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Renée Zellweger’s Bridget faces new challenges in parenting and love, but it’s the familiar faces around her who deliver heart and humour in this unexpectedly poignant fourth outing

There is something rather affecting about growing up and growing older alongside a fictional character. Particularly when, unlike the aspiration Barbies of Sex and the City , that character is permitted to show the inevitable wear-and-tear of being a middle-aged mum of two. Checking in with familiar faces – Jesse and Céline from Richard Linklater’s Before movies , for example; or in this case, Bridget Jones and her disreputable band of booze buddies – feels somehow more cherishable when those faces reflect the same rough patches and tough times we all endure.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since Renée Zellweger first stumbled on to our screens as the gauche, accident-prone klutz Bridget Jones. And, in common with the core friendships that define us, our relationship with the character has evolved and deepened. The 2001 Bridget of Bridget Jones’s Diary was an insecure hot mess fuelled by vat-sized glasses of house white (or “party petrol” as Sally Phillips’s Shazza pithily describes it). Today’s Bridget achieved her happy-ever-after fairytale ending. She married Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), had two adorable kids and moved barely a yoga mat’s distance from Hampstead Heath, only to have it all snatched away. Mark, we learn, was killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.

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A history of the campaigners who in the 1970s were viewed as cranks for demanding pay for domestic work is unintentionally comic at times but, 50 years on, their ideas no longer seem so radical

In the 1970s, the campaigning group Wages for Housework – women, lay down your dusters! – was thought to be cranky and cultish even by some of the second-wave feminists who should then have been most sympathetic to its cause. The story went that if someone stood up at a meeting and announced themselves as one of its members, the audience would groan, knowing a lecture was inevitable; in 1975, the Guardian compared its acolytes (it never had more than a few dozen official members) to Jehovah’s Witnesses. By the time it finally fizzled out in the 1990s, its reputation was in the mud. Increasingly riven by factions, former members accused its leadership of bullying and intimidation.

But some ideas take a long time to come into their own. In Britain in 2025, the issue of social care and its funding is impossible to ignore. This morning, I read of Andrea Tucker , who successfully challenged in court a demand that she repay £4,600 in carer’s allowance overpayments (Tucker looked after her mother for 15 years; the Department for Work and Pensions claimed she breached weekly earnings limits, in spite of it having previously advised her otherwise). Post-Covid, just about everyone is aware of the fuzziness of the line between work and home, while the concept of a universal basic income, once thought radical to the point of loopy, is fast gaining credence. In England, a pilot scheme is running in central Jarrow, north-east England, and East Finchley, north London ; Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, is a vocal adherent.

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Mark Cohen’s evocative shot of a child with some bubble gum machines is part of a series capturing the vibrant characters and street life of the Big Apple

When he was about 30, the celebrated American photographer Mark Cohen lived in a dorm at New York University while spending a month at the film school there. In breaks from classes, he would wander the streets of the city taking pictures. Nearly all those images were unprinted and until recently existed only as negatives. A new book, Tall Socks , collects that work for the first time.

This picture of a kid with his hand in the bubble gum machine is freighted with the weight of time and place of that backstory; those of us of a certain age will be able to recall the exact fairground feel and resistance of the handle that ejected the gum in its little plastic pod, as well as that eternal childish hope that someone might, this time, have left the prize – with its free-gift creepy-crawly – in the chute, waiting to be discovered.

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The comedian talks about politics, podcasts, family life’s ups and downs and surviving throat cancer. Plus, a remarkable extract from his new memoir

To understand the mindset of a comedian, Mark Steel says, you should imagine you’re on a plane that’s going down. While most people are screaming, hugging loved ones, saying their final prayers, the comic is sitting quietly, mind whirring, thinking, “I wonder what the joke in this is? It would be even worse if it was a plane full of comics,” Steel says when we meet at his home in south London. “Everyone would be trying to come up with the darkest, funniest thing to say before they hit the earth.”

