Despite being just a short walk from the station in Farringdon, the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's members room on Greville Street is discreetly tucked away. We're invited along for a newcomer-friendly tasting experience on a weekday afternoon, which predictably ends with a sozzled yet satisfied stagger back to the tube.

Obviously London isn't short of great whisky bars, but the Scotch Malt Whisky Society is distinguished in a few ways: one, they get around 250 bottles of each cask, so there's a finite nature to everything you can drink. Two, they independently bottle and label their own whiskies, meaning that the product is primarily designed to make you think about taste and not distilleries, region, branding or anything else.

Their tasting panel matches each whisky to a flavour profile. These eight flavour profiles include such variations as Flagrant & Floral, Smoky & Fruity and Toasted Oak & Vanilla. The point is to find a whisky that matches your sensibilities, and if that profile works for you, there will always be something new to try on a repeat visit.

A warming introduction

The staff at the members room clearly pride themselves on being novice-friendly. Up to 80% of the flavour comes from wood, they remind us. And most of the tasting is smelling the whisky. They presented us with three bottles initially: one called Sweet & Zesty, one Dried Fruit & Spices and one Bold & Peaty.

Travelling across these three flavour profiles in that order was the right way to do it. The Sweet & Zesty option ('The Village Patisserie at Dawn') helps our palate adjust and breaks us in – it's the most familiar kind of taste if your primary exposure to whisky is sweeter off-the-shelf supermarket stuff.

Following this, the Dried Fruit & Spices choice ('A Roly Poly in the Hay Loft') smells richer, and deepens the impact on our taste buds with a spicy orange aftertaste.

By the time we've reached the Bold & Peaty option, though (the filthily named 'Ointment on Roasted Nuts'), the other flavours prove hard to go back to. At first, this is an almost confrontationally smoky whisky, especially for a relative newcomer. But once the palate adjusts, the darker aftertaste is extremely pleasing.

Again, given the finite nature of what the SMWS does, you won't even be able to try these exact flavours for yourself. As one customer tells us, though, that's part of the appeal – you might buy a bottle of something in the moment because you know it's not going to come around again.

Plus, the flavour profiles mean you'll always find something else in that proximity next time you visit the members room.

'Eventised' whisky

To cap it off, the staff bring out a pair of bottles they'd recently launched as part of a Whisky Equinox event: one representing light ('Riesling Spritz in the Sun'), one representing dark ('Spice it Up After Dark'). Both nicely complement each other, even if once again the deeper and darker tastes of the latter win out for us.

The idea of 'eventised' whisky based on the calendar is a fun notion and no doubt the kind of initiative that keeps members coming back.

At this point, five drinks in, the bartender senses our increasing enthusiasm for the smokier side of things. Stopping just short of saying "let me show you the real shit", he reaches for something special from behind the bar.

The final whisky we try is called 'Smouldering Mojo'. It's an "experimental" small batch blended malt that's been matured in Mezcal casks. This comes under the society's more provocative 'Heresy' label and hasn't been available since last summer – this was from the bartender's own personal stash. He tells me that peaty whiskies were what he grew up with, and therefore his preferences are skewed as a result.

Smouldering Mojo is the extraordinary-tasting final boss of smoky whiskies, and it no doubt won't be to the taste of some traditionalists because of how it was made. But it summarises the mission of the society: to enjoy the drink however you want. If you want one of these fancy whiskies served with Coke, they won't mind.

Getting involved

The SMWS could fairly be called attainable luxury – membership starts from a reasonable £100 online (with a £75 option in-person that offers a smaller bottle freebie). The most enticing part of that proposition is surely having exclusive access to the members' rooms of each venue, with three other locations in Scotland.

The possibility of a quiet drink out of the way in central London with familiar bar staff and accessible flavour profiles is a nice pitch, even if you're a whisky novice and this isn't a world you've really dipped into before. It's no surprise that some regulars visit up to four times a week, according to the staff there.

It's also a comforting retreat if you're working from home and need a break from your computer. The age range of clientele on our weekday visit was incredibly wide, and members can sign in up to three visitors, too. The extra cost, of course, comes in ticketed tasting events, and the mild threat that you'll find a drink you like and leave with a hundred quid bottle of it.

As ever with the extensive tasting notes for each whisky, your actual ability to detect jam roly-poly, cinnamon danish or any other dessert in what you're imbibing may vary.

But even if your vocabulary to describe whisky only extends to basic adjectives like 'sweet', 'smoky' and 'spicy' barked out in Partridge-like fashion, you'll find something to like here. Alcohol branding can be incredibly cynical, but at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society you can only make decisions based on taste, not graphic design or fonts. There's something refreshingly accessible about flavour being the only real pitch.

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Arguably the rot set in some 25 years ago, when rockstar chef Marco Pierre White claimed that he was ‘giving back’ his three Michelin stars. White said he was over Michelin; that the acclaimed restaurant ranking guide had lost touch with reality and wasn’t consistent in its somewhat cryptic judgements. And he was only the first, too: over the years since a spate of high profile chefs have effectively renounced Michelin — even if, technically, stars are awarded not to an individual chef but to a dining establishment. The late, acclaimed chef Skye Gyngell, of London’s Petersham Nurseries, for example, said she prayed never to be awarded another star.

And still the rebellion grows. Last year Giglio, an Italian restaurant in Lucca, asked for its star to be removed from Michelin’s famous ‘red book’ guide. It had become more of a deterrent to diners than a lure. And then the acclaimed French chef Marc Veyrat went so far as to ban Michelin’s mystery diners-cum-inspectors from his restaurant in Megeve altogether. In 2019 he’d lost a star at one of his other restaurants because — shock! — he’d allegedly used cheddar in a soufflé. He called Michelin “the gravediggers of French gastronomy”.

Certainly chefs have suggested that, for many of them, Michelin is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, working for an establishment that’s awarded a star — let alone two or three — undoubtedly remains the ultimate accolade in their line of work, especially if it’s their name over the door. A chef with a Michelin star will forever after be referred to as ‘Michelin-starred chef Insert name here...’. Some have suggested that there are financial advantages too, with takings said to increase 20% for one star, 40% for two and 100% for three.

And yet, on the other hand, there’s talk of what Gyngell called the ‘curse of Michelin’: that a star comes with a huge increase in pressure, both to maintain that star (each establishment with one is, in theory, reassessed on an annual basis to gauge whether they should keep it, or, indeed, be awarded another) but also to meet the expectations of diners, which are also inevitably amped up.

'A stick to beat yourself with'

While a Michelin star is meant to be a judgement of nothing else but a restaurant’s food — the quality of ingredients, the skill and personality of the cooking, its consistency and, less believably these days, its value for money — invariably the kind of diners drawn to a Michelin starred place tend to want a certain formality in the setting and spectacle in the dishes. Conversely, as many people are also turned off by their notion of what a scary Michelin-starred restaurant must be like even when it isn’t.

No wonder Michael Deane, who held a single star for 30 years (eventually ‘handing his back’ when he decided he wanted to take his business in a new direction, effectively wiping his Michelin slate clean) would note how some chefs think of the award as “just a stick to beat yourself with”.

Certainly Michelin’s reputation has at times faltered, such that many an aspiring chef might wonder if the whole scheme isn’t more a kind of useful propaganda rather than a genuine reflection of greatness in the kitchen. Thanks to a handful of whistle blowers, Michelin has been beset with bad PR about its practices, with certain among its inspectors — who pay to eat at restaurants anonymously, and spend most of their year on the road, eating heavy meal after heavy meal — suggesting that actually it’s a rare thing for a restaurant to undergo regular assessment. There just aren’t enough inspectors to go around. They’d also claim that around a third of restaurants in Michelin’s guide were deemed ‘untouchable’, something Michelin would deny. Michelin has also been accused of bias towards younger chefs, and male ones.

There has been what some would call poor management, too. In 2020 Michelin introduced a green star as an accolade for those restaurants that showed exemplary sustainability. Last year it unceremoniously withdrew the award — much to the ire of those chef/owners who had striven to win it and who were now barred from advertising as much. This was all because, it’s assumed (Michelin isn’t saying why) too many diners were confusing green star restaurants with one star restaurants.

Worth a 20 mile diversion

Then there’s Michelin’s limited scope: it’s only in recent years that Michelin has extended beyond its heartlands of Europe and the big American cities, into, for example, Asia, where the culinary scene was world-class long before Michelin recognised it as such. The bigger problem in this? To offset declining sales of its printed guide, Michelin has struck deals with national tourist boards in the likes of China and South Korea — somewhat compromising any assessment its inspectors might subsequently make.

This is, at least, in keeping with the origins of the Michelin Guide. It was created in 1900 by Andre and Edouard Michelin, founders of the French tyre manufacturing giant that takes their surname, who saw it as a way of getting the few people who owned a car at the time to travel further afield. It started awarding stars a century ago this year, in 1936 introducing the multi-star system, one meaning ‘this is a safe place for travellers to eat at’, through to three, which meant ‘this is worth a 20 mile diversion’.

It would sell a lot of guides — way, way more than there were cars in France. But then, historically, Michelin wasn’t above promoting anything if it boosted demand for its tyres: within a year of WW1 ending, it was publishing a guide to the best battlefields to visit. This continued to be published annually, and to great success, all the way up until 1938 when, erm, events would soon make its poor taste somewhat more obvious.

Changing tastes

But perhaps the biggest problem for Michelin is that it simply hasn’t kept pace with the times. That popular misconception of what a Michelin-starred restaurant is like — a bit stiff, with a dress code, a lot of white linen and fussy staff — cuts against the way people dine in the 21st century, especially younger people, and especially during what’s proving to be a rather extended ‘cost of living crisis’. In fairness to Michelin, it has broadened its remit: street food vendors can now, officially at least, win a Michelin star, but this is a rare event.

“We now get very few enquiries from chefs wanting to open a restaurant that’s really premium. Eating habits have just changed. People are more excited about simple food done well, served in a more casual environment,” argues Ben Floyd, founder of hospitality consultancy Lumiere, which counts Harrods among its clients and which soon opens its own Covent Garden restaurant, Subsume.

“Of course chefs still want a star on their CV, for all of the emotional and physical toll it takes to get one. But I don’t think Michelin resonates with customers as it used to.”

It’s not just attitudes to what constitutes a great dining experience that have changed radically. So have our means of assessing whether a restaurant is worth our heavy expenditure. Arguably Michelin wins publicity way out of proportion to its actual relevance: how many people really consult the Michelin Guide to work out where to dine next? Rather, most now rely if not on personal recommendation, then on social media, or one of the multitude of other guides online that might be more in tune with their tastes. It surely doesn’t help that online commentary so often suggests people leave their Michelin experience decidedly underwhelmed, at least for what they’ve been charged.

Sure, Michelin may still count for much within the hospitality industry. Outside of it, among diners, not so much. And, some say, even less so among actual foodies, at least compared with those who see their restaurant choices as more about status signalling than the culinary excellence they’d otherwise struggle to identify. Perhaps a parallel might be drawn here with the Oscars. Who won what used to be a topic of enthusiastic interest in popular culture. Now it’s a brief headline and we all move on to watch what our mates suggest is worth watching, statuette or not.

“In my experience Michelin inspectors were always thorough and fair — and much better than any self-taught food blogger,” says Michael Deane.

“I’d always believed [the high-end restaurant business] was all about the food but started to want the kind of place that paid more attention to the feel good factor, not the kind of place where if you drop your fork 10 waiters come rushing over.

"I’m not sure who wants that now,” he adds. “It’s a big enough struggle out there as it is, with staff and food prices having to go up, with staff suffering a lot of burn out. So maybe Michelin has lost its point.

"And yet I still think every city needs at least one Michelin-starred restaurant — it’s a magnet. And for chefs a star is still the holy grail. The fact is that you still have to be able to really fucking cook to get one. That must count for something”.

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Raymond Blanc has long been a symbol of fantastique cooking, bringing the French flair beloved by Michelin inspectors and fancy chefs to London plates for decades. Having stepped out of the kitchen and in front of the cameras, he's a familiar face on our screens, whether it's from his shows Simply Raymond or his cameo in the beloved sitcom Miranda.

Who better than Blanc to provide the ultimate foodie tour guide for London, bringing both his cheffing credentials and his love for the city to the table. After teaming up with bakery chain Paul to bring a bit of sophistication to Londoners' daily coffees, the Michelin-starred chef has shared his other favourite places in the city to spend time at, from killing a quick thirty minutes in between meetings, to the 'viral' spots he wouldn't bother checking out.

London has a bounty of incredible restaurants, where are you desperate to try? Who do you think is doing something really exciting at the moment?

We are lucky to have so many wonderful places on the doorstep. There are wonderful places in Marylebone — one of my favourite places is Lita, it has such a good menu and a lovely atmosphere. And Blandford Comptoir Restaurant — Xavier Rousset [the award-winning Master Sommelier who served as the Head Sommelier at Blanc's Michelin-starred Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons] has created a wonderful place. The menu has such a good selection and of course his wine list is wonderful. I think that Bouchon Racine is also fantastic and every time I go there I have such a warm welcome. I’m also keen on Nina in Marylebone — in fact it was my partner, Natalia who took me there and I was really impressed.

Are there any London spots you think are overrated? We're seeing a lot of 'viral' places or the Tiktok-ification of the eating scene. Are there any spots you avoid, and any that you wish had the hype?

As a chef, I am very curious to try as many places as I can and I don’t tend to visit somewhere just because it is the new place to be seen. I am lucky as I have worked with so many talented people who have their own restaurants or bars and I will always try to support them as much as I can. It is not easy to own and run a restaurant these days with wage cost, National Insuarance, food cost, rent, etcetera.

Over the years, I have worked with and have a great friendship with Heston Blumenthal, he I recently had dinner at The Fat Duck and it was amazing – one of the best meals I have had for a long time. He is so creative and has such knowledge and creativity – it is definitely somewhere to add to a wishlist.

Let's talk about your average day. What's for breakfast, Raymond?

In the morning, if I swim early at my local health centre, I tend to stop on my way home to get a coffee and croissant from PAUL Bakery on Baker Street or Marylebone High Street, but if I am home, I will have some yogurt and blueberries or maybe porridge as it gets chillier now the autumn mornings are here. Simple yet delicious.

If you've got a spare 30 minutes to kill, where are you heading to after that?

I try to walk as much as I can and if I can allow extra time before meetings, I enjoy doing that. I am lucky as home is near Marylebone Village so walking there is nice and I enjoy places like Southbank as there is always so much going on along the river and I can always stop at Brasserie Blanc.

Lunchtime! Where do you head for a midday recharge?

If I am in a hurry I will go to a Joe & the Juice. Energiser Juice is really good and the Tunacado. I also try to arrange meetings at one of the Brasserie Blanc’s – Southbank or Threadneedle Street are both great locations and I can combine meetings with saying hello to the amazing team. At the moment I’m enjoying the tomato salad with a lovely baguette.

Sometimes we all need an afternoon pick-me-up, do you have any go-tos?

I try not to snack too much but sometimes enjoy a patisserie in the afternoon or will buy some fresh fruit. Apples at the moment are so delicious — albeit the crop this year is not that great due to the heat wave we have all experienced this summer.

In a very sophisticated (ahem, French) manner, if you were going for an Apperitif, what are you choosing?

Well this is a good question! I do enjoy a negroni or a glass of champagne – or a glass of pinot noir, a wine from my home region. Close by me is Le Vieux Comptoir – it is a French wine shop with a small deli and café. And I am so lucky Xavier who used to work at Le Manoir has a wonderful little place really close to me – Blandford Comptoir. I go there very often, it’s small but really convivial and he has a wonderful selection of wines.

Polit Bureau, Seagrave, Mucho Pelo, the Children. Hernan Diaz’s third novel Ply takes place in a future New York City, one in which life expectancy is way down, public services are gone and both energy ('Tensor') and water ('Flow') are controlled by one big, shady corporation, CTS, and its security apparatus. This crumbling speculative city is being slowly reclaimed by flora and fauna but art still matters: it’s also populated by underground bands — with excellent names — who need help powering their experimental live shows at venues like the Newsroom and the Dead Fountain.

That’s where Diaz’s unnamed protagonist, the pincher, comes in. She gets her name from her profession: stealing electricity from the main grid, which is unavailable to many of the lower ‘downtown’ classes. Her invention of a new form of power storage ‘brick’, in turn, leads her to a strange, ‘flunk’-addicted scientist and one near-impossible physics project involving a CERN-style accelerator and the search for a fundamental subatomic particle.

After the success of Diaz’s bestseller Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and which currently has a HBO TV adaptation starring Kate Winslet in development, almost everything about Ply feels like a deliberate turn into uncharted territory. It’s a fascinating collision of themes and subject matters which deploys literary experimentation, including a mid-point ‘fold’ in narration and some freewheeling final pages, that matches the ambition of his characters’ higher-minded schemes. We caught up with Diaz via Zoom from his book-filled home in Brooklyn, to talk about big ideas in gritty places.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Shortlist: When you were talking about your previous novel Trust, you did a lovely video about how you worked in the New York Public Library, and in the acknowledgments to this book you mention CERN and a few other science labs. I wondered where did the first germ of the idea for Ply come from and where was this book written?

Hernan Diaz: The germs of ideas are complicated. The birth of an idea is very obscure to me. I don't know quite how it happens. I know it has to do with a lot of reading and listening to music and watching films. I got this idea almost at the same time I got the idea for Trust, and they both coexisted in my head for a long time. In the end, I decided to go with the novel about capital over the novel about technology. But, you know, I kept thinking of what would become Ply all the time. So it's been gestating for at least a decade.

And then it was written a little bit all over the place, mostly in Brooklyn, which is where I live. I was lucky enough to get help from different fellowships that meant that I wrote some parts in Sweden, which is where I spent my childhood, some parts in Italy. And, you know, I'm also on the road for work a tonne and I feel very lucky to be able to do so. But I would say this is a very Brooklyn novel in terms of where it was written geographically and also in terms of its spirit.

Well, let's stick on that to start with: your beautifully rendered future city. I'm a big sucker for plants taking over, animals reclaiming cities… In terms of your process, was it characters first and then you think about where to situate them, or was it the city first?

Look, I'm not super methodical. I am very precise and controlled on the sentence level. It's not spontaneous. It's very deliberate and slow and painstaking. But when it comes to the project as a whole, I'm not a drafter. I'm not an outliner. I don't have the cool Post-it notes on the wall with the whole structure. It all comes into being as I write. And because I write very slowly, the way in which it comes into being feels cohesive. Like, it's messy in other ways, but not in that way. There's ample time for me to think ahead a few steps and see how things will play out. So I don't know what came first and what came second. I think it was all part of the same narrative gesture. I wanted a very tough but fragile protagonist in a tough but fragile environment. I think they both came as different manifestations of the same emotional texture.

You're right, the ‘what came first’ is a boring question. So talk to me more about this tough but fragile environment then of this city.

Well, I think the title, Ply, refers to many things. One of them is that the novel takes place at a historical juncture that I conceived of as a fold. It's the end of one epoch and the incipient birth throes of the next one. So it's a moment of great precariousness and a lot of the guarantees that we take for granted today that are mostly to do with the institution of the state, from the rule of law to public services, all of that has vanished, which is, I think, a trend that we see today. And this is, of course, very painful, and it comes at a great human cost.

But at the same time, these people in this imagined future have lost many things that are absolutely worth losing, that have to do with the alienation of our everyday life, the commodification of interpersonal relationships, the constant surveillance we're under. All of that is gone too, which is lovely.

That also implies new social constructs and contracts, new familial relationships outside of the patriarchal nuclear family, new economies that don't have to do with the capitalist model, a thriving art scene and a new relationship to nature that is not debased to being a contextual kind of phenomenon, but something that is us and an awareness of that. And ultimately a new idea of what being a human being means and what selfhood means. That is at the core of the novel. Going back to your question, the city is an embodiment of these tensions, of the ugliness of the end of a historical process, but also the enormous promise of what lies ahead.

In the character of Acevedo we have a “tinker” [an engineer and repairer of goods] who represents one version of this sort of community-based anarchy in the absence of state-run public services. I thought it was very beautiful that your protagonist, the pincher, rejects his mentorship for love, which is, you know, very irrational.

I know.

She could have had it all! But yeah, what are some of the intellectual underpinnings of Acevedo's worldview?

Yeah, well, Acevedo is sort of this monkish, very austere character in the book that takes in this recently orphaned protagonist under his wing and nourishes her talents, and while doing so expounds on his worldview. It's a novel of ideas very unapologetically, that's what the book is enormously about. There's also a noirish subplot, the wild science in it. There is also friendship and love and betrayal and trust. But I think I was drawn to the tradition of novels of ideas.

So some of these characters have, let's call them philosophical programs or manifestos in their minds. And I agree partially with all of them, and I disagree to some extent with all of them as well. I'm a friend of ambiguity. I like that. I think it's the natural habitat of literature, this kind of opaque, undetermined territory. I'm not particularly drawn to novels which claim to have it all figured out.

So I think what seem to be moments of great certainty in the book, like when this character speaks or when the scientist lectures in the second section of the novel, are indeed actually moments of great doubt. Like, what is salvageable in these thoughts? What can be rescued? What helps us think about our circumstances and what is, on the other hand, blow-hardiness? There are always those characters in my work who are catastrophically sure of themselves.

I do want to talk about the music and resistance of it all in Ply. So tell me about the relationship between them, because it seems quite unique to me. The drugs in this live music scene affect the body, as does the music, directly.

Yeah, well, our scientist is a drug addict, our narrator-protagonist is an alcoholic… But the music scene was very important to me. I always write about music in my books, and my previous novel Trust was a very musical novel. It's formally structured as a sonata, and music plays a big role there. But here I was interested in, especially, the post-punk scene, more than the first wave of punk, because it's music that truly takes place in space. It's music that makes us really aware of the vibrancy of space as an element, right? It's music that you feel more on your skin than in your brain or in your ears.

Also the DIY ethos of the whole movement and working with very limiting objective constraints, normally with very shitty gear and with a lack of musical education, which is presented as a virtue, of course. There's nothing shameful about it at all. But what I care about, in this context, is how great what came out of those limitations was. That to me speaks to the world of Ply, a world that is very limited but also very freeing and freed in very similar ways. I was very drawn to having this completely outrageous futuristic invention in this very gritty context.

None of your bands come on stage and shout “fuck Tensor”, there's none of that first wave of punk, like you said. Do you know this idea of ‘above the neck’ and ‘below the neck’ in music? Like perhaps the pincher doesn't fully understand the structure of the piece but she is feeling it and it is transforming her. So you maybe make a case for abstract art.

This is a book so much about physicality, in the widest possible sense, from the body to particle physics. I love to write about music and it's very challenging because it can be super cringey very fast. It can become super embarrassing.

I find it the most difficult art form to write about by far, yeah.

Oh yeah, I agree. Because it has to do with intensity, it's very hard to write about intensity. It's like writing about sex. It's impossible. So I did want for the music not to be described in intellectual terms, but as a physical experience, both as something taking place in a literal sense in space, but also how it registers on the body. So those were my parameters around how to talk about music.

If we stick on this idea of connecting with people, this is a book that does include a heist and colourful characters and double crossings. So talk to me about combining the novel of ideas with that accessibility and reaching mass audiences?

That's a great question. You know, I think it has to do with the fact that I'm a very greedy reader and writer. I like very conflicting experiences. I love, love novels that make me feel the viscosity of language, language that makes me slow down. I was a former philosophy student, so there's nothing slower than that, right? So, I like that feeling of operating in that gear where everything really comes to a grinding halt. And you experience syntax, you experience punctuation, you experience every single lexical choice. And that's pleasure to me.

But I also love the opposite end of that spectrum when you forget language. I also love forgetting that I'm reading. Dickens is the best example for me. I forget that I'm holding a book. I'm being held by the book and everything vanishes. And you know what I'm talking about. And it's great.

And I want both of those things. I really try to do that in everything that I write. I am not shy to have these hyper kind of conceptual moments, but then I love like go-go-go-go-go speed. So I went for that here as well, probably more than anywhere else.

Yeah, you achieve it. With the scientist character Pola’s mysterious disc at the center of her scientific experiment.. the narrative can be seen as a series of, like you said, physical impacts on the characters, the disc being the sort of final one. Were you listening to music or in an altered state when you were writing those passages?

Oh God, I listen to music all the time when I write. I have a nine-hour-long playlist of purely instrumental music. So yeah, I have sort of my musical canon that reflects very well what the novel sounds like, not just the music, but emotionally what the novel sounds like to me.

One of the things I picked up on is that the more you learn about science, the more scientists tell you how much they don't know. And the more you learn about art, the more you see the underlying patterns of say, music and how that might relate to science or maths. So, talk to me about that. There seems to be a hardening of the two sides, whether that’s down to AI or other technology and then the humanities get left off to the side.

I mean, I had to learn about particle physics to write this book. I thought it was a tribute to or an acknowledgement of the intelligence of the reader to present this mad invention in a way that was coherent and viable. I mean, this machine can never be built for a bunch of engineering reasons, which are actually presented in the book itself. But it is theoretically kind of possible.

It would have been much easier for me just to make up a bunch of sophisticated tech sounding words and just be done with it, as they do in most science fiction films. You just drop a few words that are meaningless and they're kind of tokens of futurity and of scientific and technological complexity, and you move on with your plot. I very much did not want to do that. I wanted for the invention to have substance because the scientific ideas behind it are so gorgeous and so beautiful and counterintuitive that it seemed like a missed opportunity not to present them as beautifully and succinctly as I could to the reader.

So I think we, in the arts, tend to think that the hard sciences are very dismissive toward what we do. I think there's great truth in that. This is a generalisation but there is this sense of: you guys as artists deal in myths, in fables. You're like the decorators or pastry chefs of the world. Whereas we, the scientists, deal with the truth, with facts, and we are purveyors of what truly matters, of the essence. You just do the fluff. Obviously, I take great issue with this. I think art has proven again and again and again to have a very intimate relationship to truth.

I think the novel, specifically, is the best technology we have to imagine what it is like to be in someone else's consciousness. That is the territory of literature. Nobody else can do that, right? But what I've also learned is that we artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians know very little about what's going on in science. And just to use physics as an example, I'll speak for myself. I lived in a completely Newtonian world. Fully, I was there. No centuries had elapsed at all. And I think this is true for a lot of people who really don't know what the standard model is or how matter behaves at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, or how special or general relativity works. These concepts are, by and large, alien to most of the people in my world. I'm not the exception, I'm actually proof of how alien they are.

I think there is a lot of work to do in terms of a conversation between science and the arts. And I've been lucky enough to have engaged with physicists here in the United States and in Europe. I went to CERN, I went to Geneva, I spent a week there, 150 feet underground with back-to-back meetings every day with theoretical and experimental physicists, like eight hours a day.

Oh wow.

I also was the writer-in-residence here in New York at the Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, so I spoke with neuroscientists for a year and a half, and I was very hungry for what they had to say, and they, I think, were very excited about the place that imagination could have in their work.

What kind of conversations were you having there?

Well, it's incredible. It's a beautiful state-of-the-art facility with many teams of researchers and labs running different projects in every aspect of neuroscience. It's home to a couple of Nobel laureates. It's a very serious hardcore place. As someone who comes mostly from a tradition of continental philosophy, rooted in idealism, it was a big eye-opener for me. I've been raised intellectually in a very dualistic kind of tradition: mind versus body, ideas versus sensorial manifestations, noumena versus phenomena, res cogitans (thinking matter) versus res extensa, (tangible matter). The list goes on and on. And this is how many of us have been raised. And for me to be exposed to these scientists at this center was a complete revolution.

This is all in the novel, of course. I find it quite impossible to uphold this paradigm, to think that there is something in us that is kind of untethered and unmoored and unanchored from our physical frame, that is immaterial, and that this immaterial bit of our selfhood is actually what defines us as conscious sentient beings. So what truly makes us is something that is completely ethereal and can't be pinned down in any way and is radically divorced from matter. I can no longer believe in that. It's just... it's over. I cannot. Like, I view that as almost believing in Santa Claus or something. It's impossible for me. On the contrary, I think we/ I/ you/ me are the result of immensely complicated interactions between matter and forces, and I find this harder to explain and more fascinating and more complex than the other rather simplistic and superstitious explanation. It's all in on the materialistic approach.

My experience at the Mind Brain Institute had a big role to play in this, but it's not disconnected from quantum mechanics or particle physics, the idea that all macroscopic systems emerge from the interaction of matter at this very elementary level. This, of course, raises important and decisive questions like, who am I truly? And who are you? And how can we hope to relate to one another? What is the space between us? And I was trying to phrase this as pithily as I could in the novel with the example of the sun: when you look at the sun and a photon hits your eye, like, what is really the difference between you and the sun? Where does one end and the other begin? We need to rethink these boundaries of selfhood, and I find these questions very, very, very appealing.

