Behind the scenes of the groundbreaking, career-making, post-Watergate interview. Plus: Melvyn’s suitcase is tested in Race Across the World. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Documentaries
Of all David Frost’s TV interviews, his 28 hours with disgraced former president Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal was his most watched and most important. The inside story is told here, opening a series that revisits Frost’s work (later subjects are Elton John and the Middle East). Contributors include his son Wilfred, Nixon insiders Frank Gannon and Ken Khachigian, and Ron Howard and Michael Sheen (the director and star of the 2008 film Frost/Nixon). Hollie Richardson

Istanbul landmark’s most extensive works in years will include efforts to prevent earthquake damage

Standing beneath the stone archways, grand murals and filagree lamps of the Hagia Sophia, the architect Hasan Fırat Diker reflects on his vocation: the protection of a fragile structure that is both Turkey’s grandest mosque and perhaps its most contentious building. He is overseeing some of the most intense restoration and preservation works in the Hagia Sophia’s nearly 1,500-year history, including efforts to strengthen its grand central dome and protect it from earthquakes.

“We are not just responsible for this building but to the entire world public,” Diker said, gesturing at the crowds of visitors kneeled on the plush turquoise carpets or gazing at the murals of feathered seraphim. He pointed up at the gold mosaic and blue mural interior of the main dome, what he describes as one of the many “unsolved problems” of the Hagia Sophia’s design.

Unseen shots by US photographer to be shown at Photo London, which also features images from Ukraine conflict

The photographer Lee Miller “buried” her experiences from the frontline of the second world war, where she captured the liberation of France, according to the team behind unseen images of hers that are being displayed this week.

The photographs from Miller’s time in St-Malo, France, and various sites in Germany are being shown at the 10th edition of Photo London. They depict the violent confrontations at the end of the conflict but also show more casual images of celebrating US troops.

The case of the serial killer couple is so harrowing that everyone involved is still haunted to this day. But is there really any point in making them recall these hideous crimes? And why have crucial details been omitted?

Another day, another addition to the “point and gasp” school of true crime documentaries; one which adds nothing to our understanding of a terrible crime or of those who committed it, nothing to our safety as individuals or as a society, nothing except our appetite for voyeurism and the normalisation of it. Most true crime documentaries are in this school. Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story is no exception. Perhaps the sordid, exploitative aspects of the genre are felt more strongly here precisely because it is one of our own stories, and one many of us remember reading about in the papers and seeing on the news as the awful discoveries were made at the time. Usually we watch these films at one remove. We can at least feel we are learning about how terrible America can be, or that a victim who would otherwise be forgotten amid the great mass of victims evil people create has been memorialised. Here, we are more fiercely confronted with our complicity and the weakness of the arguments for watching.

The best that can be said about the latest three-part testimony to human depravity is that it is superficial. It does not delve into the one aspect of the 1994 case that has the potential to edify – the backgrounds of the killers, the psychology of their relationship, and whether the world would have been different if they had not met; it also glosses quickly over the system’s failure to prosecute Fred West for rape early on in his murderous career – but neither does it dwell on the baser details of the case, the ones I suspect the officers and relatives interviewed here have in mind when they say how much this experience still haunts them.

Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story is on Netflix now.

Noël Coward theatre, London
The sheer rate of jokes, from groanworthy to dynamite, may leave you crying helpless tears of laughter in this farce from the Mischief company

‘Vodka martini.” “Shaken?” “Yes, but I’ll be fine.” If groanworthy jokes of that calibre float your boat, The Comedy About Spies, set in early 1960s London, will be plain sailing. Even if they don’t, that needn’t put you off: the new show from Mischief, the company behind the smash-hit … Goes Wrong series, also offers farce, slapstick and multiple callbacks. So much of the script relies on linguistic misunderstandings (sweet/suite, need/knead, etc) that even the most tolerant viewer may become homophone-phobic.

The nonsense, orchestrated by director Matt DiCarlo, kicks off immediately with secret agents confusingly named after letters of the alphabet (“Not U – you !”). We then jump to the art deco lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel where MI6, the CIA and the KGB are trying to get their hands on the mysterious Project Midnight. Among those caught up in the tangle of mistaken identities are a milquetoast baker and a blustering thespian hoping to be cast in Dr No as “Ooh-Seven”.

Singer says on the stand there were ‘violent arguments’ and ‘dragging’ in former relationship with the hip-hop mogul

• Key takeaways from Cassie Ventura’s first day of testimony

Singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, a former girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs and central character in the case against him, took the stand on Tuesday as the high-profile federal trial of Combs entered its second day in lower Manhattan.

Ventura, who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant, is expected to testify against her former partner for several days.

The singer, whose 2023 lawsuit was the catalyst for the hip-hop mogul’s charges, is a key witness – here’s what to know

Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, a former girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs , is perhaps the most important witness in Combs’s high-profile federal trial.

Her explosive 2023 lawsuit against Combs, accusing him of physical and sexual abuse, was the catalyst for the charges Combs is currently facing. Despite Combs settling that lawsuit with Ventura for an undisclosed sum, it prompted a federal investigation that culminated with Combs’s arrest in September 2024.

Cannes film festival opening film
Dreadful songs add no flavour to dreary tale of a big-city gourmet returning to her home-cooked roots

The opening gala of Cannes can be such a gamble: a very exposed festival slot which few films need or want, and whose occupants so often turn out to be the squawking overfed turkeys of the big screen. Such a one, sadly, is this listless and supercilious musical – ostensibly on the theme of heartwarming home town values – which flatlines like a hedgehog run over by an 18-wheeler the moment the female lead opens her mouth to sing one of the film’s many terrible songs.

Cécile (played by French singer Juliette Armanet) is about to open a restaurant in the big city having recently won a top-rated TV cooking show, and she is dating her colleague Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab). But when she hears that her adorable, exasperating old dad Gérard (François Rollin) has had a heart attack, brought on by the strain of running the family’s truck-stop cafe out in the boondocks with Cécile’s mum Fanfan (Dominique Blanc), she realises she must (naturally) put her shallow workaholic lifestyle on hold to go and see him. But of course she runs into her twinkly-eyed ex-boyfriend from the old neighbourhood; this is Raph (Bastien Bouillon), whose heart broke when she just left one day – and what makes it all complicated is that she’s pregnant.

Accepting honorary Palme d’Or at opening ceremony of festival, actor rails against the US’s ‘philistine president’

The actor Robert De Niro has – after a brief period of abstention – returned to his robust public critique of Donald Trump , using his Palme d’Or acceptance speech at the Cannes film festival to newly attack the US president.

Speaking during the opening ceremony of the 78th film festival in France, De Niro said that the US’s re-elected commander-in-chief posed a global threat.