Catey Sexton’s documentary remembers how Covid-19 changed us all. Plus: Crongton is a bold new comedy. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.30pm, BBC One
“It feels like we’re in a rush to forget and move on,” says film-maker Catey Sexton, in her feature documentary marking five years since the Covid-19 outbreak. But, as family members and friends of the more than 230,000 people who died tell her, life will never be the same again. Sexton’s own mother lost her life to the virus, and she wants to hear about the experiences of other people behind the numbers in a moving, lovely but heart-rending testimony. Hollie Richardson

The tempestuous chef trope has been done better elsewhere and this kitchen as a microcosm of exploited migrant workers is a disappointment

Here is a strangely exhausting movie, quaintly imagining the frenzied atmosphere of a New York restaurant kitchen as a microcosm of exploited migrant workers, full of macho shouting and self-conscious acting, with every speech a drama school audition piece. The Mexican film-maker Alonso Ruizpalacios has given us some terrific work in the past, such as his debut Güeros , his drama-thriller Museum and his rather amazing docudrama A Cop Movie , but I couldn’t make friends with this strained and histrionic picture. It is in English and Spanish, shot in black-and-white, but sometimes shifting to different colour filters, and inspired by The Kitchen, the 1957 stage play by Arnold Wesker .

Raúl Briones (who was an officer in A Cop Movie) plays Pedro, one of the chefs, a hot-tempered guy who has already had a brawl in the kitchen the previous night. Anna Díaz plays Estela, a hometown friend who got her job there through Pedro, while Rooney Mara plays Julia, a waitress with whom Pedro is in love and whom he has got pregnant though she may not feel quite as strongly about him. The always tense mood of the kitchen is made worse when the hatchet-faced management declare that $800 is missing from the till, about the sum that Pedro has somehow found so Julia can have an abortion. With all sorts of other tensions and grievances swirling around, Pedro’s emotions are ready to blow like a pressure cooker.

The historian tackles the most world-changing events that you almost certainly didn’t know about. Plus, a hugely engaging tale of ‘radical nuns in combat boots’

The first big historical event retold by David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell in their new series is a terror attack on New York – but no, it’s not 9/11. They want to tell us about the world-shaping moments we’re not taught about, which in this case was the Black Tom 1916 bombing. England’s great storm of 1703 – one of the worst natural disasters ever – and female pirates of the Caribbean Anne Bonny and Mary Read are also on the meaty agenda. Hollie Richardson
Widely available, episodes weekly

Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book

“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.

What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016 . “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon.

Those of us who spend our lives gaming can no longer deny knowledge that our online communities are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric

There is a lot of attention on young men and toxic masculinity at the moment. It’s about time. The devastating Netflix drama Adolescence , about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl after being radicalised by the online manosphere, has drawn attention to the problem through the sheer force of its brilliant writing and a blistering lead performance from teenager Owen Cooper. This week, former England football manager Gareth Southgate gave a speech about the state of boyhood in the UK , specifically about how young men, lacking moral mentors, are turning to gambling and video gaming, thereby disconnecting from society and immersing themselves in predominantly male online communities where misogyny and racism are often rife. There has been some kickback in the gaming press to the idea that games have provided a less-than-ideal environment for boys, but even those of us who have played and enjoyed games all our lives need to face up to the fact that gaming forums, message boards, streaming platforms and social media groups are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric.

Honestly, we have known this for a while. The 2014 harassment campaign GamerGate, which claimed to be about a lack of objectivity in games journalism, but was really a reaction to increasing inclusivity and progressive thinking in game development, was a testing ground for the radicalisation of young white men by “alt-right” influencers and news outlets such as Breitbart. Many of the apparatus of online rightwing extremism, including mass harassment and doxing of victims, originated in that rancid cauldron, where female game developers, and game-makers of colour, were made to fear for their lives.

For 19 years he has held the powerful to account on a show that attracts huge audiences around the world. Now it is over. He discusses his anger with management, his pride in his team – and what he’ll do next

Stephen Sackur makes no bones about it: he is not going willingly. “I don’t want to leave the BBC, because I still think I’ve got a lot to offer,” the HARDtalk presenter tells me. “And I don’t want the programme to be closed, but that argument has been definitively lost. I’m thinking hard about other things I’m going to do. I’m fine. I’m feeling quite positive.” Maybe. But I think he’s also feeling hurt, betrayed and, though he denies it, a little angry. “It’s definitely a strange period,” he says. We’re talking in February, a month before the show finishes and he’s sent packing by the Beeb.

Sackur, 61, is a BBC lifer. He started out as a trainee in 1986, was made a foreign correspondent in 1990, and went on to some of the biggest gigs in journalism – Europe, Washington, the Middle East. For the past 19 years, he’s hosted HARDtalk, the interview show that holds global power to account. The BBC has always lauded it as a flagship programme – thrice weekly, regularly watched in more than 200 countries by up to 70 million people (and, he reckons, with the podcast and World Service radio versions that figure could rise to 170 million). Which is why he got such a shock when he was told in October that it was being pulled .

Loch Ness Monster hunters have included the Chuckle Brothers – and even David Lean. As the Scottish icon is honoured in a new stamp and a stirring musical, we separate the classy from the crackpot

It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.

To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry . Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”

The K-pop superstar on the pop hit that kickstarted her music career, and why she can no longer listen to one of her band’s biggest songs

The first song I fell in love with
I’m an only child. My older cousin would come round to play at my house, and she was a big fan of Britney Spears. She put on … Baby One More Time and I was like: “What is this song? I love it.” I watched the music video and fell in love with her.

The first record I bought
I was a big fan of K-pop band BigBang before I moved from Thailand to Korea. I bought Taeyang’s first solo album Solar from Myeongdong, Korea’s famous shopping and fashion district where all the tourists go.

The ‘extreme magician’ delivers a unique twist on the travelogue, in which he hunts out feats of magic rather than tourist attractions – and it’s surprisingly full of darkly comic moments

He’s been hung upside down, encased himself in ice, lived in a plastic box and spent a week buried underground. He’s let helium balloons pull him several miles upwards, had 1m volts of electricity fired at him, and balanced on the top of a high pillar for a day and a half. American “extreme magician” David Blaine has a catalogue of incredible feats behind him. Now, though, he’s really attempting the impossible: the sonofabitch is trying to make a watchable National Geographic travelogue. Miraculously, he’s gone and done it.

Do Not Attempt sees the unflappable conjuror visit developing, historic or remote places in search of people whose death-defying skills could conceivably get them a Vegas residency, but who, instead, are performing for coins, or just their own spiritual enlightenment. Dressed in black and full of the sort of laid-back cool that you acquire when you’ve trained your heart to beat only every other Wednesday, Blaine starts each episode at street level, looking for the real stuff, the artisan magic that tourists don’t see: think Anthony Bourdain, but instead of sniffing out premium mortadella or the world’s best noodle soup, here the sort of fine delicacy we’re after is someone covering themselves in scorpions or sticking needles under their fingernails.

David Blaine Do Not Attempt is on Disney+. It will also air weekly on National Geographic Channel on Thursdays from 27 March.