Museums in Belfast, Cardiff, Perth, Warwickshire and County Durham compete for £120,000 Art Fund Museum of the Year award

Five UK museums, all “alive with ideas and energy”, in Belfast, Cardiff, Perth, Warwickshire and County Durham are to compete for the world’s largest prize given to a museum.

The Art Fund Museum of the Year prize offers the winner a gamechanging prize of £120,000, with £15,000 going to each of the other finalists.

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Belfast rappers post apology to families of David Amess and Jo Cox after footage emerges of apparent call to kill MPs

Kneecap have apologised to the families of murdered MPs David Amess and Jo Cox after footage emerged in which the Irish-language rappers purportedly call for politicians to be killed.

Criticism of the group has been mounting – including from Downing Street and the Conservative leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch – since a video emerged from a November 2023 gig appearing to show one person from the group saying: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”

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The Patrick Melrose author brings his trademark dark wit and flinty compassion to this wide-ranging sequel

Edward St Aubyn’s previous novel, 2021’s Double Blind , was something of a challenge even for his devotees. Leaving aside the usual gripe that he is never quite as compelling without the shield of his authorial alter ego Patrick Melrose, the obsessive nature of the book’s inquiry into bioethics, narcosis, psychotherapy, oncology, venture capitalism and inheritance made too heady a cocktail to be more than sipped, a few pages at a time. I struggled with it until the very last scene, a charity bash where a schizophrenic young man takes his first terrified steps in employment as a waiter and happens upon a woman who, unknown to both, is intimately related to him. Their chance encounter was intensely moving and tautly suspenseful – you felt an immediate longing to know what would befall them.

That longing is now answered in Parallel Lines, which picks up the narrative five years later and reintroduces its cast of interestingly troubled characters. Francis, a botanist pursuing a rewilding project on a Sussex country estate, has now joined an NGO in Ecuador trying to save the Amazonian rainforest. He’s also raising a son with his wife, Olivia, a writer producing a radio series on natural disasters and wondering whether Francis can resist the amorous lures of his philanthropist boss. Olivia’s best friend, Lucy, is in the throes of treatment for a brain tumour, the traumatic reverberations from which have forced her boyfriend – wild man plutocrat and drug fiend Hunter – to seek refuge with “compassion burnout” at an Italian monastery, where he’s hosted by a gentle abbot, Guido.

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A poetic new exhibition of dreamlike black and white images captures the country’s contemplative beauty, from lonely Torii gates to sprawling temple trees

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Sweet documentary about Sean DeLear, of LA punk band Glue, who never landed a major record deal but was famous among celebrities

That’s Sean DeLear, pronounced like “chandelier”, born Anthony Robertson in 1964. You probably haven’t heard of him: DeLear was the lead singer of a band called Glue on the underground post-punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s. On stage, he performed in drag, singing punk songs dressed like a 1960s go-do dancer in cute little dresses. The band never landed a major record deal, and DeLear died from cancer in 2017 . This sweet, scrappy documentary has been lovingly put together by his friend Markus Zizenbacher.

It’s not the first posthumous attempt at recognition for DeLear. In 2023, his teenage diary, written in 1979, was published under the title I Could Not Believe It. Extracts of this queer black memoir are read here on the voiceover – and they are glorious. Even aged 14 years old, living with his Christian parents in a conservative suburb of Los Angeles, DeLear was proudly, joyfully gay, though this was before the terror of Aids. The interviews in the film with his mum and brother, an evangelical pastor, feel a little bit thin; his family accepted his sexuality, they say, but not much else.

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The broadcaster gets the Who Do You Think You Are? treatment. Plus: Joe Lycett’s big Brummie adventure continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
Broadcaster Mishal Husain has written a book about her grandparents’ experience of the end of the British empire in India and the formation of Pakistan – and now she takes an utterly absorbing journey through her family history. She starts in India, where an ancestor was personal physician to a maharaja. Hollie Richardson

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The US playwright and anglophile behind much-revived comedies has a flair for crime and is following a crowd-pleasing Murder on the Orient Express with Death on the Nile

If you ever face a quiz question about the most performed theatre writers in the world, likely to have a play on somewhere every day, William Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Agatha Christie are all reliable answers but a fourth may surprise you: Ken Ludwig. He also has intriguing connections with the other three.

The popularity that made the American wealthy enough to have donated £1m to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is partly due – apart from his own much-revived comedies, Lend Me a Tenor (1986) and Moon Over Buffalo (1995) – to Christie. Ludwig’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express has had hundreds of productions and is currently touring the UK. We meet when he is in London for a workshop on a second Hercule Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which premieres in September.

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In an episode more moving and raw than ever before, a traumatised Ellie grabs a gun and rides off to take revenge. But can she possibly make it – and who are the scarred newbies?

This article contains spoilers for the The Last of Us season two. Please do not read unless you have seen episodes one to three.

Despite growing up amid a fungal apocalypse that she alone may have the ability to undo, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a typical teenager in one key regard: constant sarcastic backchat. We’ve seen the unfiltered 19-year-old dish it out to friends and authority figures alike, rarely thinking twice before saying whatever is on her mind. Which makes it all the more affecting when she spends so much of this episode in pained silence, grieving for the surrogate father she helplessly watched get killed at the end of last week’s relentless emotional wringer .

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The circumstances of Carol and Stephen Baxter’s deaths in 2023 were so baffling, and so hideous, that everyone involved in the case can barely hold it together as they relive it. What a horrific world

What are we going to do with all the bad people? Like, really? What are we going to do with all the people whose stories hurl your mind back to a primitive state of lusting for vengeance, or make you long for a simpler time when the conclusion “They are evil” was considered a sufficient explanation and you could proceed with their punishment and society’s protection?

Such are the thoughts that run through one’s mind when confronted with the likes of The Essex Millionaire Murders. The two-part documentary tells the grimly shocking story of the 2023 murders of Carol and Stephen Baxter. They were found dead in their home in Mersea, Essex, by their daughter Ellena. There were no marks on the bodies, no injuries, no signs of a break-in. Carol had become increasingly ill since they moved there, apparently from Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder, and husband Stephen had become her carer. Had it all become too much and they had then made a suicide- or murder-suicide pact? They had seemed a devoted couple and, though it was all mysterious, stranger things have happened: post-mortem and toxicology reports would, hopefully, offer answers.

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