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      An Online Radio Station Where Everything Is Eclectic

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      Music played by D.J.s like Flo Dill on NTS encompasses obscure ambient tracks and timeworn dad rock. The approach has won it fans far beyond its London home.On a gloomy Tuesday this past March, a cohort of trendy young Britons was waking up to the sounds of underground ’80s R&B. And Swedish space disco. And the folk singer John Martyn.Flo Dill, host of “The Breakfast Show” on the online radio station NTS, was floating around in a small East London studio, quietly back-announcing those tracks and laughing at messages in the station’s lively online chat room. Like most morning radio hosts, she tries to ease listeners into their day, slowly bringing up the tempo. But unlike most morning radio hosts, Dill plays tracks in a mixture of styles that can run the gamut from obscure ambient music to timeworn dad rock.The NTS studios in the Dalston neighborhood of London.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The Breakfast Show” encapsulates the spirit of NTS, an eclectic revamp of traditional radio that draws listeners — and on-air talent — from across the globe. Since it was founded in 2011, NTS has grown into a big fish in underground music’s small pond: You could maybe go for an entire day listening to NTS and not recognize a single artist, and, even in Britain, the average person on the street would never have heard of it.But the station’s devoted fans are drawn to its shows, most of which are structured like D.J. mixes, with no talking between tracks; others play like Dill’s: modern, casual updates on classic radio formats, with genre-agnostic programming.Dill said in an interview that NTS works because, unlike traditional radio, which “spoon feeds” its audience, it doesn’t patronize or treat the listener as “a moron.” (NTS’s tagline is “Don’t Assume.”) She started volunteering at NTS in 2016, at a time when there were hardly any full-time staff members. Now, there are around 45 working across the station and its related businesses, which include putting on festivals and events and creating marketing campaigns for brands like Carhartt, Netflix and Sonos.“The Breakfast Show” should be a respite from the “relentless pursuit of beige stuff” in today’s culture, Dill said. The program is broadly accessible — she sees it as a portal into the broader NTS ecosystem, which can be “so specialist” — but considered and particular in its tastes.That spirit has thrived since NTS’s beginning, when the London D.J. and blogger Femi Adeyemi spun it off from a music blog he was writing called “Nuts to Soup.” In an interview, Adeyemi said he conceived of NTS as a cross between U.K. pirate radio — a fixture of the country’s music scene that he admired, but found “very restrictive” — and American college radio, which “had that free-form approach that I hadn’t really heard much of in the U.K.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning,” Dill said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIn 2015, NTS expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Currently, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month — roughly 600 from residents, who host weekly, biweekly or monthly shows, and 100 or so from guest D.J.s — which come in from cities across the world, including Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Melbourne, Australia. NTS broadcasts without advertising, instead relying on income from its commercial activities and a membership program called “NTS Supporters” to keep the station afloat. In March, the station averaged 360,000 listeners a day, according to its chief executive, Sean McAuliffe.Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura, the director of music and programming at NTS, said that the station “was the first platform in London that really reflected the breadth” of her taste as a young Black music fan with a genre-agnostic mind-set. It was that boundary-dissolving character that brings people to the station, she added.Dill said the station could also act as a bulwark against the idea that listening to music is a passive experience. “I want people to not think that music is just a background thing that’s on Spotify, that rolls into the next song and they all sound vaguely the same,” she said. (Around 40 percent of the music played on NTS is not available on the streaming service, McAuliffe noted.) “I want people to think that music is a really valuable, amazing art form, like a painting or a sculpture,” Dill added.Although it is based in London, NTS has global appeal. Nabihah Iqbal, who has been broadcasting on NTS for over a decade, said that she once received a message from a man in the Nubian Desert who listened to her show from the one spot in his Sudanese village where he could get cell signal.“What NTS reflects is the way that music consumption and connecting through music has changed because of the internet,” she said. “Listening to the station live, and being part of the chat room and connecting to people that way is a very real way of feeling like you’re part of a community.”The station’s listenership ballooned during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and McAuliffe said there were now plans to “amplify NTS more.” It has never spent any money on marketing, for example, but plans to in the future. McAuliffe also said NTS would roll out a new feature of its app and website that “will enable more people to have a better music discovery experience” and “will get a lot more musicians and music rights holders paid at a time when they’re not getting paid enough.” He declined to give further details.With the platform getting bigger, Dill said she didn’t want its core identity to get lost. Adeyemi recently sold part of his stake in the company to Universal Music Group, the major label conglomerate that releases music by Taylor Swift and Drake, among others. (McAuliffe, Dill and Adeyemi all said that the company has no influence on the music that’s played on NTS, and has no seats on the company’s board.) The money from Universal would mean that NTS won’t get subsumed into a streaming service like Apple Music, Dill said, as happened to other independent radio operations, including “Beats in Space,” the beloved radio show hosted by the D.J. Tim Sweeney, which moved from WNYU-FM to Apple Music in 2021.“I have seen, over the course of my time, many things I loved go away because they can’t continue,” Dill said. “If someone wants to give us money, I’m fine with that.”Dill said that if the station were to professionalize too much, or stray too far from its intended goals, then it wouldn’t be for her anymore. “I get satisfaction from representing the station that I really believe in and I’m proud of,” she said. “I guess it comes back to trust. I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      Karl Wallinger, Who Sang With World Party and the Waterboys, Dies at 66