With your character Pola, she's extremely attuned to the difference between genius and mental illness and how others might view her. There's this idea, isn't there, that to reach greatness, you might have to stretch a bit further than other people are comfortable with?

I mean, I've always been interested in the figure or the trope of the “mad scientist”. I used to be a university professor and I taught a semester-long seminar on mad scientists. And what draws me to this figure is that it amalgamates what we think culturally as the absence of reason, incorrectly of course, which is madness, and also equally incorrectly, the apex of reason, science. So you have these two extremes again amalgamated into one term: mad scientist. And this to me is a very productive dissonance, right?

It speaks to the porous boundaries of reason, and also the criminalisation and the punitive perception of madness that we've had, at least in the West, forever, still to this day. Most of these, always in air quotes, “mad scientists” have a very problematic relationship to the law. You know, they're lawbreakers. They break the laws of nature, and they also break the laws of man, as they're called. They're usually criminals, hell-bent on global domination. So I find this figure to be extremely interesting, their single-mindedness and their monomaniacal kind of drive and their hubris.

And a lot of them are complete drug addicts and that is science impacting the subject itself, right? It's these chemicals that are being taken into this body. So it's kind of the absorption of technology. All of this becomes even more complicated when you think of a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, a hyper-classic, overly quoted book on the philosophy of science, where he famously defines a reigning scientific paradigm as a ‘normal’ science. But, in this context, if you dwell on the word normal, it has a completely new resonance. So it makes sense that scientific revolutions would be abnormal, or again, air quotes, “crazy” right?

Right. Obviously you've learned a lot about physics and neuroscience throughout the process of working on Ply, but what have you learned about writing fiction to carry forward?

My ambition as a writer is to not be recognised in my book. You know how everyone talks about having a voice? I don't want to ever have a voice. I want each book to be new, to break new ground for me and to be texturally and orally, like acoustically different. In this one, the syntax is completely new to me. I'm writing sentences in a new way for the most part. Sometimes I go back to something that I recognise as me but then I try to hide it.

For the most part, I've been writing about the past before. Now I'm writing about the future. So how do you make a believable future? That's something I had to teach myself, how to make that world not silly to begin with. That's the first thing you feel when the future fails, it just feels lame and stupid. So what are the parameters to achieve verisimilitude in a future setting? What do you resort to? I think that was one of the biggest things.

Also how to write about youth. I'm not young anymore. I have a teenage daughter whom I adore, and this book had her in mind at all times. And so how to capture that, or how to remember that freshness and that hunger and that elation. Those were things that I had to learn to write about.

• Hernan Diaz’s Ply is out now in the UK, published by Picador

This November, Church of Sound, a pioneering grassroots jazz night, will step out of its usual home at St James the Great church in Clapton to take over Barbican Hall for a celebration of the night’s 10^th anniversary.

On Friday 20th November, as part of the prestigious EFG London Jazz Festival, a specially assembled band led by trumpeter and musical director Byron Wallen will celebrate the impact of UK jazz of the 60s and 70s, while also showcasing the scene of today. The band will feature contemporary figures such as saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, guitarist Oscar Jerome, saxophonist and flautist Tamar Osborn, singer Norma Winstone and drummer Jas Kayser among others.

Byron Wallen bursts with enthusiasm as he discusses plans for the anniversary gig.

“It's about honouring a specific period but also showing the movement forward from there," he tells Shortlist.

"It represents various aspects of the music community, from the more improvised free scene to the groove scene, which in some ways are polar opposites but are actually quite united.

"It will explore the legacy of British jazz, which is inspired by American jazz but came up with a sound of its own. From there it will show how the current musicians and younger musicians are working today”.

At the inception of the night, founders Lex Blondin of legendary studio and cultural space Total Refreshment Centre and multi-instrumentalist Spencer Martin couldn’t have predicted where their project would take them, or that they’d be celebrating this anniversary at the Barbican.

Establishing the night and in fact finding a suitable venue was a challenge from the get-go, as Martin recalls.

"We considered doing a show at one church, but we could never quite convince them to get on board, so after about six months we gave up," he says.

"They then directed us to St James the Great, to the reverend there, Rosemarie Mallett who was Area Dean of Hackney at the time – a charismatic, relaxed and convivial woman. What had felt like an impossible task at the first church suddenly wasn't. We turned up at St James and she basically said, 'When's the first date? Let's go.'"

A unique format

One of the hallmarks of Church of Sound since its inception has been its format. The band on the night plays twice – first performing a ‘song book’ set where they honour a particular artist, period or influence and the second being a showcase of their own music. One particularly notable show saw Ezra Collective pay tribute to the legendary afro-beat originator Fela Kuti.

For Blondin, the format has always been central to what is special about Church of Sound.

“The songbook thing started when we launched. It was an incredible time for the scene and a lot of the artists like Shabaka [Hutchings] were hanging around at Total Refreshment Centre," he recalls.

"I realised at one of Spencer’s nights that [drummer and band leader] Yussef Dayes sounds like Idris Muhammad. I mentioned it to him and the songbook idea germinated from there. I’m a big fan of all this music, but I’d rarely experienced it live because many of the artists had passed away or it was just a personal listening experience. Being able to translate that into the live realm and share it with 400 people in a beautiful way, set the tone going forward."

The founders wanted the night to be a celebration of musical history, but also crucially a forward-looking event that gave space for innovation that is happening now.

As Martin puts it – “It was a really natural and useful way of contextualising music that was happening now, and placing it in a certain lineage, recognising similarities and things that have been inherited. It's nice to pay tribute, but also to use that tribute as a way of showcasing the new music as well. It also allowed us to naturally split things into two sets, which turned out to be a huge part of Church of Sound."

New blood, new sounds

At the heart of the night’s ethos is fostering talent and supporting the jazz scene here in London, to help it continue going from strength to strength — Wallen is unequivocal when talking about the event’s role for the music.

“One of the interesting things about Church of Sound is the building of the community," he says.

"As an artist working there, you're bringing in all facets of the community and especially music that is marginalised. To see that vibrancy of it and young people coming out who haven't necessarily been versed in jazz is incredible. They want to come because they know something special is going to happen and they trust that the music they hear is going to be great. As an artist coming into that situation is a real blessing”.

The list of artists who have played at Church of Sound reads like a who’s who of contemporary UK jazz from the aforementioned Ezra Collective and Shabaka to Moses Boyd, Emma-Jean Thackray and many more.

Blondin and Martin have also managed to bring in many international musicians too, including the late great Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen and legendary saxophonist Gary Bartz. A “pinch me” moment as Lex puts it, came when they booked The Cookers – an extraordinary American jazz super group featuring legends such as saxophonist Donald Harrison and Eddie Henderson on trumpet.

There are huge plans for the future of Church of Sound as it continues to be a significant cultural showcase for London’s jazz scene. As an event that has always celebrated lineage and history while looking to the future, it can now have a moment to reflect on its own history and contribution.

• The ‘Church of Sound 10^th Birthday/ British Jazz Songbook’ show comes to the Barbican on 20 November 2026. It is part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

• The BIG London gig list 2026: Your guide to this year's very best shows, festivals and concerts

When most musicians branch out into other fields they set up their own clothing label or launch a new booze brand. But Tom Vek has much grander plans than having his own trainer range or a bottle of vodka with his name on it.

Vek is the man behind four studio albums and one digital audio player called Sleevenote – a pocket-sized attempt to bring some value back to music. He released his debut album We Have Sound in 2005, but it was during the recording of the follow-up, 2011’s Leisure Seizure, that the seed for Sleevenote was planted.

Apple’s iTunes Store had really blown up in the interim and all of a sudden album artwork had gone from being something fans would pore over on the bus home from HMV to a tiny bundle of pixels on a screen.

“I was very taken with the industrial design of the iPod,” says Vek over Zoom from his house in Margate.

“It was very unusual for things to be bright white and it had a sort of sci-fi friendliness, almost like NASA. But the cover art was tiny and the rest of the sleeve art was missing.”

As somebody who had grown up with physical media and studied graphic design at art school, the visual element of an album was almost as important to him as the music itself. As well as writing and recording everything you heard on his records, Vek also designed everything you saw, so to have it reduced to the size of a postage stamp frustrated him.

An alternative to streaming

Vek met his Sleevenote co-founder Chris Hipgrave in 2018 and the pair spent a couple of years working on app ideas that would bring that focus back to the artwork, but the rise of nasty freemium models and what he calls “App Store bureaucracy” pushed them towards exploring their dream product: a digital music player with a square screen for showing off album artwork properly.

After a failed crowdfunding campaign in 2020, and the news in 2021 that Spotify founder Daniel Ek had started funding military technology, Vek and Hipgrave decided to go all-in on a product that would give music fans an alternative to streaming.

“I know as an artist that it actually costs you to really be on Spotify, because they have all these extra features to push your music that mean you get paid even less,” says Vek.

“It's just insane that a music service can have such bad press and still have a monopoly.”

Sleevenote’s Day One Edition, which sold out all 100 of its available units earlier this summer, has a 4-inch touchscreen for displaying full artwork and liner notes, which can be uploaded by artists who, like Vek, want fans to experience the full package. For albums that don’t have it, Sleevenote can still pull in basic artwork from the internet.

The aluminium case also includes six physical buttons to control power, playback and volume, while both wired and wireless headphones are welcome thanks to Bluetooth 5.4 and a 3.5mm socket. It supports hi-res audio files and you get 256GB of storage to fill.

App-free listening

Just as important to Sleevenotes raison d’etre, though, is what the device doesn’t do. It runs on Android but there are no apps or phone calls; no Spotify or other streaming services; and while it does have Wi-Fi it’s only for transferring tunes and sending certain listening data directly to the Sleevenote Discord community.

Instead, there’s a real focus on using sites like Bandcamp in order to financially support the artists as fully as possible. According to Sleevenote’s website, if you spend $10 on a digital download, $8 goes to the artist – a much higher proportion than even buying a vinyl record or some merch (which when bought at live shows can often be subject to the venue taking a cut), and a whole world away from the miniscule payments they receive from streaming.

“It's good to buy music,” says Vek. “It's good for the artist but it's also good for people to actually own it.”

Anyone who’s a fan of a band who has pulled their music from Spotify, as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard did after news of Ek’s investments broke, will attest to that.

A Trojan horse

Vek is not the first musician to move into this kind of hardware either. Neil Young’s PonoPlayer aimed to improve on the sound quality offered by more mainstream devices but its existence was short-lived. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $6m, the PonoPlayer started shipping in late 2014, but by April 2017 it went the way of the dodo, with Young citing the higher cost of hi-res audio files as the main reason for its demise.

Sleevenote is a much smaller operation and doesn’t rely on its own music store, so pricing of downloads isn’t a concern, although Vek is keen to find a way to make the device itself more affordable (the Day One Edition was £249/$349). He also wants to improve the battery life, which currently stands at between six and eight hours.

For Vek, though, his main hope for Sleevenote is bigger than sales. He sees it as a “kind of Trojan Horse that encourages people to actually buy music.” That’s a pretty lofty ambition, with streaming too convenient to resist for most listeners, but there are signs of hope.

Gen Z is driving a resurgence in CDs and MP3 players, while a significant proportion of people who buy vinyl don’t even own a turntable to play their records on, so there’s clearly a desire among some music fans to support artists properly.

As both a recording artist and a tech fan, it feels like Vek couldn’t be better placed to create a product like Sleevenote.

“Tech that deals with culture needs to be built by people who really do passionately care about that culture,” he says.

“To see music battered around so much by it has been really frustrating.”

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Tom Cruise’s recent press blitz for Digger has seen the reemergence of a seriously weird label.

Have you heard? Apparently, Cruise is ‘the last movie star’.

Setting aside Leonardo Di Caprio for a second, and dismissing the question over what exactly that makes Timothy Chalomet, there’s the small matter of Cruise’s most famous contemporary. If Brad Pitt isn’t the very definition of a movie star, then what are we all even doing?

As it happens, Pitt too has a new film to push. Two, in fact.

First up, from September 24th, there’s Heart of the Beast, directed by David Ayer. In it, Pitt’s special forces veteran is forced to embark on a perilous trek through the Alaskan wilderness, with only his faithful German shepherd Odin for company.

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is set to follow later in the year. Written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher (two frequent Pitt collaborators), it sees the star returning to the role that finally earned him an Oscar back in 2019.

While he got a much later start in the business than Cruise, Pitt has built up an enviable body of work over the decades, encompassing indie favourites and box office crowd pleasers alike.

Throughout the actor’s career there seems to have been a fascinating tension between his obvious leading man looks and a desire to push into more challenging, less flattering territory.

These different sides are well represented in the following list of the best Brad Pitt performances.

8. Thelma and Louise

Given how minor his role is, you might wonder why Pitt’s performance in Ridley Scott’s 1991 drama warrants a place on this list. This was the movie that set a 27-year-old Pitt on a path to rapid superstardom, however, helping the struggling daytime TV star to break into the Hollywood elite. His cocksure wanderer J.D. condenses everything we think of as a quintessential Pitt performance – laid back cool and effortless sexual magnetism with a background hint of deceit and degeneracy – into seven minutes of mesmerising screen time. You’ll be every bit as taken in as Gina Davis’s put-upon housewife.

7. Inglourious Basterds

Regardless of what you think of Quentin Tarantino’s sixth movie – or indeed of Quentin Tarantino movies in general – it can’t be denied that Brad Pitt’s contribution to Inglourious Basterds is quite extraordinary. His Lieutenant Aldo Raine appears to have been plucked straight out of a mid-century comic book – a blunt, chisel-jawed hero with an impossibly thick Tennessee drawl (even when speaking Italian) and an uncompromising drive to kill Nazis. He suits the larger-than-life ahistorical tone perfectly, forming a brash counterpart to Christoph Waltz’s chillingly suave SS colonel Hans Landa.

6. Ocean's Eleven

Anyone who doubts the part of the introduction asserting that Pitt is a bone fide movie star needs to revisit Ocean’s Eleven, and sharpish. In Steven Soderbergh’s impossibly slick heist romp, Pitt’s laconic criminal schemer manages to match George Clooney’s charming lead for pure cool and charisma every meticulous step of the way. Under Pitt’s guidance, Robert "Rusty" Ryan casually glides through the movie’s labyrinthine plot, with equal parts snacking and smouldering. It’s amazing to think that his role didn’t even exist in the 1960 original.

5. Fight Club

It’s at this point in proceedings that we’re going to emphasise the distinction between the best Brad Pitt films and the best Brad Pit performances. Because Fight Club, as influential as it was at the very end of the 20th century, hasn’t aged too gracefully. Its once edgy, counter-cultural appeal feels rather crass and forced as we approach its 30th birthday. Pitt’s performance as the mercurial Tyler Durden, however, continues to impress, thoroughly convincing as both the id of Edward Norton’s nebbish office drone and as a cult leader for disaffected young men.

4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

This is the role that won Pitt his one and only Oscar (to date), scooping him the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance as chaotic stunt man Cliff Booth. It’s a role that you can’t imagine anyone else but Pitt playing, combining his effortless laid back cool and weathered good looks with an underlying note of danger and tension. It’s why you’ll just as easily buy his character flirting with a young hippy or fixing an aerial as you will his casually kicking Bruce Lee’s arse or brutally slaughtering a gang of Manson acolytes.

3. 12 Monkeys

Pitt had shown plenty of signs that he was more than just a pretty boy before 1995, but this was the year when he truly arrived as a multi-faceted and genuinely interesting Hollywood actor. As one-two punches go, you don’t get much more impactful than Se7en and 12 Monkeys. The latter role was particularly transformative for the star, seeing our golden boy playing a jittery and erratic psychiatric ward patient. It wasn’t exactly a subtle delivery, but then you don’t expect subtlety from a Terry Gilliam film about a convict sent back in time to stop the apocalypse.

2. Se7en

The first release in Pitt’s annus mirabilis was this bleak and nasty crime thriller – the first of several collaborations between the star and David Fincher. Pitt plays David Mills, a hotheaded young detective tracking a fiendishly intelligent serial killer. His character’s friction with Morgan Freeman’s world-weary partner forms the heart of the movie, while the film’s devilishly clever plot hinges on Pitt’s emotional response during its devastating denouement. Suffice to say, the actor most certainly doesn’t phone it in.

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Andrew Dominik’s 2007 historical drama is a near-perfect film, with impeccable cinematography (Roger Deakins strikes again), soundtrack (from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), and performances from a talented cast. Nowhere is that latter point more evident than in Brad Pitt’s central take on the real life Wild West bandit, Jesse James. Pitt wholly convinces as a living legend who seems to have been immortalised within his own lifetime – with fateful results, as he encounters Casey Affleck’s awkward and resentful super-fan. It might not have won him any awards, but this was peak Pitt.

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Autumn officially kicks off on 23 September, but you don’t need to consult your meteorological calendar to tell you that. The nights are starting to draw in, and it’s now possible to go out before dinner time without the risk of your shoes melting into the pavement.

Of course, while the ambient temperature might be starting to drop, London’s art scene is really heating up. As well as being able to catch the end of some of our top picks from the summer, the autumn exhibition line-up for the capital is also starting to take shape.

We’ve got a great selection of artistic showcases for you to check out across London during the latter part of the year, some of which are completely free.

With the weather predicted to be both warmer and wetter than usual this autumn, moving between the dry, temperature-controlled venues on this list sounds like a particularly good idea.

And if you manage to capture London on one of its brighter days, we have a couple of outdoors events to help you make the most of it.

Bayeux Tapestry

Where: British Museum
When: September 10th to July 11th
Price: From £25

We seriously ummed and ahhed about including this one, because the simple truth is that if you don’t have tickets already, you’re not getting in to see the Bayeux Tapestry this autumn. More tickets are set to be made available on October 21st (that’s autumn!), but these will be for the winter and early spring (that’s not). Still, the exhibition is technically taking place right now, and the chance to see this 1,000-year-old and 70-metre-long piece of embroidery on home turf makes it one of the hottest tickets in town. Still can’t go? Check out some of these alternatives..

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Where: Kew Gardens
When: Until January 31st
Price: Entry to Kew (From £25)

English sculptor Henry Moore gained acclaim across his 70-year career by creating huge, curvaceous sculptures that frequently wound up on display in public spaces across the globe. Kew has assembled 30 of his works, which have been scattered thoughtfully throughout London’s world-famous botanical gardens. There’s also an indoor exhibition at the on-site Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, which showcases 90 of the late artist’s smaller works, including some of his drawings and sketchbooks. All are viewable for the price of a standard Kew Gardens entry ticket.

Es Devlin: Other Worlds

Where: Design Museum
When: October 9th to April 4th
Price: From £21

London-born Es Devlin has designed sets for some of the world’s biggest musical acts (Beyoncé, Adele, Kanye West), sports events, and major theatrical productions. She’s also the creator of large-scale immersive art installations. This Design Museum exhibition will mark the first retrospective in Europe celebrating the artist’s 30-year career, and the largest anywhere to date. It seeks to place you inside of Devlin’s head, starting with a complete replica of her London studio, running through her early sketches and school works, and centring on a large ’30-Year Desk’ that’s been specifically designed for the space.

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends

Where: National Portrait Gallery
When: October 8th to January 31st
Price: From £23

Tim Walker first came to prominence as a fashion photographer in the ‘90s, and his work has since appeared in the likes of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and iD. He also supplied the album artwork for Harry Styles’s second album in 2019. His photographic work is known for being extremely theatrical in nature, inspired by fairytales and surreal imagery. This latest exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery highlights his work around queer identity, with the artist having spent the past five years photographing various activists, performers, artists, and other queer trailblazers.

Korea

Where: British Museum
When: October 1st to January 31st
Price: From £18

Beat those no-Bayeux blues by popping around the corner and checking out The British Museum’s new Korea exhibition, based on works taken from the collection of late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee. It’ll take you on a trip through some 2,000 years of artistic output from an East Asian country that’s having a bit of a moment on the global stage, with the oldest pieces (bronze ritual implements) dating back as far as 300 BC. Elsewhere expect luminous ceramics, delicate porcelain objects, and rare Buddhist paintings. It’s the most consequential collection of its kind to hit the UK in 40 years.

Frieze Sculpture

Where: Regent's Park
When: September 16th to November 1st
Price: Free

And now for something completely free. The 14th edition of Frieze Sculpture has arrived in London’s Regent’s Park, with 11 leading international artists supplying works. Wander around this most stately of London’s green spaces this autumn and you’ll spot sculptures from Angelo Otero, Conrad Shawcross, Carolina Aguirre and more. If you’d like further insight into this year’s selection, then curator Fatoş Üstek is offering a one hour free public tour on the last Sunday of the exhibition in the south-east corner of the park at midday.

Becoming America: How Science Shaped a Nation

Where: The Science Museum
When: October 23rd to April 25th
Price: Free

As the United States of America celebrates 250 years since it declared independence from Great Britain, and with the pre-eminent global superpower enduring a prolonged period of political turmoil, what better time to reflect on the nation’s historical achievements and pitfalls? The Science Museum will be running a free exhibit this autumn containing a number of maps, paintings, instruments and artefacts illustrating America’s scientific endeavours from the 1760s to today – for better and for worse. Among them, an undoubted highlight has to be a rare surviving 1776 print of the Declaration of Independence.

Painting the French Riviera

Where: Royal Academy of Arts
When: October 2nd to January 31st
Price: From £26.50

This ode to the French Riviera features more than 160 works from a number of 19th and 20th century artists that were directly inspired by the region’s azure seas. With works from the likes of Monet, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, it makes a compelling claim to be central to the development of modern art. Hand in hand with this artistic side, the exhibit also explores how the region became the go-to destination for the great and good of the music and movie scenes in the mid-20th century. Perfect viewing as things become a whole lot greyer in the UK.

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UK jazz has been having somewhat of a renaissance for a good few years now. Torchbearers Ezra Collective have repeatedly achieved feats previously thought impossible for bands from the scene, such as winning the Mercury Prize, bagging a Brit Award for Group of the Year and now scoring a number one album.

It seems a perfect time for a new jazz venue to be stirring things up in London, drawing in some of the biggest names from the UK and globally. But this isn’t just any venue – it’s Blue Note, a name synonymous with high class jazz clubs and the best music the contemporary scene has to offer.

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The original Blue Note jazz club opened its doors in New York in 1981 and since then sister venues have popped up around the world, in cities from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo to Milan. Blue Note London finds its home on St Martin’s Lane Covent Garden – becoming the group’s ninth venue.

Nick Lewis, Director of Music and Programming at the venue buzzes with excitement as he discusses Blue Note London’s vision for its opening season and beyond.

“We’re going to bring a big vibe and a contemporary flavour to seated live jazz and jazz-adjacent gigs in the city! The Blue Note room itself is looking absolutely gorgeous and I’ve no doubt artists are going to love performing there, while music fans are going to love being in the room.”

For Lewis, it was important to support and promote talent from the burgeoning UK scene as well as bringing in the international acts.

“I wanted to feature as many of the big names in our brilliant UK jazz scene as possible to really represent the fact that Blue Note, an American brand, is coming to London and recognises our scene loud and clear.”

With a classic jazz-club feel, extraordinary artists and a fine selection of food and drink, the venue is sure to quickly establish itself in the hearts of London jazz fans. With a stellar opening season this autumn and winter – we pick ten not to be missed shows.

1. Nik West

• 30th Sept + 1st Oct
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Described by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics as “The female Lenny Kravitz”, Nik West has become known for her gutsy fusions of funk, soul and rock. A virtuosic bassist and highly distinctive singer – West has a commanding stage presence and is bound to light up Blue Note across this four-show run.

2. Baaba Maal

• 4th-6th October
• Two shows per day at 7pm and 9.30pm

A true legend of West African music, Baaba Maal has been fusing the traditional sounds of Senegal with influences from the wider world for over four decades. Throughout his career, he has incorporated everything from the blues to electronic elements with traditional sounds. He will debut a brand-new quintet at this show. A perfect chance to see a genuine pioneer in an intimate setting.

3. IMEHO – An Intimate Experience with Erykah Badu

• 10th + 11th October. Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

A true original, a five-time Grammy winner and genre defying creative force – there are many ways to describe Erykah Badu. Nick Lewis has called booking her “literally a dream come true” and has noted that these shows “will be her most intimate to date”. Most well-known for legendary albums such as 1997’s Baduizm and 2000’s Mama’s Gun, Badu is bound to delight London audiences as she takes to the Blue Note stage backed by a full live band. If you fancy going, be quick as these shows are bound to sell out.

4. Nubya Garcia

• 15th-17th October
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Playing six sets across three days, Nubya Garcia will light up the stage with her soaring tenor sax work and fiery compositions. Over many years and with the release of albums such as her much-lauded debut Source and 2024’s Odyssey, she has occupied a position as one of the true trailblazers of contemporary UK jazz. Her mastery of the music sees her create pieces that draw on everything from dub to RnB and classical influences.

5. Hak Baker

• 18th October
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Hak Baker has quickly become one of the most distinctive and intriguing voices within London’s music scene. A soulful singer and storyteller, he combines elements of everything from folk to post-punk and reggae. His genre smashing approach has earnt him fans from Mike Skinner to Pete Doherty. Why not grab this chance to see a fascinating artist at this early point in his career as he takes to the Blue Note stage.

6. Shabaka

• 19th + 20th October
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

From his punchy high-energy sax work with bands such as Sons of Kemet and the Comet is Coming, to his embrace of flutes and electronics on his solo work, Shabaka is an artist who never stays still for long. With his most recent album Of The Earth, he made every sound, handled production duties and even rapped on two tracks. It’s a set that simply couldn’t have come from any other artist. It’s distinctive, enthralling and exists firmly in its own lane. For these shows he will be joined by guitarist Dave Okumu and drummer Austin Williamson.

7. Brandee Younger

• November 8th
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Decades ago, legendary figures such as Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby helped establish the harp as a jazz instrument. Now, it’s making a return and demonstrating its role in the contemporary musical landscape. One of the leading proponents is the ever-engaging Brandee Younger whose playing honours those that came before her, but establishes the instrument firmly in a contemporary context.

8. Jazzanova Live feat Wayne Snow

• 27th November
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

During the 1990s Berlin Collective Jazzanova forged a distinctive path making electronic music that drew on jazz. Finding commonality between the fast-developing sound of broken beat and classic jazz instrumentation – this was music born of sample culture. Now with a full live band in tow, Jazzanova will reimagine their boundary pushing classic In Between – reconfiguring music built from samples in the live space.

9. The Brand New Heavies

• 13th - 15th, 20th - 22nd December
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Formed in 1985, The Brand New Heavies developed a loyal following for their blends of soul and funk. Going on to become a leading light of the UK’s acid jazz scene, they remain a force to be reckoned with in a live setting. The band’s sound is grounded in influences from the 1970s funk of Parliament-Funkadelic and James Brown alongside everything from rare-groove to early hip-hop.

10. Digable Planets

• 18th + 19th December
• Shows at 7pm and 9.30pm

Founded in the late 1980s, Digable Planets helped establish the blue-print for the emerging jazz-rap sound. The trio bring together sharp flows and socially conscious lyrics with beats that sample everything from Herbie Hancock to Art Blakey and Sonny Rollins. Their shows will be backed by a full live band.

• The 9 best jazz clubs in London

MobLand crash landed onto our screens last year, transforming national treasures Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Hellen Mirren into the narcotics dealing, trigger happy Harrigan clan, dealing out gawp-worthy one-liners and a whole lot of violence.

Well, violence à la exec producer Guy Ritchie, which usually means a helping of crash, bang and wallop, followed by a witty quip or two. Now, the Harrigans are back, and more blood thirsty than ever.

Season two picks up right after a calamitous finale, with the Harrigans – led by Brosnan as Conrad and Mirren as Maeve – struggling to show a unified front as rising rivals (including big wig Kat McAllister) threaten their fractured criminal empire. Harry Da Souza (Hardy), as their street-smart and formidable 'fixer', must walk a dangerous tightrope when tensions within the family intensify. As violence spills into every corner of their lives, loyalties snap, safety proves temporary, and the battle for power leaves no room for mercy.

Ahead of the new season landing on Paramount Plus on Friday 18th September, we sat down with Tom Hardy, Joanne Froggatt, Johnny Flynn, Anson Boon, Mandeep Dhillon, Lara Pulver, and Teddie Allen to hear about their favourite lines, co-star reunions, and potential cinematic crossovers.

SL: Congrats on S2! In episode one we see a quick cameo from Amir El Masry, reunited with former co-star Pierce Brosnan. But if you could reunite with a former co-star for a scene in MobLand, who would you pick to join the (under)world?

