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.
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© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky
© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky
© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky
Our popular readers’ tips column has been running for 20 years. We’ve selected some highlights from the past 12 months to help you plan your 2026 adventures
• Enter this week’s competition, on life-changing holidays
© Photograph: leoks/Shutterstock
© Photograph: leoks/Shutterstock
© Photograph: leoks/Shutterstock
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.
© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian
© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian
© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian
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?
© Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
© Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
© Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
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.
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© Photograph: Snap Quebec
© Photograph: Snap Quebec
© Photograph: Snap Quebec
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.
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© Photograph: Martin Roemers/Martin Roemers/ Panos Pictures
© Photograph: Martin Roemers/Martin Roemers/ Panos Pictures
© Photograph: Martin Roemers/Martin Roemers/ Panos Pictures
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.”
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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days
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© Composite: Guardian Design / The Guardian
© Composite: Guardian Design / The Guardian
© Composite: Guardian Design / The Guardian
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.
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© Composite: Artwork by Alex Mellon and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images, Reuters
© Composite: Artwork by Alex Mellon and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images, Reuters
© Composite: Artwork by Alex Mellon and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images, Reuters
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.
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© Photograph: Andy Paradise
© Photograph: Andy Paradise
© Photograph: Andy Paradise
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.
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© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Eden Owen-Jones.
© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Eden Owen-Jones.
© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Eden Owen-Jones.
Dara, 24, a trainee accountant, meets Alexia, 24, a healthcare worker
What were you hoping for?
Something a little different for a Tuesday night, and a fancy meal with some good company.
© Composite: Jill Mead/The Guardian
© Composite: Jill Mead/The Guardian
© Composite: Jill Mead/The Guardian
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.
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© Composite: Getty Images
© Composite: Getty Images
© Composite: Getty Images
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.
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© Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The Guardian
© Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The Guardian
© Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The Guardian
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