Sarky hacker Roddy in the espionage drama was a dream role for the actor, but before that, he had years of hard graft. He talks odd jobs, busting stereotypes and holding his own opposite Gary Oldman

Christopher Chung is no longer surprised when members of the public walk up and insult him to his face. “It happened yesterday,” he says. “A guy came up to me and said: ‘Are you from Slow Horses? You’re awful.’” Or sometimes, it’s “You’re a dickhead”.

“But,” the 37-year-old adds, the insults are usually “said with love and affection”. And “I want, as an actor, to have some effect, so it’s really …” he hesitates, as if searching for the right word, “really nice,” he beams. Then he bursts into laughter.

Theodora Laird’s serene vocals navigate delicate, textural atmospheres like a breath of fresh air on a beautiful debut, with support from her regular collaborator Caius Williams

From London
Recommended if you like Tirzah, Loraine James, Space Afrika
Up next Debut album Goodness out 10 October

Over the past three years, vocalist Theodora Laird and bassist Caius Williams have built a committed hub for improvised music at Grain, a residency held at Avalon cafe in south Bermondsey . Inviting experimental music eminences – Steve Noble, Elaine Mitchener, Maggie Nicols – to play alongside younger generations, Grain nights feature Laird and Williams as the still points of this constantly turning little world. The duo also perform as Crosspiece (recently as support for UK band Caroline) with Laird’s serene focus a foil to Williams’s rougher, busier sounds.

The Predicament by William Boyd; The Killer Question by Janice Hallett; The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman; 59 Minutes by Holly Seddon; Deadman’s Pool by Kate Rhodes

The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking, £20 )
A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon . It’s early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is in his Sussex cottage working on his latest book, struggling with emotional baggage and yearning for his MI6 handler and sometime girlfriend, Faith Green. She persuades him to go to Guatemala to check out the popular leftwing leader who is threatening to topple the country’s CIA-backed government, but Dax is forced to flee when things go seriously awry. He ends up being sent to West Berlin to gather intelligence on a possible assassin, whose arrival in West Germany just before the visit of US president John F Kennedy may not be coincidental. Beautifully crafted, with echoes of le Carré, Greene and Forsyth, this is a superb evocation of a vanished world, seen through the eyes of a relatably hapless accidental hero.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett (Viper, £18.99 )
Hallett’s latest centres on that staple of British social life, the pub quiz, and like its predecessors it’s told in emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and transcripts. We know from the start that things haven’t gone well for pub landlords Sue and Mal Eastwood: their nephew is pitching a true crime documentary to Netflix, promising “intrigue, tension, betrayal, deception and … murder”. Rewind to five years earlier: Sue and Mal, desperate to keep their struggling business afloat, are pleased at the arrival of a new quiz team. However, the Shadow Knights proceed to sweep the board every week, prompting accusations of cheating. So far, so nerdy – but when the body of someone already outed as a quiz cheat is discovered in a nearby river, things take a darker turn. Some suspension of disbelief is necessary – why Sue and Mal chose to communicate via WhatsApp rather than talking to each other is unclear – but Hallett is a master of misdirection, and this plot is up there with her fiendishly clever best.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the comedy that’s so foundational for TV as a medium, it’s the Beatles for the small screen. Five decades later, John Cleese and Connie Booth’s show is still unmatched

The first episode of Fawlty Towers was broadcast on 19 September 1975. We are now half a century distant from that point; as far away as the first episode of Fawlty Towers was from John Logie Baird’s first successful transmission of greyscale television pictures in 1925. And, while the creation of Fawlty Towers wasn’t a technical breakthrough on quite the same level, Fawlty Towers does feel almost as fundamental and foundational to the medium. Like the music of the Beatles, it’s become part of the dominant cultural language of the era.

In a 2019 list compiled by the Radio Times, the show was named the greatest ever British sitcom . Has anyone ever done it better? Fifty years seems a reasonable point at which to assess the show’s legacy and conclude that they probably haven’t. And even if anyone has, they were almost certainly following a template that John Cleese and Connie Booth’s English Riviera romp established.

