Strictly Come Dancing kicked off its first live show of 2026 tonight, and fans couldn’t help but notice something.

As new hosts Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe did their thing, several viewers noted something odd.

Johannes was left at the top of the stairs doing Claudia Winkelman’s old job while Emma and Josh were downstairs by the desk.

But fans think this might be a waste of Josh’s skill set, leaving him feeling like a spare part next to Emma.

‘Erm, why isn’t Josh doing the top of the stairs bit? asked @Katie_Lewis_ on X.

‘He doesn’t need to be standing there interrupting the judges. Get rid of Johannes and put Josh up there. I hope #Strictly realises this for next week.’

@sarahlawson84 agreed, adding: ‘Sorry but Josh does not need to be downstairs with Emma.’

Meanwhile @zanecaspersz wrote: ‘I actually think JoJo and Josh need to swap places.

‘Josh can fill the comedy value more upstairs, while JoJo’s lack of hosting can pair nicely with Emma. I don’t mind two hosts downstairs. We just need to get over that.’

The three new hosts have faced a lot of criticism since the first show last week, most notably Josh and Johannes, who have been described as out of their depth and nervous compared to Emma.

Last week, a Strictly fan called Owen claimed that Emma was ‘outshining the other two’.

Others claimed that ‘three’s a crowd’ and that the three didn’t have enough to do, leaving one of them feeling like a’spare part’.

‘3 presenters just seems unnecessary, don’t see the point of it,’ Suzi wrote, while Sue added: ‘The intro was far too long and as for presenters, two’s company three’s a crowd!’

Josh, who arguably faced the harshest criticism, has admitted he felt nervous ahead of tonight’s live show.

‘What could possibly go wrong? Loads of things, but let’s not focus on them,’ he told the BBC.

‘I think it’s going to be really, really fun. It’s going to feel utterly surreal, just as terrifying as the first one. Will it ever stop being terrifying? I hope not, because hosting something like this should be the best kind of terrifying.’

Strictly Come Dancing airs on weekends on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

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Reports that the High Street in Walshaw had been closed by police after the deer injured itself began circulating on social media earlier this morning.

It is understood the deer impaled itself on the fence surrounding Christ Church Walshaw, though this has not been confirmed by emergency services.

A spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police said: “We were called to reports that a deer had impaled itself and it was badly injured.

“The deer has been removed, and the officers arranged for street cleansing to take place, which has now been completed.”

The force has said the deer died, though did not confirm witness reports that it was euthanised by armed police officers.

Several people said the incident was ‘so sad’ and ‘very upsetting’, while many said euthanasia was ‘the right thing to do’ for the ‘poor’ animal to ‘put it out of its misery’.

Images from the scene showed several marked and unmarked police vehicles blocking the road.

Three fire crews attended, and put out a fire involving a skip

A household recycling centre has been forced to close after a fire broke out. Crews from the Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service were called to the Household Recycling Centre in Fengate, Peterborough this morning (September 26). The fire has reportedly affected one skip and it’s believed it was accidental. Details on any injuries sustained are unclear at this time.

In an announcement on social media, Peterborough City Council said: “The HRC is currently closed due to an on-site fire. We are monitoring the situation and will share reopening updates as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”

A Cambridge Fire and Rescue Service spokeswoman said: “On Saturday (September 26) at 10.28am crews were called to a fire at a recycling centre on Fengate, Peterborough.

“Crews from Stanground, Dogsthorpe and the north roaming fire engine responded. Wearing breathing apparatus, firefighters used hose reels to extinguish the fire which was affecting a skip.

“Firefighters have left the area, and the incident has been handed over to the site.The cause of the fire is believed to be accidental. Crews returned to their stations by 1pm.”

Fenland District Council’s planning committee approved new flats for the former site of two listed buildings that had sat ‘decaying for 20-plus years’

Plans to plug an eyesore gap on a town’s high street have finally been approved after two decades of delays which were branded as “embarrassing” for the council.