This certainly explains his new book: The Leopard In My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland . Back in 2023, the 64-year-old was diagnosed with throat cancer – the “leopard” in the book’s title – and he’s spent the past year recovering from debilitating chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. His gruelling account hardly glosses over anything: there are tales that make you wince, moments of gripping drama and a seemingly endless flow of mucous stories (the unstoppable production of snot was one particularly unpleasant side-effect of the treatment).

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The actor talks about grabbing a lie in, refusing to exercise, and trying to get his family to agree which film to watch

Sunday lie in? If I can get to 9.30, that’s a win. I’ve never been a morning person, but sadly a lie-in doesn’t mean midday any more.

Breakfast? There tends to be a brunchy sort of thing that happens. Omelettes, maybe muesli and yoghurt, cups of tea. I’m certainly not the cook in our house. My wife Meera [Syal] is brilliant. In an effective division of labour, I’m good at the washing-up, and I mean superb, an excellent dishwasher.

Any workouts? I probably should exercise more, but I steadfastly refuse. There might be an occasional walk that will be suggested by someone else. I’ll go along for sociable reasons but, if it’s left up to me, I won’t be shifting.

Sunday lunch? If there’s a roast, I’ll be involved in the prep. My stepdaughter, Chameli, lives nearby, so she’ll come over and our son, Shaan, joins before he disappears from view to work on his songwriting – it’s his passion.

In the afternoon? If Liverpool are playing, Shaan and I will be in front of the TV. They’re doing well, but there’s always anxiety.

What’s on TV? Trying to watch films as a family is a process. It starts with me presenting about eight films, there’s a debate about them, they all get rejected, then I find another eight, they get rejected, and then two hours have passed.

In the evening? There’s a fridge full of leftovers, so I’ll have some weird combination, like Indian food on toast. And read scripts.

Sunday wind-down? I’m reading Exterminate, Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs. I’m also a big Elvis fan, so I’ve got From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough on the go. It takes me a long time to get to sleep. When the lights turn off, my brain switches on.

Unforgotten is on Sundays at 9pm on ITV1 and STV

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David Tennant hosts the big film awards night. Plus: the shocking story of a New Zealand religious cult. Here’s what to watch this evening

7pm, BBC One

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RAC Arena, Perth
The first stop on Kylie’s biggest tour in two decades reminds us that Australia’s queen of pop has always been a genius at reinvention

It is hard to believe anyone was ever a snob about Kylie. To stand in the screaming crowds (possibly the loudest I have ever heard) at Perth’s RAC Arena, on the first stop on what will be her biggest world tour in two decades, is a reminder of what a genius of reinvention she is. This is a show stuffed with preposterously catchy hit after preposterously catchy hit – “from, you name it, almost any decade,” Minogue herself says, before letting out that endearingly goofy laugh.

Two decades ago, she said she would never be the queen of pop, as that title went to Madonna – “I’m the princess. I’m quite happy with that”. But, surely, two monarchs can come to some kind of peaceful agreement?

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The erotic reward for Chastain’s sponsorship of a Mexican dancer lights a fuse that reveals philanthropy’s toxic underside

Mexican director Michel Franco returns with a chilly, angrily intense and deeply pessimistic tale of erotic obsession among the liberal super-rich in Trump’s US who seek to launder and redeem their guilt by sponsoring the arts. It’s a really involving picture which beckons you hypnotically towards the tacit promise of a sensationally unhappy and violent denouement, and of course Franco is unlikely to deliver any other kind. The two final plot developments are shocking, if not precisely surprising, and in fact vulnerable to the charge of being crudely obvious – but Franco certainly gives us a gripping emotional drama, supercharged with toxic sensuality and fear.

Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy woman based in San Francisco extensively accustomed to high-end restaurants, couture, private planes and chauffeur-driven SUVs and Franco has an eye for the luxury-porn scenarios familiar from TV dramas such as Succession and The White Lotus, though with a more dyspeptic and fearful edge.

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