The hugely fun Motherland spin-off continues to create excruciating moments. Plus: Charlie and Daisy May Cooper reunite. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
Excruciating comedy in the hugely fun Motherland spin-off, with fallen-from-grace snob Amanda (Lucy Punch) reinventing herself as a lifestyle influencer – or “visual storyteller”. She’s going for a minimalist look in her downsized abode, but finds it hard to part with her treasures at the football club’s car boot sale (“Please don’t finger my pouffe!”). Meanwhile, mummy Felicity (Joanna Lumley) is reeling after a depressing funeral and making her feelings known to anyone who will listen. Hollie Richardson

Courtauld Gallery, London
He lived an avant-garde life in Paris, recording his intense drug-induced visions on paper. Our critic sees a spine, a hand, an owl, a sea monster – or does he?

Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art.

The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

Lovejoyish dude with magical powers wanders into a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads

This animated feature is part of the larger Witcher fantasy franchise which started with short stories by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski and has evolved to survive on all manner of platforms, from video games and comics to live-action TV series and films. Thanks to the wealth of wiki knowledge out there, you can get the gist pretty quickly. There’s a dude with magical powers, fearsome pectorals (and the platinum hair of a Finnish metal band lead singer) named the Witcher, AKA Geralt (voiced here by Doug Cockle); he wanders around a medieval-ish countryside battling monsters, partly for hire and partly out of the goodness of his own gruff heart. He’s like a ronin or a knight or TV-show amateur detective of the Lovejoy vintage, but with a sword. Geralt’s wisecracking sidekick Jaskier (Joey Batey) is cowardly and comical, and plays a lute-like instrument on which he performs ballads celebrating Geralt’s heroics. We also meet (mostly in flashback) Geralt’s on-off romantic partner Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) who can visit his dreams in order to flirt with him, but she’s less of a big deal here than in other Witcher products.

Instead, Geralt and Jaskier wash up in a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads because the humans keep decimating the oyster beds in search of pearls. Shockingly, they don’t make use of the oysters as food, which depletes food sources for the various fantasy animals the merpeople feel are their buddies because they all live in the sea together. It’s the equivalent of a post-colonial western where the merfolk are the Native Americans and the humans are rapacious land-grabbing whites. But the script also threads in a star-crossed lovers’ story involving a mer-princess and a dopey human prince which plays out like a blend of Romeo and Juliet and The Little Mermaid. Plus, because no gen-Z skewed animation would be complete without a trans subtext, there’s a bit of that too at the end.

This deeply moving film follows the maximum-security detainees training to run a marathon. It’s a troubling portrait of masculinity, but one which offers hope

Christine Yoo’s intelligent, compassionate and deeply moving film, 26.2 to Life: Inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon, follows some of the inmates of the California maximum-security facility. The men, most of whom are serving life sentences, are preparing to run 100-odd laps of the heavily guarded prison yard, along a barely marked track, weaving in and out of prisoners who do not know or care to stay out of their way. All of them are subject at any time to a minor or major lockdown that will interrupt or even cancel the race for which they have trained all year. They can wear non-prison-issue clothes to run in, but their shoes are the property of the state and have to be booked in and out by each man at every session.

The 1000 Mile Club, as the runners are known, are trained by a group of volunteers led by Franklin Ruona, an experienced marathon man himself. A naturally quiet and watchful soul, he doesn’t talk to the men about their crimes unless they want to. His view is that they are people who have not had his luck or advantages: “I just feel like I am my brother’s keeper,” he says. In the febrile prison atmosphere, he is an oasis of calm.

The 85-year-old’s Book of Lives promises to lift the lid on her unconventional Canadian upbringing, prize-winning writing career, and the experiences that shaped her work

Margaret Atwood has written the memoir her fans have long been hoping for, it has been announced.

In Book of Lives, which is due to be published in November, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale will recount memories from her unconventional childhood in northern Canada, as well as the story of her writing career, from her early feminist works to her bestselling, award-winning fiction.

It had seemed like the year of Emilia Pérez or The Brutalist but Sean Baker’s comedy won three major awards over the weekend, turning the best picture race on its head

• Oscars nominations 2025: the full list

It had already felt like a weirder Oscars race than usual.

The question of what will win best picture had been asked and then answered by most with a shrug, the frontrunner changing by the day. At various points in the last few months, experienced prognosticators have offered up Conclave , Wicked , A Complete Unknown , September 5 , The Brutalist or Emilia Pérez as their pick, the race shifting with the smallest shred of new intel.

She sells out large venues, is feted by legends – and adored for her euphoric songs. The remarkable Japanese musician talks about magical islands, sonic sorcery and playing gigs with her eyes shut

When Ichiko Aoba stood up to perform at London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields in September 2024, most people couldn’t actually see the Japanese singer at first. The Georgian parish church has no stage, just a postage stamp of a red platform. And Aoba is not that tall. “I was a bit nervous,” she says. “Venue staff had told me it would be difficult for people to see, so I kept thinking about how I might massage people, loosen them up.”

Aoba, 35, is speaking over video call from Tokyo. Her vibe in conversation is much the same as on stage: quiet but not shy, thoughtful, funny and direct. At St Martin’s, she walked down the aisle, guitar in hand, sat down on the flagstone floor, big white skirts billowing up like powdery snow, and started to sing, unamplified. The audience hushed. Aoba said, “Come closer”, and everyone who could did.

Playwrights and actors paid homage to the small but mighty UK theatre company that nurtured them, as part of a fundraising initiative for new writers

A politician bounds on to the stage to talk about the future of theatre. “I’m here to help,” she announces with an unctuous smile, holding an iPad. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of a celebrated touring company. The politician tries to convince her audience that technology will lead the way. Drama is not real but “artificial” so, moving ahead, wouldn’t it make more sense for artificial intelligence to produce it? “Let’s reset!” she says, whooping at her idea.

The scenario is, thankfully, artificial itself: a short new satirical work by James Graham , written to mark the 50th anniversary of Paines Plough , which has championed new writing and helped kickstart the careers of Graham and a glittering alumni of other leading British playwrights.

Mike White’s masterly series takes a new gang of shiny unhappy people to a Thai resort and serves up a sumptuous feast for the senses. This is killer TV

Eight to a dozen affluent Americans, half of them hiding a dark secret as they head to a glamorous location for a luxury vacation, the other half complicating the issue by creating some dark secrets of their own. A dead body ruining everyone’s fun but increasing the audience’s exponentially. Shiny unhappy people getting their just deserts by the end of an immaculately plotted eight-hour series. Yes, my friends, we can only be back at the White Lotus.

Written and directed as ever by Mike White, this time he is taking us, his new gang and one or two familiar faces to Thailand. We have the family group, with Parker Posey (possibly Parker Poseying it slightly too much in a part that doesn’t demand as much kookiness as she brings to it) as Victoria Ratliff, a heavily medicated Southern belle and wife of wealthy businessman Timothy (Jason Isaacs). They are the parents of three children: the enjoyably appalling chip-off-the-old-block Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger – and the answer to your first question is yes, he is; the answer to the next one is, no, he’s actually very, very good); idealistic daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), who is writing her thesis about eastern religion and at whose behest they chose Thailand as their holiday location; and sweet, gentle Lochlan (Sam Nivola), who may be trying to work out how to come out as gay in a family that does not seem to accommodate much difference.