The two properties at 11-12 High Street in Wisbech, were demolished in 2020 after lying empty for years but it was only this year that an application was submitted to replace them. Fenland District Council’s planning committee has now approved plans to build a commercial premises and six one-bedroom flats on the site of the former Grade II listed buildings.

The flats will be accessed from the back of the property on Castle Mews. Councillors said the delay approving a new plan for the site was “embarrassing”, as the land is owned by the council, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

At a cabinet meeting, Conservative councillor Samantha Hoy said it was “not acceptable” that the building “sat there decaying for 20-plus years”. She said it had also taken “so long” to redevelop nearby 24 High Street, which had become known as ‘the gap’, and they “need to get the work started”.

They asked for answers after discovering that an earlier application was rejected for an issue around the bat survey which was not told to some cabinet members. This included the councillor in charge of planning, leading council leader Chris Boden to ask for answers.

He said: “We must have an explanation about how this has ended up happening. It’s embarrassing to the council, to be quite honest, that we should be put in this position.”

The planning committee passed the application at a meeting on Wednesday, September 23.

Cllr Jan French, of March South, said: “I fully support this – this has gone on for several years, and I’m sure that the people of Wisbech and Wisbech Town Council will welcome this.”

City – who strongly deny all the charges against them – are expected to appeal the reported verdict. The club said in a statement on Friday that the confidential process remains “ongoing”, with “significant elements to be completed”. It is said that no decision has yet been made on potential sanctions, with a range of options believed to be possible, including a fine, points deduction, transfer ban or even the stripping of titles and trophies or expulsion from the Premier League, who have not commented on the situation at this stage.

Tech giant OpenAI has admitted rogue AI bots have ‘accessed dozens of organisations around the world including governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions improperly’ and ‘meddled’ with them.

The US company behind ChatGPT said it had now alerted those affected including the financial regulator US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Census Bureau and the US Department of Education.

As fears over the dangers of AI grow, with Pope Leo yesterday warning that we ‘must not lose humanity to machines’, alarm bells have rung over OpenAI’s admission that some of the bots used ‘extreme methods’ to bypass security measures on websites.

Autonomous AI agents are said to have found and accessed tools reserved for software developers to get census data from the Census Bureau, the company said.

The company also admitted its AI agents had used ‘misalignment’ in attempts to get at information from websites, effectively meaning they acted autonomously and did something they were not trained or intended to do.

And, indicating the hack could have been even more widespread, it suggested other institutions had been accessed but details were being withheld at their request.

It follows a hack by OpenAI of an Australian government health site which caused outrage and is believed to be a world first.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said OpenAI agents had breached non-public files on the website of its government-run healthcare scheme which was ‘obviously unacceptable’.

He also warned legal consequences could follow and said he had had a ‘frank’ discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

It has also emerged that the powerful company, founded in 2015 by tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Altman and is now worth $852 billion, failed to alert the Australian authorities as soon as they could have done, sending only one email to a virtually unmanned email address to let them know what had happened.

Altman admitted the company, which Musk is no longer involved with, had not acted ‘as fast as we would have liked’ in alerting them.

The further breaches were apparently discovered when OpenAI investigated how its AI agents had autonomously hacked into the Australian government department.

OpenAI said that some of the data was accessed by AI agents, bots that are designed and trained to operate semi-autonomously, which were working to find ‘authoritative sources of public information’.

While it claimed the government data accessed by bots was public and the hack was ‘unintended’, it admitted that information accessed from the SEC, which regulates the US stock market and protects investors, was later published by AI agents on another website.

The information was first reported by Reuters followed by an explanation from OpenAI on its public blog yesterday.

OpenAI admitted that AI agents had transferred data when they should not have done resulting in at least 53 incidents where an OpenAI agent took an image from a ChatGPT user activity and transferred it to a third party.

In each of the instances, which OpenAI said was ‘not an appropriate use of this data’, the user had apparently opted in to allow OpenAI to train models using their data.

