The acclaimed British director said Glazer had ‘understood the possible consequences, which made him braver still’

Veteran British director Ken Loach has added his support to Jonathan Glazer over the latter’s controversial Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest.

In an interview with Variety , Loach said he had “great respect” for Glazer and that his speech was “very brave”. He added: “And I’m sure he understood the possible consequences, which makes him braver still, so I’ve got great respect for him and his work.”

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Holmes Chapel to hold day of auditions for tour guides after thousands of fans make pilgrimage to Cheshire village

A Cheshire village that has been swamped by young visitors has appealed for tour guides with a very specific skill set: an expert knowledge of Harry Styles.

More than 5,000 fans – known as Harries – have descended on the quaint community of Holmes Chapel in the last year in a pop pilgrimage to the singer’s home town.

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She’s the ex-hairdresser who turned Bowie into Ziggy Stardust, then set off around the world in his entourage. Ronson relives those wild days – and recalls seeing a darker side of David

One Saturday morning early in the summer of 1971, Suzi Ronson was busy at work at the Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street when a couple walked past pushing a pram. The woman was wearing black jeans and a furry jacket, the man was in a flowing gold midi dress. “Everybody rushed out to have a look,” recalls Ronson, who then went by her maiden name Fussey. “Everyone was like nudging, poking each other, asking, ‘Who’s that?’ Then someone whispered, ‘It’s David Bowie.’”

Ronson had vaguely heard of Bowie: the success of his Space Oddity single had made him a local celebrity and the singer’s mother was a client. But she recalls: “He was in an arty clique, not my world.” However Ronson would end up becoming part of Bowie’s world, the only working woman in his touring party – as her new memoir Me and Mr Jones relates.

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Lulu has revealed that, when she’s performing, she doesn’t speak before noon. It might sound tricky – but could have benefits

Name: Speech fasting.

Age: Ancient.

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The coastal setting is beautiful, the couple are messily believable and it’s an eerily accurate homage to small-town life. Hopefully sewage won’t get in the way of all the tender, water-based bonding

The first series of Float picked up several awards and a dedicated audience for its youth-leaning small-town love story between two female lifeguards. Over six 10-minute-ish episodes, this “microdrama”, written by the acclaimed playwright Stef Smith, revealed itself to be both a romance – as Jade (Hannah Jarrett-Scott) falls for her seemingly straight colleague Collette (Jessica Hardwick) – and a bigger mystery: why is Jade so depressed and withdrawn? And what had caused her to suddenly drop out of university in Glasgow and return home? It ended on a note of impressive ambiguity, daring not to resolve everything neatly, leaving the loose ends hanging with a nod to realism rather than wish fulfilment.

We rejoin them for a second series 18 months later. The leisure centre where Jade and Collette worked is being pulled down, and both of them find themselves back at home after a long period apart. Collette is now living in Edinburgh, where she is training to be a nurse. She is caring for a sick father and a cold, distant mother. Jade, meanwhile, went back to Glasgow to face the music after she attacked a homophobe in a bar, lives with her mother and is undergoing court-mandated anger management therapy. “It’s been a long time, stranger,” says Jade, as the pair finally meet up again.

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More than 300 artists and cultural workers write open letter to Home venue over cancellation of Voices of Resilience event

More than 300 cultural workers, theatre and film artists, including Maxine Peake and Asif Kapadia , have called for a Manchester arts venue to reinstate an event celebrating Palestinian voices.

Home Manchester last week cancelled the Voices of Resilience evening , scheduled for 22 April, citing “recent publicity” and safety concerns for audiences and artists.

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After years of hard gigging, the comedian of the year finalist and pun champion is finally breaking through, thanks to his intoxicating mix of surreal standup and social justice

In comedian Kev Mud’s home in Cornwall, a caravan overlooking Porthcothan Bay, he has a mountain of DVDs stashed in a corner. There’s Hitchcock, skateboarding films, Rugrats and Fraggle Rock. “It might be a bit weird for some guy living in a caravan on top of the cliffs to have a load of kids’ DVDs,” he says. “But there’s nothing alarming going on. It’s just sometimes you don’t want to watch a Swedish noir about suicides from a bridge. Sometimes, you just want a talking bear.”

Mud started collecting them during lockdown, after he moved here from Leicester. “The DVDs were me catastrophising – there’s always catastrophe going on inside my head,” the 37-year-old continues, pausing to take a sip of his favourite concoction – Horlicks, milk powder and chai. “I’ll go through these periods, ‘What happens if I have to live without the internet?’”

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For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough.” That rejection was an unnamed experience in which she has said she “did not feel welcomed”, assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. On the album’s cover, she is on a horse, holding an American flag, draped in US flag apparel, with her long blond tresses flowing and a cowboy hat atop her head. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song and debate over her place in the genre reigned, no greater a country luminary than Dolly Parton lent her support. Later it was revealed that she and outlaw legend Willie Nelson were to feature on the album, cementing its country bona fides.

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Retro video games and aesthetics are having a moment, but it’s not just gen X and older millennials reliving their heyday: younger millennials and gen Z are getting in on the nostalgia too

The bouncy, midi melody of Nintendo’s Wii theme descends into a drill beat . A Game Boy Colour opens up into a lip gloss case . ASAP Rocky goes “full Minecraft” in a pixelated hoodie, and a panting man bobs up and down with his arm stuck in a bush . This is not a glitch. Both online and IRL, pop culture is embracing the aesthetics of retro gaming.

On TikTok, #retrogaming videos have amassed over 6bn views. On YouTube , uploads have increased 1,000-fold. Spotify users are creating 50% more retro-gaming-themed playlists than they were at this time last year, and live streamers are cashing in on the repetitive catchphrases and mechanical movements of NPCs (non-player characters). So why, in this age of hyperrealistic graphics and ever-expanding technological possibility, are younger generations captivated by an era of technological limitation?

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