The actor has the prestigious job of reading the British jury’s verdicts on the night, after starring in a special Who episode with Rylan and Graham Norton

Doctor Who actor Ncuti Gatwa has been confirmed as the UK’s spokesperson for the Eurovision song contest 2025.

Gatwa will announce the British jury’s points for each participating country’s song. Previous spokespeople include Joanna Lumley, Fearne Cotton, Nigella Lawson and fellow Whoniverse star Catherine Tate.

‘Pilot gigs’ were crucial for islanders for centuries and 90 important sites housing the boats have been identified

Swift, streamlined boats for centuries helped save lives and move people and goods around the treacherous waters of the Isles of Scilly.

An archaeological project has highlighted just how crucial the agile, tough “pilot gigs” were for islanders by mapping 90 sites of sheds that housed the boats, the earliest believed to date back to the 17th century.

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Finlay was a defiantly archaic figure with a fondness for plinths and marble. But this show’s glorification of the guillotine proves he had a shallow, adolescent mind

We all respect a classicist. So it’s hard not to be impressed by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s learned citing of the Aeneid, Book X, on a stone column in this exhibition marking the centenary of his birth. The poet, artist and creator of Little Sparta – his renowned art garden – revived the neo-classical style at a time when artists were more likely to quote Warhol than Virgil. He appeals to anyone who’s sick of illiterate pop culture – a defiantly archaic figure who made no apology for his erudition.

Unfortunately, under the marble veneer, Finlay was an idiot. He flirted – more than flirted, claim some critics – with Nazi imagery, apparently fascinated by Panzer tanks and the SS logo. His fans insist it was all very nuanced but the Little Sparta website acknowledges “letters in which Finlay had made ‘anti-semitic’ remarks”. (Their quote marks on antisemitic, not mine.)

The inconveniently irrational god-being makes Rocket Raccoon look positively humdrum. Would it be wise to let him monopolise the multiverse?

Is there ever a right time to introduce into your superhero universe a psychologically unstable god-being with the potential to sneeze a continent off the map? It is probably not when – 17 years in – you are being accused of having lost half your audience to superhero fatigue. But that’s exactly what Marvel is doing this weekend as Thunderbolts* brings us Sentry, quite possibly the freakiest superhero to ever grace the comic book publisher’s hallowed pages. You thought Rocket Raccoon was weird and unhinged? Reckon Moon Knight is a bit of a handful? This guy makes them look like well-adjusted professionals with decent pensions.

Sentry first appeared in 2000 in The Sentry miniseries which offered a sort of meta-commentary on superhero mythology; the character was initially presented as a forgotten Silver Age icon, retconned into Marvel history via an elaborate in-universe memory wipe that made everyone forget he existed – including himself. A glowing, golden powerhouse with the “power of a million exploding suns” he suffers from crippling anxiety, addiction, and the inconvenient tendency to transform into a malevolent entity known as the Void, a living embodiment of all his worst fears and impulses. Imagine Superman, if he cried after every rescue, kept forgetting he had a dog, and occasionally blacked out and levelled entire cities.

Oxford Playhouse
There is one 24-carat scene after another as a cast of two switch from bloodthirsty to comedic without toil or trouble

A significant scattering of teenagers attend this show by Out of Chaos, not just because the play is a GCSE staple but also because the touring production trails a reputation for stripping the story to its bare essentials. Staged by Oxford Playhouse’s artistic director Mike Tweddle , this Macbeth was developed with students in mind. Two actors take all the roles in a show that is focused to the point of almost miraculous brevity, coming in at just over 80 minutes.

The actors in question are Hannah Barrie and Paul O’Mahony (artistic director of the Hove-based Out of Chaos) and yes, they are the only people we see on stage, though they do seek infrequent and low-intensity bits of audience interaction.

