The two vehicle collision involved a motorcycle and a car, with an air ambulance landed in the fields of Gaskell Community Primary School around 2pm.

Police have since confirmed the man’s injuries were neither “life threatening or life changing.”

(Image: NQ)

Gaskell Community Primary School was not itself connected to the school.

The collision was first reported at about 1.38pm, according to an ambulance service spokesperson.

An ambulance service spokesperson said: “The incident involves a road traffic collision on Gaskell Street.

“The incident was first reported around 1:38pm. It involves a motorcyclist who is going to be taken to hospital.”

The car that was involved in the collision with the motorcycle was badly damaged, with much of the front bumper, as well as the licence plate, being torn off.

(Image: NQ)

Police were at the scene.

An ambulance was present, and investigations continued during the afternoon.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said: “The incident was a motorbike and car road traffic collision. One man taken to hospital with injuries not deemed life threatening or changing.”

Crews remained at the scene until around 3pm, when the man was taken to hospital to be treated for his injuries.

When Sky announced that it was bringing the legendary US sketch show Saturday Night Live to the UK, the public had questions. Would it be British enough? Edgy enough? Cooler than its American cousin?

The answer was emphatically delivered in week one when the cast performed a Hamnet parody, in which William Shakespeare returned to his family from London on a Lime scooter with a mild ketamine addiction and a “c***y little earring”. It was deeply British, a touch provocative, and extremely funny.

To get the sketch into the show, the cast had to talk to Sky and “have almost like a board meeting in the hallway about getting ‘c***y’ in, and the meaning of that”, says Jack Shep, who played a Brat-ified version of the bard. He had to explain how the word had become positive slang in Gen Z culture. “It was awesome. We were like, ‘It’s different now!’ That was week one, so that tells you everything you need to know.”

Since then, the sketch show has continued to venture near the knuckle when searching for the nation’s funny bone – from skewering former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor over his Jeffrey Epstein links to the Muppet-esque portrayal of Keir Starmer – and it’s worked. SNL UK received a warm – and relieved – reception from viewers and critics alike after its first run, while its sketches have been watched over 54 million times on YouTube since it premiered in March. National treasures Louis Theroux and Martin Lewis even made cameos as themselves in various skits.

Tonight, the show is back for more, just four months after the first series came to an end. No one is more surprised than its cast of rising stars – many of whom had been warned that attempting to bring the live sketch show to a hard-to-please, ever sceptical Britain would be a disaster. “We have been spoken to by pretty much everyone in the industry who told us why it was gonna be bad,” says Paddy Young, who co-hosts the Weekend Update segment. “A poisoned chalice, that’s what I got told. But it makes me feel very patriotic. How else would this country respond to something that’s high risk like this? Of course, we’re just going to say it’s going to be bad.”

“People were like, ‘I think it was… good?’” Shep says of SNL UK’s first show. “It’s like we were waiting to hear a gunshot but we haven’t heard one. It’s been really nice. We obviously had supporters from early on, but I think everyone was very sceptical.”

Sitting across from the cast in a London hotel while they’re in junket mode, it’s clear to see that the doubters never needed to worry. Watching them fire jokes back and forth between one another feels like securing front-row tickets to the Wimbledon of comedy, with their electric rapport leaving me with mild whiplash (or rather, quiplash).

Surely those comedy sceptics must be eating their words? “A lot of them are dead,” Shep jokes, with Young quickly adding: “Yeah. Coincidence?”

Even fellow cast member Emma Sidi wasn’t sure the format would work in the UK until the first show aired. “I couldn’t see the laughter working in the room as well as it does,” she admits. “I think that’s only because we haven’t had a big comedy show with a live studio audience be successful in the UK for such a long time. I had a disconnect of even imagining a room full of British people laughing. In my head, it was either a dated thing or an American thing – but then we were like, it can work.”

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After 16 weeks off – during which the show’s stars and its extensive team of writers have been performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, cramming in holidays and rearranging tour dates – they’re all ready to return. Although given sketches are pitched on a week-by-week basis for each Saturday’s particular celebrity host, there’s not much they could do to prepare over the summer.

“It’s hard to prep material in advance,” says star Celeste Dring, who spent the time off hiring an accountant and moving flats. “You need to be around everyone and you need some feedback on what’s working, what’s not working.”

Young, who teases that he may or may not be reprising the role of now-prime minister Andy Burnham (although he may have to shave that impressive ’tache), admits that “a smart person” would have brushed up his impressions ahead of series two, but he didn’t. Instead, he’s been recovering after slicing open his finger with a samurai sword – which actually sounds like a great idea for a sketch.

