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This article contains spoilers for The Long Song.

The Long Song is the first miniseries featured in PBS Masterpiece’s 50th Anniversary season, and it’s U.S. arrival nearly three years after airing on BBC One is highlighting themes that some viewers may not be ready to process but that remain incredibly important.

The show is an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel recounting the story of how Jamaican slaves gained their freedom in the 1830’s. Levy worked with white screenwriter Sarah Williams on the script for The Long Song before her death in 2019. Although some may want to criticize Williams’ involvement for removing the Own Voices status from the series, it is important to note she successfully worked with Levy to adapt Small Island into a TV miniseries which aired on Masterpiece in 2009. Critics and the Black British community alike praised the miniseries for featuring the Windrush Generation.

Atkins has written a book recounting his surreal experiences during his nine months at London’s Wandsworth prison.

When UK filmmaker Chris Atkins was sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding Hmrc in a film-finance tax scam in July 2016, he was immediately taken to London’s Wandsworth prison, where he began his sentence. Later transferred to Ford open prison in West Sussex, he was released in December 2018, having served just shy of 30 months.

Since his release, he has seen the publication of A Bit Of A Stretch: The Diaries Of A Prisoner, recounting his surreal experiences during his nine months at Wandsworth,...

The BBC is exploring the rise of Tony Blair’s New Labour movement and the triple murder of a family in a Telford blaze as part of its latest documentary orders.

BBC Two has given a greenlight to a five-part series about former British Prime Minister Blair’s political party, which dominated the late 90s and early 2000s. New Labour (w/t), which is produced by BBC Studios, will look at how Blair and his colleagues including Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, John Prescott took control of the Labour Party before becoming elected.

It will chart their leadership of the country through a tumultuous period of war and peace, terror and national trauma and exploring their controversial political legacy and the powerful personalities and emotional fault lines that ran through their years in charge in Britain.

It comes on the back of the success of Thatcher: A Very British Revolution.

How Gordon Brown, Harvey Weinstein and a milkman ensured film was a ‘ghastly disaster’

It is a tale of two bestselling books about 17th century Dutch painters which were both adapted into films. One was a joy. The other a “complete nightmare from start to finish” which ended in flames, along with Harvey Weinstein.

The writers Tracy Chevalier and Deborah Moggach told an audience at Hay festival of their hugely different experiences adapting their novels Girl With a Pearl Earring and Tulip Fever.

Gordon Brown today launched Christian Aid Week 2019 at an event in London in which he spoke powerfully about the moral and ethical need for aid and international development, made the case against nationalism and isolation and praised the charity’s work across the world.

The former prime minister spoke passionately about the need for Britain to be outward-looking, saying: “There is one vision of Britain that derives from people’s misunderstanding of the Dunkirk spirit – this idea that we are better off when we stand alone, aloof and apart, sufficient unto ourselves, isolated if necessary, supposedly this independent spirit that means we are better off when we are disengaged from the world…There is a second vision of Britain – a Britain that is open, outward-looking, engaged and not disengaged with the rest of the world, a Britain that is internationalist in its outlook, a Britain that sees it has responsibilities not just to itself.

The Shape Of Water stakes its claim but this is the most British line-up in years.

BAFTA nominees

After converting two of its seven Golden Globe nominations into wins on Sunday, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water scored 12 Bafta nominations and firmed up its standing as this year’s most rounded awards contender.

Read more: Baftas 2018 - full list of nominations

Del Toro’s brilliant drama achieved recognition across the board and is the most nominated film at the Baftas since The King’s Speech achieved 14 nods in 2011.

It was a morning of mild surprises at Bafta HQ in London thanks to resounding performances by Darkest Hour with nine nominations, including best film, and Blade Runner 2049 with eight nominations, including a best director berth for Denis Villeneuve.

Darkest Hour had only managed a single Golden Globe nomination but the combination of its stirring theme and Gary Oldman’s bravura performance proved a hit with voters...

Kayti Burt Nov 17, 2018

From crime novels to non-fiction, J.K. Rowling has found some time to write outside of the Potterverse.

J.K. Rowling will always be best known for her stories about a boy wizard and the world he inhabits, but she has written several works outside of the Harry Potter universe. If you'd like to see what Rowling's writing is like when she is not telling a story about wizards, check out one of these books...

The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy is a contemporary novel that touches on many of the issues Rowling couldn't easily put in Harry Potter: drugs, prostitution, rape, the list goes on. This is not a novel for those looking for a Potter-like escape, but it is a deftly told story that addresses some of the biggest social issues of modern Britain in bleak, insightful ways.

The premise? When a well-known local politician dies suddenly,...