Silencing of Jimmy Kimmel sets US on course similar to that charted by authoritarian regimes from Egypt to India

The exiled Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef has experienced firsthand how intolerant governments can silence political satire. And he had a short message this week for those living in an age of Donald Trump’s free speech clampdown: “My Fellow American Citizens,” he wrote on X. “Welcome to my world.”

In his attacks on the most prominent of American satirists , the US president has joined a cadre of illiberal and sensitive leaders around the world who will not tolerate a joke.

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Nerdery triumphs over gossip in this earnest but compelling memoir of the 90s New York club scene

It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.

Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.

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McConaughey plays the unassuming real hero who drove a schoolbus full of children out of California’s deadliest wildfire

The political context has been scorched away in Paul Greengrass’s empowering inferno. This is a dynamically shot and earnestly performed real-life disaster movie about California’s terrifying 2018 Camp fire , a darkness-at-noon horror that became the deadliest wildfire in California history, killing 85 people and razing more than 150,000 acres. Greengrass and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby have taken their inspiration from Lizzie Johnson ’s 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, about the calamity and the ironically named town caught up in it, pointing up the extraordinary, unassuming courage of school-bus driver Kevin McKay who piloted a busload of screaming kids and their teacher through hell to safety.

America Ferrera plays the caring, if slightly prim teacher Mary Ludwig and Matthew McConaughey is the rough, sweaty everyman hero behind the wheel – with whom, in the time-honoured style of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, Mary is to have an emotional connection. Before the fire, Kevin had been a loser and a screwup, alienated from his son and ex-wife, on the verge of getting fired from his school-bus-driving job (due to honest errors attributable to family worries) – but of course highly eligible for the heroic redemption that the fire will provide.

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Jessica Chastain heads up an explosive thriller about an undercover agent infiltrating hate groups, and Steven Knight is back with a very boozy new show. Plus: more Slow Horses!

Dramas about online life are hard to get right; how much tension can really be conjured by watching someone stare at a screen? This explosive thriller, which stars Jessica Chastain as Jodi, an agent who specialises in infiltrating hate groups, fares better than most. It helps that the subject matter – lone wolf, far-right terrorists whose fantasies spill out into the world – feels grimly relevant. But Chastain also embodies the duality many of us now feel; the impossibility of reconciling online identities with real life. Using the persona “Fleshy MF”, Jodi understands the impulses of her chatroom comrades – and stopping the extremists becomes a challenge with potentially terrifying consequences.
Apple TV+, from Friday 26 September

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Part documentary, part concert, Electric Church sees Hendrix play to 300,000 people at the 1970 Atlanta pop festival. Plus, comedy karaoke with Fawlty Towers: The Play. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Four
Part documentary, part concert movie, this feature-length film captures Jimi Hendrix’s last major US gig at the 1970 Atlanta pop festival, just two months before his death – making the inclusion of some of his funkier new songs such as Straight Ahead especially poignant. “We don’t play loud to hit people’s eardrums,” he tells an interviewer. “We play to get inside their souls.” Ali Catterall

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Decades after the BBC sitcom first aired, B&Bs in the Devon resort only occasionally lean into their association with the show

With his abusive and impatient service, ill temper and overt snobbery, Basil Fawlty might not have expected to be a point of reference forbed-and-breakfast owners.

But 50 years after Fawlty Towers first aired on the BBC, B&Bs in Torquay are still fond of the town’s association with the sitcom and its eponymous proprietor.

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The first episode of Fawlty Towers aired on 19 September 1975 and a month later the Guardian’s TV critic declared it the undoubted comedy of the season

18 October 1975

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Everybody loved Robert Redford. Directors and co-stars including Ralph Fiennes, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Judd Hirsch, Norman Reedus and F Murray Abraham explain why

James Vanderbilt (Truth, 2015 )

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In the city of Tarim, colourful mansions built by the city’s merchants are being knocked down as the war-torn nation cannot afford to maintain them

• Words and photographs by Saeed al-Batati in Tarim

When the bulldozers moved into Abdul Rahman Bin Sheikh al-Kaf’s mud-brick palace in Tarim and began tearing down its spectacular architecture, the clouds of dust around the landmark attracted a large gathering in the Yemeni city.

Haddad Musaied, a local journalist, got a call from a friend telling him about the destruction and encouraging him to come and see it. “As a journalist, you have a responsibility to stop what is happening,” the friend said.

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