Storyville goes inside San Quentin jail to investigate a transformative fitness programme. Plus: a frog-phobic gardener faces his fear. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
The 1,000 Mile Club is a running group inside San Quentin state prison , California, in which inmates serving life sentences are coached by a group of volunteer elite athletes to run an annual marathon within the facility’s walls. This powerful film follows the men training in the grounds (“The yard is the only place you can wear clothes that don’t say ‘prisoner’”) and examines the transformative power of the club. Hollie Richardson

A powerful, posthumous collection of diary entries, interviews, war reports and poetry has the late author’s tragic absence at its heart

When Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Victoria Amelina was a novelist and children’s writer, and the founder of a literary festival staged in New York, a town in the Donetsk region. But the invasion, of course, changed everything. What purpose did fiction have now, Amelina wondered? Wanting fervently to be useful, in the next weeks and months she worked in a humanitarian warehouse in Lviv, found vital medicines for those who needed them, and helped to evacuate both civilians and their pets from the most dangerous corners of the country. Most significantly of all, she volunteered as a war crimes researcher, training with a Kyiv-based NGO called Truth Hounds .

If such work was horrifying, it was also inspirational. Soon, she was thinking of a different kind of literary project: a book about the women who, like her, were taking huge risks to document the war. She would write this book in English, and in it she would deploy a purposeful jumble of interviews, diary entries, reports from field missions, Ukrainian history and even poetry. Such a book, she believed, wouldn’t only play its small part in holding the perpetrators accountable; one day, it would help to give “lasting peace a chance”. For a year, she worked on it, even as she performed all her other roles. On 27 June 2023, however, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in Donetsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four people were injured and 13 killed. Amelina died in hospital a few days later.

A teenager who works in the sloth’s family restaurant seeks life in the fast-food lane in this bland animated adventure

The idea of a kids’ animation about sloths – those shaggy balls of furry happiness with mellow stoner smiles – feels like a winner. But, disappointingly, the sloths in this kids’ animation don’t look much like sloths, nor do they seem to act anything like their real-life counterparts. The movie is the latest from The Tales from Sanctuary City , an Australian franchise set in a vegan metropolis where animals have learnt to coexist in harmony. Like the earlier movies in the series, it’s perfectly adequate for little kids but with little character of its own and a straight-to-download-style blandness.

Essentially, this is a film about foodies and the delights of slow cooking. Laura (voiced by Teo Vergara) is a rebellious teenage sloth from the sticks who works in the family restaurant, cooking recipes handed down for generations. But Laura longs to live at a faster pace than her parents, and gets her wish after a storm destroys their village. The family is forced to relocate to Sanctuary City and make a fresh start, opening a food truck selling enchiladas and tamales. Laura even meets her culinary hero, fast-food entrepreneur Dotti Pace (Leslie Jones), a cheetah in cowboy boots and rhinestones.

A new photo book captures young women working in Britain’s forests during the second world war – chopping down gender barriers as they went

Drake was humiliated on record, at the Grammys and now in a football stadium. But as a crisis expert attests, there’s a way he could still return to relevance

It’s fitting that the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef should end up on the Super Bowl field: “My intent from day one was to keep the nature of it as a sport,” Lamar said in an interview prior to his half-time show on Sunday . As the two rappers’ enmity built into a series of back-and-forth diss tracks in spring 2024 , writers reached for boxing metaphors, describing “sparring”, “trading blows” or delivering “haymakers”. It was reminiscent of Pusha T’s words to the Guardian after his own spat with Drake: “What has been more energetic than this?” And of Drake’s own words on one of his earliest hits: “Sports and music are so synonymous / Cause we want to be them, and they want to be us.”