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      As a songwriter and instrumentalist as well, he blended pop and folk influences into music that helped define college radio in the 1980s and ’90s.Karl Wallinger, a Welsh singer-songwriter who helped define college radio in the 1980s and ’90s as a member of the Waterboys and the founder of World Party, died on Sunday at his home in Hastings, England. He was 66.His daughter, Nancy Zamit, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause. Mr. Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm in 2001 that forced him to stop performing for several years.Following on the heels of the post-punk, new wave and new romantic movements of the early 1980s, Mr. Wallinger embodied something of a throwback to the classical pop and folk styles of an earlier era, with music and lyrics influenced by the Beatles and Bob Dylan.Though he rejected the label “retro,” onstage he looked like a stylish hippie, with long stringy hair and tinted round glasses that would have fit in at Woodstock.Mr. Wallinger was widely admired for his instrumental skills. He primarily played keyboards for the Waterboys, an influential folk-rock band founded by the Scottish musician Mike Scott, but on his own he usually played a guitar — which, though he was right-handed, he played upside down, with his left hand.After two albums with the Waterboys, Mr. Wallinger left in 1985 to form World Party, which was at first a one-man act: He wrote all the music and recorded all the parts in the studio. Only when he began to tour did he add members and make it a true band.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Saltburn’ Mansion Has Film’s Fans Flocking to the English Countryside

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      A popular video on TikTok takes viewers to the site of Drayton House, where much of the movie was filmed.Drayton House, a privately owned mansion with more than a hundred rooms, has stood in Northamptonshire, England, for close to 700 years.For most of those seven centuries, the manor was a silent countryside presence, known mostly to locals or experts with a penchant for viewing beautiful homes owned by England’s upper classes.But that peace and quiet has changed since the release of “Saltburn” in November. Though the film largely didn’t impress critics, it has generated a flood of memes, jokes and commentary on the internet.And a pilgrimage to this once-quiet estate was made even easier after Rhian Williams, who lives nearby, posted detailed directions to the house in a TikTok video on New Year’s Day. Her clip ended up attracting more than 5.5 million views. She has since followed up with more videos, including another visit to the house as well as a visit to the local pub.“I haven’t got very many followers on TikTok,” Ms. Williams said in a phone interview. “I didn’t predict it,” she said.Drayton House, a Grade I building that is protected because of its historical nature, has been privately held for hundreds of years.Amazon StudiosWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mary Poppins’ Gets New Age Rating in Britain for Racist Language

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      The musical about a nanny with magical powers had been classified for all audiences since 1964, but the British Board of Film Classification has issued new guidance.The rating for “Mary Poppins,” the beloved children’s musical about a nanny with magical powers that was released 60 years ago, has been raised to PG in Britain because of the use of “discriminatory language,” the British Board of Film Classification said.The rating change follows a wave of recontextualizing and reclassifying of films from bygone eras for modern audiences amid shifting cultural norms and mores.“Mary Poppins” includes two uses of an offensive racial slur to describe an Indigenous group in South Africa. It is first heard when Admiral Boom asks Michael, a child, if he is going on an adventure to defeat said group. Admiral Boom repeats the slur during a chimney sweeps dance sequence when he shouts that he is being attacked. The dancing figures he spots in the distance are not Black Africans, but white dancers with blackened faces from soot.The film was originally rated “U,” for Universal, upon its release in 1964, and again in 2013 for a theatrical release, the B.B.F.C. said in a statement. When it was resubmitted in February for another theatrical release, it was reclassified as PG.PG is the second-least severe of six ratings in Britain. The strictest is 18, which prohibits anyone under that age from renting, buying or seeing the film in movie theaters.“We understand from our racism and discrimination research, and recent classification guidelines research, that a key concern for people, parents in particular, is the potential to expose children to discriminatory language” or behavior which they may find distressing or repeat without realizing the potential offense, a spokeswoman for the board said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Ewen MacIntosh, Comedian on British Sitcom ‘The Office,’ Dies at 50

