools, but there is discretion for 15% of the places to go to other children who would benefit. Councils are expected to provide a minimum of 16 days of provision, and you may need a code or letter from your child's school to get a place. Check online or ask your child's teacher if you think you may be eligible. 2. Tennis lessons for beginners Get the kids healthy and into a new sport with free tennis sessions. Barclays is sponsoring free group tennis sessions that can be booked on the Lawn Tennis Association website while you'll find more free sessions at Tennis For Free. 3. Art and sculpture trails Track down painted rabbits in Ipswich or colourful guitars in Manchester with a Wild in Art trail. These public displays of large-scale sculptures come with apps and maps so you can spend the day finding them all. Check out the Wild in Art website to find one near you. 4. Outdoor cinema pop-ups Go to the cinema for free with pop-up screenings of popular movies. Everyman is hosting outdoor screens in Kings Cross and Watford while Screen on the Green runs a similar outdoor experience in the middle of Newcastle. There is no one website that details all free screenings so the best place to look is local Facebook and council sites. 5. Fun in the forest Forestry England runs free trails (some with paid-for activity packs), as well as summer activities in forests up and down the country. Download a Wallace & Gromit themed walking trail or find one of their free 'disc golf' courses at six forest sites including Hamsterley in County Durham or Salcey in the East Midlands. You can pay to hire special discs, buy your own set to play for free, or get started using a frisbee you've got at home and buy a proper set if you get hooked. Get a Blue Peter badge & meet Bluey... one mum's top tips for a great value summer Lavania Oluban has recently published a journal for families to record their days out, called The Amazing Adventures of Me. Here, the Birmingham-based mum and teacher shares her top tips for making the summer holidays great fun and, importantly, great value. Plan ahead Start with your diary, Lavania says. Ask the children what big days out they want to do. Put those in first, and then fit cheaper events around them. 'You know six weeks is coming up. It's a lot of time to fill, so plan ahead.' Look for deals and vouchers Whether its Merlin tickets with Sun Club, or 2 for 1 days out if you travel by National Rail, there are plenty of deals available to take down the cost of days out, Lavania says, so always search for a discount. One top tip she has is to get your children applying for a Blue Peter badge. There are lots of ways to get one of these by meeting specific criteria and each one gives free child entry at lots of different attractions. 'The badge arrives in the post and you've got time for summer if you apply now,' she says. 'I keep my son's in the glovebox in the car so we can use it at any time.' Scrutinise every noticeboard Local days out are often advertised on physical noticeboards, so make a habit of reading them whenever you walk past, Lavania says. Whether it's an animal sanctuary with an open day, or a local county show where your children can enter a baking competition, all these days out are free or very cheap. 'Take photos of interesting possibilities on your phone when you see them,' she suggests. Hit up the shopping centre The summer months are quieter for shopping malls, so they often increase footfall by offering free children's activities. 'They will have days when a mascot like Bluey is there,' she says. 'Or a free outdoor trail'. You can check the website of your local centre to see what is going on. Pick your own A trip to the strawberry picking farm can be fun and provide you with food for the week. 'Lots of them have fun activities like Maize Mazes too and they aren't expensive,' Lavania says. If you don't know of farms near you try the for a list, and always check first whether there is fruit ready to pick before visiting. 6. Library reading challenges and games Get the children reading with the free challenge run by the Reading Agency and available at most UK libraries. Librarians will issue your children with a collector folder, and they can earn stickers and rewards for reading books, while they may also run other free activities. More details available here. 7. Local museum craft days London and other national museums are often free to enter and run free or extremely cheap craft days for children in the summer holidays, many of which you can book in advance online. My dream pool was £40,000 so I DIYd my own 18ft version in February all for this summer heatwave - it's saved me £37,000 As well as the big free museums, check out smaller local galleries and follow them on Instagram to see what they're offering, for example the National Archives in Kew, which runs a Time Travellers club with bookable sessions is free to visit with a small charge for its craft activities, while the Science & Industry Museum in Manchester offers