Director Joko Anwar uses horror for social commentary as he skewers corruption and hypocrisy with likable silliness and raucous energy

Given the 2020s horror boom, Indonesia’s prolific Joko Anwar – who has worked more often in that genre than any other – should be better known. Using horror for social commentary, as Anwar has done often in the past, this prison-slasher-satire features the kind of scabrous broadsides against injustice you see in Bong Joon-ho’s films, and Park Chan-wook’s recent No Other Choice. But in skewering the corruption and hypocrisy of the director’s native country, it has its own likable silliness and raucous energy. As the inmates keep saying: this is Indonesia, not Norway!

Fitted up for the murder of his boss, who is found gutted and spreadeagled on a ceiling fan, timid investigative journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) winds up in the slammer. But murder, immediately followed by the flamboyant flaying of the victim, dogs him wherever he goes: the prison hitman assigned to dispose of him is in turn found in the washroom rendered into flesh origami. Charismatic prison refusenik Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) takes Dimas under his wing; as the victims stack up, an apparently clairvoyant member of his clique called Six (Yoga Pratama) admits that all of them manifested a red aura, signifying anger, prior to dying.

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© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

From rent strikes to squatting, a new show reveals how people have managed to keep a roof over their head in London – and the mould and astronomical rents that persist

Charles Booth’s pioneering poverty maps of Victorian London show a vivid colour-coded warren of streets, alleyways and slums tightly packed together. Those marked black and dark blue were classed as being “very poor”, defined by “chronic want”. The light blue ones were poor – “18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”. Pink streets housed those who were “fairly comfortable”, and those where the wealthy lived were marked in yellow.

The maps by the British social reformer are the 19th-century equivalent of the modern-day indices of deprivation, which rank every geographic area of the UK by its level of social and economic disadvantage. Comparing the two shows how much has changed in the past 150 years – but also what hasn’t. Historical slums have been cleared away and housing conditions have generally improved, but extreme poverty and extreme wealth continue to live side by side in the capital.

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© Photograph: Charles Booth Archive, courtesy of London School of Economics

© Photograph: Charles Booth Archive, courtesy of London School of Economics

© Photograph: Charles Booth Archive, courtesy of London School of Economics

(Polydor)
Its release delayed by ill health, Kiwanuka’s latest was made in tandem with 2024’s Small Changes – but it’s much more than a mere companion album

In November 2024, Michael Kiwanuka released his fourth album, Small Changes, an extremely poised and self-assured piece of work. After three gold albums, a Grammy nomination, a Mercury prize win and the ongoing success of Cold Little Heart, a 2017 single hoisted to virality and million-selling status in the US after its use in TV drama Big Little Lies, Kiwanuka – and his long-term production collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo – evidently felt confident enough to release a beautiful but wilfully understated album. Recorded in LA, some impressive names lurked in the credits: legendary session musicians including bassist Pino Palladino and the drummer James Gadson, who played on Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly; the similarly legendary R&B producer Jimmy Jam served as organist on three tracks. It attracted the kind of critical praise in which adjectives like “unhurried” and “meditative” figured heavily.

But it also wasn’t the whole story. It turned out there was a second album, its songs written – or rather, jammed into existence by Kiwanuka and members of his live band – concurrently with Small Changes. It was made not in LA but in a studio that “looks like a medieval hut” in Southampton. August session musicians and legendary R&B producers were not present during its recording, nor were Danger Mouse and Inflo. Indeed, you could read its opening track, Summer Clothes, as a kind of Dear John letter to both of them (“I’m OK, I found another way … we’ll be back here soon, just not today”).

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© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

Yi-Shan Lo returns to Nepal to follow the route of her best friend’s ill-fated hike in a harrowing but cathartic documentary

A work of deep personal reckoning, Yi-Shan Lo’s debut documentary feature opens with closeups of the film-maker’s own footsteps as she trudges through a snowbound landscape. Her jagged movement mirrors the rugged trajectory of the film itself, which grapples with a harrowing tragedy. In 2017, Lo was about to join her best friends Chun and Yueh on their hiking trip across Nepal when she came down with a sudden illness; she decided to stay behind while the other two carried on. Disaster struck: the pair went missing during a heavy snowstorm and were not found for more than 40 days. Yueh survived, but Chun died from lack of food coupled with hypothermia.

