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.

Irish TV reporters interview evacuees after fire alarm, only to find incredibly upbeat Hollywood star

Dublin TV viewers watching news coverage on Wednesday night of a hotel fire were surprised to find themselves tuning in to an interview with a Hollywood legend.

RTÉ News dispatched a camera crew to the Shelbourne hotel in the city centre, only to discover that one of the guests who had been evacuated was the Happy Days star Henry Winkler .

The longtime Daily Show host takes his satirical style to podcasting with The Weekly Show. Plus: five of the best election podcasts

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There are some things that feel like they definitely won’t work as a podcast. Right up there is anything about adorable animals – after all, you can’t exactly hear the tiny button noses. When it comes to cute creatures, it seems obvious that there’s no better way to appreciate them than gazing at them.

But this week, I discovered Animal , a New York Times podcast that proves that the beauty of fauna works even when it’s coming at you via your earholes. From charming tales of rescued baby puffins (technically known by the super-cute term “pufflings”) to a borderline immersive piece of storytelling about the ethereal experience of being stared at by a manatee, it’s a captivating listen – and it has redefined my ideas of what podcasts might be good at.

Julie Etchingham will have her hands full as they vie for the public’s approval. Plus: the finale of We Are Lady Parts. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.30pm, ITV1
Penny Mordaunt, Angela Rayner, Daisy Cooper, Stephen Flynn, Nigel Farage, Carla Denyer and Rhun ap Iorwerth have been confirmed as the representatives of the seven main parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Reform UK, Green, Plaid Cymru) to take part in ITV’s second general election debate. Following last week’s Sunak-Starmer head to head, Julie Etchingham will again lead the hour-and-a-half discussion. Hollie Richardson

Who is the most nefarious baddy? Will it be Grotbags? Skeletor? The Jack Straw lookalike in The Demon Headmaster?

He’s back. Aardman Animations have delighted fans by confirming the return of the infamous Feathers McGraw in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl – the 70-minute film that will premiere on the BBC and Netflix this Christmas.

But how evil is he? How does he compare to, say, Wolf from Gladiators? Read on for our countdown of the all-time rogue’s gallery of children’s TV baddies.

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.

These are serious times, and they demand silly entertainment. Please, British TV – send in the clowns

Do we need more stupidity in our lives? With the state of the world as it is, the obvious answer is that we most definitely do not. But what if we need more stupidity in our comedy? The actor and comedian Diane Morgan argued last week that there is a crisis of stupidity in on-screen comedy: “Mandy [her show about an idiotically unemployable woman] is stupid. I don’t think there’s enough stupid stuff. Most [comedies] have always got a bit of drama or a bit of romance … you can spend a lot of money on having something look nice, but it doesn’t make it any funnier. In fact, I think it sort of impinges on it.”

This is true. We need stupid, cheap, unpolished stuff. Also out this week is a new documentary celebrating the career of Steve Martin, one of the greatest standup comedians of the past century before he became known to a younger generation for Only Murders in the Building. Martin’s whole shtick as a comedian was in being as stupid as humanly possible. Arguably, this is the root of pure comedy: lack of self-awareness, the folly of existence, the inevitability of humiliation. We need to see more stupid people being stupid for the sheer joy of it. Not just because they are standing for public office.

Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

Of all the political dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most fervent and committed. As a Mancunian Marxist he brought to theatre his love of dialectic. He also believed passionately in “strategic penetration” of the citadels of culture. He succeeded, in that plays such as The Party and Comedians were taken up by the National Theatre; Bill Brand, an 11-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for Reds, co-authored with Warren Beatty and based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

If there was one theme that informed Griffiths’s work, it was the conflict between reformist pragmatism and revolutionary idealism. It was there in an early work like Occupations, first seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and quickly picked up by the RSC for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Set in Turin in 1920 at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers, the play involves a head-on confrontation between Kabak, a businesslike Comintern representative, and Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian firebrand advocating shop-floor soviets.

Fans are outraged, ex-cast members think it’s drivel – even its current actors are fed up. How did the world’s longest running soap go from shaping the national conversation to thinking it’s a ropey crime drama?

Whether it’s Deirdre being sent to prison , Alan Bradley getting mown down by a Blackpool tram or “you should have stayed at the party, Maxine” , Coronation Street has provided some most memorable moments in UK soap history.

At its peak, the world’s longest-running television soap could pull in 26 million viewers an episode and its stories, such as the introduction of the transsexual character Hayley Cropper , helped shape the national conversation in a way Westminster politicians could only dream of. But in recent years, Corrie has faced a backlash from fans who say they are fed up with dark, issues-based plots, an ever-increasing cast and sporadic scheduling of ITV’s flagship soap.