The Seinfeld creator went from luckless standup to multi-millionaire – but what’s his secret?

Larry David agreed to this authorised biography with a five-word email: “Oh Jesus. If we must.” As Blake J Harris tells it, the comedy writer has always been adept at finding reasons not to do something, or to stop doing it, even when there’s nothing to fall back on. As a peppery standup in 1970s New York, David was notorious for storming off stage if the audience displeased him. He walked out of his first TV job, on the Saturday Night Live clone Fridays, because “I stunk.” He twice quit Seinfeld, the sitcom he co-created in 1989, over meddling by NBC executives and fantasised about the network giving him an excuse to leave for good. In 1992, just before it became the biggest show in America, he told friends, “Honestly, I would rather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld. It would be peaceful. Nobody would make me write anything.” He was only half joking.

David’s career proves that it is in fact possible to be immensely, groundbreakingly successful without ever displaying great ambition. Growing up in Brooklyn amid a boisterous extended family, Lawrence Gene David loved baseball and tall tales but, oddly, not making people laugh. “I can’t recall him ever saying a funny thing,” remembers his older brother Ken. After a spell in the army reserve, he drifted through low-effort jobs – limo driver, bra salesman – and dropped out of acting school, partly because his classmate Jeff Goldblum showed him what a real actor looked like. “Most of the time I was just waiting for other people to stop talking so that I could start talking,” he admits.

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© Photograph: John P. Johnson/HBO

© Photograph: John P. Johnson/HBO

© Photograph: John P. Johnson/HBO

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

Look, I barely know any German, do not have much interest in crime dramas, and have never actually watched a single episode of this TV series, nor played any of the many tie-in video games. What I do know is that across 28 seasons in 26 years, the show Alarm für Cobra 11 has destroyed thousands of cars in a series of high-flying stunts, and video archivist GermanStunter has collected these stunts into a series of Crash Mixes for your ease of viewing. Here, try one!

They are generally low-res, and you will hear the same music applied quite often, but if you want to watch hours of BMWs flying over the autobahn, through other vehicles and/or exploding into fireballs, here are the playlists for you: Crash Mixes 1-10 Crash Mixes 11-20 Crash Mixes 21-30 Crash Mixes 31-40 Crash Mixes 41-50 Crash Mixes 51-60 Crash Mixes 61-70 Crash Mixes 71-80 Crash Mixes 81-90 (Currently only up to 83)

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

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

Icons Week saw Cach Mercer and Jaime Winstone jointly top the leaderboard. Dame Sarah Storey was the lowest scorer. But who will be consigned to the dreaded dance-off?

Prepare for copious use of the i-word. We’re about to go live to the iconic Elstree Studios ballroom…

Shock-faced emoji! Jeff has shafted Dolcie. (Not entirely what it sounds like.)

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© Photograph: Guy Levy/BBC/PA

© Photograph: Guy Levy/BBC/PA

© Photograph: Guy Levy/BBC/PA

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

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

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

A social media star comes a cropper in timely horror, and the Spice Girls ledge takes her disco- and indie-tinged bops out on a short tour

The Influencer Project
Out now
When your career involves constantly posting footage of everything you do to social media, it makes things a cakewalk for stalkers. And lo, the influencer-in-peril horror subgenre was born. British social media star Chiara King plays herself in this chilling iteration, set in Copenhagen.

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© Composite: -

© Composite: -

© Composite: -

Prosecution did not act in fair and impartial way in grand jury proceedings, judge rules, after West Wing actor charged with groping young boy on TV set

A state court ⁠judge in New Mexico has dismissed charges of child sexual abuse against West Wing actor and director Timothy Busfield, saying the prosecution did not act in a ⁠fair and impartial manner during grand jury proceedings.

Judge Joseph Montano said prosecutors could pursue new charges against Busfield.

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© Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

© Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

© Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

The president reportedly chose Zacharia after seeing her on television, but her first press briefing and disastrous interviews sealed her fate

And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia was leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.

