Behind-the-scenes look at the TV juggernaut’s transformation into a theatrical spectacular, interactive acrobatics with Cirque du Soleil and a spellbinding tribute to Kneehigh are among this month’s highlights

It’s almost 18 months since that neon Hawkins sign went up in Charing Cross Road but a long-running Stranger Things play was never a dead cert hit. Netflix’s backstage documentary charts the race against time from workshops to opening night, with writer Kate Trefry and producer Sonia Friedman both bracingly open about the mind-flaying challenges of turning the TV juggernaut into a theatrical spectacular.

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New work says novelist, who was a censor during second world war, may been employed to look for coded messages

It is an irony that she herself would have revelled in: Barbara Pym, the author who punctured the social strictures of 20th-century Britain, worked as a censor during the second world war.

But research suggests that rather than just poring over the private letters that must have helped hone her talent, she may have also been working for MI5.

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When the gallery opened in 2000, it transformed the artistic life of Britain – and the world. We look back at spiders, splinters, sexual dependency and sunsets

Frances Morris , then head of displays

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Judge says executive told ‘outright lies’ when he gave testimony in antitrust case from Fortnite maker Epic Games

Apple violated a United States court order that required the iPhone maker to allow greater competition for app downloads and payment methods in its lucrative App Store and will be referred to federal prosecutors, a federal judge in California ruled on Wednesday.

The US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said in an 80-page ruling that Apple failed to comply with her prior injunction order, which was imposed in an antitrust lawsuit brought by Fortnite maker Epic Games.

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Aldeas – A New Story documentary to examine work of organisation pontiff founded to connect young people around the world

Martin Scorsese has made a documentary with the late Pope Francis that will feature conversations between the pontiff and Scorsese, including what the film-makers say was the pope’s final in-depth on-camera interview.

Aldeas – A New Story will detail the work of Scholas Occurrentes, a non-profit, international organisation founded by the pope in 2013 to promote what it termed “Culture of Encounter” among youth.

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Anna Hall’s unflinching exposé reveals the years of abuse girls as young as 11 endured from grooming gangs, the misogyny that allowed so many blind eyes to be turned – and how little has changed today

‘Chantelle … was misusing cannabis and alcohol and … placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation” is a staggering sentence to find in a council’s case summary about a child in its foster care system. Here’s another one, from an assessment record by children’s services on the subject of 14-year-old Erin (not her real name). “Erin … is being exploited into prostitution. She hangs around with a number of men who take her money. She is a very promiscuous girl.”

I could go on. Groomed: A National Scandal is full of them. Film-maker Anna Hall has decades’ worth of material to choose from. Her 2004 film Edge of the City was the first television exposé of what we now call grooming gangs, born of research she had begun after a chance meeting five years before with a senior director at Barnardo’s children’s charity who told her that they had noticed a new pattern of child abuse. Groups of men were targeting vulnerable children – almost always white girls, usually in the care system – befriending them, giving them drink and drugs, becoming their “boyfriends”, then having sex with them and offering them round to other men.

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Dropping the droll, self-obsessed character from his early standup shows, the comic and TV star is swapping millennial irony for the sincerity of song

There was a time when comedians weren’t just about the jokes, they were about the crooning, too. I saw Ken Dodd shows back in the day where he broke up the tattifilarious nonsense with sentimental ballads and wartime songs. Can you imagine a 21st-century comic doing anything so uncool? Reader, you no longer have to – as one of the coolest comedians in the world wings his way to London with a show as much about the heartfelt chanson as the layers-of-ironic millennial bantz.

The man in question is John Early, scene-stealing camp superstar of the HBO comedy-thriller Search Party , and sidekick to another whip-smart standup brain, Kate Berlant . Like Berlant – and like Catherine Cohen , Bo Burnham or the UK’s own Leo Reich – Early’s work fashions the navel-gazing, always-online, identity-as-performance spiritual anomie of his generation into outrageous comedy. Or at least, he does in his screen work. Onstage, it’s a bit different, and includes straight-bat performances of pop/rock standards with the backing of six-piece band the Lemon Squares. “In the beginning,” he says, “I just felt, ‘wouldn’t this be groovier if I did this with a full band? Wouldn’t it be fun to do a Britney Spears song with a 70s-inflected arrangement?’”

John Early: The Album Tour is at Soho theatre Walthamstow, London, 28-29 May

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Exclusive: Government will promise to carry out an economic impact assessment of its proposals

Ministers have drawn up concessions on copyright changes in an attempt to appease artists and creators before a crucial vote in parliament next week, the Guardian has learned.

The government will promise to carry out an economic impact assessment of its proposed copyright changes and to publish reports on issues including transparency, licensing and access to data for AI developers.

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Netflix series Turning Point: The Vietnam War goes back to retrace a devastating history from multiple perspectives

This Wednesday, 30 April, marks a full half century since the fall of Saigon . The takeover of the South Vietnamese capital, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, by North Vietnamese forces reunited a country riven by a decades-long civil war that killed more than 3 million civilians – a triumph of one vision of Vietnam’s future at the violent expense of another, with many caught perilously in between.

For the US, the fall of Saigon was an indisputable humiliation and the end to what was then its longest war, one that killed over 58,000 servicemen, divided a nation and has only grown more ignominious with time. Fifty years on, the picture is clear: the Americanization of the Vietnam War was an unfathomably costly, poorly run, incomprehensibly horrific folly based on political lies and dubious intelligence. It is taught as a brief but upsetting chapter in American schools – if it’s taught at all.

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