Category Entertainment News

Chris Moyles ruled radio two decades ago sitting right next to him through much of his glory days was sidekick Comedy Dave

The BBC Radio One Breakfast show is one of the top jobs in the industry, given the task of cheering up millions of Brits on a lonely commute to work. Chris Moyles was given that tough task for the record length of eight years in the early 2000s – but he didn’t do it alone.

By his side throughout his entire time, serving as his sidekick when he hosted slots on Saturdays and weekday afternoons in the late 90s and early 2000s, and during his record tenure on the breakfast show from 2004 until 2012, was Dave Vitty – better known as Comedy Dave.

Starting as a broadcast assistant, Dave worked his way up during his 16 years at Radio One before reaching his role as director of comedy. Together the duo even set a world record for the longest-ever continuous Radio One broadcast, staying on air for 52 hours for Comic Relief in 2011.

But all good things must come to an end, and both Moylesy and Comedy Dave walked off into the sunset in 2012 when Chris chose to leave amid rumours he was about to be axed – handing over the keys to Nick Grimshaw. After a stint on stage in Jesus Christ Superstar, Chris started a new show on Radio X – but Comedy Dave was nowhere to be seen.

Their relationship seems to have come to an abrupt end in 2011 when Chris was caught on camera holidaying with Dave’s ex-wife, just months after their divorce. Chris was on holiday in Cyprus with his wife Kerry and his brother at the time – with no suggestion it was anything other than a friendship.

Nonetheless, Dave took the news extremely hard and things were never the same again. At the time an insider revealed: “They were so tight-knit but that changed almost overnight after Dave got wind of the friendship. Things deteriorated fast and it was never the same again.

” Dave has got absolutely no time for Chris any more, and they hardly spoke except when absolutely necessary for the show. To say there’s no love lost would be an understatement.

Dave experiences total betrayal. It’s unfortunate. Years later, they became best friends.

But that doesn’t mean Dave has been absent from the airwaves. After leaving Radio One Dave began a show on Hits Radio Manchester alongside Gemma Atkinson. He moved on once again in 2021 now as a senior producer at The Content Works, a podcast company alongside presenter Des Paul.

However, it is believed that he and his former on-air partner have remained distant. Chris told the Guardian they hadn’t spoken in a while in 2016.

At the age of 75 Alan Titchmarsh is about to launch a brand new venture. The former Ground Force star has been gardening since he was a teenager, quitting school at 15 for a job as an apprentice with Ilkley Council

The seasons are changing and with Spring in the air Alan Titchmarsh is growing a new audience as well as lots of seeds and bulbs in his garden. At 75 he could be forgiven for taking things a bit easier, but instead he says he spends mornings writing and then after lunch heads to the garden for a few hours solid work in the earth.

And now you will be able to watch along with him and get tips from his garden as he is launching a new YouTube channel offering gardening tips to young and old alike.

Alan seems unfazed by the move and tells me he already has fans on instagram from Australia, Mexico, Scandinavia, Germany. He says: “I think the thing about YouTube is it has a really broad audience and a lot of them are young, but I’m not, I hope, a boring old fart talking. I mean, I don’t think about my age ever. I’m still me, and there’s so much of the 15-year-old me who left school to go and be a gardener still in me.

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it keeps you interested in it, keeps you alive and lively. I want to make it easy to understand. And if I can have a few gosh moments in it, that’d be really quite nice.

“At least I can hopefully get out there some reliable information, but not just, you know, lecturing, or ‘this is how you do it’, but hopefully being engaging and slightly amusing. We are starting in April so it’s seeds, it’s planting some flowering bulbs. It’s looking after your lawn bit. So it really is, you know, the high spot, really, in the year. Things are moving.”

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One set of fans who might not be able to see him just yet are those in North Korea. YouTube is banned there and when Alan’s 2010 show Garden Secrets aired last year he hit the headlines as his blue jeans were pixelated. Jeans are seen as a symbol of western imperialism in the secretive state and as such are banned.

Alan remembers it well and says with a chuckle: “I am happy to go there to film, but I’ll only do it from the waist up!”

Alan remains popular both at home and abroad. He has his own TV show on ITV, Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh and of course has been involved in other huge hits down the years like Garden Force and Gardeners’ World.

