#alan-bennett

#alan-bennett

It follows a young Syrian boy, Ahmet, who arrives in the UK without his parents. He joins a school and befriends a group of kids who hear that the government is going to close the gates. They don't fully understand what it means other than that Ahmet's parents, who must be looking for him, won't be able to get into the country. So they decide, in a beautifully innocent way, to go to the most powerful person they can think of—the queen!—and ask for help to find Ahmet's parents and keep the gates open.

For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other's material and finding the alchemy, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it's been like comedy boarding school.

Mr. Darcy is its stern romantic lead. He has a massive income from his estate - 10,000 pounds a year - and, according to the novel's witty protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, just as large of a stick up his ass. Jane Austen was not one to go for lengthy physical descriptions of things, but we do know that when he enters a room, he draws people's attention with a "fine, tall person, handsome features," and a "noble mien."

I'm most at peace at our place in Kangaroo Valley, a couple of hours south of Sydney - we have 12 acres of native Australian semi-rainforest. If I'm five hours into a day of trying to get rid of the weeds from a copse of trees, I'm pretty fucking happy, especially if my kids and my wife are helping me.

I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound, Allen tells me. And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn't been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.

A romcom fanatic, Foxx didn't quite get the quaint four-bedroom apartment in Bloomsbury he assumed he'd land when he moved to London, but he did, at least, get the guy: a tall, fit rugby lad, just his type, he tells us. Yet after several years of sort of bliss, sort of reluctant mothering on Foxx's part, the Julia Roberts meet-cute fantasy crumbled.

In a now-deleted video, the 51-year old Little Britain star was filmed and followed by Thomas Abdullah Bourne on the escalator of a London Tube station. Mr Abdullah Bourne, known on social media as White British Muslim, was heard shouting Free Palestine. Free Palestine, Matt Lucas. After initially attempting to hide his face, Lucas calmly acknowledges his pursuer at the top of the escalator and asks: Hi, how are you?

The Shitheads is part period piece, part family drama and part allegorical epic. It unfolds at some time in prehistory (10,000 - 50,000 BC, to be exact). Nomadic hunter-gatherers coexist with a family of cannibalistic cave dwellers who justify their eating habits by dehumanising their human prey. Hunter-gatherers are 'shitheads', they say - inferior, stupid, without expansive interior lives. One of these cave-dwellers, a straight-talking fighter named Clare (Jacoba Williams - Vera), meets Greg (Jonny Khan - Statues), an endearing, simple-minded gatherer.

From Yes Minister co-writer Jonathan Lynn comes I'm Sorry, Prime Minister - the final act between Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey. Jim Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones) is back - older, no wiser, and still gloriously out of his depth. Dreaming of a peaceful retirement at Hacker College, Oxford, Jim instead collides with a very modern nightmare: being cancelled by the college committee.