Outdated attitudes to women are so deep in 007’s DNA that it couldn’t be a female role, but a female villain could shake him into the 21st century

Helen Mirren has said that there is no earthly point in getting a woman to play James Bond because the world’s most famous fictional spy was “ born out of profound sexism ”.

The first thing to say is that of course she is right. Of course Bond was born of reactionary attitudes and only a bore would point out what the DBE stands for in Mirren’s title. If you doubt the truth of what she says, watch the cringeworthy moment in Goldfinger when Sean Connery’s Bond dismisses his poolside masseuse Dink (played by Margaret Nolan) because he needs to discuss important stuff with Felix Leiter, and as Dink obediently leaves he slaps her behind and says: “Man talk …” Obnoxious.

‘It’s become a sort of folk song. It’s played at weddings and funerals. Dundee United play it when we win. I’ve met people who’ve told me, “I was a worker for the council for 20 years” – just like the guy in the song’

I was a teacher in Glasgow but I wanted to start a band and write songs that meant something to people. Dignity began life during a holiday in Crete in 1985. I bought Sounds magazine at the airport. Morrissey was on the cover and the headline “Home thoughts from abroad” got me thinking about Glasgow. I was living in a tenement flat in Pollokshields, from where I’d see the cleansing department guys sweeping the road. So I started writing about a “worker for the council, has been 20 years” who dreamed of sailing away on a “ship called Dignity”.

Last One Laughing UK, a reality show in which comedians like Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper and Richard Ayoade try to make each other laugh, has gone viral with good reason … it’s a total hoot

As you can probably tell by spending any time on it, Amazon Prime Video is in trouble. Citadel, its $300m Russo brothers-produced international spy thriller series, was met with widespread indifference. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a show that will end up costing Amazon a billion dollars, is destined to go down as one of the worst investments of all time. Everywhere you look, the platform is wall-to-wall duds.

And yet there is one glimmer of hope. The sole scrap of buzz Amazon has generated in months comes in the form of a cheap little reality show. Last One Laughing UK has been all over social media for the last couple of weeks, clipped up and shared across TikTok, Instagram and X. And this is down to its deceptively simple premise: a bunch of comedians sit in a room together and try to make each other laugh. If they laugh, they’re out. That’s all there is to it.

The only black female actor to have won the leading actress award was speaking on documentary Number One on the Call Sheet along with Taraji P Henson and Whoopi Goldberg

Halle Berry has said she now believes her historic Oscars in 2002, for Monster’s Ball, was an anomaly, and that fellow black female actors should therefore stop “coveting” Academy Awards.

Berry, now 58, is the only black woman to have won the leading actress Oscar in the awards’ nearly 100 year history. Cynthia Erivo’s nomination for Wicked earlier this year marks the first time a woman of colour has been nominated for the leading actress Oscar more than once (she was previously nominated for Harriet). Only 15 black women have ever been in contention for the prize.

The drama teachers behind the young actors in the Netflix smash say their lack of recognition ‘has caused wide upset’

Adolescence’s stratospheric success has catapulted its young cast of unknown actors into the limelight. Reams of headlines have suggested that they have come from nowhere – yet the grassroots regional drama schools that trained them say this overlooks their hard work.

To find undiscovered talent for the show, Adolescence’s casting director, Shaheen Baig, visited two northern drama schools that work with children from underrepresented and deprived communities.

‘I am a crime writer, I understand theft,’ said Val McDermid – joining Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in their appeal to Lisa Nandy to act on their behalf

A group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament.

The Smithsonian’s museums have been ordered to root out ‘divisive narratives’. It’s part of a pattern: the battle lines are now clear

It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.

The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

Barbican, London
The hands of pianist Tamara Stefanovich executed a mesmerising ballet as the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins saluted this revolutionary composer

It’s hard in our current climate to imagine any other iconoclast of musical modernism being celebrated as energetically as Pierre Boulez is to mark his centenary year . But even amid fear and funding cuts, it remains impossible to imagine postwar classical music without him . There is, in theory, a Boulez for everyone: revelatory conductor, director of a major French research institute , rhetorical troublemaker – “blow up the opera houses,” he famously suggested – and, of course, composer of intricate, horizon-shifting scores .

Boulez’s own music was centre-stage for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest total immersion day, the audience modest but passionate. (“To start, find 200 fanatics,” he once urged on the question of engaging people with new music.) The closing concert crackled abruptly into life, the first of his Deux Études – Musique Concrète for Tape griping and whirring from overhead speakers with the stage still empty. In the second, semi-recognisable pitches rush past in flurries, all attack and ending. More than 70 years since Boulez created them, such sounds remain refreshingly alien.

A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster

‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witch-hunt, when I found myself”.

It’s a suitably vulnerable, conflicted opener to her new album Hexed!, which plays out in a lurching mix of heavy metal and hardcore electronics. The record sounds twisted and contorted, wincing at the pain of “peeling back the plaster”, she says over a video call. She is warm, funny and seemingly at peace – following the traumas and battles with substance abuse that she revisits on this nightmarish, alien album.