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In Netflix’s new crime drama, Legends, Steve Coogan plays a steely customs investigator intent on infiltrating a drugs gang, a task that carries with it a distinct risk to life. The very fact that Coogan – who will forever be associated with Alan Partridge, a man whose mid-life crisis prompted him to drive to Dundee barefoot while gorging on Toblerone – can pass himself off in such a role is remarkable. But then it’s also testament to a career-long tenacity that has seen him strive repeatedly to swerve stereotype.

Few actors are required to stay in their lane quite as much as comedic ones. If you are funny once, you’re funny for ever. Think of David Jason, Catherine Tate and, more recently, Jack Whitehall. Even if they do stray towards drama, they return to their comfort zones soon enough.

Not Coogan, though. Who else could play a buffoon and the reviled Jimmy Savile, and get away with both? Yes, his experiences in Hollywood have resulted in some very rum movies – 2018’s mulchy emotional drama Irreplaceable You, for one – but the 60-year-old’s CV nevertheless remains notably impressive given that he spent much of the 1990s shouting “A-ha!” in front of a live studio audience.

Here are his seven finest screen performances:

Philomena (2013)

This was perhaps the first indication that Coogan wanted to be viewed as a serious thespian. Philomena is an adaptation of the journalist Martin Sixsmith’s book about an Irish woman, Philomena Lee (played by Judi Dench), and her tireless search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption 50 years previously.

Coogan plays Sixsmith, a taciturn news journalist more used to warzones than emotional stories, but who quickly develops a bond with his subject nevertheless. He proves not only an able co-star to Dench, but was later nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay, a fact he likes to point out at the slightest opportunity, not least to Rob Brydon on The Trip.

Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube and Sky Store

Saxondale (2006-07)

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Coogan seemed doggedly determined to leave Partridge behind in favour of carving out new comedic niches, there were several misfires, subsequent creations revealed merely as Partridge knock-offs, or else very close cousins. If his obnoxious travelling salesman Gareth Cheeseman (who appeared in his 1995 series Coogan’s Run) was an example of the former, then Saxondale is the latter, a Partridge-adjacent middle-aged man increasingly at odds with modern life, and who can never quite outrun the geek within.

A former roadie, Tommy Saxondale owns a pest control business, and nurses persistent anger issues – but he does at least have the love of a good woman in new girlfriend Magz (Ruth Jones). It is their deeply felt – and deeply sexual – relationship that gives this overlooked BBC sitcom its surprisingly tender heart.

Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV and YouTube

I’m Alan Partridge (1997-2002)

There have been many incarnations of his most beloved television character over the years, but Alan Partridge was best when he was at his lowest ebb. I’m Alan Partridge revisits the BBC’s most hapless sports presenter-turned-failed chat show host following his disgraced exit from the BBC. He has reluctantly pivoted to radio, doing the graveyard shift on local Norwich radio. Currently between homes, he lives first in a roadside hotel, then a static caravan, his only friend a local petrol station attendant with an impenetrable Geordie accent.

But Alan is nothing if not eternally – one might say foolishly – optimistic for brighter days ahead, and convinces himself that he still has another shot at the big-time. If a game show revolving around monkey tennis, or youth hostelling with Chris Eubank, doesn’t usher in a renaissance for him, what will?

Streaming on ITVX Premium

Greed (2019)

While Coogan has proven himself capable of great subtlety, he is rarely more comfortable on-screen than when playing a larger than life character. Teaming up with Michael Winterbottom, with whom he had previously made 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story, he plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a billionaire retail magnate whose fashion emporia have dressed Britain for decades (think Philip Green’s Topshop), but whose business is now beginning to collapse, taking his reputation with it.

McCreadie, who didn’t get where he is today by readily capitulating, decides to throw a mega party on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he believes that, like the phoenix, he will rise again. Coogan has enormous fun ostensibly playing second fiddle to a set of teeth so bright you could see them from the moon.

Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store, Apple TV and YouTube

The Reckoning (2023)

This was surely going to be the television project that saw the ever-confident Coogan stretch himself too far, by impersonating Jimmy Savile in all his shell-suited, cigar-chomping horror. The story of the former Radio 1 DJ and television personality who hid his decades-long crimes of paedophilia – and, so it was rumoured, necrophilia – in plain sight, The Reckoning proved thoroughly unpleasant viewing at 9 o’clock on a weekday evening.

