Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow
An emergency in the audience halts the gravel-voiced comic’s set but he brings it to an uproarious close in the foyer

‘Why weren’t you like this through there?!” We’re in the foyer of the Stand Comedy Club in Glasgow, to which the denouement of Nick Helm’s touring show has been unavoidably displaced. After a long break and an auditorium emptied for a medical emergency, the comic is performing to the handful of punters prepared to wait until well after 11 o’clock for the show’s closing moments. Helm perches on the bar. His diehards semi-circle around him. No other crowd on his tour will get this intimate an experience – and the laughs (more so than they were in the main theatre) are accordingly uproarious.

No doubt Helm would prefer his show to have proceeded without an ambulance call for a sick audience member. But it allows him to build a rapport, and deliver a memorable experience, that otherwise hadn’t looked likely. The show’s first three-quarters find the 45-year-old grumping at his audience as usual, recalling being bullied in childhood and touching on the struggles with depression he has chronicled in earlier shows . He relates too his search for a house and his career drift since his sitcom Uncle ended in 2017.

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Thirty years on from the release of her acclaimed album I’m With Stupid, we count down the sucker-punching best tracks by the US singer-songwriter

Aimee Mann has had hits and acclaim from critics and her peers, but the sense that she’s slightly undervalued still clings. A song as deceptive as Build That Wall might explain why: on the surface it seems straightforward and easy-on-the-ear, but beneath its mellow, mellifluous surface lurk stinging lyrics and real emotional force.

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Star will be played by the real-life singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in a film that will ‘humanise but not sanitise’ him

The first trailer for the Michael Jackson biopic has landed online after reports of a troubled production.

Filming on Michael had been completed in May 2024 and the film had originally been scheduled for release in April 2025, a date that was then pushed to October, but reshoots were needed in the June, pushing it once again, to April 2026.

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Fröst/Nordberg/Kobekina/Dubé/Andersson
(Sony)
The virtuosic musician’s effortless phrasing and imaginative collaborations make this collection short but sweet

Perhaps every musician worth their salt turns to JS Bach sooner or later. The German composer was dead before the clarinet as we know it today was established, but Martin Fröst , his playing as silkily eloquent as ever, makes the short but sweet selection on this recording very much his own.

There’s an intimate feel to the whole thing, which was recorded at Fröst’s studio in the Swedish countryside, with the fellow musicians sleeping over. The tone is set by the aria from the Goldberg Variations, with a hint of a jazz sensibility thanks to Sebastián Dubé’s bass, Fröst’s melody seamless on top. Fröst duets with his viola player brother Göran on two Inventions, and with himself, double-tracked, on the G major Sinfonia; fair enough, few others would be able to keep up. Yet though this is lightning fast, it still holds to the quiet, unassuming mood.

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St Paul’s Cathedral, London
The composer conducted two of his own choral works – one a world premiere, alongside a majestic performance of Vaughan Williams’ fifth symphony in a polished and enjoyable evening

He is a virtuoso of the jaunty rhythm and the doyen of the singable tune. He has a way with suspensions – crunchy enough for resolution to break through like sunlight, but strictly PG-rated compared with the harmonic adventures of his contemporaries. His music is as unfashionably essential as a five-pack of M&S briefs, as ineffably English as queueing .

From two royal weddings and a coronation to choir rehearsals, school assemblies and carol services across the UK and North America, British composer John Rutter has dominated the anglophone choral scene for six decades. At 80, he is in a league of his own: a niche national treasure, even referred to as “ the composer who owns Christmas ”.

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Speaking as their film Die My Love is released, the actor joined a number of other famous names questioning the value of the new roles

Jennifer Lawrence has become the latest star to express scepticism over the necessity of intimacy coordinators, saying she declined their services while working on new film Die My Love, because she felt “safe” with her co-star.

Intimacy coordinators were introduced as a result of the #MeToo movement to try to ensure the safety and comfort of actors when shooting scenes involving sex and nudity. Yet actors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Sean Bean have pushed back against the profession, with some suggesting they interrupt their creativity.

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Eschewing the fairyfloss hooks of her earlier work, the Australian’s third album is both more mature and less immediately palatable

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Almost all of Hatchie’s music could slot frictionlessly into a coming-of-age film. Her songs, mostly, are misty-eyed ruminations on puppy love and its ensuing devastation; they yearn for a redamancy that feels both fated and vexingly out of reach. You can imagine Harriette Pilbeam’s millefeuille harmonies soundtracking a high school prom dappled with a disco ball’s refractive glimmer, or picture her fleecy guitars over a montage of light teenage debauchery. These are tracks prefabbed for telegraphing big feelings; everyone knows the outsize melodrama of a first, second or 20th crush.

Liquorice, the title of Pilbeam’s potent third album, winks at her 2018 breakout EP Sugar and Spice. That formative work was a candy blast of dreampop, emphasis on pop – indebted as much to Carly Rae Jepsen as Cocteau Twins, whose co-founder Robin Guthrie ended up providing a remix of Pilbeam’s single Sure. Liquorice, meanwhile, is more mature and less immediately palatable, eschewing the fairyfloss hooks of Pilbeam’s earlier work.

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It is a pleasure to see Day-Lewis back on screen, and he dominates a movie of big scenes and big performances, co-written with and directed by his son

The absolute authority and force of Daniel Day-Lewis carries this movie in the end, and what a pleasure to see his return to the screen. Without him, though, it might have been harder to take this film’s rather redundant, laborious dramatic gestures and its macho-sensitive narcissism. Even with Day-Lewis, in fact, there are tricky moments in the dialogue, and at the end of each of the two big speeches you might imagine a drama teacher saying: “… and … scene!”

Yet Day-Lewis’s instinctive command of the moment and address to the camera – that fascinating theatricality and artifice visible in even his most realist performances – make him endlessly watchable. He is supposed to be playing a former army sergeant here. I’d put his rank higher than that. It is a movie that Day-Lewis co-wrote with his son Ronan, who also directs. It’s about a father coming to terms with his neglect of his son. We must make of that what we will.

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The actor answers your questions about slipping swearwords into Disney shows, breakfast with Terrence Malick and lunch with Richard Griffiths

Your funeral speech in Andor was a huge highlight of a show surprisingly packed with anti-fascist sentiment (we all know that when you said “Fight the Empire!” you really wanted to use a different f-word there ). Did you know at the time just how apt the whole show would be in the US political climate ? notanauthority
I did say a different word in my speech, and the writer hoped that Disney were OK with it, so we kept the strong f-word right to the end. And then I think some executive buckled, so it became “fight the Empire”. It was filmed after the first Trump incumbency, when there was another president, so it wasn’t overtly connected to the America that is now.

When I performed that speech, I was filmed by about 200 cameras so they could make a hologram. I was alone in a huge studio, no director or crew in the room with me. There was a “God” mic – somebody spoke to me remotely saying, “We’ll do that again”. It was quite scary.

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