bookable exhibitions. Which Museum is the best source for free galleries, shows and exhibitions near you. 4 Send your kids off on a treasure-hunting adventure with the Geocaching app Credit: Alamy 8. Geocaching Make a walk more exciting with the free geocaching app, which encourages you to find small 'caches' containing plastic toys and other tokens and leave some for others. Just download the app from and find caches near you. 9. Festivals and open days Expensive festivals can take a huge bite out of your budget, but there are free local events in many areas of the country. Check out the Eventbrite website for free options near you. Setting the filters for free family events will let you see what's going on in your area and allow you to apply for free tickets. 10. In-store workshops Many companies offer free workshops for kids to tempt you in during the holidays. Try your local Pets at Home for free pet owner classes with a certificate or sign up for Apple Camp on the tech company's website for free movie-making classes. Other companies to check for free kids' workshops include Hobbycraft, the Lego Store and Hamleys. 4 Head down to the farm and meet the animals with free visits near you Credit: Getty 11. Farm visits Many city farms are free to visit year-round while others hold bookable open days where children can feed and pet animals and learn about their care. Check your local websites for details or for free farms near you or try animal sanctuaries such as the Sidmouth Donkey Sanctuary, which is also free. 12. Get girls moving Nuffield Health offers free girls fitness classes run by expert instructors. You can book at if you have a Nuffield gym near you. 'My son wants to go to Harry Potter World... apart from that it's all about free days out' Natalie Ormond, 43, plans the summer holidays carefully to ensure she can get through the six weeks with her sons with her finances intact. 'I definitely do look for a lot of freebie things because obviously it's a long time and all of the paid-for things, like bowling and days out and stuff, add up if you're doing that every day,' says the Leeds-based mum-of-two. Natalie, who runs a children's gift business called Smallkind, says most deals and discounts dry up in the summer holidays, so she searches hard for free activities for sons Jesse, 11, and Noah, 8. 'We've got into geocaching which is free and lots of fun as it takes you very random places, or we'll have a day with a theme and a trail,' she says. 'So, once it was spotting owls on buildings, and that definitely gives the boys something to concentrate on while we're out and about. 'We do things like library tours - four libraries in a day with a picnic and walk in between them, and then we rate the libraries! Or we do the same with bookshops if the kids have any book tokens to spend.' Ormond, who is married to lawyer Owen, says that she's got pickier over the days out she will spend on, because she is so often disappointed. 'I think when the boys were younger, sometimes I was so desperate for somewhere to go that I ended up spending quite a lot of money. Now, if I'm going to spend a lot of money on a day out, I want to know that it's a good place. 'So, I've got a lot more selective. We've sort said to the boys for this year, they can give us a couple of ideas each of places that they'd like to go, and we'll try and do that. So, my oldest really wants to go to Harry Potter World and the younger one to a theme park – but mostly it will be free days out.' 13. Get up high Visiting London? Taking a trip up the Shard or on the London Eye will cost you dear but there are several viewing platforms that allow you to see the city for nothing at all. Horizon 22 is the highest viewing platform you can visit for free, and you can book in advance at Horizon 22 or get walk up tickets on the day. Other options include the Sky Garden and the Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate, all of which are bookable in advance. 14. Play football with McDonald's McDonald's is offering free football coaching for 5 to 11-year-olds this summer. Look online to find a session near you and to sign up for sessions and find out about free football festivals at here. 4 Potter mad? Take part in the free trail around Edinburgh Credit: THEPOTTERTRAIL 15. Join a walking tour Visiting a new city? Check out free walking tours to make the most of it with older children. A lot of cities offer these tours with an expert guide in exchange for a donation. For example, check out this free Harry Potter tour in Edinburgh. Make sure you book in advance and – in this case – make sure your children bring a wand, or something similar to 'swish and flick'. 16. Visit a splash parks or a lido If the weather warms up, a trip to a free splashpark or lido could be just the ticket. Free lidos include Swansea's Blackpill Park, while Shoalstone in Devon has a free seawater pool. Free splashpads include Splashlands in Welwyn Garden City, while many city council website have details of local offerings.
