The annual gathering of the people behind the shows that we see on TV has been taking place in Scotland this week.
The Edinburgh TV Festival has seen commissioners, press and some famous faces heading to Edinburgh to discuss the current television landscape and promote some of the new shows they have coming out in the next 12 months.
The team from Backstage – the film and TV podcast from Sky News – was there, and these were their five biggest takeaways from the event.
Louis Theroux played it safe while discussing… not playing it safe
In previous years the MacTaggart lecture has seen Michaela Coel talking about the racism and sexual assault she’d experienced working in the industry and writer Jack Thorne using his time at the podium to criticise the business for how it’s treated disabled people – both behind and in front of the camera.
Last year journalist Emily Maitlis talked about the challenges journalists face reporting on Donald Trump, Brexit and populism.
Theroux though was less disparaging in his speech, titled The Risk Of Not Taking Risks, he urged TV bosses to continue to avoid playing it safe, in an era when it might sometimes be easier for them to do so.
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A fair point, but perhaps not the ground-breaking speech we’ve come to expect from the festival’s keynote lecture.
Wagatha Christie continues to compel
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We’ve known that a documentary about Coleen Rooney and the Instagram post in which she accused her former friend Rebekah Vardy of leaking stories about her to The Sun was coming to Disney+ for a while.
The three-part series promises to tell Coleen’s story through interviews with her, and her inner circle.
The woman behind it, Julia Nottingham, said her jaw was “on the floor” after speaking to Coleen for the first time and we suspect viewers will be the same way when the doc drops this autumn.
ITV’s new offering for fans of Traitors
Among the announcements from ITV at the festival was new show Fortune Hotel.
Filmed in the Caribbean with Stephen Mangan on hosting duties, it will see 10 pairs of contestants each given a briefcase which either contains the cash prize, an early checkout or nothing at all.
The series will see contestants deceiving one another and swapping cases – when commissioners used the word “subterfuge” while describing it, we immediately knew this would be one for fans of The Traitors (which incidentally won the best entertainment prize at the festival).
Happy Valley writer Sally Wainwright’s new shows
The third and final series of Happy Valley was a monster of a hit when it aired at the start of the year.
At the TV festival a brief update on writer Sally Wainwright’s historical show The Ballad Of Renegade Nell for Disney Plus, about a highway woman with superpowers, was simply that it’s still in production.
While the BBC announced they too have a new show coming from Wainwright, Hot Flush is described as “a celebration of women of a certain age” who come together to form a punk band.
Like Happy Valley the six-part drama will be set in West Yorkshire.
Sky dig deep on the Kardashians
During their panel at Edinburgh Sky announced a few new shows, including a nature documentary focusing on sound with Sir David Attenborough and the second series of Gemma Arterton’s Funny Woman.
But the one that really piqued our interest was House Of Kardashian, a documentary series looking at the reality star dynasty and their influence and impact.
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Using interviews – including one with Caitlyn Jenner – and previously unseen archive footage, this promises to be a considered look at one of the most divisive families in popular culture.
Hear more from the festival on the latest episode of Backstage – the film and TV podcast from Sky News.
Zayn Malik paid tribute to former One Direction bandmate Liam Payne as he kicked off his solo tour.
Payne died last month of multiple traumas and “internal and external haemorrhage” after falling from a third-floor balcony in Buenos Aires, according to a post-mortem.
Images from Leeds’s O2 Academy on Saturday showed Malik – who delayed his Stairway To The Sky tour due to Payne’s funeral on Wednesday – shared a tribute.
A message was displayed with a heart on a large blue screen behind the singer reading: “Liam Payne 1993-2024. Love you bro.”
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Rapper Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – has been accused of sexual assault in a civil lawsuit that alleges he strangled a model on the set of a music video.
Warning: This story contains details that readers may find distressing
The lawsuit alleges the musician shoved his fingers in the claimant’s mouth at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City in 2010, in what it refers to as “pornographic gagging”, Sky News’ US partner network NBC News reported.
The model who brought the case – which was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York – was a background actor for another musician’s music video that Ye was guest-starring in, NBC said, citing the lawsuit.
