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Recently, whenever Peter Capaldi has been shown rough footage of himself acting in scenes, he’s done a double-take. “I’m horrified,” he says. “I go: who is that old, weird, gaunt guy with the white hair? Oh, it’s me. That’s what I’ve become. But that’s OK,” adds the 66-year-old with a shrug. “I always loved Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. Playing those villains, all those horror movie types, is great fun.”

Capaldi has certainly made a speciality out of sulphurous ne’er-do-wells with something of the night about them. On Friday, the crepuscular character actor who was more Doctor What? than Doctor Who returned to our screens in Prime Video’s twisty, time-bendy, supernatural thriller The Devil’s Hour as Gideon Shepherd, a mysterious criminal with a biblical name who may or may not be a serial killer. Meanwhile, details are scant on who or what he’s playing in the upcoming series of Black Mirror, but it’s a reasonable bet it’s a role with a whiff of the devil. Capaldi is happy with his run of malevolent characters – broadly. “I used to do voiceovers for Anchor butter. One day they said to me: ‘Could you try and sound a little less sinister?’ I thought: ‘I don’t know what’s happened, I’ve suddenly gone sinister.’ But sinister is good. I’ve always been a great fan of the sinister.”

Leaning in close over our lunchtime minestrone, eyes bulging, Scottish brogue bewitching, the Glasgow-born actor and Oscar-winning director is head-to-toe in black at a tiny table in a private members’ club in central London. Conversation turns to Criminal Record, this year’s low-key hit for Apple TV+ that is about to begin production on its second series. Capaldi plays an old-school copper with old-school values. You know, a bit of casual misogyny here, a bit of institutional racism there. All of which, naturally, rubbed up his counterpart, played by Cush Jumbo, an exemplar of “woke” modern policing. In a knotty drama developed by Capaldi’s producer wife Elaine Collins, the fact that DCI Daniel Hegarty was a barely likeable character was part of the attraction.

“Absolutely,” he affirms. “But also that he was complicated. That he wasn’t so simple to understand. We wanted to engage the audience in some sympathy for him. And understand that people are complex. He’s not black and white. But, yeah, in essence his role was to carry that darkness. That was appealing.”

Capaldi and Collins are both executive producers on Criminal Record. But he defers to his wife of 33 years – they met in 1983 on a touring theatrical production in Scotland but have long been based in north London – as “the boss, the creator”. While employed at the BBC, Collins developed Vera and Shetland – cosier police procedurals for sure. “Eventually she left, and went out on her own, and was keen to do a show that was maybe a bit harder.”

By “harder”, does he mean challenging woke sensibilities? “Well, I don’t know what woke sensibilities are. It’s trying to tell a story that’s interesting, arresting and makes people think – and is responsible. I’ve got the general picture [of what woke is]. It’s used all over the place. I don’t think half the people who use it know [what it means]. It’s just another word. This constant polarisation is not useful. It’s another tool to keep people apart.”

When I ask whether that’s what cancel culture is partly about, too, he professes confusion. “I don’t know – seriously. There have been points where there has been definite political motivation to cause [division]. To place people on the other side of the fence to each other. And it was contingent – it was more useful to the Tory party to have these wars than to try and find out what could bring people together.”

What he means is: it’s easier to foment a culture war than it is to tackle the problem of, say, social exclusion. “Yes. It’s all complicated, and simplifying it to black and white doesn’t help anyone.”

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Now in late middle age, and a grandfather of two, Capaldi admits to feeling a bit surprised at the way his career has turned out. “When I started off, I was an easygoing buffoon – a gangly youth in a Bill Forsyth gentle comedy,” he says of his breakout role opposite Burt Lancaster in the great Scottish director’s beloved Local Hero (1983). “But The Thick of It changed everything for me.”

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Armando Iannucci’s excoriating political satire, which ran for four series between 2005 and 2012, rebranded Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker: the sweary spin doctor extraordinaire, a machiavellian operative who simultaneously oozed no-f’s-given superiority and radiated all-the-f’s rage. It exposed the inner machinations of government as both farcical and toxic. But this workplace comedy now feels very much of its time. Because surely post-get-Brexit-done, post-Parytgate and post-Liz-the-lettuce, politics today is beyond satire?