Sydney Morning Herald
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
From a fun idea at 16, now Amelia Dimoldenberg has millions of fans worldwide
This story is part of the July 6 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. Amelia Dimoldenberg has just got back from a hard-earned break in Brazil. 'Most places I go now on holiday I'll get recognised by different people, which is kind of amazing,' says the born-and-bred Londoner. 'My parents always think it's so crazy that people come up to me and ask me for photos.' The trajectory of Dimoldenberg's career is, indeed, crazy. It's now more than 10 years since she launched Chicken Shop Date, the wildly popular YouTube series in which she interviews A-list actors and pop icons in fast-food chicken shops. In fact, nowadays she is often more famous than the people she's grilling over nuggets, thanks in part to her other gig – being flown around the world to deploy her blunt interviewing style on the red carpet. Think of her as a sort of quirky, more socially awkward Joan Rivers. When we meet, she has recently hosted red-carpet interviews at the Oscars, the Brits and Saturday Night Live 's 50th anniversary event in New York, where she rubbed shoulders with everyone from Kristen Wiig to Bad Bunny. 'It was just an amazing experience for so many of my comedy heroes to come up to me and be like, 'I'm such a fan of your show,' ' she says of the Saturday Night Live gig. The 31-year-old is squeezing our interview into a tight work schedule. 'I set myself up in … I don't want to say in prison because it's not prison, but I'm in some kind of cage of my own making,' she says, sipping tea and dressed down in jeans and a Wallace & Gromit T-shirt ('I love Wallace & Gromit 's awkward charm,' she explains). 'I'm just always working a million miles an hour, but there are so many things I want to do.' It all started with Chicken Shop Date. Her idea to interview UK rappers in a date scenario initially began as a column in a youth club magazine called The Cut when she was 16. From there it morphed into short videos shot in harshly lit fried-chicken shops while she was also studying fashion journalism. In 2014 her first on-screen interview was with the rapper Ghetts in a branch of Chicken Cottage. Since then, her dates have become more starry: Cher, Jennifer Lawrence, Harris Dickinson, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish. Her 2022 date with Louis Theroux has more than 12 million views; American rapper Jack Harlow has pulled in over 19 million. To have an original idea as a teenager (and not even a media nepo-baby teenager) and then pull it off so spectacularly is astonishing. 'I've always believed in the idea, I've always thought it's going to be great. It was just a matter of getting people to watch it,' says the woman now living the Gen Z dream of turning a YouTube channel into both fame and a full-time, highly lucrative career. MrBeast, the world's most popular YouTuber, for instance, reportedly earned about $US1.1 billion ($1.7 billion) last year. Dimoldenberg may not be in that league but her annual social media income is estimated at £4 million ($8.36 million), thanks in part to the lucrative advertising lured in by the 3.1 million followers she has on YouTube, four million on TikTok and 2.6 million on Instagram. The show's recipe, tweaked and honed over the years, is carefully balanced: awkward tone, unexpected questions ('If you were an ice-cream cone, would you rather be licked or bitten?' she asked a pink-cheeked Eilish) and a ruthless edit down to about eight minutes. Her sister, Zoe, who is 18 months younger, is sent the edited version to give feedback. 'She doesn't like to indulge me,' Dimoldenberg says. 'There'll be bits where I'll be like, 'Oh, I love it,' because the guest is complimenting me loads. She's like, 'It's unnecessary, you can take that out.' ' Zoe was on the Brazil holiday too, and the pair are close. 'We're kind of twin vibe because we have the same friends, we hang out socially, we work together, we used to live together – but now we don't because we were too co-dependent,' adds Dimoldenberg, who currently lives alone in east London. 'I'm very lucky to have someone who is so similar to me.' Dimoldenberg grew up in central London with her mum, Linda, a retired librarian, and dad, Paul, who is a Labour councillor at Westminster City Council. Initially, being funny was just a way to make friends – at her girls-only state school she cottoned on that making people laugh would get her on the invite list. Years later, she partly credits her single-sex education for her self-confidence: 'When you're at a girls' school, you are not competing with male voices. I hung out with guys as a young person and they dictate the dynamic of the friendship group.' In Andrew Garfield's chicken shop date he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?' We get on to her hottest dates. In 2023, she met Cher in a chicken shop in Paris (2.3 million YouTube views). What was the legend like off camera? 