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It was the year Beyoncé donned her stetson for Cowboy Carter, Taylor Swift conquered the world on her Eras tour and King Charles appeared in a vivid bright red in his royal portrait.
It was also 12 months when the British Museum showcased a handful of its recovered stolen gems and Charli XCX rebranded the summer in slime green, with her album Brat.
These are some of the highlights from an eclectic year in culture.
Poor Tom Hollander. One minute he was watching his friend perform on stage (for a £300 salary), while the Rev actor sat “smugly in the audience”, having just received about £30,000 for a BBC show. But after doing a swift check of his emails during the interval, he found a payslip labelled “Box office bonus for The Avengers”. He had wrongfully received a paycheque intended for Spider-Man actor and near-namesake Tom Holland, as they had briefly shared the same agent.
“It was an astonishing amount of money,” he told Late Night host Seth Meyers. “It was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office bonus, the first one. And it was more money than I’d ever seen. It was a seven-figure sum.”
“My feeling of smugness disappeared,” he added.
Two Madonna fans tried to sue the singer for showing up late to one of her concerts in New York. Michael Fellows and Jason Alvarez were incensed that the star took to the stage at 22:30 – two hours later than expected – and didn’t wrap up the show until after 01:00.
In a lawsuit filed in New York, they claimed her tardiness impacted their sleep and their ability to “get up early to go to work” the next day.
In response, Madonna’s lawyers argued “no reasonable concertgoer – and certainly no Madonna fan” would expect her to take to the stage at the advertised time.
The case was later dismissed without a settlement.
A year after Barbenheimer electrified cinema audiences, two more very different movies went up against each other at the box office. Both Gladiator II and Wicked Part I were huge hits, taking in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.
When it comes to awards though, Wicked seems to have the edge with Cynthia Erivo who plays Elphaba being touted as a potential Best Actress winner at the Oscars.
Chris McCausland was both Strictly Come Dancing’s first blind contestant, along with being its first blind winner of the glitterball trophy. The former salesman, who got into comedy in the early 2000s, was the bookmakers’ favourite to win. McCausland, 47, was registered blind after losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa in his 20s. He said his win was for Buswell, “and for everyone out there who’s got told they couldn’t do something or thought they couldn’t do it”.
After quite a few setbacks, British powerhouse Adele finally ended her Las Vegas residency in December 2024 after more than two years. Performing 100 shows at the 4,000-capacity Caesar’s Palace, there were plenty of viral moments for the singer, mostly involving the Brit crying over something emotional or getting wrapped up in storytelling. Earlier this year she said she would be taking a “big break” from music after a mammoth run in the US city. “I’m so sad this residency is over but I am so glad that it happened, I really, really am,” she told fans at her final show. “I will miss it terribly, I will miss you terribly. I don’t know when I next want to perform again,” she added.
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