He’s been in everything from Love Actually to Shakespeare with Al Pacino – but will he always be thought of as the string-vest-wearing boozy Glaswegian? Ahead of a tour as himself, the actor and Instagram cookery guru looks back

Few actors are more indelibly associated with one role than Gregor Fisher – and few comic characters (although Alan Partridge leaps to mind) grow with their audiences over decades rather than years. “Somebody pointed out to me the other day,” says Fisher of his most famous alter ego, the unemployed Glaswegian alcoholic Rab C Nesbitt , “that it’s 40 years since he first appeared on the telly”. Fisher wore the string vest on and off for 30 of those years, weaving himself into Glasgow folklore – but backing himself into a casting cul-de-sac too. Now 71, he’d love you to bear in mind the other roles he can play – not least that of Gregor Fisher, in which out-from-behind-the-mask persona he is soon to set off, for the first time, on a UK tour.

You might imagine that an actor stepping out as himself after years in character(s) could be scary, or exciting, or a chance to set the story straight. But Fisher is not, as I discover when meeting him in Glasgow on the eve of his tour, a man apt to self-dramatise. Ask him about his career and he’ll toss the word back at you in scare quotes. Ask him about Nesbitt and he’ll tell you: “It’s just a part. It’s gossamer wings. It’s nothing.”

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Whether it’s vibe-setting dance and rap for house parties or soothing dream-pop for when you’re contemplating the clear-up, reach for these ready-made playlists

Let’s face it: when everyone’s two improvised cocktails deep, they’ll be hollering for Pink Pony Club, and after two more, they’ll be doing Fairytale of New York in a male-female karaoke face-off. But for the early part of the party, here’s some 2025 pop, dance and rap to keep the mood buoyant.

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‘I turned a corner and saw this: a dusty alley lined with daisies, a few redheads, a handful of puppies and a woman with a gas can, all in blinding sun. That’s the miracle – when everything comes together and you’re there to catch it’

In 2013, I’d been living in New York for a long time. The social life was vibrant but I had never figured out a way to make pictures there. So when a friend sent me details of a teaching position in Eureka, California, I jumped at the chance. When I arrived, I found Northern California to be a confounding and beautiful place, one that inspired a new body of work almost immediately.

Eureka was the first time I’d stayed so long in one place. During those months, I saw the same people day after day. I taught two days a week at the local community college and the rest of the time I was free to walk around – exploring, meeting people and taking photographs. I was entirely focused on my work, almost like a residency.

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The actor said he wrote wishing 11-year-old Dominic McLaughlin ‘an even better time’ growing up in the role than he had

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe said that he wrote to 11-year-old actor Dominic McLaughlin, who has been cast in the title role of the new Harry Potter TV series.

Radcliffe appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday and said: “I wouldn’t say that anyone who is going to play Harry has to [call me],” adding: “I wrote to Dominic and I sent him a letter and he sent me a very sweet note back.”

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The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors

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Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot , Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

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Critics of deal welcome move, which has been called for since 2016 when experts said it was morally unacceptable

The British Museum has ended a controversial sponsorship deal with a Japanese tobacco firm after reports that the government had raised questions about the deal, which some critics said was “deeply troubling”.

The Guardian understands that the museum’s board chose to not renew the 15-year partnership with Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which ended in September.

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When Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath invented the visual language of Isotypes, it was to democratise education. As a new exhibition shows, it ended up influencing pop art, graphic design and electronic musicians from Kraftwerk to OMD

When Otto Neurath died in Oxford some 80 years ago, far away from his native Vienna, he was still finding his feet in exile. Like many a Jewish refugee, the economist, philosopher and sociologist had been interned as a suspected enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with his third wife and close collaborator Marie Reidemeister, having chanced a last-minute life-saving escape from their interim hideout in the Netherlands across the Channel in a rickety boat in 1940.

Thanks to Neurath’s pioneering use of pictorial statistics – or “Isotypes” as Reidemeister called them, an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – he left behind an enormous legacy in the arts and social sciences: it is the language through which we decode and analyse the modern world. But his lasting relevance would have been hard to predict at the time of his death at the age of 63.

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A bitter race to claim economic and political power has divided the country and the human cost can no longer be ignored

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Almost everywhere I go, I am asked about Sudan. The questions are partly from concern for family and my birth country, and partly from a genuine desire to understand how the conflict there has turned into something so intense and seemingly unstoppable. This week, I break down what is happening in the country, and why it has escalated to catastrophic proportions.

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Wojciech Has’s slice of 1960s surrealism is set in 18th-century Spain, as an officer careens through farcical encounters and erotic episodes in a wild ride that could be a series of Monty Python sketches

This epic picaresque comedy from 1965 is a head-spinning period-costume adventure of 18th-century Spain from Polish film-maker Wojciech Has. It is a surrealist film whose surrealism resides not merely in the bizarre parched landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns in which seductive encounters are to be had, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and anecdotes, stories which grow out of each other. The surrealist effect (and the comedy) is in the jolt from one micro-narrative to the other, and the realisation that the overall story is thwarted and undermined.

The premise is that in the Spanish town of Saragossa during the Napoleonic wars, one officer tries to arrest another, who is apparently reading an old book – but is then distracted by the fact that this book is about his own grandfather, the nobleman Alfonse Van Worden. (Later we discover that the passages about this grandfather have been added by hand, in pen-and-ink, hence Saragossa Manuscript.) Then we flash back to the this preening aristocrat-soldier himself, played by prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski.

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