Struggling to make sense of these events, Lo painstakingly retraces the days leading up to and during her friends’ disappearance. She pores over old text messages, Chun’s diaries and footage captured by the Nepali rescue team. These materials shed some light on the ordeal, as well as the pair’s backgrounds. Diving into her personal archive, Lo recalls her burgeoning friendship with Chun at their Catholic girls’ school, where the latter defiantly resisted the institution’s rigid dress codes. Considering Chun’s efforts to express his non-conforming identity and his use of male pronouns, it is even more devastating that he was repeatedly misgendered in death by various news reports.

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© Photograph: courtesy of True Story

© Photograph: courtesy of True Story

© Photograph: courtesy of True Story

How did two men who shared the same heart and the same wife end up dying the same way? Plus, inside the beef between ‘the Kennedys of Italy’

This fascinating series opens with the death of a man from a gunshot wound – and the revelation that this isn’t the first time his heart has stopped beating. It previously belonged to another man who died the same way, and who also had the same wife. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, what follows is an intriguing eight-part tale that veers between a scientific exploration and a gripping true-crime saga. Alexi Duggins
Apple, from Monday 19 October

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© Photograph: PR Handout

© Photograph: PR Handout

© Photograph: PR Handout

Prepare for blood and guts galore in Crystal Lake. Plus: David Harewood’s great legal drama, Pierre. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
A Friday the 13th prequel series produced by A24? Halloween has come early for gorefest fans. Linda Cardellini plays small-town single mother Pam Voorhees, who takes her son Jason (Callum Vinson) to summer camp where she works as a cook. But one day Jason drowns in the lake. Fast forward a year, and Pam is grieving but clings to a shred of hope as her son’s body still hasn’t been found. When two cops knock on her door to tell her they have discovered Jason’s remains, things take a huge turn – and it turns out there’s more to her and Jason’s story than meets the eye … It has all the jump-scare beats of a classic 70s slasher movie and Cardellini gets stuck in – blood, guts and all. Hollie Richardson

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© Photograph: PEACOCK/Sky Atlantic

© Photograph: PEACOCK/Sky Atlantic

© Photograph: PEACOCK/Sky Atlantic

Hudson Theatre, New York
Allison Janney and Joe Keery co-star in a powerful drama about a family reunion turned political minefield

Just in time for the holidays, Jon Robin Baitz’s family reunion drama, Other Desert Cities, is back with an even starrier cast than its 2011 premiere. The revival is a headline-grabber for marking the stage debuts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Joe Keery, alongside the Broadway returns of Ed Harris, Allison Janney and Lily Rabe.

But if this raises eyebrows as a takeover of Hollywood vanity, those concerns are easily quelled by the performances – especially those of the newcomers. John Benjamin Hickey’s staging is well attuned to its cast’s abilities, more than justifying its speedy return to Broadway. This Pulitzer finalist play still has a lot to say.

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© Photograph: Emilio Madrid

© Photograph: Emilio Madrid

© Photograph: Emilio Madrid

From Thatcherism to global crisis to an ever-online world, she has chronicled our race to the abyss. Now she’s written a play about a blond-wigged voicepiece for an un-named, strongman ruler. Who can she mean?

Triumph, which has just opened at London’s Almeida theatre, is Caryl Churchill’s latest piece of explosive minimalism. Running at just 20 minutes, it skewers contemporary barbarism without mentioning the names of Trump, Putin or any of the other supposedly strong national leaders. It works through historical analogy and is a reminder that Churchill – while “always ahead of the game” in the words of the play’s director, James Macdonald – has in recent years developed a form of elliptical drama for which the apt word might be compressionism.

At the heart of Churchill’s new play is an edgy romance between a male journalist and a female press officer who dons a blond wig for her screen appearances and who is a vigorous apologist for a cruel, vindictive, narcissistic emperor.

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

© Photograph: Marc Brenner

© Photograph: Marc Brenner

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy film was shown on only 855 screens in the biggest documentary opening in North America since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004

Nathan Fielder’s nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, has opened to an extraordinary $15m domestic box office, the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in North America in more than 20 years.

You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, made $15m (A$21.5m, £11.2m) from only 855 screens, and had more than 2,000 sold-out screenings at the weekend, according to the production company A24. It is the biggest opening for a film playing on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

Family post emotional statements to Instagram a month after their son and brother died at a rehab facility

Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber have said they are “beyond heartbroken” in a tribute to their “sweet beautiful” son, Presley.

Their eldest child died aged 27 at a rehab facility on 20 September, according to Los Angeles county medical examiner records. The cause of his death has not been disclosed.

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© Photograph: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage

© Photograph: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage

© Photograph: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage

In the face of terrible crises, it can feel right to shock people into action. But what if that has the opposite effect?

