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In Spring 2020, the UK Government announced the cessation of in-person teaching for the vast majority of school-aged children in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Prompting an accelerated shift towards digital learning across the curriculum, this announcement was accompanied by a rise in market-based solutions to address the problem of keeping young people active, 'healthy' and 'positive' whilst at home. The most prominent of these was offered by Joe Wicks, who broadcasted PE with Joe live globally via YouTube for five days per week for eighteen weeks. The aim of this paper is to critically explore some of the contextual factors that enabled Joe Wicks to create and legitimise a public health intervention under the title of physical education, and henceforth position himself (whether intentionally or not) as an authoritative agent for change within the discipline. After outlining who Joe Wicks is, we unpack the discursive framing of PE with Joe in order to locate Wicks' intervention amid the perennial politics of physical education. We then consider the meaning of PE with Joe and why Joe Wicks' involvement in physical education matters, reflecting upon the effects of Joe Wicks on the future of physical education practice and research. Among our conclusions is that the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for Joe Wicks – here positioned and understood as a branded, celebrity lifestyle enterprise – to manoeuvre himself (and his products) from the periphery to the centre of physical education's public imagery and discourse. Furthermore, we argue that exploring the ways in which Wicks' presence in the physical education space has been received, embraced, modified, challenged and resisted is vital in discerning PE with Joe's actual or perceived effects on the social construction of physical education, and the educational engagements of young people in physical activity in the post-Covid-19 landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019 British Channel 4 reality TV programme The British Tribe Next Door putatively compares contemporary life in Britain to a small, sustainable indigenous Himba community of Otjeme in the Kaoko region of Namibia. An actual British terraced house was built and provided with all the modern furnishings. British Reality TV celebrity Scarlett Moffatt and her family would live in the house. The idea was to have a "reverse anthropological exchange" between the Moffatts and the "nomadic" Himba. Critics of the programme called it "racist and exploitative" and "the most immoral show of all time." Others in the British viewing public praised it for revealing the simplicity of the Himba way of life. But the programme fails to comprehend that "the Himba" is really an artificial construct created by the South Africa apartheid regime for its own racist ideas and then reenforced by advertising, the tourist industry in Namibia, and international media. This essay examines the evolution of that construct and its impact on the Himba. The British Tribe Next Door does reveal the persistence of problematic and condescending colonial tropes as well as the deception of Reality TV. While playing their tourist role, the Himba will pursue their own agendas in the Kaoko, Namibia, and the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]