This account of Dr Crippen’s notorious Edwardian-era killing shifts the focus to the women at the centre of the sordid tale

On the evening of 31 January 1910, two couples dined together at a house in Hilldrop Crescent, on the borders of Holloway, London. The hosts, Dr Crippen and his wife, Belle Elmore, had been entertaining their friends, Clara and Paul Martinetti, until the small hours. After some difficulty fetching a cab, the visitors headed home around 1.30am. It was the last time they, or anyone else, would see Elmore alive. When her colleagues at the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild made inquiries about their friend – she was treasurer of the organisation – Crippen told them she had gone off to America to deal with a family crisis. Some weeks later they were informed she had died of double pneumonia in Los Angeles.

Thus was sparked an international murder case, one of the most notorious in Britain, later called “the crime of the century”. But Hallie Rubenhold ’s engrossing account begins a generation earlier when Hawley Harvey Crippen, a homeopathic doctor, met and married a nurse, Charlotte Bell, in New York. The couple moved west to San Diego, had a son, moved again. In the US of the 1880s, with its burgeoning railroads, you could always change towns, disappear, shed your mistakes along with your creditors, your given name, your dependents. This was the shifty Crippen way, and when Charlotte died of a stroke, aged 33, he was on the move and marrying again. His second wife, a Brooklynite born Kunigunde Mackamotzki, changed her name more than once, eventually settling on Belle Elmore, and after crisscrossing the US the couple emigrated to London, he to peddle his quack remedies for the Drouet Institute, she to pursue a career as an opera singer.

The celebrity duo reveal the realities of raising five children, two dogs and four ducks. Plus: Bradley Walsh signs off on his Egyptian travelogue. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, BBC One
Pickle Cottage opens its doors for the newest celebrity fly-on-the-wall series. Golden couple Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash let the cameras in to their home for six months, as they raise their five children, two dogs and four ducks. The duo are easy to like – especially when the besotted Joe recalls the day they met (“I haven’t been able to shake him since,” says Stacey) – in what can be described only as soft TV. It starts with them celebrating their wedding anniversary. Hollie Richardson

David Tennant and Cush Jumbo in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a puppet-powered transformation for Yann Martel’s novel and Anna Chancellor in a Restoration-era comedy are among this month’s highlights

Performances at Covent Garden’s 251-seat Donmar Warehouse have an inbuilt intimacy. Max Webster’s 2023 production of Shakespeare’s breakneck tragedy went a step further, as audiences wore headphones to experience Gareth Fry’s richly eerie binaural soundscape and savour the powerhouse pairing of David Tennant and Cush Jumbo. This film, captured in 5.1 cinema surround sound, amps up that atmosphere with some flesh-crawling closeups. On Marquee TV .

All four Beatles biopics, focusing on each member of the band, will be released in cinemas in April 2028

The cast of Sam Mendes’ four upcoming Beatles biopics has been officially announced, with Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon, Paul Mescal playing Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan playing Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn playing George Harrison.

Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of films including American Beauty, 1917 and Skyfall, made a surprise appearance on stage with his Fab Four at CinemaCon, an annual industry event for Hollywood, in Las Vegas on Monday night.

The disastrous sewage dump continues, leading residents to protest by dressing up as giant bog rolls … and staging a 10-hour campanological marathon. Only in Borsetshire

A miasma hangs over Ambridge; an enchantment of sorts. Its inhabitants seem bizarrely foggy about events in the outside world. For example, the word Palestine cannot be spoken in the village. The Malik family have been saying a few prayers during iftar, among which “Let it stop soon,” is the nearest anyone has come to mentioning The Situation. They have now moved back to their house on the recently sewage-engulfed Beechwood estate – departing their temporary accommodation at the Ambridge Hall B&B perhaps just before the well-meaning joining-in-with-Ramadan by Lynda Snell (MBE) got oppressive. The Snells, on the other hand, are missing the Maliks so much that Constanza upped and died (she’s a llama).

Ah, the sewage. Aside from its olfactory effects, the longer-term consequences continue. No one wants to eat cheese or yoghurt artisanally produced amid human excrement, remarkably, so Helen Archer’s organic dairy business is in trouble. The plan is to make one of Clarrie Grundy or Susan Carter redundant, a typically humane move from the Bridge Farm Archers. The threatened job loss has only strengthened Emma Grundy’s resolve to campaign against the evils of Borchester Water. She and Pat Archer turned up at a demo dressed as giant bog rolls, and soon, a plan for a bellringing protest at St Stephen’s church was hatched. Alan Franks, at his trendy vicar best, loved the idea, and a 10-hour campanological marathon, plus an outburst of citizen handbell ringing, was devised. Not everyone was delighted. Martyn Gibson, twirling his moustache and swirling his evil capitalist’s cloak, swept into the church on the verge of an apoplexy. The bells rang out, nonetheless.