These days, it’s easy to succumb to hopelessness. Whether you’re thinking about the climate crisis, the prospect of AI apocalypse, war or political turmoil, the list of challenges facing humanity can seem insurmountable.

It certainly feels unprecedented, and much of it may be. The sense of impending doom, on the other hand, is nothing new. And what we have learned from the past is that doomerism can lead to paralysis. If everyone freezes, then nothing changes – but if we want to have a chance of mitigating some of the threats I’ve mentioned then action is what’s required.

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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri

© Illustration: Elia Barbieri

© Illustration: Elia Barbieri

Barbican, London
Omar Rajeh performs out of frustration, resistance and a need to connect in this stream-of-consciousness solo at Dance Umbrella festival

In August 2019, Omar Rajeh sat in his bedroom, listening to the sound of pounding percussion with his world in crisis. In the midst of political instability, Citerne Beirut, a theatre and cultural centre Rajeh had founded in his native Lebanon, was forced to close, dismantled by order of the local government, who planned to build an incinerator on the site.

Rajeh tells us that as a teenager, coming of age at the end of the Lebanese civil war, dance had always seemed like the most revolutionary thing he could do. Now here he is, more than three decades later, still dancing – out of frustration, defiance, resistance and a desire to connect. As the percussive score gains momentum, Rajeh’s busy body builds up a sweat. In this danced stream of consciousness, Rajeh is not always an especially elegant mover, but he dances like it’s a necessary thing to do.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Mark Simpson delivers gauzy luminosity and punchy tone in Gavin Higgins’s exquisite new work, conducted with spellbinding pacing by rising star Adam Hickox alongside spirited accounts of Britten and Stravinsky

Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year; he commissioned a short piece for clarinet from Gavin Higgins, another young composer. It was Higgins’s first paid work and he promised to thank Simpson by writing him a clarinet concerto. Fast forward two decades: both men have forged award-studded careers, Simpson continues to combine composition and performance – and Higgins has finally delivered that concerto.

Marking the end of Simpson’s tenure as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s artist in residence, its premiere featured the kind of intense splashes of musical colour that leave an afterimage. Climaxes came in slow-burn waves and paroxysms of frenetic activity. Simpson’s solo line – sometimes keening, expressive vocalise; sometimes a wild assemblage of rapid blips and riffs – weaved through the shifting orchestral textures, here haloed by muted brass, there soaring over a low hum of gong and double bass. In one exquisite passage, Simpson’s clarinet was a fine, luminous gauze. Elsewhere he punched through the vast orchestral surge through sheer focus of tone. Certain passages seemed haunted by John Adams at his most maximalist, others by Aaron Copland’s celebrated clarinet concerto. But Simpson inhabited the score as a work made to measure, the physicality of this virtuoso performance unmistakable as soloist and orchestra hurtled ecstatically to its close.

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© Photograph: Gareth Jones

© Photograph: Gareth Jones

© Photograph: Gareth Jones

Linbury theatre, London
Six fearless singers and the Chroma Ensemble, conducted with arresting immediacy by Naomi Woo, rise to the challenge of the brutal musical onslaughts and anarchic orchestrations of Philip Venables’ raw, imaginative score

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999.

The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

Exclusive: Play anonymously published in 1596 was collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, according to computer analysis

Dramatic new evidence concludes that the play Edward III should be added to William Shakespeare’s canon, and also that it was a major collaboration with his contemporary rival Christopher Marlowe.

The history was published anonymously in 1596, and it has long been thought that Shakespeare wrote at least a few scenes. However, Dr Rory Loughnane, a leading scholar and co-author of the research, told the Guardian that computerised textual analysis pushed the case “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Stratford-born playwright was the principal writer.

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© Photograph: Geraint Lewis/ArenaPAL

© Photograph: Geraint Lewis/ArenaPAL

© Photograph: Geraint Lewis/ArenaPAL

Amid financial pressures on household and school budgets, the theatre company is expanding access with free plays

Six young actors step into the spotlight as a reverent silence descends on the hall at City Academy in Bristol. A boy steps forward to pose a central question: “What does it mean to be young in Britain in 2026?”

Union jack flags flash across the backdrop as three girls excitedly debate a Spice Girls reunion concert, before the focus swings back to the young boy wrestling with modern British identity. He rattles off a list of familiar cultural touchstones – fish and chips, cups of tea, Butlin’s, David Attenborough, Gogglebox and the England football team, naming heroes such as Jordan Pickford and Jude Bellingham.