Joanna Froggatt: Oh easy, Dame Maggie Smith, sadly no longer with us but amazing

Johnny Flynn: Aimee Lou Wood is fab, she would be good.

Lara Pulver: [to Johnny] You’ve already just worked with Helen Mirren.

Johnny Flynn: Yeah, last time I worked with Helen she played my dying mother in a very sensitive, weepy film, and here she was causing chaos so that was a trip.

Lara Pulver: Do you think David Morrisey would come in as some kind of Policeman? Get a Scouser.

Anson Boon: I reckon Stephen Graham would be a good Scouse gangster to bring into the mix.

Teddie Allen: I worked with Andrew Scott when I was little and I feel like he’d be such a good villain.

Mandeep Dhillon: I’d bring back Daniel Betts, who played Brenden in season 1. I loved my scenes with him.

Tom Hardy: Scroobius Pip should have been in the first and the second [series] and I hope he’s in the third.

SL: There are so many brilliant one liners in MobLand. Do you have any favourite lines from season two? Any you were jealous your character didn’t get to say?

Anson Boon: There’s a line which cracked me up from the third or fourth episode, when the Harrigan’s new lawyers come round, and the female lawyer is getting on a bit too well with Conrad, and Maeve stands up and goes “Alright Meryl, you’ve had your moment, your Oscar's in the post”.

Johnny Flynn: I have to say I think I got all the best lines. I can only remember mine because I got so many good ones. I’m particularly mean to Kevin — there’s a line when he rings another character and I go “what does she want?”, I like that one.

Lara Pulver: You got so many, your episode three is full of them. Maeve always gets good ones, “f*cking google us” is a great one in the opening episode.

SL: There's a great scene with Pierce Brosnan and Emmett J. Scanlan having a quick pep talk in the bathroom — which makes a nice change from gun fights for a minute. If you had to have a bathroom pep talk before doing something important, which co-star do you think would give you the best one

Johnny Flynn: Tom – yeah he’s got a lot at his fingertips to drawn on, then it pulls together into this calm, “you’ve got this”.

Teddie Allen: I feel like Tom’s got the voice though to really lock you in.

Lara Pulver: Tom intellectualises stuff on a whole new level that my brain doesn’t even operate at so I always sit back in awe. And then he’ll throw in a Shakespearean reference and I’ll just nod in awe at where his brain has gone

Anson Boon: Dame Helen Mirren, easy.

Mandeep Dhillon: Oh, she’d fire you right up!

SL: Which National Treasure do you think would make a good mob boss?

Johnny Flynn: Stephen Fry.

Teddie Allen: Claudia Winkleman.

Lara Pulver: NOT Alan Carr. Celia Imrie would be hilarious – why are we all going down the Traitors route?

SL: Sort of feels like the closest thing we've got...

Johnny Flynn: Claudia Winkleman, she’d be good – hiding an AK-47 underneath that fringe. David Attenborough?

Anson Boon: I would be very surprised but how cool would it be if Sir David Attenborough turned around and was like “hey, guess what”... If we're talking national treasures go right in at the top, he’s amazing.

Lara Pulver: I’d tune in.

Johnny Fynn: That being his final show...

Anson Boon: Or Gemma Collins?

Mandeep Dhillon: Gemma Collins would be Incredible!

SL: Which show do you think would be cool for MobLand to have a 'cinematic crossover' episode with?

Johnny Flynn: I’d wanna see The Simpsons take on MobLand.

Lara Pulver: I thought you were gonna say The Sopranos?

Johnny Flynn: If they were still making it, Sopranos would make sense.

Lara Pulver: Dynasty!! Helen Mirren could have a cock-off with Joan Collins.

Mandeep Dhillon: I think mine would be The Gentleman.

Teddie Allen: I thought about this the other day, but The Gentleman would be cool – I feel like it isn’t that unfeasible, both in the Guy Ritchie world….

Anson Boon: Love Island!

SL: Who from Mobland would go on Love Island?

*everyone points at Anson*

Teddie Allen: I don’t think he [his character, Eddie] would be very popular with the public...

SL: He'd be prime Casa Amor territory wouldn't he?

Anson Boon: Could you imagine, Eddie as a bombshell?!

Tom Hardy: Shameless?

Joanne Froggatt: Shameless would be good

Tom Hardy: Or Downton

Joanne Froggatt: Could you imagine? Mobland x Downton

Tom Hardy: I'd watch that

Joanne Froggatt: The fourth movie that we weren't going to make

MobLand season two will air on Paramount Plus on Friday 18th September.

• "There’s nothing better than a bacon sandwich": Will Poulter talks cooking, acting and working with the kids food charity Magic Breakfast

Douglas Booth has spent his entire life in the limelight, a teen acting prodigy first seen in Julian Fellow's film From Time to Time and the BBC's adaptation of Great Expectations opposite Gillian Anderson before catching the eye of Hollywood. His leading-man-good-looks has seen him act opposite Miley Cyrus in LOL, Sam Claflin in cult fave The Riot Club, and Emma Watson in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. But he'd give it all up for a quiet life. "Sometimes I look at my gardener and think: that looks like a nice life," he tells Shortlist as he settles down for a pint in our Pub Corner.

But that spotlight is going to be squarely back on the star this autumn, as he takes on one of his most challenging roles yet, starring as s DI Tom Radley, the partner to Michelle Keegan’s wily DI Emma Crane in ITV's new twisty thriller The Blame.

Based on the novel by Charlotte Langley, The Blame follows a local police investigation following the discovery of the body of a young figure skater in a quiet town. What starts as a disappearance quickly turns into a twisted chase through police corruption, cover-ups, and the shocking choke-hold institutionalised misogyny has on the truth. It's up to Crane to get to the bottom of it.

In between solving crimes and dismantling the patriarchy, Douglas popped into our favourite The Lucky Saint pub in Marylebone for a couple of ice cold IPAs to chat about the new show, his favourite roles, memories of Maggie Smith – and spilling the tea on getting starstruck by superstar chef Yotam Ottolenghi earlier in the day.

Shortlist: Cheers!

Douglas Booth: Cheers! Been looking forward to this all day.

SL: Your new show on ITV, The Blame is based on a great book by Charlotte Langley. Having wrapped this adaptation, is there any book you would like to adapt for the big screen yourself?

DB: I just finished reading a book called Lazar and it's a multigenerational story about a family in the Austrian Hungarian Empire.

It takes them from the beginning of the Empire all the way through until the 50s. It goes through both world wars, it covers the Soviet rule and it's just all about humanity really, and... I want to say generational trauma. That makes it sound kind of heavier than it is, but just generational trauma passed down and watching how each generation affects the next generation, on and on, with all these different backdrops through history.

I read it on holiday and absolutely loved it. It is written beautifully by [Nelio Biedermann]. I would love to adapt that so if there's a producer out there doing that right now I would play any one of those parts.

SL: Or all of them, a one man show! The Blame is quite an intense police drama, but do you have a go-to comfort watch?

DB: I'm trying to avoid saying a really boring thing, but football I find very comforting in the background. Also I just demolished the UK version of Love is Blind with my wife. I did Below Deck during Covid, and then I think my brain rotted out of my ears and I had to stop – but particularly like the Mediterranean one, with Captain Sandy.

SL: Yes Captain Sandy! I loved Ben too, Chef Ben from season one

DB: Yes! We had a crazy holiday once... where were we? We were somewhere with friends and we had this really drunk idea before New Year to try and hire Ben as a chef – it didn’t come to fruition, sadly, but he's crazy.

SL: It seems reality TV is especially good if you need a palette cleanser whilst watching – and filming – an intense drama?

DB: That's what we do. We've been watching DTF St Louis – it’s a comedy so it wasn't too intense but you'd watch that and then you’d be at the threshold because I mean it was fairly stressful. When he was behind the blinds watching that stuff happen... Wild people are freaky.

SL: You and Michelle in The Blame are a great duo, and you’ve had an incredible co-star history – wasn’t your first ever gig working with Maggie Smith?

DB: Yeah, my first ever film had Maggie Smith in it and I remember sitting at the read through and Dominic West was there, Timothy Spall and Maggie Smith were there – I was only 16 years old, didn't know what I was doing, couldn't act.

I sat there and Timothy Spall's phone went off during the read through and Maggie just turned and went “another voice over?”. It was very funny – she could just do that, but with a real sense of humour. It was amazing to work with her. I've been very lucky to have some great co-stars and Michelle is definitely one of the best.

SL: If you could have had a guest star cameo in The Blame, who would you cast?

DB: I’d call on an old friend — Ray Winstone. We've worked together twice and he's one of my ultimate favourite actors to work with and to watch on screen. Ray is an absolute gentleman, he's one of the nicest people I've ever worked with.

I'd also want to cast him as a detective because I always feel like he's playing a criminal. I would love to be reunited with him because I worked with him on Great Expectations and I worked with him on Noah and he really looked after me. I remember I got to New York for the first day, I was there all on my own away from my family, I was only like 20 – the phone rings and he goes, "Dougie, it's Ray. I'm taking you out." And I was just like, "I love you so much." And then, we walked down to this sushi restaurant downtown and he was like “this street in the 70s, you wouldn't walk down here”.

He just gave me a tour of the whole of New York and just looked after me for six months. So I love him and he still texts me happy birthday every year.

SL: Jealous. Speaking of filming in glamorous places, whereabouts did you film The Blame?

DB: We filmed which was amazing because you don't get to shoot shows like this very often in London. So that was a real pleasure.

Obviously there's there's a lot of heavy themes and subject matter — you know, dealing with misogyny and institutional corruption. But we found time to have lots of fun. Michelle is famously one of the nicest people in television and she's genuinely really fun – and she's a big quiz quizzer. So you’d walk into the police detective boardroom, she'd be there with a marker and a whiteboard and she'd have the whole crew doing this general knowledge quiz.

SL: You’re a London local too – any favourite spots you like to go to?

DB: Well, I mean there's one that I probably shouldn't say because there's only seven seats and it's a place called Sushi Tetsu – I love it so much, but I actually haven't been in 5 years because I can't get in! I actually have on my phone like my mum, my wife, and then I have Sushi Tetsu. I used to do this thing where they had cancellations and I had a whole Twitter account set up just to follow the restaurant to see if they had a last minute cancellation.

I love Rovi, which is a Yotam Ottolenghi restaurant, actually. And I saw Ottolenghi earlier today and I was really starstruck. Brat I love too, but I’d always go for the steak over the turbot.

For a more everyday one, I love Dusty Knuckle. Their potato bread is insane, their sandwiches on a weekend – egg, chili, cheese vibe is just [**chef’s kiss gesture**], and their feta pastry!

SL: It sounds like you had a great time on The Blame, but were there any days that didn’t quite go to plan?

DB: You can be the judge of whether it's funny or not – it was wasn't very funny for me when it happened on this job but I was doing this eight page interrogation scene, we were breaking for lunch and I had a bit of a headache. So I go into my bag and normally I have ibuprofen just tucked on the inside zip up bit.

Went in, got the ibuprofen out, popped it, took two, I look at the packet and it's Nytol!

I'm like, 'What the actual f**k, then I was like, oh my god. Oh my god!'

I already felt like I was about to pass out, so I was imagining have to go back and do another five, six hours of filming while also going to sleep, so I made myself sick.

That was my big work fail, I was like half naked outside yelling 'help' – I didn't actually tell anyone because I was I was so embarrassed. Taking Nytol instead of an ibuprofen...

SL: It’s great seeing you play a policeman in The Blame – something you’ve not done before. And you’ve never been ‘typecast’ – you’ve been a flirty fairy in Sandman, you’ve done sci-fi, Western, drama. Is there anything still on the hitlist?

DB: I would love to work with Paul Thomas Anderson, I mean, every actor probably says that.

SL: Is there a current TV show you’d love to join?

DB: I love Severance. I'd love to be in Severance, but I also think maybe watching it is more fun than being in it? I just want to work with great people on good scripts.

SL: Is there anything you could picture yourself doing career-wise if you weren’t an actor?

DB: Sometimes I look at my gardener and think: that looks like a nice life. Otherwise, I’d love to do something on the water. I love boats and just anything to do with being on the water – maybe a pirate, I’d like to do that. Growing up I wanted to play Captain Jack Sparrow's son. Growing up, I just loved Pirates of Caribbean movies as a kid.

The Blame starts this Sunday 20th September on ITV1 and ITVX.

It seems somewhat ironic that the director of The Pete Doherty show - the ramshackle yet surprisingly wholesome new YouTube series fronted by the storied musician alongside comedian co-host Josh Pugh - came to the production fresh from a stint on 24 Hours In Police Custody.

For large stretches of his early career, The Libertines frontman would have been far more likely to pop up on the former programme. Yet now, clean for more than half a decade, living with his wife and daughter in rural France, and managing to hold down several bands simultaneously, Doherty’s pivot to beloved British institution is one of modern pop culture’s most unexpected redemption arcs.

The Pete Doherty Show acts as still-fairly-chaotic proof of his considerable charms. Filmed over five days, predominantly in Doherty’s former home of Margate where The Libertines’ recording studio The Albion Rooms still sits, it finds Doherty and Pugh interviewing guests from the sublime (a sing-song with old bandmate Carl Barat) to the ridiculous (Natalie Cassidy trying to play the Eastenders’ theme tune on a trumpet).

In between are clips of Doherty jumping in the Kent sea, messing about in the studio, and attempting to lead Pugh in a guerilla meditation session on the beachfront. Regular snippets of the first episode, featuring a guest spot from comedian Ivo Graham, are taken up with trying to figure out the question at the crux of the matter: what actually is this?

“That was just how it was edited, they weren't supposed to put those bits in,” Doherty pipes up, speaking to Shortlist from a Belfast dressing room where he’s currently on tour with his other reformed band, Babyshambles.

“It was just us desperately scrambling around for someone who might have the faintest idea what the fuck we were supposed to be doing.” Has he not harboured long-held dreams of hosting a TV show?

“Absolutely not, I was dragged in, kicking and screaming pretty much,” he jokes.

“I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be doing a podcast called The Pete Doherty Show, but I wanted to meet Josh because I’m a fan. It was the blind leading the blind,” he continues, an amused look forming, “quite literally!”

The conversation carries on for a few moments. “Just to add to the blind leading the blind thing,” Doherty clarifies, “Josh plays international men's football for the England blind team, just so you know.”

"It's just instinct"

It’s this sort of whimsical commitment to the bit that’s central to The Pete Doherty Show’s appeal. The loose framework allows its titular star to wander off down whatever trains of thought he might stumble upon, such as the truly insane tale of being held hostage in a Russian bunker that appears in Episode One. Doherty is clearly enjoying himself.

“Pete knows what he's doing, he's a born entertainer,” says Pugh. “It's just instinct, that stuff, and it's wanting to make people laugh - that’s the biggest thing. He’s got a glint in his eye that you can see. You can tell when he’s doing something, it's all just genuine.”

“We want to make people laugh because, you know, you can't tickle yourself,” the musician says sagely.

“It’s scientifically impossible. Hopefully that gets in the show somewhere because I said it about 11 times over the course of the week and I swear it got a laugh at some point. It's quite an interesting scientific fact though, that you cannot physically tickle yourself to the point of laughter…”

Doherty might not be able to tickle himself, but everyone else involved seems appropriately amused. In one social media preview clip, Doherty asks ‘disgraced’ ‘90s TV presenter Richard Bacon if he ever snorted cocaine off the Blue Peter tortoise. In another, he spends an interview with Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson shouting random Mods lyrics at him, out of context.

“Jason comes over as a class warrior, with these angry, vicious lyrics about everyone in society, so I thought I'd like to shout out random lyrics of his, just shout ‘TIT RIFLE!’,” Doherty muses.

“He liked that, I think it put him off guard a bit because he's not actually the sort of bloke that goes around shouting ‘tit rifle’. He's just imitating some obnoxious bloke in the pub. But of course, when you first hear him on stage, he is just going ‘tit rifle!’”

The boys in the bands

At the end of each episode is a live performance from one of the artists on Doherty’s record label Strap Originals, filmed at Margate’s Dalby Cafe - the scene of the musician’s now-legendary big breakfast challenge.

“There was a Canadian bloke that did two full platters in a row,” Doherty tells us, “and [the cafe owner] bet two grand he wouldn't be able to do it because he was so sure that no man, especially a slightly-built fellow from Canada, would be able to wolf down 400 pounds of gluten.”

This time round, the treats are firmly in musical form, with a blistering set from Black Country duo Gans kicking the series off.

“We put that at the end so, even if people are fast-forwarding through, they've got to at least get there,” Pugh says. “You know like in a supermarket where they've got the bread and milk right at the back of the shop?”

A section of one episode is also dedicated to Doherty and Pugh trying to write the show’s theme tune: a scrappy, punky number that manages, impressively, to rhyme “voodoo” and “YouTube”.

“Even if I do say so myself, that’s a great lyric,” Doherty nods. “What you'd pay for that experience, people would absolutely love to do what I've done there,” Pugh grins of his drumming contribution.

There’s a genuine camaraderie between the pair that comes through even on two separate zoom screens. Quipping about the influence of Tony Hancock (“Pete Doherty’s Half Hour would have been a no-brainer title…”), Doherty clearly has comedy bones in him; a genuinely decent drummer, Pugh is visibly delighted to be around the show’s musical guests. There’s a haphazard charm and a mutual enjoyment to the whole production that’s the absolute antithesis of most polished YouTubers trying to sell their brand before people even know what it is. Instead, Pete and Josh don’t really know either, but they’re having a right old laugh figuring it out.

“Specifically, for a long time now, I've noticed that there aren't any shows where you see me and Josh interviewing people,” Doherty decides of the gap in the market he’s trying to fill.

“Yeah, there's been a real dearth of that over the last 20 years,” Pugh nods.

“I feel it's a beautiful template for something that could be a bit of a cult favourite,” the musician concludes.

From a big breakfast to The Big Breakfast, The Pete Doherty Show is bringing loose, lovable anarchy back to the chat show: it’s well worth raising a cuppa to.

• 50 years of Punk: A Shortlist celebration

London Fashion Week is back - and it’s shaping up to be a very good week for menswear. Where other fashion capitals trade on heritage and A-list designer names, London’s superpower is throwing household names, cult labels and the next generation of designers into the same five day fashion extranvangaza.

So, which shows should you turn your attention to?

From Burberry and McQueen to M&S, Fashion Scout and some seriously exciting new menswear talent, the September 2026 schedule is particularly stacked for men - whether you’re looking for inspo on what you’ll actually be wearing next summer or simply want to know the names worth dropping before everyone else does.

And you don’t need a front row seat to follow it. LFW runs from 17th to 21st September, while its official digital hub is freely accessible to everyone, with collections, designer content and digital fashion shows available online.

Consider this your FROW ticket: Here are the menswear shows you need to know about and the designers to follow right now…

McQueen

McQueen coming home is a big deal. This LFW, the house returns to London for the first time since 2022, with Seán McGirr staging his first London show as creative director and unveiling both men’s and womenswear for SS27. Founder Lee Alexander McQueen built his fashion icon status on gloriously theatrical London shows before the label moved to Paris - so what McGirr does with that home advantage is one of the week’s most exciting questions.

• Sunday 20 September, 8pm

Burberry

Someone has to shut the doors on London Fashion Week, and this year it’s Burberry. Daniel Lee’s menswear and womenswear show takes the final 7pm slot on Monday, after a year in which the designer has doubled down on the brand’s relationship with its close relationship to the capital. February’s collection turned Old Billingsgate into a nocturnal London fantasy, complete with an indoor replica of Tower Bridge. Expect plenty of eyes on what one of Britain’s biggest luxury fashion house does for the follow up.

• Monday 21 September, 7pm

Labrum

Foday Dumbuya’s Labrum blends West African culture with British tailoring, tackling migration, identity and the meeting of cultures without forgetting that the clothes still need to look very good. This year, Dumbuya finally won the prestigious 2026 BFC & GQ Designer Fashion Fund, landing £100,000 after being shortlisted twice before. Previous collaborators include Adidas, Arsenal and John Lewis. Third time lucky indeed.

• Sunday 20 September, 2pm

H&M

H&M is not coming to London Fashion Week simply to send some basics down the catwalk. The high street giant has recruited legendary fashion photographer Nick Knight and SHOWstudio for what the British Fashion Council describes as a “bold reconceptualisation of the fashion show experience”. Intriguingly, that’s about all they’re telling us for now. Both menswear and womenswear are on the billing, but exactly what Knight and co have cooked up remains under wraps. Consider our curiosity piqued.

• Thursday 17 September, 8pm

M&S

Yes, that M&S. After 100 years in fashion, Marks & Spencer is making its first ever London Fashion Week catwalk appearance - and it’s making an entrance. The show will mix menswear and womenswear from Collection, Per Una and Autograph, reworking moments from the retailer’s fashion history. Better still, this will be a see-now-buy-now affair: everything on the runway becomes available to buy from 12.30pm that day. Think Fashion Week, but with considerably fewer six month-long waiting lists.

• Friday 18 September, 12pm

Aaron Esh

Aaron Esh suddenly has two fashion empires to take care of. Alongside his acclaimed namesake label, the London designer is now chief creative officer of AllSaints, where his first collection landed this month as part of an ambitious attempt to revamp the iconic indie uniform purveyors. His own label remains the more experimental playground, however, and returns to LFW with menswear and womenswear. For a designer currently being trusted with reinventing one British institution, this should be an especially exciting watch.

• Friday 18 September, 7pm

Barbour

The wax jacket has escaped the countryside. Barbour returns to the official LFW schedule with a menswear and womenswear presentation, while simultaneously celebrating its history with Tartan Reimagined: The Barbour Way at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition dives into the brand’s Scottish roots, its 130 year history and the tartan that has lined countless jackets, alongside one-off Re-Loved pieces involving everyone from Gucci and Paul Smith to Glastonbury and Aardman. Heritage, yes. Farm mud, absolutely not.

• Thursday 17 September, 4.30 pm

INFdark

Before he was cutting clothes, INFdark founder Kuo Wei was a competitive breakdancer - which perhaps explains why his clothes rarely sit still. The Taiwanese label specialises in structural, transformable pieces that can be worn multiple ways, mixing sharp tailoring with deconstruction and streetwear. Officially classed as both menswear and womenswear, with a unisex style, INFdark returns to London after regular appearances at Taipei Fashion Week. Clothes for people who consider one way of wearing a jacket deeply insufficient.

• Sunday 20 September, 4pm

Fashion Scout Ones to Watch

Twenty years after Fashion Scout began hunting out fashion’s next big things, its Ones to Watch programme is going supersized: three showcases across the weekend introduce 23 emerging designers. For menswear, circle Adolf Maldonado, whose leather heavy work has been described as “menswear couture”; Savile Row trained CHATCHAI C., a dedicated luxury menswear label; and BAM-BAM, whose hand sketched artwork becomes brilliantly loud tailored streetwear. Consider this fashion’s extremely stylish scouting syndicate.

• Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th September

Ray Chu

Menswear, but make it considerably less uptight. Taiwanese designer Ray Chu returns to the official LFW schedule with another mixed menswear and womenswear presentation, continuing a run at London Fashion Week that began in 2022. The label champions body positivity and sustainability alongside playful crossover collaborations; its SS26 menswear collection included loose silk shirts, printed shorts and matching sets, with fabrics made using plant based materials including mint and crystalline ice plants. Finally, tailoring that’s not afraid to have a personality.

• Friday 18 September, 2.30 pm

• The Bayeux Tapestry and the 8 most important historical artefacts you can see in London right now

Whether it’s our strong genetic and cultural links to Germany, our shared love of beer and sausages, or just a weird lederhosen kink, Britain has taken to Oktoberfest like a pretzel to mustard.

London, in particular, seems to turn into Munich-on-Thames for a few mad weeks in early autumn.

If you’re looking for an opportunity to sink some steins, partake of copious quantities of cooked pork, and listen to a spot of live oompah music (ironically or otherwise), the UK capital has you sorted.

The first ever Oktoberfest was held in Munich on 12th October 1810 as a celebration of the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. But never mind about all that.

These days Oktoberfest is an excuse to sit on a vast communal table, glug beer from a ginormous handled glass (actually a Maß/mass, but erroneously referred to by us Brits as a stein), and generally act a bit silly.

The following venues are throwing special Oktoberfest-themed events in the capital over the next month or so, kicking off in mid September. There’s plenty in there for those seeking an authentic Oktoberfest experience, with a couple of the venues serving all six of the special Oktoberfest Festbiers.

For those who just want to enjoy a big boozy get-together as the UK nights start to grow colder and darker, well, we’ve got plenty for you too, whatever your budget.

All will be serving up classic Bavarian food, but several of the venues are accustomed to supplying such sustenance all year round. They’re probably your best bet if you’re after a proper authentic Munich-style feast.

With all that said, let’s get on with the show. Prost!

1, 2, 3. Boxpark (Shoreditch, Camden, Croydon)

The popular London street food hubs are throwing big Oktoberfest parties at all three of its outlets. Between 25th September and 10th October they’ll be putting on live oompah party bands, mass singalongs and interactive games – all served up alongside their usual diverse street food offering, making it the pick for those who don’t necessarily get on with sausages and schweinshaxe. Czech brewer Staropramen is laying on the beer, which will doubtless make the purists frown into their Augustiners, but at least it’s bottomless during select sessions. Check the website for more details.

4. Oktoberfest on the Common (Clapham)

The biggest outdoor Oktoberfest celebration in the capital – and quite possibly the country – is once again set to take place on Clapham Common in South London. With a level of efficiency that could be described as Teutonic, the festivities have been spread across nine sessions and six days between 9th and 24th October, each lasting between five and six hours. Expect all the usual frothy steins and hearty food, plus live brass bands, Bavarian games and funfair rides. General entry tickets start from £30, but the slots are already starting to sell out.

5. London Oktoberfest (Finsbury Park)

If you’re looking for more North London vibes with your Oktoberfest celebrations, head to Finsbury Park from 1st to 3rd October. Expect “long tables, Bavarian FestBeer, German food and a live band”. Yep, sounds like Oktoberfest to us. The organisers are actively encouraging the donning of Lederhosen and Dirndl, and have supplied a link to a Bavarian outfitter on their website. General admission only costs a tenner, but a special Bavarian Ticket will add one Mass (1.5 pints) of Bavarian FestBeer, a Bavarian Bratwurst roll with Sauerkraut, and a shot of Underberg for £35.

6. Bermondsey Bierkeller (Bermondsey)

Bermondsey already has a reputation as one of the best neighbourhoods in the capital for beer consumption. Between 19th September and 31st October, however, attention will shift from the district’s enviable craft beer scene to something more Germanic, as the Bermondsey Bierkeller puts on “London's wildest Oktoberfest”. How wild? The website positively encourages bench standing, while the Saturday night programme features stilt walkers and “fire acts”. Jessas na! This one’s got one of the widest ranges of ticketing options of them all, from a basic £6.60 entry fee to the gluttonous £111.30 Youtopia Oktober-Feast package.

7. Between the Bridges (South Bank)

Situated between the London Eye and the Southbank Centre, this Thameside venue seems like the ideal place to sink a few autumnal steins. It’s got two huge beerhall tents (very Bavarian), a large central courtyard lined with street food kiosks, and plenty of additional outdoors seating. For entertainment, Old Dirty Brasstards will lay on “a ten-piece tweed-clad ‘drum and brass’ band”. If you’re not all brassed out, Atomic Brass will parp through a string of pop and rock hits. Drag hostess Miss Leigh Ding will oversee proceedings.

8. Steins (Kingston on Thames)

Steins has been serving up mounds of excellent Bavarian food in leafy South West London for years now, starting at its beautiful riverside Richmond venue. It’s the mini-group’s second opening a little further down the Thames that’s going all in on Oktoberfest this year, however, with a special 7th October event. They’re promising to serve all six official Oktoberfest beers alongside their usual impeccable food, along with accompanying live music. Note that online bookings aren’t available, so you’ll need to ping them an email, give them a call, or swing by in person. How alte schule.

9. Albert’s Schloss (Soho)

This cavernous Soho venue (which also has outlets in Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham) offers kitschy Bavarian vibes all year round, but it’s going the extra mile for Oktoberfest. Running from 19th September to 25th October 2026, Albert’s Schloss promises “Bavarian feasting, seven days of live entertainment, and festival biers galore, available ‘til the taps run dry”. On the latter front, it’s one of few places outside of Munich to offer all six Oktoberfest beers, while it’s also a rare British venue that serves top Czech tipple Pilsner Urquell in the proper way — straight from the tank.

