Robot arm makes me feel like a superhero
£10k limb is ‘a game-changer’
It’s very futuristic. Every time I see it, I’m like, ‘Wow!’ ENAS SAEED ON
HER NEW BIONIC ARM
BULLIES used to make Enas Saeed want to hide away because she had no left hand.
But she overcame their cruelty and is now the proud owner of a robotic arm that makes her feel like a superhero.
Enas raised £10,000 in just four months to buy her ‘Hero Arm’ from UK firm, Open Bionics.
Now she loves to be seen wearing the cuttingedge limb, which reminds her of bionic-armed Marvel sleuth Misty Knight, played by
Simone Missick in TV shows Iron Fist, Luke
Cage and The Defenders.
Enas, who got her Hero
Arm last month, said: “It’s very futuristic. Every time
I see it I’m like, ‘Wow!’ I feel like Misty Knight.”
Sensors in the Hero
Arm detect electric signals from Enas’ muscles and convert them into movements. “It makes such a difference,” she said. “Carrying things in both hands is game-changing.”
Enas, 30, of Leeds, was born with a congenital limb deficiency that meant her left arm stopped below the elbow. She gave up wearing ill-fitting NHS prosthetics at senior school – but then the bullying began. One cruel pupil even spat at Enas and told her to put her “disgusting” arm away.
She said: “When people challenge the way you look, it can break a lot inside of you. I hid my arm in my pocket. I’d never go to the gym or swim.”
Enas regained her confidence at university and when she saw sci-fi film I Robot, she told mum Safia that she wanted a robot hand.
Her family thought it was just a fantasy – until Enas saw the Hero Arm in a video last year.
The NHS told her there was a “40-year waiting list” so she contacted Open Bionics in Bristol direct.
They told her about crowdfunding, which she started in September. It is hoped the Hero Arm will one day be available through the NHS. Enas, who is now studying to be a counsellor, said: “All the bad things I went through made me stronger. If I can help people who grow up looking different, then that’s great.”
After reports that Simon Cowell’s The X Factor will relaunch in 2022, Talk TV hears it could mean a comeback for Cheryl, too.
Sources say the 37-yearold’s name has been brought up in talks around the new series.
The Girls Aloud star has been quiet after the BBC’s The Greatest Dancer – another of Simon’s shows – was ditched last year after just two series.
An insider says: “Cheryl is still very much in the Cowell fold. She trusts him and he enjoys working with her.
“He brought her back on TV with The Greatest Dancer and could do the same with the new series of X Factor.”
It may or may not be music to your ears that the ITV show is set to return.
The talent contest was axed in 2019 after celebrity and band versions failed to interest disillusioned fans. Despite reigning supreme for 16 years, the show was taken off air after viewing figures plummeted.
But it has been reported that plans are in place to bring it back next year.
It comes after Simon, 61, was spotted back in London this month.
An insider says: “It’s all systems go for X Factor 2022. Bosses feel it’s been given enough of a rest and hope by next year, fans will be ready to welcome it back with open arms.”
Cheryl – who is mum to three-yearold Bear, who she shares with her One
Direction ex Liam Payne, 27 – became a judge on the show in 2008.
She mentored two of the eventual winners – Alexandra Burke and Joe McElderry – before leaving in 2011 to join the panel of the US version, which she left during the audition stage.
She returned to judge series 11 and 12 of the UK version.
X Factor ran from 2004 until 2018. In 2019, Simon tried to revamp the concept with two new versions – X Factor : Celebrity and X Factor: The Band – but neither caught on.
The X Factor’s return would herald a turning point in Simon’s recent misfortunes after Covid also forced him to ditch this year’s Britain’s Got Talent.
He also broke his back last year and had to have surgery after falling off an electric bike.
Jed Mercurio’s
James Nesbitt
HOLLYWOOD has a new queen in waiting... and a role as Anne Boleyn is set to confirm her status as acting royalty.
British star Jodie Turner-Smith is the first black actress to play Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife, beheaded on the king’s orders.
A three-part drama – called simply Anne Boleyn – will lift Jodie’s profile in the UK, where she grew up before moving to the US.
A former banker, she is already a big name in the States after starring in Queen & Slim, the hit 2019 movie about a couple on the run from police after an accidental shooting.
While her character’s name was Queen, that is where the similarities end with the Tudor wife Jodie, 34, is now playing.