'Amazing, so nice, talking to all the crew. Literally, we couldn't get her out of the shop. She was chatting to everyone.' Jennifer Lawrence (9.2 million views) was one of her favourites. 'It's amazing when they're going toe-to-toe for you, and they're funny and charming,' Dimoldenberg says. 'She literally did one piece of press [promoting a rom-com] in the UK and it was my show.' As an interview subject, Dimoldenberg is polite and engaged but has a slight frostiness that I fail to melt. She seems unimpressed when I ask about Andrew Garfield, for instance, the Spider-Man actor with whom she's had famously fizzing chemistry on the red carpet, first at British GQ 's Men of the Year party in 2022 and at the 2023 Golden Globes. Cue fans clamouring for real-life romance to blossom. In Garfield's chicken shop date last year (11 minutes of nonstop flirting that's had 11 million views), he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?' What's the latest on their flirtationship, then? 'We're friends. I saw him at the Oscars and he's a great guy, a great person,' she says, professional hat firmly on, although she admits: 'We've got such a great dynamic.' She relishes it when her chicken shop encounters blur the boundaries between what's real and what's not. Matty Healy, the lead singer of UK band the 1975 and Taylor Swift's one-time bad-boy squeeze, tried to kiss Dimoldenberg at the end of their YouTube date in 2022 (5.9 million views). She ended up pecking the musician's forehead instead. 'He was definitely down to kiss me,' she says, grinning. Despite her numerous chicken shop dates, Dimoldenberg is happily single. 'I've got my whole life to be settling down with someone. My life is very fast-paced. I'm going travelling, I'm working away, I'm doing all these different things. I feel like I'm really glad to be single at this moment.' Whenever he comes along, her ideal man is 'kind, thoughtful, intelligent', has self-confidence and, obviously, a solid sense of humour. Does Chicken Shop Date get in the way of real-life romance? 'I feel like it depends. Obviously, the guys who I'm dating need to be confident in themselves for many different reasons. I also just feel like maybe my work gets in the way of dating more broadly. I definitely want to create space in my life to meet someone but, at the same time, I don't want it to be the focus of everything.' Right now, her focus is clearly her career. She is developing a romantic comedy film in which she'll take on the lead role ('It's me playing myself'), and another project, a drama series that Dimoldenberg wrote, is in the early development stage at the BBC. She has other acting ambitions too: 'Playing versions of myself, or in comedic roles. I don't necessarily, at this point, have an ambition to do a dramatic reading of Shakespeare.' Going into auditions has forced her inner monologue to shift from telling herself that she definitely won't get the role to telling herself that she will get it. 'Saying I'm not going to get something is a negative mindset and I feel like often the voice in my head is so negative and critical,' she says. 'It's a good exercise to start talking to yourself positively.' Dimoldenberg acknowledges that it's not easy being on the red carpet alongside mostly pin-thin women. 'The self-confidence thing, in terms of body image, is hard when you're having to have your photo taken, and you're literally in a line-up next to professional models, for example,' she says. Yet she vows never to have cosmetic surgery, which she believes has become normalised: 'That'd be very revolutionary of me, a celebrity, to have no surgery.' Due to her series' near-blanket exposure over social media, endless celebrities are lining up to be her guests, but Dimoldenberg is discerning: 'Just because you're famous, you're not going to get an interview.' She knows who she wants to lure, though: Harry Styles, Beyoncé, Timothée Chalamet, Kendrick Lamar, the UK rapper Giggs and Philomena Cunk (aka the comedian Diane Morgan). Loading Politicians of any stripe or level of global fame need not apply, however. At one point, Joe Biden's team reportedly reached out, as the Americans would say, but it came to nothing. 'The politics of my show is that we have a diverse range of people who are from different backgrounds and their views I appreciate,' the presenter says. 'I'm being political in the sense of the people I choose to not have on the show.' Acting, writing, developing and chicken shop dating aside, Dimoldenberg also wants to one day launch her own youth academy to help people from varied backgrounds forge careers in creative industries. 'I hope my legacy is that I'm able to open doors or create confidence in young people and level the playing field in some way.' Her advice to up-and-comers? Crack on with your bright idea sharpish. 'I always tell them, go and do the thing.'