The author of Late in the Day pays tribute to the exuberantly inventive Yorkshire-born novelist who has died aged 96

Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96 , was such an exuberant, inventive writer. It’s the sheer energy of the voice you notice first, picking up one of her books from the shelf; she had the easy authority of a natural storyteller. Her first book, A Long Way from Verona, was written for children and published in 1971, when she was in her early 40s. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,” announces Jessica Vye in the first sentence, “that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine.” In the book, clever bookish girls, at a private school in wartime, are hungry for adventures and also for tea with cress sandwiches and chocolate eclairs; they belong to that class beloved of British fiction in the old days, educated people fallen on hard times. Jessica’s father has left his job as a schoolmaster to follow his vocation as a poor curate. The Summer After the Funeral, published in 1973, begins with the death of Athene Price’s elderly vicar father, when his young wife and children have to move out of the vicarage with no money. Athene believes she’s a reincarnation of Emily Brontë; Jessica has mentioned Henry James, Chopin and Shakespeare by the end of her second chapter. These books belong to the tail-end of that rich period of English middle-class children’s writing, which depended upon an audience of sophisticated and informed young readers; it was partly through the books that their readers grew sophisticated and informed.

These books are set in the north of England; Gardam grew up mostly in North Yorkshire. The difference between the rugged north and the posh home counties, which are the other half of her subject, cuts across her fiction. In her adult novel Faith Fox she describes two tribes, “South and north, above and below the line from the Wash to the Severn, the language-line that is still not quite broken to this day.”

St George’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Southwark, London
Conducting duties were shared between Nicholas Daniel and Benjamin Nicholas in a sombre and moving programme whose main work was Messiaen’s great memorial to the dead of both world wars

Innovative as always, Britten Sinfonia joined forces with Sinfonia Smith Square for a programme of music for wind ensemble by Messiaen and Stravinsky, alongside Stravinsky’s Mass and 20th-century French motets (Poulenc, Duruflé, more Messiaen) sung by the choir of Merton College, Oxford. There were two conductors, Nicholas Daniel for the wind ensemble music, and Benjamin Nicholas (Merton’s director of music) for the a cappella works. Daniel, also the Britten Sinfonia’s principal oboist since its founding in 1992, steps down at the end of the current season, and this was effectively his final concert with the orchestra.

The programme was sombre and beautifully constructed. The main work was Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Messiaen’s great memorial to the dead of both world wars. It was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the second, and is still an essential reminder, another 60 years on, of the necessity of hope in dark times. It was prefaced by other 20th-century works reflecting on conflict. The echoes of both Russian Orthodox church music and The Rite of Spring that lurk behind Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments suggest a world lost to revolution and exile, while his Mass, written in the US between 1944 and 1948, moves from hard-edged austerity towards a chilly peace, tentative at best. Poulenc’s Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, only three of them sung here, date from early 1939, their surface calm barely concealing deep unease at impending crisis.

A delightfully deranged party girl whose bleepy vintage synths, sleazy chug and tireless disco keeps things weird in the right way – plus new music from Jorja Smith and more

From Boise, Idaho
Recommended if you like Devo, Chai, Remi Wolf
Up next Debut album Switcheroo released via Innovative Leisure on 27 June

The freshly hatched Gelli Haha is an old-school pop world-builder. The aesthetic world of her few singles so far recalls a kids’ soft-play centre, all bright primary colours and bouncy surfaces. Live, she fires bubble guns into the air, surrounded by caged inflatable sea creatures and red-clad backing dancers dressed as boxers. Her delightfully weird dance-pop draws from a toybox of vintage synths, and sounds as if it could be some rediscovered lost Euro new-wave pop curio, dabbling in Italo, sleazy chug and early electro.

The author on re-reading The Mill on the Floss, discovering the eccentric genius of Georges Perec and the comforts of Lee Child

My earliest reading memory
I remember very clearly being taught to read by my father, who had just returned from the second world war in Italy with the RAF. We were living in a council house in Pontefract, having been evacuated from Sheffield. I was three or four, and we used a primer called The Radiant Way which I loved. I later used the title for one of my novels.

My favourite book growing up
I loved the Alison Uttley stories and was shocked to find in later life that the creator of Little Grey Rabbit was not a good mother and did not like children. I also loved Mary Poppins by PL Travers. I didn’t like the film, which was saccharine, but I loved the much sharper book. Travers too was a very difficult person.