She said: “I am looking forward to bringing my heart and spirit into this daring retelling of the fall of this iconic woman.”
Anne Boleyn, mother of Queen Elizabeth I, was executed so that Henry could marry Jane Seymour in his quest for a male heir.
In a first glimpse of Jodie in the role, she wears a black frock and white veil, bearing the resigned expression of a condemned woman.
The hotly anticipated Channel 5 drama – screened late this year – co-stars Mark Stanley as Henry. For Jodie, it marks a remarkable journey from Peterborough to the palace.
ACCENT
She grew up in a village on the outskirts of the Cambridgeshire town where she and her siblings were the only black kids in school.
Her parents are Jamaican and she has a brother and a half-sister.
Jodie grew up listening to Grace Jones and idolising supermodels like Iman and Naomi Campbell. When her parents divorced, mum Hilda and the kids moved to America.
They lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Hilda worked as a cleaner and a nanny.
Jodie said her accent and her colour made things difficult. She revealed in an interview: “Even when I first moved to America, just the idea that I was a dark-skinned black girl from England with an accent.
“It’s one thing to be a black girl, but it’s another to be a dark black girl. I was chastised for that. I was chastised for the way I spoke.”
She said even the black community rejected her, telling her: “You talk like a white girl.”
So Jodie changed her clothes, her shoes and, most significantly, her patterns of speech – which she would practise in the mirror.
She told of unhappy times as a 17-year-old and posted Instagram snaps of herself from her days in high school.
Jodie recalled: “I remember how badly I hated myself and hated the dark skin that made people call me ugly.
“How I changed my voice, changed my hair, became captain of this and president of that, used my intelligence to build a wall around me, spent years in the practise of bending and shaping myself into the most acceptable form of Jodie for the people around me until there was nothing of me left but hate for a person I didn’t recognise.”
She later studied in Pittsburgh, landing an internship at PNC Bank during her degree, and a job once she had graduated.
Jodie was working as a corporate banker when she met singer Pharrell Williams at a concert by N.E.R.D. and he told her: “You need to be in front of a camera!”
She took his advice and appeared in a string of music clips – once alongside Kanye West in the video for Walkin’ on the Moon. From the music scene she went on to become a successful model, with a high-profile Levi’s campaign.
At that time she based herself in London and could easily get the train to see her dad, who still lives in Peterborough.
But her experience of modelling in the capital was plagued by racism. Of the London modelling agency circuit, she said: “It was awful. I’d hear things like, ‘We’ve already got one black girl. Well, she’s mixed race, but she’s our black girl and anyway she doesn’t work much’.
“They wanted a version of blackness more palatable to their clients – lighter, different hair. I was dark-skinned with no hair. Or they wanted you to look obviously African.”
After a few months she returned to LA, doing hotel work and TV ads until screen roles came her way. She appeared in comedy series Mad Dogs, action drama The Last Ship, and sci-fi tale Nightflyers.
But her big break came in Queen & Slim, with fellow Brit and Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya. But Jodie felt her identity was called into question once more during auditions.
She said: “Daniel was already
British. So, again, I needed to be more American to other people, and because I wasn’t American, that was making me not good enough. I was so triggered that after two of my three auditions, I went into the car and just cried.”
Despite the challenges the film received critical acclaim, and Amer
ican and British directors are now desperate to have her in their films. In 2019 she married Joshua Jackson, 42 – the Dawson’s Creek actor she had a crush on when she was a teen.
They have a 10-month-old daughter. Jodie even watches his ’90s drama when they are apart because she misses him “so much”.
Celebrity pals include Jay-Z and Beyonce – a friendship cemented after Jodie hit back at a film critic who targeted the couple’s daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, over her looks.
Her co-stars are A-listers too. This year she appears with Michael B. Jordan in action thriller Without Remorse, Colin Farrell in sci-fi drama After Yang, and John Boyega in IRA thriller Borderland. And as she balances work and motherhood, Jodie wants a variety of roles, saying: “True strength is not found in force and brutality, but in vulnerability. I would love to do more action, and action where I’m allowed to be a woman.”
Buoyed by Anne Boleyn, she can probably name her price. No doubt it’ll be a king’s ransom.
I look forward to Boleyn... bringing my heart and spirit into this iconic woman jodie taylor-smith ON HER NEW ROLE AS TUDOR QUEEN