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© Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

The potter and presenter on a tricky childhood, his religious calling for clay, and cross-dressing as Adele

Born in London in 1965, Keith Brymer Jones is a potter, ceramic designer and TV judge. After a stint as lead singer of the punk band the Wigs, he became an apprentice at Harefield Pottery in London. He went on to set up his own company, and created pots and homewares for retailers including Conran, Habitat and Laura Ashley, before developing his signature Word range. He has been a judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down since it started in 2015. His new book, Firing Earth: An Unexpected History of Pots and Potters, is published on 22 October.

This photo was taken in our family home in Finchley. Socks, shorts and a T-shirt was my usual outfit for scabbing around in the garden aged 11. I was a complete and utter square.

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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

Hackney Empire, London
Jessica Cale’s soprano is diamond-bright in Elena Langer and Glyn Maxwell’s captivating monologue, while Rebecca Meltzer creates a compelling schoolyard staging of Purcell

English Touring Opera’s autumn season has a mythological theme – which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind. Touring alongside Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is this compact double bill, pairing Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer’s Ariadne, a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, which was premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002.

Langer’s mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright. Anna Morrissey’s production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive. It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor – it’s as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before. When Ariadne wakes he’s still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform.

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© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

Critics mock it as raunchy trash – but this enchanting genre is much older, and wilder, than you might imagine

There’s a popular genre, filled with beautiful, human-sized fairies having sex with humans (often quite violent sex, but the people reading it seem to enjoy it). Word is that it’s badly written and unashamedly escapist – all golden, glittering palaces, wild adventure and, of course, gorgeous fairies. It’s certainly popular – plenty of the stories have been translated into numerous languages, spreading across continents. Serious commentators are sure it spells bad news: at best, it’s just a load of trash; at worst, it’s actively leading people astray. Most damningly of all, women produce and consume it. Welcome to the 12th century, where fairy romance is all the rage. Sound familiar?

The romantasy that fills our shelves and bestseller lists – from Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses to Callie Hart’s Quicksilver – is not a new genre, but part of a centuries-old heritage. You only need to look at the medieval predecessors of the modern romantasy novel to understand why it’s enjoyed by millions and why, even after hundreds of years, fairy romance has such power over us – and why there are still those who want to diminish and dismiss it.

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© Photograph: Artepics/Alamy

© Photograph: Artepics/Alamy

© Photograph: Artepics/Alamy

Crucible, Sheffield
The yellow stockings are as funny as ever – yet a haunting, folky live score casts a dream-like uncertainty over Shakespeare’s tangled romance

You can picture Mathew Horne’s Malvolio as a guest on an early 1970s BBC Two arts show. With his buttoned-up collar, tight black suit and supercilious delivery, he oozes self-satisfaction. Trusting in his superior taste, he has the pose to prove it: stiff, studied and haughty.

His fall from grace, tricked into dressing up as a yellow-stockinged morris dancer, is as funny as it ever is in Shakespeare’s comedy. It is the comeuppance of the arriviste. Brought down to size, he is no less indignant for it. In a smart, unyielding performance, he goes from pompous to bruised – and ever unrepentant.

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© Photograph: Manuel Harlan

© Photograph: Manuel Harlan

© Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Staines’s finest nailed the zeitgeist of the late 90s and early 00s, and now he’s back – but how does he fit into 2026? He discusses the backlash against his return, his worst ever interviewee and how he’s going to prevent world war two

“Can you tell people that you’re from Hustler?” Ali G asks me. “Or The Source. Or Guns & Ammo. Speaking to a Guardian journalist ain’t a good look for me in the hood.”

At Ali’s request, we are meeting in an independent chicken shop in Staines because – due to some sort of mix-up – he thought the one interview he had agreed to for his new film was Chicken Shop Date, which was “90% likely to lead to boning”. He follows this with an entirely unprintable reminiscence about the first time he and “me Julie” had sex in the disabled toilets of Egham KFC.

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© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

Style of emceeing based on high-octane, ad-libbed vocals has flourished thanks to its unique way of captivating crowds

For the 2015 freshmen cohort of the history degree programme at the University of Lagos, their classmate’s first-semester presentation was so captivating that they began calling him Toby Shang, after the 16th-century Chinese dynasty he had focused on.

His crowd engagement that day had been harnessed from his high school days as a ginger-man (energiser) in a three-man band and as a private tutor. By his final year at university, his viral catchphrases and infectious energy had resulted in a hit song, Shedibalabala. Today, he is one of the self-acclaimed “evangelists and pioneers” in the Afrobeats sub-genre some are now calling Afrohype or lamba.