Then there are the books……he is now writing novel number 13 and his book How to be a Gardener Book One: Back to Basic was a best seller with over 600,000 copies sold. But he is clearly very proud of his own stories which include some raunchy early titles Jilly Cooper might be proud of Debut Mr MacGregor was about a TV gardener with a fatal sexual magnetism.

“The thing is, I don’t ask or I hope for anything else. If it all stops tomorrow. I ain’t complaining,” he adds. “But I would like to see one of my novels turned into either TV series or a film. They’ve never been translated into the screen, and I quite fancy that, y’know the works done, somebody else can do the screenplay.

“That is about the only thing on the bucket list. Everything else, I’ve been so lucky to have done so many things I enjoy and I like nothing more now than the sun shining than being out in the garden, pottering still, because it’s making something beautiful. And I love doing that.”

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His days start early at the Grade-II listed Hampshire farmhouse he lives in with wife Alison. “I get up fairly early, sometime between six and seven, and I start writing early. By one o’clock, I’m pretty spent in terms of writing, and my reward is to go out into the garden now after lunch.

“I have friends who retired 10 years ago, of course. But I do now for a living, what they all have been doing in retirement, either writing a book or gardening. So yes my job’s lovely and I have been very lucky.”

As ever, Alan is being modest and it is not all down to luck. He has been gardening since he was a teenager, quitting Ilkley county secondary school at 15 for a job as an apprentice gardener with Ilkley Council.

And over 60 years later he must have seen most things happen to his flowers and crops in that time. He insists he owes others in the TV industry a debt of gratitude as he didn’t push himself the way some other young people might now trying to get onto the screen on reality TV.

And despite his confidence on screen now, he admits being shy and unconfident growing up. “Life finds you out if you let it. If I could give advice to my younger self I’d just say ‘you can afford to be a bit more confident. You do have a right to be here. You’re not just making up the numbers’.

“Growing up in Yorkshire, I was way away, away from anywhere, that anything remotely, supposedly exciting was happening. Though I loved my life in the Yorkshire Dales. It was a blissful childhood, but I think I felt I was being a bit of a loner.

“I have loved my career path, but the implication that it says it was planned and it wasn’t. I’ve just allowed life and people to nudge me.

“And I’m really blessed by meeting people who said ‘you should’, because often people see things in yourself that you don’t see. There’s half a dozen people throughout my life that I’m enormously grateful to for being kind enough to encourage.”

Looking ahead to the YouTube channel and what it might include, he thinks he will aim for an eight minute video each week filmed at his Hampshire home. But he is open to ideas and changes and may do some videos answering questions from fans too as well as giving tips and showing practical things where he gets his hands dirty.

As we chat Alan is about to start filming ready for the launch and he says April is a great time to start but also the UK in general is a great place to be gardening, because of the ever changing weather.

“I think the lovely thing about gardening in the contemporary climate is seasonality, there is the fact that the snowdrops really come back, they’ve now faded. It’s now daffodils everywhere.

“But then they’ll start to go, and the tulips will come up, and then we’ll follow them with things like peonies. And it’s the fact we go through having a different favourite flower every month of the year in the UK, right the way through, every single month there is always something to look at, and that’s what keeps you going.

“So when people say, ‘What’s your favourite flower?’ at the moment it is daffodils because they’re looking lovely, and it will certainly tulips, because they’re on their way now. We’ve been a sort of melting pot for horticulture in this country.

“Also in mainland Europe, the vast majority of people rent their homes. We buy and when you buy something and you’ve got a piece of land with it, you want to know what to do with it and you want to make the best of it. For me, it’s the variety which is the big thing I love.”

Maya Jama, the host of Love Island, showed her lookalike mother Sadie in a new campaign, stunking her celebrity friends by making such eye-catching appearances.

Maya Jama has shocked her celebrity pals by showing off her age-defying mum. The Love Island host, 30, posed alongside her mum Sadie, 50, as part of a new campaign where they looked more like sisters than mum and daughter.

Maya’s clip-in fringes and extensions make the pair proudly rocking matching hairstyles, which she proudly shared. The duo joined forces to launch her Beauty Works hair extensions line on Mother’s Day in stunning photos.

Maya also shared a behind-the-scenes video of her enjoying herself and her gorgeous mother dancing and brushing one another’s hair on the set. The honorable presenter emojied a red love heart emoji and said, “The best shoot days are those with my family.”

