Royal Albert Hall, London
There was plenty to admire as a fine lineup of soloists stirred the emotions on a night that paired Beethoven’s Ninth with Anna Clyne’s subtle meditation on time

What do you pair with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? You might do worse than Anna Clyne’s The Years, a subtle meditation on the mystery of time set to words by Stephanie Fleischmann. Composed during the pandemic, its approachable mood of calm isolation survives a series of angsty intrusions to convey a message of quiet hopefulness. Like the Beethoven, it reaches a triumphant conclusion, though in Clyne’s case the victory is an eminently peaceful one.

The Danish National Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Fabio Luisi gave it a relaxed and sensitive reading, warm string tones cocooning vocal lines that rose and fell, rendered with impressive clarity by the Danish National Concert Choir. The musical language, faintly reminiscent of Tippett or Barber, was built on simple melodies that blossomed into tangy harmonic clusters. Oscillating voices, stalked by harsh orchestral interjections like wailing sirens, gave way to an expansive sunset glimpsed through a haze of strings and a tranquil, timeless conclusion.

Inside the trial in which the actor claimed the Guardian’s sexual misconduct investigation was a conspiracy among people with grudges against him

• Clarke loses case against Guardian over sexual misconduct investigation

“I think the world has just changed,” Noel Clarke told the judge while giving evidence in his libel case against the Guardian. “I think we can all agree that things that were acceptable 10, 20 years ago are just no longer acceptable.”

While the actor also vehemently denied many of the claims against him, that, in essence, was one of the arguments he presented to the court.

A House of Dynamite, told from perspective of White House officials, will premiere at Venice before Netflix rollout in October

An unattributed missile is launched at the US, setting off a desperate effort inside the White House to determine who fired it and how to respond: not the latest news headline but the premise of Kathryn Bigelow’s political thriller, A House of Dynamite, which will premiere at the Venice film festival.

The film marks a return to the large-scale, geopolitically attuned storytelling that made Bigelow, 73, one of the most decorated directors of her generation.

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From a nude life-drawing class to a Colombian kidnapping, with help from his Ghosts co-star Lolly Adefope, Smith-Bynoe uses audience members’ stories to comic effect

The involvement of big-time performers such as Kiell Smith-Bynoe – he of Ghosts fame – has been credited with reviving UK improv . On the flipside, hobbyist household names don’t always reveal the art form in its best light. Happily, Smith-Bynoe proves no mere dilettante in Kool Story Bro, which cooks up entertaining antics from personal stories volunteered by three audience members. I doubt even its host would claim this is improv at its most meticulous; he himself referred to the previous night’s offerings as “dogshit”. But it’s hard to imagine it ever not being good fun.

The format accommodates a guest quizmaster, and – what a treat – tonight it’s Smith-Bynoe’s Ghosts co-star Lolly Adefope . Her role is to solicit and interrogate each audience member’s kool story, and she so revels in doing so, the show’s talky part (supposed to be just a prompt) threatens to swallow up the whole hour. That tale is about a nude life-drawing class; a later one features a solo holidaymaker ambushed at sea in Colombia. Once (or, thanks to Adefope, long after) the team have enough to go on, they bring these scenarios to comic life.

After the notorious box office bomb John Carter, the actor became the movie star who wasn’t. Now back on TV, he’s redefining what it means to be a leading man

There is a moment in every actor’s career when they must confront their early dreams and their present reality. For Taylor Kitsch, that reckoning has been more painful than for most. “If you start marrying yourself to these phantom outcomes that don’t exist, man, you’re gonna go crazy,” he says.

Kitsch is talking from New York, thousands of miles from his home in Montana, where he has carved out a different life from his Hollywood years. “I’d rather be in the wild chasing animals with my camera than going to clubs or bars or Hollywood parties,” he says.

She gets trolled on TikTok, but it just makes her chuckle – the Bake Off host is determined to find the happiness in everything. She talks giggling, golf buggies and Paul Hollywood’s expensive hands

All Alison Hammond wants is to “bring happiness and spread joy”. She’s so devoted to this mission she even did it straight after the death, five years ago, of her beloved mother Maria. “My mum died in hospital at 5.30am,” she recalls. “At 6am, I went out to my car and this woman stopped me for a selfie. I said sure, no problem. I knew it would make her happy, so I hid behind my own smile. Little did she know my mum had just died but looking back, oh my God – I’ll always remember it.”

The 50-year-old Brummie whirlwind loves to make someone’s day. At her local supermarket recently, she met a fan called Kate who’d just lost her own mother. “I’ll never forget how hard it was when my mum passed, so I invited Kate to the Bake Off final. She met Paul Hollywood and he gave her a handshake. She said it was the best day of her life. It doesn’t take a lot, does it? Kindness truly does make a difference.”

PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox; Crinkle Cut Games/PQube
Don’t be fooled by the graphics, there is no twee, relaxing vibe in this intense and work-heavy game where you are taken in by your aunt and put to work in her supermarket

We are thick in an era of retail simulators. In the comet-trail of Stardew Valley, a genre is now fat with titles wherein a protagonist restarts their life and career in a bucolic, quasi-rural landscape and undertakes a blue-collar job. They get to know the local people, interfere in some lives, solve some community issues – maybe even a mystery or two. Maybe even get married. In a way, they are all Harvest Moon’s pixelated offspring – but Discounty, Crinkle Cut Games’ new offering to the genre, tackles the cozy shop life simulator a little differently.

In Discounty, you are taken in by your tricky, cantankerous aunt and are put to work in her branch of a franchised supermarket. A fascinating approach, given that the road less taken through Stardew Valley involves prioritising the growth of a local supermarket rather than a community centre. Discounty is a game about business and injecting the economy of a small town. For a cozy game, there are elements of it that are very sharp indeed.

Making tracks in a blacked-out bedroom, the precocious UK rapper has an adrenaline-fuelled, overstimulated aesthetic

From London
Recommended if you like Nettspend, Bladee, Crystal Castles
Up next New album coming early 2026; playing London late August

Twenty-year-old London rapper Vincenzo Camille, better known as Fakemink, makes disorienting sugar-high electroclash rap, delivered with a voice that sounds like it’s barely broken. On paper, it sounds as if he should be of a piece with the 2020s class of overstimulating Gen Z internet rappers such as Nettspend and OsamaSon. But although he is, in some sense, part of that scene, his music is also far more linear and melodic, and more indebted to the past. His best songs, many of which were produced by the American electronic duo Suzy Sheer, utilise beats that sound like fast, euphoric flips of songs from the Skins soundtrack; the viral hit Easter Pink could pass for a mid-2000s indie dance hit if not for Fakemink’s fast, very 2020s rapping, while Makka, a collab with Mechatok and Ecco2k, contains echoes of Bloc Party’s Intimacy, thanks to an insistent, extremely melodic guitar line.

Convicted fraudster expresses regret in a two-part BBC documentary but also asks ‘what about all the good deals?’

As an art dealer in London and Miami, Inigo Philbrick had the Midas touch and lived the high life, with private jets, $5,000 bottles of wine and $7,000 suits. But in 2019 he was exposed as a serial swindler who had created one of the largest art frauds in history, a Ponzi-style web of lies that conned collectors and investors.

In 2022, aged 34, he was sentenced to seven years in a US prison, with two years of supervised release and an order “to pay forfeiture of $86,672,790”.

The Great Art Fraud will be on BBC Two on 27 and 28 August and on iPlayer.