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How Strictly Come Dancing star Rose Ayling-Ellis is high-kicking myths about deafness and dance

This year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing is well and truly under way. Despite controversy over the dancers’ vaccine status threatening to sabotage the competition, the first of the live shows seemed to prove that the sequined Strictly spirit is still very much intact.

And one thing that is making the 2021 series better than ever is its history-making line-up, not only with its first all-male pairing in John Whaite and Johannes Radebe, but with its first-ever deaf contestant, Rose Ayling-Elli
Refinery29 •

Find Solace In The Instagram Communities For Women With Chronic Illnesses

While one in three people in the UK live with some sort of chronic pain, many conditions disproportionately affect people who were assigned female at birth. Fibromyalgia, for example, which causes pain all over the body and memory and concentration issues (known as 'fibro-fog'), affects nearly one in 20 people but seven times more women than men.

Although one in 10 people with a uterus have endometriosis – when bits of the tissue that lines the uterus grow on other pelvic organs – many suffer f
The Telegraph •

Meet the woman hoping to change the way we treat eating disorders

Hope Virgo visited her GP in 2016 knowing that she needed urgent help. She began struggling with anorexia at 13, which got progressively worse until she was hospitalised at 17 when her heart “nearly stopped” because it had been so long since she had eaten properly. Now 26, following the death of her grandmother, she had begun to hear the familiar “relentless anorexic voice” again. “I knew I was becoming unwell again and I knew that what I was doing was really dangerous,” she says. She was referr
The Telegraph •

How I learned to embrace my 40cm scoliosis scar – even in summertime

“Wow, that’s one hell of a scar.” I’m at the GP having a check-up and the doctor is looking at my back, a mixture of surprise and awe on her face. I am fifteen and suddenly very aware that although I can’t see the scar – 40 centimetres long and the width of a piece of string running down my spine – other people can. A month before I had undergone surgery for scoliosis, a condition that causes the spine to curve significantly. Although the condition is not uncommon, only around three in every 1,0

Arts & Culture

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It’s good to be bad: Why terrible people make for the best TV

It turns out that if you mine the darkest depths of humanity, that’s where you find the screen gold. Or at least, the darkest depths of the lives of the filthy rich.

Take Ridley Scott’s film House Of Gucci, which comes out today. Sure, reviews have been (to put it politely) mixed – our critic called it ‘muddled in both narrative and tone’ – but the story of family legacy, betrayal and murder, points to a broader trend.

Forgetting the dodgy direction and even dodgier accents, why are we obsesse
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The best books being adapted for the screen this year: From Dolly Alderton’s millennial memoir to the novel that came before Normal People

It was exciting news for millennials across the land this week when the cast was announced for the TV adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s 2018 memoir Everything I Know About Love.

The semi-fictionalised seven-part series, which will air next year on the BBC, is set to star up-and-coming actors Bel Powley and Emma Appleton as childhood best friends Birdy and Maggie, living out their twenties in London. Fans of the book – which was adoringly passed around friendship groups and spawned a thousand weddi
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Swipe right! A modern manual on what it means to love today

Millennial Love by Olivia Petter: Ever heard of ghosting? Ever slid into someone’s DMs? Combining memoir with social commentary, this book by the journalist and podcast host explores dating in the digital age and the impact of technology on our love lives. It asks why, despite the fact that we are now the most connected generation, it’s harder than ever to meet someone.

Based on the Independent’s chart-topping podcast of the same name, Millennial Love draws on Petter’s own experiences of dating
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A broken promise down the decades: South Africa seen through a moving family saga

The Promise by Damon Galgut: This thought-provoking and poignant novel from the twice Booker-nominated author tells the story of the crashing and burning of a white South African Swart family through the country’s transition out of Apartheid.

It begins at the funeral of the mother, where the extended family are gathering at their farm outside Pretoria. Amor, the youngest child, learns her mother’s dying wish was for the family’s black servant Salome to receive the deed for the ramshackle house
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Starstruck’s a sparkling addition to the rom-com genre

Romantic comedies have had a bad time of it lately. The heady days of Hugh Grant and Colin Firth wrestling (literally) for Bridget’s affections or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan flirting over ancient AOL email accounts (in You’ve Got Mail, for the uninitiated) are long gone, replaced only by endless Netflix films which seem to have given up both on originality, and the prerequisite for chemistry between the romantic interests.

Where once the gloriously farfetched and unapologetically sappy reigned supr
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Billie Eilish is just emulating the great artists

I do not have the fondest memories of what I used to wear when I was 19. I was at university and the style du jour was very much a nod to the early noughties – crop tops, flares and a lot of glitter.

Incidentally, this look seems to be back with a vengeance with the Generation Z TikTokers, but I wouldn’t consider this my finest sartorial era. And luckily for me, it really doesn’t matter. I wasn’t even out of my teens and I was experimenting with wearing whatever the hell I wanted.

And so shoul
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This Is My House is better than any night at the pub

I should be at the pub. Lockdown has finally been lifted and, after months of waiting, I’m actually allowed to have some fun. But instead, I’m watching four men named Michael walk around a Tudor house in Hertfordshire, all desperately trying to convince Stacey Dooley they live there.