It claimed the incidents happened before new safeguards were put in place and said it was working to remedy the situation and remove the images which had been transferred.

The company was left red-faced in July when AI platform Hugging Face revealed it had been attacked by OpenAI agents, only later admitting it was to blame.

In a broadside at the company this week, Hugging Face head Clement Delangue told a United Nations Security Council session on AI on Wednesday: ‘I often wonder what would have happened had I decided not to disclose this attack publicly.

‘Especially now that we know similar incidents had been happening months earlier in secret at a handful of frontier labs without monitoring.’

Attempting to counter accusations it was slow to act, OpenAI said yesterday that it was going back on a ‘month by month’ basis from the time of the Hugging Face incident, stating: ‘Our goal is to give each organisation the facts and defer to them on if and when to make the incident public.’

It also claimed that not all of the known breaches were significant, saying:

‘Some organizations may review what we share and conclude that the information was intentionally public or that the model’s interaction was not concerning.

‘Others may identify a design issue or security weakness they want to address.’

It added: ‘Most cases identified so far have been low severity, with limited or no evidence of meaningful impact.

‘Given the scale of the review required, and the need to verify each case, this work will take months to complete.’

Altman and rival Anthropic head Dario Amodei called on the UN at the same meeting to form global standards for AI safety and ways to monitor and report such incidents.

David Krueger, a professor of machine learning at University of Montreal and the founder of AI safety group Evitable, said yesterday that he was ‘deeply troubled’ by the increasing number of AI-related safety incidents.

Calling for ‘an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium’ on AI development, he said: ‘We have yet to understand the extent of existing incidents, and future rogue AI scenarios could be catastrophic.’

Meanwhile, sounding another note of concern, TV executive Nick Parnes told the BBC today that AI was now so prolific in TV production that ‘we are very close to having AI edit programmes’.

The Kalel Productions CEO also told Radio 4’s Today programme that while the AI ‘guard rails’ mentioned by new BBC Director General Matt Brittin, former Google president, should prevent AI making ethical judgements, it ‘was hard for them to be stringent enough to cover all eventualities’ and ‘there will be times when AI will be able to make an assumption based on an ethical dilemma’.

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The Traitors star Paul Gorton has revealed he’s thousands of pounds out of pocket after being burgled. 

Earlier this month, the reality star was on holiday with partner Kate Waldron and their sons Charlie and Cooper in Mallorca, but was left devastated upon his return when he learnt their house had been ransacked by thieves. 

Paul, who found fame as a Traitor on season two of the BBC show, and Kate, a content creator, boast more than 200,000 Instagram followers between them. 

They have now deduced from police evidence that their house was broken into a mere 20 minutes after they posted in real time from their holiday, with Paul wanting to share his story to warn others.  

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Paul shared: ‘We were sitting by the pool having a drink and I posted it on my Instagram, not realising that minutes later someone would jump over my fence and smash the back door.

‘They were robbing us as simultaneously me and Kate are actually having a nice evening.’ 

Recalling the moment they realised they’d been robbed, Paul shared: ‘We were super delayed on our flight getting back home, we got back around 6 o’clock, so it felt like a full day of travel with the kids and we were all exhausted. 

‘Charlie started school the next day and all we wanted to do was have a Chinese, watch a bit of telly, do bath time and go to bed. 

‘And as we walked through our hallway and into the kitchen, we looked at the bifold back door, which was closed, and there was no handle or lock.

‘We knew that we’d been robbed at that point, so I opened my office door and my office was just completely ransacked.’

The biggest blow to Paul, however, was that they’d got hold of his ‘pride and joy’, his Specialized bicycle that was worth roughly £5,000. 

Having checked upstairs they then realised thieves had also ransacked their bedroom, with Paul noting: ‘The boys’ bedroom was absolutely fine, and inside our wardrobe it was really weird that all Kate’s stuff, was absolutely fine and relatively untouched.

