Taylor Swift broke down in tears after meeting survivors and families of the victims of the Southport stabbing attack, backstage footage from her Eras tour reveals.

The star met privately with some of those affected by the attack in July 2024, which took place at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop and claimed the lives of three young girls.

Afterwards, she sobbed in her dressing room, as her mother, Andrea, tried to comfort her.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them,” she said.

Swift, who was already in her stage costume, then had to pick herself up and perform for three and a half hours at London’s Wembley Stadium.

Speaking to select members of the media, including the BBC, at the New York premiere of her new six-part Disney+ documentary, Swift revealed she had felt compelled to “create some form of escape” for her fans after the incident.

“From a mental standpoint, I do live in a reality that’s unreal a lot of the time,” the star says in the first episode. “But I need to be able to handle all the feelings and then perk up and perform.”

Adding to the emotional burden, the Wembley show also marked Swift’s return to the stage after cancelling three concerts in Vienna, Austria, due to a terrorist threat.

In her words, the tour narrowly “dodged a massacre situation” when the CIA identified a plot to explode a bomb at the concert.

Swift said that, after performing for 20 years, “being afraid that something is going to happen to your fans is new.”

Thankfully, the rest of the tour proceeded without incident, and the documentary shows her relief after playing Wembley. On a phone call afterwards to her fiancé, Travis Kelce, the star says, “I was so happy – I thought I was going to forget how to play guitar and sing.”

The insights are shared in the six-part series, titled The End of an Era, which debuts on Disney this weekend, alongside a concert film, shot on the final night of the star’s record-breaking tour, which ended a year ago.

Before taking her seat at the New York City screening, Swift, who was joined by her mother Andrea, said the tour had been “a lifetime within my life.”

“Everything that went into this was all of the lessons that we’ve learnt [throughout] all of our lives.”

From the first moment the docuseries played, there was no doubt that one of those lessons was that joy can be palpable if you let it.

Here are five others:

Episode one emphasises the immense effort required to create art that appears effortless.

Viewers are taken behind the scenes of the exhaustive planning, choreography, rehearsals, set building, and collaboration it takes to put on a show of such magnitude.

Swift says the goal of the Eras tour was to “over-serve” in terms of the number of songs performed, the extravagance of the costuming, and the details of each set design.

“Every person is the best one in the entire industry,” she says. Their job is to make all the effort “look accidental”.

That said, speaking to the audience in New York, Swift confessed there was also “some kind of magic, destiny, and stuff we can’t explain… when something goes as well as this [tour] did.”

While everyone on the tour is clearly working at maximum capacity, there’s only one person at the front of it all – and what’s the old cliche… with great power comes great responsibility?

The series examines Swift’s existence as a larger-than-life pop star and, more specifically, the emotional toll of putting on a happy face to perform night after night after night.

During Swift’s introduction, she explained she was “obsessed” with perfecting the art of entertaining a huge audience by making “the world go away for a little while”.

At one point, she even compared herself to a “pilot flying a plane,” needing to project an air of steady confidence to distract the passengers from focusing on potential dangers that may be lurking unseen.

“If you were, like, ‘There’s turbulence up ahead; I don’t know if we’re actually going to land in Dallas,’ everyone on the plane is going to freak out,” she explains.

Whether you agree with it or not, Swifties have become a global phenomenon. Well over 10 million people across five continents danced, laughed, and cried their way through three and a half hours of each sold-out Eras Tour show.

The noise of the crowd is overwhelming from a cinema seat, even after it’s piped down and the sound mixed for a documentary. One can only imagine what it’s like from the stage.

“I see the mass quantities of joy that everyone’s feeling,” Swift says. An audience member even compares the atmosphere to “Woodstock without the drugs”.

Fans aren’t just obsessed with the music. They hear themselves in her lyrics and see themselves in her public persona, as she navigates love, heartbreak, illness, treachery and finding your place in the world. She’s a best friend, or an older sister, or a combination of the two.

So when Swift takes a phone call in the documentary and says, “Baby”, the whole theatre erupts – knowing through pop culture osmosis exactly who is on the other end of the line.

Throughout the series, friendship bracelets are traded, strangers become fast friends, crew members form family bonds, and surprise guests punctuate intimate backstage moments.

