Richard Gadd’s semi-autobiographical stalker thriller has eight nominations, with Mr Bates Vs the Post Office and the raunchy bonkbuster Rivals on six apiece

Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s groundbreaking semi-autobiographical saga about his years of abuse and being stalked, has been nominated for the most 2025 TV Bafta awards.

The Netflix drama – which claimed to be a true story, prompting the woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character to sue for defamation – leads the pack with eight nominations, including a leading actor nod for Gadd as the traumatised comic Donny Dunn. Jessica Gunning, who plays the stalker lawyer Martha, goes head to head with Nava Mau, who plays Donny’s partner, Teri, for the supporting actress gong.

(Geffen/Polydor)
The Virginia songwriter gets lost in understatement on a loved-up album about her relationship with bandmate Julien Baker, shrouding sharp lyrics in shy melodies

Last February, the American “indie rock supergroup” Boygenius – AKA Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – announced an indefinite hiatus . The announcement came a couple of weeks before their solitary album, The Record , won three of the seven Grammys for which it had been nominated. This was a suitably triumphant ending to a project that had been garlanded with acclaim, both for their music – “at the vanguard of keeping rock alive,” as one US magazine editor put it – and their willingness to indulge in attention-grabbing gestures, frequently designed to prick at the male domination of rock history.

Their debut EP came in a sleeve that referenced that of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s eponymous 1969 album. They dressed as the Beatles for an appearance on Saturday Night Live and as Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone. Onstage, they snogged each other, ripped open their shirts and discussed free-bleeding menstruation. They appeared at a Tennessee festival dressed as drag queens , complete with names – including the impossibly winning Queef Urban – to protest against the state banning public drag performances. The memes piled high. By the time the project drew to a close, all three members were substantially more famous than they had been at its inception; Dacus was even namedropped in the title track of Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.

Samuel Bottomley, 23, to tutor on courses at West Yorkshire Workshop, aimed at working-class actors in north of England

A Bafta-nominated actor from Bradford has launched his own drama school to help working-class northern English talent access the TV and film industry.

The West Yorkshire Workshop in Bradford was opened this week by 23-year-old Samuel Bottomley, who received a Bafta nod for his role in Channel 4’s Somewhere Boy in 2023.

The US crooner, whose career stretches back to 1956, will play four more scheduled concerts but cancels remainder of 2025 run

Johnny Mathis, the US pop singer whose career stretches back to 1956, has announced his retirement from performing live.

A statement posted to Facebook reads: “As many of you may already be aware, Johnny Mathis is approaching his 90th birthday this year. So, it’s with sincere regret that due to Mr Mathis’s age and memory issues which have accelerated, we are announcing his retirement from touring and live concerts.”

This spare, luminously pure novel charts a secret gay relationship in post-industrial Wales

Set during the late 1980s, against prevailing Aids paranoia and the Tories’ Section 28 bill forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in education, Anthony Shapland’s taut debut novel about the relationship between two men in the Welsh valleys packs a considerable punch. In an interview, Shapland suggests there was “a generational howl of film and literature about that era when legislation combined with moral attitudes and misconceptions”. Indeed, there are echoes of 80s queer cinema, such as the work of Derek Jarman and My Beautiful Laundrette, in the forbidden liaison between the men, who are known only as B and M throughout. The difference here is that their world is not metropolitan but suffocatingly provincial, a fact that adds considerably to their predicament.

The novel begins on New Year’s Eve 1987, a time when “ Don’t Die of Ignorance ” HIV information leaflets were being pushed through letterboxes, with their melodramatic images of icebergs and black marble slabs, warning “the virus can be passed from man to man”. At the time, B is living with his father in a cul-de-sac near a “man-made mountain” of coal waste, a “place to be alone with this feeling he’s different to the others”. In the pub, he meets the “good-natured M” from the ironmonger’s, who is 11 years his senior, and with whom he feels an immediate spark.

The summers were full of falls and leaps and forfeits. Of scabs picked at the edges and tarmac-grit grazes, dock-leaf salve on stings, breath held underwater. Of running alongside trains and freewheeling bikes down the steep rutted tracks. Summers of dares and whispers of what men do and what women do, and who has seen what.

In Sebastian, a writer sells his body to provide material for his debut novel, then doesn’t give the night job up. Mikko Mäkelä explains what inspired his film – and remembers his cinematic sexual awakening

Growing up in a small Finnish town close to the Russian border, Mikko Mäkelä knew he was gay from the age of 11. “I think I was happy until then,” says the shy 36-year-old, whose slippery second film Sebastian is about to be released. Isolated he may have been, but at least the young Mäkelä had movies. Alone in his room, he watched queer gems such as Mysterious Skin, Presque Rien and Beautiful Thing, keeping the volume low in case his parents heard. Then a trip to the cinema to see Brokeback Mountain changed everything.

“When I got home, they asked me, ‘Did you like that film?’ They had read about it and wanted to make sure I wasn’t like the characters. That was the night I ended up coming out to them.” He didn’t stay in Finland much longer, movingNottingham to attend university. “My home town felt extremely homophobic, which was a big part of why I left. I told myself that when I stepped off the plane in the UK, I’d stop lying.”

This fascinating book questions whether such a misunderstood ideal should be lauded as an end in itself

This book arrives at an interesting moment. Elon Musk has declared himself a “free speech absolutist”. JD Vance worries that free speech in Europe is “in retreat”. Donald Trump issues an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”. Meanwhile, journalists are routinely abused, threatened with lawsuits and branded enemies of the people. US federal agencies circulate lists of red-flag words such as “equality”, “gender” and “disabled”, and reporters are denied White House access for referring to the Gulf of Mexico by its actual name. Free speech is, shall we say, an elastic concept.

In fact, as Fara Dabhoiwala explains in this meticulous and much-needed history, it has long been a “weaponized mantra” in a public sphere dominated by the moneyed and the powerful. Many of those who think of free speech as being uniquely under threat today are rich, white men – but then freedom, like wealth, is something that hardly anyone thinks they have enough of.

Founded by a $10,000 loan from a dentist, the label has had an extraordinary array of groundbreakers from Aretha Franklin to the Drifters, from Abba to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

In a region fractured by jihadists and coups, Ségou’Art shows ‘we share our culture, even if politics divides us’

A group of Tuareg musicians dressed in light blue robes were playing by a campfire that cast dancing shadows on the red sand. A drum and violin accompanied the electric guitars as more people came to watch the band, called Aitma.

Every February, the city of Ségou, 140 miles (230km) north of the capital, Bamako, is transformed into Mali’s cultural hub as tens of thousands of people come to enjoy a week-long arts and music festival, Ségou’Art , on the banks of the Niger River.