Professional dancer appeared to say farewell to BBC show in moving speech

New book will serve as sister volume to ‘Elphie: A Wicked Childhood’

Strictly Come Dancing host Claudia Winkleman has been praised for the “best moment” of the 2025 series so far.

‘It’s the chief thing that kept me going,’ ‘Mary Poppins’ actor says weeks before 100th birthday

Judges were split over latest decision on BBC competition

‘I need to get home straight away,’ football pundit said

The creator-star of ‘I Think You Should Leave’ has channelled his uniquely bizarre sensibility into a hit conspiracy series, ‘The Chair Company’. As far as Louis Chilton’s concerned, no one is doing comedy like it

The return of Nobel laureate Han Kang; film-making under the Nazis; stuck in a time loop; Scandinavian thrills; and essential stories from postwar Iraq

We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel. Kyungha, a writer experiencing a health crisis (“I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance”), agrees to look after a hospitalised friend’s pet bird. The friend, Inseon, makes films that expose historical massacres in Korea. At the centre of the book is a mesmerising sequence “between dream and reality” where Kyungha stumbles toward Inseon’s rural home, blinded by snow, then finds herself in ghostly company. As the pace slows, and physical and psychic pain meet, the story only becomes more involving. This might be Han’s best novel yet.

On the Calculation of Volume I and II
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
“It is the eighteenth of November. I have got used to that thought.” Book dealer Tara Selter is stuck in time, each day a repeat of yesterday. Groundhog Day it ain’t; this is more philosophical than comic – why, she doesn’t even bet on the horses – but it’s equally arresting. Tara slowly begins to understand how she occupies space in the world, and the ways in which we allow our lives to drift. At first she tries to live normally, recreating the sense of seasons passing by travelling to warm and cold cities. By the end of volume two, with five more books to come, we get hints of cracks appearing in the hermetic world – is Balle breaking her own rules? – but it just makes us want to read on further.

Through static compositions and observational detail, the documentary explores how Laos’s visitors and residents inhabit the same spaces in very different ways

Shot in Laos, Kimi Takesue’s idiosyncratic documentary gazes upon sights and vistas that would not be out of place on travel postcards. Minimal in its camera movements, the film looks at glimmering golden temples, waterfalls cascading down silver rocks, and processions of monks moving through lush landscapes. It also shows what is absent from glossy brochures, namely the intrusion of tourists. The disruption to the local rhythm of life is at once visual and aural: we see throngs of wandering visitors, their casual clothes of shorts and T-shirts a stark contrast to the ancient architecture. Their occasionally rowdy leisure activities are intercut with more mundane moments from the locals’ everyday lives, like schoolchildren heading to class or laywomen offering alms to monks by the roadside.

There’s a sense of tension between the static camera and the movements that occur within the frame. Scenes of tourists being loaded on to buses bring to mind Jacques Tati’s 1967 classic Playtime, which gently pokes fun at the idea of an authentic cultural experience attained via consumerist means. The point of view in Takesue’s film, however, is on shakier grounds. Some of the visual juxtapositions veer towards reiterating well-worn binaries between the east and west, the regional and the global. For instance, most of the tourists seen in Onlookers are white; in truth, visitors to Laos largely come from neighbouring Asian countries. Likewise, the Laotian population is also far from homogeneous: one sequence shows middle-aged men playing a game of catch, with the caption telling us they are “arguing in Lao” – yet some of them are speaking Vietnamese.

Put some artful oomph into your festive season with our bumper guide, featuring everything from a satanic South Park shirt to Marina Abramović’s penis salt and pepper pots

Is there an overly sweary person in your life? Do you have a friend who’s utterly bereft without The Traitors? Would anyone you know like to shake up their cocktail-making? And do you ever wish your neighbours’ doormat was, well, a bit more kinky?

Well, look no further! Our bumper Christmas gift guide has arty present suggestions galore for all these people – and many more. Dig in before the jingle bells rush!

The comedians on their first meeting, pissing each other off, and a shared obsession with Pride and Prejudice

Born in London in 1982, Cariad Lloyd is a comedian, actor and podcaster. She met comedian and musician Rachel Parris, born in Leicester in 1984, through improv comedy. Along with six other comedians, they formed Austentatious. The show is an improvised Jane Austen novel, based on an audience’s suggestion for a title, and is currently on at the Vaudeville theatre in London. Beyond their stage work, Cariad hosts the podcast Griefcast and is a co-host on Weirdos Book Club and Rachel worked on The Mash Report and publishes Introducing Mrs Collins: A Pride and Prejudice Novel on 6 November.

Savoy theatre, London
State-of-the-art animatronics, imaginative staging, fabulous performances and some marvellous songs about marmalade make for an evening that will fill you with joy and melt your heart

Here is the Peruvian bear as we have never seen him before – or so we are led to believe from the marketing of this musical, which is based on the beloved 2014 film, based on Michael Bond’s beloved books. But this is in fact exactly how we have seen him before: initially alone in Paddington station with marmalade sandwiches under his felt hat and a pleading look in his eye for strangers to be kind to outsiders such as him.

This is not new fare, even if Paddington is brought to life with state-of-the-art animatronics: James Hameed is his voice and remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah is under his furry skin on stage (puppet design by Tahra Zafar). The Brown family are recognisable from the star-studded film: risk-averse dad (Adrian Der Gregorian), arty mum (Amy Ellen Richardson), adolescent Judy (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) and encyclopaedia-chomping wee Jonathan (Jasper Rowse on the night of attendance), along with houseguest Mrs Bird (Bonnie Langford, in national treasure mode).

A sharply satirical attack on unevenly applied 19th-century laws to enforce religious observance still bites today

Rich or Poor, or Saint and Sinner

The poor man’s sins are glaring;
In the face of ghostly warning
He is caught in the fact
Of an overt act —
Buying greens on Sunday morning.