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© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories

“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?

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© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

The singer-songwriter gets a lift from U2 and likes to reminisce to Bette Midler, but which cheesy Euro banger does she secretly like?

The first song I fell in love with
When I was five or six, my mum wouldn’t let me listen to anything other than Christian gospel. Her friend Jane felt sorry for me and brought me a cassette with Whitney Houston on one side and Cher on the other. My ears couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I Will Always Love You made me think: This is what I’m going to do.

The first single I bought
So Young by the Corrs, from Sainsbury’s in Walton Village in Liverpool. I couldn’t really afford music as a kid, so buying a record was a big deal. I’d heard the Corrs on the radio, liked their voices and thought: I’m buying this.

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© Photograph: -

© Photograph: -

© Photograph: -

The show depicts prisons as places characterised by violence and isolation, with no focus on rehabilitation. It’s depressingly accurate

• Alex South is a former prison officer and the author of the memoir Behind These Doors

The new series of Time is not an easy watch. The opening seconds of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama show a normal woman on a normal bus, as it drives up a normal road. But to the right of that road is a huge concrete wall, topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras.

The wall is only partly visible, just as prisons themselves tend to occupy a space towards the very edges of our thoughts. They exist, but not as part of normal life. But McGovern’s drama shows just how permeable that wall is.

Alex South is a former prison officer and the author of the memoir Behind These Doors

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/BBC Studios/Peter Marley

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/BBC Studios/Peter Marley

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/BBC Studios/Peter Marley

They spoofed mothers … and now they are mothers. The comedians talk about moving with the times for the return of their scalpel-sharp BBC sketch show

Before Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou were mothers, they were mums. In a skit from their 2019 sketch show pilot, the comedy duo play two straight-talking, hygiene-obsessed matriarchs in gilets and camel-toe-accentuating leggings who record lifestyle vlogs from a pristine kitchen while melodramatically referencing the pressures of motherhood. Ever since, the characters have become a core component of the pair’s comic universe, appearing repeatedly in the first proper series of Ellie & Natasia in 2022.

Now the mums are back and moving with the times: reviewing various supermarket white breads – all reassuringly “sterile” options – as car-based food influencers for the show’s second outing. But behind the scenes there has been a bigger shift. The last time they wrote these sketches, White and Demetriou were childless; now they each have two kids.

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Nit TV/Jack Barnes

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Nit TV/Jack Barnes

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Nit TV/Jack Barnes

A new play revisits the story of Ireland’s 18th-century German refugees, whose experience of prejudice and exclusion resonates with today’s debates over immigration

In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade.

Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes.

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© Photograph: Andreas Etter

© Photograph: Andreas Etter

© Photograph: Andreas Etter

Luke Evans and Sarah Solemani star in ITV’s top autumn thriller. Plus, an epic trip through Mongolia with Simon Reeve. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, ITV1

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© Photograph: ITV/World Productions

© Photograph: ITV/World Productions

© Photograph: ITV/World Productions

Creativity and influence of Morris & Co designer Kate Faulkner to be detailed in Cambridge exhibition

For more than a century, she has been little more than a footnote in William Morris’s story, her work mistaken for his, her contribution to British decorative art largely overlooked.

Yet, in her lifetime, Kate Faulkner was a pioneer: the first person after Morris to design wallpapers and fabrics for Morris & Co, and one of only four designers he ever trusted to do so. Several of the patterns she designed under her name for the company in the 1870s and 1880s are still sold today.

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© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

His good-natured camaraderie on The Traitors has turned him into a viral heartthrob. What these Johnny Come Latelys don’t realise is that he’s always been a man for our times

It’s hard not to wonder how James Acaster feels at the moment. On the one hand, everybody suddenly fancies him, which must be flattering. On the other, all the language around the phenomenon is stuff like “unlikely”, “unexpected” and “bizarre crush”, which is presumably … less so. But there’s no denying that he is now a viral heartthrob, which sounds like something that requires urgent medical attention, but isn’t. After each episode of The Celebrity Traitors, social media is flooded with slow-motion edits and thirst-trap clips of Acaster, including one of him in the castle set to Ginuwine’s Pony that has received more than 500,000 views and counting. Vogue declared that his “specifically east London-y wardrobe has captured the hearts and minds of millennial women countrywide”, and anointed him its “new internet boyfriend”.

