The latest in our series of writers recommending their go-to comfort watches is an ode to Paul Feig’s 2015 comedy starring a never-better Melissa McCarthy

It has a plot and a cast that seem cooked up during a hallucinatory fever dream. It shouldn’t work, but it does – and so splendidly, too. In Paul Feig’s comedy Spy, Melissa McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, a timid CIA desk agent who gets sent out into the field by her fearsome boss (Alison Janney) after the death of her slick Bond-like colleague, Bradley Fine (Jude Law, in a rare comedic turn). The cast is full of delightful surprises. Rose Bryne is a stiletto-clad Oxford-educated villainess with quips so brutal that she makes Regina George look like Barney. Peter Serafinowicz does a game turn as an – admittedly very pre-#MeToo – cringey Italian pervert figure named Aldo (“like the shoe store found in American malls”).

And in the film’s most magnificent twist, Jason Statham parodies the hard-as-nails action leads he’s played over the years as a hard-edged buffoon with “a habit of doing things that people say I can’t do: walk through fire, water-ski blindfolded, take up piano at a late age”. That’s not even to mention whatever it is that’s going on between English comedian Miranda Hart, who stars as Susan’s best friend and co-conspirator, and American rapper 50 Cent, who plays himself.

Debut from Muhammad Hamdy, who won an Emmy for his cinematography, features dramatic chiaroscuros and panning shots to rival Antonioni

Muhammad Hamdy’s debut feature is what you might call an Egyptian stoner flick – if Cheech and Chong were a pair of exhausted, poetry-spouting revolutionaries roaming a broken-down necropolis. Hashish is the means of dulling painful memories and, apparently, preventing subcutaneous eruptions of mint, in this distinctive and stubborn-headed post-Arab-Spring reckoning which comes with magic-realist overtones.

Bahaa (Alaa El Din Hamada) is a disaffected doctor who, on hearing a woman’s complaint about being unable to stop her dead son manifesting, passes her a joint. Wandering through a set of decrepit apartments in a becalmed nocturnal purgatory, pursued by sprinting shadows and bemoaning his lost love Dalal, it seems he and his friend Mahdy (Mahdy Abo Bahat) have joined the ranks of the ghosts themselves. These ruins are psychological as much as anything: their dealer, a former Black Block activist, laments the failed revolution. Another acquaintance laments the 171 bullets that ended his life. There is much lamentation.

How has Motherland writer Helen Serafinowicz followed up her TV hits? With a rollicking, sub-Game of Thrones epic based on a Liverpudlian legend. Will the happy couple go and see it?

The benefits of hosting Eurovision are contested. But Liverpool has that song contest to thank, improbably enough, for wooing an exiled writer back to her native city. Helen Serafinowicz is the co-writer of BBC sitcoms Motherland and, more recently, Amandaland . The world of TV, you might think, is at her feet – but instead she’s returning to Merseyside with a debut theatre show, a swords-and-sorcery pastiche about the relationship between Wayne and Coleen Rooney, rejoicing in the title The Legend of Rooney’s Ring.

“I’ve started reconnecting with Liverpool recently,” says Serafinowicz, scouse accent unmistakable as she dishes up a cuppa at her home in Norwich. “And I was invited to the Eurovision song contest in the city a few years ago.” While there, she went to see her friend, the actor Keddy Sutton, in a Jonathan Harvey play called A Thong for Europe at the Royal Court theatre. This was where teenage Helen used to watch heavy metal bands: elitist middle-class theatre the Royal Court is not. “It seems to have opened itself up to everyone.” And the play? “It was mad, but very funny. It showed that you can be very silly and true to Liverpool without taking the piss. That unlocked a lot of stuff for me. I began to think I might have some ideas.”

Jaw-dropping formal invention turns this witty heist tale of endangered snails and ‘mail-order’ brides into an urgent dispatch about writing during conflict

Maria Reva’s dexterous and formally inventive debut novel is impossible to review without giving away a major surprise. I do this with a heavy heart: one of the pleasures of this book is the jaw‑dropping coup de théâtre that comes halfway through. Until that point, Endling offers its readers the pleasures of a more or less conventional novel.

The central character is a misanthropic obsessive called Yeva who drives a converted campervan around the countryside of her native Ukraine, rescuing endangered snails. She’s hoping to get them to breed, but some turn out to be endlings – the last living member of a species. First coined in the 1990s, the word was unknown to me before I read this book, but the tragic biological checkmate it describes is older than history. Aurochs, dodos, quaggas, mammoths and Tasmanian tigers must all have culminated in an endling.

Snails weren’t pandas – those oversize bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets – or any of the other charismatic megafauna, like orcas or gorillas. Snails weren’t huggy koala bears, which in reality were vicious and riddled with chlamydia. Nor were snails otters, which looked like plush toys made for mascots by aquariums, despite the fact that they lured dogs from beaches to drown and rape them.

Greatest Hits Radio to air original performances from stars such as Queen and David Bowie in 10-hour show on 13 July

The 1985 Live Aid broadcast that featured legendary performances from Queen, David Bowie, the Who and Paul McCartney will be recreated on Greatest Hits Radio to celebrate the event’s 40th anniversary.

The 10-hour special, hosted by Simon Mayo, will air from noon on 13 July featuring all of the original live performances from the concert, which took place at Wembley Stadium in London to raise money for the Ethiopian famine.

From bustling Free Huey rallies to private moments smoking with Angela Davis, Stephen Shames’s photographs tell the revolutionary organisation’s incredible story

TJ Dominguez opens up about his extraordinary life doing drug runs for Pablo Escobar. Plus, the incredible story of Hollywood legend Hedy Lamarr

Two days after his release from prison, TJ Dominguez opens up about a life where he ran the largest Lamborghini dealership in the world by day, then by night made $100m a month flying cocaine for Pablo Escobar. Host Jonathan Walton’s rapport-packed interview with him makes for a wild story – of how Dominguez only ended up there after being conned, desperately needing to make a quick buck to fulfil his late dad’s last wishes. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

In an endearingly whimsical road trip documentary, Floriane Devigne takes calls from her interview subjects in the last remaining phone boxes dotted across rural France

The humble telephone box, a souvenir from the days of analogue, can also be an intriguing cinematic locus. Floriane Devigne’s road trip documentary begins with such a relic: the last public phone booth in Paris, which also appears in Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising 1981 film Le Pont du Nord. Unlike their Instagrammable British counterparts, French phone boxes are usually painted in a demure grey and blend seamlessly with their surroundings.

As it moves from the capital city to more remote areas, Devigne’s film observes the vanishing of a formerly essential utility as her cross-country odyssey sparkles with an endearing whimsicality. Instead of using talking heads, Devigne ducks into various phone boxes scattered across France, as she takes calls from her interview subjects. Stories of love and longing fill these unassuming booths, themselves once the location of secret rendezvous and romantic trysts. The interiors of these facilities are now caked with dirt and graffiti; the lovers of yore are long gone.

Julian Fellowes’s New York-set period drama returns for a third series. Plus: was nurse Helen Smith murdered in Saudi Arabia in 1979? Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
Julian Fellowes’s New York-set costume drama continues to underwhelm in its third series. Somehow, it’s never quite racy or absorbing enough to excuse its lack of literary weight, plus some of the dialogue feels like a parody of period potboiler tropes. Ada (Cynthia Nixon) has become heavily involved in the temperance movement – which isn’t suiting Agnes (Christine Baranski) at all. Elsewhere, George’s railroad plan is in danger of hitting the buffers. Phil Harrison