Watching the opening episodes in New York, the Eras Tour performers were equally energetic – laughing boisterously at on-screen jokes, marking the choreography through aggressive chair dancing, and cheering for each other as they rotated into scenes and through plot lines.

Swift is both comfortable and content to let this diverse cast “pull focus” and steal scenes, both on and off the stage.

During one particularly moving segment, dancer Kameron Saunders – one of the tour’s breakout stars – talks about his struggle to get hired because of his size and look.

Later, when his mum attends the tour, he tells her how much her love and support meant as he waited for his opportunity.

As those scenes played in New York, Swift affectionately turned to Saunders and yelled, “YES!” as he giggled and covered his face in feigned shyness.

It’s easy to feel how life-changing the tour was for everyone involved.

As any Swiftie who has endlessly shout-sung the bridge to their favourite breakup song can tell you, there is no shortage of weeping in the Taylor-verse.

Truly, there is so. Much. Crying.

The docuseries is no exception. It even opens with Swift shedding some heartfelt tears during the first tour rehearsal.

So, why all the big feelings? The simplest answer is that they’re a rite of passage.

Putting the show together, Swift says she was “thinking of all the girls I was before this one” while re-recording her albums and “surgically tweaking” songs to make them fit the show.

It would seem the tears are a manifestation of feeling fully seen through her lyrics – of not feeling like you’re being “too much”, or “too dramatic”, or “too sensitive”, as Swift broadly puts it – and having the freedom to express femininity without shame.

As you watch, it becomes clear that these record-breaking shows were intended as a safe place to explore a wide spectrum of emotions, and in that, they truly succeeded.

Best-selling author Joanna Trollope has died aged 82, her family has announced.

The writer was known as the “queen of the Aga saga” because her novels often focused on romance and intrigue in middle England, although she rejected the tag as “patronising”.

In a statement, her daughters Louise and Antonia said their “beloved and inspirational mother” had died “peacefully at her Oxfordshire home” on Thursday.

Trollope’s novels include The Rector’s Wife, Marrying The Mistress and Daughters in Law.

Trollope’s literary agent James Gill said in a statement: It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of Joanna Trollope, one of our most cherished, acclaimed and widely enjoyed novelists.

“Joanna will be mourned by her children, grandchildren, family, her countless friends and – of course – her readers.”

Trollope’s books have been translated into more than 25 languages, and several have been adapted for television.

Trollope was a writer for more than five decades, and one of the best known novelists in the UK.

She authored 22 contemporary novels including 2013’s Sense & Sensibility, the lead title in HarperCollins’s Austen Project, as well as 10 historical novels published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.

Trollope also occasionally wrote short stories and pieces for magazines, chaired book prizes, authored a 2006 study of women in the British Empire called Britannia’s Daughters, and edited a 1993 anthology of rural life, The Country Habit.

She received an OBE in 1996 for services to charity, and was made a CBE in 2019 for services to literature.

Trollope was born in Gloucestershire, a fifth-generation niece of the English novelist Anthony Trollope.

“I’m not a direct descendent of his, although I’m from the same family, but another branch of it,” she once told the Independent. “I admire him hugely, and take several things he said about writing very much to heart.”

She read English at Oxford University and worked in the Foreign Office and as a teacher before becoming a full-time author in 1980.

Her early novels were all written under her pseudonym until the release of her first contemporary novel, the choir, in 1987.

Several of her later novels were adapted for the screen, including A Village Affair, The Choir, Other People’s Children and The Rector’s Wife.

But the description of her books as “Aga sagas” caught on despite only two of Trollope’s novels actually featuring an Aga.

She later admitted she was “fairly tired of such an inaccurate and patronising tag”.

“Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak,” she told the Guardian.

Trollope said it was “a great honour and an even bigger challenge” to rework Austen’s Sense & Sensibility in 2013.

But, she had previously said that comparisons of her own work with Austen’s “make me fidget”.

“There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into,” she told the Independent.

“On a good day, I might be good. I think of my writing as contemporary accessible fiction and it really isn’t for me to add the qualifying adjectives.”

Trollope’s work tackled a range of topics from affairs, blended families and adoption, to parenting and marital breakdown.

Gatwick Airport is increasing the price of its drop-off zones by £3, bringing the minimum charge to £10.

The fee to allow drivers to stop outside the terminal for 10 minutes is set to increase on 6 January.