“We all felt that. I’m constantly asked by the press if I would do a new one,” he says of a show that won him a Bafta in 2010. “But [under the Tories] things were just too serious. The corruption was too deep. We’d be letting them off the hook by being funny.”

Capaldi was raised in a working-class household in Glasgow and it’s not hard to divine his political sensibilities. But while he’s “glad, obviously” that the Tories lost the election, he insists that he’s “not politically engaged”. Why not? “I was forced to be politically engaged,” he answers, presumably a reference to the demands placed on him by Iannucci’s typically nuanced scripts. “I’m not interested in it. In fact I hate it. I don’t want to spend my life thinking about all this stuff. Of course I was relieved the Tories lost. But it’s not that simple, is it?” He pauses and twitches a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Sorry, I sound mournful, don’t I?”

It’s that mournful demeanour that made him find some elements of his three-series run as the Time Lord difficult. He recalls talking to his predecessor-but-one, David Tennant, before his casting was announced in August 2013. “David said: ‘Is this true, you’re going to be the Doctor? Well, let’s go have a talk.’ It might have been here actually,” says Capaldi, gesturing round this clamorous room beloved of film and telly folk. “And he said to me: ‘What will change is your visibility. You won’t be able to walk down the street without people knowing who you are.’ I was like: ‘OK, we’ll see how that goes…’”

Capaldi ultimately found having to be nice to fans all the time “a bit of a stress… My [personal] character leans more to the melancholic and cynical. The daily good-heartedness of it all is quite a leap for me. But that’s what I was paid to do. But that’s exhausting… And that’s one of the things I’m glad to have left behind: I’m not responsible for the endless cheerfulness [of] little kids.”

He’s watched Ncuti Gatwa, yet another Scottish Time Lord, as the 15th Doctor and pronounces him “fantastic. I met him and thought he was lovely.” Add in the fact that original reboot showrunner Russell T Davies is back, and that Disney – and their money – are partners on the show, and it all makes for a show that, on paper at least, should feel very different. But as a corollary of that, some viewers feel that the world’s longest-running sci-fi show, a cornerstone of British culture, has been Disney-fied. Does he agree?

“I think that the show is… whatever those who love it want it to be,” he replies, carefully. “I come from [seeing] it in 1963. So even the show, when I came into it, was different from the show I remember. And I loved the show that I remember. I loved the show that we did, but it was different.”

Can he, though, imagine being in Gatwa’s shoes, as the brand ambassador for this new Doctor Who, one with demanding American audiences (and producers) to please?

“It must be tough,” he concedes. “That’s one of the hardest things about the job. Apart from the day-to-day business of delivering those lines, and you’ve got to have lots of ideas and energy, there’s always a knock at the door at lunchtime: ‘Can you come and talk to these visitors we’ve got onset?’ ‘Can you look at these new toys?’ ‘Can you sign these things?’ ‘Can you go to this meeting with so-and-so who’s selling this in South Korea?’ There’s always a [request]. It’s a big brand. So it’s quite a demanding job. It takes its toll.”

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Capaldi also experienced the demands of geek fandom and blockbuster IP during his brief foray into the superhero world, with his role in James Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad. He found filming alongside an all-star Hollywood cast on huge sets in Atlanta, Georgia a blast; the endless promotion less so.

Still, the three-month shoot allowed him plenty of him to reconnect with his first passion: music. In the long hours in his Suicide Squad trailer, Capaldi wrote a bunch of songs that were eventually released as an album, 2021’s St Christopher.

It was a debut that was a long time coming. While at Glasgow School of Art in the early Eighties, Capaldi was in a band, The Dreamboys. “Bizarro punk” was Capaldi’s estimation at the time. Or “showbiz Bauhaus” according to their drummer Craig Ferguson, who went on to become a stand-up comic, actor and American chatshow titan (James Corden inherited his chair on The Late Late Show).

What kind of frontman was Capaldi? “I was OK,” he demurs. “I’m sure I jumped about a lot. You’d have to ask somebody else, really.”

So I do. “Oh, spectacular!” Ferguson tells me. “My girlfriend at the time was in another band and she said: ‘Your band are rubbish, but you’ve got a really good actor as the frontman.’ Peter was very charismatic – he still is – and onstage had that ineffable presence I’ve seen in a few people. Your eye goes to him. He was a star player from the word go.”

