The lure of a limitless digital jukebox was great, but as the algorithm increasingly served up music I didn’t enjoy, I’ve taken back control of my listening

When most people were comparing how many times they had listened to Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Fontaines DC on Spotify Wrapped last December, I had to make do with Burger King Unwrapped, delivered to me via their app, which told me how many Burger Kings I’d eaten that year (a solitary Whopper meal in July). You see, I’ve stopped streaming music, which, in this modern day and age, seems frankly weird. But hear me out. I’ve gone back to buying CDs, and it’s made me fall in love with music all over again.

I listen to music all day, every day. I can’t work without music in the background, or consider doing the washing up without some tunes to groove to. Traditionally, I’d buy albums on CDs or vinyl, and listen to them over and over until I was bored to death with them, by which time I’d hopefully have bought another album. It’s apparently a very annoying habit: as a student (way before the days of Spotify), one housemate was so utterly exasperated with me blasting Urban Hymns by the Verve around the house that they barged into my room, ejected the CD and flung it out the window.

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These epigrammatic verses compress the great essayist’s philosophy with a beauty that echoes Keats and might have pleased Wordsworth

Poet

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Zara Zerny’s lucid and compassionate study gathers moving, candid interviews with bereaved partners remembering their lost loves

The Marvel bromide about “What is grief, if not love persevering?” comes to mind watching this metaphysically charged Danish documentary in which nine senior citizens discuss their departed life partners. Director Zara Zerny works hard in defining the miracle of lifelong companionship, and the ineffable essence of that significant other which persists after death. So much so that, in one final, oddly encouraging section, some of the interviewees here suggest that their loved one still watches over them, Patrick Swayze-style.

Awkward beginnings and lovestruck thunderclaps: it’s all here. Finn-Erik recalls his first sighting of Kirsten as a 17-year-old with ballet-dancer grace. Ove was rescued from a hotel-room orgy with multiple Norwegians by strapping six-footer Bent, who tells him: “You’re coming home with me.” Then there’s Elly, the trauma of whose first violent marriage “vanished like the dew before the sun” when she met her new partner Aksel. In Zerny’s intimate interviewing environment, nothing is off the table: sex and infidelity, domestic bliss and disaffection, partnerships that outlast passion, the pain of outlasting your partner.

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It’s a personal project for Packham, whose stepdaughter has dyslexia. Plus: the penultimate episode of The Last of Us. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
“Like a slippery fish you’re trying to grab hold of. And you can’t.” This is how Suiki describes her dyslexia as Chris Packham’s two-part series concludes. He has a particular connection to this form of neurodivergence as his stepdaughter, Megan, has dyslexia. But what becomes clear is that the experience of dyslexia affects people in different ways. Packham is engaging and empathetic, helping Suiki explain her dyslexia to her brothers, and making builder Lee the star of his own musical. Phil Harrison

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The Glasgow-born artist makes huge cocoon-like sculptures out of found fabric and videotape. We meet the team who helped her become the first learning-disabled person to make the award shortlist

One day, out of the blue, everything changed for Nnena Kalu. For more than a decade, she’d been making a certain kind of drawing, in a certain kind of way – repeated shapes, clusters of colour, all organised in rows. “Then, in 2013, she just suddenly started to go whoosh ,” says Charlotte Hollinshead, Kalu’s studio manager and artistic facilitator, making big, swirling, circular hand gestures. “Everybody in the studio just stopped. She was somebody who had such a set way of working, for years and years and years, repeated over and over. For this to suddenly change was really quite shocking.” It was a shock that would set Kalu on the path to becoming the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner prize, as she was last month.

Her drawings are incredible: vast, hypnotic, swirling vortices of repeated circular marks on pale yellow paper. But it’s her sculptural installations that have garnered the most attention: huge cocoons made of found fabric and VHS tape, wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colourful knots. It was an installation of these heady sculptures at Manifesta 15, a pan-European art biennial held in Barcelona last year, that brought her to the attention of the Turner committee.

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The adventures of great voyagers echo across centuries as a father and daughter flee from flooding in near-future China

The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer’s Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce’s Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It’s what Jules Verne described as the “Living Infinite”.

In Madeleine Thien’s rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, “the Sea” is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound, sprawled on the shoreline a decade or two in the future. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment on the labyrinthine 12th floor, from where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta, leaving behind Lina’s mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These tattered instalments cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. They provide both a link to the past and a sextant to navigate by. The world exists in endless flux, Lina is told, and yet here in the Sea nothing ever goes missing. Its chambers fill and empty like locks on a canal. Different portions of the compound appear to correspond with different decades. “The buildings of the Sea are made of time,” Wui Shin explains.

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After meeting at a wedding, Su-hwan and Yeong-gyeong plunge into a desperate relationship fuelled by alcohol, and powered by tremendous performances

Seventeen years after her debut feature Let the Blue River Run, Korean director Kang Mi-Ja returns with this devastating tale of love and addiction, adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel. The film’s lo-fi aesthetics – unvarnished digital cinematography, minimally edited static shots – strips the already compact narrative down to pure, elemental passions. After a chance encounter at a wedding party, lonelyhearts Su-hwan (Kim Seol-jin) and Yeong-gyeong (Han Ye-ri Minari) cling on to each other for emotional shelter, their connection simultaneously fuelled and imperilled by the latter’s debilitating alcoholism.

The shared baggage of romantic betrayals and financial uncertainty is revealed rather swiftly in a rare dialogue-heavy scene; the rest of the film prioritises body language over words. After this hasty introduction, to ask viewers to immediately plunge into the depths of the characters’ sufferings is quite a demanding request. And yet the extraordinary performances from the lead actors, along with Kang’s eye for framing, beautifully fill out the missing gaps. The world around the couple is a void of indifference, filled with nondescript apartment buildings and forlorn bars. Together, these outsiders soften the harsh edges of city life; trained in dance, Kim Seol-jin and Han Ye-ri imbue their every gesture with a stunning physicality. A recurring composition of the doomed lovers locked in a nurturing embrace grows overwhelmingly moving with each episode, as external forces pull the pair apart.

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Shakespeare sexts! Being dumped by a robot! The Britain’s Got Talent winners’ new series is chaotic fun. Plus: the ultimate girl talk with Vicky Pattison and Angela Scanlon

Dancers turned “media personalities” Ashley and Jordan Banjo team up with sibling Perri Kiely for this podcast , which is like dropping into a group chat with some silly (but well-intentioned) pals. If you’ve ever wondered how William Shakespeare might sext, whether it’s better to get dumped for a person or a robot, or whether Kiely is still thinking about the time he took a tumble at Downing Street (he is), then let them entertain you. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

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Since Comcast takeover, broadcaster has slashed jobs and is losing the exclusive shows that drew subscribers

When the boss of the media multinational Comcast was putting together an ultimately eye-watering £31bn bid for Sky , he recounted how a chat with a London cab driver reinforced his opinion that he was in pursuit of a crown jewel of UK broadcasting.

Brian Roberts’s plan was to use Sky to build an international powerhouse outside the US – after being beaten by Disney in the battle to acquire his prime target , Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox – but some analysts and industry figures wonder if he has been taken for a very expensive ride.

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