At 18, Saraya-Jade Bevis had a rags-to-riches signing that took her from Norwich to the largest wrestling promotion in the world. A few years later, she hit rock bottom. Here is how she started over

It’s hard to know where to start with champion wrestler Saraya-Jade Bevis. Do we start in the same place as her memoir, at rock bottom aged 25 when a sex tape of Bevis taking part in a threesome was leaked and went viral? At that time, Bevis was suspended from wrestling, addicted to alcohol and, she says, snorting so much cocaine that her nose was spraying out blood.

Or do we start with her childhood in Norwich, raised by a family of wrestlers, ex-cons and alcoholics, living in a council house where, she says, the rent was always due and dinner might be mashed potato sandwiches. The childhood sexual abuse that she had kept hidden for most of her life? Her rags-to-riches signing at 18 to WWE, the largest wrestling promotion in the world? Her new life in the US, when she was enjoying success as champion wrestler Paige, but feeling lonely, homesick, vulnerable? She met some very bad men. She partied too hard. She fractured her neck. She spent five years in recovery before returning to the ring. Her memoir is called Hell in Boots: Clawing My Way Through Nine Lives for good reason. “There’s actually a lot I had to leave out as I couldn’t fit it all in,” Bevis says of the book. “How am I only 32?”

As his most ambitious project comes together, the artist plans to unleash a bacchanalian festival that will be his most daring public artwork yet

On a frosty bright-blue day in February 2024, Jeremy Deller was in Dundee, examining severed heads. “How can anyone not be fascinated by a head?” he said. Deller is an elfin figure, 5ft 5 on a good day, a low-key, unintimidating presence. The only giveaway to his identity as an artist was his slightly dandyish clothing: a KLF T-shirt, a checked neckerchief, lemon-yellow socks and a purple Missoni sweater, which he hurriedly explained, lest he come across as too fancy, he had bought on sale. When he won the Turner prize in 2004 he looked like a dapper schoolboy. Twenty years on, the only indication he was nearing 60 was the way he kept alternating a pair of reading glasses with his sunglasses, toggling them between nose and forehead.

Deller, carrying himself more like a journalist than most people’s idea of an artist, was questioning Dr Tobias Houlton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Dundee, about the art and science of building 3D or digital impressions of a face from skeletal remains. On a trip to the university the previous summer, Deller had been fascinated by a re-creation of the head of Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” who claimed the British throne in 1745.

Live-action animated film starring John Cena and Will Forte will hit cinemas in 2026, after it was controversially shelved in favour of a $30m tax write-down

For once, things are working out for Wile E Coyote.

The film Coyote vs Acme, which stars John Cena and Will Forte acting alongside beloved Looney Tunes cartoon characters, will finally be released to the public, almost two years after the completed film was shelved by Warner Bros as part of a tax write-off .

Hampstead theatre, London
Sophie Melville and Laura Whitmore star in an ambitious yet flawed play about the pressures of parenthood

John Donnelly’s new play is perceptive about early parenthood, especially the way a baby’s arrival stress-tests your relationship. He particularly captures the strange combination of surety and fragility in which families take shape. Designer Tom Piper has shrunk Hampstead’s wide stage and surrounded it by scaffolding to create a sense not just of lives under construction but also the preciousness of a family unit sheltered from danger. Donnelly’s drama suggests a kind of 100-minute cortisol release as a mother and father battle with fight or flight responses. But despite the nuanced domestic backdrop, Apex Predator’s interwoven supernatural and thriller elements are bloodless, albeit not literally.

Mia and Joe live in London with their 11-year-old son, Alfie, and five-month-old Isla. Joe is frequently away for work of a sensitive, classified nature. Mia is driven to despair by sleep deprivation, exacerbated by the noise from upstairs neighbours. To make matters worse, Alfie has been biting other children but his art teacher, Ana, is here to help. Maybe she could give Alfie some extra free-of-charge tuition, take Mia on a boozy night out, perhaps offer her own breast for Isla to suckle?

At Hampstead theatre, London , until 26 April