‘It turned out I had a brain tumour …’ Six standup comics on what spurred them to get on stage

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friendNot all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.The first time I had an inkling I wanted to be a standup was at 14, in the school canteen, when my friend Tom and I were talking about what we thought we’d be when we grew up

Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon: who knew the end of the world could feel so romantic?

From a squad of young soldiers stationed in the middle of the Djiboutian desert to a stubborn plantation mistress refusing to abandon her estate amid a brewing civil war, Claire Denis’s films have placed some of cinema’s most alluring stars in some of the world’s most volatile environments.Stemming from her memories growing up as a child throughout West Africa, the legendary French film-maker has possessed a career-long fascination with the everlasting ripples of colonial oppression and its lingering psychic effects on native communities.On paper, her 2022 film Stars at Noon seemed to be another one of these stories: a return to the material that launched the 79-year-old director to global acclaim more than three decades ago. But when the lights inside the Lumière auditorium finally went up after the film’s glitzy world premiere at Cannes, critics noted that the immediate reaction to Denis’s movie was instead a confused and puzzling silence.A storm has just rolled through town when we’re first introduced to Trish (Margaret Qualley), a disillusioned American journalist stranded in a Covid-stricken Nicaragua turning tricks in order to survive

Eric Huntley obituary

Eric Huntley, who has died aged 96, was the co-founder with his wife, Jessica, of the radical publishing house Bogle L’Ouverture, set up in London in 1968 to showcase black writing talent. Initially run on a printing press in their west London living room, the venture soon outgrew those makeshift premises, and in 1975 became the Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop, which established itself as a community hub and informal advice centre as well as a place to buy books from outside the mainstream.Among the authors championed by Bogle L’Ouverture were Linton Kwesi Johnson, Valerie Bloom, Lemn Sissay, Beryl Gilroy and Donald Hinds, while the Huntleys also became involved in creating the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, which ran from 1982 to 1995, uniting and amplifying the thoughts of black intellectuals, creatives and activists across continents.Aside from his work in publishing, Huntley was for many years involved in racial justice campaigns in the UK. He was a key figure in the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association and the Black Parents Movement; the first formed in response to the racist labelling of large numbers of black children as “educationally subnormal” and the second campaigning against “sus” laws that allowed police to stop, search, and arrest individuals on suspicion of intent to commit a crime – a facility that was deployed disproportionately against young black people in the 1970s and 80s

‘We get a lot of requests for it to be used in sex scenes’: how Goldfrapp made Ooh La La

‘I couldn’t think of a line for the chorus – but we had just been to France. I got Baudelaire into the lyrics somewhere, too’This song was an ode to glam rock. My older sister was really into Marc Bolan and her passion for him and his sound really rubbed off on me. I love the vocal effects and drum sounds on those old records.I couldn’t think of a lyric for the chorus, though, and I thought to myself: “What do I need?” We’d just been to France, hence the “Ooh la la”, but we wondered if it was sufficient

Blurry rats and coyotes with mange: the oddly thrilling subreddit dedicated to identifying wildlife

I spent the first decade of my life in Vancouver Island, Canada, in an area rich with parks, lakes and forests. Deer would occasionally wander into our neighbourhood and nibble on the blossoms in our front yard. In that neck of the (literal) woods, mountains and deer also mean cougars.My sister and I would play at a local park, then walk home along a track parallel to a dense forest. My older sister, being three and a half years ahead of me in life and therefore lightyears ahead of me in wisdom, would helpfully declare that if we encountered a cougar it would attack me, not her, as I’m the smaller prey

‘She was a bitch in the best possible way’: the life and mysterious death of drag queen Heklina

The performer was found dead in ‘unexpected’ circumstances in her London flat in 2023. Why are her loved ones still waiting for an explanation?In commemorations and memorials after her death, the view was unanimous: Heklina had been a bitch. In the world of San Francisco’s drag scene, where she made her name, this wasn’t meant as an insult. Heklina had been a legendary performer whose stage persona was equal parts raunchy and abrasive, slinging insults known as “reads” in fine drag tradition. “Yeah, she was a bitch,” recalls her longtime collaborator Sister Roma, “but she was a bitch in the best possible way