Coogan plays him from a young buck making his name in the 1960s up to his death in 2011, and not once does he slip into cheap imitation. If the drama itself made curiously scant impact, and is not fondly remembered, then that is surely because the subject matter continues to abhor. But its lead performance? Masterly.

Streaming on BBC iPlayer

Stan & Ollie (2018)

Perhaps his most nuanced cinematic role, this lovely and doleful biopic of comics Laurel and Hardy as they navigate the end of their career exemplifies, as with Savile, just how much Coogan can occasionally disappear into someone else’s skin entirely. Here, he not only offers his customary canny vocal impersonation, but actually becomes Stan Laurel, his face seeming to grow longer, his ears more pronounced, his gaze ever more forlorn. It’s eerie.

John C Reilly is terrific alongside him as the more ebullient Oliver Hardy, as the comedy legends arrive in 1950s England to reconnect with an otherwise dwindling fan base. There are echoes of Partridge here, another character who lives mostly on past glories; perhaps this is why Coogan seems to understand him quite so intuitively, and so well.

Streaming on BFI Player

The Trip (2010-)

Sometimes the funniest comedy is that which cuts closest to the bone. We’re back in Michael Winterbottom territory for what is billed as a thinly disguised autobiographical tale of two television comedians – Coogan and Rob Brydon, both playing versions of themselves – in a perpetual battle of one-upmanship. Over four series (a fifth is looming), the pair undertake a succession of gastronomic adventures across the UK, Italy, Spain and Greece for Coogan’s side hustle as a restaurant critic.

Over a lot of fine dining, and much daytime drinking, they bicker, compete in Roger Moore impressions, and thoroughly eviscerate one another with passive aggression. It is Brydon who emerges as the more comfortable in his skin, while Coogan wants only to assert his ultimate superiority and his greater finesse, determined that Brydon afford him the respect he feels he deserves.

Series one and two are streaming on BBC iPlayer. Series three and four are available to rent or buy on Prime Video

‘Legends’ is streaming on Netflix from Thursday 7 May

When Wendy Turner was in her late fifties, she and her husband were just beginning to enjoy their empty nest together in East Sussex. Their two adult children had left home, they had enough money to go on holidays – Wendy had a well-paid job as a book-keeper – and the house was tidy for the first time in years. “We were spending lots of time together again, me and my husband,” remembers Wendy, now 71, “and we were looking forward to retirement.” Then came the phone call.

Social services rang Wendy one morning to ask if they would come and get their 17-month-old baby grandson Callum – otherwise he would be put into the care system. Wendy was in shock. She had seen her grandson on a regular basis, and knew that her daughter and son-in-law were facing challenges, but hadn’t known that things had got so bad. “When you’re expecting a baby you’ve got time to plan for it,” says Wendy, “but in my case, we went from being lovely, fun grandparents to becoming full-time parents – and it happened overnight. There was no time to think.”

Every aspect of life was radically altered after that phone call. Social workers told Wendy she’d have to stop working in order to look after baby Callum – the time and attention she’d need to give him wasn’t compatible with a job. Wendy left her job immediately. Finances became strained, and Wendy’s husband worked extra hard to get early retirement, so he could help with his grandson at home.

They are two of a surprising number of people across the UK who, with no warning, are plunged into full-time, round-the-clock childcare for grandchildren. Census data estimates that at least 141,000 children in the UK are in kinship care – the term for when a family or friend takes on full parental responsibility when a child loses their birth parents as a result of death, a family court order, severe illness or imprisonment. Grandparents are the carers in 51 per cent of these cases. Of 2,000 kinship carers surveyed in 2025 by Kinship charity, half are over 65 and 34 per cent have found themselves raising two or more children. This kind of care arrangement is on the rise, according to Foundations, a UK charity for vulnerable families and children.

Baby Callum ended up permanently with Wendy and her husband, and then, two years later, just as Callum was about to start school, Wendy was told that her daughter was expecting another baby. “I knew that this child would come to me, too. So there I am, in my early sixties, with a newborn (a girl called Willow), doing night feeds and changing nappies – oh my goodness, it was quite something.”

Their role, and relationship to their grandchildren changed. “We lost that loveliness of, ‘Oh, come and stay with granny and we’ll have ice cream for breakfast’, and then send them home. Instead, we had to be the strict parents. And if I’m ever poorly, I just have to get on with it, there’s no sitting back on the sofa. I can’t ring granny for help like I did as a parent. But then there are so many things you are there for – the big milestones, teaching them to read, helping them find their talents, taking them on holiday. We met a lot of other grandparents taking their children on holiday. But of course, we’d be taking ours home with us.”