Dorfman theatre, London
Directed by Stephen Daldry, David Lan’s historical drama has a revelatory performance by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt

David Lan’s play takes us into a fascinating corridor of history: that of displaced people, or DPs, in the aftermath of the second world war. The focus is on displaced minors, some of whom are German, others Slavic. There is talk of a third category of “special” children who were stolen by the Nazis as part of their campaign to create a breed of Aryan “pure bloods”. This, we hear, consisted of abducting mostly Slavic children and habilitating them into German families – if they met the “genetic” requirements.

Young Thomas is among this category, his previous Polish identity having been erased. He was given a new name, mother, tongue and Bavarian home, but we meet him as he is torn from this second, adoptive family to become a temporary charge of Ruth (Juliet Stevenson), a UN relief worker working with the American forces to return the children to their original towns, villages and homes.

Exclusive: Democratic candidate lays bare tensions with then president during 2024 election campaign

• US politics live – latest updates

Kamala Harris has revealed she was left “angry and disappointed” when Joe Biden called her hours before her US presidential debate with Donald Trump to suggest powerful associates of Biden’s brother refused to support her.

The former vice-president and Democratic nominee recounts the episode – and other criticisms of Biden – in her campaign memoir 107 Days, obtained by the Guardian before its publication next week.

Channel 4’s film follows the fight to overturn Letby’s conviction, questioning expert testimony and exposing deep divisions over whether she is guilty or the victim of a miscarriage of justice

Is Lucy Letby innocent? Or, to put it another way, is there now enough reasonable doubt to declare her conviction unsafe? This documentary’s answer to the second question could hardly be clearer: yes.

Letby was declared to be the biggest child serial killer in modern Britain, though she could yet go down in history as the subject of our era’s most serious miscarriage of justice. Public opinion, media mythology and the law turn as slowly as an oil tanker. Letby could walk free … or she could end up the subject of unending and fruitless debate, in a kind of permanent standoff with her accusers, like the Menendez brothers in the US , contentiously convicted of killing their parents in 1989 and still in prison.

Crucible theatre, Sheffield
Elizabeth Newman’s debut show as artistic director captures the play’s humour and heartbreak yet leaves you wishing for more ecstatic abandon

Dancing at Lughnasa both is and isn’t a memory play. It’s told in retrospect by Michael, remembering the summer of 1936 spent with his mother and aunts in County Donegal, and draws on Brian Friel’s own early life. Yet what we see of the women at its centre resists the sentimentality of nostalgia, instead showing lives of survival, humour and wild, suppressed desires.

Aspects of this duality are captured by Elizabeth Newman ’s production, her first as artistic director of Sheffield Theatres. The five unmarried Mundy sisters are sharply drawn, their interactions conveying the subtle, unspoken language of a lifetime together. Even when in the background, their faces each tell a shadow story – whether it’s the pained disapproval of schoolteacher Kate (Natalie Radmall-Quirke), the quick wit of joker Maggie (Siobhán O’Kelly), or the various thwarted yearnings of Agnes (Laura Pyper), Rose (Rachel O’Connell) and Chris (Martha Dunlea). Their familiarity is thrown into relief by the presence of older brother Jack (Frank Laverty), back after 25 years in Uganda and floundering.

At Crucible theatre, Sheffield , until 4 October. Then at Royal Exchange, Manchester , from 10 October to 8 November.

(Berliner Philharmoniker, three CDs or BluRay)
Five works by the modernist composer, all taken from concerts given by Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, include a magnificent performance of the oratorio fragment Die Jakobsleiter

The Berlin Philharmonic has never been particularly associated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg, though both Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado recorded his Gurrelieder with the orchestra, and in the 1970s Herbert von Karajan included superlative versions of Pelleas und Melisande and the orchestral Variations in his Berlin box of recordings of the Second Viennese School. But to judge from this impressive collection of five works by Schoenberg, all recorded at concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie between 2019 and last year, Kirill Petrenko is already exploring the composer far more thoroughly than any of his predecessors.

Petrenko’s set does include some of Schoenberg’s best known works. There’s the string sextet Verklärte Nacht in its sumptuous string-orchestra expansion, and the Chamber Symphony No 1, thankfully not in the late orchestral version that blurs the acerbic textures and robs the instrumental writing of its muscularity, but in the original scoring for 15 solo instruments. And a superb account of the Violin Concerto, in which the soloist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, turns what can sometimes seem a rather four-square, dutifully conventional piece into something constantly surprising, and the Variations for Orchestra, with each event vividly, fiercely characterised.