region Loire: Celebs Rumors

Escape to the Chateau star Dick Strawbridge, 64, has revealed the "real reason" Channel 4 decided to finish his and wife Angel Strawbridge's popular home renovation series last year. Escape to the Chateau followed Dick and Angel as they worked on building their forever home within the old Chateau de la Motte Husson in France. The couple, together with their two children, Arthur, 10, and Dorothy, nine, got stuck in and tried their hand at all sorts of DIY works to turn the immense property into a stunning home for them all to live in.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s the quiet that strikes you in “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” a documentary rejoinder to every image of cacophonous haute cuisine environments — complete with clattering pans, hissing steam and chefs screaming invective — that has been fed to us by “Hell’s Kitchen”-style reality shows and the propulsive drama of “The Bear.” Serenity reigns in Frederick Wiseman’s languidly mesmerising 240-minute anatomy of one of the world’s greatest restaurants: The masters and staff of Le Bois Sans Feuilles, a three Michelin-star establishment in France’s Loire region, work with a hushed intensity of concentration that recalls a science lab, or a surgery table, more than any standard kitchen. That suits Wiseman, a patient, rigorous examiner of institutional structure and process, who observes this culinary cathedral as seriously and methodically as he has such comparatively vast cultural hives as London’s National Gallery or the New York Public Library.