She held her mum’s hand as the lookalike pair gave a sultry look to the camera while wearing maxi dresses. They also got photo ready in matching white silk robes as a stylist touched up Sadie’s long dark locks.

Maya has been the face of Beauty Works for the past year, which is just the latest lucrative role she has landed alongside her impressive TV and radio work.

How similar Maya and Sadie resembled her in Abbey Clancy’s “Unreal” speech shocked her famous friends. “Same body and face wow,” remarked Rapper Stefflon Don.

Singer Paloma Faith gushed: “So so beautiful.” Rapper and singer Ms Banks wrote: “Your mum is beaut.” I’m A Celebrity star Nella Rose said: “It’s giving SISTERSSSS.”

One fan even expressed his admiration, “You look like sisters!!” “Students,” continued one, “I’m just speechless.” What’s the mood? “Best friends”

Maya was born and raised by her mum in Bristol, and often praises the support she has received. Sadie was a teenager when she gave birth to Maya, and named her daughter after the US activist Maya Angelou.

Maya has previously joked about how the pair look more like sisters and talking to the Evening Standard about the pair’s strong relationship, she once said: “She had me at 18, so our relationship was a bit different.

Because I was completely free, I rebelled less. Tell me, my mother has always said, “I want you to have your experiences. I won’t criticize you or yell at you. ‘

Sadie turned 50 in January, with Maya on hand to treat her mum as she marked the landmark occasion. Maya gushed: “Happy 50th birthday to my beautiful motherrrrr.” She shared a number of loving emojis before spilling the advice she carries with her from Sadie.

“Thank you for teaching me everything, but most of the time, as long as you remain kind and true to yourself, you can f*** what others think.” To all those who have the pleasure of knowing you, an icon.

In her final sweet post, she shared a video of her and her mum enjoying a sing-a-long with her brother Omar and his pals. Maya’s dad, Hussein, wasn’t around much while she was growing up due to being in and out of prison.

However, Maya told Marie Claire that she didn’t let his absence affect her too much. She said: “Anything that seems tragic or could make people feel sorry for me, I make a joke out of.

“I suppose it’s because I’m happy with it.” I’ve accepted it, and I don’t want to feel sorry for me. If someone asked, “Where is your dad?” I’d say, “Oh, he’s in jail,” and I’d have fun doing it. I didn’t cry at home while I was there.

She added that she was appreciative of how a loving, healthy relationship turned out and that her mother had found love once more. My mother met my stepfather when I was ten years old, and he is the most romantic man.

So I got to witness a loving relationship, which I believe can affect young women who don’t have fathers because they don’t have the experience of loving someone firsthand and understand how important a loving relationship should be. Although Dad wasn’t present, I had everything I needed from elsewhere.

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As we head deeper into spring, Mules are a trending style to wear in the sunny and warmer weather. That said, we don’t all have the money to splurge over £500 on an iconic pair from a designer brand like Jimmy Choo. But that isn’t to say we’ll never be able to get our hands on the enviable style without breaking the bank.

While the Jimmy Choo Etta Mules retail for £575, Doc Martens have unveiled their spring-ready footwear line that includes a similar pair of stone suede mules that are sure to match the design – but these Doc Martens are currently on sale for under £70, saving shoppers over £400 on securing luxury look.

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These Doc Martens promise effortless style with their essential suede mules, crafted for all seasons. With an easy-to-slip-on design, the Carlson mules are a must-have for summer and beyond.

Whether stepping out for a day at the beach or a quick trip to the store, these shoes can carry you anywhere for any occasion. The flat Vibe sole provides all-day comfort, and the moveable strap lets you wear them as a slip-on or secured around the ankle to ensure no slipping or sliding as you walk.

Designed from supple EH Suede Moss Back leather, these slip-on sandals feature a silky soft texture to match the Jimmy Choo’s iconic look, with a single buckle fastening to complete the understated luxe look. They also boast a thicker, sturdier sole than the designer alternative, ensuring they last longer and can carry you across various terrains without damage to your shoe or feet.

With over 900 reviews from satisfied customers, one 5-star rating for these shoes reads: “Super comfortable, lightweight, true to size.” Another thrilled shopper beams: “Absolutely love them so comfy.”

