For 19 years he has held the powerful to account on a show that attracts huge audiences around the world. Now it is over. He discusses his anger with management, his pride in his team – and what he’ll do next

Stephen Sackur makes no bones about it: he is not going willingly. “I don’t want to leave the BBC, because I still think I’ve got a lot to offer,” the HARDtalk presenter tells me. “And I don’t want the programme to be closed, but that argument has been definitively lost. I’m thinking hard about other things I’m going to do. I’m fine. I’m feeling quite positive.” Maybe. But I think he’s also feeling hurt, betrayed and, though he denies it, a little angry. “It’s definitely a strange period,” he says. We’re talking in February, a month before the show finishes and he’s sent packing by the Beeb.

Sackur, 61, is a BBC lifer. He started out as a trainee in 1986, was made a foreign correspondent in 1990, and went on to some of the biggest gigs in journalism – Europe, Washington, the Middle East. For the past 19 years, he’s hosted HARDtalk, the interview show that holds global power to account. The BBC has always lauded it as a flagship programme – thrice weekly, regularly watched in more than 200 countries by up to 70 million people (and, he reckons, with the podcast and World Service radio versions that figure could rise to 170 million). Which is why he got such a shock when he was told in October that it was being pulled .

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Loch Ness Monster hunters have included the Chuckle Brothers – and even David Lean. As the Scottish icon is honoured in a new stamp and a stirring musical, we separate the classy from the crackpot

It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.

To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry . Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”

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The K-pop superstar on the pop hit that kickstarted her music career, and why she can no longer listen to one of her band’s biggest songs

The first song I fell in love with
I’m an only child. My older cousin would come round to play at my house, and she was a big fan of Britney Spears. She put on … Baby One More Time and I was like: “What is this song? I love it.” I watched the music video and fell in love with her.

The first record I bought
I was a big fan of K-pop band BigBang before I moved from Thailand to Korea. I bought Taeyang’s first solo album Solar from Myeongdong, Korea’s famous shopping and fashion district where all the tourists go.

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The ‘extreme magician’ delivers a unique twist on the travelogue, in which he hunts out feats of magic rather than tourist attractions – and it’s surprisingly full of darkly comic moments

He’s been hung upside down, encased himself in ice, lived in a plastic box and spent a week buried underground. He’s let helium balloons pull him several miles upwards, had 1m volts of electricity fired at him, and balanced on the top of a high pillar for a day and a half. American “extreme magician” David Blaine has a catalogue of incredible feats behind him. Now, though, he’s really attempting the impossible: the sonofabitch is trying to make a watchable National Geographic travelogue. Miraculously, he’s gone and done it.

Do Not Attempt sees the unflappable conjuror visit developing, historic or remote places in search of people whose death-defying skills could conceivably get them a Vegas residency, but who, instead, are performing for coins, or just their own spiritual enlightenment. Dressed in black and full of the sort of laid-back cool that you acquire when you’ve trained your heart to beat only every other Wednesday, Blaine starts each episode at street level, looking for the real stuff, the artisan magic that tourists don’t see: think Anthony Bourdain, but instead of sniffing out premium mortadella or the world’s best noodle soup, here the sort of fine delicacy we’re after is someone covering themselves in scorpions or sticking needles under their fingernails.

David Blaine Do Not Attempt is on Disney+. It will also air weekly on National Geographic Channel on Thursdays from 27 March.

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Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

The record-breaking take on the Shakespearean tragedy might already be a smash, but it’s disappointingly muddled

With the smell of doom and regression in the air, perhaps it’s not surprising that the hottest ticket on Broadway this season is for a 400-year-old tragedy. There’s been much ado about the box office for Othello, a new rendition of Shakespeare’s classic given movie-star wattage. The show at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, grossed $2.8m during one week of previews – the most of any non-musical during a single week on Broadway ever, in part because some orchestra tickets are going for a whopping $921.

The sticker shock is not just an Othello problem – tickets for two other celeb-driven plays on Broadway – Glengarry Glen Ross, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, aren’t averaging much less , and it’s already been a lucrative season for celeb-studded Shakespeare as Romeo + Juliet , starring screen-famous Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, recouped its $7m capitalization before closing last month. But before it even officially opened, Othello became emblematic of Broadway’s trend toward luxury experience and status symbol over popular entertainment, billing Hollywood names in a hyper-competitive, exclusionary market. (Full disclosure: the Guardian, denied tickets for review, paid $400 for a middle orchestra seat.)

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The fantastic performances don’t do enough to lift this scouse Sopranos. There’s an essential emptiness at the core of this generic show

“I sort of hope they all die,” is never the reaction a television drama wishes to evoke. But in relation to the drug-running family the Phelans and their colleagues and connections that make up This City Is Ours, that just might be your response.

Sean Bean plays cocaine-smuggling patriarch Ronnie Phelan, who has enjoyed a long career dominating Liverpool’s drug trade. He is now considering retirement and, it seems, is planning to hand over the reins to his right-hand man of 20 years, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce, recently brilliant as Treacle Goodson in A Thousand Blows). Michael is pretty pleased. It almost makes up for his discovery that he has a low sperm count and that he and Diana (Hannah Onslow), the love of his life, will need to use IVF to start a family. If that all seems a jarring juxtaposition, it is. Scenes of violence are spliced with Michael’s sentimental moonings over pictures of his embryonic children, demanding that we see the irony and feel the humanity of a thirtysomething who is only now beginning to see what life may be really all about and to start groping towards some kind of escape and betterment for the next generation.

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Children’s magazine TV show, which first aired in 1958, will now be pre-recorded due to changing viewer habits

Blue Peter has recorded its final live episode as the show moves to a pre-recorded format, the BBC said.

Airing weekly on Fridays, the longest-running children’s show in the world began on 16 October 1958 with its intrepid presenters and characterful pets.

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Actor, 76, denies claims made by assistant director and set designer who worked with him on Les Volets Verts

Gérard Depardieu will become the most high-profile French person to stand trial on #MeToo abuse allegations when he appears in a Paris court on Monday.

The actor, a titan of French cinema with more than 200 films and television series to his name, is accused of sexually assaulting two women during a film shoot in 2021.

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Turner prize nominee Delaine Le Bas says entrenched racist attitudes to community persist in UK and Europe

Roma, Gypsies and Travellers have not made as much progress as other minority groups in the UK because of deeply entrenched racist attitudes towards them, the Turner prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas has said.

Le Bas, who has spent her career exploring themes connected to her Romani Traveller heritage , said that Traveller communities have been “stuck in place” by stereotypes and hostile newspaper coverage.

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