Ravishing actors, charged glances, buttocks like pneumatic hams … this is one steamy love story. But it’s far more than just a porny sport-based bodice-ripper
I was surprised to learn that ice hockey romance is a genre, a popular one. Surprising, but it makes sense. Love in a cold setting has a fairytale quality. It’s why the great Russian romances endure, though they aren’t relatable. Most of us don’t sit by windows, waiting for a horse to bring word that our cousin has survived the winter in Smolensk. Perhaps it’s time for a modern Doctor Zhivago? Enter Heated Rivalry (Saturday 10 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), a Canadian queer romp so hot it threatens to scorch the ice it skates upon.
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are star players from Montreal and Moscow respectively, mysteriously drawn to each other on the rink, in the full glare of the media. Well, not that mysteriously. The co-leads get down to business almost immediately, with a not-quite meet cute in a shower room. Every episode thereafter features charged glances, sweaty necks and muscular pumping. Even the camera feels as if it’s in lust, gliding over 8%-fat sports star bodies and the glass walls of luxury flats. It’s an audacious feat, making ice hockey sexy. Those padded uniforms usually make wearers resemble the Thing from The Fantastic Four.
I had been a member of the Children of God for two decades, but was growing disillusioned with its controlling behaviour and increasingly worrying sexual practices. Then I heard Michael Stipe’s lyrics and was set on a path to freedom
In 1991, I was living in a commune with 200 other people in Japan, as a member of a cult called the Children of God, which preached that the world was going to end in 1993. Everything I did – from where I slept each night, to who I was allowed to sleep with – was decided by the head of my commune. I was encouraged to keep a diary, and then turn it over to the leaders every night, so they could comb through it for signs of dissent. I was only allowed to listen to cult-sanctioned music, and I was only allowed to watch movies with happy endings, because those were the types of films of which the cult’s supreme leader – David Berg – approved. The Sound of Music was one of Berg’s favourite films, so we watched it on repeat.
By the time I was living in Japan, I was in my mid-30s, and I’d been part of the cult for 20 years. I was indoctrinated by a young hippy couple when I was 16, and persuaded to run away from my family and join a sect of the cult near my home town in Canada. I was a lonely teenager and desperately searching for some kind of meaning. Everybody I knew worked in the lumber mill in my small town, and the thought that I was doomed to live that life scared the hell out of me. The first time I visited the commune, everyone hugged me when I walked in, just to say “hello”. It was intoxicating.
But by 1991, after two decades in the cult, my faith was weakening. It was becoming clearer to me that Berg was wrong about the world ending in 1993. A whole series of events that were meant to directly precede the Second Coming hadn’t happened, and Berg – who lived in secrecy and communicated with his followers by written “prophecies” – kept issuing increasingly unconvincing excuses.
I was also becoming more resistant to the way the cult leaders sought to control the most intimate parts of my life. When I joined the cult, it was very sexually conservative. If you wanted to date another member of the community, you had to ask for permission from the leadership. But as the years went by, Berg started preaching a doctrine of sexual freedom, and ordering his members to couple-swap. I had got married to another cult member in the 1980s, and was living with her in a Children of God commune in Japan. Because I resisted couple-swapping I was forcibly separated from my wife as a punishment – and ordered to live in a different commune on my own.
There was also an even darker side to the Children of God that I was trying to shut my eyes to. Berg had released a written decree which permitted adult cult members to have sex with children. I never witnessed any sexual contact with children, and while I did read that decree when it was released in the 1980s, I refused to accept it. Still, it horrified me.
Forcibly separated from my wife, and with Berg’s teachings becoming more twisted, I was in a state of spiritual turmoil. But it was only when I heard REM’s song Losing My Religion that I was pushed to action. Cult members were allowed to own Walkmans, because the Children of God released their own music on cassette, but we were forbidden from listening to “worldly” music. As my will to blindly obey crumbled, I began to secretly tune in to the American armed forces radio station that broadcast in Japan. (Technically, I’d always had the power to covertly listen to music this way, but it’s a sign of how indoctrinated I was that I had never allowed myself to do so before.) One day, Losing My Religion came on, and I remember hearing it for the first time and freezing. I physically stopped walking.
From Barclays, Cadbury and Clarks to Nith and Wampool, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 What identically named comic strips debuted in the US and UK in March 1951? 2 Which pharaoh was known by later Egyptians as the Great Ancestor? 3 Which Spanish-language singer is the world’s most-streamed artist? 4 Which big cat has the widest geographical distribution? 5 Who was the first woman to train a Grand National winner? 6 What element has the lowest boiling point? 7 Which artist has museums in Pittsburgh and Slovakia? 8 Which country has more than 9m abandoned homes? What links:
9 Billie Eilish; George Gershwin; Barry Gibb; Robert Sherman? 10 Annan; Dee; Eden; Esk; Kirtle Water; Nith; Wampool? 11 Lord Kitchener and Mighty Sparrow; nymph of Ogygia; Jacques Cousteau’s ship? 12 Elgin City; Juventus; Marseille; Swindon Town? 13 Barclays; Cadbury; Clarks; Fry’s; Lloyds; Rowntree’s? 14 Rose; tree; bird; arrow; globe; poppy? 15 Nicola Adams; Mel B; Alan Bennett; Erling Haaland; Gabby Logan; Marco Pierre White?
