Channel 4 To Recreate COBRA For 'War Room' TV Series From Expectation - Deadline

The former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group has obtained a near-£15m investment for his UK music tech startup that hopes to recreate classic concerts by manifesting musicians as digital avatars. Unit1 was set up last year by Barney Wragg, an entertainment executive who ran Lord Lloyd-Webber’s Cats-to-Evita empire for five years from late 2011. It has secured the $20m in funding from a group of investors, including tech backer Balderton Capital through its partner Daniel Waterhouse, who made early investments in Spotify. The company hopes to stage concerts fronted by the “hyper realistic” digital avatars of living artists who are no longer touring and by recreating existing performances from dead musicians. In the latter case, it will develop the avatars through a mixture of archive footage and hiring actors and musicians who either look or play like the departed star, before blending the footage together. Barney Wragg, the founder of Unit1, ran Andrew Lloyd Webber’s empire for five years. Photograph: Unit1Unit1 has tested the technology with Scottish singer-songwriter and musician KT Tunstall, who worked with Wragg during a stint at the music company EMI

Apu is back on "The Simpsons"... and he sounds a little different. Springfield's friendly Kwik-E-Mart owner spoke for the first time in nearly a decade in Sunday's episode of the long-running Fox cartoon, and the words came from a new voice actor: Sunil Malhotra ("Grey's Anatomy") will voice Apu on the show going forward, TVLine has confirmed. (Variety first reported the news.) He replaces Hank Azaria, who voiced Apu from the show's premiere through 2020, when he stepped aside amid mounting criticism of a white actor voicing an Indian character.