‘But all my wardrobe space was just ransacked so they were obviously looking for something and then they’ve left with my bike.’

Paul explained that they were worried their eldest son Charlie, four, would be spooked by the police arriving, yet thankfully he took it all in his stride.    

‘When CSI came he was handing them things and saying what to take a picture of,’ Paul laughed. ‘He like right on their shoulders, just fascinated by the whole experience.’ 

Earlier this month, Paul was on holiday with partner Kate Waldron and their sons Charlie and Cooper, but was left devastated upon his return when he learnt his house had been ransacked 

Yet while Paul and Kate were pleased the robbery had caused minimal disruption to their children, they were dealt another blow when they realised they’d found Kate’s jewellery box. 

‘It was costume jewelry, so it was only a couple hundred pounds worth of jewellery, but it did have Kate’s grandmother’s ring in there, it’s super sentimental,’ Paul explained.

‘Completely worthless but worth everything to Kate, and it’s now gone, I presume it’s just in a bin.’

Paul was also left spooked by not knowing if the robbers had taken everything they planned. 

He explained: ‘It‘s a huge loss, from a sentimental perspective, from a monetary perspective, but nothing was smashed in our house. 

‘The police were saying a lot of robbers have tunnel vision, so they come for particular items, and like they left my like computer, they left phones and electrical stuff and tellies – but they must have had a target in mind.

‘Everything I post now, I’m just more conscious of how am I posting it and how vulnerable is my house. 

‘Moving forward, the house is going to be lit up, if our broadband goes down, there’s a backup connection, all these things you put in place to be more difficult to rob.’

Ironically, Paul had been looking into getting contents insurance the night before they went away, but ended up getting distracted and not going through with it – a move that has now left him thousands out of pocket from the robbery. 

Paul, who found fame as a Traitor on season two of the BBC show (pictured) and Kate, a content creator, boast more than 200,000 Instagram followers between them

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Now Paul has partnered with Compare The Market, who commissioned The Online Safety Experiment to highlight the importance of taking steps to help protect your home while you’re away.

 To explore how social media posting habits may affect home security, they surveyed 3,000 UK adults about their social media habits while travelling, while a Private Investigator investigated how quickly publicly available information could be used to identify home addresses and determine whether properties were unoccupied.

‘We’ve had a really stern warning,’ Paul mused. ‘It’s amazing that Compare the Market can use my story to help people, so hopefully what happened to me doesn’t happen to them.

‘Hopefully this hits home because I think sadly it takes a painful story for people to action certain behaviours. 

‘So that’s the goal from this campaign, if people can get contents insurance and make their home safer because of my story then it was almost worth getting robbed in the first place.’ 

Among the most alarming statistics from Compare The Market’s Online Safety Experiment is that seven out of nine home addresses could be identified using publicly available information; the fastest address was uncovered in just 15 minutes; and four of the nine volunteers had private Instagram accounts. 

To find out more about The Online Safety Experiment, visit www.comparethemarket.com/home-insurance/the-online-safety-experiment

Dramatic footage shows huge flames and thick black smoke after two vehicles caught fire following a crash on the A9 at Moy.

The A9 has been closed in both directions after a crash caused two cars to burst into flames. Dramatic footage sent to the Record shows huge flames and thick black smoke rising into the air at Moy.

Emergency services were called to the scene at around 2.04pm on Saturday, September 26, after reports of a collision involving two vehicles. It happened near a section of the A9 currently being upgraded as part of the Dualling Programme.

Both cars caught fire following the crash, with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service confirming three appliances remain at the scene. The blaze has since been extinguished, but emergency crews are still in attendance and recovery of the vehicles is being arranged.

A Police Scotland spokesperson said the A9 between Moy and Tomatin remains closed in both directions while emergency services deal with the incident. A diversion route is in place, but members of the public have been urged to avoid the area at this time.

A Scottish Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson said: “We are still in attendance following reports of two cars on fire on the A9 at Moy. We received a call at 14.04 and three appliances are there at the moment.”

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