How do you control a class of kids after the whole nation’s watched you backstabbing on The Traitors, snogging strangers on Love Island or starving half to death on Hunted? Three teachers reveal all

When students used to ask English teacher Joe Scott to sign their homework planners, it was usually because they were in trouble. But things changed in January, when the Southampton-based secondary schoolteacher appeared in the latest series of the BBC reality show The Traitors. Pupils started voluntarily pressing their planners into his hands – for autographs. “It felt funny,” says the 38-year-old. “It was such a juxtaposition.”

Teachers have always gone on reality TV – but they haven’t always come off well. In 2001, a contestant on the second series of Big Brother was fired from her job at an east London girls’ school after her towel slipped on air. Six years later in 2007, parents complained after an American elementary school teacher missed 22 days of work to appear on The Bachelor. Just last year, a Canadian educator was let go after taking unauthorised leave to compete on Survivor.

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate , and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

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Designers have long used nostalgia as a narrative device – but how does it reflect our own relationship with games?

I finished Lost Records: Bloom and Rage several days ago, but I’m still thinking about it. Developed by Don’t Nod, the creator of the successful Life Is Strange series, it’s a narrative adventure about four girls in a town in Wyoming, who meet one summer, form a band, discover a strange supernatural force in the woods and then meet up 30 years later to dissect what exactly happened to them. It is about growing up, growing apart and processing trauma, seen through a nostalgic lens. We meet the lead characters as adults, and join them as they scour their shared past, revisiting old places – a shack in the woods, their teenage bedrooms, the local bar – and exhuming old feelings. Lost Records has an excellent feel for the mid-90s when the girls were 16: you can explore rooms and pick up artefacts such as game carts, diaries and mixtapes and, if you were around at the time, you absorb the nostalgia as keenly as the characters themselves.

While playing I was struck at what a vital role nostalgia plays in video game design. I don’t mean in the extrinsic sense of playing and remembering old video games, and I don’t mean games that call back to old titles. I mean nostalgia as a central theme and a motivational force for characters. So many role-playing adventures are about unlocking the past through narrative archeology. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avowed, Journey, Outer Wilds and Heaven’s Vault are all games in which your primary aim is to discover what happened to some ancient civilisation and, through it, your character’s own legacy and identity. It’s nostalgia that infects the landscape of The Last of Us as much as the deadly fungus – Ellie’s love of old comics, songs and joke books; the repeated use of ruined museums, theatres and playgrounds as key locations – that Naughty Dog wanted to tap in to by repurposing our own nostalgia for lost childhood pleasures. I’m reading Agnes Arnold-Forster’s excellent book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion , which looks at the origins of the concept and how it was first considered a fatal disease of the mind, a sort of mortal home sickness. In Death Stranding, this idea is made physical in the shape of the Beached Things, the smoky tar-like spirits that haunt the game’s ruined landscapes.

‘As a species, these crocs are easy to find and easy to catch. Brice Itoua is the most skilled hunter in his village. But they kill the crocs to eat – not to sell’

The Congo dwarf crocodile is a lovely species. They’re very shy and, unfortunately, very easy to find and catch. Mostly hunted for their bushmeat, these crocs only grow up to a few feet in length and during the dry season, they often spend the daytime hiding in burrows and dens at the water’s edge. Hunters use a long, woody liana vine with a hook on the end to drag them out, before binding their snout with a shorter vine and carrying them away.

Last summer, I shot a story about the Congo dwarf crocodile after being given access to the Lake Télé Community Reserve by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which manages this protected area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with the Congolese government.

The Canadian singer-songwriter is releasing an album about his transition. Trump’s ‘dehumanizing’ new passport rules mean he won’t perform it for US fans

Bells Larsen knew that releasing a low-fi, folksy album about his transition as the Trump administration relentlessly attacked LGBTQ+ people would give it an inherently political edge. But the Canadian singer-songwriter did not expect to be caught in a bureaucratic nightmare while attempting to tour the US – and ultimately have to cancel that tour due to the gender marker in his passport.

On 12 April, Larsen announced on Instagram that he was pulling out of concerts to promote the album in eight cities this spring: “To put it super plainly, because I’m trans (and have an M on my passport), I can’t tour in the States,” he wrote.

