TV & Showbiz

Interior Design Masters is looking for Manchester venues to makeover

Producers of the show are reaching out to Manchester in a bid to find a local bar worth redesigning.

The Manc The Manc - 8th April 2021

The BBC has commissioned a brand new series of makeover show Interior Design Masters – and showrunners are have decided to bring their blueprints to Manchester.

Presented by comedian Alan Carr, Interior Design Masters puts budding designers in competition against one another for a chance to win a commercial contract.

Each week, contestants take on various challenges and briefs – tasked with redesigning areas such as shops, cafes, restaurants and salons.

Former Elle Decoration editor-in-chief Michelle Ogundehin then judges each piece of work.

A third series has been commissioned by BBC Two – in which one lucky venue will have its bar rebuilt from top to bottom by the winner of the show.

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Producers are now reaching out to Manchester as they are looking for local locations to makeover.

Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr / Image: BBC

Any venue interested in having their bar rebranded by the Interior Design Masters winner can put their site forward for consideration via email.

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All applicants should send a brief description and recent photo of the space they’d like redesigning to [email protected].

The deadline is April 16.

If your bar is in need of a good sprucing up, this could be just the ticket…

Featured image: BBC

TV & Showbiz

Sir Ian McKellen pays emotional tribute to long-time friend and fellow northern actor Sir Patrick Stewart

Emily Sergeant Emily Sergeant Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen

Sir Ian McKellen has paid an emotional tribute to his long-time friend and fellow northern actor, Sir Patrick Stewart, following his death.

Sir Patrick Stewart – who was born and bred in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, and is best-known for his theatre work alongside an illustrious 60-year screen career, taking on prominent roles in franchises such as Star Trek and X-Men – sadly passed away at the age of 86, with his death being announced publicly yesterday evening (29 October).

In the statement announcing his death last night, it was confirmed that Sir Patrick had a ‘brief but poignant journey’ with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia.

And now, his long-time friend and fellow northern actor, Sir Ian McKellen, has paid tribute.

Sir Patrick and Sir Ian shared the stage together countless times over their decades-long careers, but also famously starred alongside each other in the X-Men franchise, and subsequent Marvel movies, as Charles Xavier/Professor X and Magneto.

The tribute, shared across Sir Ian’s social media platforms, reads: “Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.

“We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions.

“My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in ‘Star Trek’. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”

“Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did, for not just his devoted Trekkies, but film and theatre audiences who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes (‘X-Men’ of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.

“America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin.

“But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.”

Read more:

Sir Patrick Stewart’s farewell performance will be in Avengers: Doomsday, which is being released in UK cinemas on 18 December 2026

Featured Image – Gage Skidmore (via Flickr)

TV & Showbiz

James Acaster reveals eerie song all Traitors contestants are forced to listen to before every roundtable

Emily Sergeant Emily Sergeant James Acaster on The Traitors

James Acaster has revealed the eerie (and pretty surprising) song that all Traitors contestants are forced to listen to before every roundtable.

In case you’ve been living comfortably under a rock, you’ll probably be aware that comedian James Acaster is currently a contestant on this current season of BBC‘s smash-hit reality TV competition show, The Celebrity Traitors – a show that viewers in their millions are tuning into each week, with some big names on the cast.

Acaster is currently (spoiler alert… but it shouldn’t be at this point, we are several weeks in after all) one of three Traitors competing on the show, and he’s doing a pretty good job at it.

But we wonder how much of his success can be put down to the producers’ love of a certain song they like to play before every roundtable? Probably next to none, but it’s surprising to find out how much of an integral role the tune plays though.

The song we’re referring to here, it has been revealed, is ‘The Hanging Tree’ – a folk ballad made popular by The Hunger Games.

‘The Hanging Tree’, composed by James Newton Howard and Suzanne Collins, was famously sung by Jennifer Lawrence’s character Katniss Everdeen in the third instalment of the film franchise, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1.

The lyrics are as follows:

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where they strung up a man
They say who murdered three?
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree

So, as you can see, the song does make reference to ‘murder’, which is a key part of The Traitors game (not real murder, of course), but even with that context, we’re still not sure why the producers are keen to play it out before every roundtable.

During a viral TikTok clip from an on-stage Q&A this week, Acaster revealed the song’s usage to the audience: “You all walk in silence down the corridor, and you all sit down, and they don’t announce it’s gonna happen.

“The first time this will completely blindside you, but they do it every single roundtable. They play that song from The Hunger Games, that ‘coming to the tree’ song. Like acapella, Jennifer Lawrence.”

He continued: “It was every f***ing time, it was the only song we heard the whole time we were in there, and all day I would have it in my head constantly, everyone would, I’d go ‘have you got coming to the tree in your head?’ and they’d go ‘yes, it’s in my head, again’.”

Read more:

Viewers who watch the show may have spotted the song being played in the background or transition between certain scenes, but now it’s been revealed that the contestants hear it too.

Who would’ve thought?

Featured Image – Euan Cherry / BBC / Studio Lambert

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