He played china mugs, bells, rattles and car horns for everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Benjamin Britten – and once got Laurence Olivier to bang a broomstick. We go behind the scenes of a Radio 3 celebration

Saturday night and the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings is filling up with 300 chattering punters. We are about to record a show that will go out “as live” on BBC Radio 3. This is a one-shot wonder: for one night only, in this drama-documentary, we are exploring the work of percussionist James Blades. Our setup neatly combines the most stressful elements of a live show, plus the key aspect of audience participation which we have – obviously – no proper chance to rehearse. Nerves are fraying. How did it get to this? And who is James Blades anyway?

Born in 1901, Blades was one of the great percussionists of the 20th century, whose life spanned the century itself – he died in May 1999. His blazing talent combined with a startling capacity for hard work took him to the top of his profession and later made him a mentor to music stars as varied as rock drummer Carl Palmer, percussionist Evelyn Glennie and a young Simon Rattle.

Toxic male behaviour of David Szalay’s protagonist reflects real-world concerns about a ‘crisis of masculinity’

In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.

The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.

This six-part adaptation of Sarah Moss’s novel is deeply confused. The acting is melodramatic, the tone bewildering and the plot is full of cartoonishly grim situations that go nowhere

Holidays can be murder. Regular domestic life often smothers a festering seam of incompatibility in a relationship, or a fault in an outwardly solid family dynamic. But trap people together for a week or two somewhere far away and there’s nowhere to hide. In Summerwater, a forbiddingly bleak drama written by John Donnelly and based on Sarah Moss’s novel, each of the six rain-lashed lochside cabins contains a uniquely unhappy household-on-holiday that is, on one particular day, about to endure a reckoning.

We start, as far too many dramas do, with characters being interviewed in the near future by the police. There has been a fire, but we won’t know who started it, whose cabin it was in and who died until episode six. In between is an interlinked anthology, the same day seen again and again from different perspectives. First we shadow Justine (Valene Kane), a wife and mother of two preteens.

Summerwater is on Channel 4 now.

Marissa Bode is the first disabled actor to play Nessarose, a key character in the stage turned film franchise – but has had to respond to online abuse

Disabled actor Marissa Bode, who plays the prominent role of Nessarose Thropp in the hit film musical Wicked and its forthcoming sequel Wicked: For Good, has called for improved representation for disabled performers in the entertainment industry – and specifically an end to what activists call “cripping up” – casting non-disabled actors in disabled character roles.

“I really hope my casting sets precedent,” says Bode, adding: “It’s just navigating a world and a system that we have just not been acknowledged in as we should be.” A recent study by the Rudderman Family Foundation found that only 21% of disabled characters on US TV between 2016 and 2023 were played by disabled actors.

Sharing a name with the late singer has led to some interesting conversations – although no one would want me to sing, writes Joe Cocker

Your article ( ‘You get more attention than you would choose’: how an unusual name can shape your life – for better or worse, 13 November ) resonated with me for obvious reasons, even though 11 years have now elapsed since the death of the singer Joe Cocker.

He was actually christened John Robert Cocker, and it is not clear where the “Joe” came from. I wrote to Joe before my 70th birthday suggesting that, as I had for most of my adult life “suffered” from having the same name, maybe he could send a message to my party.

Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
Isabella Gellis’s first full-length stage work has the feel of a modern mystery play as it unpacks the legends surrounding an ancient Wiltshire monument

Sometimes it feels as though British folklore gets stranger the closer you look at it. The Devil’s Den, an hour-long opera with words and music by Isabella Gellis , is certainly one of the odder shows to have been hosted by Opera North. Following a try-out at the Nevill Holt festival in summer 2024, it was being fully staged for the first time here, courtesy of Shadwell Opera and the Sheffield City Morris.

Morris dancing in opera? That was being claimed as a first. The dancers filled the interludes between scenes like a hanky-waving Greek chorus, their bells and sticks adding another layer to Gellis’s music.

AO Arena, Manchester
The New Zealand alt-pop diva’s show has shades of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense colliding with frenetic digital glitches and moments of crowd-pleasing intimacy

Lorde has been trying to make sense of the gawky phases of girlhood since her 2013 debut Pure Heroine and while more stars open their therapy sessions to the public, the New Zealand alt-pop diva makes unpicking adolescence far less embarrassing.

A single blue laser sweeps the 21,000-capacity AO Arena before settling on the singer performing Hammer, barefoot in baggy jeans that hang from her hips. There’s a slinky, strung-out downtown New York theatre trope slipping through the set showcasing her latest release Virgin; subtle nods to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense pile up as each song brings a new prop and body to clamber across tabletops in euphoric abandon.

The comedians on their Bafta-winning sketch show, the reason they split up – and why she reminds him of Diane Keaton

Born in Louth, Lincolnshire in 1969, and raised in Troon, Ayrshire, Ronni Ancona is an actor, writer and impressionist. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and trained as a teacher before turning to comedy. Born in Evesham, Worcestershire, in 1964, Alistair McGowan studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before becoming an impressionist. The pair met on the London comedy circuit in the 1990s. They co-created the Bafta-winning Big Impression, which aired between 1999 and 2003 and became one of the BBC’s most popular sketch shows. Ancona’s new podcast with Hal Cruttenden – Hal & Ronni in Pieces – is available now.