Wendy’s husband – Callum and Willow’s beloved grandfather – died almost four years ago. “We never did have our retirement together,” says Wendy, “and because I’m only human, sometimes when I’m making packed lunches in my seventies now, I do think, ‘I should be on a cruise ship somewhere,’ – but it’s not resentment, it’s just that some days it can feel a bit unfair. At the same time, I feel the pride in the children, and love for them, that any parent would. I’m so happy they’re safe and well. I can’t imagine life without them.”

‘It’s difficult but we wouldn’t change it for the world’

Meanwhile, in South Yorkshire, Michael* and his wife Sally* had, in 2017, just sold their four-bedroom house in order to downsize when they were asked to raise their grandchildren. Their older son was grown up and gone, and they had only their 11-year-old son still at home. They were temporarily renting a two-bedroom bungalow, before looking to buy their own little house to settle into for the future. “Then, literally at the stroke of a phone call,” says Michael, “our three grandchildren – two-and-a-half, three-and-a-half and six years old – came to live with us.”

Their son’s children had suffered severe neglect, hunger and physical harm at home. “We’d gained these three grandchildren, but we also felt we’d lost a son,” says Michael. “Your fears are suddenly confirmed that he’s failed as a parent, so you’ve got this grief for the life you’ve got that you’re not going to have and that you were looking forward to, a grief for your child who has failed as a parent, and grief on behalf of the children that they’re not going to have their life with their parents that they expected, and that you expected them to have.”

Before his three young grandchildren came to live with him, Michael – who is now still only in his ffties – was working all over the UK, training people to drive machinery. “My work bumbled on for two months,” he says, “I took as much annual leave as I could, but my employer was not very friendly about my situation – probably, in hindsight, because they had no idea about kinship care. In the end, I just had to quit. I had three traumatised children at home, a very upset young son in the house, a very upset wife, marriage being strained, and all sorts of things going on in the background. The pressure of work on top of all that was impossible.” Sally was working in retail, but she resigned the day the grandchildren arrived.

The Children Act (1989) demands that kinship care is used whenever possible for the long-term placement of children, but the financial and practical support offered is often very patchy, especially when compared to the support offered to foster carers, who are entitled to a minimum of £170 and £299 a week. Grandparents like Wendy and Michael also aren’t entitled to paid leave from work even when suddenly taking on a newborn baby.

Soon after their grandchildren came to Michael and Sally, they moved to rent a bigger home. The children had bedrooms, while Michael and Sally slept in the dining room. “Because of our work situation, we’d suddenly become unmortgageable,” says Michael, “so we spent a large amount of the deposit we had left from our house sale just keeping ourselves afloat for a year or more. At that point, we were well off the property ladder, out of the world of homeownership, and never to return.” Today, Michael works two jobs, while Sally is at home focused on the children.

Does Michael think of himself as a grandfather? “No, they’re all our children. We have four children in our home. There’s no two ways about it. Life has been hugely difficult, and it continues to be, but we wouldn’t change it for the world.”

One of the toughest things about being a grandparent like Michael is that because you’re a blood relative, and because you chose to step in rather than allow the grandchildren to be fostered, you’re often left to get on with it. Once you’ve taken charge, it’s a private family matter, and carers say that the over-stretched, under-funded social services tend to go quiet on them.

Nigel Priestley, a lawyer at Ridley & Hall and leading expert in kinship care and adoption breakdown, was awarded an MBE for services to family and children. Priestley – himself a former kinship carer – has for years taken on local authorities to get financial help for grandparents who end up in dire straits, unable to work, and struggling to access the professional, therapeutic support their grandchildren so often need.

“They’re often left outside the support system,” says Nigel. “When they try to get help they often find themselves banging on the door until their knuckles are bruised and bleeding. Yet this bunch of grandparent heroes are saving local authorities tens of thousands of pounds.” There is a glimmer of hope, though. As of February 2026, some grandparents who provide full-time care for their grandchildren to prevent them being taken into care are guaranteed financial support under a government pilot scheme. Kinship carers in seven council areas will get a financial allowance in line with that of foster carers, depending on where they live and the age of the child. This has been something campaigners have been fighting for for more than 20 years.

‘My life came crashing down’

Getting an allowance to help bring up her grandchild has been transformative for Lesley, 62, from Leeds, who had to quit her job in a vegetable factory 11 years ago to take in her two grandchildren, then aged two and four.

