Building society makes warning to fans desperate not to miss out as resale for Glastonbury festival approaches

One in four Britons say they have fallen victim to a ticket scam involving an in-demand event and lost £82 each on average, according to research issued ahead of the official Glastonbury festival ticket resale.

High demand and low availability, fuelled by “fomo” (fear of missing out), were creating a “perfect storm” for scammers, said Nationwide building society, which commissioned the analysis.

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John Lithgow, Imelda Staunton, Romola Garai and Layton Williams are among the winners at the annual stage awards

• Olivier awards: full list of winners

The play Giant , which portrays children’s author Roald Dahl amid an outcry about his antisemitism, has triumphed at the Olivier awards on a star-studded night at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

US star John Lithgow took home the best actor prize for his performance as Dahl, Elliot Levey won best supporting actor (for playing publisher Tom Maschler) and Mark Rosenblatt received the award for best new play.

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Nominees, presenters and guests arrive for London theatre’s big night out at the Royal Albert Hall

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My friend Ken Chubb, who has died aged 80, was the founder, along with his wife, Shirley Barrie, of the London-based Wakefield Tricycle theatre company in 1972. Eight years later he and Shirley set up the Tricycle theatre in north-west London to provide a permanent base for the company’s productions.

Working with a small team of actors, Ken was the theatre’s artistic director for four years from its foundation, until he and Shirley returned to their native Canada. Over that period, and before that with the travelling company, he was a notable champion of new plays by writers such as Sam Shepard, John Antrobus and Olwen Wymark .

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The annual award for aspiring cartoonists – which now boasts its own evening event – offers the chance to be published in the Observer and win £1,000, with past winners landing book and film deals

This year, we have decided to launch the annual Faber/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize with an event as well as an announcement: an evening that will hopefully be highly enjoyable for anyone who has followed the progress of the award, as well as helpful to those who might be thinking of entering this time around. On 9 April, then, come along to the Bindery in Hatton Garden, London, where a panel will discuss graphic novels in general and our prize in particular – tickets are still available. On stage will be last year’s brilliant judges, Luke Healy and Posy Simmonds, as well as Lesley Imgart, who won the 2024 prize for her charming, funny comic Witch Way? . The event will be chaired by me, and I hope to see you there.

But back to the details of 2025. As ever, the winner of the prize will receive a cheque for £1,000 and his or her work will appear in the New Review in print and online (the award for the runner-up is £250, and their story will also be published online). Perhaps the bigger thing, however, is that both will know that their work was admired by our two guest judges: Aimée de Jongh, whose graphic adaptation of William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies was published to such acclaim last year; and Jonathan Coe, whose wonderful novels include What a Carve Up! , The Rotters’ Club and The Proof of My Innocence . This is the 18th year of the prize, and we’re so happy to have them.

To book tickets for Celebrating the Graphic Novel at the Bindery, London EC1, click here

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On Celebheights.com, thousands of users measure the statures of the rich and famous. The methods are scientific and the debates are fiery

As someone brushing up on 6’3”, height is one physical insecurity I’ve never agonised over. Instead, it’s a source of frustration as I crunch my legs into airplane seats and wait for them to go numb.

Only after discovering Celebheights.com did I truly understand the depth of feeling – both excitement and rage – that height can inspire.

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James McArdle plays a novelist whose care-giving duties are suddenly expanded in this nicely acerbic remake of Italian hit Mid-August Lunch

A frazzled, thirtysomething gay novelist, Edward (James McArdle) is preparing for a tour of the US to promote his latest book, a hotly tipped coming-of-age story. But there’s a problem: Edward is the primary carer for his elderly mum, Alma ( Fionnula Flanagan ). Alma is recovering from a stroke that has robbed her of her speech but not the ability to make her many opinions on Edward’s life forcefully clear. Edward’s situation is further complicated when his three friends decide to take a weekend break to Gran Canaria for Maspalomas Pride, unceremoniously offloading their mams on the doorstep of the boxy Dublin semi Edward shares with Alma.

Co-written by director Darren Thornton with his brother Colin and loosely based on Gianni Di Gregorio’s hit Italian comedy-drama Mid-August Lunch (2008) , Four Mothers is a charmer of a picture that lures us in with Edward’s angst but hits its stride when it digs into the dynamics between the four women who run Edward ragged with their catering requests and incessant bickering. What could have been a sentimental plodder gets a pleasingly acerbic tang from the bracing cattiness of the dialogue.

In UK and Irish cinemas

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The author’s sharply intelligent history of how black British identity was forged beyond London in the cauldron of the Thatcherite 1970s and 80s is a necessary corrective

“It’s so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,” the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country.

But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured?

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Could you be the world’s next worm-charming champion? Or maybe toe wrestling is more your thing? These (real) sports are ripe with joyful eccentricity – but for contestants and supporters, it’s serious competition

‘The sheer madness of it is the appeal’

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