Capaldi has since completed a second album, Sweet Illusions. It’s a robustly melodic set, with Capaldi’s voice a cross between Leonard Cohen and The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. Quelle surprise, the songs have a touch of midnight, too. “All the songs hanker back to that time,” he says of early Eighties, glad-to-be-grey Glasgow. “To an eternal, dark, synthesiser, guitar-y kind of vibe. Because I’m picking up where I left off.”

The first single is out now. It’s called “Bin Night”, a lullaby that’s a tribute to his infant grandchildren, to the “ticking clock” of his own mortality and to the domestic concerns of a Muswell Hill grandpa.

“I love bin night. It’s the one night when I can control the chaos of the world. The one night when I can restore some order to the entropy. Everything goes out on bin night.”

Even if Peter Capaldi’s borough, like my neighbouring borough, only takes recycling weekly but waste is fortnightly and garden refuse God knows when?

He splutters and straightens up. “They might only take one of them. But then I’ll just take the other one back in. That’s my rules. Bin night is my rules.”

‘The Devil’s Hour’ is on Prime Video from 18 October. The single ‘Bin Night’ is out now, and the album ‘Sweet Illusion’ is released on Last Night From Glasgow in March 2025

STRICTLY Come Dancing fans are turned off after a summer of scandal.

BBC’s flagship show has been struck by poor ratings – and despite it being its 20th anniversary it appears the series has lost its sparkle.

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Bosses attempted to sweep the programme’s ‘abuse’ allegations under the dancefloor – after Graziano Di Prima was sacked over his behaviour towards Zara McDermott.

His axe came amid a five-month inquiry by BBC bosses into alleged bullying by Giovanni Pernice towards Amanda Abbington on the same series.

Despite the pair being firm fan favourites – their notable absence has been ignored.

Instead, viewers have been left without an on-screen explanation from hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman.

The show’s family-friendly persona is being protected – with stars keeping up appearances amid the storm.

That’s despite Giovanni’s best friend Anton Du Beke returning as a judge while he competes on the Italian version of the show.

Although their names have not been mentioned, a dark cloud hovers over Strictly.

That’s not because the celebs are less entertaining, or the costumes not as glamorous; Dave Arch’s band is still producing fantastic performances and the choreography remains top-notch.

The elephant in the room has cast a shadow over the series because viewers are sick to the back teeth of being lied to.

Everyone understands that slapping on a smile after hearing “lights, camera, action” is second nature to those performers.

But the shocking allegations made when we’ve been led to believe everything’s hunky dory behind the scenes has left a bitter taste.

Keen to shrug off any accusations there’s trouble in the Strictly bubble, the new celebrities have remained as tactile and friendly with their dance partners as ever.

This behaviour backfired last weekend however, when Katya Jones appeared to let slip her “real feelings” towards Wynne Evans.

She was spotted rolling her eyes at the GoCompare singer after snubbing him over a high-five – before having to bat away his wandering hands in front of the cameras.

After instant backlash online, Wynne and Katya uploaded an apology video claiming it was an “inside joke gone wrong”.

Ever since, we’ve had to put up with the pair’s cringeworthy attempt to put on a united front.

Sadly it’s not worked on the public – with Wynne favourite to be booted out this weekend.

He appears to have become collateral damage to long-suffering fans who are fed up of being lied to.

Katya’s face told a story on Strictly last weekend when her smile dropped. It’ll take an Oscar-winning performance on this Saturday’s show to convince viewers her fixed grin isn’t just for show.

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Strictly Come Dancing viewers were left divided by the high scores for opera singer Wynne Evans and his partner Katya Jones on Saturday’s episode.

In the pre-taped video before the performance the partners journeyed to the Welsh countryside in a video shown on the BBC One show.

The pair danced a bouncy quickstep to “Mr Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra, which saw the Welsh singer finished with a mayonnaise blob left on his head, and Jones cleaned it off.

Evans followed this by apologising for a “joke” that saw Jones move Evans’s hand from her waist last week.

Judge Anton Du Beke said “it’s a lovely show, when you dance”, while Motsi Mabuse called it “exquisite”.

Jones held Evans’s arm as the pair received 33 points.

However, controversy aside, many viewers were puzzled at the positive score that the pair received for what was mostly a comedy dance.