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One of the most important artefacts in British history is now available to view in London, but securing tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry is proving tricky. Thankfully, there are plenty of amazing alternatives.

The 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry is currently on loan from France to The British Museum until 11th July, but the initial run of 100,000 tickets turned out to be heavily oversubscribed. Another batch of tickets will be dropping on 21st October, but these are for dates in the New Year, and are likely to be similarly challenging to procure.

It’s no great mystery as to why this might be the case. We’re talking about a 70-metre-long piece of embroidered cloth, portraying the lead up to the hugely consequential Norman Conquest of 1066, which has had to be housed in a bespoke case.

What’s more, the tapestry can only be exposed to a certain number of hours of light in any day in order to preserve the delicate material.

In other words, the Bayeux Tapestry’s trip to London was always going to be popular, and access was always going to be limited.

Still, there’s a fair chance that this is going to scupper the plans of many hoping to visit London for a spot of culture over the coming months. It’s a good job our beautiful capital isn’t short of priceless relics, which have been curated and presented for your perusal.

Here are eight important historical artefacts that you can see in London right now.

1. The Rosetta Stone

The British Museum is a literal treasure trove of important artefacts, even without the Bayeux Tapestry. Perhaps the most venerated of all is The Rosetta Stone, a 2,200-year-old fragment of a slab that proved crucial to the initial translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the early 19th century. It’s only a partial text, taken from a fairly dry official decree about Ptolemy V, but the key here is that it’s inscribed in three separate scripts – hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek – which enabled scholars to finally crack the code.

• Where to see it: The British Museum

2. The Crown Jewels

If you were to assemble a list of old London tourism cliches, then a mention of the Tower of London, the precious baubles housed within, and the tall-hatted guards commissioned to protect them would probably all feature somewhere near the top. It’s easy to take these things for granted, but The Crown Jewels are well worth seeing at least once in your life. They take the form of a collection of 140 royal ceremonial objects, inlaid with some 23,000 precious stones. These include the crown, orb and sceptre used in British royal coronations.

• Where to see them: The Tower of London

3. The Coffin of Ramses II

Head over to the iconic Battersea Power Station, dodge the obnoxious nouveau riche residents, and ignore the more soulless aspects of the project’s multi-billion-dollar revamp, and you can catch a genuinely world class exhibition. At the heart of the 180 assembled ancient Egyptian artefacts sits the 3,000-year-old coffin of Ramses II, arguably the greatest (and certainly the most self-aggrandising) pharaoh of them all. These artefacts are on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and have never been seen in the UK before, so this is a rare opportunity.

• Where to see it: Ramses and the Pharaohs' Gold exhibition, Battersea

4. The Abraham Tapestries

If you’re specifically in the market for a big old tapestry (how very specific of you) then head on down to Hampton Court Palace in Richmond. There you’ll find ten of the suckers, all hanging on the wall of the Great Hall. This is probably exactly where they were always intended to live, given that they were commissioned by Henry VIII around 1540. True, that means these tapestries are ‘only’ 500 years old, but they stretch out an impressive 84 metres in total, and they offer a remarkable depiction of the life and deeds of the fabled Bible prophet.

• Where to see them: Hampton Court Palace

5. The Tarkhan Dress

I’ll see your 1,000-year-old length of cloth and raise you a 5,000-year-old linen garment. The Tarkhan Dress is thought to be the oldest surviving piece of woven clothing in the world, and you can view it for free at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology on the UCL campus. The garment was excavated south of Cairo in 1913, but was only discovered among a larger pile of linen in 1977, when the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Textile Conservation Workshop was commissioned to clean it all up.

• Where to see it: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology

6. Cleopatra’s Needle

One of the oldest and grandest artefacts in London is free to see at any time. Cleopatra’s Needle is right there on the Embankment, with thousands of commuters and visitors marching past it every day – possibly quite oblivious as to its history. This is no replica, but rather a genuine 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk, made for Pharaoh Thotmes III. The story of how it came to rest by the Thames in 1878 is an epic story in itself, involving a traumatic voyage in a specially designed ship called – you guessed it – the Cleopatra.

• Where to see it: London WC2N, 6NU (near Embankment station)

7. Bloomberg Tablets

The London Mithraeum is built around a restored third-century Roman temple situated in the basement of Bloomberg Europe’s headquarters. Around 14,000 objects were dug up between 2012 and 2014, and around 600 of those are on display here. Among them are the Bloomberg tablets – a collection of some 405 wooden writing slates that were discovered underneath London’s gleaming financial district. They’re the oldest written documents found in Britain, dating as far back as 50 AD, which places their writing to some time soon after London’s establishment as a Roman settlement.

• Where to see them: London Mithraeum

8. Parthenon Sculptures

These Ancient Greek sculptures have been central to a heated debate over the continued postcolonial ownership of historical artefacts. They were removed from Ottoman-ruled Greece by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early 19th century, earning them the informal name of the Elgin Marbles. For now, you can check out the Parthenon Sculptures in the very same building as the Bayeux Tapestry, in Room 18 of The British Museum. These impressive Ancient Greek sculptures were carved 2,500 years ago, and would once have adorned a temple on the Athenian Acropolis.

• Where to see them: The British Museum

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Turn on any really good TV show or film from the past five years and 90% of the time Will Poulter will be in it.

Warfare. The Bear. Dopesick. Poulter has been busy.

Whilst his traditional “breakout” roles that people quote back to him are usually from We’re the Millers and Maze Runner, some Brits will remember his early days starring in films like Son of Rambow (filmed in his summer holidays aged 14), and the beloved Narnia series. Whilst the stock story of a child star usually signposts to burn out and Hollywood excess, Poulter acts as an antidote to this arc, never doing the same kind of project twice, and being the definition of a genuinely great guy in the A-Z of Hollywood who’s who.

If you needed further proof of that statement, in between his (many) acting gigs, Will works as an ambassador for a dozen different charities, taking his precious days off from hectic filming schedules to volunteer and forward a bunch of great causes.

In between wrapping his new film Union County and before heading back out to the states for his next project, Will stopped by The Lucky Saint in Marylebone with Shortlist for a pint… of iced coffee.

It's an appropriately breakfast themed twist on our usual boozy chats, as he’s currently working with charity Magic Breakfast who help provide breakfast for kids in primary and secondary schools, so that no child goes hungry. The kind of cause a self-confessed huge foodie loves to get behind.

SL: Will, thanks for coming down and joining us for a pub breakfast. Kicking off with a drink, are you more tea or coffee?

Will Poulter: I don't actually like tea. They're going to take away my British passport! I love coffee though — without coffee I'm a different person.

SL: It feels like the classic mic-test question we usually ask before shooting, but considering what you're working on, it feels appropriate: what did you have for breakfast this morning? What was a usual breakfast or morning like when you were younger?

WP: As a kid I used to eat the leftovers from the night before for breakfast. So I would always be embarrassed if it came up in like a French oral class or something. I would have to ask “how do you say Spaghetti Bolognese on toast” in French, because that’s what I’d had. I actually went to a region in Italy where apparently Bolognese on bread is a real thing, so I was at home straight away.

SL: So you were vindicated? A cultural visionary in North London.

WP: It’s since changed, so now it’s more like a yoghurt bowl with granola and fruit. Which when I was younger I never thought I’d like.

SL: As an ambassador for Magic Breakfast, that technically makes you a (slightly tenuous) breakfast expert, right? So what in your opinion is a top tier breakfast?

WP: I think it’s about trying to get something in the morning that’s mostly healthy but has energy attached, because you’re next meal will be lunch, so you do need something that is slow releasing energy and balanced. I wasn’t necessarily the best advert for that as a kid, I think it took me until I was in my thirties to learn that. But Magic Breakfast do that so well – whenever I’ve gone down to help out I’m always impressed with the range they have so there’s something for everyone.

SL: You’ve had some amazing co-stars in the past — and shared some on screen roles being a chef. But if you had to team up with a former co-star and open a restaurant with them, who would you pick?

WP: I am really lucky because I’ve been able to work with amazing actors and had to learn how to cook because of the nature of the roles I'm playing – and got to a really good level. The person who immediately comes to mind, because he’s one of the nicest people on planet earth and talented in the kitchen, and someone I have a really good natural rapport, with is Lionel Boyce who plays Marcus in the Bear.

We did a fair amount of prep together and we’d spend a lot of time talking about food, and eating together off set so I think I have a good sense of his palate, he has a good sense of mine, and we have a good working relationship. Maybe we’d open a kind of Danish pastry inspired breakfast spot. With iced coffee too.

SL: You spend a lot of your time on sets, so what's the food like? Have you ever had a moment on set where you're like, 'oh wow I'm eating a bacon roll with Michael Keaton'?

WP: One of the best things about my job is being able to travel, and you get to experience food from various parts of the world, and depending on where you’re shooting you get different options that are reflective of the kind of cuisine and multicultural influences of the area. One of my favourite things about shooting in America is that breakfast burritos are a huge thing. There are a million different ways you can have it and it's a staple on American sets. From a nostalgic point of view though, there’s nothing better than a great bacon sandwich, or a sausage in a roll.

SL: Speaking of stuff the Brits do well, what are some of your favourite London spots?

WP: One of my favourite things growing up was this Thai restaurant which in the mornings was a greasy spoon — it was around the corner from my family’s place. After midday it would transition into serving Thai food, run by this lovely family and it was the best Thai food I found in London. It was a one stop shop for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but that was how I experienced my first Full English outside the house, and it introduced me to Thai food too. It was emblematic of that kind of multiculturalism we all benefit from in London.

The London greasy spoon I love is the Little Wonder Cafe right by the Emirates stadium and I’m an Arsenal Fan – it’s an iconic and beloved spot for Arsenal fans, and they’re die hard arsenal fans so that might have a little something to do with it. But the food’s amazing and the people are lovely.

SL: Thinking back to school days, I feel like you can really tell we’re in an assembly deficit as adults — I miss school assemblies and just think everyone would have a better day if we started with an old-school assembly...

WP: You know, I did a film last year and our director Greg Kwedar spent every morning addressing the cast and crew for like 10 minutes, and it just helped get everyone on the same page and establish this sort of camaraderie. I hadn’t seen a director do that before and it was really cool, it was sort of like a little set assembly.

SL: I feel like we talk about breakfast setting you up for the day, but sometimes, no matter how ready you are for the day... sometimes there’s no saving you. Have you ever had a really bad day on the job, particularly an audition you can’t forget?

WP: There’s one I wake up with the sweats about. It was in America, and I’d flown out especially for it. It was down to the final stages but even then I didn’t fancy my chances – I was sort of the outside bet. I went out and prepared the three scenes, learnt them off by heart and was doing it opposite the lead actor who was this amazing American comedian, very famous.

I finished the third scene and was like, “thanks very much everyone” turned to leave and they went “what about the fourth scene?", and I just went “I’m sorry what”. The American actor just turned over his page and I remember thinking ohhhhh no. I was given twenty minutes to go and quickly look over it, and I remember being so nervous all the words were swimming around on the page. And I could hear everyone else going in and crushing it, I could hear cheering, whooping, laughter.

Safe to say I barely remembered a single thing on the page and did a very bad job. It was like leaving the exam hall and realising you haven’t turned over and done the last page.

SL: You've been acting since you were school-aged. Were there any dream roles you were desperate to do as a kid? And have you done them now?

WP: Definitely as a kid some version of a superhero would have been on the dream list for sure [Will plays Adam Warlock in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise .ed]. Honestly my biggest interest alongside acting was always cooking – my mum was a great cook and I’d be in the kitchen watching her so playing a chef was the kind of dream. I’m so grateful to The Bear for giving me that opportunity — and that gave rise to collaborate with different people in the hospitality space. Despite facing a load of challenges themselves, especially post Covid, they’re so philanthropic and lots of people I’ve intersected with in the hospitality world [while training for The Bear] are so keen to give back, acknowledging that food insecurity and hunger is such a challenge even in a country like England.

So being able to collaborate with friends I’ve made in the hospitality space supporting organisations like Magic Breakfast, New Horizon Youth Centre, City Harvest has been one of the best things to come out of being on that show. I hope I’m able to continue doing that.

You can find out more about Magic Breakfast and how to support the charity via their website.

Watching a concert film in the cinema is all very well, but there's one obvious problem: you're generally expected to sit down and keep quiet. That, however, won't be an issue when Queen Budapest rocks London's Roundhouse this October.

The legendary 1986 Queen concert film is being transformed into a full-on gig experience for one day only, with the Roundhouse hosting a show where fans can stand, dance, sing along and generally behave as though Freddie Mercury and the band are actually on stage in front of them.

Taking place on Saturday 3rd October 2026, with afternoon and evening performances, the ‘is-it-a-gig?’ event comes just before the new Queen Budapest concert film, remastered by Peter Jackson, gets its worldwide cinema and IMAX release on 7th October.

So what sets this apart from just popping some vintage live Queen on YouTube? We sat down with the team behind the event to find.

One vision (with some AC/DC inspiration)

Queen Budapest: The Concert Film Experience is a fresh take on the live gig experience from the production team at Playback Live, who had a eureka moment whilst working with another rock-royalty group — AC/DC.

“We'd been working with Sony on AC/DC when they were on tour in Europe and the States last year and the year before, and we were doing pop-up fan zones for them,” explains Caroline Lockyer Nibs, CEO of Playback Live.

“We had a large screen where we were playing footage from concerts, and it was just interesting to watch all the fans who were coming — basically initially to buy merch, if we're honest — spending time in front of the screens, and having that shared experience. We were getting approximately 5,000 people a day across all of those sites, so it was a big volume of people who were engaging with the screens and the concert and the footage. So we thought there's got to be something in this.”

“We created these beautiful places for fans to sit and chill out, and all they wanted to do is stand at these screens and just sing their hearts out and dance around together!” adds Rebecca Margariti-Smith, Production and Operations Director at Playback Live.

“Everyone's seen so many of the music biopics now, or Taylor Swift's era's tour in the cinemas. But we've always felt personally that it's a bit of a square peg / round hole situation where, sure, it brings fans the opportunity to connect more with the bands and with the artists they love, but films are very much more of an individual experience. No-one wants any talking during a film in a standard cinema.”

Rather than sitting in a cinema watching a concert on a conventional screen then, the Roundhouse will turn its main space into something much closer to a Queen gig.

The restored concert will be projected onto a giant LED screen, accompanied by full surround sound and synchronised concert lighting. The idea is to recreate some of the scale and atmosphere of being in the crowd at a Queen show, rather than simply watching one.

“The bigger concept of Queen Budapest is that it takes that cinema screening problem and just provides the solution,” says Margariti-Smith, “because, at the end of the day, you're reliving the experience, but in a professional live music setting — big surround sound, and lighting that cinemas just can't do.”

And yes, you're actually allowed to get out of your seat. The organisers say fans can move, dance and sing throughout the screening – so if you've ever found yourself wanting to belt out We Are The Champions beyond a karaoke booth or a football terrace, here’s your chance.

Days of our lives

The footage comes from Queen's legendary 27th July 1986 concert at Budapest's Népstadion, performed during the band's enormous Magic Tour.

Around 80,000 people packed into the stadium to see the band, making the show a landmark moment: Queen became the first Western stadium rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain.

It also has an added poignancy for Queen fans: This was the band's final filmed live performance, captured just three years before Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. It therefore offers a remarkable document of Queen at the height of its stadium-rock powers – with Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon performing together.

The setlist is suitably stacked, a greatest hits show including We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions, A Kind of Magic, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Under Pressure, Who Wants To Live Forever, Hammer To Fall and Bohemian Rhapsody — all primed for mass-singalong potential at the Roundhouse.

The team are more than aware of the reverential love for the gig that fans have, and are striving to do it justice in the production — not just for the fans, but for the surviving band members, too.

“We want to do it to a high quality, that's important, and that is signed off by the band themselves,” says Margariti-Smith.

“The only reason they were doing it is because Sony went to Brian May and Roger Taylor. They were both really excited by it, which is great. And obviously, as soon as we heard that and learnt that they'd given their nod, we were like, right, we're onto something here.”

It’s an important show for Sony too — it spent $1 billion in securing the rights to the Queen back catalogue, and while the remaining members still tour (with Adam Lambert now in front of the mic), that purchase will only pay for itself over decades, not years. As the band grows older, events like Playback Live’s show will give fresh generations of fans reason to splash the cash on Queen’s music for years to come.

A magic makeover

If you've seen Queen Budapest before, this isn't simply a re-release with a new poster. The original 35mm footage has been restored and rescanned in 4K by Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production facility (the team that worked wonders on all that archive footage of The Beatles for Disney), while the original multitrack recordings have been given newly remixed audio.

The production team are taking full advantage of the technical wizardry at the heart of the remaster.

“We've got the main audio production team that were involved in Peter Jackson’s remastering,” explains Margariti-Smith.

“We’re working really carefully together, collaborating. They’re very much a post-production film, audio, and visual team. But then we're coming at it as a live events team. This is our bread and butter. This is what we know, and we have our experts, from audio designers to lighting designers that work in the live space. They're top of their game, doing shows across the West End.”

As well as live lighting to mimic a concert experience and 360-degree sound, the show will also benefit from a live-on-the-night mix, tuned to match the atmosphere in the venue.

“We've really gotten into the weeds of how the original '86 recording was made, what stems were there, what's then delivered in the film, how we can then take it as a live event, as if they were the band on the stage,” says Margariti-Smith.

“We've got our audio front of house engineer who'll be doing that live mix, and that comes in play as well with the 5.1 surround sound.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to get stems, which are almost like the audio files of a film, as separate files. That's not just pre-delivered as part of the reel like in the cinemas. We can adjust [the mix], temper it in a live space — when you're hearing the audience track on the film, we can adjust that in the main space because we've got real audience participation, too.”

From Budapest to the Roundhouse

There'll also be an 80s DJ set before the film, while original Queen memorabilia from the band's archive will be displayed around the venue. Photo opportunities, bars and an exclusive Queen Budapest merchandise pop-up complete the line-up — but the glorious Roundhouse venue itself, with its circular shape and skeletal interior leftovers from its former days as railway turntable, will be just as key to shaping the atmosphere on the night.

“It's a great, iconic music venue, which is what we wanted,” says Lockyer Nibs. “That was really important for the idea, that we went to somewhere that was known as a gig space. And it's a good capacity number as well for this kind of event, as it's not too big.”

Fancy belting out Radio Ga-Ga in the heart of Camden? Tickets are available for two performances on Saturday 3rd October 2026, with the matinee opening at 2pm, and the evening performance opening at 7pm.

And there's a nice bit of timing to it all: the Roundhouse event comes just weeks after what would have been Freddie Mercury's 80th birthday, making the screening something of a celebration of the singer's enduring legacy as well as Queen's extraordinary live career.

“To be up on level two during Bohemian Rhapsody, and just looking down on the audience and their engagement, I think I’m going to cry,” smiles Lockyer Nibs.

Hankies at the ready all round then.

Tickets for the Roundhouse performances are available now.

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“I remember one night in this squat in South London when a really early version of Foals played in the basement,” recalls Blaine Harrison, frontman of stalwart UK indie band Mystery Jets.

“During the set this wall was destroyed and everyone got covered in brick dust and blood. I was chatting to these people over a tinny in the garden and they were TV researchers, and then a few months later, I remember watching Skins and being like, ‘Oh shit, you're creating characters based on all of our friends’. What was going on on screen was basically a replication of what us and all our friends were doing, being sold to the younger generation.”

When Skins first appeared on TV screens at the start of 2007, it pointed towards a change in the temperature of ‘00s alternative British culture. The Libertines frontman Pete Doherty would announce his short-lived engagement to the country’s most famous supermodel Kate Moss a few months later. The seismic youthquake of guitar bands that began with The Strokes and soon travelled across the Atlantic with The Libertines, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and more had already begun to yield a slew of second wave major label signings like The Kooks. Soon, social media would mutate from a nascent, rose-tinted place of Myspace and rudimentary, fan-centric message boards to another means for the industry to regain total control. What had begun as a sexy, hedonistic antidote to the turn-of-the-century beige wave of Starsailor, Travis et al had gone commercial.

But for a pivotal window at the start of the decade, says author Janine Warren, “it felt like there was a really exciting energy. For a while, it really did feel as if culture was something young people could make for themselves.”

It’s this rise and fall-out of the last great British indie boom that Warren - who worked directly as a PR with bands including The Strokes and The Libertines - has documented in The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect: a new book compiling first-hand testimonies from artists and key players, looking back on the period now often affectionately known as ‘indie sleaze’.

Like Meet Me In The Bathroom before it, it walks readers through the scene via memories and anecdotes told directly by those who were there. But where Meet Me In The Bathroom’s eulogy of noughties New York still contains a sort of sketchy, underground glamour, there is something infinitely more homespun and charmingly haphazard about its British equivalent. Here, we get Wakefield sibling trio The Cribs throwing up in a plant pot after taking a meeting with Tom from Myspace, and The Libertines turning up to early gigs with their first drummer - a 70-year-old pensioner nicknamed Mr. Razzcocks.

Glorious, noisy, drunken

Crucial to the atmosphere of The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect (named after a track by London post-punks The Rakes) is the London nightlife at its centre: club nights like Trash, AfterSkool, White Heat and Frog, where you could dance most nights of the week with like-minded souls, get pissed for a tenner, and very possibly bump into someone who’d be on the cover of the NME the next month. If those sticky walls could talk, they would doubtless need their own, even heftier biography.

“There was this brief period where [the trends] felt like they were coming from the young people in the clubs and it was them making the decisions about what was cool,” says Warren.

Leonie Cooper, former NME journalist and current Food and Drink Editor at Time Out, spent her formative years rattling around the capital’s vibrant indie club circuit. “I went to Trash once and Grace Jones was there, she just looked me dead in the eye, lifted up her skirt and then put it back down. I was like ‘All right, decent, just been flashed by Grace Jones’,” she recalls.

“Another time, Kings of Leon were there. My friend Jo was wearing all these bangles that she had made, and she gave some of them to the band and then, two weeks later, they were on the cover of NME wearing the bangles. Nobody ever told us to fuck off, and I don't think it was because we were teenage girls because we were all quite goofy back then. I think everyone was just really open to having a chat. And they knew if you were in this place as well, you were probably on the same wavelength.”

For fans, bands and budding music industry bods alike, these nights became a hub and an entry point to a world that, suddenly, was all around you, in glorious, noisy, drunken technicolour.

“I met journalists from NME at Trash, and I think I got an internship at The Face because I’d see them there. I thought I was just being a slightly annoying teenager shouting at people, but in fact, I was networking,” says Cooper.

Hey scenesters!

“Going out five nights a week was a huge part of it,” agrees Harrison.

“That was how a lot of bands [like Mystery Jets] found an audience in the first place. When you were at school, you maybe had your clique of three or four people that liked the same music as you or dressed like you. But suddenly, when we arrived in London and started going to places like Candybox and AfterSkool and Trash, it was like, ‘Oh shit, it's like the ‘me’ of every town and we're all here’.”

Originating from Twickenham curio Eel Pie Island, it was through their affiliation with Trash that Mystery Jets would form a friendship with DJ Erol Alkan, who would produce their second album ‘21’ and its big hit ‘Two Doors Down’. Almost 20 years later they’re still going strong, having just released their seventh album ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’.

Up north, meanwhile, Nick Hodgson - original drummer and songwriter of Kaiser Chiefs, and now vocalist in indie supergroup Everyone Says Hi, whose new album ‘Funny ‘Cos It’s True’ lands on October 9th - had spent the early years of the noughties running Leeds club night Pigs. Its community became so integral to Kaiser Chiefs’ story that, following a particularly rowdy gig with fellow Leeds band Black Wire, Hodgson was inspired to write their breakthrough hit ‘I Predict A Riot’.

“Pigs created a big gang of people in Leeds who could be identified by their hair or clothes, and I think that’s my favourite memory of that time - walking about feeling like you were part of something new,” Hodgson recalls.

“I do feel very grateful that I was able to start a band in the early noughties and not now. Despite it being easier now to get your music out there, it feels harder to find an audience.”

Harrison agrees: “I don't think genres really exist or have the same relevance as they did and, in some ways, that's a good thing. But it does mean that it's hard to build a fan base as a new artist because people might know a minute of one viral song, but they won’t have necessarily taken a deep dive if they're not invested in everything that you're about.”

Noughties nostalgia

Pre-Spotify and TikTok, there’s a sense of tribalness to the scenes of The World Was A Mess that seems unlikely to return.

“It was always important to me, that sense of belonging,” says Warren. “It was never just about the bands. It was about the people and the places that allowed those bands to mean something.”

And as the cost of living rises, with the average price of a pint in London sitting at £6.50 according to the British Beer and Pub Association, perhaps even the notion of affording to go out multiple nights a week is the noughties’ biggest cause for nostalgia.

“I had the educational maintenance allowance from the government which was £30 a week so I would stay in secondary education and go to sixth form, and I feel like that got me out for five nights a week,” Cooper remembers.

“Drinks at Cheapskates in Soho were 60p and they were rank but they had alcohol in them. They did work.”

“At White Heat you could get a bottle of Smirnoff Ice or a Becks for two pounds, and you'd already drunk half a bottle of wine on the bus to get there,” Harrison agrees. “Most of our clothes just came from charity shops. It was cheap.”

It’s easy to see why, in a world of Ozempic and photo filters, when people’s digital footprint is more highly curated than their real life existence, a less manicured approach to the world might also appeal. The images in Warren’s book are candid snaps of dancing revellers and backstage photos of bands piled on top of each other, sharing an experience in the moment.

“There's a kind of messy decadence to it: the chaos, the imperfection, the creativity, the optimism. Yes you’d plan your outfit, but by 3am no one was worrying about their eyeliner because no one was going to be seeing you on TikTok the next day,” says Warren.

“Now, when you look at people sharing pictures on Instagram of them in the club, everyone's so polished and they look fucking great. Whereas we sort of looked like sweaty little rats in a 1980s rah-rah dress,” says Cooper.

“We all look sort of dreadful, but we all look so happy.”

The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect is out now via Omnibus Press.

• The BIG London gig list 2026: Your guide to this year's very best shows, festivals and concerts

Apple has finally done it. After years of rumours, speculation and increasingly elaborate leaks, the company has unveiled its first-ever foldable iPhone — and it’s called the iPhone Duo.

It’s a pretty major departure for Apple, combining the familiar iPhone experience with a folding design that turns the handset into something closer to a mini tablet when you need more screen. And, naturally, Apple has packed it with a new processor, redesigned iOS experience, upgraded cameras and a sizeable dose of AI.

Here’s everything you need to know.

1. It’s Apple’s first foldable iPhone

The iPhone Duo is the first foldable iPhone, opening up into what Apple describes as its largest-ever iPhone display.

Fold it shut and you get a 5.4-inch Super Retina XDR outer display, designed to be used one-handed and comfortably slipped into a pocket. Open it up and there’s a 7.6-inch folding OLED display — giving you a much larger canvas for watching video, gaming, browsing and multitasking.

The inner screen has a nano-texture finish designed to reduce reflections and make the crease (where the phone folds in half) less noticeable, while both displays offer ProMotion, Always-On functionality and up to 3,000 nits of outdoor brightness. Apple also says the two screens share the same aspect ratio, meaning content can transition between them without everything suddenly looking weirdly stretched.

And! It’s the first iPhone to support Apple Pencil, although that feature is coming later after launch.

2. It’s seriously thin

One of the biggest surprises is just how thin Apple has managed to make the Duo.

When open, it measures just 5.2mm thick, making it the thinnest iPhone ever — as we guessed, it seems last year’s slimline iPhone Air was a test run for this new device. Folded, it measures 11.3mm. It weighs 254g, so you're certainly going to know it's in your pocket, but that's not outrageous given you're essentially carrying a phone and small tablet in one device.

The chassis is made from polished Grade 5 titanium, with a precision hinge designed to support the centre of the display and provide a smooth opening and closing action.

Apple has also gone to considerable lengths to make the folding screen tougher, using high-strength glass, custom adhesives and a titanium plate beneath the display. The Duo is also IP68 rated for water and dust resistance.

3. There are some clever camera tricks

The Duo is looking pretty capable in the photo and video capture department, too.

Its main camera is a 48MP Fusion sensor with optical-quality 2x telephoto functionality, alongside a 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide camera. There's also a Center Stage front camera that can automatically frame photos and video in different orientations.

But the folding design introduces some useful new tricks.

Duo Preview lets people see the camera's live view on the outer display, making it easier for your subject to check their pose and framing. You can also use the higher-resolution rear cameras for selfies while previewing the shot on the external screen.

There's Smart Take, which uses on-device AI to automatically capture the right moment, while Kid Cue uses Peanuts animations on the external display to persuade children to actually look at the camera. We've all been there.