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      Mr. MacIntosh was known for his role as Keith Bishop, a dry, blunt accountant on the original version of “The Office.”Ewen MacIntosh, a British actor and comedian known for his dry portrayal of Keith Bishop, a lackluster accountant in the acclaimed British sitcom, “The Office,” has died. He was 50.He died on Monday, his management company, Just Right Management, said, but it did not give a cause of death. The company said in a social media post that Mr. MacIntosh received support from a care home before he died.Mr. MacIntosh had parts in several comedic series, including the British sitcom “Miranda” and the sketch series “Little Britain.” But it was “The Office” that would be his most famous role, as a socially inept accountant working at a boring branch of a paper company.Created by the comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the mockumentary series began airing in 2001 and focused on the horrors and trivial lives of office workers. It included two series and a Christmas special, and its comedic approach was praised by critics and audiences alike.The show later inspired an Emmy-winning American counterpart that ran for nine seasons and also attracted an avid audience.Referring to Mr. MacIntosh as “Big Keith,” one of his nicknames on “The Office,” Mr. Gervais called him “an absolute original” in a social media post Wednesday.This is a developing story. More

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      in Movies

      Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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      He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sophie Turner’s Custody Lawsuit Against Joe Jonas is Dismissed

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      The English actress sued the American musician weeks after they announced their split, saying he had prevented their two children from returning to Britain.A judge in New York on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit that the English actress Sophie Turner filed last year against her husband, Joe Jonas, in which she requested that their two young children be returned to England from the United States.The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was dismissed with both parties’ consent, according to a court filing.Turner, a star on the television show “Game of Thrones,” sued Jonas, an American musician who plays in a boy band with his brothers, in September, weeks after the couple said publicly that they planned to divorce.That summer, the children had traveled to the U.S. with Jonas because he was on tour there and Turner had a busy filming schedule in Britain, according to the lawsuit. The couple agreed that Turner would pick up the children in September and return with them to England, it said.Instead, the lawsuit said, Jonas filed for divorce in September and later refused to give Turner the children’s passports, preventing them from returning to England, their “habitual residence.”A representative for Jonas said at the time that giving Turner the children’s passports would have violated a court order in Florida — where the couple’s divorce proceedings had been initiated — that restricted both parents from relocating the children.In the court filing on Wednesday, known as a consent order, Judge Katherine Polk Failla noted that Turner and Jonas had signed a memorandum of understanding and a “parenting plan” related to their children in October. They also filed a consent order with a court in Britain that was approved on Jan. 11, she wrote.Attorneys and publicists for Turner and Jonas did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.The couple’s children, who were born in the United States in 2020 and 2022, have American and British citizenship. They have been identified in court documents by only their initials.Turner and Jonas began dating in 2016, when he was touring in Britain, and married in Las Vegas three years later.After living a “very peripatetic lifestyle” for a few years, Turner’s lawsuit said, they relocated to England in April 2023 and had planned to buy a home there later in the year.But in early September, after a succession of negative news stories about Turner, they said in a joint statement on Instagram that they had “mutually decided to amicably end our marriage.”Seamus Hughes More