One viewer said on X/Twitter: “A 9?! For Wynne and Katya?!

A second wrote: “Not to be hyperbolic but i genuinely think Wynne’s quickstep was the worst dance ive ever watched on #Strictly…. it was absolutely awful i can’t believe it.”

A third added: “Not saying I’m dramatic, but I had to leave the room when Wynne received 9s.”

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Some did defend Evans and Jones, admitting that they enjoyed the performance. One defender enthusiastically wrote: “WHAT A GREAT QUICKSTEP FROM WYNNE !!!! THIS WAS SUCH A FUN & JOYOUS ROUTINE. I ENJOYED IT.”

Referring to the controversy, another fan said: “I feel sorry for Wynne, him and Katya have said multiple times it was an inside joke, yes I get it’s a weird joke, but people are still being mean about him on here!”

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A third added: “The hate that Wynne is getting is so disgusting to see. How do people still not understand that these comments can ruin people’s lives?! I think he seems so lovely and they have addressed it and said it meant nothing so move on.”

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The duo have been embroiled in controversy after a video went viral that showed Evans awkwardly placing his hand slowly across his professional partner’s stomach, during the 12 October episode, in which Jones removed it and placed it on her hip instead, went viral on social media.

Later, a separate clip was shared from viewers who noticed that Jones refused to give Evans a high five while stood behind the show’s co-host Claudia Winkleman. Jones turned her back on Evans and seemingly rolled her eyes at the opera singer. The pair later addressed the awkwardness as they said it had been a “joke”.

“I’m absolutely heartbroken by the things that have been written about me in the last day,” he told BBC Radio Wales on Monday (14 October).

“It’s not nice to live in that time, but basically Katya and I are really, really close and we’re really good friends, and on Saturday night we made a stupid joke.”

He explained,“It was a stupid joke that went wrong, okay, we thought it was funny. It wasn’t funny. It has been totally misinterpreted.”

Additional reporting by PA.

STRICTLY Come Dancing fans were left giggling after two competitors came out ‘looking like twins’.

Shayne Ward and Pete Wicks returned to the dancefloor tonight in order to fight for their place in the competition.

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But fans couldn’t resist poking fun at the pair after they were dressed in matching outfits and hairstyles for their routines.

As they arrived on the iconic staircase, both were wearing loose fitting grey shirts that exposed some of their chest with navy blue trousers.

To add to the similarities, both men had their long hair slicked back, and growing beards at a similar length.

Fans couldn’t quite get over how lookalike the pair were, comparing them to ‘evil twins’ out of a storybook.

“Why is shayne dressed as pete?” questioned one fan, while another joked: “Shayne Ward looks like the Poundland version of Pete Wicks tonight”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” said a third.

“Everyone loves an evil twin story,” joked a fourth.

While their costumes were very similar, unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for their scores – with Shayne rising above Pete on the leaderboard.

Pete and Jowita performed a rumba to Oasis track Don’t Look Back In Anger, but got penalised for including an illegal lift.

Craig Revel Horwood even declared they should have been disqualified for the move, but they were defended by the other three judges who let it pass.

However, it was noted in their scores, with the pair coming dangerously close to the bottom of the leaderboard with only 22 points out of a possible 40.

They now need to rely on the public vote to save them, with Dr Purnam and Paul Merson currently the stars in the danger zone.

Shayne and his pro partner Nancy Xu fares slightly better with their American Smooth to Sam Smith’s Get Here.

They earned an impressive 31 points, putting them smack in the middle of the leaderboard and hopefully safe.

Both pairs will find out their fate on the results show, which airs Sunday night on BBC One.

Strictly 2024: Week Five Scores

Here’s a look at the leaderboard after this week’s live show

• Jamie Borthwick and Michelle Tsiakkas = 39 
• Montell Douglas and Johannes Radebe = 39
• Chris McCausland and Dianne Buswell = 35
• Tasha Ghouri and Aljaž Škorjanec = 34 
• Wynne Evans and Katya Jones = 33
• Sarah Hadland and Vito Coppola = 32 
• Shayne Ward and Nancy Xu = 31
• JB Gill and Amy Dowden = 30
• Sam Quek and Nikita Kuzmin = 26
• Pete Wicks and Jowita Przystał = 22
• Dr Purnam Krishnan and Gorka Marquez = 21
• Paul Merson and Karen Hauer = 19

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The Marvel series Agatha All Along has answered a long-running music mystery by revealing that Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is in fact witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn).