What, you might ask, could cause the memory of endless excruciatingly dull nights in to instantly disappear and be replaced by a compulsive need to watch a show that sounds bizarre, even for lockdown TV?

I’ll tell
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How has Mr Brightside spent five years in the charts? It’s the anthem of British youth – and it’ll never get old

There aren’t many songs that drag everyone to their feet and get them singing at the tops of their lungs. Fewer still can bring the same roar of appreciation at a dingy student club, football stand or wedding reception dance floor. Mr Brightside by The Killers is just one of those songs.

The indie rock track, which manages to be both fantastically upbeat and crushingly melancholic, tells a universal story of paranoia and betrayal. Guaranteed to produce hysteria, the opening guitar riff has beco
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Quit while you're ahead! Why TV execs should have Killed Eve long ago

We all know the feeling. You wake up hungover after returning home in the wee hours from a night out and wish you had left the party at a more appropriate time. As they say, nothing good ever happens after midnight. If only you had quit while you were ahead, instead of ordering that taxi home at 3am.

It’s an age-old conundrum and one that seems to be greatly afflicting the execs producing the biggest programmes in television. Increasingly, many once great shows are ruined by simply not knowing
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Framing Britney Spears: This salutary documentary is searing and sobering in its depiction of the pop industry’s savage heart

With a shaved head and troubling stare, lashing out wildly at a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella, the pictures of the crazed-looking pop star which splashed across front pages around the world in February 2007 are difficult to forget.

I was 12 years old at the time, but old enough to know what those photos represented: Britney Spears’s public image plummeting to an all-time low.

Growing up in the early noughties, Britney was an icon. We sang and danced along to her songs despite knowing nothin
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Sex And The City is back… But will it work in 2021?

Pour yourself a Cosmopolitan cocktail, and slip on those Manolo shoes. When the news broke earlier this week that a Sex And The City revival was heading for our screens later this year, it was just the good news that we needed in a year that seems to already be off to a bad start.

The original show, which ran from 1998 to 2004 and won eight Golden Globes and seven Emmys, followed the lives of four thirty-something single women as they navigated careers, friendship, dating, sex and love in New Y
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Emily in Paris got you craving a French fancy? Then say oui to these film and TV picks for a true taste of the French capital

It’s the Netflix show that launched a thousand comment pieces; from ‘An excruciating exorcism of French cliches’, to ‘An Outraged Expat In Paris Pens A Letter To The Show’s “Absurd” Protagonist’. And while the coverage has been distinctly mixed, it can’t be denied Emily in Paris has got people talking.

The ten-part series stars Lily (daughter of Phil) Collins as a smart and zealous (if not slightly grating) marketing executive from Chicago who relocates to Paris to help luxury marketing firm Sa
Hackney Citizen •

Girlpool, Moth Club, live music review: 'Ready to take on a new era'

Girlpool step onto the Moth Club’s gold glitter stage to Adele’s 2008 hit ‘Hometown Glory’.

It seems like an unusual choice for the Californian indie rock duo, whose sound is a hybrid of grunge, shoegaze, folk punk and melancholic dream pop, and elicits some confused looks from the crowd.

A few songs into the high energy, guitar-laced set Cleo Tucker, his distinctive red hair dyed peroxide blonde, explains the choice.

“Did you guys like the song we came on to? We just love Adele!” he says, as
Hackney Citizen •

Feminists Don't Wear Pink, EartH, live podcast: 'There's no right or wrong way'

Coming out of Dalston Kingsland station, I don’t need the map on my phone to work out the way to the venue.

Throngs of young women, some clutching copies of a bright pink hard-back book, many wearing pink, and all looking excited, fill the street.

These are all tell-tale signs that tell me that they are heading towards EartH for the Feminists Don’t Wear Pink live podcast recording.

Since the publication of Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies) in 2018, journalist and activist Scarlett Cu
Hackney Citizen •

Sitting, Arcola Theatre, review: 'Funny yet subtly devastating'

A young man wearing a tracksuit walks onto the stage, looks around anxiously and then slowly and awkwardly begins taking off his clothes.

As he sits down on a chair and carefully takes off the final piece of clothing, he suddenly jumps up, apologises frantically and scrambles for his discarded clothes.

He is not there for life drawing as he thought, but rather to have his portrait painted.

This is the opening scene of Sitting, the debut play by BAFTA-winning actress Katherine Parkinson (won f
Hackney Citizen •

'Fore play in the bedroom: Hackney's Daniel Kramb on his upcoming drama - and it's unusually intimate backdrop

Hackney has always been a source of inspiration for writer Daniel Kramb, who has lived in the area for 15 years.

His latest work Look at Us, a collaboration with poet JJ Bola, may be the most intimately related to the borough to date.

Look at Us is an hour-long play set entirely in a Dalston bedroom.

It follows the relationship and faltering intimacy of an unnamed couple; she is black and was raised on a Hackney council estate, and he is white and the son of well-off parents.

On 6 June the p