Dwindling audience figures seem to have taken a hit on participation rates in the much maligned talent show X Factor. After record-low audiences for the 2016 series finale it looks like 2017 has got off to a rough start with audition queues resembling more of a parish church talent contest than a national television competition. Only a handful of people queued for auditions in Swindon today after just ten people turned up for the show's auditions in Kent earlier in the week....

By Michael McNulty Hello and welcome to this week’s instalment of Forgotten Film Friday. Dubbed the voice of Generation X, Richard Linklater’s 1991 film, Slacker, put him on the map. Helping to propelling independent filmmaking in the nineties, Linklater’s film marked the birth of Austin, Texas’s filmmaking culture and inspired Kevin Smith to make Clerks. Set in the sleepy campus town of Austin, Texas, Slacker structures itself around a series of encounters. The camera travels leisurely, tracking its characters, who...

From a charging great white shark to sunlight streaming into a sinkhole these are just some of the amazing prize winning underwater pictures in a worldwide competition. More than 5,000 pictures were entered for the underwaterphotography.com contest across 17 categories - from above water, to wide angle,sharks and even underwater fashion featuring models. Pictures range from a sperm whale with its mouth open warning off a diver to a turtle reflected in another diver's mask on the Great Barrier Reef....

Education Policy Institute study claims £74,000 will be slashed off primary school budgets while secondaries stand to lose £291,000 GMB, the union for school support staff, warned today every school in the UK faces a real-terms per-pupil funding cut thanks to the Government’s brutal national funding formula. According to a new report by the Education Policy Institute, primary schools will face budget cuts of £74,000 on average by 2019/20, and secondary schools will lose £291,000. This is the equivalent of...

Have you ever been to a high-rise restaurant so bad, so incomprehensibly grim, that you’ve genuinely considered jumping from the top floor, if only to spite them? Madison, owned by D&D London, is a rooftop restaurant and bar on the top of the One New Change shopping centre in the heart of the city, boasting astonishing views of nearby St Paul’s Cathedral. It is less of a restaurant than a place to grab an after work drink and bite to...

There is a certain sort of person who likes to talk a great deal about the importance of etiquette. There is also a lot of discussion about the decline of modern manners. At the same time we live in a time of the decline of ritual – if you want an emblem, my former employer, the House of Commons, has decided that the clerks should no longer wear wigs and court dress (the House of Lords has not followed suit,...

During his successful campaign to become the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan promised to make London’s housing crisis his “single, biggest priority.” In fact, Khan said in his manifesto that “it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking to business leaders, local residents, charities or community groups: far and away the biggest issue across the board is London’s housing crisis.” Despite the lack of affordable housing, it isn’t for lack of properties. The most recent statistics found that there were 56,715 vacant...

Moonlight’s Best Picture win at the 89th Academy Awards will always be remembered as the most botched Oscars moment of all time. Which is a shame, because it is historic in many other ways. Moonlight is also the first Best Picture winner to have an all black cast and to tackle LGBT issues. In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite, this marks great progress. But there is a less positive way Moonlight’s Best Picture win has made history; the film is the...

New figures have shown that four million children are affected by poverty. These statistics are a damning indication of the circumstances that large sections of the country find themselves in on a daily basis. The Children’s Society have slammed the figures and said the situation is “clearly getting worse.” The charity has claimed that around a third of children are now living in poverty. In a time when the economy is growing this shows that many are being left behind...