The latest in our series of writers drawing attention to their go-to mood-lifting films is an ode to the hit Abba musical from 2008

Three years ago, I was sitting on the mezzanine of an east London bar when it collapsed. On my way back from the hospital, I called my friend to come over and he asked: “What do you need?” I said I needed a glass of rosé and to watch Mamma Mia!

Since Phyllida Lloyd’s camp jukebox musical came out in 2008, I’ve seen it upwards of 20 times (including three trips to the cinema). Why? Well, let’s start with the basics. The cast: Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Stellan Skarsgård, Colin Firth. The delightfully absurd plot: young woman raised by a single mother about to be married on a Greek island wants to find out who her father is. The music: 20 of Abba’s classic hits. What more could you ask for, really?

Letter says many of works being sold by Christie’s are made by AI models trained on pieces by human artists, without a licence

Thousands of artists are urging the auction house Christie’s to cancel a sale of art created with artificial intelligence, claiming the technology behind the works is committing “mass theft”.

The Augmented Intelligence auction has been described by Christie’s as the first AI-dedicated sale by a major auctioneer and features 20 lots with prices ranging from $10,000 to $250,000 for works by artists including Refik Andanol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen.

A gloomy musician messes a string of people around, but this earnest British drama doesn’t worry much about the women he betrays

A young man is haunted by the possibility that he is turning into his father and becoming the thing he hates the most in the world – a cheating partner. This is Ethan (Matt Wake), a fresh-faced indie singer-songwriter who treats three women badly over the course of this earnest and angsty British drama with droopy songs. Ethan’s agonising over the suffering caused by his infidelity – to himself mainly you’d think – may have you reaching for a tiny violin. At points I could’ve smashed his acoustic guitar over his head.

It begins when Ethan’s wife Freya (Christine During) boots him out after discovering he’s had an affair with her friend. Ethan is broke, his music is going nowhere, so he buys the least rock’n’roll car ever – a two-door yellow Vauxhall – and takes a road trip to his home town in Devon to see his mum Nora, played by ex-Eastenders actor Michelle Collins. Hers is the only recognisable face here – and some of the performances feel a bit drama school graduation film. The fact that Melodrive is filmed on the tightest of budgets doesn’t help.

The author and academic roams from Senegal to Palestine to South Carolina in essays unified by his belief that, as stories shape us, journalism should reflect the world, warts and all

When Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message , was published in the US last autumn, there was a media uproar over its final section about Palestine. After a tense interview on CBS Mornings , CBS News said a week later that the segment had not met its editorial standards. If you followed that media storm, it’s hard to come to The Message , now that it is out in the UK, fresh. But it’s important to try.

The title is a slim volume of essays addressed to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, one of the premier historically black universities in the US. The collection roams: from Darryl Stingley, a New England Patriots wide receiver paralysed in a 1978 pre-season game, to Senegal, to Coates’s own struggles as a student, to Paulo Freire ’s pedagogical theories, to a South Carolina school board meeting – and, yes, to Palestine.

One day after a royal visit, the boxing icon hit South Shields at his own expense, played darts, had his marriage blessed, and trounced Elizabeth II’s turnout. Our writer explains why he has written a play about the day the Greatest changed many lives – including his own

Muhammad Ali and I share a birthday, 17 January. I crowbar this fact into any conversation about the greatest sportsman of all time. It’s a tenuous link but I care not a jot and bask in the reflected glory.

I was born 27 years after my idol, in Middlesbrough. Our small town on the north-east coast relied on the steelworks for employment. Everybody had a father, brother or uncle who worked there. For me, childhood was innocent, though for my older siblings, it was different. Racist violence was rife. Yet my earliest televisual memories are of Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan, an Urdu-language programme, and Muhammad Ali’s fights.

Champion is at Live theatre, Newcastle , 13 February to 8 March.

Encompassing eugenics, euthanasia and terrorism, this dark, sprawling novel by a man of many talents is not for the easily offended

“Warm bath telly” is how programme-makers describe cosy Sunday-night arts and history documentaries. Jonathan Meades, who has written and presented 50 films, brings a different energy to the game. A typical Meades piece-to-camera would find him in slightly menacing dark glasses intoning his clever, sardonic script while standing in front of a forbidding lump of brutalist architecture. If anyone was tempted to run a warm bath anywhere near him, he looks capable of dropping an electrical appliance into it.

Today Meades is on our screens less often. The commissions aren’t what they were. He doesn’t emote; he doesn’t have a floppy schoolboy fringe. He doesn’t do jolly hockey sticks. For TV executives, greater diversity in front of camera doesn’t noticeably extend to a wide range of writing or hosting styles. Luckily for his many admirers, Meades has more than one string to his bow. Once a must-read food critic, he’s also been a columnist, essayist, take-no-prisoners reviewer and novelist. From Meades’s Le Corbusier-designed apartment in his perhaps unlikely home of Marseille , birthplace of the great Zinedine Zidane and cockpit of drug gangs, he has now produced a 1,000-page novel. It’s not so much a doorstep as a block of raw concrete.

The award-winning journalist helps a victim of horrific cyber-harassment campaign to fight back, plus a hilarious look at one of the funniest writers ever

This terrifying tale of a cyber-harassment campaign against Hannah Mossman Moore sees her and her family hacked after a meeting with a high-flying fashion insider. It’s a gripping, immersive tale , hosted by Mossman Moore and her ex-stepmother, Guardian and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who she turned to for help – with the promise that in future episodes they launch an investigation to uncover the real perpetrators. Alexi Duggins
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly

Documentary about the Portuguese colonial exhibition of 1934 aims to expose historical prejudice but inadvertently reinforces its racist gaze

For a film that grapples with the legacy of colonialism, Marta Pessoa’s documentary begins with a rather provocative title card – it says: “Portugal is not a racist country.” This refers to the popular belief that overseas Portuguese imperialism – or “ lusotropicalism ” – is a gentler form of colonisation, compared with other European empires. To dispel such misconceptions, the film turns its attention to the Portuguese colonial exhibition of 1934, with the aim of exposing the racist treatment endured by its African subjects.

Taking place in Porto, the fair’s organisers erected a number of housing quarters to replicate native dwellings found in Portuguese colonies, in which Indigenous people were placed and where they performed their daily rituals to more than a million spectators. Seeking to extol the virtues of imperialism, this spectacle of colonialism amounted to nothing more than a cruel example of a human zoo.

His back hurt and his piano was substandard. But the musician’s improvised 1975 show entered jazz history. Now two films are celebrating that mesmerising night – and the sweary teen promoter who made it happen

‘I went face to face with Keith Jarrett,” recalls Vera Brandes, “and I said to him, ‘Keith, if you don’t play this concert, I’ll be fucked. And you’ll be fucked too.’” Brandes laughs as she recalls this pivotal conversation, 50 years later. It came after a day of chaos where she, an 18-year-old concert promoter, was desperately trying to convince the famously temperamental jazz pianist to play a concert on a substandard instrument.

“To be honest,” she adds, “I had absolutely not a single clue what those words meant! My English wasn’t then as good as it is now. I’d heard Miles Davis using the f-word while talking to his band, which featured Keith Jarrett, a few years earlier, so maybe I was channelling Miles. Keith must have been floored to hear this teenage girl who looked like Brigitte Bardot’s little sister using this kind of language!”