She was renting a two-bedroom flat, but one was a box room, so she had to move. Her vicar friend told the congregation about Leslie’s situation, and friends and strangers rallied, providing her with a bed for the children, food parcels, toys, and clothes. “I was so moved by their generosity,” she says, “because I was getting no wages, but I was also getting pressured by job seekers to get a job, even though I’d just given up a full-time job to look after the children.

“I hardly saw the social worker, who said I was doing a good job, but my life was turned upside down. I’d get phone calls from my friends asking if I was coming out, and I had to tell them no, I’ve got two kids now, and I can’t leave them with anyone else. I lost lots of friends. I had to start applying for benefits, but I’d worked all my life and never done that before. My life came crashing down.”

Lesley spent several years relying on food banks, charity shops, and friends – “scraping the barrel,” as she puts it – before going to court to fight for some help. “The judge said that I should have a financial package,” she says. “Now I can take the children places, on days out, to have a meal, just nice things to make good memories. I try to help them remember the good times and get rid of the bad times.”

In a 2023 study in the Journal of Women and Ageing, academics Jenny Birchall and Amanda Holt wrote; “Kinship carers are taking on a huge unpaid care burden and as a result are experiencing lif-changing economic penalties… we need a social, economic and cultural shift.”

The grandparents contacted for this article all said that through attending support groups and events for kinship carers, they’ve regained some form of social life, and realised that all kinds of grandparents, from all kinds of backgrounds and walks of life, can end up in their position.

Wendy’s grandchildren had an incredibly tough start in life, but they are doing well. Callum does football refereeing and Willow plays inline hockey for Team GB. Wendy- as well as Lesley, and Michael, and many other grandparents like them – continue to campaign for better support, and understanding.

“You think you’re the only person in the world doing this,” says Wendy, “until you find out you’re not. We’re the invisible army of forgotten carers. We battle these challenges every day while trying to look after the children and give them the best childhoods they can have. The childhoods that our grandchildren deserve.”

Kinship is the leading kinship care charity in England and Wales. It provides, information, support and advice to kinship carers through it’s peer support group network, advice line, training and campaigning.

The financial reality for kinship carers

• Kinship’s annual survey of nearly 2,000 kinship carers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings, reveals that nearly one in five kinship carers report that either they, their kinship child, or another child in the family sleeps in unsuitable conditions due to lack of space and support
• Four in 10 (44 per cent) are using savings to cope with the high cost of living compared to 30 per cent of the population   

• One in five (18 per cent) had a direct debit, standing order or bill they couldn’t afford to pay in the last month – three times the national average (6 per cent) 
• Nearly one in three (28 per cent) are using credit more than usual, such as credit cards, loans or overdrafts, to provide for their children, nearly twice the national average (15 per cent) 
• More than one in eight (13 per cent) remain concerned they won’t be able to continue caring for their kinship children in the next year, citing poor health, lack of support and financial worries
• Of the 2,000 kinship carers surveyed, 80 per cent of carers who stopped working when they became kinship carers have never returned to work

A mãe assassina da Carolina do Sul, Susan Smith, está em liberdade condicional mais uma vez depois de ser condenada por afogar seus dois filhos pequenos.

A mulher de 53 anos, que cumpre pena de prisão perpétua por afogar os seus dois filhos pequenos num lago em 1994, teve a liberdade condicional negada em Novembro de 2024, depois de passar 30 anos encarcerada.

Agora, Smith é mais uma vez elegível para libertação enquanto continua cumprindo pena de 30 anos de prisão perpétua.

Smith amarrou seus filhos, Michael, de 3 anos, e Alexander Smith, de 14 meses, no banco de trás de seu carro e o deixou descer uma rampa até John D. Lengthy Lake em União, Carolina do Sulem 25 de outubro de 1994.

A PROPOSTA DE PAROLE DA MÃE ASSASSINA SUSAN SMITH INSPIRA 360 CORRESPONDÊNCIAS – VEJA QUANTAS FAVORAM SUA LIBERDADE

Smith, com 22 anos na época, viu a água levar seis minutos para encher o carro, afogar seus filhos e afundar o carro no fundo do lago.

Ela foi condenada pelos assassinatos de seus dois filhos em 22 de julho de 1995, e embora os promotores argumentassem que Smith deveria receber a pena de morteela acabou sendo condenada à prisão perpétua.

