In May, Cannes went weak at the knees for Harry Lighton’s tale of BDSM and bootlicking in suburbia. Ahead of its release, the director and his stars reveal the explicit shots snipped from the final cut and discuss why Pride has become too sanitised

Harry Melling knows the secret to being a good boot-licker. “You want to give a decent, satisfying, sexy lick,” says the 36-year-old actor, who has the umlaut eyes and nasal tones of Nicholas Lyndhurst. “Once you get to the toe-cap, you need to make sure they can really feel your tongue through the leather.”

Melling, barely recognisable from his childhood role as wretched Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, learned this new skill while preparing for the award-winning BDSM romcom Pillion. He plays Colin, a timid traffic warden who becomes the willing submissive to a taciturn biker named Ray. Listening intently to Melling’s boot-licking tips in this London hotel room are his Pillion partners-in-kink: Harry Lighton, the film’s 33-year-old writer-director, whose flat cap and smirk lend him a roguish look, and Alexander Skarsgård, 49, who plays Ray, and is dressed today in a slobby ensemble – red sweatshirt, blue tracksuit bottoms, black shoes – that fails to spoil his pin-up prettiness.

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Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel was convicted in 2023 after a trial that included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former US attorney general Jeff Sessions

The Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for a case in which he was convicted of illegally funnelling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former US president Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Michel, 52, declined to address the court before US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him on Thursday.

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Public accounts committee calculates cost of households either evading the fee or saying they do not need TV licence

The BBC is now losing more than £1bn a year from households either evading the licence fee or deciding they do not need one, according to a cross-party group of MPs who warned the corporation is under “severe pressure”.

Attempts to enforce payment of the licence fee are also stalling. The number of visits to unlicensed homes increased by 50% last year, but it did not translate into either higher sales or successful prosecutions. BBC executives have said they face the increasing problem of householders simply refusing to answer the door.

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The tale of Prof Sarah Blagden’s attempt to find a treatment that stops the disease is the rarest of things – TV that makes you dare to hope

Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures should come with a rare warning: may make you feel hopeful for humanity and marginally less convinced that we are all willingly leaping into a handcart and smoothing our own paths to hell.

This is an hour that outlines the work being done to create vaccines against cancers. Lung cancer, specifically, at the moment – 50,000 cases of which are diagnosed each year in the UK and which is the most common cause of cancer-related death – but with the potential to prevent many more types in the future.

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All the bleak tenderness from the musician’s novel makes it into this heartbreaking screen adaptation of a father-and-son road trip where the dad relentlessly pursues sex. It will undo you

The travelling salesman used to be a stock figure – a centrepiece for jokes about man’s priapism, the untameable wanderlust of the peen once free of its domestic shackles. The Death of Bunny Munro, adapted from Nick Cave’s 2009 book of the same name by Pete Jackson and keeping all its bleak tenderness and unforgiving brutality, gives us the tragedy that lies the other side of any comic character worth its salt.

Cosmetics salesman Bunny (Matt Smith, a brilliant and still underrated actor, plus the best Doctor of modern times, please send an SAE for my monograph on this subject) is out on the road, sampling another young lady’s wares, when we meet him. His wife, Libby (Sarah Greene, perfectly cast as a fierce, loving woman broken by depression and her husband’s choices) calls him. He dismisses her and returns to his sampling. When he returns the next day he finds that she has killed herself. They have a nine-year-old son, Bunny Jr, played by Rafael Mathé, who gives an absolutely wonderful, heartbreaking performance, treading the thinnest of lines between knowing everything and nothing about his father and about his own likely future. At first, Bunny Sr tries to palm him off on Libby’s mother (Lindsay Duncan), who, in a harrowing post-funeral scene, refuses. But when social services arrive to take the boy into care, Bunny’s pride or conscience is pricked. The pair light out of the window and head off on a road trip along the south coast, and a father-son bonding experience. Traditionally, these are good things. But Cave is not a traditional writer and this is not a traditional tale.

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(Berliner Philharmoniker)
Brahms’s Tragic Overture leaps to life while there is much interest in a careful reading of the composer’s First Symphony in this new recording from the Berlin Philharmonic with their chief conductor

The Berlin Philharmonic’s in-house label continues its mission to document chief conductor Kirill Petrenko’s considered interpretations of the classical canon. In this case, it’s Brahms’s First Symphony, captured live at the Philharmonie just two months ago, coupled with the Tragic Overture, recorded last year.

For this performance, Petrenko examined Meiningen Court Orchestra scores marked up with specific directions given by the composer himself. The results may strike some as interventionist, however there’s an organic momentum here that is hard to resist with a pronounced flexibility that, according to the excellent booklet essay, clarifies Brahms’s “furious struggle against the bar line”. Balance is impeccable, although solos seem over spotlighted at times by the recording engineers.

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• Hunt backs Turning Point USA’s rival half-time show

• Goodell stands firm despite Trump-driven backlash

Gracie Hunt, the daughter of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, is throwing her support behind Turning Point USA’s plan to stage an alternative Super Bowl half-time show, a direct counter to the NFL’s decision to feature Bad Bunny at Super Bowl LX .

Hunt said in an appearance on Fox News Channel’s The Will Cain Show on Tuesday that she “most definitely” backs Turning Point’s counter-programming effort, spearheaded by Erika Kirk , the widow of Charlie Kirk. The NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny for the half-time show has attracted strong pushback from many on the right, who object to his criticism of Donald Trump and US immigration enforcement.

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The daughter of the British composer Samuel made controversial choices that took her on a different path to her father’s activism. Ahead of the premiere recording of her piano concerto, its soloist looks at a musician who learned the hard way about ‘belonging’

Avril Coleridge-Taylor always felt the weight of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor , one of the most famous British composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s was a name enveloped in the long shadows of history.

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to make the world premiere recording of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto with the BBC Philharmonic. With its impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant new listeners fascinating insight into how she – a wartime composer, born in 1903 – conceived of her world as a woman of colour.

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Ian Brown and Tim Burgess were among those to pay tribute to Mani, whose death was announced by his brother and nephew

Gary “Mani” Mounfield, best known as a founding member and bassist of the Stone Roses, has died aged 63. The cause of death has not been shared.

His brother Greg Mounfield posted the news on Facebook: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce the sad passing of my brother.” His nephew also shared the news.

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