Jonathan Pryce was humorous, Peter O’Toole capricious, Liv Ullman secretly female and Jude Law memorably Speedo-clad – onscreen pontiffs have come in all forms

Everything about the papacy is cinematic – especially picking a new one, as shown in the wildly popular movie Conclave, with Ralph Fiennes as an unwilling contender for the top job. There is the mystery, the ritual, the vestments; the spectacle of a lone, fragile human being poised over an abyss of history and good and evil; the elevation of one flawed man to a position of supreme authority, an exaltation whose parallel to the crucifixion is sensed but not acknowledged.

Discussing the onscreen representation of the pope in Conclave would risk the blasphemy of spoilerism but there have been many popes on screen, some cheekily fictional, many factual. Many a heavyweight British thesp has turned in a gamey cameo as some hooded-eyed Renaissance pontiff. Peter O’Toole was the lizardly and capricious Paul III in TV’s The Tudors (2007), presiding over a simperingly submissive 16th-century court of cardinals. Jeremy Irons was a small-screen Alexander VI in The Borgias (2011), a family member whose face radiated sensual refinement and hauteur.

Holy balls of wool! From pointless paintings to emotionless snapshots, the once-controversial award tiptoes too earnestly across the minefield of today’s culture wars

Remember when controversy was fun? If not, that’s because you’re too young. But back in the 1990s, my child, Britain got itself in hilarious knots about conceptual art, the readymade and whether a pickled shark or elephant dung can be art, with the Turner prize as battleground. It was a culture war but with laughs, because no one’s identity was at stake and it wasn’t like Brian Sewell was going to become prime minister and have Rachel Whiteread jailed.

It is by embracing the earnestness of today’s high-stakes culture wars that the Turner prize has lost its edge, the art getting more careful as the ideologies loom larger. This year’s shortlist is the soppiest yet. Two of the artists nominated are painters. Painters, I ask you! This makes some sense of the shortlist announcement taking place on JMW Turner’s 250th birthday. But as painters go, do Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa (who also creates bland installations) compare with the boldness of Mr Turner? Neither is pushing back the boundaries of what a painting might be, or redefining this art for the 21st century in scale, freedom, audacity.

PC, PlayStation 5 (version played); Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive
Boasting a unique world, challenging combat and great writing, this RPG has a lot going for it, if only it didn’t revel in its own mysteriousness so much

When we meet Clair Obscur’s protagonist Gustave, he’s getting ready to say goodbye to his ex-girlfriend, Sophie. Once a year the Paintress, a giant god-like woman visible from across the sea, wakes, paints a number on a large monolith, and in the peaceful town of Lumière, everyone whose age corresponds with the number dies. This process, called the Gommage, has shortened people’s lives for 67 years, and now it’s Sophie’s turn. Immediately after this heart-wrenching goodbye, Gustave and his adopted sister Maelle get ready to set sail as part of Expedition 33, on a journey to defeat the Paintress and end her gruesome cycle.

While stunningly beautiful, the continent you arrive at is no friendly place, and the path to the Paintress is filled with surreal monsters called Nevrons, which you fight in turn-based battles. Characters have a melee attack and a long-range attack, but most importantly, they have a large variety of unique skills including elemental magic attacks and strong attacks with multiple hits that have the chance to stun. Each member of your team has a special way of building up damage even further; Maelle for example uses a defensive, offensive or aggressive combat stance, inspired by fencing, while the magic that Lune wields builds up so-called stains that you can then spend to make other spells more powerful. Add to this long list of optional passive skills called Pictos, and soon you have a wide array of ways to enhance your characters. The interplay between building up action points to use skills, building up damage and defending is really interesting, and I enjoyed trying out different tactics, even as it meant that a lot of my time was spent in menus.

In 1993, the Swedish artist had reached a dead end – so he burned all his work. Seeing the ashes inspired him to embark on an epic journey through the Indian wilderness, a Swedish cave – and now Britain

Drive north of Stockholm for an hour or so and, buried within woodland near the village of Vendel, you will come across the 200-year-old house where Gustaf Broms lives. There are no shops or even neighbours here – just trees, wild animals and a man making beguiling performance art videos. You shouldn’t, however, assume that Broms feels isolated.

“I don’t see it like that,” he says through a beaming smile. In the early 1990s, the Swedish artist moved to Kumaon in northern India, right near the border with western Nepal and Tibet. Compared with that, this place couldn’t be more accessible. “It’s easy enough to get on a bike if I need something,” he shrugs.