The Age
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
From a fun idea at 16, now Amelia Dimoldenberg has millions of fans worldwide
This story is part of the July 6 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. Amelia Dimoldenberg has just got back from a hard-earned break in Brazil. 'Most places I go now on holiday I'll get recognised by different people, which is kind of amazing,' says the born-and-bred Londoner. 'My parents always think it's so crazy that people come up to me and ask me for photos.' The trajectory of Dimoldenberg's career is, indeed, crazy. It's now more than 10 years since she launched Chicken Shop Date, the wildly popular YouTube series in which she interviews A-list actors and pop icons in fast-food chicken shops. In fact, nowadays she is often more famous than the people she's grilling over nuggets, thanks in part to her other gig – being flown around the world to deploy her blunt interviewing style on the red carpet. Think of her as a sort of quirky, more socially awkward Joan Rivers. When we meet, she has recently hosted red-carpet interviews at the Oscars, the Brits and Saturday Night Live 's 50th anniversary event in New York, where she rubbed shoulders with everyone from Kristen Wiig to Bad Bunny. 'It was just an amazing experience for so many of my comedy heroes to come up to me and be like, 'I'm such a fan of your show,' ' she says of the Saturday Night Live gig. The 31-year-old is squeezing our interview into a tight work schedule. 'I set myself up in … I don't want to say in prison because it's not prison, but I'm in some kind of cage of my own making,' she says, sipping tea and dressed down in jeans and a Wallace & Gromit T-shirt ('I love Wallace & Gromit 's awkward charm,' she explains). 'I'm just always working a million miles an hour, but there are so many things I want to do.' It all started with Chicken Shop Date. Her idea to interview UK rappers in a date scenario initially began as a column in a youth club magazine called The Cut when she was 16. From there it morphed into short videos shot in harshly lit fried-chicken shops while she was also studying fashion journalism. In 2014 her first on-screen interview was with the rapper Ghetts in a branch of Chicken Cottage. Since then, her dates have become more starry: Cher, Jennifer Lawrence, Harris Dickinson, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish. Her 2022 date with Louis Theroux has more than 12 million views; American rapper Jack Harlow has pulled in over 19 million. To have an original idea as a teenager (and not even a media nepo-baby teenager) and then pull it off so spectacularly is astonishing. 'I've always believed in the idea, I've always thought it's going to be great. It was just a matter of getting people to watch it,' says the woman now living the Gen Z dream of turning a YouTube channel into both fame and a full-time, highly lucrative career. MrBeast, the world's most popular YouTuber, for instance, reportedly earned about $US1.1 billion ($1.7 billion) last year. Dimoldenberg may not be in that league but her annual social media income is estimated at £4 million ($8.36 million), thanks in part to the lucrative advertising lured in by the 3.1 million followers she has on YouTube, four million on TikTok and 2.6 million on Instagram. The show's recipe, tweaked and honed over the years, is carefully balanced: awkward tone, unexpected questions ('If you were an ice-cream cone, would you rather be licked or bitten?' she asked a pink-cheeked Eilish) and a ruthless edit down to about eight minutes. Her sister, Zoe, who is 18 months younger, is sent the edited version to give feedback. 'She doesn't like to indulge me,' Dimoldenberg says. 'There'll be bits where I'll be like, 'Oh, I love it,' because the guest is complimenting me loads. She's like, 'It's unnecessary, you can take that out.' ' Zoe was on the Brazil holiday too, and the pair are close. 'We're kind of twin vibe because we have the same friends, we hang out socially, we work together, we used to live together – but now we don't because we were too co-dependent,' adds Dimoldenberg, who currently lives alone in east London. 