A ‘fit as a fiddle’ charity runner, 85, from Greater Manchester has been chosen to be one of the faces of a new Adidas advert.

Barbara Thackray, a grandmother from Altrincham, runs 10k twice a week to keep fit. She has been chosen — alongside the likes of Liverpool footballer, Mo Salah, Qatari hurdler Mariam Farid and Egyptian runner Khadija Hegazy in the new TV and YouTube advert — as one of the faces of to feature in it.

The retired college lecturer took up running eight years ago, aged 77, to raise funds for St Ann’s Hospice in Heald Green, Stockport.

She has been raising money for the hospice since her sister died there in the 1990s.

She said she watched the new advert ‘on a little screen’ and it was ‘fine’, adding: “So long as they were prepared to make a significant donation to St Ann’s Hospice, I felt ok about it.”

Ms Thackray has raised over £20,000 for St Ann’s Hospice in just a few short years, having been a champion of the organisation for over 10 years — including during her sister’s illness and eventual passing.

She’s not planning on stopping running any time soon.

Paddy McGuinness has fans’ hopes up as he hints at a return of the comedy show Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere.

The show was a spin-off of Peter Kay’s iconic Phoenix Nights, which Kay and McGuinness starred in as the club’s bouncers. The Channel 4 spin-off aired in 2004 and proved popular, though there were only ever six episodes made. 

It picked up where Phoenix Nights left off; with Max and Paddy driving off into the sunset as they feared for their lives after the club patron threatened them with a hitman. The pair began a life on the road as they got into a number of hilarious scrapes along the way.

McGuinness teased fans as he hinted: “Well, when we talk about stuff, like the interesting thing about Max and Paddy and Phoenix Nights is now, we are kind of all of an age of the people we played back then.

“But we [him and Kay] do talk about it and what have you, but, I don’t, I can’t, I can’t see it at the minute, but we never say never, but it’s good to talk. Max and Paddy for instance, we wrote a couple of Christmas specials, and we’ve still got them.

“We never got around to doing one for whatever the reasons were back in the day. But we’ve actually got them!”

While it’s not definite, the door remains open for the two mischievous doormen should they wish to make a comeback.

It’s unclear whether Kay would return to the show as he is currently in the middle of a UK arena tour while McGuinness is back performing stand-up for the first time in 12 years. 

As the Take Me Out star continued: “I mean, he’s on tour. I’ve got all kinds of stuff going on, and it’s just sort of going ‘right, let’s get together. Let’s get our diaries together. And let’s blank out for that time’.”

Kay started his tour in December but McGuinness has said he doesn’t need to watch his mate perform live on stage, adding: “The mad thing about this show is, he rings me up, he says, ‘I’m going on tour’.

“So my first thing is, ‘why? Why do that? Why put yourself…’ and he’s like, ‘I want to do it’, this, that and the other. Great, fair enough, each to their own, and it is very seducing when you’re on stage and people are laughing.

“So anyhow, he’s put this massive tour on, I come round for a cup of tea. So I’m round at his house, kids are out, wife’s out, it’s just me and him and a cup of tea. So he says, ‘get the laptop, I’ll talk you through stuff’.”

He continued: “And then he says, ‘I tell you what, I’ll do the show now’. So he’s in his slippers, jogging pants from George at Asda, T-shirt with bean juice down the front – it’s just him.

“I’m sat where you are to me, he’s done the full routine.”

A man who was fed up with the UK pothole problem has decided to start filling them with Pot Noodles.

Mark Morell, from Brackley, wanted to tackle the UK pothole issue so he decided to fill the dreaded ditches in the road with Pot Noodles. Also known as ‘Mr Pothole’, Morell wanted to highlight the ridiculousness of the problem in the hope that councils would notice and do something about it.

Now he’s teamed up with the Pot Noodle brand to urge the government to fix the state of the UK’s roads. In a tweet on his Twitter page, he put: “Since #NothingFillsAHoleLikePotNoodle, who better to team up with to highlight the ridiculous state of the UK’s roads than @potnoodle.

“Send us pictures of your worst, local potholes using the hashtag and tagging your local council!”

As reported in The Metro, it’s not the first time he has tried to come up with unusual ideas to catch the attention of the council to sort the issue. His previous ideas of floating rubber ducks and feeding potholes cake on their birthday were unsuccessful, forcing him to think up new measures.

He told The Metro: “Potholes drive road users potty and me more than most. The pothole crisis across the UK is an increasingly serious issue and something I have been campaigning on for more than 10 years.

“During this period I have had to use my noodle with stunts to highlight just how bad potholes are, from floating plastic ducks in water filled potholes, birthday cakes, fishing rods and model submarines.”

Experts say that ‘rapid freeze and thawing cycles’ have made situation affecting the UK’s roads much worse. And Morell is not the only one who has been coming up with wacky methods to get potholes fixed in their local area.

In Manchester ‘Wanksy’ became famous for spray painting penises around them — which proved to be pretty effective — with council workers taking swift action to remove the profanity from the street.