learning to read at the age of 51. it may be a little bit grey and damp for some this morning, but there is a good deal of sunshine on the way as we go into the second half of the afternoon. good morning. it s thursday, the 27th of january. prince andrew is demanding a trial byjury in a civil case brought by virginia giuffre, who has accused him of sexual assaulting her when she was 17. the prince denies her claims, and his lawyers have lodged papers with the us court, which set out several reasons why they say the allegations are false. these include a denial that andrew was a close friend of ghislaine maxwell, at whose house some of the alleged abuse took place. our royal correspondent nicholas witchell has more details. across 11 pages, andrew s lawyers have set out his defence, a denial of the central allegation of sexual abuse made by virginia giuffre, and an assertion in respect of others that andrew lacks sufficient information to either admit or deny what s been claim
by pedro almodovar. we have a new british horror movie, amulet. and sing 2 more singing animals. that s quite the mixture. so, parallel mothers, lots of sort of excitement about almodovar s latest film. yes, and a nine minute ovation when it premiered, i think, at venice. so, penelope cruz and milena smit are single mothers to be. they are sharing a room together in a hospital, they give birth together, their babies go into observation together, and when they leave hospital, they swap phone numbers. and perhaps a bit more. here is a clip. so, that s one strand of the story. in another strand, penelope cruz s character is trying to excavate a mass grave in her hometown from the civil war, so there are two stories. parallel mothers, parallel stories, personal and political, which sounds like a really fascinating combination. and if you think of the films of guillermo del toro, like the devil s backbone or pan s labyrinth, he s managed to do exactly that with the spanish civil
personal and political, which sounds like a really fascinating combination. and if you think of the films of guillermo del toro, like the devil s backbone or pan s labyrinth, he s managed to do exactly that with the spanish civil war. here s the thing with this, it s beautifully designed, beautifully played a very well written script with great performances, wonderful score. and it sounds like a perfect match. the problem for me is that it s not so much parallel stories, it s tangential stories. you have the spanish civil war story, which kind of appears and then gets sidelined. you have the personal story, which is full of melodramatic contrivance which you re kind of meant to buy into because, hey, it serves the story. and then we move back to the spanish civil war, so now. i have to say, i m in the minority here. most people i ve spoken to think this is great. and i m a big pedro almodovarfan, i loved the short film that he made, the human voice, just recently. itjust fe
like they lost out as a result for various reasons. yeah, and the whole thing strikes a chord with a couple of other issues that have made news in just the last couple of months. and they fall into a category that you could sort of loosely describe as generation long state failure, which then comes with a massive bill for whichever government decides it is going to try and deal with it. so we ve seen the row about the post office, we ve seen the row about infected blood and now we see this. you know, with a report today saying that this generation of women were never told properly what was going on, which left many finding out very late in the day that suddenly they would not be getting the state pension they thought they were going to be getting until much further down the track. and yet, what we ve had today in response to this is the conservatives in government and labour soon hoping to be in government, both committing to diddly squat. they re not saying that they ll comp
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