'I'm very lucky to have someone who is so similar to me.' Dimoldenberg grew up in central London with her mum, Linda, a retired librarian, and dad, Paul, who is a Labour councillor at Westminster City Council. Initially, being funny was just a way to make friends – at her girls-only state school she cottoned on that making people laugh would get her on the invite list. Years later, she partly credits her single-sex education for her self-confidence: 'When you're at a girls' school, you are not competing with male voices. I hung out with guys as a young person and they dictate the dynamic of the friendship group.' In Andrew Garfield's chicken shop date he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?' We get on to her hottest dates. In 2023, she met Cher in a chicken shop in Paris (2.3 million YouTube views). What was the legend like off camera? 'Amazing, so nice, talking to all the crew. Literally, we couldn't get her out of the shop. She was chatting to everyone.' Jennifer Lawrence (9.2 million views) was one of her favourites. 'It's amazing when they're going toe-to-toe for you, and they're funny and charming,' Dimoldenberg says. 'She literally did one piece of press [promoting a rom-com] in the UK and it was my show.' As an interview subject, Dimoldenberg is polite and engaged but has a slight frostiness that I fail to melt. She seems unimpressed when I ask about Andrew Garfield, for instance, the Spider-Man actor with whom she's had famously fizzing chemistry on the red carpet, first at British GQ 's Men of the Year party in 2022 and at the 2023 Golden Globes. Cue fans clamouring for real-life romance to blossom. In Garfield's chicken shop date last year (11 minutes of nonstop flirting that's had 11 million views), he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?' What's the latest on their flirtationship, then? 'We're friends. I saw him at the Oscars and he's a great guy, a great person,' she says, professional hat firmly on, although she admits: 'We've got such a great dynamic.' She relishes it when her chicken shop encounters blur the boundaries between what's real and what's not. Matty Healy, the lead singer of UK band the 1975 and Taylor Swift's one-time bad-boy squeeze, tried to kiss Dimoldenberg at the end of their YouTube date in 2022 (5.9 million views). She ended up pecking the musician's forehead instead. 'He was definitely down to kiss me,' she says, grinning. Despite her numerous chicken shop dates, Dimoldenberg is happily single. 'I've got my whole life to be settling down with someone. My life is very fast-paced. I'm going travelling, I'm working away, I'm doing all these different things. I feel like I'm really glad to be single at this moment.' Whenever he comes along, her ideal man is 'kind, thoughtful, intelligent', has self-confidence and, obviously, a solid sense of humour. Does Chicken Shop Date get in the way of real-life romance? 'I feel like it depends. Obviously, the guys who I'm dating need to be confident in themselves for many different reasons. I also just feel like maybe my work gets in the way of dating more broadly. I definitely want to create space in my life to meet someone but, at the same time, I don't want it to be the focus of everything.' Right now, her focus is clearly her career. She is developing a romantic comedy film in which she'll take on the lead role ('It's me playing myself'), and another project, a drama series that Dimoldenberg wrote, is in the early development stage at the BBC. She has other acting ambitions too: 'Playing versions of myself, or in comedic roles. I don't necessarily, at this point, have an ambition to do a dramatic reading of Shakespeare.' Going into auditions has forced her inner monologue to shift from telling herself that she definitely won't get the role to telling herself that she will get it. 'Saying I'm not going to get something is a negative mindset and I feel like often the voice in my head is so negative and critical,' she says. 'It's a good exercise to start talking to yourself positively.' Dimoldenberg acknowledges that it's not easy being on the red carpet alongside mostly pin-thin women. 