Co-owner of west London studios tells of dunking Victoria Beckham, industry upheavals and 25-year labour of love

The first time film-maker Barnaby Thompson visited Ealing Studios it was to shoot Victoria Beckham, who at the time was better known globally as Posh Spice , being unceremoniously plunged underwater.

“It was 1997, we were making Spice World and there was a sequence where Posh Spice got thrown into the Thames,” says Thompson, whose film credits include Wayne’s World, the remake of St Trinian’s and an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. “We have a tank at Ealing so we shot Posh being thrown into the tank. It was the first time I had been on that hallowed ground.”

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Why is a huge pack of puppet animals, from tiny monkeys to towering elephants, making a 20,000km cross-planet odyssey? As The Herds nears the UK, our writer spends a week as an antelope to find out

Wide-eyed, a child peers at the metre-long corkscrew horns rising above the crowd. She takes in the enormous raggedy hide and the strangeness of the wild creature stomping through her streets. Up ahead, a giraffe peeks warily through a first-floor window as a zebra skitters backwards from a growling dog. “Kudu, washa!” The instruction comes through my radio. We turn away from the child and hurl our hefty creature forwards. The crowd scatters. We thunder through the narrow alleys to catch up with the rest of The Herds .

In 2021, Little Amal , the puppet of a refugee child almost 4m tall, walked from the Syria-Turkey border to the UK. The Herds, from the same team, is even more ambitious. This new theatrical mega-marathon is shepherding a pack of life-size animal puppets a distance of 20,000km, from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle. More than 1,000 people will take part in creating the odyssey and, as the animals march into Marseille, I become one of them – as a volunteer puppeteer – for a galvanising (if sweaty) week.

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She made her name in Lena Dunham’s landmark series, then starred in Get Out. As she returns in M3gan 2.0, the sequel to the hit horror about a murderous AI doll, she talks about parenting in an age of smartphones, Botox and her famous father

If you had wandered the set of the film M3gan 2.0 last year, chances are you would have stumbled into M3gan, the terrifying humanoid doll, staring lifelessly while she waited to be called for her next scene. Sometimes she would stand in the corner of the soundstage, says Allison Williams with a nervy laugh. “The dilemma is: do you turn her around so she’s facing the wall, or do you let her face the room? Both answers are wrong.”

In the sequel to the sci-fi horror M3gan, Williams resumes her role as Gemma, a roboticist who has become a crusader against rampant and reckless AI development after her creation – developed for her orphaned niece – became murderous. (She is also a producer on the second film.)

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Actor says it is good thing that Netflix hit has started conversations about phone use and parenting

The Adolescence star Ashley Walters has said the show led him to limit one of his sons’ screen time, and that he “can’t even touch his device” for half of the week.

The 42-year-old, who played DI Luke Bascombe in the series, said he had started “drawing back on his son’s screen time” because of concern he was not always doing what he said he was.

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Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework?

There are two kinds of readers: those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins. The two rarely combine in one person, and they definitely don’t lend each other books. But a new generation of readers are finding a way to combine both approaches: reviving the art and romance of marginalia, by transforming their books and reading experiences into #aesthetic artifacts.

“I keep seeing people who have books like this,” says one TikToker , their head floating over a greenscreened video of fat novels bristling with coloured sticky tabs. “What are you doing? Explain yourselves! Because this looks like homework . But also … I do like office supplies.”

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Utilita Arena Birmingham
The newest song might date from 1992 but that matters little to fans of their fast and intricate heavy metal

It takes four songs for Bruce Dickinson to shout what everyone knows he is going to shout: “Scream for me, Birmingham!” For their 50th anniversary tour, Iron Maiden are not reinventing the wheel – they are, as ever, playing fast and intricate heavy metal. As ever, Dickinson spends much of the set on top of the backline, acting out characters, Steve Harris machine-guns the audience with his bass while playing his “galloping” lines, and Janick Gers, when not swinging his guitar around, sticks his left leg in the air and rests it on the stage side speakers. No idea why. But he always does it. And, of course, the song subjects are the contents of a 12-year-old’s head: the Battle of Britain (Aces High); crazy mental powers (The Clairvoyant); Satan (The Number of the Beast). You get the picture.

The one deviation from usual, Dickinson informs us, is that this is as near as Maiden get to a greatest hits show: the most recent song tonight, Fear of the Dark, dates from 1992. For the less committed, that is a good thing. Maiden have a tendency to be windy, and this format – their early songs were generally shorter and sharper – helps with that, though it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. Rime of the Ancient Mariner lasts nearly as long as a cross-channel ferry, and you can’t even buy duty free to pass the time.

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A look back at 1960s Black arts movement explains why Trump is obsessed with eliminating Black artistry and the museums and institutions that support it

By the time Jesse Owens bowed his head from the highest podium tier to be crowned with his fourth Olympic wreath in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Europe’s premiers knew they had a problem. In front of a record-setting crowd at games that should have been a lavish display of Aryan propaganda, Owens’s unmatched athleticism on the track humiliated the host Nazi regime and smashed one of the vital ideological pillars upon which European empires annexed the world into their racial order. Since the inception of race-based slavery and settler-colonialism in the 15th century, the novel idea that human beings could be stratified into distinct “races,” with superiority defaulting to white Europeans, was bolstered by the claim that white racial supremacy was the rational outcome of the “natural” biophysical, intellectual and aesthetic ascendancy of white people, and thus of whiteness itself.

Adolf Hitler watched Owens, the five-time world record holder and grandson of enslaved people, triumph in his first event from a lavishly decorated imperial box, and abruptly exited the arena thereafter rather than witness Aryan athletes stumble to place second. In his conspicuous departure, a reluctant admission heard around the world had been made. A pillar was smashed. European physical superiority had been proven an undeniable fallacy and, more insultingly, Black dominance on the track was now a quantifiable fact. The ideological stakes of white supremacy – that whites were the smarter race, the sole ones capable of higher thought, that white people were the most physically beautiful, and also that the cultural products of whiteness were the most artistically valuable to advanced civilization – had suffered a powerful blow and shifted on its heels.

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The band remember their hit 2005 record Stars of CCTV and talk about coming back with a new dynamic

Hard-Fi formed in 2003 in Staines, Surrey. Frontman Richard Archer, guitarist Ross Phillips, bassist Kai Stephens and drummer Steve Kemp released their debut album, Stars of CCTV, in 2005. Featuring Cash Machine, Hard to Beat and Living for the Weekend, it reached No 1 in the UK, sold 1.2m copies worldwide and earned Brit awards and a Mercury prize nomination. The band released two further albums before going on hiatus in 2014. They reunited in 2022 and released a new EP in 2024.

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