“I’m in physio and I can only do that,” he says, while trying to bend the injured finger. “It builds character. The thing with hands is they’re overrated. Once you lose one, you think, ‘God, I don’t need that for anything. I don’t want to open a bottle of Pepsi…or Coke or Dr Pepper.” Briefly dropping into an eerily accurate impersonation of US president Donald Trump, he adds: “‘We love the lilt!’ I have been practising a few impressions, I guess. That’s Angela Rayner by the way.”

Meanwhile, Sidi spent the time off getting to know her baby son, who she welcomed last year with husband and SNL UK writer Al Roberts. “I wasn’t really able to do that during the last series,” she says. “I saw him learn to walk and I was a bit nervous that I’d be busy doing the show while he did that, but he did it in front of me so that’s great.”

The comedy couple will be doing the “crazy juggle” between work and parenting once again when they return to what Sidi describes as “Hogwarts for comedy”, but it does mean that they get to spend some quality time together. “This is a really weird way of dating,” she giggles. “We’re at work together, talking about comedy, without a baby.”

A typical week at SNL UK isn’t for the faint of heart; the cast and writers pitch sketches on a Monday, then plan sets, costumes and scripts all week before performing what can often be a completely different version of the skit on Saturday night. They get the Sunday off before starting all over again with new ideas for another celebrity host on Monday.

The cast are still getting used to watching their jokes, some of which they’ve been developing and working on all week, be savagely cut after Saturday afternoon’s dress rehearsal. “The second a sketch gets cut, you go, ‘I’m devastated.’ But then you go, ‘I know why – it wasn’t good enough’,” Sidi says. “It’s like doing your driving test every week and failing every week and rebooking every week. That’s what it feels like doing SNL. It is really fun, but it is brutal. There’s no two ways about it. But you just need to rebook that driving test – don’t give up. You will learn to drive.”

It’s the same for the show’s Weekend Update segment, where Young and co-anchor Ania Magliano deliver quickfire jokes about the week’s biggest news stories. “When you’re churning out ideas and most of them just by their very nature don’t work, that is such a weird thing,” Young says. “A show might go well on Saturday and then you have one day off and on Monday, you’re back to being crap all over again. It’s really humbling.”

While the likes of Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Hannah Waddingham and Ncuti Gatwa were the first celebrity hosts to take a chance on SNL’s British cousin, Jurassic Park star Jeff Goldblum is kicking off series two tonight with CMAT as his musical guest. Despite just how physically and mentally tiring making the show can be, its cast – which recently welcomed comedian and Such Brave Girls star Freddie Meredith into their ranks – can’t wait to return for their sophomore year and the sketch madness that’ll come with it.

For Young, it’s all worth it for the curtain call at the end of each live show, where the celebrity host and full cast take to the stage as the credits start to roll. “When we’re all waiting to go on for the bow and normally we’re all wearing whatever the last costume is, that’s always pretty sweet,” he says. “It’s just surreal to see Louis Theroux standing next to some Beefeaters. You see that and you think, ‘That’s why I got into this game’.”

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ returns tonight at 10pm on Sky One

Last week I turned 69. And I don’t think I’m middle-aged.

I understand why people use the term. We are living longer, many of us are healthier for longer, and people in their sixties and seventies often feel very different from previous generations at the same age. But extending midlife further and further doesn’t seem to me to be the answer.

The long-running MIDUS study asked people when they thought midlife ended. The average answer was 59. That feels much closer to my own sense of it.

When I turned 60, nothing happened. Nobody treated me differently. I didn’t feel a shift in my body. If anything, I was the healthiest I had ever been. There has been research done in the past that suggests most of us feel younger than our years past 40, so perhaps this isn’t unusual.

But I’m less interested in feeling younger than in simply being 60, or 69, and having that be enough of an answer on its own.

So I was fascinated to read research from Stanford suggesting that ageing may not happen at a slow, steady pace. The researchers found dramatic molecular changes at two particular points in adulthood, around the ages of 44 and 60, involving everything from immune function and cardiovascular health to the way we metabolise carbohydrates and alcohol.

Yet I didn’t recognise myself in the idea of some great physical shift at 60 at all.

And that interested me. Because perhaps part of the problem is that we still don’t have very good ways of talking about this stage of life. We seem to move from midlife to old age without much language for what comes between. And I don’t want to pretend that 60 is really 40, or that 70 is really 50. I’d rather acknowledge that these years are different.

What would it actually mean to name this stage properly?

The phase from 60 to 80 feels to me like a distinct period of life. It isn’t simply an extension of midlife, and it isn’t necessarily old age as most people imagine it either. It has its own possibilities, limitations, changes and questions.

My own life since 60 certainly hasn’t looked like winding down. I divorced, completed a doctorate, bought four acres of woodland, wrote more books and eventually stepped back from much of the work that had defined me for decades. In many respects my life has expanded. But I am also more aware of my body, of people around me becoming ill or dying, and of the simple mathematical fact that there is more life behind me than ahead. Both things are true.

