The men on Graham Norton’s sofa found self-defence a hoot. I’m sure most women have found ourselves in that conversation

In a development that absolutely must not catch on, something interesting has happened on a TV chatshow. What a precedent: I’m desperately hoping the entertainment industry rallies around to prevent it ever happening again. We can probably count on it. The dance of all chatshows these days is almost entirely mechanised. You go on. You do your rehearsed anecdotes. The news that the late Michael Parkinson is being relaunched as an AI barely raises an eyebrow because it’s all so synthetic anyway.

Therefore the moments when it isn’t take on outsize significance. As you may have guessed, we are talking about last Friday’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, on which the Blitz star Saoirse Ronan appeared as a guest alongside Gladiator II actors Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal and Day of the Jackal leading man Eddie Redmayne. We join the sofa as Redmayne is doing an anecdote about how his Jackal preparation involved being trained in self-defence, in order to do what Team America would call “his acting”. (Not how Eddie put it, obviously. And yet, the reality.) Redmayne’s revelation that he was shown how to use a phone as a weapon if attacked proves quite the hoot, with Mescal riffing on the absurdity – “Who’s actually going to do that, though?” – Norton chiming in, and Denzel laughing along. Ronan is trying to say something but she gets honked over, before managing to cut through with a line for the ages: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time”.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Promoters said the affected tickets were bought using prohibited techniques, including acquiring more than four tickets per household and using multiple identities

Ticketmaster will cancel about 50,000 tickets for the UK and Ireland dates of Oasis’s reunion tour for violating the company’s terms and conditions in the coming weeks, the BBC reports .

The tickets concerned are listed for sale on unofficial secondary websites such as Viagogo – as opposed to the official resale partner, Twickets, where tickets can only be resold at face value. Promoters Live Nation – which is part of Ticketmaster – and SJM told the BBC that 4% of tickets sold – close to 50,000 – ended up on resale sites.

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The 1992 film, also called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, predates the beloved series by five years. It’s low-rent and oft-forgotten – but it’s delightfully camp

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If it’s possible to have a parasocial relationship with a fictional character, I have it with Buffy Summers. She’s tattooed on my thigh. I’ve dressed as her for comic conventions. I’ve attended Buffy trivia. And I’ve watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer more times than Giles, her watcher – kind of like a guardian-slash-taskmaster, for the uninitiated – got knocked on the head.

Even as a megafan I recognise that many aspects of the show have aged badly. Still, Buffy helped me get through adolescence into adulthood by showing me that nearly everything is survivable: in Buffy’s case, even one’s own death.

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The disgraced actor has returned with a lofi new podcast, shot in his tiny apartment, where he interviews other stars but seems more interested in talking about himself

Yesterday, with very little warning, Armie Hammer resurfaced. You may remember that in 2021 Hammer’s career ended in an instant, after multiple women came forward to accuse him of varying degrees of abuse . His representatives dropped him, his work dried up and he was forced to sell timeshares in the Cayman Islands to get by. That, everybody thought, was that.

However, in recent months, Hammer has started to reemerge into public life. He moved back to Los Angeles and made a big deal about selling his car. He was on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel, and Bill Maher’s podcast. And now it looks as if he’s back for good. Yesterday saw the launch of the first episode of Hammer’s new podcast, Armie HammerTime.

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This festive season the streamer is bringing us a snowman as the buff-but-dim love interest in an erotically complicated romcom

Thanks to increased competition, rising subscription costs and a maddening policy of cancelling shows right at the moment they start to get good, Netflix isn’t the cultural behemoth it once was. However, the good news is that we are now approaching Christmas, the time of year where Netflix gets to roll up its sleeves and show everyone its muscles. Which is another way of saying that it has just made a movie about a woman who wants to have sex with a snowman.

Hot Frosty – for that is the film’s name – is the story of Cathy (Lacey Chabert), a woman who is starting to emerge from grief after the death of her husband. As per the trailer, one day she is walking home when she sees an incredibly buff snowman with a six-pack and meticulously modelled nipples. Taken by the majesty of this weirdly sexy snowman, she drapes her scarf across it and it comes to life. And now he isn’t just a sexy snowman, he’s a sexy naked human with limited intelligence. And Cathy is into it. The tagline to Hot Frosty isn’t “This Christmas, forget about your dead husband by having it off with some snow,” but it probably should be.

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In this extract from her foreword to O’Connor’s collected interviews, the Throwing Muses musician recalls their backstage interaction about God, rage and acceptability

In 2005, Sinéad O’Connor and I sat in a dressing room in London together, people-watching and listening, eyeing the music biz swirl around us suspiciously. Neither of us was familiar with the other’s work, which helped us to speak freely, unattached to anything but a shared impression of humanity we both needed to help us with our stage fright.

It was an uncomfortable night, not our show – the Meltdown festival in London, not an event with which we were familiar – so we were jittery, hoping to be allowed to leave soon. In that moment, we were two people, though – not two performers – and we chatted like women on a bus. I didn’t know her music because pop stars weren’t interesting to me, so I didn’t pay attention to them, and she didn’t know my music because nobody but pop stars are interesting to normal people. And she was a pretty normal person, I think, though she’d been accused of strangeness, of craziness, as had I. It’s like somebody somewhere had decided that, having broken too many rules, we fit in no category, and so we were not invited to the party. Having been invited once and met with anger, she felt alienated. Having never cared about the party, so did I, when I learned that it was the only game in town. Alienation helps with clarity, though, as it adds the objectivity of no longer swimming in those waters.

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The actor who will be returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom said he believed Marvel would ‘never’ recreate him on screen without his permission

Robert Downey Jr has said he will instruct his lawyers to sue future executives who attempt to create digital replicas of him using AI.

Speaking on the On With Kara Swisher podcast, he said: “I would like to here state that I intend to sue all future executives just on spec.”

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This frothy film tells the true-crime story of the so-called polite bandit Bruno Sulak, who goes on a crime spree in 1980s France, but insists his gang never fire their guns

Fast-rising French star Lucas Bravo, best known so far for playing love interest chef Gabriel in the series Emily in Paris, plays polite armed robber Bruno Sulak in this frothy true-crime story. Set largely in a version of the 1980s where everyone avoids wearing the most heinous trends of the time (and instead rock all the chic 80s styles designers have been reviving recently such as huge feather earrings and animal print) the story apparently sticks reasonably close to the historical record as it tracks Sulak’s career.

The handsome bandit specialises at first in robbing les supermarch és in the sticks. His gang includes stalwart wingman Drago (busy character actor Steve Tientcheu) and Bruno’s girlfriend/getaway driver Annie (Léa Luce Busato, whose slim list of credits includes playing one-third of the love triangle seen in the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics). Bruno insists that the crew is always cordial to those they rob and that they never fire their guns, although the weapons are loaded. Soon he is being hailed as a real-life Arsène Lupin, a gentleman burglar for the times. Naturally, this only annoys police commissioner George Moréas (Yvan Attal) who escalates his efforts to capture Sulak and the gang.

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