More love comes from this Doc Martens fan, who raves: “Nicest, most comfortable shoes I’ve brought in a long time.” And a fourth enthuses: “Absolutely love them! Perfect fit, nice and soft, would love more colours. Great with all sorts – shorts, dresses, cut offs – the lot. Well done DMs.”

While you can pick up Jimmy Choo’s Stone Velvet Suede Mules for £575 here, these more affordable alternatives are set to become your new go-to shoe. These suede mules would normally cost a steep £110 but are currently reduced to £66 in Doc Martens’ spring sale.

They come in both the sand shade and a more versatile black, with sizes ranging from 3 to 13 – though it’s worth mentioning not all sizes may be available due to their popularity and sale price.

You can also pick up a pair of these designer-alternative mules from ASOS for £91 or on Amazon for £98.

The legendary Irish quintet could have been sung with a much different name in the wild.

For millions of adoring fans, Westlife’s name stokes memories of the late 90s and early 00s, with some banging ballads and heartfelt harmonies. But, following a recent revelation, many fans have been shocked to discover the story behind the band’s original moniker, which could have left fans screaming an entirely different name.

The Irish five-piece’s name, “Westside,” a nod to the area of Dublin west of the city center, was a nod to the band’s earlier hits My Love and If I Let You Go, which sounded appropriate at the time. However, the group encountered trouble, hitting a snag when it became clear that a band had already been formed under the name “”

The band were forced into a last-minute scramble to think of a new identity – enter manager and X-Factor icon Louis Walsh, who is reported to have thought quick on his feet and changed the name to the now legendary moniker. The simple alteration managed to keep the nod to Dublin while avoiding any costly legal fees while the band was still rising up on the Irish music scene.

Thankfully for Louis, the name and their songs became a fast-growing global band that has sold hundreds of millions of records and continues to earn hundreds of millions of Spotify listens. However, Westside the Irish five’s musical journey extends even further.

Isabella, the eldest of James Bond’s granddaughter, was brought to this week’s MobLand premiere by Pierce Brosnan, 71.

Pierce Brosnan was supported by his granddaughter as they attended the afterparty of the MobLand premiere. The 71-year-old James Bond icon invited his 26-year-old granddaughter Isabella, who looked out of this world in a black-and-white two-piece formal outfit and a black blazer.

As he guided his granddaughter through the crowd, 007 star Pierce donned a black two-piece suit and a black scarf. After her mother Charlotte, who is his adopted daughter, passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of 41, Pierce and Isabella remained close and maintained a strong bond. Cassandra Pierce’s first wife’s daughter, Charlotte, was her.

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After their father, Dermot Harris, passed away in 1986, Charlotte and her younger brother, Christopher, 52, were adopted by Pierce. Cassandra, Charlotte’s mother, passed away from ovarian cancer in 1991.

Isabella and Lucas were welcomed with partner Alex Smith by her mother, who adopted the Brosnan surname. She tragically passed away just weeks after getting married to him in 2013.

Sean, age 41, is Pierce’s biological son. He and Keely Shay Smith, both 61, welcomed their sons, Paris, 24, and Dylan, 28, respectively.

He typically avoids public speaking about his private life, but he did speak at the Stand Up To Cancer telethon last year about the women he met.

The actor described himself as a “man who has watched the women he loved struggle with great pain.”

He continued, “That kind of sorrow becomes an indelible part of your psyche to watch someone you love lose their life slowly because of this insidious disease.”

I held my first wife Cassie’s hand as ovarian cancer passed away far too soon, and I was so grateful for it. And just last year, I held my hilarious, wonderful daughter Charlotte in her lap before she too passed away from this terrible, inherited condition.

It comes after Pierce said he hasn’t ruled out a return to the 007 franchise – as he gives his backing to another actor for the iconic role.

Taking on the role of the formidable spy between 1995 and 2002, Pierce previously said whoever takes on the part must be British and stay true to history after Amazon took creative control of the it.

In a new interview he said being involved with the new films was a “delightful kind of notion to contemplate” – whilst giving his seal of approval to front runner Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Discussing rumours about him potentially playing an older James Bond figure, Pierce, 71, says: “No-one’s spoken to me about it. I’ve heard all of the rumours. Listen, let’s see where the wind takes us.”

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