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© Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

© Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

© Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Lena Dunham has announced a surprise reboot of the cult TV show Girls, which had its finale 10 years ago. The news was broken via a fake Zoom call with all four female leads, which went viral and raised questions about what a show depicting millennial struggles would look like as the women enter their 40s. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian writer Rebecca Nicholson – watch on YouTube

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© Photograph: Guardian Design

© Photograph: Guardian Design

© Photograph: Guardian Design

The comedy smash is back – and now the standups aren’t allowed to laugh or shriek! Lou Sanders, Tom Allen, Phil Wang and more reveal what made them crack – and what happened when they went too far

What could be more disorientating for a comedian than not being able to laugh – for nine hours! – nor elicit laughter from anyone else in the room? I’ll tell you. Try all of the above on a sunny summer weekend while pretending it’s Halloween. Then force the comics to return to the scene of what one of their number, Phil Wang, calls “a cross between a gameshow and a psychological experiment”, and relive the whole ordeal for a man from the Guardian. Is it any wonder Wang, Lou Sanders, Tom Allen and others come across as a little punch-drunk 24 hours after emerging from televised captivity on the smash comedy hit Last One Laughing?

It’s the day after filming, at Elstree Studios, the show’s Halloween special which sees a unique tweak to its winning formula: contestants must not only refrain from laughter but from screaming. “Which I thought might be a non-event,” says Wang, “but it’s actually harder. I didn’t know I was a screamer. Turns out I am.” The participating comics – including paranormal obsessive Daisy May Cooper and that maestro of comedy-horror, Reece Shearsmith – seek not only to amuse each other but spook them too. Which makes sense, says host Jimmy Carr. “Laughs and screams come from the same place. There’s surprise in a joke, and there’s surprise in a jump scare. Comedy and horror mess around in the same area. It’s the same bit of your brain.”

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© Photograph: Prime Video

© Photograph: Prime Video

© Photograph: Prime Video

As violent spirits are unleashed in Sky’s Possession, observers see confident creatives reclaiming the island’s narratives in a form of ‘cultural reparation’

A woman opens a 300‑year‑old box, unleashing a violent spirit – it is the spirit of colonialism and oppression roaring back to life. It is a pivotal scene in Sky’s supernatural series Possession and symbolises a wider shift in Jamaica’s film industry, where directors are increasingly using the landscape to tell Jamaican stories – including those that confront enslavement, trauma and historical memory.

The series is about a biracial British lawyer who travels to Jamaica to investigate a multimillion-pound inheritance dispute, only to uncover a dark, vengeful spirit tied to the plantation’s brutal colonial past.

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© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

Singer and TV presenter who had a UK No 1 hit in 1979 with One Day at a Time

The singer Lena Martell, who has died aged 86, enjoyed a career that took her from dance halls in her native Scotland to cabaret in London and stages in Las Vegas and Australia. She performed on the same bill as Sammy Davis Jr and had her own shows on BBC television.

On record, she was a one-hit wonder in Britain with One Day at a Time, a song written by Marijohn Wilkin and Kris Kristoffersonthat mixed country and gospel. “Lord, for my sake, teach me to take one day at a time,” she sang.

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© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

From inspiring careers to treating people to unforgettable curries, the late presenter and campaigner had quite the impact on Guardian readers. Colleagues, admirers and TV show guests share their stories

The summer of 1976 held a particularly fond memory for my family. In one episode of her programme The Big Time, my father took part in conducting the Royal Philharmonic in Croydon and met several of his musical idols. Esther and her team visited our home, causing much teenage excitement, took us for lunch at a local Indian restaurant (the height of sophistication) and after lunch asked me to sit on her feet in our back garden while she did sit-ups. We were kids, probably in the way of filming, but were included and treated warmly and impressed by her down-to-earth manner. We fondly remember the visit and as Dad said at the end of the film: “lovely Esther”. I’m glad she went on to make so many important contributions to the lives of so many. Rosalind Cresswell, Maine, USA

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© Photograph: Cheese Scientist/Alamy

© Photograph: Cheese Scientist/Alamy

© Photograph: Cheese Scientist/Alamy

Tom Hiddleston, Willem Dafoe and Genden Phuntsok scale Everest in the ultimate adventure biopic, plus Martin Scorsese mafia masterpiece

To Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) and British expedition leader Col John Hunt (Willem Dafoe), it was ‘Mount Everest’, named to honour a 19th-century British Raj official. But Tenzing Norgay (Genden Phuntsok), the Tibetan-Indian mountaineer who joined them on that historic 1953 trek to the summit, called the peak by its Sherpa name Chomolungma, meaning “holy mother”. To Tenzing, the mountain is not so much somewhere to conquer but someone to connect with. As director Jennifer Peedom’s film tells his story, it scales the heights of the adventure biopic, discovering new angles from which to view old themes of ambition, colonialism and class.
Out now, Apple TV

