Sebastian Stan gets real (estate) in Donald Trump’s origin story, and Iannucci, Mendes and co have fun on a superhero movie set

The Wild Robot
Out now
Using a hand-painted aesthetic, this warm-hearted family animation tells the story of a shipwrecked robot who becomes the adoptive mother of an orphaned goose. Lending her dulcet tones to the robot is Lupita Nyong’o, with Heartstopper’s Kit Connor as the goose.

Continue reading...

Strictly Come Dancing is no longer just a dance show – it’s a battlefield for culture wars, says Marina Hyde. The extraordinary story of Robbie Parker facing down right-wing provocateurs after losing his child. Philippa Perry offers advice to a reader whose partner wants more sex and more enthusiasm

Continue reading...

After Starstruck and Taskmaster, the new project sees Sidi play a profane, lowbrow version of Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff. She explains why her latest comedy creation is breaking-news proof

When Emma Sidi was in year seven, a classmate predicted she would one day become a comedian. Her reaction was one of total horror. “I was like: no! I thought she was being really rude and saying I was like an old man. I thought: wow, I really am so ugly and uncool.”

Twenty-one years later, on an unseasonably warm September afternoon, Sidi can appreciate the prescient compliment. She did become a comedian, and has spent the past decade refining her own gratifyingly flamboyant character comedy while making scene-stealing appearances in a slew of great British sitcoms ( Starstruck , Ghosts , Black Ops , Stath Lets Flats , W1A , Pls Like ). Even so, the 33-year-old does understand where her former self was coming from: there were vanishingly few comic female role models around in the early 2000s, and it’s not difficult to imagine why a preteen girl might have feared she was being likened to a sweaty middle-aged man ranting into a microphone.

Continue reading...

Delia Balmer spent four days as the hostage of her murderer boyfriend, only to survive his axe attack – and get him put away. The team behind a challenging drama about her horrific experience tell all

Nick Stevens is remembering the first time he met Delia Balmer, the only known survivor of serial killer John Sweeney , whose story he wanted to dramatise. The meeting went very badly. “She was half an hour late,” recalls the screenwriter. “She wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was very agitated and angry.”

Even though Stevens was familiar with the sensitivities of true-crime stories from his previous dramas In Plain Sight and The Pembrokeshire Murders , this was extreme. But he soon realised that the behaviour of Balmer – played by Anna Maxwell Martin in new drama Until I Kill You – reflected the PTSD she suffers due to Sweeney. In 1994, after she ended their three-year relationship, he held her hostage tied to a bed for four days and later attacked her with an axe, as recounted in her memoir Living With a Serial Killer, on which the show is based.

Continue reading...

Tasha Ghouri waltzed to the top of the leaderboard with this year’s first 9s, with Toyah Willcox and Paul Merson down the bottom. But as the public vote opens and the first elimination looms, who will be the first to get sent home?

Cue tension-building VT.

Charge your glasses and open a grab-bag of Monster Munch. We’re about to go over live to Elstree …

Continue reading...

Dominant demographic among viewers ‘don’t feel like they are represented on screen’, say Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin

The creators of a new “working-class Downton Abbey ” drama say the lack of such programming is being compounded by the decline of soaps and “posh older guys” who have had the monopoly on storytelling.

Made by the producers of All Creatures Great and Small , the “rags-to-riches” period drama The Hardacres is the brainchild of Call the Midwife and Our Girl writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin, who said they chose to make the series because, “more working-class people watch telly than any other demographic, but they don’t feel like they are represented on the screen”.

Continue reading...

It’s quite a leap for a ‘fragile, sensitive kid’ to find himself starring in a Hollywood action movie. After the huge success of Industry and his new part in Joker, Harry Lawtey reveals why being in denial is the only way he can make sense of it

It’s not that Harry Lawtey is kidding himself. He’s fully aware, as we chat in a west London pub, that a giant billboard with his face plastered across it is now towering over New York City’s Times Square. “A friend sent me a video of it just this morning,” he says, prodding at a plate of steak and chips. “My mug, that big in Manhattan? I can’t make any sense of it, so I don’t think about it. It feels better for me to live as if it’s not actually happening.”

Lawtey has been thinking a lot like this lately, as his career and public profile have rapidly accelerated. The 27-year-old already has two critically acclaimed seasons of the HBO/BBC co-production Industry under his belt: a highly stressful, cash, cocaine and hormone-fuelled drama about a group of graduates during their first forays working at a fictional London investment bank. Lawtey plays a leading role – and its third instalment is about to hit UK screens.

Continue reading...

Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty examines the struggle between Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo

Renaissance Florence bubbled with deceit and corruption. It was the place menaced and blackmailed by Cesare Borgia and ruled on the advice of Niccolò Machiavelli himself. Yet inside this treacherous city, three of the greatest names in art vied to create works of transcendent beauty. Each of them is still recognised by only one of their names: they are Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Not much written evidence survives of the creative rivalry that raged between these men – and what has endured often does not stand up to scrutiny. But this autumn the British public will have the chance to witness the competition between these revered artists with their own eyes for the first time. In fact, they will be able to see it twice: once on the walls of the Royal Academy of Arts, where drawings by this trio of masters will be brought together for comparison as never before (from 9 November), and later on television.

Continue reading...

David Mitchell turns sleuth in a genuinely funny comedy thriller; Rachel Johnson gets the boot camp treatment; Annette Bening leads a stodgy mystery; and searing documentaries tackle Hamas atrocities and Kirkby disorder

Ludwig (BBC One)
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4)
Apples Never Fall (BBC One)
Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again (BBC Two)
Small Town, Big Riot (BBC Three)

Comedy thrillers are a tricky genre, too often imploding into a tonally bumpy mess: usually not quite funny enough, and about as gripping as a game of half-hearted yuletide Cluedo.

Continue reading...