To celebrate the return of charming hit Nobody Wants This, romcom superfans like Russell T Davies and Jack Rooke pick their favourite shows. Prepare to be swept off your feet!

It’s perfect, that’s all. It’s got the perfect meet-cute (boob, crashed car, injured dog); the perfect combination of realism and romance (especially for non-romantics like me); the perfect heroine (neither the hot mess nor the manic pixie dream girl we are so often forced to accept); the perfect hero (laid-back but not lazy, older but not creepy, patient, not a pillock) and perfect writing.

(Island Records)
The London five-piece throw the kitchen sink at these dizzyingly dense songs, often crushing their melodic pleasures in the process

In an era when new bands struggle to break into the mainstream, the Last Dinner Party’s unusually swift rise (they were supporting the Rolling Stones a mere eight months after their first gig, and won the Rising Star Brit award just two years later) meant they spent much of the press cycle for their Mercury-nominated, chart-topping 2024 debut rubbishing suggestions they’d been manufactured by the music industry. As its follow-up arrives, the London five-piece still seem defensive. “While it may seem to an outsider that we have moved quickly on to a second album,” they write in a self-penned press release, “this timing felt like a natural progression to us.”

From the Pyre certainly doesn’t sound opportunistically rushed out. Quite the opposite, in fact: this is a dizzyingly dense collection of long, intricate tracks that layer biblical imagery, baroque detailing and cacophonous 00s indie energy. From Kate Bush cosplay (Second Best) to slightly tortured metaphors (if This Is the Killer Speaking’s narrator has been ghosted, does that make her a murderer?), often all this sonic and lyrical extravagance seems to come at the expense of basic melodic pleasure. It’s only when the band restrain their instincts for maximalism and melodrama – as on the beautiful (and still stompingly anthemic) I Hold Your Anger, a brooding exploration of maternal instinct – that the Last Dinner Party’s erudite, elaborate pop is able to really sing.

Lovable prankster-satirist Oobah Butler takes on hustle culture by trying to get rich quick. His tour of crypto-CEOs exposes the bleakness of their world – but it sure makes for comedy gold

Near the start of this hilarious and ambiently horrifying documentary, presenter Oobah Butler informs the viewer what exactly is riding on the success of his latest stunt. Emerging from a meeting at Channel 4’s headquarters, he floats a contract in front of the camera. In signing this, Butler claims, he is “guaranteeing that I am going to make a million pounds in 90 days”. If he succeeds, he’ll be a rich man. If he fails, “I suppose I won’t be working with Channel 4 again.”

If Butler is yet to make it on to your radar, those stakes may sound negligible – does it really matter whether this man ever makes another TV programme? To that I say: yes, it absolutely does. Over the past decade, Butler has established himself as one of the most enjoyably idiosyncratic prankster-satirists of the modern age. He gained global attention with a 2017 project for Vice magazine, in which he managed to get a completely fictional establishment – “The Shed at Dulwich” – listed as London’s top restaurant on TripAdvisor, questioning the effectiveness of the algorithm (when TripAdvisor became aware that it was a fake, they took it down).