Experts and community trying to untangle mystery of outburst that saw water travel almost 10km overland into a bigger lake
Manoel Dixon had just finished dinner one night last May when a phone dinged nearby with a Facebook message.
Dixon, 26, was at his family’s hunting camp near their northern Quebec home town of Waswanipi. They knew the fellow hunter who was messaging Dixon’s father, but what he wrote didn’t make sense.
You can tell a lot about someone from the vehicle they drive, as Martin Roemers’ collection of photographs show. Introduction by author William Boyd
In my novels I find that I very rarely write “a car” or “a van” or “a lorry” – I always tend to specify the marque and the model, often with some pedantic precision. Why should this be so? After all, I am a non-driver, someone who claims to be able to drive (I did learn), but who never passed his driving test. And yet, paradoxically, I’m something of a car enthusiast – a sort-of petrol-head, I confess – perhaps a consequence of spending many hours, or maybe that should be years, in the back of minicabs that conveyed me here and there around London. In my long experience of minicab use I’ve found that most conversations with minicab drivers often end up being about cars. I’ve learned a lot.
There is another reason why I like to specify. I have a conviction that the type of car, or vehicle, that you drive is as much an expression of your personality as the clothes you wear or the decor of the home you call your own. Even the blandest of mid-price cars – the Toyota Prius, the Kia Picanto, the Volkswagen Jetta, for example – are making a covert statement about you, the owner. You chose that car – and your choice is surprisingly eloquent.
Former champion on his relationship with trainer Brendan Ingle, now portrayed on film, quitting at the right time and the importance of his faith
Naseem Hamed carries himself with a stately grandeur these days. Having settled his considerable bulk into a comfortable chair he pauses meaningfully. We look at each other intently and it’s hard to believe the incorrigible little “Naz fella”, the swaggering Prince Naseem who became a world champion 30 years ago and changed British boxing forever with his dazzling aptitude for fighting and showmanship, is 51 now.
“This is the one thing you need to understand,” Hamed says as he remembers Brendan Ingle’s famous old gym in Sheffield. “The minute I walked through the doors of that boxing club, that was it. I saw the ring, the bags, the lines on the floor, and I was immediately obsessed. This was going to be my life. I saw boxing as a game of tag. I’m going to hit you and you can’t hit me. It took speed and accuracy and I was really good at it.”
Trump’s attack on Venezuela suggests expansionism is under way but some argue it is simply standard US foreign policy stripped of hypocrisy
The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era.
The US president was leaning on a bulkhead on Air Force One, in a charcoal suit and gold tie, regaling reporters with inside details of the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. He claimed his government was “in charge” of Venezuela and that US companies were poised to extract the country’s oil wealth.
Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff An imaginatively programmed concert featured Anders Hillborg alongside Sibelius and Shostakovich – with Alban Gerhardt the impeccable soloist in the latter’s second cello concerto
Cadavre Exquis was the game – akin to Consequences – in which surrealist artists such as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró made separate contributions to a single piece of work without sight of what anyone else had done, to see how a picture might evolve, or just for the hell of it. Anders Hillborg took the principle as inspiration for his composition Exquisite Corpse but, where the surrealists hoped for signs of an unconscious collective sensibility, the emerging components of Hillborg’s piece bear his consciously singular imprint while also incorporating references to composers as disparate as Stravinsky, Ligeti and Sibelius.
In the performance given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under their chief conductor Ryan Bancroft, the unfolding layers of sound were never less than brilliantly alive. Hillborg’s instinct for a remarkable range of instrumental colour – delicate tendrils of harmony, monstrously growling bass registers, insistent conga drumming, shrill piccolos – taunted and teased the ear before finally fading into a gentle haze.
Earthy, sweet swede soaks up a curry sauce like a champion, and this ginger, tomato and coconut number is no exception
As a day-in-day-out home cook, there is no more welcome tool in my dinner toolbox than a bung-it-in-the-oven dish. A second necessary tool in the month of January is the ability to dispose of or transform a swede into an evening meal. For the uninitiated, when roasted, the swede, that pretty, purple-creamed, dense little ball, is part-creamy, part carrot-like in nature, and earthy and sweet in flavour. It also takes to big-flavoured sauces such as this tomato, ginger and coconut curry like a chip to vinegar and couples up well with its seasonal pal, fresh, crunchy purple sprouting broccoli.
As Netflix and Paramount Skydance clash over WBD, football rights once considered peripheral could become central to the future of UK streaming
Netflix has spent years politely rebuffing Premier League and Uefa entreaties to bid for their TV rights, so it would be ironic if it picked them up by default. That intriguing outcome is a possibility as a result of the $100bn-plus takeover battle for Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) between Netflix and its streaming rival Paramount Skydance which will shape the future not only of Hollywood but global news.
