This utterly idiosyncratic sitcom about young men in smalltown Northern Ireland has hints of This Country – but with a pedalo-based masturbation scene that is unspeakably, brilliantly awful

Like so many great comedies, Funboys is an idiosyncratic, gently nurtured, quietly horrific thing. The creation of RyanDylan and Rian Lennon, who also play two of its main characters, it began life as a 14-minute film – small but perfectly formed – that premiered at the BBC Two comedy festival two years ago. Now, with cast nicely broadened and content nicely deepened, it has become a series. We follow the three “emotionally unassembled” twentysomethings – Callum Brown (Dylan), Jordan McCafferty (Lennon) and Lorcan Boggin (Lee R James) – whose earnestness belies their self-chosen funboys moniker, as they attempt to assemble and entertain themselves with the sparse resources on offer in the tiny town of Ballymacnoose, Northern Ireland.

Callum is no longer engaged to his ultra-religious fiancee Morgan (Emer O’Connor), but the gang is disturbed and astonished when an English girl, Gemma (Ele McKenzie), arrives in town and promptly makes Callum her boyfriend. “Strong, rugged, good-looking,” she tells him. “I’m sick of that rubbish.” Jordan quickly gets very drunk to cope with his friend’s absence from their group gaming sessions. “I’m worried about Callum’s post-nut depression,” he insists. “I don’t want that for you, Callum.”

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A cantankerous Shaw undercuts her daughter’s summer sexual awakening in this interestingly elusive adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel

Dramatist and film-maker Rebecca Lenkiewicz presents Berlin with a complicated, interestingly elusive Valentine’s Day present: her adaptation of Deborah Levy ’s 2016 novel Hot Milk , which appears to anaesthetise emotional pain with the sensual languour of a summer sexual awakening, that title perhaps alluding to the overheated, unwholesome quality of the mother’s milk metaphorically involved in a parent-child relationship. Or perhaps it ironically inverts the idea of a placidly bedtime drink of northern climes, which is of no earthly interest in the film’s passionately sunny, southern European settings.

Fiona Shaw gives an excellent performance as Rose – querulous, cantankerous, witty – an Irish woman in her 60s using a wheelchair due to some mysterious ailment or psychosomatic condition. If it is the second, what is the cause? She has brought along her twentysomething daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey) with her on a trip to Spain where as a desperate last resort, she is going to consult an expensive private consultant Dr Gomez (Vincent Perez) about the debilitating pains in her bones and joints.

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Hull Truck theatre
Snappy movement and a Billy Nomates score can’t make up for the lack of emotional range in this portrait of the 18th-century writer

It was quite a life. Having escaped a violent and heavy-drinking father, Mary Wollstonecraft ploughed a singular path. Avowedly independent and radical in thought, she dazzled and discombobulated a crusty male establishment with her intellect. She turned from governess to author and landed a reporting job in revolutionary France. Among her works, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a foundational feminist text. After that, giving birth to Mary Shelley seems like a postscript.

Maureen Lennon’s patchwork tribute for Hull Truck and Pilot theatre is a musical collage of fast-paced scenes designed to memorialise a pioneer of sexual equality. As Lennon has it, this is a woman who demands parity with men, radicalises children and refuses to be shouted down. The play is “told for all women who find themselves howling at the world”.

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Getting rid of separate best actor and best actress categories is not the answer to lack of diversity in the industry

The Guardian style guide advises writers to use the term “actor” regardless of the performer’s identity : “avoid actress except when in name of award, eg Oscar for best actress”. As the awards season is upon us, this instruction goes to the heart of a question that has been asked behind the scenes – should we still have separate best actor and actress categories? Or are they exclusionary and outdated ? There’s no Academy award for best female sound engineer.

Last year, Variety magazine reported that the Academy was considering eliminating the separate awards, following the example of the Grammys in 2012 and other film and TV honours since, but that this was still in early “exploration”. The arguments in favour are that this would put male and female actors on an equal footing and include non-binary actors. The case against is the danger of fewer or no women at all being nominated: the Brits’ decision to combine the best solo artist awards in 2022 was immediately followed by an all-male shortlist .