The Duo can also shoot 4K Dolby Vision video at 120fps and supports Cinematic effects after recording.

4. The A20 Pro is doing the heavy lifting

Powering everything is Apple's new A20 Pro chip, also used in the iPhone 18 Pro.

It features a six-core CPU, seven-core GPU and dual 16-core Neural Engine, with Apple claiming up to 35 percent better sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro. There's also a custom vapour chamber to help dissipate heat — particularly important when you're simultaneously running two displays, games and AI workloads.

In other words, this isn't a foldable that's making sacrifices on performance for the sake of the form factor.

5. iOS 27 has been redesigned for the folding screen

Apple has adapted iOS to make the most of the Duo's dual-screen approach.

Split View allows two apps to run side by side for the first time on an iPhone, while you can also run two windows of the same app — handy for something like Safari.

The Dynamic Island has been redesigned for the Duo, while content can automatically reorient itself as you fold, unfold or turn the phone.

StandBy also gets a significant upgrade, working on either display without needing the phone to be charging. Put the Duo down and it can become a clock, photo frame or widget hub.

Apps including Netflix, Zoom and Slack have already been optimised for the larger display.

6. Siri is getting smarter, too

The iPhone Duo launches with iOS 27.1 and Apple's latest Apple Intelligence features, including the all-new Siri AI.

The new Siri can understand personal context, use onscreen awareness and take action based on what's happening on your display. Apple says it can pull information from things such as messages, emails and photos to provide more useful answers.

It also gets a dedicated Siri app with conversational history synced through iCloud. Apple's foldable is very much designed as an AI phone as well as a big-screen one.

1 and Apple's latest Apple Intelligence features, including the all-new Siri AI.

The new Siri can understand personal context, use onscreen awareness and take action based on what's happening on your display. Apple says it can pull information from things such as messages, emails and photos to provide more useful answers.

It also gets a dedicated Siri app with conversational history synced through iCloud. Apple's foldable is very much designed as an AI phone as well as a big-screen one.

7. Battery life looks promising

Folding phones have historically had to make compromises with battery life, but Apple has taken an unusual approach here.

The Duo has a battery on each side of the device, with Apple's silicon and energy-management software treating them as a unified system.

Apple claims up to 31 hours of video playback using the inner display, rising to 44 hours when using the smaller outer screen. With both screens being used equally, it claims up to 24 hours of usage per charge.

Fast charging can take the phone to 50 percent in around 20 minutes, while MagSafe or Qi2 wireless charging can reach 50 percent in around 30 minutes.

8. How much does the iPhone Duo cost?

Here's the slightly less exciting bit.

The iPhone Duo starts at £1,999 for 256GB of storage. It's also available with 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, with the latter presumably aimed at people who have absolutely no intention of deleting a photo ever again.

There are two colours: Star White and Night Sky.

Pre-orders open on 16th October, with the iPhone Duo going on sale in the UK and more than 70 other countries on 23th October.

Apple is also launching a two-part iPhone Duo Case for £79 and an iPhone Duo Folio with an integrated kickstand for £129.

So there you have it: Apple's long-awaited answer to the foldable phone. With its enormous inner screen, genuinely useful multitasking, new camera tricks and hardware designed specifically around the folding form factor, Apple is betting that the future of the iPhone is a flexible one.

• Meet the 5 stars of Apple's class of 2026: From Apple iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro to AirPods 5

For 16 years, for Oasis, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ was much easier sung than done. Now, the new documentary of the same name puts rock’s biggest reconciliation on the largest possible screen, capturing not only the reunion gigs but the raw emotion behind them.

ShortList sat down with writer Steven Knight (also creator of Peaky Blinders) and directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern to discuss the moment Liam and Noel finally shared a room again, the fans who left the filmmakers in tears and whether new Oasis music could follow.

Knight also reveals what we can all learn from the Gallaghers - and whether their reunion might feed into his next writing assignment: James Bond. As you were…

SL: Through the documentary, Noel and Liam talk about this being their chance to change the narrative. Steven, as the film’s writer, how did that narrative come to you?

Steven Knight: It’s not like when you’re writing fiction. [In fiction], you choose and you decide and you have your destination, and you can say, “This is going to have a happy ending.” This is you observing what’s really happening. So, for me, it was an act of faith to say, “This is a film that’s going to be about reconciliation, redemption, forgiveness. It’s going to work. They’re going to be okay,” when lots of people were saying, “This could end badly.”

So, just watching it unfold and picking up on those moments when you start to get the feeling this is going to be okay, they’re starting to get on, and just tracking that. It’s about their relationship.

Speaking of emotions, were there any moments behind the scenes that brought you to tears?

Steven Knight: Then and still. Music, I think, has a big effect, because even if it’s the score of a fiction film, when that music comes sweeping in, that’s when everybody loses it. That’s when you feel the emotion.

Here, the soundtrack is just brilliant because it’s them. There are many occasions, especially watching in the cinema with the lights off - you can hear people. They’re all sobbing!

Will Lovelace: In rehearsals, it felt quite emotional the day that Liam turned up and they were in the room together. We knew it was going to happen, but we didn’t actually know when it was going to happen.

Dylan Southern: I’m not afraid to admit I cried at most gigs because I was operating a camera, so I’m there in the middle of 90,000 people. When they’re all feeling such strong emotions, it overwhelms you. Something in these shows brought out the best in people. When you’re watching it, you feel a connection to them.

SL: Is it unusual for a concert tour documentary to focus so closely on people in the crowd?

Dylan Southern: We had people in the crowd - we wanted this to feel as much like being at the show as possible because, hopefully, as many people as possible are going to see this on IMAX or the biggest screens they can find, with the loudest sound systems.

SL: Were there any moments that you just couldn’t have scripted?

Steven Knight: All of them. The things that Noel and Liam say are so smart and funny, and virtually everything they say you can put on a T-shirt. There’s a lady in South Korea, who’s in tears and saying, “When you fall down, some music picks you up. But with Oasis, they fall down with you and get up with you.” Who’s going to write that? It’s beautiful.

SL: Liam and Noel are both so naturally funny. Do you have a favourite memory from filming with them?

Steven Knight: I’ve never made a documentary before, and I’m not an interviewer. So, when we sat down together in a pub, it was just a conversation. The funniest - but in isolation, you don’t get it - is when Liam just says really innocently, “Some of these songs are quite aggressive.” Noel just bursts out laughing like, “Well, what did you expect?” The way he delivers them is as if it’s like, “I’m trying to make them nice.” It’s very funny.

This is really a story of reconciliation and forgiveness. It’s a much more positive story than people might expect from Oasis…

Steven Knight: The idea was: here we are living in an age of division - politicians, people on social media, spite, hate, all of that stuff that’s going on that seems to have become acceptable. I wanted to make a film that was about all that sort of old fashioned ’60s peace, love, understanding: come back together, it’s okay.

And just seeing that all around the world, in so many very different places, the same song has the same effect - exactly the same effect - means you can conclude people are the same.

SL: What do you think we can all learn from the Gallagher brothers?

Steven Knight: People are the same. No matter how far apart it may seem, you can get there. What a lot of people are doing after they’ve watched the film and got very emotional is thinking, “Well, there’s somebody I haven’t spoken to for 10 years. Maybe I should give him a call. Maybe I should text him.” It has that effect!

SL: Did the film have you thinking about people you might want to reconnect with?

Steven Knight: Yeah, of course!

SL: Having spent so much time with Liam and Noel, do you think they would make new music together?

Will Lovelace: That’s a question for them. I’d like to see it, but who knows?

SL: Steven, you’re writing the next Bond movie! Are there any themes from the Oasis reconciliation that you might take into that?

Steven Knight: Oh, I can’t really talk about it, but it’s a good question. Everything that you experience feeds into what you’re [making]...

SL: You’ve crafted the stories of all these British icons - Oasis, Peaky Blinders, Bond and you even created Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?! Is there another British icon you’d like to explore further?

Steven Knight: It’s been done so many times, but Churchill, I think, is very, very interesting. Probably. I don’t know! It would probably be a footballer, actually, because I do like football. So, it would be somebody who made an impact in the world. But if I say someone, then it will go, “Oh, he’s writing a film about that person,” so I can’t really name anybody!

Don’t Look Back in Anger is in IMAX® and Cinemas now.

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There was a time when picking a new gaming monitor was relatively straightforward. You picked a size, chose between 1080p and 1440p (4K if you were feeling plush), and then spent the next three weeks convincing yourself that an extra 20Hz would somehow transform you into a professional Counter-Strike player.

Well, Samsung’s just made that choice a little more complicated… in the best ways possible. Its new Odyssey G8 G80HS is a 32-inch gaming monitor with a frankly ridiculous 6K resolution. That's 6144 x 3456 pixels, putting more pixels in front of your eyeballs than most gaming rigs have the juice to push.

It is also capable of running at 165Hz in its native 6K mode or switching into a 3K mode that pushes the refresh rate all the way up to 330Hz. In other words, Samsung has attempted to build one monitor capable of doing both spectacular cinematic gaming and ultra-fast competitive play.

It's expensive, of course. And you'll need a seriously powerful PC to make the most of it. But if you're looking for a proper end-game upgrade for your gaming setup, here are five reasons why the Samsung Odyssey G8 G80HS deserves your attention.

Samsung Odyssey G8 G80HS: In Short…

• 32-inch display with an incredibly detailed 6K resolution
• Dual Mode: 6K at 165Hz or 3K at 330Hz
• Fast IPS panel delivers crisp colours and wide viewing angles
• 1ms response time keeps fast-paced action sharp
• HDR10+ Gaming boosts detail in shadows and highlights

1. 6K gaming looks absolutely ridiculous

Let's start with that headline number. The Odyssey G8 G80HS is one of the first gaming monitors to bring a full 6K resolution to the party, squeezing 6144 x 3456 pixels into its 32-inch Fast IPS panel. It’s the star attraction here: this is a monitor built around sheer pixel density, rather than simply chasing ever-larger screen sizes.

Those pixels aren't just there for the sake of having an impressive number on the box. Outside of the still-rare 8K monitor market, this is the most detailed picture quality you’re likely to find on a gaming monitor — at least in terms of sheer pixel density. Yes, 8K resolutions can push that higher, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a GPU/CPU combo that can push those pixels at anything above slide-show framerates. To call 6K a compromise is a slightly bizarre choice of words, but against the excess of 8K, it’s a smart middle ground. Tiny environmental details that would normally disappear into the visual noise suddenly become clear — from autumnal leaf fall in Forza Horizon 4, to the war-worn weaponry of Cyberpunk 2077.

2. You don't have to choose between pretty games and fast games

Run the Odyssey G8 at its native 6K resolution and you get a 165Hz refresh rate. It’s an enormous amount of visual detail while still delivering the kind of smoothness that makes 60Hz displays feel increasingly like relics from a less enlightened age. However, 6K is a demanding resolution to run games at, and with the GPU pricing and RAMpocalypse showing no sign of slowing, there will be many rigs that’ll struggle to hit high frame rates at the G80HS’s top resolution.

But switch the monitor into its lower-resolution mode and it drops to 3072 x 1728 — essentially 3K — while boosting the refresh rate to a frankly ludicrous 330Hz. Both modes are paired with a quoted 1ms response time.

It’s the best of both worlds, then. Playing something cinematic like Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2? Go 6K and feast your eyes.

Playing Marvel Rivals, Valorant or anything else where seeing your opponent approximately three milliseconds before they see you is the difference between in-game life and death? Switch to 3K and let the refresh rate rip.

The particularly clever thing is that 3K on a 32-inch screen remains properly sharp. Unlike some 4K dual-mode monitors that drop down to 1080p in pursuit of extreme refresh rates, you're not suddenly playing competitive shooters through a screen door. It makes the lower-resolution mode considerably more practical than the compromises required by some existing dual-mode screens.

3. It doesn't look like a spaceship has landed on your desk

Samsung's Odyssey range has never been particularly shy about announcing itself as gaming hardware. The G80HS, however, appears to take a more restrained approach.

Its relatively minimalist design would work just as well in a home office as it does in a neon-lit gaming den. There's RGB lighting around the rear monitor mount, but it’s kept to a minimum, and Samsung's CoreSync system can synchronise those effects — just like a Philips Ambilight TV — with what's happening on screen if you want your desk to join in with the action.

The stand is also adjustable, allowing you to raise, lower, tilt and swivel the display, with the option to rotate it into portrait orientation. There's cable management built into the stand, too — an unglamorous feature, perhaps, but one that becomes more valuable once you've connected a gaming PC, console, speakers and more to it.

Connectivity includes DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 and USB ports, while a matte finish is able to diffuse directly lighting and glare without washing out the richness of the image.

4. It's one of those upgrades that could make everything else look old

The danger with high-end display technology is that once your eyes adjust, going backwards becomes difficult. 6K detail and dual-mode performance makes it one of the most impressive non-OLED gaming displays currently available, with the difference in image sharpness immediately noticeable.

And that's really the pitch here. The G80HS isn't necessarily the sensible gaming monitor. With a £1,299 price tag, it’ll hardly qualify as a budget purchase — but if you’ve got a rig capable of making the most of it, we’re going to hazard a guess that it’s within reach of your finances.

This is the monitor for the PC gamer who wants one screen capable of making the latest blockbuster look super detailed while still being able to switch gears for competitive play.

If your GPU can handle it, the Odyssey G8 G80HS might be its perfect companion.

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As the famous saying goes, 'when you are tired of London, you are tired of life’. The capital has enough to fill years of weekends (and weekdays), from brilliant restaurants, pubs, and green spaces to historic buildings, museums, galleries, and world class institutions such as Tate and the V&A.

In 2026, making the most of it all is not always cheap, though.

Exhibition tickets, cinema screenings, concerts, and major attractions can quickly turn an ambitious cultural calendar into an expensive habit. The right membership can soften the blow – and, in some cases, pay for itself after only a couple of visits.

To help you make the most of this amazing city, we’ve found the best cultural memberships – from the National Art Pass to the Barbican to the BFI – that may well help you avoid spending a king’s ransom next time out.

How did we pick?

For each option, we looked at the cheapest standard adult membership, the usual cost of entry, and how many realistic visits it would take to recover the fee.

While temporary discounts can improve the maths, the figures below are based on regular prices at the time of publication wherever possible. We’ve also left out private clubs and memberships built mainly around donations or priority booking.

1. National Art Pass

• Best for: Culture hopping
• From: £65.25

The National Art Pass is the broadest option on the list, making it a good starting point for anyone who prefers exploring London’s cultural landscape rather than repeatedly visiting one favourite museum.

Members get half-price entry to many major exhibitions, alongside free admission to more than 250 museums, galleries, and other historic places across the UK. The Art Pass website is also a helpful starting point for keeping up with what’s happening.

In London, that could mean catching a blockbuster show at the V&A one weekend, visiting the Design Museum the next, then trying somewhere smaller such as Dulwich Picture Gallery or the Courtauld.

Visiting even a handful of major exhibitions should cover much of the annual fee, particularly during the discounted first year. (Paying by Direct Debit gives you a further discount.)

Dedicated museum memberships may offer better perks for loyal regulars, including members’ rooms and access to sold-out shows. For variety, however, Art Pass is hard to beat. Members also get a nice physical membership card.

2. Historic Royal Palaces

• Best for: Two big days out
• From: £65

Historic Royal Palaces membership opens up some of London’s biggest historical attractions, from the Crown Jewels and Yeoman Warders at the Tower of London to Henry VIII’s state apartments, kitchens, gardens, and maze at Hampton Court Palace.

The £65 annual membership is easy to justify when you break it down: a standard visit to the Tower costs £37, while Hampton Court starts at £29, so seeing both once already costs more than joining.

After that, you can return for seasonal events and bring visitors to your favourite palace. For families and history fans, the membership is a no-brainer, and even long-term Londoners who have never quite made it to the Tower may find it pays off surprisingly quickly.

3. Royal Museums Greenwich

• Best for: A full day out
• From: £48

Greenwich is exactly the sort of place where a day out can easily become a huge operation, especially with family in tow.

You might begin aboard the Cutty Sark, climb the hill to stand across two hemispheres at the Prime Meridian, wander through the National Maritime Museum, and still somehow find yourself rushing the final attraction before closing time.

Royal Museums Greenwich membership removes that pressure. Though currently reduced to a bargain £48, Individual membership normally costs £65 by Direct Debit, while a combined ticket for the Cutty Sark and the Observatory is £38. Two full visits are therefore enough to come out ahead.

It’s especially good for families, local residents, and anyone who enjoys a day out with several possible directions in a beautiful and sometimes under-explored part of London.

The Planetarium is currently closed for refurbishment (reopening around spring 2028, which may explain the recent discount), but there is still more than enough here to justify the return journey.

Plus, it’s a nice excuse to get an Uber Boat.

4. Barbican Membership

• Best for: People who never stick to one thing
• From: £59

The Barbican is made for the indecisive among us. One week you might be watching a restored film in the cinema, the next sitting through a full orchestra, exploring a gallery exhibition, or taking a chance on a piece of theatre you know almost nothing about. Not to mention the amazing Conservatory.

Membership makes experimentation easier, with 20% off many tickets for you and a guest, free entry to exhibitions, and no booking fees. A few evenings out as a pair can make a serious dent in the £59 annual cost.

Not every event is discounted, and reduced-price allocations can sell out. Even so, it is one of the most flexible memberships here, and also works nicely as a present for any culturally-minded friends or family. I got a membership earlier this year and love it.

5. Southbank Centre Membership

• Best for: Making a habit of the Hayward
• From: £60

The Southbank Centre is easy to treat as somewhere you simply pass through on the way to somewhere else, like the BFI IMAX to see The Odyssey or the London Eye.

Membership gives you a reason to linger, whether that means dropping into the latest Hayward Gallery exhibition or turning an aimless riverside walk into a cultural outing.

The biggest draw is unlimited Hayward Gallery entry, which makes it much easier to take a chance on an exhibition you might otherwise skip. See three major shows across the year and the £60 Direct Debit fee is already close to earning its keep, before counting booking fee savings or discounts elsewhere around the site.

6. Prince Charles Cinema Membership

• Best for: Making movie nights spontaneous
• From £15

I love the Prince Charles Cinema, one of London’s last truly renegade institutions. Sitting just off Leicester Square, the programme jumps from 35mm classics and cult favourites to all-night marathons, singalongs, director Q&As, and the occasional gloriously questionable double bill.

Annual membership costs just £15, with at least £2.50 off most screenings, cheaper weekday matinees, and the odd £1 ticket thrown in, making it a permission slip to book the strange film you spotted while scrolling the listings.

Just six screenings can pay back the membership, and with persistent threats over its rent and continued operation, supporting one of the city’s gems is more worthwhile than ever.

7. BFI Membership

• Best for: Taking film seriously
• From: £44

If the Prince Charles is for seeing the movie marathon you didn’t know you needed, then the BFI is for turning a casual interest in cinema into a full-blown hobby.

The BFI’s Southbank and IMAX programme moves between new releases, restored classics, director seasons, archive discoveries, and films you may never get another chance to see on a big screen.

Membership costs from £44 per year, and comes with two free tickets, ongoing discounts, no booking fees, and early access to much of the programme, including the London Film Festival, set for October, and IMAX (although these sometimes have their own rules).

I’m coming off a week of seeing two films at the BFI (Rose of Nevada and Eraserhead); having an excuse to head down to the river and soak up the evening sun before enjoying some cinematic excellence really can’t be beaten.

Bonus memberships worth knowing about

We’ve highlighted some of the main memberships to consider, but London is so varied that we thought we’d include some honourable mentions.

The London Transport Museum’s annual ticket is one of the easiest wins, especially for families or anyone with a child who could happily inspect buses for several hours. One visit gets you through the door, while every return trip over the next year is free.

Younger Londoners should also check the free schemes run by Tate, the Barbican, Southbank Centre, and the BFI, which unlock cheaper tickets without an annual fee.

Meanwhile, dedicated memberships at places like the V&A or Design Museum can still work brilliantly if you visit often enough.

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Hells yeah, it’s the start of cinema’s ‘school year’. The BFI London Film Festival turns 70 this year and for the 2026 edition, it’s back, at the Royal Festival Hall, in London cinemas and around the UK, from 7th to 18th October.

First up, the crucial dates: tickets go on general sale on 17th September, with BFI Patrons getting first dibs for screenings on 9th September and BFI Members following a day later on 10th September. Extra tickets are released a week before the fest on 1st October and most films get two or three screenings throughout the 12-day window.

Next, our pro tips: be flexible with your schedule as daytime screenings are less in-demand. Make friends with a BFI Member if you aren’t already one. Outside the buzzy must-see critical darlings and awards contenders, take a risk on a debut or international title you know nothing about. Oh, and if your screening’s at the main venue, give yourself plenty of time to get to the right doors.

The full programme is now live so you can start checking dates, times and making your wishlist. Here’s our 25 most-anticipated LFF picks across must-see films, British directors, big stars, Oscar contenders and elite auteurs. See ya in the digital ticket scrum.

Five Can't-Miss Films

1. Artificial

• Director: Luca Guadagnino
• Cast: Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov

Amazon MGM Studios might be too scaredy to release Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, but the London Film Festival is bold enough to screen it at a Gala, after the heroes at Neon picked it up. Let’s goooo. Andrew Garfield is playing ChatGPT tech boss Altman, alongside Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Anora’s break-out Yura Borisov as co-founder and chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever. Described alternately as ‘bleak’ and ‘a comedy’, it sounds from early chatter that Artificial’s plot focuses on the drama around the firing and re-hiring of Altman in late 2023. Can’t wait.

In cinemas TBC

2. Fjord

• Director: Cristian Mungiu
• Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Carlehed

Acclaimed Romanian film-maker Cristian Mungiu’s social drama Fjord won the top Palme D’Or prize at Cannes this year. Set to be a crunchy debate-worthy release, the story revolves around an evangelical couple who move to Norway and encounter friction with their new liberal neighbours around the way they are bringing up their children. Renate Reinsve, known for her work with Joachim Trier, is a phenomenal talent and Sebastian Stan is on an incredible run of choosing - and executing on - fascinating roles (A Different Man, an Oscar nom for The Apprentice) parallel to his MCU work. All of which makes the Fjord Gala screening a smoking-hot LFF ticket before it’s out with Picturehouse in the UK in November.

In cinemas 13th November

3. Ray Gunn

• Director: Brad Bird
• Voice Cast: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits

If you don’t know Brad Bird’s name, he’s probably made you tear up at least once. The legend behind The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille has made a sci-fi neo-noir animation that’s coming to Netflix at the end of the year. Ray Gunn is a world premiere at London Film Festival: exciting. And unlike much of current-era Pixar, Bird’s is an original story, with influences including old Bogie and Bacall flicks, The B-52s and comic book series The Spirit. Sam Rockwell plays Raymond Gunn, the last human private eye in a hybrid alien-human world, with ScarJo as femme fatale Venus Nova, Tom Waits as an alien plus Patton Oswalt and Kathyrn Hunter on the voice cast. For grown-ups then.

On Netflix 18th December

4. Behemoth!

• Director: Tony Gilroy
• Cast: Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor

Tony Gilroy, the genius behind Michael Clayton, the Bourne films and, most recently, Andor is bringing his new Searchlight pic set in the world of LA’s classical music and film scoring scene to London. Pedro Pascal is portraying a renowned cellist, with a stacked supporting cast including Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Will Arnett and the elegant trailer suggests more than a little Tár-style disorientation, which is music to our ears. Even more intriguingly, Gilroy enlisted the help of no less than nine composers, including greats James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri and Michael Giaccino, to create Behemoth!’s all-important score. Art about making art from a master? We are seated.

In cinemas 4th December

5. La Bola Negra

• Directors: Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo
• Cast: Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González

La Bola Negra is right up there with the autumn films we’re most hyped for. It’s an ambitious two and a half hour epic that blends queer romance, 1930s wartime drama and the legacy of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, with mutli-stranded timelines which move from the past to the present. The images we’ve seen so far look genuinely knock-out stunning, the work of Spanish co-directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. The central performances are from Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente (Álvaro Lafuente Calvo), Carlos González and Miguel Bernardeau, with supporting roles for Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. Catch it on a cinema screen.

In cinemas 6th November, on Netflix 2nd December

Films By British Directors You Need To See

6. Rogue Trooper

• Director: Duncan Jones
• Voice Cast: Aneurin Barnard, Matt Berry, Hayley Atwell

Duncan Jones’ long-awaited 2000AD adaptation appears to be finally ready. There’s even a quick spicy teaser of this slice of sci-fi that’s now out. The film-maker behind Moon and Source Code first announced he was writing and developing a Rogue Trooper film way back in 2018. We trust that he’s got the vision to guide this particular dystopia to the big screen and the thoroughly British voice cast, around Aneurin Barnard as the titular sole-survivor-super-soldier, is impeccable. Deep breath: Matt Berry, Hayley Atwell, Jack Lowden, Diane Morgan, Reece Shearsmith, Peter Serafinowicz and honorary Brit Jermaine Clement.

In cinemas TBC

7. Ink

• Director: Danny Boyle
• Cast: Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce, Claire Foy

Just premiered at Venice, Danny Boyle’s latest, Ink, has a lot going for it. Based on the 2017 play by the terrific playwright James Graham, the film is a late ‘60s period piece charting the origin story of the tabloid The Sun, one of the most influential newspapers of modern times. Guy Pearce plays the devil, pardon us, Rupert Murdoch; Claire Foy plays a fictional reporter named Jules Davis and we’re well chuffed to see Jack O’Connell get a meaty role as Yorkshireman and Sun editor Larry Lamb. Listen, any behind-the-scenes journalism drama with a talented director and cast has us sold but from everything we’ve seen so far, this one looks to be a high-energy, can’t-miss-it kinda deal.

In cinemas 7th January 2027

8. Tender Loving Care

• Director: Mike Leigh
• Cast: Kate O’Flynn, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson

In what might be his cinematic swan song, due to his ongoing ill health, the legendary British director Mike Leigh has once again worked with his partner Marion Bailey. Here she’s appearing alongside her daughter Alice Bailey Johnson and Northern actress Kate O’Flynn, whose CV includes all manner of stage roles as well as the recent cult Apple TV hit Widow’s Bay. Tender Loving Care follows two friends Amy and Rosie, living in London and both working within child protection and social services; then Amy’s father, played by Paul Jesson, begins to show signs of dementia. Could be a beaut.

In cinemas 12th February 2027

9. Elsinore

• Director: Simon Stone
• Cast: Andrew Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper

Simon Stone is a name more often found on the lips of London theatre-heads who’ve seen his work at the National or Bridge Theatres, than cinephiles. But the Aussie director has been building up a filmography too, including The Dig and The Woman in Cabin 10. His next project is suitably theatre-themed, though. Elsinore is an account of the late Scottish actor Ian Charleson’s final performances of Hamlet at the National, when he was seriously ill from AIDs. Andrew Scott is portraying Charleson; he has both the sensitivity and intensity to do a part like this justice; he’s joined by Olivia Colman and Billie Piper, who worked with Stone on his Yerma for the Young Vic. (Elsinore is the setting).

In cinemas 29th January 2027

10. Prima Facie

• Director: Susanna White
• Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Ings, Simon Russell Beale

Wicked witch Cynthia Erivo is taking on the lead role in Prima Facie, the film version of Suzie Miller’s hit one-woman play of the same name. On the West End and Broadway, it was Jodie Comer who took on the role of Tessa Ensler, a barrister who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault, and this stage treatment was an asbolute sensation. Miller herself has adapted the material and expanded the cast of characters for Susanna White’s upcoming film and we’re fascinated to see how the intensity translates to the screen.

In cinemas 13th November

11. A Long Winter

• Director: Andrew Haigh
• Cast: Fred Hechinger, Kit Connor, Ebon Moss-Bachrach

Brit director Andrew Haigh, whose work you might know from his films Weekend and 45 Years, has written and directed a treatment of a short story/novella by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. Published just last year, A Long Winter follows a father and son who must survive harsh conditions high up in the mountains of the Pyrenees after the woman of the house leaves and does not return. Fred Hechinger is Mike, the son, Caitríona Balfe, his mother and The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach his father with Kit Connor - soon to be Cyclops in the MCU - as Mike’s brother Tommy, who is away fighting in the Korean War of the early 1950s.

In cinemas TBC

12. 7 Miles Out

• Director: Carol Morley
• Cast: Lucy Halliday, Aidan Gillen, Gemma Whelan

One of the hidden gems playing in the London Film Festival’s Official Competition is Carol Morley’s 7 Miles Out. The film is based on the director’s part-autobiographical 2015 novel covering the coming-of-age of her protagonist Ann amongst the new-wave punk scenes in Stockport and Manchester in the 1970s and 80s. Ann is trying to make sense of her father’s suicide when she was eleven alongside puberty and discovering herself. The teaser clip, full of dry Northern humour, shows her as a teen, hanging out with friends, being skint and obsessing over Tony Wilson and Factory Records. One to seek out.

