Sombre documentary sees US soldiers give brave testimony while undergoing ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment to confront their traumas

A gaggle of former US Navy Seals open up about their post-traumatic stress in this absorbing if somewhat formulaic documentary by Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen. Ultimately, it is something of an advertisement for a new therapeutic protocol that involves the veterans taking the hallucinogens ibogaine (derived from an African shrub) and 5-MeO-DMT (derived, like something out of a William S Burroughs novel, from a river toad); a treatment that, to hear the subjects here describe it, can work miracles on the battle-scarred, suicidal minds of its users. Currently, the treatment is only available at a Mexican clinic because the drugs have not been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration, but a bunch of boffins connected to Stanford University’s Brain Stimulation Lab are studying its clinical effects and the film works hard to make everything look as legit as possible.

To be clear, we’re not necessarily questioning the drugs’ efficacy, but this particular film seems barely interested in the cognitive science and lets interviews with scientists with interesting glasses and fancy vocabularies stand in as guarantors that it all actually works. More persuasive is the testimony from the half dozen men we meet, who bravely discuss their pain and distress while the cameras roll.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Mikey Madison and the director himself tell Jay Glennie how they made the Oscar-winning movie

The Welsh superstar watches back footage of his extraordinary life. Plus: a new Mary Berry show. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.40pm, BBC One
A lovely, intimate trip down memory lane as the Welshman with the voice watches back smile-raising footage of his life. From working-class life in Pontypridd to breakout hit It’s Not Unusual, his first TV show and a midlife comeback that led him to a knighthood – some highlights include his surprise hit Glastonbury slot (“I didn’t realise he had so much magnetism!” said one woman in the crowd), hair dye regrets and his quest to collaborate with up-and-coming Welsh bands. Hollie Richardson

Its whole concept – comics judge the public’s tales of awfulness to decide who is the most horrible – is based on a subReddit. It’s a confusing, outdated watch

In the not-so-distant past, you would have had to bribe most people to get them to confess to being committed users of the social media site Reddit. As a Redditor of several years, let’s just say that I didn’t used to be particularly vocal about my daily consumption of “subreddits” (individual communities on the site) such as Malicious Compliance (mistakes people make at work, passive-aggressively), or the fairly self-explanatory Am I The Asshole? (AITA). These days, though, Reddit isn’t just for people who live in basements – everyone seems to be on there, rubbernecking in threads like Open Marriage Regret or just indulging in TV fandom . And now they’re even making TV shows based on it.

Jimmy Carr’s Am I the A**hole? (asterisks aside, no one in the programme can decide whether it’s pronounced “asshole” or “arsehole”) isn’t the first television show based on a subreddit – that award goes to the CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories – but it may just be the laziest. The concept is simple: members of the public, who may or may not be Online Content Creators, tell a story of possible assholery to host Carr and panellists GK Barry and Jamali Maddix in front of a studio audience. The trio then decide who is the biggest asshole (arsehole?) of the day, gently ribbing them in the process (sometimes not-so-gently, too – this is Mr Bad Taste, Jimmy Carr, after all). Imagine if Would I Lie To You? was 50% less wholesome and you’ve got the general shape of the thing. It is, says Carr, “the show that does for arseholes what Naked Attraction did for, well, arseholes”.

Jimmy Carr’s Am I the A**hole? is on Paramount+

02 Apollo, Manchester
The guitar duo cast a spell over a rapt audience with wistful songs evoking open skies and yearning that even the final house lights can’t dispel

The Apollo’s huge stage contains nothing more than a stool and a table, upon which are placed two drinks and a very tiny amplifier, but Gillian Welch and David Rawlings don’t need showbiz trimmings. Later, when Rawlings straps on a harmonica, his musical partner quips: “That’s all you get by way of costume changes from us.” The “show” comes in the playing, the performance and 23 songs which cast a magical spell for (including interval and encores) just short of three hours.

After playing on each other’s albums for years, last year’s stellar Woodland album cemented the pair’s more recent emergence as a classic American acoustic singing duo. They complement each other perfectly. Stetson-topped Rawlings fingerpicks and grapples with his vintage guitar as if it is a wriggling animal, while Welch strums purposely in a flowing dress that could be straight from a spaghetti western. Rawlings’s voice is beautifully plaintive with shades of Cat Stevens while Welch’s stirring vocals evoke mountain ranges, open skies, railroads.

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday items

Drip catcher
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.

The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east.

Arcola theatre, London
In 1980s Northern Ireland, an abusive father and the soldiers patrolling the streets morph into a common enemy to rage against, in Meghan Tyler’s blackly comic tale

The rosary is whipped out within seconds. God-fearing Alannah (Rachael Rooney, her angular movements like a frightened bird) is scrubbing the cooker with a toothbrush when her muddy-booted, foul-mouthed, IRA-recruited little sister Fianna (Meghan Tyler, also the play’s writer; wildness written all over them) bursts in through the window of their childhood home. This fearless revenge play has a taste for chaos, transforming a biting domestic drama into a surreal, gruesome horror.

First performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 2019 and set over one stormy night in 1980s south Armagh , this new production is a revelatory character study of these two troubled sisters. Tensions start high and keep climbing. Gun-wielding Brits roam the streets outside, while inside, Alannah tiptoes under the rule of their abusive, now-paralysed father (Stephen Kennedy, with a slippery, sinister entrance, the fear of him built up before he even gets on stage).

In her new book Having it All, Corinne Low outlines how stubborn expectations around work and home fail to accommodate working women

When Corinne Low gave birth to her son in 2017, everything seemed to be lining up. A tenure-track economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, she was working in a career she had long dreamed of. Her husband, stepchild and baby lived in New York City and the two-hour commute to Philadelphia was inconvenient but sustainable. She was embarking on a journey to do it all: a working mom, supporting her family with a career she loved.

As track repairs tripled her commute time, things suddenly felt like they were falling apart. Instead of getting home in time to put her baby son to bed, Low found herself sobbing while breast pumping in an Amtrak bathroom.

Would saying goodbye to every last newspaper clipping, button and book her parents had saved over decades help her mourn?

In the autumn of 2023, I wanted to return to the house where I was raised in order to stand in the garage and look at some marks I made on the wall sometime towards the end of my childhood. I had discovered some tins of black and white gloss paint left on the floor and a narrow house-painting brush and I still remember, once the first dab lengthened into a line, how quickly I was lost in the pleasure of making another line and then another. I drew a woman in a long dress, maybe a kimono, with a wide belt or obi, and her hair dressed high. And when she was done, I stopped.

I doubt it was any good as paintings go but it was the right shape, it was expressive. Also, no one complained. Though the garage was attached to the house it was considered my father’s domain and it seemed he wasn’t bothered by my daub on the wall, though he might have been bothered by the spoiling of a brush. He might have said, “What did you do that for?” which would have been enough to stop me doing more, but there were no serious repercussions that I can remember for my afternoon’s idle graffito.