Uzo Aduba turns Poirot-esque super sleuth in a juicy White House murder mystery; it’s stony faces all round for Bob Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper and co; and where next after a breathless Severance season finale?

The Residence (Netflix)
Last One Laughing (Amazon Prime)
Severance (Apple TV+)

A terrible thing has happened in the White House. This isn’t real life, thank God. This is a delicious, funny fantasy.

The broadcaster on a new documentary about how music helped her recover from a catastrophic haemorrhage, having a tricky name, and why ‘Arsène knows’ would be her dream tattoo

Clemency Burton-Hill, 43, was born in Hammersmith, London, and brought up by her mother, casting director Gillian Hawser, alongside her two older half-brothers. She has performed internationally as a violinist, acted, written five books, worked as an arts journalist, and been a regular BBC classical music presenter and broadcaster since 2008. In January 2020, she suffered a brain haemorrhage caused by an abnormal connection between arteries and veins in the brain. A new BBC Arena film, My Brain: After the Rupture , about the experience and her recovery and aphasia, will be shown this Friday. She lives in Washington DC with her husband, James Roscoe, and sons Tomos and Joe.

My Brain: After the Rupture is an astonishingly honest film about your brain injury. How would you describe it?
The reason it exists isn’t because I suddenly thought I’d like to have a documentary about my absolute fucking nightmare. Sorry! I do swear these days. At no point have I been one of those people who feels as if I hold any interest. But as a journalist and a broadcaster who had lost all my ability to speak and to write, I did realise that I had this unbelievable privilege to tell this story.

In what sense?
Unlike most brain injury survivors, I had a platform, or knew how to get the wheels turning, in terms of telling people how something like this could happen. I also had this very strong sense of wanting to do something useful for the community of people who have had brain injuries, especially as we still don’t know what is going to happen to me ultimately, or anyone else.

This documentary gets incredibly raw and personal at times. Was it important to you to show the toughest moments?
It felt really important that none of this was sugar-coated. Yes, what happened to me was extraordinarily rare and random and weird and wild, and here’s where all the platitudes and cliches come out, but we just don’t know how long we’ve got. We don’t know what is going to happen in five years or five minutes.

But there is hope in your film, too, especially when you start playing your violin again.
Yes, we didn’t make a film to make people depressed. I didn’t want people to think, oh God, I’m going to have a brain injury [too], so I’m going to go away and just watch kittens on the internet instead!

Coldplay, Harry Styles and Stormzy also join the Suffolk songwriter in campaigning for music funding in schools

Elton John, Coldplay, Harry Styles, Stormzy and Central Cee are among the artists backing a call from Ed Sheeran for Keir Starmer to commit £250m of funding for music education.

As part of his newly launched Ed Sheeran Foundation, the Suffolk songwriter is campaigning for music funding in schools, training for music teachers, funding for grassroots venues and spaces, apprenticeships in music and a more diverse music curriculum.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh
Words and ideas are as one – and at war – in Finlay’s witty, elegant work, from sculptures to screenprints, which are ideally displayed in this intimate centenary show

S tar/Steer is a masterpiece from 1968 by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). What you see can be simply described. The word “star” appears a dozen times, screenprinted in silver on deep grey. They graduate down the page in a swaying column. Right at the bottom is a 13th word, “steer”, as if tethering – or guided by – all these descending stars.

Each star is like an instance of itself, glimmering out of a fog, and the winding pattern irresistibly evokes starlight on rippling water. You look up to the stars, and down to the invisible boat summoned by that noun-verb “steer”. Which star to follow, how to navigate at sea, what the night skies can hold: the work is a visualisation, a poem and a prayer.

In attempting to contextualise the murky evolution of freedom of expression, the British historian has instead given encouragement to authoritarians of all stripes

The top blurb on Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book describes it as a “remarkable global history of free speech”. But it isn’t, and throwing in an interesting chapter on the press in British-occupied India, a tedious one on 18th-century Scandinavian free-speech laws and referring to the French Revolution doesn’t really make it one.

No, it’s a polemical account of the evolution of American first-amendment exceptionalism (which the author, as we shall see, regards as an entirely bad thing), with most of the globe entirely omitted. You suspect the author all the way through of having what Keats called “palpable designs” on you, but you don’t fully catch up with his intentions until towards the end.

Thirty years after the film, the musical version makes no excuses for being a nostalgia-fest

Who needs to learn to park? “Everywhere you go has valet!” Cher Horowitz, teen heroine of 1995 cult movie Clueless , is one of the most spoilt and entitled characters ever to have appeared on screen. She is also, with her irrepressible urge to solve other people’s problems and her coltish steps towards self-knowledge, one of the most endearing. Millennial women like me, who grew up watching the movie again at every sleepover, will defend her against all comers.

Now, Clueless is the latest millennial coming-of-age movie to hit the West End as a stage musical, opening to critics last week at Trafalgar Theatre. It follows Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, both of which opened in London last year, each built to replicate the success of the repeatedly revived Legally Blonde: The Musical . (Sadly, Jennifer Coolidge has yet to cameo.)

In Germany, tariff-hit car factories are being repurposed for defence. In Britain, American academics are queueing up for jobs. The west will be different as a result of Trump – but will it be worse?

The German ­electronics firm Hensoldt has a backlog of orders for its technology, ­including radars that protect Ukraine from Russian airstrikes. Meanwhile, Germany’s car industry is struggling with low European demand and competition from China.

As Europe worries about how it can weather the economic and ­political turmoil unleashed by Donald Trump, executives from Munich and Düsseldorf say they have at least a partial answer.

In her new book, music writer Kate Mossman looks back at her favourite type of encounter – interviews with charismatic, ageing, male rockers. Here she remembers the band – and specifically drummer – who electrified her as a girl growing up in Norfolk

I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn’t know it until recently.

The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the “frog song” was given as much time as Sgt Pepper . Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn’t afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in the Volvo.

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s enchanting eco-fable about a lone moggy in a flooded world is a triumph of imagination over budget

Animation as a medium and fairytales as a subject have always been natural bedfellows. You only need to look at Disney’s princess industrial complex to understand that sparkle-dusted happily-ever-after is big business; that the appetite for this particular breed of magical thinking (plus associated merchandising and sequined tat) is enduringly healthy. But the beguiling, Oscar-winning , dialogue-free Latvian animation Flow , which tells of a solitary cat who must learn to cooperate with a mismatched pack of other species to survive a catastrophic flood, is a little different.

The fairytale here is not the story the picture tells – it’s the story of the film itself. Created by a tiny team with a minuscule budget of about £3m, and rendered entirely on the free open-source 3D software Blender , Flow has been on a journey: its premiere in Cannes; the haul of prizes (54 to date), culminating in the Oscar for best animated feature – that is the stuff of film industry fantasy.