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© Photograph: Apple

© Photograph: Apple

© Photograph: Apple

The director talks about his new West End farce starring Sacha Baron Cohen. Plus: a squad of boozy miscreants target the Empire State Building in The Walking Dead. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.40pm, BBC One
It has been more than a decade since director Quentin Tarantino was on Graham’s sofa, and now he’s back to rave about his new Sacha Baron Cohen-starring West End farce, The Popinjay Cavalier. Taking a seat with him are US chat host Ellen DeGeneres; Colin Farrell, with a moving documentary about his friend; and Gemma Chan, who stars opposite Channing Tatum in the film Josephine. Suede provide the uplifting live music from their latest album, Antidepressants. Hollie Richardson

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© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Who will survive the deadly game of hide and seek in the woods? Join us here for every single moment of treachery and backstabbing

Romesh enters, and explains everything. Flashback to last night: the traitors knock on a Rob’s door. Ross Kemp leaves to freak about nothing for another day, while Rob Beckett is brown bread.

Because now it’s breakfast. Maya, Hannah, Michael and James Blunt sit down and grimace. Joe Lycett knocks on the door so hard that he hurts his hand, and then becomes excited about eggs. James Acaster enters, eats a boiled egg with his bare hands and declares that he enjoys murdering people eye to eye. And then Leigh-Anne enters and explains everything.

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry

The broadcaster has bullet-proof confidence as he departs the BBC. But his first YouTube show with Gareth Southgate is nowhere near as radical as you’d expect – and he sounds like yet another tech guru

Whatever you think of Amol Rajan, he can’t be accused of not dreaming big. In the clip trailing the launch of his YouTube project The Amol Rajan Connection, he acknowledges the seismic volatility of our times but locates himself firmly at the heart of them. “We are about to get 100 years of change in a single decade,” he says. “And that’s scary. But maybe I can help.” Big talk for someone who somehow managed the singular feat of being outlasted by Richard E Grant in The Celebrity Traitors. But joking aside, Rajan’s bulletproof self-confidence remains titanium-tough.

The branding of The Amol Rajan Connection features a mock-up of the poster from The Harder They Come, a Jamaican film about a renegade insurgent whose reckless defiance of the establishment’s rules culminates in him dying in a hail of bullets. But however he might see himself, it’s impossible to regard Rajan as an outsider. From his editorship of a national newspaper, via University Challenge and Today, he has shown an uncanny facility for arriving, briskly, at the very heart of one national institution after another. The sponsors of this show are two world-bestriding tech corporations, one of Britain’s largest banks and an upmarket supermarket chain. He soft-launched with an appearance on former Tory chancellor George Osborne’s podcast. Rajan’s connections are clearly being worked very efficiently.

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© Photograph: Youtube

© Photograph: Youtube

© Photograph: Youtube

Linda Cardellini tries her best but this baffling attempt to add backstory to one of horror’s thinnest franchises is IP stretching at its most pointless

The unending exhaustion of IP has forced us to ask questions we never really wanted or needed to ask. How did the Pink Ladies in Grease come to be the Pink Ladies? What would happen if one of The Craft witches had a kid who was also a witch? Why is the yellow brick road the colour of yellow? What is Linda Blair up to these days?

No one or no thing ever really dies any more, something that has long been true in the world of slashers, where no amount of stabbing, shooting and exploding has stopped masked killers from killing again and again and again. Recent years have seen the timeline of the Halloween franchise retooled so that Michael Myers could regain his head and restart his reign of terror, while Ghostface has resurfaced to stalk the younger relatives of his old frenemies. As Leatherface prepares an A24 comeback courtesy of Obsession’s Curry Barker and dual Nightmare on Elm Street reboots square off, it’s time to return to Camp Crystal Lake to see what desperate rights-holders can do with Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees, the hockey mask-wearing giant who enjoys slicing and dicing horny youngsters.

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© Photograph: PEACOCK/Matt Infante

© Photograph: PEACOCK/Matt Infante

© Photograph: PEACOCK/Matt Infante

I was in my early 20s when the classic series debuted and I recognised so much. I can’t wait to see how the reboot takes on a new – equally messy – stage of life

HBO’s Girls is coming back, Lena Dunham and her fellow cast members announced this week, and the internet is already abuzz. Women of a certain age, myself included – approaching, turning or having turned 40 – are genuinely thrilled, if also slightly trepidatious. When you’ve loved, loathed and most importantly grown with characters in the way many of us did with Girls, you feel protective of a show’s legacy. But with Dunham, I’m confident it is in good hands.

Girls means a lot to me, in part because it was the topic of my first ever column for this newspaper: in 2012, shortly after the show premiered, it was already generating a bananas amount of internet discourse and I was on work experience. I was in my early 20s and not long off the dole. I didn’t share the privilege of Dunham’s characters, which is perhaps why I so enjoyed how she skewered it. (I never understood the criticism that the show was about spoilt rich girls. So many people missed the satire.) Yet there were aspects of it that I related to, as I wrote at the time:

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

Keri Russell is still trying to stop a sea of berks who are one bad hair day away from starting a nuclear war – only this time, the cortisol levels and the sauciness have been ramped up even further

The Russian submarine is on the fritz and as such remains at the bottom of the North Sea. Its fancy nuclear missile, meanwhile, has been purloined by the Americans in an operation presumably entitled Let’s Flush Our Alliance With the Brits Down the Bog (and potentially instigate the third word war while we’re at it). The prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), remains oblivious and a berk. The Russians are similarly unaware of the theft, for now at least, but the US ambassador to the UK, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), predicts the eventual discovery will blast the Kremlin’s ushankas skywards. “Russia will come to get their sub,” she warns her unblinking husband – and current US vice president – Hal (Rufus Sewell). “They will lose their shit when they find their apocalypse weapon is gone and they will attack the United Kingdom!” “Hmm,” replies Hal, who has, one suspects, shiftier fish to fry. “Mmm.”

This is where we find ourselves as The Diplomat returns for a fourth series of exquisitely fraught geopolitical skulduggery. Which is to say; we’re stuffed. Poised on the precipice of Big War, a situation almost wholly attributable to the whims of the US president, Grace Penn (Allison Janney). Yikes. But also, in a very real sense, woohoo. Because there are few things as entertaining as The Diplomat in a bad mood, even if the stress induced by its doomsday theatrics requires much diaphragmatic breathing and the odd diplomatic sprint to the loo.

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© Photograph: ERIKA KUENKA/NETFLIX

© Photograph: ERIKA KUENKA/NETFLIX

© Photograph: ERIKA KUENKA/NETFLIX

In the third episode of the latest season, the boys head into Sephora and eventually the Backrooms in a story that makes fun of app-mutated self-care

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always been pretty upfront about how South Park, like all animated sitcoms from the past 35 years, lives in the shadow of The Simpsons. There are plenty of ways that The Simpsons, even in its more uneven recent seasons, still outshines South Park: greater depth of ensemble, stronger emotional moments, even in the sheer number of episodes.

Something that South Park often does better, though, is react to contemporary social trends. Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny and the rest are more or less the same age as Bart (and have been for decades); but The Simpsons has never been as adept at riffing on trends, tech and social issues as South Park, which has always been more immediate and responsive. Perhaps this is why it doesn’t feel like a betrayal to see the boys dealing with, say, looksmaxxing and aura farming, which is exactly what the third episode of South Park’s 29th season addresses.

South Park is streaming on Paramount+ in the US, UK and Australia.

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© Photograph: Paramount

© Photograph: Paramount

© Photograph: Paramount

It’s the final double bill of housing crisis romcom Break Clause. Plus, will the Traitors win their game of hide and seek? Here’s what to watch this evening

10.05pm, Channel 4
Can a breakup in a flatshare end well? In the closing double bill, Ben (Samuel Bottomley) and Lil (Lara Ricote) are single and mingling – but they also find themselves back in each other’s arms, gallivanting around London … before reality hits again. With their six-month break clause in the lease coming up, they need to decide whether to get back together or move on for good. Hollie Richardson

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© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Channel 4 / Vishal Sharma

© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Channel 4 / Vishal Sharma

© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Channel 4 / Vishal Sharma

Wonderful, exuberant stories spill out in these honest tales of lives genuinely transformed by literature – while Queen Camilla has an off-with-their-heads moment

You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.

Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Blink Films

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Blink Films

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Blink Films

HBO’s era-defining comedy is set for a new five-episode series. Its bleakness and warmth couldn’t be more welcome

It’s a pop culture emergency. A millennial-quake that shook my social feed to its core. Girls, the HBO show that stole the zeitgeist in the early Instagram era and made Lena Dunham a generational star, is returning for a five-episode revival series. The project was announced via a mock video call with some of the original cast: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Andrew Rannells. They’re all returning for the reboot, which will pick up the story 10 years after the 2017 finale.

Girls captured such a specific era when it premiered in 2012. Social media still felt new and exciting, Barack Obama was president and so-called “woke 1” felt like it was going to be the new normal. The show’s characters navigated that terrifying twentysomething period when you’re searching for an identity, where it feels like everyone has it figured out but you. Dunham’s realistic approach to sex scenes – sticky, awkward, unflinching – made the show one of the first to be “discoursed” on social media, spawning endless think-pieces and Twitter threads. She was declared the voice of her generation, but she also became a figure of controversy who didn’t always seem suited to such intense, era-defining fame.

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© Photograph: HBO/Allstar

© Photograph: HBO/Allstar

© Photograph: HBO/Allstar

The once heroic boxer showcases a frankness in this compelling new series but also an unwillingness to take accountability for his darkest moments

Mike Tyson never envisioned old age. And yet here he still is, having outlived his parents, Brooklynites of ill repute who died when he was a teenager, and the Brownsville tough guys who teased him for being scrawny and having a lisp. Here he is after doing hard time for rape in his prime, winning and losing great fortunes and battling addiction to drink, drugs and fame. Here he still is, 60 years old and a grandfather now, mixing it up with Jake Paul in the ring, opening up to manosphere-adjacent podcasters, bobbing into an impromptu White House press briefing – Māori face-tattoo unmistakably in the frame – while on a DC visit to buck up his old pal as his party faces a bleak midterm forecast. “I don’t have to exist,” the champ says in Tyson, the latest four-part vanity project on his turbulent life and times. “Some reason, something allowed me to exist.”

In his heyday, Tyson was a mesmerizing sporting event unto himself – the ruthless knockout machine who struck fear into opponents at first sight, felled them in seconds and looked back on the carnage with cool nonchalance. His darkest episodes – the combustive relationship with actor Robin Givens, the six-year prison sentence for rape, biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear – only deepened the public fascination with him, adding to the lore of boxing’s baddest man. In the winter of his life, Tyson’s self-reflection, so deep it tips into self-parody, is the enthralling spectacle now. And if generations of Black comedians have proved anything, it’s that the appetite for Mike Tyson impersonations is inexhaustible.

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© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

Paul Bettany stars in a WandaVision spinoff that’s a visually striking, genre-bending package – of fighting and tediously wordy dialogue. What an odd confection

Martin Scorsese compared them to theme parks. Nicolas Cage likened them to WWE. The products of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – 38 films, 18 television shows and counting – are not generally well regarded as works of art. This is understandable: they are derivative, corporate and also somewhat mechanical – not just in their CGI-heavy production or phased rollouts, but in their preoccupations, with robotics, technological combat, complex webs of association. This is not the cinema, per Scorsese, “of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

The MCU doesn’t just gravitate towards cliche in this area, it barely features actual humans at all. And yet – like a superhero searching for a special stone – you get the sense that Marvel will not rest until such profundity is within its grasp. Unlike rollercoasters or wrestling, the MCU can be quite intellectually demanding: why shouldn’t it be capable of illuminating truths about the human condition as well?

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© Photograph: Marvel. All Rights Reserved

© Photograph: Marvel. All Rights Reserved

© Photograph: Marvel. All Rights Reserved

The pair’s first feature-length adventure stars Jemaine Clement and Olivia Tennet, has a dreamy soundtrack and beautiful stop-motion visuals – fantastic family fun

Kiri is a lively yellow dinosaur, Lou is an amiable purple palorchecie (a fictional beast, vaguely resembling a palorchestes, which in turn vaguely resembles a giant tapir) – and if you’ve been watching their CBeebies show, which hails from New Zealand and consists of 5-minute episodes, you’ll know they’re the best of friends despite their ingrained temperamental differences. But how did they become friends in the first place? For the uninitiated, Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! functions as an introduction to the characters and their world, while for fans it’s a delightful origin story.

At only one hour long, the runtime is toddler-friendly – and to be honest, there are plenty of films marketed at adults that could learn a lesson from writer-director Harry Sinclair’s economical storytelling. (Sinclair is also the writer of the TV series, alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing alum Rebecca Kirshner.) With the voice acting talents of Olivia Tennet (Freda in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) and Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), plus dreamy songs from Don McGlashan (Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn), Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! would arguably work superbly as an audiobook or radio show – except the visuals are a treat too.

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© Photograph: Stretchy

© Photograph: Stretchy

© Photograph: Stretchy

Fellow Travelers follows the clandestine relationship between Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin in 50s’ Washington. Plus: Louis Theroux on Portrait Artist of the Year. Here’s what to watch tonight

10pm, Channel 4
From the makers of Homeland, this suave, weighty, Emmy-nominated period drama finally lands on UK telly. It is both a romance and a thriller, following Hawk (Matt Bomer) and Tim (Jonathan Bailey) who meet in Washington DC during the height of McCarthyism, and develop a sexual relationship across the next three decades. Hollie Richardson

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© Photograph: Ben Mark Holzberg/SHOWTIME

© Photograph: Ben Mark Holzberg/SHOWTIME

© Photograph: Ben Mark Holzberg/SHOWTIME

Creator and star will return along with Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Andrew Rannells for five-episode revival

Girls, the seminal HBO series on millennial strivers that launched the careers of Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Adam Driver and more, will return for a limited run on HBO in 2027.

The five-episode addendum, set to begin production next year – a decade after the series finale aired – will reunite creator and star Dunham, as aspiring writer Hannah Horvath, alongside Williams as Marnie Michaels, Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna, Jemima Kirke as Jessa and Andrew Rannells as Elijah. Judd Apatow will also return as executive producer.

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© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

© Photograph: Mark Schafer/HBO

I watched the filming of the first jazz-hands epic. Two decades on, its sparkle hasn’t faded – and now it’s back on the London stage

Whenever I watch basketball, I come away disappointed that the players’ shoe squeaks didn’t jumpstart a choreographed dance number, just like in High School Musical. Whether it was a lunch break turning into a confession of closeted passions or a pep rally evolving into a flashmob, the 2006 Disney Channel movie proved that teen drama can always be solved through song.

Quality entertainment? Meh. The corniest of lines? Oh, for sure. But the cheesiness was the point. Its 98 minutes became a deliciously enduring slice of pop culture not despite the cringe, but because the film embraced it so wholeheartedly.

Rachel Chang is a journalist and author specialising in travel and pop culture. Her book Unforgettable Walks: 52 Places to Stroll Around the World is published next year

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© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

This peculiar – some would say truly irresponsible – hagiography of boxing superstar Mike Tyson veers from psychedelics and sobbing to the inadvisable face tattoo via a cameo from the US president

Netflix’s new four-parter on Mike Tyson is one of the strangest sports documentaries it has ever released, or maybe just one of its strangest documentaries full stop. The streamer has form in sporting hagiographies – tales told with questionable distance from their subjects, and all the objectivity of cold war agitprop. Tyson is different, though: not only is it lopsided, but it also feels deeply icky. And that’s before Donald Trump arrives to defend its subject – a great catch for the programme-makers but a wholly baffling cameo that makes you wish he would stick with geopolitical meddling and golf.

It ends – spoiler alert – with the former boxing champion taking the hallucinogenic drug DMT (or as he calls it, “the toad”, after the animal that produces it), while sobbing and inviting the show’s director to join him. Its episodes are peculiar, sometimes compelling, and – as many viewers will surely feel – truly irresponsible.

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© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

Actor who played Walter White Jr and who advocated for disability representation is remembered by Bryan Cranston as ‘my sweet son’

• RJ Mitte – a life in pictures

The actor RJ Mitte, whose personal experience living with cerebral palsy informed his role as Walter White Jr in the television series Breaking Bad, has died aged 34 in Brownsville, Texas.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of beloved actor, philanthropist, and passionate disability rights advocate RJ Mitte,” Mitte’s representatives said in a statement. “Drawing from his own experience living with cerebral palsy, Mitte brought authenticity to the role and built a platform on disability awareness and inclusion.”

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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Mobeen Azhar isn’t afraid to tackle hard topics in a brilliant documentary about the rise of Islamophobia – even when it involves hearing criticism about his own decisions

In 2024, the journalist Mobeen Azhar made a documentary called Small Town, Big Riot that ought to have been highly influential, but, in our atomised modern media landscape, wasn’t. He deconstructed how anti-immigrant racists, radicalised by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up on the streets perpetrating shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary foe.

Azhar’s new film tackles a wider, thornier problem and is less satisfying as a result. But in his willingness to debate hard topics – even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which are aimed at him personally – he is still provoking thoughts and airing views that better-known journalists would never go near.

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© Photograph: BBC/Forest

© Photograph: BBC/Forest

© Photograph: BBC/Forest

As she leaves the Traitors castle to star in The Pelicot Trial and receive a lifetime achievement award, the actor has highlighted ‘a loss of regional identity’ caused by funding pressures on UK theatres

There has been “a loss of regional identity” in the stories on stages around the UK due to the challenging circumstances facing theatres, according to Julie Hesmondhalgh.

The actor, who last week was the fourth contestant to leave The Celebrity Traitors, observed that for financial reasons regional theatres are increasingly making co-productions with other venues. This can lead to a “generic” product, she said, rather than a show that specifically says something about the local area.

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© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

© Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert

Peter Flannery’s 90s TV drama classic is getting a theatre reworking in Newcastle. The director and cast talk about doing justice to its themes of scandal and decay – and emulating its star-making actors

In a small room at the top of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live theatre, four actors are bringing to life the principal characters from one of British television’s best-loved dramas. Sitting around a table strewn with coffee cups, water bottles and annotated scripts, Tosker and Geordie have been boozing in a nightclub and weighing up their chances of pulling. Mary and Nicky have been arguing about whether they have a future together.

The scenes are from a new stage version of Our Friends in the North, the landmark nine-episode series first broadcast in 1996 on BBC Two. Set against a backdrop of Labour politics and police corruption, it charted 30 years in the lives of four working-class geordies and made stars of Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. It was a hit with critics and viewers, won awards and regularly makes “greatest ever” lists.

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© Photograph: Chris Bishop/PicturesbyBish

© Photograph: Chris Bishop/PicturesbyBish

© Photograph: Chris Bishop/PicturesbyBish

Mobeen Azhar and Masood Khan look at life after the terror attacks. Plus: investigating Roman Abramovich. Here’s what to watch tonight

9pm, BBC Two
“There was a time, 25 years ago, when being a British Muslim was OK,” says journalist Mobeen Azhar. “We were on the cover of magazines, getting elected to parliament and even captained the England cricket team.” Then 9/11 happened. He and his film-making partner, Masood Khan, have made this documentary to explore how the terror attacks affected the Muslim community – including their own experiences – and why they still reverberate today. Hollie Richardson

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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Forest

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Forest

© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Forest

Did Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless swashbuckling tale need the addition of a superpower? Is it better for reducing its young hero to an afterthought? Nope

A lever groans, a pipe judders and thunk: another unsolicited adaptation of a beloved literary classic is deposited on our screens. This particular emission is a six-part take on Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless tale of swashbuckling adventure, high-seas treachery and thick eyebrowed youths in tiny britches wrestling with double-edged superpowers. The 19th-century novel has of course long captured the public imagination, its themes of … hang on. Superpowers? Aye, that there be. An’ plenty more bilge besides. For this US-UK co-production be what lubbers refer to as a “reimagining”. Which essentially means much effort has been made to “jazz up” – or, if you will, “ruin” – the source material.

And so, for better or significantly worse, the Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet) of this new Treasure Island, titivated by writer Robert Murphy, has been given a photographic and possibly quasi-mystical memory; a preternatural talent for recollection that is demonstrated in scenes of much whooshing excitement. Here we find the youngster scowling at various documents while the soundtrack whispers mysteriously and the camera zooms slowly in then quickly out of his face, like a bee too embarrassed to ask for directions to the toilet. Not that any of this makes him interesting, mind.

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© Photograph: Paramount Plus (UK)

© Photograph: Paramount Plus (UK)

© Photograph: Paramount Plus (UK)

The third series of Jimmy McGovern’s terrifying and acutely moving prison drama is set in a young offender institute – and the reality it depicts needs national attention

Jimmy McGovern has said that this new, third instalment of his prison anthology drama Time will be the last. For the sake of audiences’ emotional equilibrium, you have to hope so. For the sake of scripted drama, for the sake of art that has a hope of stirring the conscience of authorities and effecting change, you have to hope not.

This time, Time is inside a young offender institution. It is crammed with under-18-year-old males, locked up often for 23 hours a day, all subject to the relatively new “keep apart” system whereby prisoners deemed likely to be violent towards each other are not allowed out of their cells at the same time. Naturally, this leads to a lot more boys being banged up for a lot more of the day and suits the officers a lot better. It is a facet of modern YOIs that McGovern and his co-writer Sam Bailey, a man evidently cut from the same socially conscious cloth, are clearly intent on bringing to wider attention. Their script, and the direction by Paul Whittington, do a wonderful, terrifying job of conveying the kinetic energy pent up and desperate for release, and the seething fury ever threatening to erupt, in every scene.

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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

Sarah Soleman’s adaptation of Elizabeth Day’s bestseller is hugely moreish – it leaves you absolutely desperate to find out more about the mystery at its heart

Imagine going to a huge party in a country pile stuffed with posh Tory MPs. Now imagine being massively pregnant and unable to drink. Now imagine that the party is “Victorian freak show” themed, because the hostess thought that would be even more fun. Such is the situation Lucy Gilmour (Sarah Solemani) finds herself in at the beginning of The Party, Solemani’s adaptation of Elizabeth Day’s 2017 bestseller of the same name.

When you learn that a gun has gone off, your first thought may well be that this can only improve matters. At the very least, the circus troupe will probably decline to perform further, and I believe even posh people have to stop conga-ing to 80s hits once the police show up. Like most of us, I’d be tempted to fire the gun into the air myself.

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© Photograph: Rob Youngson/ITV/World Productions

© Photograph: Rob Youngson/ITV/World Productions

© Photograph: Rob Youngson/ITV/World Productions

We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con. Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) joined showrunner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) onstage for the big reveal.

As Luisa described the show during the NYCC panel Saturday night:

We are 50 years after [Blade Runner] 2049 and, bad news, the worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place and the humans have lost. So the creations have surpassed their creators. And the series, the big question it asks is, ‘What happens when our time as a species ends?’ 2099 is taking place at a junction point when one species is ending and a new one is rising. The first film, something I loved about it, was that it was looking at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asks that same question but on a macro level. Mankind—what happens when we realize our time is running out? And are we going to accept that loss? Can we hold on to our humanity during it?

Yeoh stars as Olwen, the dying Replicant, while Schafer plays Cora. The cast also includes Hugo Hamlet as Buster Friendly, as well as Dmitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke, and Maurizio Lombardi—all in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

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The choir leader and presenter on not fitting in at his all-boys grammar, how synthesisers changed everything, and his ‘dithering’ start on TV

Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006’s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.

I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents’ house in Bournemouth. When I wasn’t filling up guests’ drinks, I’d be playing some songs – it looks like I’m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Gareth Malone

© Photograph: Courtesy of Gareth Malone

© Photograph: Courtesy of Gareth Malone

Major TV networks were notified on Friday that the department was examining whether they violated antitrust laws when they suspended pool coverage of President Trump.

© Andrew Leyden for The New York Times

The British actor on the genius of Bend It Like Beckham, the role she lost to Emma Thompson and why some actors get worse with age

What was the most Australian thing that you experienced while you were in the country filming Dustfall?

Working with a python? We don’t tend to work with snakes in the UK. I’m absolutely snake phobic but the python was very professional. Behaved better than I did.

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© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge

Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.

The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.

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© Composite: Pituk Loonhong/Getty Images/Guardian Design

© Composite: Pituk Loonhong/Getty Images/Guardian Design

© Composite: Pituk Loonhong/Getty Images/Guardian Design

The broadcaster on her days as a shoplifter, catastrophising, and a first kiss with her dance partner

Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, Stacey Dooley, 39, left school at 15 and worked as a shop assistant. In 2007 she was selected to take part in the BBC reality series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. This led to the series Stacey Dooley Investigates and her career as presenter of hard‑hitting documentaries. In 2018, her face-to-face confrontation with an Islamic State soldier won her the One World Media award and she also received the MBE for services to broadcasting. She has made three new investigative films for the BBC and presents BBC series Clickbait Clinic. She met dancer Kevin Clifton when they were partnered on Strictly Come Dancing; they have a daughter and live in Merseyside.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m quite greedy. I achieve something or something’s feeling really brilliant and I’m, like, “Right, what are we doing next? What are we getting next?”

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© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment

© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment

© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment