Andy Burnham wants to look like a man of the people on Celebrity Gogglebox. But why not test his working-class credentials with Benny Hill or Love Thy Neighbour? Alexander McKibbin thinks he knows why.
The post Burnham’s Gogglebox Act: Get Ready for a Carnival of Woke Platitudes and Wearying Northern Homilies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
For the past two decades, Zoe Kazan, 43, has built a low-key career, moving between independent films and more ambitious projects. The former include Ruby Sparks (2012), a comedy she also wrote and produced. The latter include hits such as She Said (2022), in which she starred alongside Carey Mulligan as one of the New York Times reporters who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s abuses.
© Rob Kim (WireImage)
Smart TVs will be forced to power up more slowly under plans to align Britain with the EU's Net Zero rules capping the power usage of devices on standby.
The post Smart TVs to Switch on More Slowly Under EU Net Zero Rules appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The Czech government has taken a further step towards fundamentally restructuring the country’s public broadcasting system, pushing controversial legislation through its first parliamentary reading after an extraordinary overnight session that triggered demonstrations and clashes with police in Prague.
In the early hours of Saturday, 24 October, the Chamber of Deputies advanced a government proposal abolishing licence fees for Czech Television (ČT) and Czech Radio (ČRo), replacing them with direct financing from the state budget. Opposition attempts to reject the legislation or return it for revision failed.
The decision represents another stage in the confrontation between Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s governing coalition and organisations defending independent public broadcasting. Critics argue that the proposed financial arrangements could give successive governments greater leverage over the country’s principal public service media institutions.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside parliament on Prague’s Malostranské Square on Friday, protesting against the legislation and the government’s decision to accelerate its parliamentary consideration.
According to the Czech News Agency’s account of the demonstrations, several dozen protesters attempted to force their way into the parliamentary building. Officers from a special police unit prevented their entry.
Police spokeswoman Eva Kropáčová confirmed that the situation was brought under control without arrests. Demonstrators also confronted SPD parliamentarian Jaroslav Foldyna, requiring police intervention.
Inside parliament, the governing coalition of ANO, Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) and the Motorists party imposed limits on parliamentary debate and scheduled the decisive vote for 4.36am.
Of the 177 MPs present, 81 supported rejecting the proposal. The opposition subsequently pledged to continue resisting the legislation during its remaining parliamentary stages.
The central controversy concerns the proposed transfer of financial responsibility for public broadcasters from licence-fee payers to the state.
Under the government’s plan, Czech Television would receive approximately CZK 5.74 billion annually, while Czech Radio would receive CZK 2.07 billion.
Combined funding would amount to approximately CZK 7.8 billion, representing a reduction of around CZK 1.4 billion, or 15 per cent, compared with existing licence-fee revenues.
Culture Minister Oto Klempíř, who developed the proposal, maintains that budget financing is an established European model. The government argues that abolishing the combined CZK 205 monthly household charge would reduce costs for consumers without compromising editorial independence.
However, the dispute extends beyond the immediate financial reductions.
Under the existing system, licence fees provide broadcasters with revenue that is substantially separated from annual government spending decisions. Financing through the state budget introduces a different relationship between broadcasters and political authorities.
Even where allocations are established by legislation, future parliamentary majorities can amend the law governing those payments.
A particularly significant development emerged on Saturday when an examination of the government’s own legislative documentation showed that its regulatory impact assessment had identified direct budget financing as the riskiest funding option.
The accompanying documents explicitly acknowledge the possibility of increased dependence on the state and political pressure without adequate safeguards.
The controversy has attracted criticism from international organisations responsible for defending independent journalism.
In a joint statement issued on 23 October, the European Broadcasting Union, Reporters Without Borders, International Press Institute and other organisations warned that the accelerated parliamentary process was incompatible with the thorough scrutiny required for such legislation.
They highlighted the proposed funding reductions and questioned whether the new arrangements would sufficiently protect the broadcasters’ operational and editorial independence.