In cinemas TBC

Big Stars

13. The Debut

• Director: Jesse Eisenberg
• Cast: Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Halle Bailey

Jesse Eisenberg is back and his new release with A24, The Debut, could not be more different from his gentle, lovely film A Real Pain in 2024. For a long time described only as ‘Untitled Jesse Eisenberg Comedy Musical’, or words to that effect, The Debut sees acting heavyweights Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti go toe-to-toe as Mona, an introvert who unexpectedly auditions for a local am-dram musical and Jerry, its director and “the biggest name in New Jersey community theatre.” Eisenberg has written the music and lyrics himself - a bold choice - and, you know what, we trust everyone involved “to shine” in what appears to be a weird and wacky project with a lot of heart.

In cinemas 15th January 2027

14. Paper Tiger

• Director: James Gray
• Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller

A favourite American director amongst European cinephiles, Paper Tiger is the new film from James Gray (We Own The Night, Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z). With crime thrills, Adam Driver at full intensity and Scarlett Johansson doing an accent, it’s ticking a lot of boxes. Set in the suburbs of 1980s Queens, Driver and Miles Teller play two brothers, Gary and Irwin Pearl, a former cop and an engineer. They end up getting mixed up with the Russian mafia and the fallout puts the whole family at risk. This will be a couple notches above the by-numbers crime thrillers on streaming services in terms of quality, that’s for sure.

In cinemas TBC

15. Wild Horse Nine

• Director: Martin McDonagh
• Cast: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi

More funny business, this time from Martin McDonagh and if you’re familiar with his back catalogue, Wild Horse Nine looks more in the vein of an In Bruges than a Banshees of Inisherin or a Three Billboards. Dynamite cast, too. Sam Rockwell and John fucking Malkovich - yessss - play Lee and Chris, two quippy CIA agents sent to Easter Island just before Pinochet’s 1973 coup overthrowing the socialist coalition government in Chile. Steve Buscemi’s their bureau boss, Parker Posey’s Lee’s wife, War’s on the soundtrack, there’s a bunch of 70s style and swagger, the dialogue is dialogue-ing. Strap. Us. In.

In cinemas 6th November

16. I Love Boosters

• Director: Boots Riley
• Cast: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Demi Moore

Any project by Boots Riley will always be on our most-anticipated list because you simply cannot possibly guess what this guy will do next. Riley is a rapper, record producer and the writer-director behind the wild, absurdist film Sorry To Bother You and the wild, absurdist TV series I Am Virgo. Actually, one thing’s guaranteed: this guy does not like late stage capitalism! I Love Boosters, with Neon, is his colourful, maximalist comedy take on high fashion, with Keke Palmer and Naomi Ackie playing two members of the ‘Velvet Gang’ of boosters/thieves of Demi Moore’s Christie Smith designer stores. LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter and Don Cheadle are all here having fun too. It’s TIME to get LOOSE.

In cinemas 30th October

17. Bunker

• Director: Florian Zeller
• Cast: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Paul Dano

Florian Zeller’s Bunker is still something of a question mark, but this one has the potential to be great. Real-life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem play Sofia, a publisher and Miguel, an architect in this psychological thriller focused on their marriage from the French playwright and director of The Father and The Son. Another solid late-stage-capitalism premise here: Paul Dano plays Andrew, a tech billionaire who commissions Miguel to design him a luxury bunker, leading to an “unsettling moral puzzle” between the husband and wife. One of the titles you can see four months ahead of its wide UK release at the fest.

In cinemas 19th February 2027

Oscar Contenders

18. Club Kid

• Director: Jordan Firstman
• Cast: Jordan Firstman, Diego Calva, Cara Delevingne

We first encountered Jordan Firstman as the charmingly rude Charlie in Rachel Sennott’s underrated bratcom I Love LA. His debut as a writer-director, Club Kid, was snapped up by A24 out of this year’s Cannes in May and it looks set to be a shoo-in for a Best Original Screenplay nod come awards season. Here, Firstman plays an NYC party promoter named Peter who discovers out-of-the-blue that he has a ten-year-old son named Arlo. Early reviews suggest that the film blends cooler-than-thou underground scene-y vibes with a perhaps more surprising undercurrent of sweetness. Diego Calva and model Cara Delevingne round out the cast.

In cinemas TBC

19. Fatherland

• Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
• Cast: Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler, August Diehl

It’s Sandra Hüller’s year. You know, she played the brusque bureaucrat lady who sang Sign o’ The Times karaoke in Project Hail Mary. She’s also one of the finest actresses of her generation and Fatherland is the first of two of her titles at this year’s LFF. Polish film-maker Pawel Pawlikowski has such a distinctive eye and is best known for his two arresting black-and-white films, Ida, which won him an Oscar in 2013, and the gorgeous Cold War in 2018. In Fatherland, a Mubi release, he takes on the German literary colossus Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), specifically a trip he made in 1949, with his daughter Erika (Hüller), from the US to both West and East Germany to receive two Goethe Prizes. The question: which side is he on, Stalin or Mickey Mouse?

In cinemas 23rd October

20. Wildwood

• Director: Travis Knight
• Voice Cast: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan

Another animation world premiere for London comes in the form of Wildwood from Laika, the studio which made Coraline and Kubo and The Two Strings. The Portland-set story, based on a 2011 novel by Colin Meloy, follows teen Prue and her sidekick buddy Curtis as they search a magical forest, full of fantasy animals, to find Prue’s missing baby brother Mac. Directed by Laika CEO Travis Knight (who also helmed this year’s underrated Masters of The Universe), Wildwood is set to be the longest stop-motion animated film ever produced, featuring hundreds of puppets and sets. We can’t think of a finer way to turn our noses up at soulless AI slop than to luxuriate in a “hand-crafted” fairy tale like this.

In cinemas 23rd October

21. 14th

• Director: Ava DuVernay
• Cast: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, Hasan Piker

Ava DuVernay is once again teaming up with Netflix for a documentary on one amendment of the US Constitution, after the success of her doc 13th in 2016, looking at the systemic mass incarceration of African Americans and its roots in slavery. This new doc focuses on the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 during Reconstruction, which guaranteed birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law for all citizens and fair legal procedures, together with shifting powers from states to the federal government. Featuring politicians like AOC and Stacey Abrams, 14th could not be more timely and important, with President Trump’s recent attempts to overturn birthright citizenship rejected by the US Supreme Court in June.

In cinemas 27th November, on Netflix 4th December

Elite Auteurs

22. Possible Love

• Director: Lee Chang-dong
• Cast: Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Cho Yeo-jeong

South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong returns to the international festival circuit following quite an absence since Burning, his 2018 thriller starring Steven Yuen and based on a Murakami short story. Possible Love, coming to this year’s edition of LFF, is an intimate four-hander centring on two married couples, one a laid-off worker Ho-seok and his wife Mi-Ok, the other Ye-ji, a documentary film-maker, interested in Ho-seok as a subject, and her husband Sang Woo. You might recognise Cho Yeo-jeong as Ye-ji - she played the snooty wife superbly in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.

In cinemas 23rd October, on Netflix 6th November

23. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

• Director: Clio Barnard
• Cast: Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Lola Petticrew

A bunch of mates, dancing and dicking about in the pub, shouting the words to The Streets’ Don’t Mug Yourself: that’s the scene in the clip put out by Curzon of Clio Barnard’s latest film I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Written by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (who co-wrote recent indie fave Ish), and based on the 2024 novel by Kieran Goddard, ISBFLL follows five working-class childhood friends from Birmingham. It’s getting a lot of early praise from the festival circuit and that’s no surprise — Barnard is known for both her documentary and feature film work and directed the wonderful Ali & Ava in 2021. The young cast includes Anthony Boyle (Say Nothing, House of Guinness), Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) and Lola Petticrew (Trespasses) with Darryl McCormack in the mix too.

In cinemas 4th December

24. Josephine

• Director: Beth de Araújo
• Cast: Mason Reeves, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan

Brazilian-American director Beth de Araújo’s second feature, Josephine, was the stand-out at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury and Audience prizes. It’s tough subject matter: an eight-year-old girl, Josephine — played by child actor Mason Reeves, widely praised for her performance — witnesses an assault in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Her parents, Claire (Gemma Chan) and Damien (Channing Tatum) have to deal with the impact of the incident on their daughter and the subsequent interactions with the criminal justice system.

In cinemas 20th November

25. Look Back

• Director: Hirokai Kore-eda
• Cast: Natsuki Deguchi, Aju Makita, Masaki Suda

Japanese film-maker Hirokai Kore-eda is also gracing LFF with Look Back, his latest film, actually one of two releases this year alongside Sheep In The Box. If you’re not familiar with his back catalogue, 2018’s Shoplifters is a great way-in to his sensibilities. Look Back follows two girls, extroverted and popular Fujino and introverted ‘shut-in’ Kyomoto who bond over their passion for drawing yonkoma manga comics. Fittingly, this story is actually based on a manga itself, a one-shot from Tatsuki Fujimoto published a few years ago which also received an anime treatment. Don’t miss this one.

In cinemas TBC

BFI London Film Festival: More Ones To Watch

• Godzilla Minus Zero: Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel to the fantastic kaiju flick Godzilla Minus One.
• Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother: Bassam Tariq’s hitman thriller starring Mahershala Ali, John Cho and Giancarlo Esposito.
• Everytime: Sandra Wollner’s film about a family grappling with grief in Tenerife won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes and has been picked up by BFI Distribution for a 2027 release.
• Coward: A gay WWI romance set in the Belgian trenches from auteur Lukas Dhont and Mubi.
• Minotaur: This is a Russian remake of French film The Unfaithful Wife from Mubi and director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan).
• Gentle Monster: Léa Seydoux is garnering raves for her performance in this drama from director Marie Kreutzer (Corsage).
• The Blood Countess: Isabelle Huppert in camp/cult-mode in Ulrike Ottinger’s vampire comedy? Yes.
• The Beloved: Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s story of a film director father who casts his estranged daughter, with Javier Bardem in the lead role.
• Rose: The other Sandra Hüller/Mubi picture at the fest, a monochrome period piece from Markus Schleinzer exploring gender in the 17th century German countryside.
• Wicker: You know, the one where Olivia Colman ****’s a wicker man played by Alexander Skarsgård! From directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson.
• All Of A Sudden: A welcome return from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi who gave us 2021’s exquisite Drive My Car.
• Clarissa: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is transported to Nigeria by directors Arie and Chuko Esiri, starring Sophie Okenedo.
• Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! This looks unique - Rinko Kikuchi stars as a Tokyo ballroom dancer in this film from Josef Kubota Wladyka.
• Lemonade: Barry Keoghan plays a social worker in Kim Bartley’s debut Irish drama about a young man leaving the care system.
• The Idiot(s): Well, this looks fun from Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert. Aimee Lou Wood and Johnny Flynn star as Anna and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
• Sweet Milk Lake: A BFI Flare special presentation, Harvey Zielinkski’s film follows a young trans man’s homecoming.
• Ketticé (Giovanni Tortorici): An Italian coming-of-age story set in 2000s Palermo with Monica Bellucci as Giulio’s mother and Luca Guadagnino producing.
• Klara & The Sun (Taika Waititi): The Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation with Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams, from Waititi who is hit-and-miss these days.
• Being Heumann (Siân Heder): From the director of Coda, a biopic of disability rights activist Judith Heumann, played here by Ruth Madeley, with Mark Ruffalo supporting.

BFI London Film Festival: Documentaries, Shorts, Restorations and TV Series

• DOC: Once Upon A Time in Harlem (William Greaves and David Greaves)
• DOC: The History of Concrete (John Wilson)
• DOC: Making Marie Antoinette (Eleanor Coppola)
• DOC: Imperium (Sergei Loznitsa)
• DOC: Queer Edward II (Theo Rollason)
• DOC: Tutu (Sam Pollard)
• DOC: Rebellion (Ken Fero, Tariq Mehmood)
• DOC: The Story of Documentary Film: The 1990s (Mark Cousins)
• RESTORATION: Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)
• RESTORATION: Gone To Earth (1950) (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
• RESTORATION: La Dérive (1964) (Paula Delsol)
• SHORT: Paper Plane (Saoirse Ronan)
• SHORT: Date Night (Tanya Reynolds)
• TV: VisionQuest (Terry Matalas with Paul Bettany, James Spader)
• TV: The Trip To The Northern Lights (Michael Winterbottom with Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon)

Six years ago, The Molotovs were busking around London. Now, after a summer smashing through festivals across Europe, they’re preparing for their biggest UK tour yet - including two nights at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town after the first sold out.

For siblings Mathew and Issey Cartlidge, now 18 and 20 years old, it has been quite the crash course in starting a band. Before even releasing their debut album, ‘Wasted On Youth’ earlier this year, The Molotovs had already clocked up hundreds of gigs and shared stages with the likes of The Libertines, Sex Pistols and Blondie. When it comes to building a band from the pavement up, they’ve put in the hours.

So how do you go from Oxford Street busker to thousands of paying fans? According to The Molotovs: gig constantly, play absolutely anywhere, know exactly who you are - and learn how to survive your bandmates. Especially if they happen to be family.

We sat down with Mathew and Issey to talk busking, building a following, finding your identity, surviving terrible early gigs and why starting a band with your sibling risks turning things distinctly Gallagher-esque.

Consider this your ten-step guide to forming a band - flying platform boots not included…

1. Get out and gig. A lot...

“Genuinely, just gig loads,” says Issey.

“For us, it’s how we started,” the bassist adds, “You start because you just love the thrill of live performance. You want to go out there and get out this extra energy. From honing our craft that way, we obviously got to the point where we could record an album, be on a record label and do all the stuff that follows.”

“Go out and gig, because that’s the best rehearsal you’re ever going to get.”

“But do both,” adds Mathew, “We don’t just go gigging without rehearsing anything!”

2. Don’t get into a band with your sibling

The Molotovs have one fairly significant disadvantage when it comes to getting along with their bandmates: they’re siblings.

“I don’t think you need to get along,” reveals Issey.

“We’re quite Gallagher-esque actually,” shares Mathew, “It’s just that we don’t really have cricket bats around! She has hit me with 6-inch heeled boots before though.”

The worst it has got, they tell us, involved a festival, a pile of freshly cleaned clothes and a pair of enormous La Moda boots.

“I spent all my time ironing my clothes,” says Mathew, “I’d washed them all. They were all really clean. And when I went in there, they were all scattered across the floor - and she’d be stepping all over them with her muddy boots.”

“I loved these clothes. They had mud all over them. I went f*cking mental!”

Eventually, Mathew attempted to make peace.

“I was going to say something like, ‘Look, I’m sorry for going mental, but you understand why I’m angry, right?’

“I was halfway through the word ‘sorry’ and then a boot comes flying at me!”

Issey remembers it differently.

“I remember my thought process. I said to myself, ‘If you say one more word about this…’ because you wouldn’t stop going on about it. You wouldn’t stop!”

“I thought, ‘If he says one more thing, I’m getting him. You did say one more thing, and that’s when I got you!”

3. Don’t wait until you’re ‘ready’

“Every band shouldn’t do it the topsy-turvy way of recording first and then playing live,” says Issey.

“I think you can always tell when someone breaks and they’ve had something like a big online moment and they they’re like, ‘Sh*t, I’ve got to do some gigs!’ and they’re not prepared for it.”

And you can’t just post online content without getting out there anyway: Mathew has a fairly simple response:

“What are you going to film and post then?”

4. Busk until you can stop someone in ten seconds

“I think it hardens you as performers,” says Mathew, “because people who walk by don’t necessarily want to hear your music.

“They’ve had a busy day at work or whatever, and the last thing they want to hear is a couple of kids who can’t really fucking play, playing really loudly. They just want to get on their train back home to their loved ones or whatever.

“You’ve got to turn them around within about ten seconds of them walking by. That’s quite a skill.”

5. Play absolutely anywhere

Before the Molotov’s massive global headline shows came every kind of gig imaginable.

“We played everything,” says Mathew, “Weddings and parties, street parties and birthdays and all sorts. Churches, art exhibitions, private members’ clubs, pubs…”

“Anywhere that would have us,” adds Mathew.

“People’s gardens!” says Issey.

Pro tip: Busking could lead directly to the next booking, too.

“People would book us by throwing pieces of paper into our guitar case. It wasn’t money, unfortunately, but it was more valuable in the end,” explains Mathew.

Those notes would say “Ring me for a gig,” - which actually led to some of the band’s first indoor shows.

6. Treat every gig as training

“I guess our stage presence was built on those gigs,” remembers Issey, “It was like a baptism of fire.

“All those busking sets, all those gigs, and just knowing how to please an audience as well.”

Some were more memorable than others.

“We used to play at Millwall Football Club, before their games. Those were interesting!” says Mathew.

Then there was a wedding where the band performed The Beatles’ Oh! Darling for the first dance.

“It was a pretty bad rendition, but they seemed to enjoy it,” says Issey.

“The bride and groom fell out at the wedding,” she adds, “I was maybe 14 or 15 years old and I was on the steps just outside this social club, with all the bridesmaids and the bride. She was crying into my shoulder…”

After consoling the bride, there was still work to do.

“I was stroking her hair. Then I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to go on and do another set now!’”

7. Build your following in the real world

“We built up our following from that,” explains Issey, “People would follow us when we were busking and we’d have the social media.

“There are still people coming now who saw us way back then.”

That real-world following has grown at the same rate as their gig venues.

Mathew shares: “We sort of level it by London. The Electric Ballroom is like 1,500 capacity. Now we’re doing 5,000 tickets in London, and across the country it’s getting bigger.”

8. Know exactly what your band is

“Know who you are,” says Issey.

“That’s a good thing for anyone, but I mean know what your band is about. That can change, but have an identity. Have a strong visual image.”

That sense of identity helped the band get gigs from the beginning.

“A lot of the time, the reason we got good gigs was because we were aesthetically minded. We had a very ‘classic mod’ get up, but it worked because people could imagine us playing their weddings!”

9. Make the way you look part of the band

“I think the way we dress reflects the music, and I think there’s a very cohesive balance,” says Mathew..

“It’s having a tribe, isn’t it?” adds Issey.

“I guess it’s just a sense of identity,” continues Mathew, “I think it’s very human to want to attach yourself to a sort of tribe.

10. Don’t obsess over whether you’ve made it

For a band that has gone from busking to playing festivals across Europe, identifying the exact moment things changed is surprisingly difficult.

“You don’t really find success until you look back, really,” says Mathew.

“Yeah,” says Issey, “You’re just in the eye of the storm all the time.”

“There’s just so much. I guess it’s hard to say where the success is and quantify what that step up is.”

Six years in, perhaps that is The Molotovs’ simplest lesson of all: keep playing first, work out how far you’ve come later… and try to avoid the flying boots.

The Molotovs have announced that their second album, Welcome To Urbia, will be out on 9th April 2027. The record is the follow up to their No.3-hit debut, Wasted On Youth. The Molotovs’ ‘Welcome To Urbia’ UK tour kicks off across the UK this September, with a second London date added at the O2 Kentish Town Forum on September 26 after the first date sold out. Tickets are available now.

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It can be especially difficult to know where to eat in London, not least with inviting pubs on every street corner and such a variety of cuisine seemingly every two steps. Likewise, with everyone recommending a few different places, it can be quite difficult to cut through the noise to find good food and — perhaps most pressingly in these cash-strapped times — at good prices.

Somewhere in that noise you'll find places doing excellent food at lower prices than you might think – there are a few tricks of the trade and things to know so that will help you eat like a king in London without paying a king's ransom for the privilege. Here are eight ways to eat well in London without the need to remortgage your house.

1. Take advantage of a set menu at a place that usually costs double

My first trick: some of London's most in-demand restaurants run fixed-price menus using the same kitchen, chefs and ingredients as the main menu. You're just a little limited by the items you can have – it is a "set" menu after all.

The Devonshire in Soho, just behind Piccadilly Circus, is an excellent example. Currently rated as the UK's #1 gastropub (in no small part thanks to its penchant for selling a reputed 20,000 pints of Guinness a week), it built its reputation on quality meat and chips, which seem to be its bread and butter on the à la carte menu.

However, if you go in any time Monday to Saturday or for a Sunday lunch, then you can get a no-choice two-course set menu for £25, or a full three courses for £29. That nets you a prawn and langoustine cocktail starter, a main of skirt steak, served medium rare, duck fat chips and a pot of béarnaise, and a sticky toffee pudding as a third course.

The prawn and langoustine cocktail is full of sizeable prawns, with a tangy Marie Rose sauce, and is presented nicely in a retro-inspired cocktail glass. The steak comes medium rare and melts, clearly rested properly rather than rushed out, and the chips are especially good: crispy outside, fluffy inside and well seasoned without going overboard. Upgrade to three courses and a sticky toffee pudding follows — compact rather than a huge slab, but light, with a rich toffee sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that balances it well. It's worth noting that a 12.5% service charge is added on top, as is customary with a lot of London restaurants these days.

It's notoriously difficult to get a reservation at The Devonshire for peak times, such as a weekend, with slots going live on a Thursday at 10:30am for three weeks in advance – pick a day and time, and go for it like you would a booking for a Glastonbury headliner.

On a Saturday afternoon at the end of lunch service, the pub was buzzing in its main dining room (to the point it was quite loud) which is something to bear in mind. But service remained especially attentive for water and an excellent free bread service. A weekday afternoon may give you a quieter experience.

2. Bring your own bottle of wine for free

Drink price can add £15-30 per-head to a bill before you've eaten anything, given the cost of a bottle of wine. Some restaurants will however waive any corkage fees if you bring your own bottle in on select nights, and serve it to you as if it's one of their own. You end up with a bill just for food, rather than one mounting up with drinks costs as the evening progresses.

The Cadogan Arms on the King's Road in Chelsea does exactly this every Monday: bring your own bottle (capped at one 75cl bottle per person) and it'll be served with zero markup. For a pub with a genuinely serious wine list, that's a significant saving — a decent bottle from a supermarket, wine merchants or your own collection replaces what would otherwise be a £30+ line item. It doesn't apply on Bank Holidays from my reading, so check the calendar before you turn up with a bottle under your arm.

The food from the Cadogan Arms also backs up its venerable reputation. In terms of starters, the lamb ribs, which are pressure-cooked for 24 hours before a quick finish in the deep fryer, come out succulent with real crackle on the outside; the scotch egg is the best I've had, properly seasoned and well-salted with a wonderfully runny yolk, and the crab toast is full of fresh seafood flavour with a creamy sauce to match.

For mains, the ham, egg and chips is the star and what a lot of people go for. Treacle and mustard-glazed ham that falls off the bone, alongside triple-cooked chips with an excellent texture outside and inside and a spiced pineapple ketchup that gets the balance of heat and fruit just right. The fish and chips elevate a pub staple with excellent mushy peas, a thin, crispy batter and a proper tartare sauce with just the right amount of tartness. The cod loin features a rich, buttery sauce with leeks that matches well with the fresh and surprisingly meaty fish, while a side of Jersey Royal potatoes have a flavour all of their own.

Puddings don't let up either: a rich sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream, a well-made crumble with a proper homemade crumb, and a cherry trifle with thick whipped cream, plenty of sponge and just enough cherry jelly to cut through was genuinely the standout. Service is attentive without hovering — our waiter, Lizzy, was genuinely a delight, making the 15% charge a justifiable extra — and the whole thing feels worth the price tag once you factor in the setting and quality, corkage saving or not.

3. Hunt down a lunch menu

Lots of bars and restaurants often run a near-invisible daytime deal, because a dining room that's empty at 1pm and packed at 9pm is still a dining room they'd rather not waste. As such, you can snag a bargain by dining at 'off peak' times.

I caught The Blues Kitchen in Camden towards the end of lunch service on a Friday, when it wasn't too busy — the lunch menu runs 12-4pm on weekdays, and dishes that would run £16-18 on the evening menu are a flat £10 at lunch, with no extras bundled in.

I went for a fried chicken sandwich and a beef brisket dip, £10 each, with a pint of IPA on the side for £6.90, with the fried chicken being juicy inside and extra crispy on the outside, giving a surprising kick from the sauce and its coating. The beef brisket dip is something I'd had on a previous trip, but another one of my party ordered it, and its meat is packed solid into a brioche bun. It falls apart on its own, let alone when paired with a rich and thick beefy gravy for dipping. For sides, a £5 corn bread is lovely, feeling like a savoury sponge cake with a rich honey butter, while the mac and cheese is a sizeable portion and impresses on flavour and quantity. One thing worth flagging: there is a 12.5% service charge, so factor that into the final bill.

A similar trick is running at Boxhall in Liverpool Street if you're headed Central via East: any dish from one of its nine resident kitchens — from Beef on the Block's Philly cheesesteak buns to Club Mexicana's tacos — paired with a drink, for £20. It's on Sunday to Wednesday from 5pm, running from 2nd August to 11th November, ordered via a QR code with no app needed. That's ideal for after-work dining without much of the expense at a prime location that's sure to have some fun evening vibes as the summer wraps up.

4. Let an app tell you what's about to go to waste

At the end of service, high-quality food that hasn't sold isn't thrown away. It's sometimes bagged up and sold at a fraction of its price through surplus-food apps, since restaurants would rather recoup a few pounds than nothing at all. The catch is that stock is unpredictable and first-come, first-served, so it rewards a bit of habit-forming.

Too Good To Go is the best-known version of this and is an app I can attest to using probably at least twice or three times a month when I'm in London. Sometimes as a bit of fun, but otherwise I've stuck to a few places that I keep returning to for an ideal blend of cost and quality. Bags typically go for £3-5 and represent stock worth three or four times that at full price, but they're released at specific windows (usually towards closing time) and can sell out within minutes, so it's worth setting an alert on the app for your local spots.

I picked up a bag from Roni's in West Hampstead, part of a North London institution of bagel bakeries you'll find in Hampstead, Belsize Park and Primrose Hill, for £3.79 that contained a salt beef bagel, a schnitzel sandwich and an almond croissant. Against a combined menu value of roughly £20-22, that's about as good as this trick gets. On some days, the bag can be £4.99, but that's still a bargain.

The salt beef bagel is the real standout here, and goes for nearly £7 on its own, with a healthy quantity of beef that melts, a sharp pickle and mustard combo, all on a freshly baked bagel — I think is one of the best in London. I always stop by Roni's when I can, and it's usually that bagel that keeps me coming back.

Sticking with north London, Euphorium's Hampstead branch is one of the better-priced bags around at £5, in one of London's pricier postcodes. In the past, mine have come with croissants and blueberry muffins, though what you get is always the luck of the draw, which is exactly why it's worth checking in regularly with a few favourite spots rather than relying on just one.

Crumbs and Dollies by Carnaby Street sits at the premium end of Too Good To Go, with bags going for £8 and a choice of cookies or cakes when you collect. I went for cookies and got two Victoria sponge and two chocolate, which were thick, gooey New York-style cookies, working out to roughly half price or better per cookie.

The next time I went, there wasn't any choice, and it was just cakes in a variety of flavours. Red velvet, Biscoff, chocolate and birthday cake were in my box of four, with thick icing and a moist sponge the name of the game. It's a popular bag, so the same rule applies: set an alert if you want to be sure of grabbing one.

5. Book the first table of the day for half price

In a similar vein to a lunch menu, there are times of the day when restaurants can be empty, so you can snag a bargain by using an app if you're happy to dine in a certain window.

First Table gets you 50% off the food bill (drinks are excluded) for a group of 2-4 people, on the condition you book a slotted sitting of breakfast, lunch or dinner at a participating restaurant, and pay a small non-refundable booking fee (around £6 per person) to secure it. It's essentially a way of paying for reliability rather than the meal itself — restaurants use it to guarantee footfall in their quietest slot, and you get half-price food in exchange for eating a little earlier than you might otherwise choose to.

I tried it at Dirty Bones on Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, sharing a Mac Daddy burger and a side of cheesy truffle fries with some friends. That's £27 of food at full price. What you get is a full metal tray of loaded truffle fries and a burger that blends quality shortrib with mac and cheese for good measure. The cost is cut almost in half by First Table, before service charge, making it much more affordable for quality eats if you're happy to pay for drinks.

6. Find the pub that never tried to be fancy

Some of London's best pints and simplest, most honest food comes from pubs that have deliberately stayed small and unpolished. You won't find a gastropub makeover, small plates menu, nor any attempt to compete on décor. The value comes in the honesty of its offering.

