On a beer-fuelled tour of Sheffield that begins ‘at the crack of midday’, the musician discusses the strange magic of his home city, how his musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, hit a nerve in austerity-ravaged Britain, and his main hope for Keir Starmer

On 8 November 2007, the great Pelé visited Sheffield. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield FC, which was celebrated with a match between the hometown team and Inter Milan at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane. Pelé, by then in his late 60s, walked on to the pitch to a rapturous ovation, but then he did something unexpected: he knelt on the turf, took out a tiny pair of scissors, carefully snipped a few blades of grass and popped them in a bag in his pocket. “Without Sheffield FC, there wouldn’t be me,” he declared.

Richard Hawley, the 57-year-old singer, songwriter and longsuffering Sheffield Wednesday season-ticket holder, relates this story with the care and wonder of someone charged with protecting a sacred memory. But his point is a bigger one: Sheffield and football should be synonymous. As, arguably, the birthplace of the world’s most popular sport, the city should be home to museums, statues and tourist walking tours. If Pelé wanted to make a pilgrimage to South Yorkshire, how many others who love the game would follow him?

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Actor-director John Krasinski’s animated tale of an anxious tween and her make-believe buddies is not in Pixar’s league, but it boasts a heartfelt sweetness and an engaging young star

What if imaginary friends didn’t vanish into the murk of forgotten memories as soon as the child who conjured them grew up? What if the invisible bestie lingered on, trying hard not to be wounded by the rejection and waiting in vain to be of use once more? If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The central premise of American actor-director John Krasinski ’s IF – his first family film after the horror movie double of A Quiet Place and its sequel – is borrowed from several Pixar films.

There’s an obvious parallel with the subplot of Bing Bong in Inside Out . A heartbreakingly cheerful pink cat/elephant/dolphin mashup in a too-small top hat, Bing Bong is the long-discarded imaginary friend who still lurks in the subconscious of Riley, and who’ll do anything, even sacrifice himself, for the girl who dreamed him into existence. But there’s also an almost too close for comfort overlap with Toy Story , and the idea of an intensity in a child’s imagination that is potent enough to breathe life into inanimate objects, and of the bruising transience of the period in infancy in which disbelief is fully suspended and magic is real.

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The pioneering ​photographer, who would have been 100 next month, showcases her eye for the uncanny​ with this image of a newspaper stand

From the moment her father took his Leica camera from around his neck and gave it to Dorothy Bohm as she boarded a train out of Nazi-occupied Lithuania in June 1939, she seemed fated to her vocation. Bohm – then Dorothea Israelit – was 14 at the time and the journey took her to England as a refugee; she lodged with a family in Hassocks in the heart of the Sussex countryside. She did not see her parents – eventually sent by Russian forces, separately, to detention camps in Siberia – for another 20 years. The separation, she later said, gave her a profound sense of impermanence; the Leica felt like one antidote to that: “The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing,” she wrote. “It makes transience less painful.”

Over her long life – Bohm died last year aged 98 – that need never left her. This picture, taken in Lisbon in 1996, is included in a small exhibition and a wonderful retrospective book of the photographer’s work, Dorothy Bohm at 100 , in which notable friends and fellow photographers pay tribute to her pioneering influence. Her career began when she set up a portrait studio in Manchester in 1946, but she subsequently travelled extensively with her camera across Europe and beyond, before settling in London, where she was a prime mover in creating the Photographers’ Gallery in 1971.

Dorothy Bohm at 100 is published by Beam Editions on 20 June (£35). A print sale exhibition of her work is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1 until 23 June

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From The Office sidekick to standup legend and a serial killer, the multitalented Stephen Merchant is impossible to pin down. He talks about cancel culture, why pubs are more interesting than outer space and hanging out with Christopher Walken

Stephen Merchant has always been obsessed by the idea of the ordinary man “thrust into extraordinary circumstance”. Since he was a kid in Bristol, the son of a plumber and a nursery nurse, those were the kinds of films he sought out and the stories he wrote, about normal people who experience something that “jolts them out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. He’s talking to me from his office in Nichols Canyon, LA, in a house once owned by Ellen DeGeneres , where he lives with his partner of seven years, actor Mircea Monroe. It’s early morning there, the white light offering shadows of shifting leaves, and he wears a black baseball cap and speaks thoughtfully without pause. Is he, I ask, that ordinary man? “Well, possibly,” he says, slowly. “Maybe. Yeah.”