Their objections have a specific legal foundation.
Article 5 of the European Media Freedom Act requires EU member states to provide public service broadcasters with adequate, sustainable and predictable financing, based on transparent and objective criteria.
Budget financing is not prohibited under EU legislation. However, financial arrangements must contain safeguards against political interference.
As EU Today previously examined, the European Media Freedom Act establishes legally binding obligations intended to prevent governments from undermining independent journalism through institutional or financial pressure.
The Czech proposal therefore raises questions about whether its safeguards and funding provisions satisfy those requirements.
Employees of Czech Television and Czech Radio have announced a nationwide strike for Tuesday, 3 November, organised by the Veřejnoprávně initiative.
The industrial action follows an earlier warning strike in June, when journalists and other broadcasting employees protested against the government’s plans.
A further public demonstration is scheduled for Sunday, 25 October, in Prague’s Old Town Square.
The confrontation also reflects the broader political divisions that have emerged since Babiš returned to government in December 2025.
Opposition politicians have drawn comparisons with political intervention in public broadcasting elsewhere in Central Europe, particularly Hungary and Slovakia.
The government rejects accusations that it intends to nationalise public broadcasters or interfere with their editorial decisions.
For the moment, the legislation remains subject to parliamentary scrutiny and has not become law. Its passage would nevertheless change the financial relationship between the Czech state and two of the country’s most established news institutions.
The central question is whether future governments would acquire additional means of influencing broadcasters through their budgets, even without exercising direct control over individual editorial decisions.
Show features live chat sessions with breeders, a podcast and updates on dogs’ progress from birth to weigh-ins
A 24-hour Finnish TV show dedicated entirely to the live progress of a dog and her six newborn puppies is drawing millions of viewers.
As well as a 24-hour webcam, Pentulive (Puppy Live) includes live evening chat sessions with the dogs’ breeder, a podcast and an instant notification service that updates followers on the puppies’ progress – from their birth to weigh-ins and first nail trims – for eight weeks.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Julia Kiiskinen/Yle - The Finnish Broadcasting Company/AP
© Photograph: Julia Kiiskinen/Yle - The Finnish Broadcasting Company/AP
© Photograph: Julia Kiiskinen/Yle - The Finnish Broadcasting Company/AP
© CBS, via Getty Images
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be careful when you're behind the wheel this week.
College football is great! Surely you want even more of it, right? We'll get into the problems with a 24-team College Football Playoff (CFP), then talk about the NBA's new betting restrictions, and close with thoughts about President Donald Trump's new government golf course plans. And just in case you don't make it to the end, here's a shortcut to our survey on who you're rooting for in the World Series.
But first, many congratulations to "Gary's 1st Entry" on outlasting everyone else in our NFL Survivor group. There's no prize other than this shoutout, so be sure to print out today's newsletter, highlight this paragraph, and frame it in gold. Perhaps Gary can keep going and challenge Primetime Paulie Rothrock's 13-game winning streak from last season.
I figured out how ESPN calculates fantasy football win percentage, it's bad!
ESPN made a stats 101 error when calculating their win percentage which leads to horribly miscalibrated numbers. (
thread) pic.twitter.com/bDypgjelKj
— Will (@will_j_5) October 18, 2026
Saturday was one of the best days of college football ever—or perhaps it could have been, if we thought any of the five top-10 teams who took a loss were now certainly out of playoff contention. Instead, Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, Alabama, and Texas are all still very much alive in the championship hunt.
Today was one of the craziest days in college football history:
- First time ever five teams ranked in the top 7 lose in a single week
- First time the No. 1-ranked team loses to an unranked team in consecutive weeks since 1990
- First time Texas, Alabama, and Georgia all lose… pic.twitter.com/psVRoM5s5b— Bobby Football (@Rob__Paul) October 18, 2026
With two losses, Alabama and Texas are at least on the edge of the playoff bubble with perhaps no more room for error. But that's only true under this year's CFP format. Next year, the playoff is almost officially set to balloon to 24 teams, making the chaos of a day like Saturday matter even less.