The Southampton Arms in Kentish Town is my model for this: a genuine hole-in-the-wall, with no fruit machines, no TV screens and no food beyond simple snacks like scotch eggs and pork pies, alongside an ever-rotating list of cask ales and ciders sourced from small, independent breweries. It'd be right at home in a far more expensive setting.

I tried both the Southampton Arms and its sister pub, The Pocket on Upper Street in Islington (both are run by the same folks) — both rammed later on a Friday and Saturday afternoon respectively, with the craft pints flowing, and I imagine a shortage of pork pies and hot hog roast rolls to go with it.

Your best bet, as I find out, is to go early, although even then that may not be enough. The Southampton opens at 12pm, although the hog roast roll wasn't ready until nearly 2pm, a full two hours after opening, but it was worth the wait — packed with pulled pork, apple and a properly sharp mustard, for £8.95 – considering it's a stone's throw from Hampstead Heath, that feels surprisingly reasonable. A standard pint under a certain ABV comes in at £5.44, so a roll and a pint lands comfortably under £15 in a pub with good atmosphere once people pile in.

Further east, The Grapes in Limehouse leans into the same spit-and-sawdust appeal, but with a genuinely remarkable backstory. It's a 500-year-old riverside pub name-checked by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, and it's currently leaseholder-owned by Sir Ian McKellen. Yep — it's Gandalf's gaff, with his very own Lord of the Rings staff taking pride of place behind the bar.

It's unpretentious by design rather than accident — no table reservations, a proper local feel despite the history — and does a lunch menu with sandwiches for under £10 alongside its famous fish and chips. It's further proof that "affordable" in London doesn't have to mean compromising on quality.

7. Grab a proper sandwich, not a supermarket meal deal

London's best cheap lunches are often standing-room-only counters where the ingredients do all the talking. No service charge, no waiting staff, just quality and speed from people who've been doing one thing for decades.

Brick Lane's Beigel Bake has been doing this since the 1970s: open 24 hours a day, cash-friendly, and serving salt beef bagels for a few pounds. There's a queue out the door at 3am just as readily as at midday — a genuine only-in-London institution. A salt beef beigel here feels like a rite of passage, with salt beef that requires no effort to chew, cut through with the sharpness of mustard and a hefty pickle.

For something different, Dal Fiorentino in Fitzrovia applies the same logic to Tuscan schiacciata sandwiches — a thinner, crispier cousin of focaccia. Its menu splits into gourmet and standard ranges, each priced in small and large sizes. I went for the Michelangelo at £8.50 (large), which comes loaded with parma ham, stracciatella cheese and peppery rocket on fresh schiacciata bread, plus olive oil and a truffle cream for good measure. Even the smaller-sized version would put it roughly in line with a supermarket meal deal for noticeably higher-quality food.

On a separate visit, I tried the Boccaccio from the gourmet menu, smaller at £7 — bresaola, pecorino, rocket and extra virgin olive oil. Even at the smaller size, it was sizeable enough to share between two, and wonderfully fresh.

8. Order for the table, not for yourself

A final trick: if you can, order a sharing platter. It might seem like a hefty up-front cost, but it's usually a surefire way of feeding three or four people in one fell swoop if you're happy using fingers.

Poor Boys in Kingston, a New Orleans-inspired restaurant known for its portion sizes, is a good example of this. I went for the Surf and Turf Sharer at £56.95, and got a genuinely huge amount of food, with fried shrimp, fried crab, fried calamari, sublime beef brisket burnt ends and excellent fried chicken that's easily enough for multiple people to share. Split four ways, that's roughly £14-15 a head for a spread that would easily cost double ordered as individual mains.

It's also available as takeaway, which opens up a nice variation on the trick: Hampton Court is just over the river, so a sharer ordered to go makes for a genuinely great summer picnic. Sharing the same food in the grounds of a Tudor palace rather than a restaurant booth also means you waive any form of additional tip or service charge for eating inside. Bring a cooler of drinks or wine in an insulated water bottle, and you've got an upmarket picnic with quality food.

None of these tips and tricks require giving up on quality, and if anything, just need a little bit of forward planning. A restaurant booking made on the right day, an app downloaded, or knowing which night of the week to turn up at a favourite spot is all it takes. London's expensive reputation is largely true if you eat where most of the queue goes. Look slightly to the side of that queue, and the same city gets a lot more affordable, and even more interesting than you first thought.

• I visited London's luxury bottomless roast dinner and it was the ultimate decadent Sunday lunch

For a generation of British comedy fans, Jim Moir will always be Vic Reeves. Except, these days, Moir is considerably more interested in Jim Moir.

Moir’s alter-ego arrived on television at the dawn of the 90s with a bag of bizarre props, a knack for penning a surreal song and a take on comedy that had more in common with Dadaism than it did the fusty club comedians that preceded him. Soon joining forces with the equally-unlikely star Bob Mortimer, the duo created some of the strangest — and funniest — television Britain has ever produced.

But ask Moir about Vic Reeves now and he'll tell you something rather definitive: “I think Vic Reeves died about 12 years ago. Ran off into the tundra.”

It is a typically mad Vic Reeves answer, even if the comedy creation is now in Moir’s rear view mirror. Long before Big Night Out, Shooting Stars and the weird sketches that made him one of British comedy's most distinctive jokers, Moir was an artist. And having increasingly devoted himself to painting in recent years, he's now enjoying recognition from an entirely different audience — birdwatchers, art collectors and a new wave of fans who have followed him from television into galleries.

Ahead of this year's Art Car Boot Fair in London (at which Moir is planning to sell his wares and do his best barrow boy impression), Shortlist caught up with Moir to talk about his daily painting routine, the art he thinks everyone should see, and whether there is any chance of a reunion with Bob.

Looking back at Moir’s South London pub memories and New Romantic nights out, there’s even a tease as to what the bequiffed Reeves would be up to these days. Should he ever be found alive, that is…

Shortlist: There’s a great variety to your art work, with pieces ranging from traditional paintings of birds to much stranger surreal pieces. What drives that variety in you?

Jim ‘Vic Reeves’ Moir: Well, I have too many thoughts crammed into my tiny brain, so I turn on the syphon and they come out. I don't, quite often, know what's going to turn up. I generally go out bird watching every day, so you're going to see plenty of bird pictures. Other days I might have other ideas. Today, for instance, I'm doing industrial scenes just because I'm getting a kick out of painting clouds and smog and horrible sort of old dirty factories.

SL: Is that part of a series you're working on now?

JM: Yeah — I'm doing about 30 small paintings on one big piece of paper using carbon ink. So at the moment, I've just done 90 of them. So it looks like a series, doesn't it?

SL: Yeah, absolutely like a series! Do you have a favoured technique? Are there preferred materials you work with?

JM: It used to be oils, and then it was acrylic, and then it went back to oils. But I really like using inks at the moment, so it kind of chops and changes. It switches with my mood, and that can change all the time.

SL: Having had a public profile prior to your more recent public-facing art career, do you think people have an expectation of what your art is going to be before they see it?

JM: Well, I don't really know. I mean, I go out bird watching and I meet blokes — usually blokes — who are bird watching as well, and they go, "You're going to go and paint that?”, and I go, "Yeah, I will.” They all take photographs and I do the painting. So I've got that little crowd. I've got a comedy crowd who say, "I like your comedy paintings, but I ain't got enough money to buy them, is the only thing”!

It sometimes doesn't work in your favour, because people don't like you to be… I'm not going to say “good”, but I will — good at two things. People go, “Well, no, you can't do that. Stick with the comedy”. So, even though I did painting before I did comedy, and comedy was kind of an extension of that, people have an expectation and make their own decision. So I think it's up to them. I mean, I make a living out of it, and that's all I'm interested in!

SL: I am one of those people who have never bought art before, but I bought one of your Chris Palmer paintings, and it's the one thing I say to my girlfriend: if the flat burns down, that's the only thing we grab.

JM: You're in that category. You're not in the bird category!

SL: You've talked about having notebooks around the house, painting virtually every day. What's a normal day in the studio look like?

JM: I get up about half five, six, start working, and I feel like I'm most lively then. I'm an early bird, so I get most of me work done first thing in the morning. Then grab lunch, and then go out bird watching. It's a simple life, but I like it.

SL: Do you do paint on location as well, or is it always back at the studio?

JM: No, I do. What I tend to do is take photographs if I see a scene that I like, and then go back and work it up from the photographs. But I do sometimes go out and do it en plein air. I've done experiments painting outside as well, like where I've painted a scene and then hidden it, or pinned it to the back of a tree and then gone back a month later seeing how it's faring, things like that.

That's quite good fun, but that came from a friend of mine, Colin Self, who was one of the first pop artists — he's got a broad Norfolk accent, so I'll try and do it. But he says, “I knocked on this old lady's door and said, ‘Do you mind if I stash all my paintings under your bush?’” She just went and hid his bits under a bush, and then returned to him the next day!

And I love that about artists who go out and paint outside. So you know, you never know! You might go and have a look under a bush and find some works of art under there.

SL: What would you say to someone, then, who comes from your comedy, and you represent like a gateway to an art world that they've not experienced before? Where would you say they should go next?

JM: I used to spend all my time in the library looking at art books, but now I suppose you just do it online. But you can follow a theme, find something you like, and then go surfing, which is what I do all the time. Like I say, I used to be in the library, and that'd lead me off onto one direction — I was really into German Expressionism when I was at art school and stuff like that. So that was just from looking at American Expressionism and then working out what it was I liked. So you surf around.

SL: What are your memories of art school?

JM: Being told off and them saying, "What do you think you've got some kind of artistic licence?” And I went, "Yeah, I have!”

Another one was, "Can you paint something which is in bad taste?” And I said, "Well, not really, because if it's bad taste, it might be good taste to someone else, and that makes it objective.”

So I was stroppy — I spent most of my extra time there working, using equipment and doing it myself, really, rather than listening to lectures.

SL: Did you enjoy it? Do you think it helped you?

JM: Oh yeah — you learn the basics of drawing and perspective and things like that. So you take away stuff like that, and then you go and sort of forget about it.

SL: ‘Jim Moir as an artist’ is kind of a second coming for you, and I wonder what you would say to someone who's maybe in their 40s, 50s, 60s, looking to take a different path? Someone who maybe feels like they've missed their chance to do something creative.

JM: Well, you just have to go for it. I mean, that's what I did — I was about 21 and realised I didn't really want to work for anyone ever again. My mum, who's 99 nearly, I saw her the other week and she said, "Are you going to retire?” I said, "I retired when I left school.

SL: That’s a nice way of looking at it.

JM: Yeah, well, you’ve just got to. You take a chance. You just mess about and see if it works. And if it works, leave what you're doing and go and do that. But I would always say do what you want to do, because if you do what you want to do, you're going to do it well. That's the crux of it. If you like fiddling about with cars, then go off and do that. You know, it’s the same thing.

SL: Beyond your painting and your comedy, do you have any other creative outlets you're passionate about?

JM: What else is there? Well, I'm writing a new book, which is a bird book, actually. I mean, it's all the art. I sculpt. I do mainly fine art. Really, I don't know what else there is. There probably is something, but I can't think of it right now…

I used to be in a band when I was in my teens. I played bass in bands — I started off on drums actually, but I could only play them in the garage on a Saturday. I learned I could play the snare drum on my bed, so I learned how to do drum rolls. But it wasn't fulfilling enough, so I swapped that for a guitar. I couldn't be bothered playing six strings, so I just played four, and that's why I'm a bass player.

SL: The upcoming Art Car Boot Fair, Jim — what's going to be your involvement? What can people expect to pick up if they come and visit?

JM: I think this might be the sixth or seventh Art Car Boot Fair we’ve done — what I've done is loads of paintings of what people want, and you can get them cheap. So I've done landscapes, birds, there's some comedy paintings in there, stuff that I know people are going to want. And there was a massive big queue at my stall last year, which was good — when I've been before, there've been big queues for Peter Blake and Tracy Emin. Last year, I thought, “Yeah, I've arrived”.

SL: Are you feeling more recognition as an artist now?

JM: Yes, I think people are kind of accepting that or understanding it. I mean, I still get people shouting "Vic, Vic, Vic" in the street. But there's a lot of people going, “Jim. I really like your artwork. I like your paintings”. I actually get that a lot more all the time, so that's good. I've landed on that planet, and I'm really looking forward to the Art Car Boot Fair — you get a really good feeling out of it because, you know, you're like a barrow boy. You're selling stuff off a car, earning your bread and butter from flogging stuff to people.

SL: Do you like the interaction? Do you have to be a wheeler-dealer, or is it a bit more refined than that?

JM: My art agent is an ex auctioneer, so he's really good at doing that. And my daughter's really good at flogging stuff, so I kind of sit in the background and say, "Oh yeah, I'll sign that. I'll do a photo”. If people want to talk to me about it, I'll go and chat to them. So you spend all day chatting to people usually about techniques, and what paintings mean and things like that. Maybe I should have been selling fruit and veg off a wagon or something because I like it.

SL: Vic Reeves' Big Night Out regularly featured your drawings. Do you have a favourite piece from that time?

When we did The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, we used to have a Reeves and Mortimer product on great big boards. When everyone else was off having their lunch, I'd be painting the boards. I’d do the sketches at home, bring them in, and then paint them with black paint. And I do remember ‘Walk Me Home Cheddar’. I enjoyed that. ‘Licky Kicky’, which was just an extending dog leg with razor blades and knives on it, which could chop the legs off of robbers and burglars.

But ‘Walk Me Home Cheddar’ was a big piece of cheddar that would walk your girlfriend home if you were too drunk. And I said to Bob, "Look, there's your girlfriend, (who's Sharon from EastEnders), being walked home by the cheddar”. And then after that, it went in all the papers, in the tabloids, saying that Bob was going out with Sharon from EastEnders. So they decided that from seeing a drawing that I made of her being walked home by a lump of cheddar!

SL: Were those pieces then on the shows were they purely yours or collaborative?

JM: No, they were all mine. I used to do everything. I used to draw ‘The Man with the Stick’ helmet and everything. Any bit of art was all my stuff.

SL: Do you know what happened to all of it? Is that in a lockup somewhere?

JM: No, I would imagine it got either burned or pilfered when it went into the skip around the back of the BBC.

SL: There will be a ‘100 Year Jim Moir Retrospective’ when it gets found somewhere, sat in someone's loft for decades, that's what we're looking forward to.

JM: Yeah, might be somewhere.

SL: It goes without saying there’s a lot of affection for what you did with Bob Mortimer. Do you and Bob still find yourselves coming up with ideas together? Are you formally working on anything?

JM: No, I haven't seen Bob for a while now. He doesn't really go out anywhere, and if he does, he goes out fishing. I ain't seen him for ages. Mind you I don't go out anywhere either…

SL: Is that partnership something that you would like to come back to, or is that chapter closed?

JM: You never know. I never say never. But I’ve kind of moved on to the next stage. I've transformed into a full time artist and I'm really happy doing that. So I stick with what I'm doing. I mean, I'm getting on now. So I can't see any going backwards.

SL: So if Vic Reeves never made another appearance, that would be fine by you?

JM: I think Vic Reeves died about 12 years ago. Ran off into the tundra.

SL: So no big Viking funeral or anything for him?

JM: I think Vic Reeves has just found some shack on the tundra and is trying to set up a hair salon.

SL: Shooting Stars — you recently said it was ‘an antidote to comedy’. Do you think television comedy is still taking risks? What do you make of what's on screen now?

JM: Well, I'm always on the lookout for something that's funny. I don't think anyone's taking risks because I don't think they're allowed to take risks. I think most TV channels are too afraid of a backlash in case something might turn out to be a bit dodgy. I don't know. I don't think anyone's taking any risks, though.

SL: I hate to use the term, but I don't know how better to put it — is ‘cancel culture’ putting people off?

JM: That's what I was trying to aim at. You said it perfectly — I think cancel culture, and also the television channels not being willing to really risk anything.

SL: Is there any comedian out there you see carrying the torch for your brand of surreal comedy?

JM: I don't know. I never watch it!

SL: How about then social media comedians — quick fire TikTok stuff. Do you think there's value in that?

JM: I don't know because I've never seen any of that either! I promise you honestly, I've never seen any of them.

SL: To be fair, Jim, you’re probably saving yourself a lot of hassle. When in London, is there anywhere in terms of pubs or restaurants or music venues you like to poke your head into. Or areas even?

JM: I used to live in Brixton in 1979, so I’d be going out to music venues. I'd go to the Moonlight Club [in West Hampstead - ed.] to see Joy Division.

That’s probably no longer open, and Joy Division aren’t around! I mean, I left London in 1995. I don't go to gigs much at all now because I'm half deaf. I like going to restaurants if I can sit outside because I can't take the cacophony indoors. So if I'm going anywhere, I go to somewhere around Coal Drops Yard. I like Caravan, I like sitting outside there.

I love London pubs. What I don't like is the upstairs and downstairs toilets. That's the thing about London pubs. I really love a London pub. I love that, did you know, they were painted brown, cream, and red to represent beer, wine, and red wine?

SL: I did not know that! Is that a fact?

JM: Yeah, that's a fact. And also, it's the same colours you get in theatres because they would represent the same thing.

SL: See, when I ask you if that's a fact, I'm just wondering, is this a ‘Shooting Stars fact’ or is this a true fact…

JM: No it’s true! I've got loads of false, fake facts, but this is a true one.

SL: And if you could spend one evening in 1980s London again, where would you go and what would you do?

JM: I'd go back to my old flat in Brixton and go to the George Canning [in Camberwell .ed] with me mates, have a couple, and then shoot off up to ‘Le Beat Route’, which was an old New Romantics club on a Friday night.

SL: Were you a New Romantic, Jim?

JM: Yeah, pretty much. We used to get them all round our house. We had Boy George, before he was famous — there were a lot of them. They all used to come round to our gaff. Yeah, I’m ex-Punk, ex-New Romantic, and then I went off in a kind of industrial way.

SL: That is the movement of music through the 80s and early 90s, I suppose then, isn't it really?

JM: Yeah, that's it.

SL: All right, Jim. One more question and we’ll let you go. Big Night Out first kicked off back at the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross. When was the last time you were there?

JM: I think it must have been about 10 years ago — it’s turned into a kind of pizzeria. When I was there, it was a gay pub — Lily Savage was on early on, and then he'd move out, and his crowds move out, and then I'd go in with all my rubbish, carrying in all my props, and my gang would turn up. It was really Hogarthian and kind of rough, but really good fun.

SL: At Shortlist we’re really fond of that area. We tend to go back to some of those pubs nearby like the Marquis of Granby…

JM: That's still a dark place, I think! I went there about eight years ago. Still, it looks like it hasn't changed much in there!

SL: Do you ever miss those early days? That sense of coming up?

JM: Yeah — I mean, there was a sense of vibrancy and urgency and all that stuff. It wasn't really, ‘I want to be famous’. It was like ‘I've got a new idea — let's see what if this works’. I think the attitude that is around now is like, ‘Let’s see how famous I can get, how quickly I can get into a stadium’. For me it was ‘Let's see if anyone can accept this idea’!

I still work like that anyway. Let's have a crack at something new — not do it ‘cos you think you're going to make it with it. It was really good times, it changed every week, there was a lot going on.

But the Art Car Boot Fair is what I'm working towards now. And I've got four exhibitions around the country at the moment, and they're all coming to an end. So go to the Art Car Boot Fair, go and have a look at that!

The Art Car Boot Fair takes place on September 5th at Coal Drops Yard, with tickets starting at £5. For more on Jim Moir's art and upcoming exhibitions, visit JimMoir.com.

It’s said that in every German embassy there is kept a big fat Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen, expressly for the signing of treaties, trade agreements and other Important Documents. And, according to Patrick Yandall, director of the Omas pen company, it’s easy to understand why a disposable Bic or any ballpoint wouldn't be right for the job.

“It’s like making a coffee by machine or just going out to get one - that loses all the ritual involved in making a coffee at home that we used to have," he says.

"It’s the same for a fountain pen - its use is a ritual, from first choosing the pen for its looks, its materials, its feel, through to the right ink, nib, even the paper on which you’ll write. A ballpoint decides all this for you. A ballpoint doesn’t bring a sense of occasion to what’s being written.”

Sales of fountain pens have been climbing steadily since Covid — when we had more time to put any pen to paper, or perhaps discovered the need for what Yandall calls the fountain pen’s “meditative” quality in use. As the author Graham Greene once noted: “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. [But] my hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”

But, Yandall argues, the fountain pen renaissance is also another example of our reaching for the analogue in an ever more digital age, the same impulse that sees us buying more tactile, more human paperback books and vinyl records (vinyl is now the biggest selling physical format for music), alongside the rise of journalling and hipster stationery lines.

Maybe it’s even akin to the appeal of mechanical watches, also among products that have long since been declared outmoded (and for which there are much, much cheaper and just as functional alternatives), and yet which still keep selling regardless. And while Yandall doesn’t see the fountain pen competing on that market’s scale, he says people are now considering fountain pens as accessories and style objects as much as tools.

The rise of the 'penfluencer'

Omas, for example, has its signature triangular barrel shape. The Japanese maker Namiki is known for its filigree and lacquer work, while a Montegrappa may be made from its proprietary resin, Montegrappite, or ceramic, titanium, carbon fibre or even mammoth ivory. The brand recently established a custom design service, online and in Harrods, so you can let rip with colour, materials and engravings. Or you might go for — or collect — one of the many options in limited-edition licensed models, or a replica of the Conway Stewart fountain pen that’s used to disarm a Nazi in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (cue quips about the pen being mightier than the sword).

As Alastair Adams, managing director of Conway Stewart puts it, in a meeting it’s the person who pulls out a fountain pen that gets noticed.

“There are only a few things that a man especially can carry that show his status - that’s his watch, his cufflinks and his pen,” he says. “So they want their pen to be different too”.

That’s also why, when Rolls-Royce asked the company to provide a pen for its glove compartments, it didn't want a ballpoint. And why you can go online and now find any number of ‘penfluencers’ espousing the virtues of the nib.

“The fountain pen has always appealed to certain professions - lawyers, doctors and so on,” adds Adams.

“That, in part, is about tradition, but also because a fountain pen does slow your writing down, and, it’s said, make your thinking clearer too. Yet it’s younger people, in their 20s an 30s, who seem to be getting into fountain pens now, which cuts against the stereotype of quite who an ‘archaic writing instrument’ might be expected to appeal to”.

From quill to high-tech jotter

The basic idea of the fountain pen is much the same as it was when it was invented almost 400 years ago, when a German by the name of Daniel Schwente came up with the idea of a pen carrying its own ink supply: he put a quill inside another quill and sealed the end with cork.

Something more familiar is attributable to insurance salesman Lewis Waterman, whose 1884 model, launched that year, introduced the insight of placing an air hole in the nib - this balanced air pressure inside and outside the pen, so kept the ink flowing - and supplying said ink to that through a grooved feed mechanism. That, in turn, was held by a barrel that held the ink. Simple, but also very clever.

That said, fountain pen mechanics have not stood still, ensuring the device is not the tricky, inconvenient one you once might have pictured: the one that runs dry unexpectedly or leaks all over your shirt. Ink compartments are capacious and filling them streamlined, with vacuum systems and shut-off valves. Nibs are stronger, finer, anti-clogging. The use of CNC machinery in their manufacture means tolerances are both much tighter and production more consistent.

“I don’t think I’ve heard about a pen exploding in someone’s pocket since the 90s,” Yandall laughs.

The fountain pen — like the mechanical watch — is still evolving, too. Injection moulded pen barrels may be the next frontier, and improvements in metallurgy. Yandall cites Omas’s ongoing attempts to launch a contemporary version with a super-flexible metal alloy (the precise ingredients of which, as with Coca-Cola, are secret) it originally developed around time of WW2, when more standard materials were needed for the war effort. If only it could persuade the metals industry, more used to working on huge-scale industrial projects, to make it for them. Still, there’s time to make this happen.

“We all seem to type everything now. But as practical writing gets ‘phased out’, I think the better it is for us,” says Omas’s Patrick Yandall.

“If you’re making the choice to write, then it’s inevitable you’ll end up with a fountain pen”.

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I've had a lot of Sunday roasts, from homemade masterpieces to questionable, mass-produced pub fare. Each had their own charm and whimsy, even the bad ones, but London's offering up an experience for those looking for the ultimate in Sunday lunchtime gastronomy.

A decadent buffet that goes far beyond the traditional roast (although it’s in plentiful supply for the Sunday purists) at The Ned hotel near Bank station.

There are two “feasts” available every Sunday, with Ned’s Feast in Millie’s Lounge and Cecconi’s Feast in the hotel’s Italian restaurant of the same name. The food selection is similar, but Cecconi’s offers an additional Italian flair with cook-to-order pasta and pizza, and a dazzling selection of regional desserts.

I paid a visit to Cecconi’s Feast to find out if this really is the ultimate Sunday lunch in the heart of London. Loosen those belts, folks...

Easing in

Step through the doors held open by the attentive staff into the banking hall of this former financial institution and you’re met with 1920s opulence. 92 verdite columns, rows of Grade I-listed walnut banking counters, and an easy-listening jazz trio on a raised central bandstand welcome you to the luxury of The Ned.

Millie’s is to your left, the Nickel Bar directly ahead, and Cecconi’s to your right, a little hidden thanks to a wooden privacy screen running the circumference of its dining area, providing a calmer, more intimate experience away from the bustling bar, without losing the soft jazz or stunning architecture.

As the host showed us to our table and we sat down, our server glided in to offer us a complimentary drink, included as part of the feast experience. We could choose from prosecco, white wine, red wine, rose wine, beer or a soft drink - we went for prosecco, which was delightfully light and served in wonderfully Art Deco glassware.

But of course we were there for the food, so there was only one thing to do. Get up, and head to the oval counter to survey the spread.

As any civilised diner about to eat their body weight in food would do, we began at the start with the salads and bites.

There were five fresh salads to try, with the creamy potato and pancetta a particular highlight, while the thinly sliced sausage roll offered a deep, meaty flavour hit. The devilled egg made for a playful amuse bouche, with the mountains of cured meats and temptingly crisp bruschetta giving us that Italian flair.

See: food

Before diving into the roast selection, there was another attraction that we needed to sample. You’re paying a premium for this feast, so you’ll want it to deliver big hits, and the seafood selection is one of them.

The salmon en croute had a light pastry, well seasoned cabbage wrap and perfectly cooked fish, while the hearty lobster mac and cheese is a dish you could easily keep going back to - but don’t fill up on one thing.

You can also pick up poached and smoked salmon, and whole prawns, but the main event is next door. Limitless lobster and oysters.

Oysters are shucked, seasoned and ready to eat, while the lobsters are halved, giving you easy access to the juicy tail meat. Your table comes pre-set with a bowl, lobster fork and shell cracker, allowing you to get to the claw meat. And once you’re done you can get up and have another. And another. And another. It’s a seafood lover's dream.

Plus, if you prefer your lobster warm, you can ask your server to bring a hot crustacean to your table.

And as we polish off our fish course and are about to rise out of our seats to head to the roasts, our server reminds us of the cook-to-order options that we’d dutifully forgotten about as we lost ourselves in the self-service buffet.

We had the choice of four pasta and two pizza options. We opted for the mushroom tagliatelle, with the sauce offering a rich, earthy, umami flavour, complementing the freshly made pasta perfectly, and topped with a generous helping of parmesan.

And we couldn’t say no to authentic Italian pizza, going for a classic margarita (the other option was spicy salami) that was thin, light and perfectly cooked.

Roasting

No Sunday lunch is complete without the traditional roast, and for those that love a well-cooked protein and all the trimmings, Cecconi’s Feast has you covered.

We start with a choice of four roasts; beef, chicken, porchetta and a vegan roast. You can choose multiple at a time, and always come back for more. Move along the dedicated counter for roasts and you’ll get an excellent variety of sides.

Crispy roast potatoes and flavourful stuffing are present and correct, pigs in blankets (because they’re excellent and shouldn’t be held just for Christmas), and there’s seasonal veggies, too. During our visit in August, there were two offerings: green beans, broccoli and courgette, and a medley of roasted roots including carrots and parsnips.

There’s exceedingly cheesy cauliflower cheese, and some absolutely enormous Yorkshire puddings. They were well cooked though, so for those who like theirs a little less crispy you might be disappointed.

And no roast is complete without gravy, available in a large warmer with a ladle. A word of warning though — it’s like a very rich red wine jus, so go easy as it can overpower the plate if you’re heavy handed with the serve.

A couple of other small, but significant touches at this ultimate Sunday lunch buffet included a sauce station with mustards, ketchup, apple sauce and more, and a cheese board and fresh fruit alongside a wide array of desserts.