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Responding to an editorial about the surge in romantasy books, James Latimer writes that romance isn’t only for girls, and Yvonne Williams talks about the synergy of dragons and sex

I was disappointed to read your view on romantasy fiction ( Editorial, 7 February ), which seemed to imply that the fantasy genre needed reclaiming for women. This does a huge disservice to the many excellent female fantasy authors – some recent, some around for decades – who have been a mainstay of the genre despite not writing romance or teen fiction.

These women do not seem to get the recognition, and readership, that they deserve – despite some, such as NK Jemisin , Ann Leckie , Charlie Jane Anders , RF Kuang or Martha Wells , dominating genre awards. These authors also have to fight the continual misperception that they only write romantic or young adult fiction, which is exactly the fantasy that your article perpetuates. And this also erases all the female fantasy readers who are not (solely) here for the romantasy, and have always been here.

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Whishaw is not tested by this verbatim retelling of Hujar’s day in hip 1970s New York, recounting encounters with Ginsburg, Burroughs and Leibowitz

Peter Hujar was a brilliant photographer and stylish gay man of the 1970s and 80s, associated with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe and part of a hip New York coterie of artists and intellectuals. In 1974, he took part in a kind of documentary nonfiction project undertaken by author Linda Rosenkrantz, in which he simply came to her apartment and recounted into a tape machine everything that happened to him on a certain day.

The tape is lost, but the typescript survived, published three years ago as Peter Hujar’s Day and now filmed by director Ira Sachs as a verbatim-cinema chamber piece entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, sometimes in different rooms or pensively up on the roof looking out at the skyline, shot to make it look like it was filmed on 16mm at the time, with ungainly cuts, and scratches on the print.

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Singer scores 13th chart-topper with Valentine’s Day edition of her live album Lover (Live from Paris)

Taylor Swift has broken Madonna’s record as the female artist with the most No 1 albums in the UK, as her new live album Lover (Live From Paris) becomes her 13th chart-topper.

It means she draws level with Elvis Presley as the international artist with the most No 1s. Still outpacing her are the Rolling Stones with 14, then Robbie Williams and the Beatles, joint top with 15.

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In this week’s newsletter: Usually, we’d rather make a cup of tea when the ads come on, but the Super Bowl slew of A-listers flogging AI products smacks of desperate PR

The Guide doesn’t tend to focus on adverts very often. We’re usually more interested in the popular culture those commercials are busy rudely interrupting. Besides, complaining about the most annoying ones – like the Confused.com ad where a succession of people squeeze the mouths into a disgusting O-shape and mime whistling for reasons unknown – only affords them the attention they crave. My primary life ambition is to live in a world where they stop making the Domino-hoo-hoo ads, so I’m hoping that ignoring them may help make that utopia a reality.

Still, sometimes it is worth paying attention in the ad breaks. After all, the best examples – Ridley Scott’s 1984-riffing Apple spot , say, or Jonathan Glazer’s Guinness ad – elevate the form to something close to art. Great ads tend to linger in the collective imagination, serving as shorthand for the era they belong to. Even when the ads aren’t coming close to doing that, they can still tell us something interesting about what messages our capitalist overlords are trying to get us to swallow. And if you have been paying attention to ad breaks over the past few months, you’ll likely have noticed a recurring message: artificial intelligence, far from being the thing that will ultimately turn society in to a giant pool of grey goo , is actually your friend.

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Hayward Gallery, London
Thomas employs rhinestones and tiger-print to reflect on the representation of black women, while Linder appears covered in coloured goo at two concurrent shows

After lauded outings in LA and Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas arrives at the Hayward Gallery with a roar. It’s the roar of a wrestler’s body-slam or a diva’s ovation – throaty, triumphant, immoderate. Thomas’s exhibition is all that, and glamorous too, opening with a room of monumental portraits of black women. All are painted on panels with rounded corners – no frame is enclosing these women.

Working from staged photographs and found images, Thomas’s compositions are hymns to excess. Figures emerge in fragments from layers of pattern, like the swirling kimonos that unfurl to reveal body parts in Japanese woodcuts. The bodies themselves are radically flattened, rendered in simplified graphic forms like Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes of the 1960s. Yet unlike those nudes, Thomas’s figures have names, and eyes, and agency. Posed naked on a couch covered in florals and animal prints, the woman in A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) is identified as the artist’s ex-girlfriend Maya.

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