For longtime Acaster admirers, loyal listeners to the Off Menu podcast who rooted for him on the seventh series of Taskmaster, this is bittersweet. The smug plus side: we were right all along. The lemony minus: now we have to share him. It’s like those people who saw Oasis in a tiny working-man’s club when they didn’t have a record deal. I fancied Acaster long before this crowd of Johnny Come Latelys at the BBC TV equivalent of Knebworth.

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© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

Will Huxley thought Garrett looked like a Heathcliff type. They bonded over their shared love of Kate Bush. Then one day Garrett handed over an ornate gift box

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

In 2006 I’d just graduated film school at the Victorian College of the Arts and was working at the ABC in Melbourne. It was a pretty tumultuous time of my life. I had just broken up with my best friend and high school sweetheart – whom I adored – and was in the process of coming out.

I was drinking too much and in breaks from the chaos I’d find myself drawn to the local video store. That’s where I first saw Garrett behind the counter. I had an instant crush on him and spent a lot of time perusing the art house section, so he would see how creative and cultured I was.

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© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power star on his muddy marriage proposal, controversial cheese opinions, memories of Sam Neill and having a good evil face

You once played Basil Fawlty in an amateur student production of Fawlty Towers at Queen’s College in Melbourne. How amateur was your Basil Fawlty moustache?

It was terrible. It was real but it was definitely coloured in – I still have holes in my beard. I’d also shaved my head, so if you look at the early promo posters, you can clearly see I’m wearing a wig. Our theatre was closed so we had to perform in a circus tent in the middle of winter, on an oval in the university grounds, which was all very Fawlty Towers.

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© Photograph: Photo Image Press/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Photo Image Press/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Photo Image Press/REX/Shutterstock

A daring, rich and funny study of the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self amid confounding changes

Carol Morley’s self-portrait of the artist as a young woman is rich, tender and terribly funny and sad: a study in the chaos of being young and a triptych of childhood, girlhood and youth, with some daring touches of Terence Davies. It is about the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self, even as the things you thought permanent suddenly collapse – including the background stability of your poor old mum and dad. And it’s also about the untold, unacknowledged story of sadness that lay behind the angry blaze of punk and new wave. Watching this I thought of something I’d assumed lost for ever: my own feelings, aged 17, on hearing Buzzcocks’ Sixteen: “… I wish I was 16 again / Then things would be such fun / All the things I’d do would be the same / But they’re much more fun / Than when you’re 21.” Could it be, I thought, that I’m already sad about not being 16?

7 Miles Out is based on Morley’s autobiographical novel of the same title, the once-upon-a-time-in-Stockport story of Ann, played with charm and zing by Lucy Halliday, and as a sweetly innocent young girl by Amelie Hughes. Young Ann pretends to be making a radio programme with her cassette recorder the way so many did in the 1970s, and hero-worships her would-be rock journalist elder brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille) – based on Morley’s brother Paul – who is already plugged into the burgeoning post-punk and new wave scene.

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© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

Actor experienced a ‘medical emergency’ on flight during which she allegedly injured crew members, statement says

Actor Selma Blair did not mean to hurt anyone during the recent flight which led to her arrest on allegations that she assaulted a pair of cabin crew members, a police officer and a nurse, her representatives said on Friday in a statement that characterized the episode as a medical emergency.

The lengthy statement also dismissed prior media coverage of Blair’s arrest after a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to New York as unsympathetic and inaccurate, singling out reporting from several outlets alleging that she tried to open the door of the airplane that she and her fellow passengers were on.

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© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

Chilean-American author awarded Premio Planeta for sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits

The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1m (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated debut novel, The House of the Spirits.

Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with La hora antes del alba, which returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile.

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© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Pau de la Calle/GTRES/Shutterstock

A restored version of his 1983 film My Brother’s Wedding, set in South Central LA, brings Burnett’s vision to a new audience

Charles Burnett had a dilemma. He had agreed to attend the wedding of a co-worker, but the wedding was scheduled for the same day and time as a funeral for a childhood friend.

Initially, the film-maker – a landmark chronicler of Black working-class lives – decided he’d go to the funeral. But when he tried to break the news to the co-worker, she was so dejected that he couldn’t go through with it. He tried asking the bride to change the wedding – which was “ridiculous to think of trying to do”, he says decades later – but that didn’t work either. He decided he’d go to both events.

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© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

Staffing issues, financial woes, equipment failure and a thousand other things made it seem as if being the boss of a dental practice wasn’t for me, but TV’s burly hero inspired me to push on

I discovered the TV series Poldark about a year into a new business, an ill-fitting professional identity, and life in a new city. Having worked for others since dental school, I’d taken possession of a practice the year I turned 30.

