The South African soprano on her love of Star Trek, a Stockholm gallery that used to be a squat, and where to find a great negroni in London

The soprano Golda Schultz was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1983. She studied journalism before switching to singing at the University of Cape Town and then Juilliard in New York. In 2011 she joined the Bavarian State Opera. Since then she has sung at La Scala, the Met and, in 2020, at the Last Night of the Proms , as well as releasing two acclaimed albums. Schultz, who lives in Berlin, makes her debut at the Royal Opera House as Fiordiligi in Jan Philipp Gloger’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte , from 26 June to 10 July. She also appears at Buxton Opera House on 8 July.

The comedy producer, 51, reflects on early ambitions to be a stockbroker, dodging racism by being a wheelchair user, and being noisy enough to get invited to the party

I was born in Cairo and moved to Northern Ireland when I was two for my parents’ work – they’re both doctors. I’d open my mouth and this really manic Northern Irish accent would come out, which was even more incongruous for a little brown boy in a wheelchair. When my family moved to England, my nickname at school was IRA.

I was really interested in becoming a stockbroker. I’m a product of the 80s, with the stock market booms and red striped shirts. I thought: they’re just sitting down, shouting into a telephone. I could do that! That’s what I trained to do, but when I got there, I wasn’t very good at it. I got fired or resigned – depending on who you ask.

I can’t tell you that I grew up wanting to work in comedy. It’s something that occurred to me quite late. I got my midlife crisis out of the way when I was 23, a realisation that I was at the bottom of a ladder I didn’t want to climb. There’s something melancholy about trading in the City. As the new guy, I’d sit seven down from the man who’d been there 25 years. I thought: I don’t want to be him.

If you’re a wheelchair user, it’s all you know. Growing up, you start to realise that most people are not wheelchair users and you are a significant minority. It’s unwelcome learning that the world has not been built to help you.

I can’t remember experiencing racism. It’s the second most obvious thing about me. Had I not been in a wheelchair, my heritage might have turned up more. If you looked at me as a child or even now, the first thing you might say is: “That man is a wheelchair user.” Only then would you add: “He is Egyptian.”

I don’t subscribe to the narrative that it’s hard to make comedy in the current climate. Only a small percentage of issues are hot-button topics: gender, the trans debate. Do those things occupy my thinking when I’m putting together a new sitcom? Not at all. If you want to go straight into the fire and talk about those things, good luck to you. But that’s not where 99% of comedy sits.

I’ve always been worried about being invisible. It’s GCSE psychology to say the guy in the wheelchair wants to make sure he’s noisy enough that people take notice. Working in comedy is one way of making sure you’re invited to the party.

I find it very hard to watch comedy. I’m either hugely envious or writing script notes in my head. I want to watch television for escapism. The problem is, it’s what I do for a living.

I cry relatively easily. I get quite melancholic and nostalgic about the passing of years. It can bring me to tears quickly.

I had some interior designers help me do my flat. They said, “You should include something to do with The Office .” I thought that would be showy, so instead they came up with this ugly picture of a canal in Slough that has nothing to do with the show I produced. It’s been on the wall for years.

Is there a God? Well, my family thinks so, so hopefully they’re not reading this. If there is, I’ve got a few notes for him.

Things You Should Have Done is available to catch up on BBC iPlayer

The chef and her friend Jérôme Merdrignac on all-night parties, chosen family, and brutal honesty

Born in Samoa in 1975, Monica Galetti is a chef, MasterChef judge and Amazing Hotels presenter. She developed a passion for food on her family’s plantation on the island of Upolu, before moving to New Zealand, where she established her name in the world of fine dining. In 1999, Galetti moved to London to work for Michel Roux Jr at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Gavroche, where she met her friend, Jérôme Merdrignac, who runs the London-based boutique dog walking business, Active Barks . Galetti is working with The Singleton whisky brand on its new Dream Gathering campaign .

A teenage Riley gets to know Anxiety and Envy in the Pixar animated sequel, and Westeros descends into civil war as the Game of Thrones prequel returns

Inside Out 2
Out now
The first Inside Out gave us five personified emotions living inside the mind of 11-year-old Riley. Now a teen, Riley and her brain must contend with the arrival of new emotions, including Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

Pitching his creed to a roomful of comic stars, the pontiff pronounced that it is good to laugh at God. In which case, he may enjoy these

A hundred top comedians are generally considered a tough crowd, but Pope Francis had them rolling in the aisles at the Vatican on Friday, with jovial praise for their profession.

To “laugh at God” was fine, he explained, in the same way “ we play and joke with the people we love ”.

Nicola Coughlan’s steamy start to the costume romp’s third season is the show’s most passionate yet – although it’s not the worst TV episode you could unwittingly watch on public transport…

This week I have seen more than one tweet from mortified people who thought it would be OK to watch the new batch of Bridgerton episodes on the train on their way to work. The reason they were mortified was the first new episode, in which a sex scene goes on and on. And on. And on .

According to people who know these things, the sex scene – between Nicola Coughlan ’s Penelope Featherington and Luke Newton’s Colin Bridgerton – was the longest in the show’s history, clocking in at almost six minutes. It was so long, in fact, that Coughlan and Newton managed to break the furniture they were filming on.

At the Tribeca premiere of Wise Guy, a documentary about the legendary show, cast and crew laughed and reminisced

David Chase selected Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ to soundtrack the final moments of The Sopranos in part because he liked the lyric about how “the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on”. (His decision was sealed when he floated the idea to his writers’ room and everyone reacted in uniform revulsion.)

Depressed kingpin Tony’s attempts to self-improve, compromised wife Carmela’s delicate program of rationalization, the capitalistic churning of America – it all continues ad infinitum, and last night at the Tribeca film festival’s premiere of the documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, it was clear that the saga of New Jersey’s top “waste management consultants” wasn’t over, either.

Audiences at the time had to deal with the shock of seeing the actors’ old faces in this weighty but fun threequel that dealt with the mysteries of matter, death and eternal life

Forty years ago, the Star Trek movie franchise reached its Solaris stage with this mystic and melodramatic threequel, written and produced by TV veteran Harve Bennett and directed by Leonard Nimoy himself. The Search for Spock (and how that title must have startled everyone still getting over the shock of his demise) dealt with the mysteries of matter, organisms, death and eternal life. The last two of these were especially piquant considering that the audiences at the time had to deal with something that is forgotten now: the unease and even shock at seeing the characters’ faces, so youthful in the concurrently running TV show, looking suddenly older, blown up to big-screen size.

This is a film about the passionate bromance between Kirk and Spock – and above all about sacrifice. In the previous film, of course, Spock had died, thus teaching future franchise creators a lesson about how a death can electrify the fanbase. This one begins by remembering his poignant farewell to Kirk in a small black-and-white panel in the centre of the screen; rather a coup de cinema. And yes, it is a genuinely sad moment, accurately depicted in the famous episode of Seinfeld when George Constanza realises that he is more devastated by Spock’s death than by that of his own wife.

Journalist Sian Eleri reaches out to the 14 men who saw a flying object when they were schoolboys in 1977. Plus: Gardeners’ World live. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Three
The TikTok generation are increasingly obsessed about UFO sightings, according to curious Welsh journalist Sian Eleri, who investigates the local history of the phenomenon in this four-part series. She starts with a double bill, reaching out to the 14 men who claimed to see a UFO when they were boys in 1977, and the hotelier who weeks before said she saw a spaceship and “two creatures”. Hollie Richardson