I especially enjoyed the crumble station, where you get to control your own ratio of crumble to filling, and then smother it in custard. The Tiramisu was a staff favourite, while the blueberry and lemon muffin cake, battenburg, cannolis and red velvet roulade were also hits.

The staff were excellent. Attentive without being overbearing, ensuring we had fresh cutlery, water top-ups, and removing plates we had finished with. There was even one staff member constantly monitoring the buffet, with a walkie-talkie so they could radio to the kitchen when supplies looked to be running low.

In fact, we only saw one empty dish - one of the dessert options - during our time, and even that was quickly replenished before we’d finished perusing the sweets. You won’t be waiting for your favourites to be restocked here, with all the good stuff ready for you whenever you head up for more.

To get the most for your money you’ll need to be a carnivore, or pescatarian. While there is a selection of vegetarian options (and very few vegan choices), you might find the overall offering a little limiting if you’re not a meat eater.

And I encourage you to visit the restrooms. A strange recommendation, but not for the facilities themselves. They’re located in the basement, and you’ll pass the former bank’s vault, complete with a movie-like giant circular safe door. It’s open, so you can take a peek inside. It’s pretty cool.

So is this the ultimate Sunday Roast? Looking solely at the roast, this isn't the best traditional roast dinner I've ever had, but that's not the whole story. The breadth of options, the superb seafood, and the overall quality makes this feast an excellent crowd pleaser.

For a special occasion or large group, it's a spectacle, with excellent atmosphere and architecture, and so many food options you’ll wish you had a bigger appetite.

Cecconi’s Feast (and Ned’s Feast) is £120 per person and includes a welcome drink and a two hour seating, available on Sundays between 12pm and 4pm. If you’d like to include Free-flowing Champagne, it’s £190 per person. Children three and under eat for free, and it’s half-price for children aged four to 12.

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“This animation-lark might be worth pursuing.”

The year is 1972 and teenager Peter Lord is handing a £25 cheque to fellow student, friend and future cofounder David Sproxton. The pair have just been paid by the BBC for a piece of 2D animation they created about a hapless superhero: Aard Man. A combo of “Aardvark” and “Superman”, the name stuck ever since the duo hung it above their Bristol door in 1976.

“Aardman and the world have changed out of all recognition over 50 years,” a freshly knighted Sir Peter tells Shortlist.

“There were three terrestrial TV channels, no personal computers or smartphones. Two of us did just about everything in the studio, whereas now there are about two hundred of us.”

It all started with a borrowed 16mm clockwork camera at Peter’s kitchen table, where he says he couldn’t possibly have dreamt of the trajectory those early experiments in stop motion animation would take him on.

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO THE OSCARS RED CARPET

Now a multi-academy award winning studio with globally recognisable IP like Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, Aardman is celebrating its 50th anniversary this September.

For Peter, those smash hits of the 1990s and 2000s must certainly be career highlights, but his favourite year from the stretch of fifty is 1986. It was a time when Aardman was starting to make a name for itself with projects like Creature Comforts and a plethora of TV ads and music videos.

It’s a lesser known and vibrant corner of the Aardman archive, but the studio’s credits include Viva Forever for the Spice Girls, Daddy for Coldplay and Peter’s personal favourite, a surreal music video for Peter Gabriel: “It’s got to be Sledgehammer, hasn’t it? Amazingly exciting to make and incredibly successful.”

Peter says that the studio’s first breakthrough into Hollywood followed in 1995 with Wallace and Gromit’s third outing from creator Nick Park. It was in this film, A Close Shave, where the world fell in love with Shaun the Sheep for the first time.

“It wasn’t designed for cinemas, it was made for TV, but we showed it at a festival in Venice and it went down a storm,” Peter says.

“It just proved to us that our films would work on the big screen. That led on directly to Chicken Run.”

Dr Caroline Ruddell, an animation specialist at Brunel University, says that Chicken Run’s attempt to appeal to an American market clearly paid off, but that the real secret to the studio’s global success has always been its playfulness with genre. “They draw on loads of different genres that people will be familiar with, like the thriller and noir-y aspects of The Wrong Trousers,” she explains.

“FINGERPRINTS IN THE CLAY”

Aardman’s forthcoming feature film sticks to this winning formula. According to chief creative director Sarah Cox, Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom blends universal comedy with witty references to classic scary movies that will delight older audiences.

Visually, the Halloween movie takes cues from Hammer Horror and old film colour processing techniques. The palette is saturated with hot pinks and lurid greens that pair with the mad science storyline. It’s a “beautifully hand crafted, perfect cinematic experience,” Sarah exclaims.

Over the years, this craftsmanship has become synonymous with the Aardman brand and is sometimes referred to by the animators as “thumbiness”.

“It’s the visible humanity in our work,” managing director Sean Clarke tells Shortlist, “You can see the hand of the maker — sometimes literally in the fingerprints in the clay — and that imperfection is part of our warmth, charm and truth.”

Sarah, an executive producer on Beast, confirms that thumbprints are dotted throughout the new movie: “The expressive and more extreme facial moments are sculpted individually in clay so that’s where you can see the thumbs.

“On a large feature like this we make identical puppets of each character. We use a kit of parts that are mainly made from either wool, clay, silicone, or textiles.

“The biggest challenge in this film was the beast as he is so wild and hairy that it was difficult to create the ten identical multiples required. A lot of hairspray was used!”

Dr Ruddell says that the “thumbiness” holds a lot of cultural cachet that’s attached to society’s ideas of authenticity. Part of the appeal is that with stop motion you can almost imagine playing with the models as your own childhood toys, she suggests.

EMBRACING GRAND NEW TECHNOLOGY

All that being said, Aardman never shies away from experimenting with digital technology and emerging tools in its filmmaking. At the current exhibition at the Young V&A, the studio showcases its use of tech like VR headsets for pre-production set modelling and software that creates special effects for weather, fire and large crowds.

“The use of CG and technology generally enables us to use stop frame in a cinematically epic fashion, but it is always in service to the stop frame world and puppets,” Sarah explains. For Beast, the animators used Gaussian splat scans, a 3D rendering technique, to capture and expand real sets and create moving backgrounds.

There’s a line in the sand though when it comes to AI. “We don’t use generative AI in our films. There would be no point,” Sarah stresses. “The magic is in the handcrafted approach.”

“Our own research shows there is real concern around the use of generative AI in filmmaking, so our focus is on embracing useful tools without compromising the human creativity, skill and care at the centre of our work,” agrees Sean Clarke.

AARDMAN ON TOUR

In recent years, another tactic in Aardman’s quest for world domination has been its roll out of countless rides, trails and exhibitions.

Ngaio Harding-Hill, head of attractions and live experiences at Aardman, says these “real life interactions” are another way of telling stories and are a “gateway” to reaching audiences and flourishing fanbases in countries like Japan.

Flanked by dozens of classic archive models being dusted off for a hometown anniversary exhibition, Ngaio tells Shortlist that a grand finale for the 50th year celebrations is on its way to the capital. The immersive Lightroom show is set to drop later this year, designed to plunge Londoners into a mix of classic nostalgia and completely bespoke Aardman footage projected at an "epic scale."

BACK TO THE KITCHEN TABLE

Sir Peter reflects on the studio’s legacy while watching young people tinkering with DIY “animation stations” at Aardman’s current exhibitions in both Bristol and London museums. As if at their own kitchen tables, children and big kids alike can direct their own stop motion masterpieces.

“It’s really important to spread the message that animation is exciting,” he says.

“Just about anybody can experiment with animation, with no experience, and enjoy the thrill of bringing something to life. An animator is like a little god: you make a world, you populate it and you bring it to life – that’s a pretty powerful idea!”

Looking ahead, he playfully envisions a Back to the Future version of Aardman HQ where “kindly and friendly” robots ferry cups of tea to employees. “Outside the studio, the animators are treated like superstars, adoring fans with rocket packs are always waiting outside offering tribute and thanks to these people for continuing to do something real,” he imagines.

Daydreams aside, Peter promises that Aardman will always place hand-made animation at the heart of everything it does.

“As long as people value it, we’ll keep pioneering it.”

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Did you ever play Pokémon on the Game Boy in the late '90s and dream of a sequel set in the UK?

Well, good news: they basically did that 7 years ago. Pokémon Sword and Shield took inspiration from multiple parts of the country in its world of Galar.

But! If you were looking for a less fairytale depiction of the UK – and more specifically, London itself – one upcoming monster-collecting game captures the less tourist-friendly side of living in the capital.

Cassette Beasts 2002 is a game where players record monsters onto cassette tapes then play them back to make them do battle. Superficially, it resembles Pokémon's mix of capturing and battling colourful beasts, but it has a number of unique twists. You can combine any two monsters to generate tens of thousands of variants, for example.

It's also set in London in the year 2002. Well, one half of the game, anyway...

A walk through 'Elmwich'

While you might expect its in-game version of the city to focus on Zone 1, like past London-set video games The Getaway and Watch Dogs: Legion did, the creators took a different tack.

"We weren't interested in setting it in the middle of Oxford Street, Big Ben, or the Millennium Dome," says Jay Baylis, co-founder of developer Bytten Studio. "All the obvious signposts to an outsider of what London is don't reflect our own experiences of London."

This version of London is instead inspired by the creators' own pre-Covid experiences of commuting into the city to work at a development studio based in Canary Wharf. "Setting it in an East London borough high street...that is London to us, in a way."

In Cassette Beasts 2002, players split their time between London – specifically a town called Elmwich – and Nodnol. Both represent different sides of the traditional RPG experience.

"Elmwich is your downtime. It's where you go to gather items, hang out with other characters and further your relationships with them and so on. And then Nodnol is your adventure space. It's where the monsters are. It's where you explore and do dungeons and fight bosses and so on." A mystery-based story links the two locations together.

"Revel in the mundanity"

Cassette Beasts 2002's setting is deliberately down-to-earth, Baylis says, because they can use more humdrum imagery to create an authentic sense of place. Or "revel in the mundanity", as he puts it.

"There was something appealing about making a somewhat mundane high street location, or town centre location that might be like a London borough," Baylis says. "It features characters living in London and working in London, but outside of the Paddington-esque view of the city."

"That taps into our interests and also our sense of humour as well."

Both Baylis and Bytten Studio's other co-founder, Tom Coxon, come from the north of the UK, which coloured their interpretation of living there.

"London to us is very much about people from outside London coming in and working. Is this a stepping stone for them? Is this where they want to end up? A lot of the characters are not from London. That probably does come from our own backgrounds as outsiders."

Baylis makes the point that games are often culturally uncomfortable with being anything less than American, especially compared to the UK's other cultural exports like music, TV and film. This game has zero shame about it.

"The Britishness shines through in how the characters talk and what they talk about and the fashion, and it's unmistakably English. It makes sense, I think, in context for it to be London, thematically and narratively."

"But I think there's something fun about [the idea of], 'hey, this is a game set in London, but it's a bit crap'."

All walks of life

The 20-something characters in Cassette Beasts 2002 reflect the mix of folks you meet in the capital, too: you'll see working class and privileged British people interacting, which is highly unusual for a video game. It perhaps takes a British studio to comprehend our social classes and capture how you can often find yourself talking to another person whose life experiences are totally alien to you.

The game leans more towards British archetypes over the personality types you're likely to see in Japanese RPGs, then. "We prefer drawing from the real world," Baylis says.

The other key component of the London setting is the '2002' bit of the title. This affects in-game details like the fashion and technology, as well as the soundtrack's pop, nu metal and rap influences. Baylis says the early '00s have become a lightning rod for nostalgia among younger players, similar to how the '80s had a stranglehold on Millennials in the 2010s.

"For the longest time, '80s nostalgia was all the rage in games, based on the age of the people that were directing games, I feel. But young people now never grew up in the '80s. I didn't grow up in the '80s."

With Stranger Things ending on a bum note, mainstream '80s nostalgia has arguably passed its peak. The fascination with Miami Vice and synthwave music is less meaningful to younger people today than The Lord of the Rings movies, low-rise jeans or Linkin Park.

"I think part of that nostalgia is there's a recognition of familiar iconography and pieces of media that shaped the modern day and musical stylings and things."

"But it's also the last moment in time where you don't have the panopticon of social media."

Between the analogue and the digital

Cassettes themselves were on death's door in 2002, we point out, which Baylis says the game highlights in one of its first lines of dialogue.

"It's this very transitory time period between the analogue and the digital age. And I think a lot of people are fascinated by looking at the early 2000s through that lens. Exploring that narratively is also a factor in the game."

Video games themselves were also having a real moment in the early 2000s.

"2002 is probably one of the best years there'll ever be for video games. I think it's quite fun to have a video game that is set in an era where at the time video games were very exciting."

2002 saw the UK releases of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Final Fantasy X, Halo and Metal Gear Solid 2, among many other classics. Perhaps some of that magic will rub off.

One of the best 2002 touches in the game, though, is another dull British detail that's somehow way more evocative than seeing Big Ben for the umpteenth time.

"We've made sure to have the crappy, early 2000s BT phone boxes with the glass and the metal frames, as opposed to the really kitschy and iconic red phone boxes," Baylis says. Celebrating the naff parts of British life is one of the great privileges of living here, which is clearly not lost on these developers.

Still, with London ticked off, that doesn't mean the developers plan to tackle other parts of the UK in future games.

"There is something alluring about exploring more mundane places and locations in the country," Baylis says. "But we'd have to also balance that with how many people are interested in going to Middlesbrough in a video game."

Cassette Beasts 2002 releases in March 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

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Notting Hill Carnival is back this Bank Holiday weekend, and 2026 is a particularly big one: the legendary west London street party is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

From its beginnings as a small community event in 1966, Carnival has grown into one of the world's biggest celebrations of Caribbean culture, with music, dancing, costumes, food and sound systems taking over the streets of Notting Hill. This year, the main event takes place on Sunday 30th and Monday 31st August, with a ticketed steelpan competition on Saturday 29th August.

If you're planning to join the estimated millions of revellers heading west, here's everything you need to know.

1. Start Times

Technically, Carnival begins on Saturday, when the UK National Panorama Steel Band Competition takes over Emslie Horniman's Pleasance Park. The event starts at 4pm, with Junior Panorama at 5pm and the main Panorama competition at 8pm. Unlike the main Carnival, this is a ticketed event, with the winning junior and adult bands announced on the night.

Sunday is the traditional family and children's day, but the really committed can get started much earlier. J'Ouvert runs from 6am to 9am, beginning at Sainsbury's by the Canal Way Roundabout. The official opening ceremony takes place from 10am to 10.30am at the Mas Judging Point on Great Western Road, followed by the Children's Day Parade from 10.30am to 5pm.

Sunday's Dutty/Fun Mas also begins at 10.30am, while sound systems and the Powis Square live stage run from midday to 7pm. There is then a judging zone from 8.30pm until close.

Note also that Sunday afternoon at 3pm sees a moment of reflection held in memory of those who lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire, a tragedy still keenly felt by Londoners nine years after it occurred.

Monday is the big one. The Adults' Parade starts at 10.30am with sound systems and live entertainment getting going from noon and ending at 7pm. A reflection moment for Grenfell takes place on Monday too, also at 3pm.

2. How to Get There

Do not drive. Seriously.

Carnival closes huge numbers of roads and public transport operates differently, but the Tube, Overground and Elizabeth line remain the best ways of getting there. The official Carnival advice recommends travelling to Paddington, then walking into the Carnival area using the signed route.

Several of the obvious stations will be closed or restricted. Ladbroke Grove is closed all day, while Westbourne Park has no entry from 11am and Notting Hill Gate has no entry between 11am and 6pm. Holland Park and Queensway also have restrictions.

Paddington is therefore your friend. It also gives you plenty of options for getting home afterwards, including the Elizabeth line, National Rail, Bakerloo, Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines.

If you're meeting friends, agree on a meeting point before you arrive. Mobile reception in a crowd of this size can be temperamental, and "I'll find you by the really big speaker" isn't a particularly useful plan.

3. Parade Routes

The Carnival parade covers roughly three and a half miles, following the same basic route on Sunday and Monday. It starts around Westbourne Park and winds through west London before finishing around Elkstone Road, taking in Westbourne Grove, Ladbroke Grove, Kensal Road and Golborne Road.

There are a few particularly good places to watch. The Judges' Area, beside the Brunel Estate near Westbourne Park Station, is where you'll see the bands performing at their most spectacular. The judging grandstand is open to the public again this year, although you'll need a ticket for it. Grab one here.

Otherwise, Ladbroke Grove is a good bet simply because it's such a long stretch, giving you a better chance of finding a viewing spot. Westbourne Grove is another lengthy section; the organisers recommend sticking to its northern side.

And don't treat the parade as something you simply stand and watch. The whole point is to move with it, dance, stop at a sound system, eat something, wander off and discover something else.

Here's the official map from the event organisers:

4. Performers and Sound Systems

The stars of Carnival aren't just conventional stage performers. The streets themselves are the show.

There are dozens of 'Mas' (Masquerade) bands, whose elaborate costumes form one of Carnival's most spectacular traditions. Bands including Mahogany Carnival Club, Mas Africa, Chocolate Nation, Colours Carnival, Karnival Mania, Soca Massive, Tropical Fusion and Utopia Mas UK will be among those taking part this year.

You'll also hear the unmistakable sound of the steel drum, an instrument woven into Carnival's history from its earliest days. This year's participating steel orchestras include Ebony Steelband, Glissando, Mangrove Steelband, Pan Nation, Panectar, Pantonic, Real Steel, Stardust and UFO Steelband.

Brazilian carnival culture is represented by groups including Baque de Axé, Batala, Dendê Nation, Império da Rainha, Kinetika Bloco, London School of Samba and Tribo, bringing choreographed dancing and huge live percussion to the streets. If you want Soca and Calypso, you actually are best off heading out on Thursday 27th August — the ‘Calypso Monarch Finals’, are held then at The Tabernacle, ahead of the main carnival celebrations.

Then there are the sound systems, arguably the beating heart of Carnival for many regulars. This year's roster includes Gladdy Wax, King Tubby's, Saxon Sound System, Trojan 7, Rampage Sound, Volcano Sound and many more.

For something more stage-based, head to Powis Square, where live performances run from noon to 7pm. Meanwhile Gardens also hosts family-friendly entertainment.

Among the sound-system highlights flagged for this year's event are Different Strokes, playing hip-hop, jungle and drum'n'bass; Gaz's Rockin' Blues, bringing ska and rocksteady; and KCC and the Rockin Crew, supplying house music.

5. Food and Drink

Come hungry. There are more than 300 food stalls around Carnival this year, a big leap from the 250-odd selling great eats last year.

The obvious place to start is Caribbean food: expect Jamaican jerk chicken, Trinidadian roti and Guyanese pepper pot — the sort of street-food dishes that are particularly satisfying when you've been on your feet building a dance-sweat for eight hours.

There are vegetarian choices at most stalls and organisers say the number of vegan traders has increased this year, too.

The trick is not to commit to one enormous meal immediately. Wander, investigate, follow your nose and build your own Carnival tasting menu.

And remember that this is a huge street event rather than a conventional festival site. Bring a reusable water bottle if you can, keep hydrated and carry some cash as a backup.

6. Weather Forecast

After a summer of seemingly endless heatwaves, the forecast has taken a rather more British turn.

Saturday is currently expected to see rain from around midday, with temperatures reaching about 22C and a chance of thunderstorms in the evening. Sunday looks considerably better, with rain less likely but a chance of light drizzle and a maximum of around 23C. Monday is currently forecast to bring sunny intervals, a moderate breeze and temperatures around 22C.

A lightweight waterproof jacket is considerably more useful than pretending you're going to spend eight hours dancing through a downpour under a tiny umbrella. Comfortable shoes are essential, too. You will walk much further than you think.

In other words: pack for everything, but a couple degrees of cooler weather won't hurt when you're heating up the street dance floor.

Most importantly, don't let a bit of drizzle put you off. Carnival has been doing this for 60 years and, as the organisers put it, it goes ahead rain or shine.

So charge your phone, pick a meeting point, wear something you don't mind getting sweaty, wet or covered in something colourful, and get ready for one of London's great weekends.

• 50 Years of Punk: A Shortlist Celebration

Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly have been gracing our screens for over forty years between them, but it turns out throwing the pair together in the scintillating sci-fi adaptation Dark Matter was the hit we never knew we needed.

Twisting around Blake Shelton’s topsy turvey world, Connelly and Edgerton lit up our screens and thoroughly confused us during season one of Apple TV's 2024 hit. Now, Dark Matter is back for season two, and it only gets more twisted.

For the uninitiated, Dark Matter is based on Shelton’s 2016 novel following Jason Dessen (Edgerton), a physicist, professor and family man who — one night while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Wonder quickly turns to nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could have lived.

Season two picks up with the Dessens as they settle into a quiet life in a world that finally seems safe — until the unimaginable forces them to run once again. As Jason’s obsessions deepen, Daniela’s (Connelly) growing paranoia pushes her to the brink, threatening to tear their fragile stability apart.

Spooky and thrilling, we had a quick catch up with Joel and Jennifer ahead of season two hitting screens on 28th August.

There have famously been a slew of fantastic adaptations recently – Jilly Cooper's Rivals, Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars, BAFTA winning Hamnet. So, the pressure is on a little for the second season of Dark Matter to uphold the current M.O. However it sounds as though it wasn't getting to the pair.

"Dark Matter was such a great thing to adapt because Blake was interested to go take the book and then push some of the characters even further," Joel explains, referencing the more emotive POV we get from his character in the series.

When it comes to adaptations the pair would like to see get the big screen treatment, it seems Hollywood already has them covered.

"I'm famously trying to get my hands on books that have already been optioned and I'm not allowed to," Joel jokes, laughing.

Adapting a killer novel is a far more laborious process that it often seems to audiences, with books' rights getting snapped up sometimes just months after their publish date, even if it takes years – decades even – until they hit our screens.

"It's best to get a hold of books that are not that well known, that have a great story or a great plot," Joel explains.

"Not just because then you've actually beaten everyone else to it [but also] because the pressure of adapting a well-loved book is so intense. Your imagination has pictured the world and the characters separately from other readers."

Translation: you're never gonna please everyone.

It's exciting to see Dark Matter getting a second series, as we've lost too many great series to the graveyard of single-season-hits – only yesterday Hulu confirmed it had cancelled Not Suitable for Work after just one season, My Lady Jane (unfairly) met the same fate. It's not just one-seasoners that have been unfairly cancelled – Joel's one that got away cancelled was the 2004 HBO series Deadwood. "I was obsessed with that show and I remember being really hungry for more of it."

From looking back on under-served shows of yore, to thinking about a possible season three of Dark Matter, there was only one thing we wanted to know. Celebrity Crushes. Or more specifically, the other celebrities the pair love who would have made an incredible cameo in Dark Matter. One of the great things about sci-fi is that no celebrity is out of place – a scientist? Well, they need to explain the time travel obvs. Alison Hammond? Of course she'd pop up even in a topsy turvey world, entertaining whatever is left of civilization.

"The person who popped into my head was Michael J. Fox," Joel laughs. "I don't know why."

"I often think about our show being like a multiverse, visiting parallel universes. And I often wonder what it would be like if you were to add time travel to that. And of course, my prince of time travel is Michael J. Fox. So for some reason, he popped into my head. And I have always adored him."

"The first person I thought of was Anthony Hopkins," Jennifer agreed, similarly unsure as to how she got to that conclusion.

"I don't really know why I just pictured him in that kind of room dispelling wisdom. You know, he's a wise man. When you're in a science fiction show and you need someone to explain a complicated scientific concept, Anthony Hopkins would be perfect because he could do anything. He could convince you of anything. He's the best."

Dark Matter S2 will premiere globally on Apple TV with the first episode on Friday, August 28, followed by one new episode every Friday through October 30, 2026.

London is full of great bars for drinking the best that craft beer has to offer. But sometimes nothing beats a delicious IPA at home or possibly while catching up with friends and whiling away the hours in one of the city’s beautiful parks.

The supermarkets may offer larger beer ranges than ever – but nothing beats supporting independent bottle shops. The city boasts many great options, which will give you not only an incredible choice of UK, European and global beers, but also access to the passion and knowledge of the incredible people that run these spots.

We’ve selected 10 of the best craft beer bottle shops. So why not crack open your favourite beverage, sit back and start planning your next trip to restock the fridge with sumptuous stouts, juicy IPAs, crispy pilsners or whatever else takes your fancy!

1. Caps and Taps

Founded in 2015 by craft beer loving couple Stephanie and Phill Palgrave-Elliott, Caps and Taps is a business built on the incredible passion and knowledge of its owners. They’re always willing to give advice to customers as they navigate the well-stocked shop and explore the beautiful range of beers that it carries. If you’re in the Tufnell Park area, why not drop in and see for yourself why this indie beer shop has become a much-loved institution on the London craft beer map.

• 141 Fortress Road, NW5 2HR

2. Clapton Craft

Originally started (not surprisingly) in Clapton, this group of beer shops now has eight locations throughout the capital and it’s not hard to see why. The interiors are funky and inviting, the staff are knowledgeable and friendly and the selection is top notch. The Finsbury Park branch is also one of five that has a tap room, making it perfect for a cheeky beer on the spot as you load up for later consumption.

• 77 Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park, N4 3EG

3. UTOBEER

Open as a permanent stall in Borough Market since 1999, UTOBEER pre-dates the UK’s craft beer revolution. Run by the same folk as Westfield Shopping Centre’s brewpub Tap East and nearby legendary spot the Rake, UTOBEER is chocked full of beautiful Belgian beers, German lagers and of course plenty of UK favourites, ranging from huge imperial stouts to juice-bomb IPAs. If you’re anywhere near Borough Market, this one is not to be missed.

• Unit 24, Middle Row. Borough Market, SE1 1TL

4. Hop Burns and Black

Nestled conveniently alongside Deptford Station, Hop Burns and Black, which has a sister location in Dulwich, is somewhat of a favourite among London’s beer afficionados. It’s not hard to see why, as it boasts a superb selection and also allows you to drink in. On sunny weekend afternoons, many a beer geek can be spotted happily idling the day away, drink in hand in front of the venue.

• 1 Deptford Station, Deptford High Street, SE8 4NS

5. Ghost Whale

Boasting the most unusual and possibly the most memorable name on this list, Ghost Whale is one of the best spots in the Brixton area for picking up top quality beer. The shop has six kegs for on site consumption, alongside a rotating line-up of between 300 and 500 different beers in its fridges. As a result, there’s something to suit the tastes of every beer lover at this fine establishment. They also have a Putney branch alongside their flagship Brixton site.

• 70 Atlantic Road, SW9 8PX

6. Seven Seasons Beer

Located just 10 minutes from Old Street, Seven Seasons is a family run establishment boasting an enormous selection of UK, European and global beers. They also offer some excellent wine and cider and, unlike most craft beer bottle shops, they don’t charge corkage for on site drinking.

• 195 Hoxton Street, N1 6RA

7. Indiebeer

Owners Clare and Owen founded Holloway Road’s Indiebeer after travelling and experiencing beer shops and associated beer cultures in Europe and the USA. Particularly inspired by the offerings stateside, the couple wanted to create a shop that focuses on the overall experience that punters have. In practice that means a wonderful shop and tasting room, where you can sit back and drink, load up on take-out bottles and learn about all things beer.

• 322 Holloway Road, N7 6NJ

8. Beer Merchants Tap

In some ways, Hackney Wick’s Beer Merchant’s Tap is a bit of an outlier on this list. It is first and foremost a cavernous bar, with a huge range of draft beer options. However, it also functions as a bottle shop and boasts multiple fridges covering a plethora of styles from Belgian sour beers to crisp German pilsners and fruity New England IPAs. It’s a perfect stop for grabbing a couple of pints, while also filling your bag with bottles and cans for appreciation at home.

• 99 Wallis Road, E9 5LN

9. Tipsy Dog

Founded by owners Rai and Yuka with a focus on connecting with the local community, Tipsy Dog has become a much-loved spot in the Hampstead area. It of course boasts a fine range of beer, but also stocks excellent natural wines, ciders, pre-mixed cocktails and more. Like many shops on this list, Tipsy Dog is open for onsite drinking as well as take-out bottles and cans.

• Unit 4, 12 heath Street, NW3 6TE

10. Craft Beer Junction

Located in the middle of the famed Bermondsey beer mile, Craft Beer Junction is a particularly interesting proposition. It’s another hybrid bottle shop and tap room, but this one stands out with its extraordinary range of American imports. While there are of course UK options, many a craft beer geek can be found scouring the fridges for hard-to-find US beers. Even more impressively, most of the beers hit the shop’s fridges within 10 days of being bottled stateside.