Drake fans might grumble that Lamar is now being less than sporting: having clearly won the beef thanks to the huge US No 1 success of Not Like Us – which framed Drake as a paedophile, a claim Drake outright rejected – he is now gleeful in victory. Last month he went to collect five Grammy awards for Not Like Us dressed in a “ Canadian tuxedo ”: Drake is from Toronto. At the Super Bowl, he brought out Serena Williams to dance during Not Like Us: Drake and Williams were once rumoured to be dating, and Drake later wrote hurt lyrics about her. Lamar’s special guest SZA was one of Drake’s own beloved creative foils. Lamar himself grinned down the camera as he rapped: “Say Drake, I hear you like ‘em young”. At both events, thousands-strong crowds chanted “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor”, a line about paedophilia, at full volume – it was, Billboard stated, “even more deafening in the Superdome than the telecast suggested”. Kendrick wore a lower-case “a” pendant to underline the reference. The “stop, he’s already dead” Simpsons quote is being much shared, and has never been so appropriate.

Alterations, by Michael Abbensetts, follows a Guyanese tailor as he tries to establish himself on Carnaby Street

The National Theatre’s decision to stage a work by a “pioneering” and “forgotten” black British playwright should be the start of a revival of similar overlooked work from the 70s and 80s, according to the creative team behind the project.

Director Lynette Linton and writer Trish Cooke will bring their revival of Alterations by Michael Abbensetts to the Lyttelton Theatre stage this month, and have said the decision to stage a play by the Guyanese-born author, who was the first black British writer to have a series commissioned by the BBC, is overdue.

Speaking on Theroux’s podcast, the actor also denied accusations of sexual abuse against a number of women and says he did not eat an animal’s entire heart

Armie Hammer has repeated his denial of claims that he is a cannibal and that he sexually abused a number of women.

The actor was speaking on the Louis Theroux Podcast on Spotify , and responded to Theroux’s direct question: “Are you a cannibal?” Hammer replied: “You know what you have to do to actually be a cannibal? You have to actually eat human flesh. So no.”

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
From shocking images of him Sieg Heil-ing to a woodland watercolour haunted by the atrocities of war, the German artist confronts his homeland’s fascist past – and it’s never felt so relevant

When he was 24, Anselm Kiefer found his father’s old Wehrmacht uniform in the attic. This hidden, shameful family history was almost lost to time, almost forgotten, but Kiefer couldn’t let that happen. So he put on the overcoat and “Sieg Heil”-ed all across Europe, taking pictures along the way. This early art project in the late-1960s was the German artist attempting to embody and confront the past.

A picture of him doing the banned salute – forbidden in Germany under the long process of denazification – is at the heart of this show of his early works. He stands, arm raised, against a barbed-wire fence in shimmering, solarised black and white. It’s a ghostly and quiet photo, but amazingly powerful in its simplicity. That overcoat became a historical burden for Kiefer to bear in the first gesture of an artistic career dedicated to raking through history so that it would not be forgotten, or repeated.

You will have a wild ride watching this ineffably cool Bradford-based cop thriller. But it’s also surprisingly moving – and may well leave you in tears

If Virdee is what we get to mark the naming of Bradford as this year’s city of culture (congratulations, Bradford!) then I’m going to need it to be so anointed until at least 2029. The six-part thriller is an adaptation by Amit Dhand of his own book City of Sinners. It’s the third in a series set in the troubled West Yorkshire town and centred round Detective Harry Virdee and his conflicted personal and professional loyalties, and I am going to need them all.

This is a switchbacking ride from the off. We open with a man apparently on the run from the police, until it turns out he is the police. Virdee (Game of Thrones’ Staz Nair) is in pursuit of the man he suspects can give him the whereabouts of missing teenager Ateeq Farooqi (Yousef Naseer). But, after the eventual arrest, he is taken to task by his brother-in-law Riaz (Vikash Bhai) for not letting him handle the matter “unofficially”. They are on the same side here, he insists to Virdee. A missing kid is bad for business. It is clear that Riaz is a very shady brother-in-law indeed, but neither Virdee the man nor Virdee the show is in the habit of lingering, so with the first of many tantalising set-ups complete, he is off to a friend’s wedding to plunge us into the maelstrom of difficulties that is his private life.

Virdee aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.