This UK-Aussie comedy’s depiction of Britishness is painfully twee and trite despite starring Sally Phillips and Ben Miller. Good job that its lead, Michael Theo, is such a joy

We briefly meet Austin, the namesake of this British-Australian sitcom, at the very beginning of the opening episode: he’s walking through his workplace – a warehouse, he’s a forklift driver – bluntly dispensing unsolicited advice to his colleagues (“Best hangover cure: sardines on toast!”). But before we know it, we’ve been torn away from this offbeat sage and thrown into the orbit of a far less wise man. Julian (Ben Miller) is a children’s author in crisis. He has come to Australia with his illustrator wife Ingrid (Sally Phillips) to promote the latest instalment in their wildly successful Big Bear franchise. Before takeoff, Julian retweeted a missive about free speech from a neo-Nazi (he didn’t realise they were a neo-Nazi). Upon arrival, he discovers his career has effectively been destroyed.

Book tour (and self) cancelled, Julian hastily arranges a signing in one of the only shops that will still have him, a Mein Kampf-laden store run by a neo-Nazi (he didn’t realise they were a neo … you get the picture). After the penny finally drops, Julian starts packing up – that’s when Austin arrives, Big Bear back catalogue in tow. He wants his books signed and to deliver some news. “I’m pretty sure that,” he begins, pausing idiosyncratically, “I’m your son.”

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Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the bin strike in Birmingham and the Grand National Meeting at Aintree: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

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Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan —the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

"Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday , "but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US."

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

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Welsh culture is in crisis. The actor’s intervention is to be applauded, but it is not a long-term solution

Michael Sheen’s statement of intent for his newly founded national theatre for Wales couldn’t be more clear. The Welsh actor launched the company in January after the demise of National Theatre Wales owing to funding cuts. This week, Sheen announced that one of his first plays will be Owain & Henry, the story of Owain Glyndŵr, who led a 15-year revolt against the English in 1400. Sheen will star as Glyndŵr, adding the last Welshman to have been proclaimed Prince of Wales to a résumé that includes Tony Blair, David Frost and, most recently, another Welsh hero, Aneurin Bevan.

Retelling Shakespeare’s Henry IV from the Welsh perspective was “an act of defiance” and “resistance”, Sheen told BBC Four’s Front Row , saying that he hoped the play would spark national conversations, not least about his country’s relationship with England. Sheen returned his OBE in 2017 , calling for an end to the practice of keeping the title of Prince of Wales in the English royal family.

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Guardian readers recall encounters with a brilliant actor who was kind, generous and much more than a heart-throb

• Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65
• An ethereally handsome actor who evolved into droll self-awareness
• A life in pictures

I worked as a dialogue coach on Oliver Stone’s Alexander in 2003. Val was playing Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon. Oliver wanted the Macedonians to have Celtic accents in contrast to the Greeks, who looked down on the Macedonians, as the English have only too frequently done to neighbours of the UK. We were prepping in Morocco and I had been working for a while with Val on his Irish accent when my 95-year-old mother died and I had to leave for a couple of days for her funeral. During my absence, Val had to go home for a short while. When I returned I opened my hotel room door to find it awash with beautiful white roses. Val had sent them before he left, leaving a note of condolence and both his personal phone numbers so that I might call any time if I needed someone. Such unexpected kindness I have never forgotten. Catherine Charlton, voice coach, St Leonards-on-Sea

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From hyper-intelligent analysis to heated arguments, the 21st-century home of buzzy chatter about big television shows is Reddit. We go behind the scenes to hear about millions of Severance and White Lotus fans, wild freebies – and accusations of racism

They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “ She got off the plane! .”

Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus , while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance . Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.

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Exhibition of 456 works by the Bradford-born Francophile underscores Paris’s efforts to reclaim its status as Europe’s art capital

Poised to open its doors on Wednesday, Paris’s biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25 . A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of the artist’s best-known painting: A Bigger Splash.

Purportedly focused only on the last quarter-decade of the Yorkshire-born painter’s career, the 456 works on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 11 vast galleries in fact span 1955-2025.

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Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux is a shot-for-shot labour of love made with amateur actors, beanbag dinosaurs and an army of volunteers. Three years later it is finished – and ‘bigger than Ben-Hur’

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This morning’s location: a field outside Castlemaine, Victoria. The air is thick with flies, attracted to the cow dung but ignoring the nearby dinosaur poo, sturdily constructed from papier-mache.

“Oh god,” Sam Neill groans – though these words aren’t actually uttered by Neill but local builder Ian Flavell, who has taken on Neill’s role as palaeontologist Alan Grant – and drops to his knees in front of an ailing triceratops.

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Compulsion Games; Xbox, PC, Xbox
A spell-casting high-school athlete ventures into the heart of southern folklore in this distinct yet uneven action adventure

Soaring development costs; protracted production cycles; cautious C-suites looking to deliver reliable returns for shareholders: for many reasons, there is a dearth of original programming in big-budget video games. Already this year we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization game, the 14th entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the 27th Monster Hunter title. But look: here’s a magical-realist tale set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix.

South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked details of a Tim Burton film. Within minutes, a house – that of high-school athlete Hazel and her mother, a social worker – is carried away along a roiling flooded river. Playing as Hazel, you give chase, bounding with a lanky teenage gait across various platforms until the storm abates. In its wake lie miles of stagnant, fetid swamps. At one grisly point, you explore a farm stacked with the carcasses of pigs who did not survive the typhoon.

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