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When I was growing up, I was obsessed with watching TV. I would rush home after school and wake up early on weekends, just to soak up the magic of storytelling on screen. But as a child with partial deafness, I could only catch about 70% of the dialogue; the rest was guesswork. Like being in a foreign country, winging it with limited vocab, not having full access is tiring and everything is tinged with a sense of alienation.

One day in the early 80s my parents brought home a new TV set. Up flicked a page of blocky coloured digital text – Teletext. They pressed page 888 and subtitles suddenly appeared. It was a revolution, my own personal moon landing. The half stories were unlocked. I had full access.

The novelist was just 12 when the ex-busker stunned a mammoth crowd at the Free Nelson Mandela concert – and sent everyone racing to Woolworths for her astonishing debut album. Its simple, honest, perfect songs of protest have mesmerised the writer ever since

On 11 June 1988, I was 12 and sitting with my family watching the Free Nelson Mandela Concert on TV. As a clan, we were old hands at trying to free Mandela, having done our fair share of marching and boycotting over the years, and this concert felt like the culmination of all that. There was a lot of excitement in the room: we squeezed on to the sofa and opened the windows wide. (If the wind’s blowing in the right direction, you can hear a Wembley audience roar from Willesden.)

Many world-famous musicians played that day. Most of them I don’t remember, but one I will never forget: Tracy Chapman. I think a lot of people feel that way, though when you rewatch the footage you realise what she was up against at the time. Nobody cheers as she takes the stage. In fact, the crowd seem hardly aware she’s arrived. People are chanting, chatting or just partying among themselves.

Cadogan Hall, London
Chelsea Opera Group were at their best and conductor Paul Wingfield drove the score hard in this rare outing for the French composer’s startlingly original work

É douard Lalo ’s Le Roi d’Ys was first performed in Paris in 1888. A work of often startling originality, it was hugely admired in its day and still hovers on the fringes of the repertory in the French-speaking world. Elsewhere, however, its outings have been sporadic, so Chelsea Opera Group cannot be too highly commended for tackling it in a very fine concert performance conducted by Paul Wingfield.

The opera derives from the Breton legend of the city of Ys that vanished, Atlantis-like, beneath the ocean. The king of the title, however, is not its central protagonist, and Lalo focuses on his two daughters, gracious Rozenn and imperious Margared, both in love with the soldier Mylio, initially believed a casualty of the recent war between Ys and the forces of the enemy prince Karnac. A pawn in her father’s politics, Margared is to marry Karnac as part of their peace treaty. But her refusal to do so on discovering that Mylio is both alive and loves Rozenn, leads first to the resumption of hostilities, then to her conspiring with Karnac to open the floodgates that protect the city from the sea.

The director, whose film JFK has been derided by historians for suggesting the CIA had a role in the killing, will speak to task force aiming ‘to get to the bottom of this mystery’

Film director Oliver Stone will testify at a US House of Representatives hearing on Tuesday that is considering thousands of pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy released this month at the direction of President Donald Trump.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said that lawmakers will hear from witnesses about the value of the documents.

Outdated attitudes to women are so deep in 007’s DNA that it couldn’t be a female role, but a female villain could shake him into the 21st century

Helen Mirren has said that there is no earthly point in getting a woman to play James Bond because the world’s most famous fictional spy was “ born out of profound sexism ”.

The first thing to say is that of course she is right. Of course Bond was born of reactionary attitudes and only a bore would point out what the DBE stands for in Mirren’s title. If you doubt the truth of what she says, watch the cringeworthy moment in Goldfinger when Sean Connery’s Bond dismisses his poolside masseuse Dink (played by Margaret Nolan) because he needs to discuss important stuff with Felix Leiter, and as Dink obediently leaves he slaps her behind and says: “Man talk …” Obnoxious.

‘It’s become a sort of folk song. It’s played at weddings and funerals. Dundee United play it when we win. I’ve met people who’ve told me, “I was a worker for the council for 20 years” – just like the guy in the song’

I was a teacher in Glasgow but I wanted to start a band and write songs that meant something to people. Dignity began life during a holiday in Crete in 1985. I bought Sounds magazine at the airport. Morrissey was on the cover and the headline “Home thoughts from abroad” got me thinking about Glasgow. I was living in a tenement flat in Pollokshields, from where I’d see the cleansing department guys sweeping the road. So I started writing about a “worker for the council, has been 20 years” who dreamed of sailing away on a “ship called Dignity”.

Last One Laughing UK, a reality show in which comedians like Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper and Richard Ayoade try to make each other laugh, has gone viral with good reason … it’s a total hoot

As you can probably tell by spending any time on it, Amazon Prime Video is in trouble. Citadel, its $300m Russo brothers-produced international spy thriller series, was met with widespread indifference. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a show that will end up costing Amazon a billion dollars, is destined to go down as one of the worst investments of all time. Everywhere you look, the platform is wall-to-wall duds.

And yet there is one glimmer of hope. The sole scrap of buzz Amazon has generated in months comes in the form of a cheap little reality show. Last One Laughing UK has been all over social media for the last couple of weeks, clipped up and shared across TikTok, Instagram and X. And this is down to its deceptively simple premise: a bunch of comedians sit in a room together and try to make each other laugh. If they laugh, they’re out. That’s all there is to it.

The only black female actor to have won the leading actress award was speaking on documentary Number One on the Call Sheet along with Taraji P Henson and Whoopi Goldberg

Halle Berry has said she now believes her historic Oscars in 2002, for Monster’s Ball, was an anomaly, and that fellow black female actors should therefore stop “coveting” Academy Awards.

Berry, now 58, is the only black woman to have won the leading actress Oscar in the awards’ nearly 100 year history. Cynthia Erivo’s nomination for Wicked earlier this year marks the first time a woman of colour has been nominated for the leading actress Oscar more than once (she was previously nominated for Harriet). Only 15 black women have ever been in contention for the prize.

The drama teachers behind the young actors in the Netflix smash say their lack of recognition ‘has caused wide upset’

Adolescence’s stratospheric success has catapulted its young cast of unknown actors into the limelight. Reams of headlines have suggested that they have come from nowhere – yet the grassroots regional drama schools that trained them say this overlooks their hard work.

To find undiscovered talent for the show, Adolescence’s casting director, Shaheen Baig, visited two northern drama schools that work with children from underrepresented and deprived communities.