Fans will always celebrate a huge upset or major rivalry win, of course—Tennessee fans don't need playoff stakes as an excuse to get drunk when they beat Alabama. But the joy of a rivalry win in the past was always bigger because of the off-field stakes, too—the first loss for your rival meant they probably wouldn't be national champions, the second meant they'd be out of the Rose Bowl, a third meant you could be proud your team sent them packing for the Alamo Bowl. Winning is great; ruining your rival's season is even better.
With 24 teams in the playoff, the joy is a bit diminished because it will take four or possibly five losses to knock a powerhouse program out of the CFP (Iowa, at 8–4, was ranked 23rd by the committee before last year's playoffs). It'll be a bit like a rivalry win in college basketball—we win, you suck, congrats on getting a slightly worse NCAA Tournament seed.
In the business of sports, more inventory for TV is king, and the powers that be think more teams playing more playoff games will make more money. At Free Agent, we don't begrudge institutions for trying to make more money—we all do the same every day. But it's not clear abandoning conference championship games will be the answer, especially when the Big Ten and SEC championships apparently outdraw many playoff games.
ESPN and the power conferences know fans aren't happy about it—just look at all the chatter online, and how the crowd at BYU reacted when College GameDay discussed expansion on Saturday (especially when BYU would probably benefit from expansion!). They're betting enough people will watch to make the expansion profitable anyway. The last hope is that fans get loud enough to bully them into abandoning expansion—which only occasionally works, sometimes on things small (putting the trophy logo on the court for the NBA Finals) and large (soccer's European Super League). If any powerhouse considers going independent, that might shock leaders into a rethink too.
Almost every sport I know is adding more: more teams, bigger playoffs, more for TV. As fans, we still eat it up, of course—much to the excitement of the TV executives who are selling commercial time to the people trying to reach us, the viewing public. (The only counterexample is the MLB proposal to cut eight games from the regular season—I'd love to see each sport I follow cut its season by about 25 percent to make regular season games matter more, so I'm interested to see how this goes.)
Perhaps I'm biased because my favorite team, Michigan State, is a dumpster fire—they could expand the playoff to 64 teams and the Spartans still wouldn't deserve a bid. I personally don't have a whole lot at stake in the playoff format now or anytime soon. But as a neutral, the chaos of Saturday might have been viewed with my full attention in the past—instead, this year I just had it on in the background while I played video games.
After last year's major betting scandal, the NBA asked sportsbooks late last week to stop offering certain types of potentially problematic bets. The sportsbooks, which the NBA says handle roughly 99 percent of the U.S. betting market, agreed. No politician or regulation was necessary to solve the problem.
No longer can bettors bet on unders for a bit player who likely won't get more than 12 minutes of playtime. Bettors also can't wager on the opening tip or on players to miss specific shots. Parlays that string together under bets on the same player's statistics are also out (this one seems a bit harsh—if you just want to bet on a certain major player to have an off night, you can bet on stats separately, but not in a big multiplier parlay). Bets on players who have two-way contracts between the NBA and G League were already banned.
This all comes on the heels of similar developments last year in the NFL and MLB. While some people want to ban prop bets altogether, the NFL asked sportsbooks to eliminate bets in four different categories. Sportsbooks largely agreed or weren't offering those bets anyway. MLB, in light of some pitching-related scandals, asked for a $200 limit on pitch-specific bets and to keep them out of parlays—sportsbooks agreed to that too.
As I wrote last year, "Ideally, this is how the regulation of the sports betting industry should go….These approaches are catching the nuances of what works for both the leagues and for sportsbooks without the heavy-handed approaches of politicians who would use an axe to ban all prop bets instead of a scalpel to limit problematic bets."