Much-hyped sports rights are a footnote in a deal of such magnitude that it will require signoff from the US government, but the implications for football will be profound, even if Donald Trump is more concerned about who owns (and presents on) CNN than which platform shows Bournemouth v Brighton at Saturday lunchtime next season.
I can’t tell the GP ghosts are pulling my hair. That’s even more embarrassing than my previous ailments – ‘hot hand’ and ‘phantom phone’
I wake up with a headache. Not a headache, really – more of a head pain, and not exactly that either. I am sitting in the kitchen opposite the middle one, who is staring at his computer. My wife is wandering in and out, not really listening to the symptoms I’m trying to describe.
“It’s like I walked through a low doorway and cracked my skull on the frame,” I say.
Since my mum died, family photos can be painful to look at. But this one of me and my brother is a reminder we still have each other
My only sibling is seven years older than me. That means he has forever been seven years ahead of me in life, sitting somewhere between a willing co-conspirator and knowledgable surrogate parent – protective but fun, and always aware of the secrets of existence I am yet to discover. It was his aside that spoiled the secret identity of Santa Claus; he who laughingly revealed the mechanics of sex; he who gave me my first sip of beer. Yet, when he found out I was sneaking cigarettes from my dad’s stale dinner party supply, he chastised me before either of my parents could, and when my mum was diagnosed with cancer and I was just 15, he was already a 22-year-old medical student, able to speak in a doctor’s shorthand and advocate for her care while my father and I floundered.
Ever since my mum died in 2013, family photos have been a source of bittersweet pain. In the pictures where she is present, I’m reminded of her wide smile, appetite for fun and her loving presence. In the images without her, all I see is her absence – the mum-shaped silhouette where she should be, either because she was outside the frame or because she was no longer alive.
British defence minister says money will be spent on vehicle upgrades, communication systems and counter-drone protection, ensuring troops are ready to deploy. What we know on day 1,417
‘We’re going to be extracting numbers in terms of oil like few people have seen,’ Trump said – key US politics stories from 9 January 2025
Donald Trump had a message for fossil-fuel companies on Friday: Venezuela is now “open for business” as the US president vowed the country’s resources would be extracted for the benefit of the US, oil companies – and “some” money for Venezuelans.
At a roundtable press conference at the White House with more than a dozen oil executives, including leaders from Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, the US president doubled down on claims that Nicolás Maduro’s arrest presents American oil companies with an unprecedented opportunity for extraction.
At least 119 structures are believed to have been destroyed in bushfires across Victoria and more than 300,000 hectares of bushland burned as the state continues to battle blazes that may rage for “weeks”.
Emergency management commissioner, Tim Wiebusch, told the media on Saturday that about 50 homes had been lost in the Ravenswood and Harcourt fire, which was believed to be a “conservative number”. The Bendigo railway line had also been damaged by fire and was closed.
Harold Pinter theatre, London Crudup and Denise Gough lead a tense adaptation that turns the film into a debate play whose McCarthy-era roots resonate powerfully today
How do you turn a classic Hollywood western into West End musical fare? Add songs, many of Bruce Springsteen’s in this case, along with a few rounds of line dancing and a sizzling star in Billy Crudup. Still, it’s an odd experience initially as Thea Sharrock’s production switches from one brief filmic scene to the next, and the endeavour seems as wooden as the clapboard saloon-bar slats that comprise the handsome set.
As a piece of theatre, it finds its flow. As a debate play, though, it gathers a locomotive energy as it travels towards the showdown between Frank Miller (James Doherty), who is returning to this “dirty little village in the middle of nowhere”, and the marshal Will Kane (Crudup) who put him behind bars. That is mostly because of the uncanny and urgent relevance of this 1952 film about a community working out (or rather, squirming out of) its civic responsibilities around institutional wrongdoing.
Artistic director of US’s national opera also cites ‘shattered’ donor confidence and box office revenue
The Washington National Opera (WNO) announced on Friday it is moving its performances out of the John F Kennedy Center, in what could be one of the most significant departures from the institution since Trump took control of it.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the opera said in a statement to the New York Times. A separate website appears to be set up for the opera.
US president doubles down on threats to acquire territory at White House meeting with oil and gas executives
Donald Trump has doubled down on his threats to acquire Greenland, saying the US is “going to do something [there] whether they like it or not”.
Speaking at a meeting with oil and gas executives at the White House, the US president justified his comments by saying: “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland. And we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.”
Platform has restricted image creation on the Grok AI tool to paying subscribers, but victims and experts say this does not go far enough
Elon Musk’s X has been ordered by the UK government to tackle a wave of indecent AI images or face a de facto ban, as an expert said the platform was no longer a “safe space” for women.
The media watchdog, Ofcom, confirmed it would accelerate an investigation into X as a backlash grew against the site, which has hosted a deluge of images depicting partially stripped women and children.
Manager takes charge of first game on Saturday in FA Cup
‘It’s not possible to be in this job and not be your own man’
Liam Rosenior is confident he will make the decisions at Chelsea, insisting he would not have agreed to take over as head coach if he doubted his ability to work within the club’s structure.
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