In the latest episode, a series of news clippings explain Agatha’s origins by showing that she survived the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the 1937 Hindenberg disaster.

Another clipping shows a black-and-white screenshot of a blonde woman slapping Agatha. It is headlined: “Does This 1972 Surveillance Photo of Dolly Parton Show the Real Jolene?”

In a new interview with The Wrap, Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer was asked to confirm whether Agatha really is Jolene. “In the MCU, hell yeah,” he replied.

Schaeffer went on to explain that the idea for the music reference came from writer Laura Donney, after the writers’ room was given the “fun assignment” of coming up with “five low-level, nefarious things that Agatha has done in her deep past.”

Schaeffer added: “And it was one of, I remember being one of the most fun days in the room, was everybody coming in with their sort of low-level Agatha nasties. And that was Laura Donney, she was like, ‘she’s Jolene.’ And we were just like, everybody fell out. It was so funny.”

Parton’s song famously identifies Jolene only as a beauty “beyond compare” with “flaming locks of auburn hair.”

In 2022, The Independent’s Robert Webb investigated the origins of Parton’s signature hit. He found that Parton had once credited its inspiration to a young fan of her sometime collaborator Porter Wagoner. “When I used to work with Porter, we used to sit on the stage after a show and sign autographs,” Parton recalled. “One night this little redheaded girl with the prettiest eyes and the prettiest hair I had ever seen was looking up at me. She was maybe 10 or 12.” Parton asked her name: it was Jolene.

Last month, Hahn shared an insight into how the opening scenes of Agatha All Along, a spin-off from previous series WandaVision, came to include Marvel’s first female bare bum shot.

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At the end of WandaVision, Agatha was trapped in containment, but in the opening of the first episode of Agatha All Along, she wakes up back in the suburb where most of the original series took place.

She wanders out into the streets looking for answers about what’s going on – naked.

“I thought it was good to see her as stripped down, literally, as we possibly could, which spoke into her powerlessness at the present moment,” Hahn told Variety.

“[Agatha has] been stripped of all of her power at this point in the series. I mean, she really had nothing at that point, and so it became about illustrating that gap between that moment and her finding her power again.”

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Strictly Come Dancing viewers were left complaining just seconds into Saturday (19 October) night’s show, with the introductions failing to entertain those at home.

There are 12 couples remaining after Nick Knowles and Luba Mushtuk’s exit on Sunday night, making them the third pair to be eliminated from this year’s competition.

However, before the dancing even began the viewers were left baffled by the decisions surrounding the new intro to the show, which involved the fours judges dancing their way out to the show’s main tune while Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman awkwardly shuffled behind them.

Then after Daly and Winkleman had begun presenting the celebrities and their professional dance partners were introduced to the audience on the stage behind them.

People at home called the introducing “surreal” and felt that it lacked atmosphere and failed to set an atmosphere for the episode.

One person wrote: “Can we please go back to having the #Strictly theme playing when the stars are introduced? It really created the atmosphere.”

A second added: “HATE the way they don’t introduce Tess and Claude anymore with the “Live from the BBC” and Dave Arch wagging his finger… really takes away from the atmosphere.”

A third said: “We really don’t need the judges dancing, so cringe.”

A fourth person wrote: “Dear #Strictly Can we please go back to using the theme tune for the celeb intros. You’re ruining the vibe. Thank you.”

This Saturday night’s show does not have a theme so viewers can expect a wide but eclectic variety of dances, including Paul Merson dancing a Samba to Rose Royce’s “Car Wash” and Pete Wicks dancing a Rumba to Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

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This week’s dances include two Sambas and two Quicksteps, plus a couple’s choice routine for Montell Douglas and her pro partner Johannes Radebe.

Chris McCausland and Dianne Buswell will dance a Waltz to “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, while Sarah Hadland and Vito Coppola will dance a Samba to “Do It Do It Again” by Rafaella Carrà.

Want to watch Strictly Come Dancing while travelling abroad? Then you’ll need a VPN to stream this show. Discover the UK’s best VPN deals today. Viewers using a VPN need to make sure that they comply with any local regulations where they are, and also with the terms of their service provider.