It's important to note leagues are able to do this because they have commercial partnerships with the sportsbooks. Otherwise, the leagues would have no direct leverage over a sportsbook offering a bet the league doesn't like. Keep that in mind the next time you see people bemoaning a league partnership with a sportsbook or a prediction market.
President Donald Trump has new plans for the National Park Service golf course at East Potomac—again. Last time new plans were announced, the site plan still had its historic miniature golf course, a par-3 course, and the existing road still ringing the property for bicycling, running, etc. Much of the public didn't like that plan anyway—now, none of that remains in the latest plans, just 18 holes of golf and a driving range.
Trump announces plans for the redeveloped East Potomac Park golf course. pic.twitter.com/ZiGYgc99Uo
— Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) October 18, 2026
What's really going on here seems quite clear to me: Like so many other things going on in the second Trump administration, this is a scheme to enrich the Trump family. The plan?
Step 1: Cancel a lease that was signed during the first Trump administration with a nonprofit group operating the golf course and working, in the long term, on major capital improvements and renovations.
Step 2: Use taxpayer dollars to pay for renovation of the course into, allegedly, a championship-level course capable of hosting major golf tournaments (no matter that the area has next to zero parking, is a mile from the nearest Metro station, and only accessible by narrow roads not meant to handle tens of thousands of spectators).
Step 3: Have the federal government sign a sweetheart deal with, who else, the golf division of the Trump Organization to operate the course on extremely favorable and profitable terms.
If you're wondering why the Trump administration is doing something, corruption is usually a good guess.
The arguments for the course don't make much sense. There are plenty of adequate, competitively priced golf courses in the broader Washington, D.C., area. Several of them are already capable of hosting professional golf tournaments. Between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, there were three tournaments at three different courses in the last couple years. The 2030 PGA Championship and 2037 Ryder Cup will happen just over the D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland.
East Potomac is not the nicest course around, no thanks to the legal limbo it's been in for the past year. But if the National Park Service is going to, for some reason, be in the business of running a golf course, it should be a course that emphasizes and teaches its history instead of the pipe dream of a corrupt madman.
For the first time in 46 years, we've got a World Series contested by two teams that have never won it before. Brewers against Rays is also a rare instance of the top seeds from each league outlasting the randomness of the MLB playoffs to make the World Series. And before you trot out the tired line that "TV executives must be seething about the small market teams" remember that they care much more about getting a playoff series that goes seven games with close results in each game (What did I say above? Inventory rules all!).
In any case, I want to know who you're rooting for. At first glance, neither team seems super objectionable to me. Come back next week for my thoughts. But make sure you sound off and take 10 seconds to respond to our World Series poll here.
Kick-six alert! (Honorable mention to the blocked extra point returned for two the other way.)
"A kick-six type opportunity."
Chris Lewis was all over this one on the CBS Sports Network call of Nevada-North Dakota State.
pic.twitter.com/eRt42xcYIt
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 18, 2026
That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend: MSU men's hockey (No. 2 in the nation!) against New Hampshire.
The post Fans Don't Want a 24-Team College Football Playoff. The NCAA Thinks You'll Watch Anyway. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Myha’la Herrold, the Celebrity Traitors star banished on the show last week, has accused the reality TV programme of having "unconscious racial and cultural bias" in its format.
The post Banished Celebrity Traitors Star Accuses Show of “Racial Bias” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
What moves the star of Jackass to risk his life for our entertainment? This “very serious investigation” involves interviews with friends and family, a surf trip to Malibu, a gag with a fake raccoon, and a stop at In-N-Out:
He nosed the car into the drive-through line, drawing stares as he nosed—some for the vehicle, some for the driver. Mostly male stares. A teen-age boy stepped up to the passenger window and leaned in to take his order.
“One hamburger with tomato, lettuce, and mustard,” Knoxville said. “Fries, please. And a cup of water.”
“Onion?”
“No, sir.”
The teen-ager squinted. “You look familiar. Are you famous, by any chance?”
“Actually, completely by chance!” Knoxville improvised.
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