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Em 2024, ela pediu liberdade condicional pela primeira vez e foi finalmente negada, com o conselho citando a natureza e a gravidade do crime e o histórico institucional de crimes de Smith.

A MÃE ASSASSINA SUSAN SMITH AGORA ESTÁ ‘PESADELO COMPLETO’ DEPOIS QUE A PAROLE FOI NEGADA: RELATÓRIO

“Eu sei que o que fiz foi horrível… sinto muito por tê-los feito passar por isso… gostaria de poder voltar atrás, realmente gostaria… só estava com medo”, disse ela durante a audiência.

GOSTA DO QUE ESTÁ LENDO? ENCONTRE MAIS NO TRUE CRIME HUB

O histórico disciplinar de Smith durante sua passagem pela prisão foi uma das razões pelas quais sua audiência de liberdade condicional foi negada em 2025.

Em agosto de 2025, Smith foi acusada de se comunicar com uma vítima e/ou testemunha de um crime por falar com um documentarista, o que period contra as regras da prisão, menos de duas semanas depois de ter dito a um homem desconhecido por telefone que “não falaria” com a mídia.

Esta foi a primeira ação disciplinar de Smith em quase 10 anos, e ela foi condenada pela acusação em 3 de outubro de 2025, Chrysti Shain, diretora de comunicações do Departamento de Correções da Carolina do Suldisse anteriormente à Fox Information Digital.

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Se seu pedido de liberdade condicional for negado este ano, ela poderá solicitar novamente em dois anos.

Sua última audiência está marcada para 19 de novembro de 2026.

O ex-senador democrata de longa knowledge Sherrod Brown, de Ohio, ganhou na terça-feira a indicação de seu partido para o Senado em 2026, relata a Related Press.

Brown, que serviu três décadas no Congresso antes de ser derrotado na reeleição em 2024 pelo agora senador republicano Bernie Moreno, enfrentará nas eleições gerais deste ano o senador republicano John Husted, ex-vice-governador de Ohio que foi nomeado para substituir o vice-presidente JD Vance.

O vencedor das eleições gerais preencherá os dois últimos anos do mandato de Vance no Senado. Vance, eleito para o Senado em 2022, deixou a Câmara depois que ele e o presidente Donald Trump venceram as eleições de 2024 para presidente e vice-presidente.

DEMOCRACIA ’26: MANTENHA-SE ATUALIZADO COM O CENTRO DE ELEIÇÕES DA FOX NEWS

Vance viajou para seu estado natal na manhã de terça-feira, parando em um native de votação em Cincinnati para votar nas primárias.

A corrida para o Senado em Ohio é uma das poucas que decidirá se os republicanos defenderão com sucesso a sua escassa maioria na Câmara, ou se os democratas recuperarão o controlo pela primeira vez em quatro anos.

SEIS MESES ATÉ O SEMESTRE: AS DEZ CORRIDAS QUE DETERMINARÃO A MAIORIA DO SENADO

Os republicanos atualmente controlam o Senado por 53-47.

Brown derrotou o rival Ron Kincaid, profissional de TI e treinador das Olimpíadas Especiais, para obter a indicação democrata ao Senado. Husted concorreu sem oposição à indicação do Partido Republicano ao Senado.

“Os habitantes de Ohio estão fartos da corrupção e da ganância em Washington. Eles merecem um senador que lute pelas famílias trabalhadoras, não pelos CEOs e bilionários”, disse Brown nas redes sociais depois de vencer as primárias. “É por isso que vamos vencer em novembro.”

No início da noite, Husted recorreu às redes sociais depois que Trump elogiou o senador em uma postagem do Fact Social.

“Obrigado, presidente Trump! Seu apoio aos empregos em Ohio significa muito para as pessoas trabalhadoras de nosso estado. O corte de impostos para famílias trabalhadoras está ajudando as famílias de Ohio a manterem mais do que ganham para que possam gastar, economizar e investir em suas próprias prioridades”, escreveu Husted. “América primeiro! Ohio primeiro!”

O APERTO DE TRUMP SOBRE O GOP ENFRENTA GRANDES TESTES NAS PRIMÁRIAS DESTE ESTADO

Outrora um dos principais estados de batalha nas eleições gerais, Ohio mudou para a direita na última década, com Trump vencendo o estado por 11 pontos nas eleições de 2024.

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Mas espera-se que as disputas deste ano para o Senado e para governador sejam muito competitivas.