The airport said the increase was “not a decision we have taken lightly” and blamed “several increasing costs, including a more than doubling of our business rates”.

Rod Dennis, RAC senior policy officer, said, “The words ‘Happy New Year’ are unlikely to be uttered by drivers dropping off friends and family at Gatwick in January.”

He added, “A more than 40% increase in the cost to drop-off is the largest we’ve ever seen and represents a doubling of the fee since it first came in.”

Southend Airport charges £7 for drop-off for up to five minutes, but that increases to £15 for between five and thirty minutes.

A drop-off fee of £5 was introduced at Gatwick in March 2021.

That increased to £6 in 2024, with the cost rising again to £7 in May.

“Passengers can still drop off for free in our long-stay car parks, with a free shuttle bus to the terminal,” stated a Gatwick spokesperson.

“We also have excellent public transport connectivity at the airport, with passengers able to connect directly with more than 120 train stations.

“Many local bus routes serve the airport 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Blue Badge holders remain exempt from the charge.

The statement added: “The increase in the drop-off charge will support wider efforts to encourage greater use of public transport, helping limit the number of cars and reduce congestion at the entrance to our terminals.

“It will fund a number of sustainable transport initiatives – such as our £1m investment in new and enhanced Metrobus routes in 2025.”

Drop-off fees are also rising at Heathrow from 1 January from £6 to £7.

London City is the UK’s last major airport without a drop-off fee and is to introduce one later this month.

Out of mainland Europe’s biggest 10 airports, only one, Schiphol in Amsterdam, charges for drop-off, according to RAC research.

The cost of travelling on the London Underground, the Overground and the Elizabeth line is set to rise by 5.8% next year, the mayor of London has confirmed.

The increase is 1% above the rate of inflation and will come into force in March.

The freeze in national rail fares announced last month will not apply to Transport for London (TfL) services.

Sir Sadiq Khan says he proposes to freeze the price of Travelcards until March 2027, which means the weekly and daily caps will not change, and fares on London buses and trams will not rise.

The mayor said a rise – equivalent to one percentage point above the RPI rate of inflation – was a condition of the £2.2bn capital funding deal that TfL agreed with central government in the spending review in June.

He said the freeze on bus and tram fares until July 2026 was “an emergency cost-of-living measure” funded by City Hall.

Fares on London’s buses will be frozen.

Sir Sadiq added, “This is the seventh time I’ve been able to freeze bus and tram fares, and it will particularly benefit those on the lowest incomes in our city.

“The plans would mean that only fares on Tube and TfL rail services would now increase from March 2026.

“I also plan to ensure that increases to pay-as-you-go fares on the Tube will be capped at 20p, with many only rising by just 10p.”

City Hall Conservatives criticised the announcement.

In a statement, they said, “Whilst the rest of the country enjoys a fare freeze, Sadiq Khan has burdened Londoners with cost increases that are disproportionately going to affect the young professionals that are the backbone of our city’s economy, as well as the other millions of passengers who use these services.”

The Liberal Democrats said the mayor had “failed to make this case to his ‘mates’ in government like he promised he would; he’s now expecting working Londoners to stump up the costs instead.”

The fare rises will apply to all TfL-run rail services, including the Docklands Light Railway.

The mayor said the increase would mean an off-peak pay-as-you-go Tube fare from Tottenham Court Road in Zone 1 to Edgware in Zone 5 would rise from £3.60 to £3.80.

Pay-as-you-go fares on Tube and TfL rail services within Zone 1 only will rise from £2.90 to £3.10 in the peak and from £2.80 to £3.00 during off-peak and weekends.

A peak-time journey from Upminster in Zone 6 to Cannon Street in Zone 1 will increase from £5.80 to £5.90.

The government capital funding deal is expected to help to replace ageing fleets, upgrade signalling technology and improve buses.

The fare rises will be subject to a final decision by the mayor.

London TravelWatch, the statutory transport watchdog for London, said the city already had some of the most expensive public transport fares in Europe.

It said delays to the delivery of new Tube and DLR trains, alongside worsening bus speeds across the capital, “will make the overall package feel like a hard sell to many passengers”.

It added: “Coming on top of last summer’s price rise for concessionary cards and next month’s hike in the congestion charge, Transport for London will need to run ever faster to show it is delivering value for money to the travelling public.”