My cultural awakening: I joined Danny Wallace’s accidental positivity cult – and found the love of my life

I was aimless and lonely after finishing my A-levels. Then a friend recommended the author’s book and everything changedThe spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I was 19, hadn’t got the required grades for any of my university choices and hadn’t saved for a gap year. My friends were off enjoying their new lives and I was stuck at home in Essex with my disappointed parents, doing occasional temp work.Then I read Join Me by the writer and comedian Danny Wallace

Watch the Skies to Wet Leg: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

Watch the SkiesOut now With the return of all things Y2K in fashion and music, it makes sense that the turn of the millennium fascination with little green men would likewise be back in vogue. But this sci-fi about a teenager teaming up with an agency that investigates paranormal phenomena is notable for its futuristic qualities too: it uses AI dubbing technology to create an English-language film from the Swedish original.SupermanOut now Superman is dead, long live Superman: wave goodbye to handsome hunk Henry Cavill’s stint as the man of steel and say hello to the new era of equally handsome hunk David Corenswet, a veteran of two Ryan Murphy series on Netflix. At the helm of this reboot is James Gunn, the director behind diverse entertainments including Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy.Michael Haneke RetrospectiveVarious venues nationwide; to 30 July The Austrian director is known for making films that are often kind of a bummer, but also bona fide masterpieces

The Guide #198: Such Brave Girls shows that grown-up gross-out comedy is thriving

The best binge-watches should make you feel a little bit sick while you gorge on them, and Kat Sadler’s sitcom Such Brave Girls, which just returned for a second season on BBC Three and iPlayer, certainly fits that description. I found myself burning through episodes, the enjoyment of them tempered with the slightest top note of nausea.That isn’t a criticism of the series, which follows the chaotically bleak existence of adult sisters Josie (Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson), still living at home with their wild-eyed mother, Deb (Louise Brealey). In fact it’s the intended reaction. From its logo (the title of the show made out in strands of wet hair slithering across bathroom tiles) onwards, Such Brave Girls is built to shock, unsettle and gross out, but above all be laughed at

‘What should be taught in schools?’: the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial’ turns 100

Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the “trial of the century” – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday.No one has a perspective on the “Scopes monkey trial” quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse

Comedian Paul Smith: ‘People get disappointed when they meet me in real life. I’m really quiet’

The scouse standup’s cheeky takedowns of his audiences have earned him viral fame, 1.2 million Instagram followers and a string of sold-out arena shows. But is that the real him? Far from it, he saysAt the Hot Water Comedy Club in Liverpool, Paul Smith’s standup double-header feels like a pop star’s homecoming. Women are wearing his tour T-shirts as dresses and the bar is half a dozen deep with fans hoping to get roasted by the local comic famous for his audience takedowns. There are first-daters, girls’ night outs, lads’ night outs, tourists, locals, couples, mothers and their grownup sons clamouring for a spot on the front row

Clash of cultures: exhibition tells story of when Vikings ruled the north of England

Viking North at Yorkshire Museum features UK’s largest exhibition of Viking-age artefacts, including era’s ‘cheap’ jewellery and evidence of slave-owningWhen Anglo-Saxons buried their jewellery in an attempt to keep it safe from marauding Vikings, it is unlikely they envisaged their treasures would be dug up a millennium later and studied by their descendants.Nor would they have expected the items to sit alongside everyday objects owned by their Scandinavian oppressors as part of the largest exhibition of Viking-age artefacts in the UK, aiming to tell the story for the first time of the invaders’ power base in the north of England.“This is the finest collection of objects from Viking-age England that you can see on display in a museum in this country,” says Dr Adam Parker, curator of archaeology at York Museums Trust.Viking North, which opens on Friday, focuses on the settlement of the Viking Great Army, as it is known, which arrived in the north of England from Scandinavia in AD866 and spent two centuries controlling the territory.Among the exhibits are examples of the Vikings’ great wealth, some of which appeared to be raided from holy sites, such as an Anglo-Saxon silver-gilt bowl with Christian symbolism on it found buried with a Viking warrior