Ericka Abram reflects on her remarkable childhood as a 1970s revolutionary

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, Guardian Documentaries has released a short film about the life and legacy of the Black Panthers with a focus on the group’s children . It was released alongside a Long Read by Ed Pilkington in the US on the wider group. I spoke to one of those cubs in the film, Ericka Abram, about her childhood within the activist community in the 1970s, and how her life was shaped by the experience. But first, the weekly roundup.

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
A flag hoisted in 1971 looms over a show that references to George Floyd, Inuit women and spear-bearing Amazons – to a droll soundtrack from Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer

One gusty afternoon in 1971, the artist Rose Finn-Kelcey hoisted a flag above Alexandra Palace in London. Silver lamé letters on a black background, spelling Here Is a Gale Warning, sounded the alarm for an unspecified emergency. A half century later, Finn-Kelcey’s act, a video of which flickers above one of the two main galleries at Kettle’s Yard and gives this exhibition its title, no longer seems so enigmatic. From climate change to economic precarity to rising fascism, we are living in an age of concurrent catastrophes. The future is here, the storm already blowing.

Artists have always responded to the exigencies of their times, but these days it’s museums that are uniquely under pressure. Public campaigns to make institutions more diverse and accessible have mounted just as governments around the world move to strip them of budgets and their audiences of rights. Museums have a responsibility to grapple with the cultural fallout, though the trend for mounting group exhibitions around critical issues can feel like an anxious plea for survival. Art, meanwhile, isn’t well served by sloganeering. Assembling works ranging from documentary to totally abstract around the assertion that they “warn us of political, social and ecological upheaval”, Here Is a Gale Warning seems painfully aware of this conundrum, but succumbs to it anyway.

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Masculine pals who shudder at intimacy help grieving addict Donny find viral success and unlikely solace in this brilliant, funny three-hander

Your standard group-therapy drama involves people sitting in a circle revealing the trauma that put them on the path to addiction. Playwrights Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith are having none of that.

Any time someone threatens us with a backstory in this funny and heartening three-hander, they halt the action with a meta-theatrical flourish and put us back on track. Too much trawling through the past, says one character, and we’ll be blaming everything on medieval serfs.

An emergency at Butlin’s gave the children’s TV presenter an early break. He recalls his shaky start as a standup and what he learned from Bob Monkhouse and Les Dawson

After spending the summer as a Redcoat, I arrived at Butlin’s Metropole hotel in Blackpool. As I walked in, the entertainments manager asked, without hesitation, “Can you do an act?” “No,” I said. “Shit,” he said, and the tale unravelled. The summer Reds had gone and we were starting up the winter season. But the hotel had no lull between summer and winter. There were guests who needed entertaining, but with whom? Principal comedian Freddie Davies was on honeymoon and a second comic hadn’t yet arrived. “Are you sure you don’t do an act?” asked Vince in desperation. “Well, I do know an act!” I said. “Great,” said Vince, “you’re doing it tonight.”

For the past two seasons, playing drums for the Redcoat Show, I had watched Ricky McCabe’s very funny, never-changing comedy spot around 60 times. Of course, I knew every word. It opened with, “Hello there. Will the lady with the lucky ticket come up and get me?” So, that very Friday night, having no option, being the only person available, I was top of the bill. I was very nervous, but once the first few gags had got laughs, I relaxed, and it went quite well. “Fabulous,” said Vince, “same again tomorrow night!” I pleaded no, but, of course, the guests changed over on Saturday so I would have a totally new audience. This time, with more confidence, it went very well indeed. Right after the show, one of the girls came up and said, “Great spot, Johnny. Oh, the new Redcoat has just arrived – he says he knows you. His name is Ricky McCabe!”

There are very good performances from Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton, who go to ground in a survival bunker with their son, only to come across an uninvited guest

The end of the world is usually only thought about with horror. But Joshua Oppenheimer’s unearthly musical drama, set in a fossil-fuel oligarch’s luxury survival bunker, replaces that with something even worse: sadness. And then something even more wrenchingly unbearable; not hope exactly, but a strange sense that it might not be the end, but an evolutionary transitional stage to something else, something unknowable, something that makes humanity’s current state even tinier than simple annihilation.

Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton play the last super-rich couple in the world. He is a breezily self-assured energy magnate and she a former ballerina. After an environmental catastrophe 25 years ago, they retreated from civil disorder, deep underground into an eerily well-appointed suite of rooms with food, air and medicines in which they keep their colossal fine art collection. Their only son (George MacKay) busies himself creating a twee diorama of a quaintly imagined American landscape, and assisting his father with his self-serving autobiography that no one will read – in which he absolves himself of any blame for the climate crisis.

This emotionally astute novel describes a woman’s descent into psychological distress, but some of its ideas remain embryonic

Nine months is not long enough to grow a physiologically robust human being. Newborns enter the world vulnerable in ways that might be avoided if the gestation period were longer. Scientists long held the belief that this foreshortening was due to an evolutionary trade-off between the brain size of the child and hip-width of the mother. More recently, research has suggested that the explanation lies in energy, not geometry. When the energy demands of a foetus reach roughly double those expended by a mother at rest, a threshold is passed and the upper limit of a pregnancy is reached. As a result, we humans meet our children ahead of time, their bodies assailable and exposed, ours exhausted and hypervigilant.

Raw Content, the latest novel by author and academic Naomi Booth, exists in the psychological and social hinterlands of new motherhood; heart ablaze, nerves frayed, a mind willing itself to do the impossible, namely, to make the world safe. The book centres on Grace, a legal editor who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. She denies the impending reality of her situation until the last moment, before hastily setting up house and playing families with her boyfriend and her newborn baby. At which point, the stage is set; Grace, alternately brittle and open-hearted, is thrust into a new unreality of alien bodies, uncomfortable proximities, needs, flesh, insatiable hungers.

From school to stardom, the singer-performer has always felt like an outsider. She discusses social media censorship, sexuality, crying on stage – and her magical childhood

‘I had an epiphany recently,” FKA twigs says. You have to love a conversation that starts like that. “Where I sit in the industry now is where I sat when I was at school. I was a little bit of an outsider then. And I thought, if I did this job, I’d be on the inside. But after 15 years of doing it, I just found myself still on the outside.”

FKA twigs’ appearance is mysterious: the 37-year-old has wise eyes, seemingly as old as a mountain, but the skin of a 14-year-old; her head is shaved at the side, like an ecowarrior, yet she is ridiculously beautiful, like a Disney princess. Her singing voice is otherworldly and she has incredible range. People have always compared her to Björk, but the first song on her new album, Eusexua , gives a bit of texture to that comparison. Yes, they are alike, in the sense that they are both from outer space. But space is quite large.

The 1982 film was rejected by its conservative financiers but had an influential afterlife at cinemas such as the Scala in King’s Cross. A restored print is showing in London this month

You never forget your first visit to Café Flesh. Mine took place in June 1986: it was a month before my 15th birthday and I was spending Saturday afternoon, as I often did, at the notorious Scala cinema in tawdry, pre-gentrified King’s Cross. I don’t know which staff member thought it appropriate to allow an acne-peppered child in to see the post-apocalyptic sex fantasy Café Flesh – in a double-bill with the equally explicit hardcore horror-comedy Thundercrack! – but I’m glad they did.

When I emerged blinking into the early evening sunlight, I had witnessed sights that few 14-year-olds could have imagined. The movie is set in a desolate future where “the Nuclear Kiss” has left 99% of the population unable to enjoy intimacy without becoming nauseous. These are the Sex Negatives. The remaining 1%, known as Sex Positives, are forced to perform for the chaste, dead-eyed masses. They grind away joylessly on stage to a jazzy but sinister electronic score by Mitchell Froom, who went on to be a producer for Paul McCartney, Crowded House and Suzanne Vega (to whom he was briefly married).

In her second memoir, Knox writes about her attempts to adjust to normal life after leaving prison in Italy

When Amanda Knox was released from an Italian prison in 2011 after her murder conviction was overturned, her mother insisted she see a trauma specialist. Knox had been jailed along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in what investigators insisted had been a sex game gone wrong. Four years later, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted.

Back home in Seattle, the trauma specialist began by asking Knox how she was doing, prompting her to break down in tears and run away. What was intended as an icebreaker “felt like the hardest question in the world to answer”. She tried another therapist – though, fearful of having her story sold to the tabloids, she quit after two months. Next, she went on a 10-day silent retreat where she was instructed to do walking meditation in a field, which reminded her of walking in circles in the prison yard. She had a panic attack and fled.