She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages against the 47-year-old.
A representative for Ye was approached for comment by NBC News on Saturday.
The New York City Police Department said it took “sexual assault and rape cases extremely seriously, and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a police report so we can perform a comprehensive investigation, and offer support and services to survivors”.
The lawsuit alleges that a few hours into the shoot, the rapper arrived on set, took over control and ordered “female background actors/models, including the claimant, to line up in the hallway”.
The rapper is then believed to have “evaluated their appearances, pointed to two of the women, and then commanded them to follow him”.
The lawsuit adds the claimant, who was said to be wearing “revealing lingerie”, was uncomfortable but went with Ye to a suite which had a sofa and a camera.
When in the room, Ye is said to have ordered the production team to start playing the music, to which he did not know his lyrics and instead rambled, “rawr, rawr, rawr”.
The lawsuit claims: “Defendant West then pulled two chairs near the camera, positioned them across from each other, and instructed the claimant to sit in the chair in front of the camera.”
While stood over the model, the lawsuit clams Ye strangled her with both hands, according to NBC.
It claims he went on to “emulate forced oral sex” with his hands, with the rapper allegedly screaming: “This is art. This is f****** art. I am like Picasso.”
Universal Music Group is also named in the lawsuit as a defendant and is accused of failing to investigate the incident.
The corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment by NBC.
Jesse S Weinstein, a lawyer representing the claimant, said the woman “displayed great courage to speak out against some of the most powerful men and entities within the entertainment industry”.
Actor James Norton, who stars in a new film telling the story of the world’s first “test-tube baby”, has criticised how “prohibitively expensive” IVF can be in the UK.
In Joy, the star portrays the real-life scientist Bob Edwards, who – along with obstetrician Patrick Steptoe and embryologist Jean Purdy – spent a decade tirelessly working on medical ways to help infertility.
The film charts the 10 years leading up to the birth of Louise Joy Brown, who was dubbed the world’s first test-tube baby, in 1978.
Norton, who is best known for playing Tommy Lee Royce in the BAFTA-winning series Happy Valley, told Sky News he has friends who were IVF babies and other friends who have had their own children thanks to the fertility treatment.
“But I didn’t know about these three scientists and their sacrifice, tenacity and skill,” he said. The star hopes the film will be “a catalyst for conversation” about the treatment and its availability.
“We know for a fact that Jean, Bob and Patrick would not have liked the fact that IVF is now so means based,” he said. “It’s prohibitively expensive for some… and there is a postcode lottery which means that some people are precluded from that opportunity.”
Now, IVF is considered a wonder of modern medicine. More than 12 million people owe their existence today to the treatment Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy worked so hard to devise.
But Joy shows how public backlash in the years leading up to Louise’s birth saw the team vilified – accused of playing God and creating “Frankenstein babies”.
Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie star alongside Norton, with the script written by acclaimed screenwriter Jack Thorne and his wife Rachel Mason.
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The couple went through seven rounds of IVF themselves to conceive their son.
While the film is set in the 1970s, the reality is that societal pressures haven’t changed all that much for many going through IVF today – with the costs now both emotional and financial.
“IVF is still seen as a luxury product, as something that some people get access to and others don’t,” said Thorne, speaking about their experiences in the UK.
“Louise was a working-class girl with working-class parents. Working class IVF babies are very, very rare now.”
In the run-up to the US election, Donald Trump saw IVF as a campaigning point – promising his government, or insurance companies, would pay for the treatment for all women should he be elected. He called himself the “father of IVF” at a campaign event – a remark described as “quite bizarre” by Kamala Harris.
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Bill Nighy ‘proud’ of new film on IVF breakthrough
“I don’t think Trump is a blueprint for this,” Norton said. “I don’t know how that fits alongside his questions around pro-choice.”
In the UK, statistics from fertility regulator HEFA show the proportion of IVF cycles paid for by the NHS has dropped from 40% to 27% in the last decade.
“It’s so expensive,” Norton said. “Those who want a child should have that choice… and some people’s lack of access to this incredibly important science actually means that people don’t have the choice.”
Joy is in UK cinemas from 15 November, and on Netflix from 22 November