The practice needed serious refurbishment. I bought it despite dire warnings that my plans for the building, and the way I wanted to treat patients, couldn’t keep a practice in the black. After months of frigid rooms (the building barely had central heating) and frantic clinics, being constantly reminded I hadn’t yet accrued years of trust like the previous owner, I found myself in the upstairs office at 8pm on a Monday, weeping over a spreadsheet.

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© Illustration: Martin O’Neill

© Illustration: Martin O’Neill

© Illustration: Martin O’Neill

The photographer was holidaying with his family when two shadows became a plaything for his young son

Gellért Gombai, his wife and two children spend much of the year at their home in Budapest, Hungary, but most of their summers in Alsóörs. “It’s a small holiday village on Lake Balaton, the largest in central Europe, so it’s often referred to as the Hungarian sea,” Gombai, a freelance photographer, says. “We go to the playground and beach most days, swim, and eat beach food, but even when I’m enjoying my holiday, I’m looking out for interesting moments to capture.”

On this particular day, the family had eaten hotdogs for lunch, before Gombai had taken the kids, Lóci and Janka, to the playground. “Lóci, who was five at the time, was jumping between two shadows – one from a changing room, and the other from a building’s roof,” he says. “I asked him to stay still for a few minutes while I got the shot, and he lay like this on the ground. He’s a big-hearted little clown; I’m so glad he’s my son.” When he showed the children, “Janka immediately asked me to take the same shot of her, which often happens. Lóci said it looked like he was among mountains, or as though a monster was about to eat him.”

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© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy

David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.

“The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious,” Agus, a medical oncologist, recalls by phone from Los Angeles. “It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

If cinemas must run 20 minutes of adverts before a feature, they could at least be honest about it. Or, I have a better solution …

Do you remember the last time you were lied to? I certainly do. I was tricked by the North Finchley Vue, which sold me and my boyfriend tickets to a 7.15pm showing of The Odyssey. Guess what was playing at 7.15pm? A car advert. Ten minutes later, it was a trailer for the horror film Werwulf. Then there was an advert for Vue – as if I wasn’t already there. The film was half an hour late to its own showing when it finally started at 7.45pm.

I am sick and tired of cinemas getting away with such treachery. I don’t want to follow in the footsteps of my friend, who knows that the ads at her local run for 22 minutes so slinks in at just the right time. I shouldn’t have to do mental maths because I am being lied to by cinemas. We are all the victims of their predatory time-wasting system.

Jeffrey Ingold is a freelance journalist covering LGBTQ+ issues, music and culture

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Future Farmers of America. "A hotel room that changed rural America On November 20, 1928, the Future Farmers of America was established in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Hotel Baltimore. Thirty-three delegates from 18 states."
2026.
'Smith, Schweikert, Mann: Future Farmers of America Must Explain Ties to Chinese Communist Party'
'Record High U.S. Farm Debt and FFA National Convention'
'National FFA convention again bars Christian group from hosting booth.'

Unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing and spectacular hubris is predicted to lose $245m. How did this happen?

The fanfare at Digger’s world premiere in London four weeks ago was literal. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their arrival was heralded by the band of the Irish guards’ fanfare team – bugles gleaming, epaulets shining, bearskin bonnets rippling under the lights.

Given the occasion, the band were not overdressed. Joining William (velvet tux) and Kate (chiffon gown, the late Diana’s earrings) to introduce the film was cinema’s longest-reigning monarch, Tom Cruise (Armani), along with a retinue including director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-stars Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. Loyal courtiers filled the front rows: Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and no fewer than three Beckhams (David, Cruz and Romeo).

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© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

The author talks about her nomadic childhood, being targeted by the Turkish government and overcoming depression to write her latest novel

For a long time Elif Shafak was referred to as Turkey’s “most widely read female author”. Today, she is surely simply its best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel prize in literature, but it is Shafak whose novels are fervently passed among readers. There Are Rivers in the Sky, which follows a single raindrop from ancient Nineveh to the River Tigris in 2018, was one of the UK’s bestselling literary novels last year. The Island of Missing Trees, a love story set in post-colonial Cyprus and contemporary London, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize in 2022, and 10 Minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World, narrated by a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2019. Last December she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature. It would be tempting to say she is on a roll, but Shafak’s reputation and readership have been steadily growing for more than 20 years and spanning as many books, of which 14 are novels.