Merchant’s early career is perhaps better known than the success that followed. He met Ricky Gervais when he got a job as his assistant on the radio station XFM and the two went on to write and direct The Office in 2001, quietly changing expectations of British comedy for ever. Then there was some acting, a lot of very popular radio and standup. In his 2011 show, Hello Ladies , which later became a sitcom, he talked about his height: “6ft 7in is too big… Growing up I spent as much time as possible in the distance.”

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This follow-up, set 20 years on, kicks off with a marriage in crisis and skilfully conveys how blind we are to our own motivations

The great thing about writing a sequel is that you can go straight in with the action, and no need to worry about setting the scene. Colm Tóibín certainly does that in Long Island , the follow-up to his 2009 novel Brooklyn . That book shifted Tóibín from being a respected, prize-friendly literary novelist to a commercial success: his publishers’ publicity materials at the time accurately predicted that it would be his “breakout novel” , which would “do for him what Atonement did for [Ian] McEwan”.

Brooklyn succeeded artistically and commercially because it told a simple story well: a satisfyingly sad tale of thwarted love in 1950s Ireland. It featured Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in Tóibín’s old stamping ground of Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford near the country’s south-east coast. In Brooklyn , Eilis went to the US and secretly married, came back to Ireland for a family death and then hampered her mother’s hopes by returning to America rather than settling down with local boy Jim Farrell. Her decision seemed to surprise Eilis as much as it did the reader: her dominant characteristic in Brooklyn was a maddening passivity toward her own destiny – at least, right until the moment she decided to return to America.

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The business guru talks about her family, her menagerie, vegan lunches and a day of contemplation

Up early or lie-in? My husband, Paul, is up and out coaching for the local rugby team; I’m not an early riser. The cats get me up about 9.30am by tapping my face.

First thing you do? I walk around the garden in bare feet. Then I’m on feeding duties. As well as the cats, we’ve got horses, sheep, rescue dogs, ducks and angry geese. I wander with my coffee and say good morning to them all.

Breakfast? I only eat breakfast on holiday. I have wholemeal toast around lunchtime, but don’t eat properly until around 6pm.

Sunday morning? I see my sister, Gail, who lives 20 minutes away – close, but not too close. I keep horses there so we go out for a ride, then I treat myself to an oat-milk latte and we have a chat.

Sunday afternoon? I’ll have a fiddle around in the garden. I don’t pretend I look after it particularly well because we have a gardener and he should take all the glory when people say, ‘Oh, how lovely.’ Then Paul and I walk our five dogs as a group before I take them out one by one. They’ve got different personalities. I do that so they focus on me, to remind them I’m in charge.

Sunday dinner? A ‘this isn’t chicken’ roast with stuffing, cabbage, leeks and broccoli. Paul makes himself a chicken casserole. I’ve been vegan for three years. I don’t cook and he’s a fantastic cook, but he makes the fair point that I decided to go vegan, he didn’t, so he’s not cooking two meals.

Monday dread? On Friday, I look at the next week ahead so I know what is coming my way, but I never look at it on a Sunday. It is my day away from everything. Sunday is a time for contemplation, not for work – it’s for remembering what life’s all about.

Wind down? I sit with a heap of animals on my lap and can barely see the television. We watch something lovely like The Piano, because Sunday nights have a different feel to other days. We’ve just finished Baby Reindeer . That is definitely not for a Sunday.

Deborah Meaden Talks Money (Red Shed) is out in paperback on 23 May

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The excellent scouse cop drama continues to unsettle. Plus: Rob and Rylan hit Florence, and it is wonderful to see. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One

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Cannes film festival
Noémie Merlant’s first film as a director is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and unsuited to its themes of misogyny and sexual violence

Here to prove that “actor project” movies are always the ones with the dodgiest acting is the otherwise estimable French star Noémie Merlant who presents her writing-directing debut in Cannes, with herself in a leading role and Céline Sciamma on board as producer and credited as script collaborator. It’s got some funny moments and there’s a great scene in a gynaecologist’s treatment room whose calm, straightforward candour completely annihilates all those other coyly shot gynaecologist scenes you’ve ever seen in any movie or TV drama. And the opening sequence is very dramatic, centring on a woman whose story is sadly neglected for the rest of the film in favour of the younger, prettier people.

But I have to say that the film is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and self-admiring with a certain tiring kind of performer narcissism, always tending towards a jangling tone of celebratory affirmation which can’t absorb or do justice to the themes of misogyny and sexual violence that this film winds up being about. The cod-thriller scenes of corpse disposal do not convince on a realist level (though given that these corpses keep coming back as unfunny ghosts, a realist level is not needed) and do not work as comedy either.

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