'The self-confidence thing, in terms of body image, is hard when you're having to have your photo taken, and you're literally in a line-up next to professional models, for example,' she says. Yet she vows never to have cosmetic surgery, which she believes has become normalised: 'That'd be very revolutionary of me, a celebrity, to have no surgery.' Due to her series' near-blanket exposure over social media, endless celebrities are lining up to be her guests, but Dimoldenberg is discerning: 'Just because you're famous, you're not going to get an interview.' She knows who she wants to lure, though: Harry Styles, Beyoncé, Timothée Chalamet, Kendrick Lamar, the UK rapper Giggs and Philomena Cunk (aka the comedian Diane Morgan). Loading Politicians of any stripe or level of global fame need not apply, however. At one point, Joe Biden's team reportedly reached out, as the Americans would say, but it came to nothing. 'The politics of my show is that we have a diverse range of people who are from different backgrounds and their views I appreciate,' the presenter says. 'I'm being political in the sense of the people I choose to not have on the show.' Acting, writing, developing and chicken shop dating aside, Dimoldenberg also wants to one day launch her own youth academy to help people from varied backgrounds forge careers in creative industries. 'I hope my legacy is that I'm able to open doors or create confidence in young people and level the playing field in some way.' Her advice to up-and-comers? Crack on with your bright idea sharpish. 'I always tell them, go and do the thing.'
North Wales Live
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- North Wales Live
Discover Aardman's famous duo as they touch down at Bodnant Garden this summer
Wallace & Gromit have been cherished by families worldwide since they first appeared in the 80s, captivating hearts with their whimsical adventures and timeless charm, forging an enduring legacy of love and laughter. This summer, experience Wallace & Gromit's 'All Systems Go', a brand-new, augmented reality trail from the Aardman team, at Bodnant Garden in the Conwy Valley. The dynamic duo will be helping to keep families entertained throughout the school summer holidays, all set against the stunning backdrop of the world-famous historic garden. Fans of the pair will be able to help Wallace & Gromit get their rocket ready for blast off by following the markers and completing a series of challenges along the way. Using the brand-new, free app, visitors will be able to capture photos together as they complete a whole host of challenges for all ages to enjoy. There are also plenty of surprises to find as you follow the trail down through the Old Park and through the Yew Dell, heading towards the Far End. When you arrive at Bodnant Garden, you can head over to the App Store or Google Play to download the free bilingual AR app. Simply search for 'All Systems Go', enter the location code of 1 2 3 4, and you'll find Wallace & Gromit ready to begin the adventure with you. Don't worry if you'd rather not play on a phone, there are still plenty of fun activities to discover along the way. A grand day out Summer is the perfect time for the whole family to visit Bodnant Garden and walk through the Old Park meadow. Enjoy a picnic down by the Willow maze, taking in the peaceful surroundings as you watch the birds, including new duck families with their young brood. There's no need to rush, so why not enjoy some outdoor play with a variety of activities and games in beautiful surroundings? Sitting against the backdrop of the Carneddau mountain range of Eryri (Snowdonia) the garden holds a special place in the hearts of thousands of visitors across the generations, both in the UK and globally. The garden always delights with its constantly changing display of flowers, towering trees and brightly coloured borders along with many 'wow' moments on offer throughout the season. Bodnant Garden is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm, last entry at 4.30pm. Dogs are welcome every Thursday to Sunday, between April 1 to September 30 and on short leads at all times. *Wallace & Gromit's 'All Systems Go' runs from July 19 until August 31. Normal admission prices apply to the garden and the trail itself is free.