Work can look different here, not necessarily less of it, but differently motivated. The question shifts from: what am I climbing toward? to: what is actually worth my remaining time? Relationships can become more selective too, while creativity may intensify once there is less need to build a career or prove something to anyone.

None of this requires the dramatic “reinvention” we’re so often told later life should involve. Simply continuing, doing work you value and ageing without a headline-worthy transformation attached, is good enough.

There is loss in these years too, and pretending otherwise is its own erasure. Parents die, friends die, capacities narrow in places even when health holds up in others. A stage of life that can’t hold both the loss and the freedom honestly isn’t being named. It’s being marketed.

I’ve been trying to find a name for it. The one I keep coming back to is: olderhood, roughly the years from 60 to 80.

Not because everyone between those ages is the same, or because something magical happens on a particular birthday, but because it gives us a way to acknowledge that this is a life stage of its own.

For me, olderhood is less about a number than a shift in orientation. Your career stops being the organising principle of identity, and something else moves into that space: a clearer sense of who you actually are, alongside an honest reckoning with the fact that time is now finite in a way it wasn’t at 40.

That’s not decline. It’s focus.

This didn’t happen to me because some biological alarm went off at 60. It happened because I stopped organising my life around who I was supposed to become and started paying attention to who I already was.

I notice how rarely that’s the picture we’re given of ageing.

Too often, age itself is treated as something to be afraid of, something to be managed out of sight rather than lived through. Look at photographs of older celebrities, women in particular. Nicole Kidman is a good example, styled and retouched in the photos for her recent Vogue shoot until it’s genuinely hard to tell how much of what you’re seeing is her face and how much is the work done to it. The message underneath is simple: you are allowed to be this age, as long as no one can actually see it.

And the flip side is just as damaging.

If the only publicly visible image of being old is frailty, then everyone who is older but not frail has to keep proving they’re the exception.

I’m 70, but I can still do this.

I’m 65, but I can still…

That “but” is doing a lot of work, and it’s exhausting, because it means the only way to be seen as vital at this age is to distance yourself from your own age group. And if we keep doing that, younger people only see frailty when they picture old age. They also need to see that being 70 or 75 can mean being active, curious and engaged with life. That is part of what living longer actually looks like.

I’d rather say it plainly. Old and active. Old and curious. Old and, some days, tired.

Olderhood shouldn’t need a disclaimer. It should just be visible, ordinary, and allowed to look like what it actually is.

Dr Denise Taylor is a chartered psychologist and author of ‘ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now’. She writes about ageing and later life at denisetaylor.co.uk

The father-of-three said: “Your fears are that automatically, ‘this is a death sentence’’”

This is Dr Shane McCarney who received a stage four metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis in December 2025.

Sitting in his office in Lisburn ’s Primary Community Care Centre, the 53-year-old from Altnamuskin, near Ballygawley in Co Tyrone, who is the South Eastern Trust’s Head of Psychological Services, speaks bravely about how he has now become a patient.

The father-of-three explained emotionally: “Like anyone, regardless of the fact that I am a seasoned psychologist, your fears are that automatically, ‘this is a death sentence’. My family, my wife Olga and I focused quickly on what was the next step – what can we do about it?’”

Dr McCarney has shared his story as part of Palliative Care Week with this important message: “I want to assure others not to be afraid of the words ‘palliative care’. It doesn’t mean that there are no options left.”

He added: “When you hear the term palliative care, people sometimes just think of syringe drivers, but I know it means you are being offered the best support available to help you live your life as fully possible. That is something people should not fear.

“There are other people who are on their own palliative care journey, they won’t look like you might expect, they look like you, they look like me.”

While coming to terms with his diagnosis, he and his wife Olga, who have run marathons, turned their focus to their ‘bucket list’ and completed the Ring of Kerry cycle in July.

“We completed 106 miles and although we were initially hesitant about sharing my diagnosis publicly, we decided to use the event to raise money for charity.”

The couple raised more than £18,500 for local charities, including the North West Cancer Centre, Termonmaguirc Cancer Patients Comfort Fund, Care for Cancer in Omagh and Prostate Cancer UK.

Shane attends his hospital appointments every three months and remains active, something he believes challenges common misconceptions about cancer and palliative care.

He is very much focusing on the future and his message to others who are facing their own palliative diagnosis is a powerful one: “When people hear the words ‘palliative’ they think about the very end stage of looking after someone who has had a life limiting diagnosis.

“Palliative care is about getting the right treatment. Managing not just the physical, but the spiritual and to have as good a quality of life, for as long as possible.

“For me, palliative care means receiving the best possible care and support. It has given me confidence, reassurance and the opportunity to focus on making the most of every day.”

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