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      in Television

      How a Show Forced Britain’s Devastating Post Office Scandal Into the Light

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      After years of delays, victims of one of the U.K.’s worst miscarriages of justice are finally being exonerated — thanks to a TV drama.More than 700 people convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. At least four suicides. A woman sent to jail while pregnant. Bankruptcies. Marriages broken, lives ruined.The shocking details of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history have been reported for years yet somehow stayed below the radar for most of the public, despite intense efforts by campaigners and investigative journalists.Until last week. A gripping ITV drama series, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which began airing on Jan. 1, achieved something that eluded politicians for a decade, cutting through a morass of bureaucratic and legal delays and forcing government action.The show dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran branches of the Post Office across Britain, and who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system called Horizon created false shortfalls in their accounting.Between 1999 and 2015, they were pursued relentlessly in the courts by the Post Office for financial losses that never occurred. Some were jailed, most were driven into financial hardship, many suffered mental health issues and some took their lives.Under pressure, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised a new law to exonerate and compensate all known victims, a sweeping intervention that aims to finally bring justice after years of glacial progress.And the police suddenly said last week that they would investigate whether Post Office officials — who refused for years to admit that the IT they forced managers to use was at fault — should face charges. Meanwhile one of its former bosses, Paula Vennells, has handed back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019, after more than a million people signed a petition demanding she be stripped of it.All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade?“However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” “Whereas drama is designed to appeal to your heart — that’s what it has been doing for thousands of years.”Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, in 2012. She said she would hand back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019 after a public outcry this week.Anthony Devlin/PA Images, via Getty ImagesMattias Frey, a media professor at City, University of London, argued that the drama shows the continuing power of terrestrial TV to change public perceptions and generate “one of those old fashioned water cooler moments” that fuels broader public debate.Even the show’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, was surprised by the scale of the reaction. Before the show was broadcast, he told his team that they shouldn’t be downhearted if ratings were modest, given the competition for eyeballs.The day after the series began he was informed by a colleague that more than 3.5 million people had watched the first episode. “I thought I had misheard her,” Mr. Spence said. Nine million people have now seen the series, according to ITV.He believes the show has inadvertently become a state-of-the-nation drama, articulating “a bigger truth, which is that we don’t feel heard, and we don’t trust the people who are supposed to have our backs.”The case is all the more shocking because the Post Office is an institution woven into the fabric of British life, more used to being portrayed in a benign role as in the popular TV show for children, “Postman Pat.”An official inquiry into the scandal was established in 2020, and more than £148 million, or more than $188 million, has already been distributed to victims from compensation programs. In 2019, 555 branch managers successfully challenged the Post Office in the High Court.Despite that, of the 700 criminal convictions, only 93 have so far been overturned, a sluggish pace that fueled campaigners’ anger.Former post office branch managers celebrating outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2021, after a court ruling cleared them of theft and false accounting.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince ITV’s drama aired, more victims have come forward, but dozens of other people died before they could receive compensation. When Horizon declared branch accounts were in deficit, managers were contractually obliged to make up shortfalls.Some paid from their own savings to avoid prosecution, even though they were sure they had done nothing wrong. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes to avoid jail although they were innocent.One victim, Lee Castleton, whose plight was featured in the drama, told the BBC that his Horizon account would swing abruptly from profit to loss and that more than 90 calls to a help line proved useless. The Post Office, he said, was “absolutely hellbent” on not assisting him.As news of his supposed wrongdoing filtered into the community, Mr. Castleton and his family were accused of theft in the street, his daughter was bullied at school and she developed an eating disorder. Forced to travel far afield to seek work, he slept in his car.Such stories provide the beating heart of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which is the result of three years of work. The truth of what happened was “unbelievable,” said Ms. Hughes, the show’s writer. “If I wrote those things fictionally, nobody would believe me, people would switch off.”The heroic Mr. Bates, played by Toby Jones, is portrayed as an even tempered and indefatigable character who — like other victims — was told by the Post Office that he was the only person to report problems with Horizon.The actor Toby Jones in character as Alan Bates, a man who is “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.”ITVHe found others, formed a group of victims, and pursued their cases with meager resources, battling a succession of setbacks to achieve an extraordinary victory in the courts.“Everyone likes an underdog, and we had underdogs in spades,” said Ms. Hughes, adding that Mr. Bates might look like a mild-mannered bearded fan of real ale but is also “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning.”“He is, in a way, a gift as a character, he has a complexity: cometh the hour, cometh the man,” she said. “He’s led this long march of the misunderstood and unheard, and kept his sense of humor.”A few politicians were allies in the victims’ cause, notably James Arbuthnot, a Conservative lawmaker (now in the House of Lords) who fought on behalf of a constituent wrongly accused of stealing £36,000.There is also a cameo role for another Conservative lawmaker, Nadhim Zahawi, who played himself in the drama, questioning Ms. Vennells, the former Post Office boss, during a parliamentary committee hearing.To viewers Ms. Vennells emerges as the obdurate face of the Post Office, someone determined to defend its reputation rather than engage with its victims, a stance all the more surprising because she is an ordained Anglican priest (although she stepped back from any major role in the church in 2021).Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the Horizon system, is also under increasing pressure, with politicians hoping to recover some of the costs of compensating victims from the firm, which still has billions of pounds’ worth of contracts with the British government.Professor Frey worries viewers may have seen a “simple David and Goliath story” whereas lawyers and politicians must grapple with something more complicated. He sees a risk that “the pressure that should be brought to bear on politicians in order to clean this mess up maybe comes in a way that is undifferentiated.”Ms. Hughes has concerns about that too. “I hope they do right by all our lovely sub postmasters, but I also hope they find a way to do so that isn’t going to cause further problems down the line,” she said. “Thank God that’s not my job.” More