In a 2017 Ted Talk, which has been viewed more than 6.4m times, she describes herself as an Istanbulite, “a European by birth and by choice” and a Londoner for many years. “I like to think of myself as a global soul, as a world citizen, a nomad and an itinerant storyteller.” Her novels sweep confidently across centuries and continents, taking in politics, history, feminism and ecology, typically with a dash of magic realism or mysticism.

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© Photograph: Alice Zoo/The Guardian

© Photograph: Alice Zoo/The Guardian

© Photograph: Alice Zoo/The Guardian

The Booker-wining author of Possession was known for her voracious research. Now, 68 boxes of her notebooks, letters and diaries acquired by the British Library reveal how she assembled the raw material of her fiction

At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. “Do I take myself seriously as a writer?” she asked herself in her diary in September 1956. “No, I think not.”

The young Byatt – who would go on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, best known for her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance – was troubled by the possibility that her mind might not be equal to her ambitions. Yet her determination was already evident. On her 20th birthday, she wrote: “Today, I know I can do anything. But not yet.”

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© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Cook/Getty Images

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible, the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

• To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair.

• For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books.

• To learn more about what’s become of the British right, there’s a column by me for the Guardian.

• Phil Burton-Cartledge examines why Britain's most successful political party is now failing in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak.

• Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshal a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch.

• Geoffrey Wheatcroft offers an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!: or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

• For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper examines how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

• And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, read this paper based on data from the Bank of England.

• Finally, on the Spectator, read Nesrine Malik’s recent column in the Guardian: Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

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© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

Jonathan Glatzer’s pitch-black Silicon Valley satire exposes tech-CEO greed and billionaire egos – at the intriguing, measured pace of Better Call Saul

Many of us yearn for the return of an analogue world, but it’s never coming back. You can’t buy potato waffles without a QR code. I had to arrange an IRL bank appointment for my mother to check her balance, and it took, I don’t know, 100 days? A friend of mine has boycotted WhatsApp, but I can’t tell you how that’s going because we haven’t spoken in a year.

Watching The Audacity (from Thursday, HBO Max) this week, I was shaken by how much of our dystopia can be traced to a small number of men in Silicon Valley. Their products and platforms, an expression of their shortfalls as much as their skills, have reshaped our world more seismically than any political party. Their power-brokering has turned a small collection of towns and villages south of San Francisco into a modern-day Camelot.

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© Photograph: Ed Araquel / AMC/HBO

© Photograph: Ed Araquel / AMC/HBO

© Photograph: Ed Araquel / AMC/HBO

In this week’s newsletter: Record labels always push music forward into interesting new places. Here’s a celebration of their power by readers and Guardian music writers

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Last week we asked Guide subscribers to tell us about their favourite record labels, and the response was enthusiastic. Clearly, even in this age of streaming services that flatten albums, singles, EPs and mixtapes into one single “feed”, the lure of a label – and its role in identifying, nurturing and developing musical talents – remains.

So this week, a celebration of the record label: along with some readers’ favourites, we’ve asked music writers to share their personal picks. They’ve put together a great list of familiar and off-the-beaten-track labels that might just help you discover your next favourite album (I can already tell I’ll be spinning the Verlaines record recommended by reader James a fair bit!).

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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Cops Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are back looking for a killer. Plus, Celine Dion and David Bowie inspire Strictly’s icons week! Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, U&Alibi

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© Photograph: UKTV

© Photograph: UKTV

© Photograph: UKTV

York Theatre Royal
Atwood’s adaptation of her own novella is revived with Amelia Bullmore as a wry Penelope but it’s the eight-strong chorus who pull the story’s threads

After a summer of Odysseus hogging the spotlight thanks to Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster take on Homer, it’s time for the women to have their say. The Penelopiad is, as its title declares, the story of Odysseus’s famously faithful wife. But in Margaret Atwood’s play, adapted for the stage from her own novella, it is also Penelope’s brutally slain maids whose perspective is reclaimed. If Penelope’s voice has been sidelined, theirs have been silenced altogether.

The backdrop for this revisionist storytelling is hades. In Sara Perks’s minimal design, it’s a sterile, featureless place, deliberately drained of the passion and mess of life. Thick, blood-red ropes suggest the strands – literal and narrative – woven by Penelope and the cords used to hang the maids. These wronged figures form a chorus, acting out episodes from Penelope’s life as well as interrupting with their own bitter take on events. We hear of Penelope and Odysseus’s marriage, his departure to Troy, and the long, long years that followed.

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© Photograph: Pamela Raith

© Photograph: Pamela Raith

© Photograph: Pamela Raith

David Tennant wows in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing prison drama, and the Dublin band are back with a beguiling fifth album. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer