My cultural awakening: ‘The Specials helped me to stop fixating on death’

My anxious disposition means I think about death a lot. But a cluster of people I loved dying in 2023, and most of them unexpectedly and within a few months of each other, was enough to shake my nervous system up pretty significantly. Five funerals is too many. The first was my nan: she was the family matriarch. The oldest person in the family, so there was a level of acceptance among the sadness

From After the Hunt to the Last Dinner Party: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

After the HuntOut nowJulia Roberts stars in the latest from Challengers director Luca Guadagnino: a cancel-culture thriller set in the aftermath of an accusation of sexual assault on a college campus. She plays a philosophy professor at Yale, whose colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) claims he is innocent of the charges against him.FrankensteinOut nowYears in the making, decades in the dreaming, Guillermo del Toro’s splendidly visceral take on one of literature’s true greats, starring Oscar Isaac as the eponymous scientist and an unrecognisable Jacob Elordi, asthe Creature, is long and messy and brilliant. It deserves to be seen on the big screen (though a Netflix release is following hot on the heels of this cinema release if you do miss it).SunlightOut nowComedian Nina Conti makes her directing debut with a deliciously dark road trip comedy that isn’t for the faint of heart

The Guide #213: Should we mourn the demise of TV channels?

For seasoned tea-leaf readers of the future of TV in the UK, two stories will have stood out this week, swirling around at the bottom of their cups. There was the news that MTV is shutting down its music channels – sad for those of us who misspent their youth watching them, though hardly surprising either, given MTV’s decades-long shift away from music and towards rolling repeats of Teen Mom and shows about tattooists. And there was a media piece in the Guardian about the demise of British TV’s once-gold plated 9pm slot, which for the first time last month failed to achieve a rating of 1m or more among any of the major broadcasters.That second story was a little surprising. Overnight viewing figures are in constant decline in the streaming age, but even by those standards, not one solitary rating over 1m is eye-catching

Jimmy Kimmel on the Republicans: ‘So much greed and hypocrisy and duplicity’

Late-night hosts spoke about Donald Trump’s attempts to transform the White House and how he was “cashing in bigly” on being president.On Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host spoke about Trump’s “goon squad” indicting his former national security adviser John Bolton while the president was still “brazenly lying about the economy”.This week Trump also met with Vladimir Putin, something he bragged about on social media before claiming that he is the only president to have ended a war. “All the other wars ended mysteriously by themselves,” Kimmel said.Trump also “still has his eye on the ballroom” hosting an event for investors willing to help fund a renovation

Laurence Fox’s libel claim over racism accusations to go to retrial

Laurence Fox’s libel claim after he was called a racist on social media will go to a retrial, the court of appeal has ruled.The former actor was successfully sued by Simon Blake, who is now the chief executive of Stonewall, and the drag artist Crystal over a row on the social media platform Twitter, now called X.Fox, 47, called Blake and the former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, whose real name is Colin Seymour, “paedophiles” in an exchange about a decision by Sainsbury’s to mark Black History Month in October 2020.Fox called for a boycott of the supermarket and was called “a racist” by the men, as well as by the broadcaster Nicola Thorp, before he responded with the “paedophile” tweets which led to the initial libel claims.In two judgments in 2024, Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled in favour of Blake and Seymour, and said Fox should pay them £90,000 each in damages

Blue plaque to be unveiled at home of Thomas the Tank Engine creator

Eighty years since the first of a beloved fleet of trains was introduced to the world, a national blue plaque is being unveiled at the redbrick house in Gloucestershire where the Rev W Awdry worked on his railway stories.The addition of the new Historic England plaque to Wilbert Awdry’s old address in Stroud is expected to prompt fans of Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow locomotives to make a pilgrimage to the street to pay their respects.Awdry’s daughter, Veronica Chambers, said the family was delighted: “It’s an enormous privilege and an honour. Father would have been very surprised.”The unveiling ceremony at Awdry’s former home, named Sodor after the fictional island his anthropomorphic engines inhabited, also forms part of this year’s Railway 200 celebrations