Ravishing actors, charged glances, buttocks like pneumatic hams … this is one steamy love story. But it’s far more than just a porny sport-based bodice-ripper

I was surprised to learn that ice hockey romance is a genre, a popular one. Surprising, but it makes sense. Love in a cold setting has a fairytale quality. It’s why the great Russian romances endure, though they aren’t relatable. Most of us don’t sit by windows, waiting for a horse to bring word that our cousin has survived the winter in Smolensk. Perhaps it’s time for a modern Doctor Zhivago? Enter Heated Rivalry (Saturday 10 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), a Canadian queer romp so hot it threatens to scorch the ice it skates upon.

Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are star players from Montreal and Moscow respectively, mysteriously drawn to each other on the rink, in the full glare of the media. Well, not that mysteriously. The co-leads get down to business almost immediately, with a not-quite meet cute in a shower room. Every episode thereafter features charged glances, sweaty necks and muscular pumping. Even the camera feels as if it’s in lust, gliding over 8%-fat sports star bodies and the glass walls of luxury flats. It’s an audacious feat, making ice hockey sexy. Those padded uniforms usually make wearers resemble the Thing from The Fantastic Four.

I had been a member of the Children of God for two decades, but was growing disillusioned with its controlling behaviour and increasingly worrying sexual practices. Then I heard Michael Stipe’s lyrics and was set on a path to freedom

In 1991, I was living in a commune with 200 other people in Japan, as a member of a cult called the Children of God, which preached that the world was going to end in 1993. Everything I did – from where I slept each night, to who I was allowed to sleep with – was decided by the head of my commune. I was encouraged to keep a diary, and then turn it over to the leaders every night, so they could comb through it for signs of dissent. I was only allowed to listen to cult-sanctioned music, and I was only allowed to watch movies with happy endings, because those were the types of films of which the cult’s supreme leader – David Berg – approved. The Sound of Music was one of Berg’s favourite films, so we watched it on repeat.

By the time I was living in Japan, I was in my mid-30s, and I’d been part of the cult for 20 years. I was indoctrinated by a young hippy couple when I was 16, and persuaded to run away from my family and join a sect of the cult near my home town in Canada. I was a lonely teenager and desperately searching for some kind of meaning. Everybody I knew worked in the lumber mill in my small town, and the thought that I was doomed to live that life scared the hell out of me. The first time I visited the commune, everyone hugged me when I walked in, just to say “hello”. It was intoxicating.

But by 1991, after two decades in the cult, my faith was weakening. It was becoming clearer to me that Berg was wrong about the world ending in 1993. A whole series of events that were meant to directly precede the Second Coming hadn’t happened, and Berg – who lived in secrecy and communicated with his followers by written “prophecies” – kept issuing increasingly unconvincing excuses.

I was also becoming more resistant to the way the cult leaders sought to control the most intimate parts of my life. When I joined the cult, it was very sexually conservative. If you wanted to date another member of the community, you had to ask for permission from the leadership. But as the years went by, Berg started preaching a doctrine of sexual freedom, and ordering his members to couple-swap. I had got married to another cult member in the 1980s, and was living with her in a Children of God commune in Japan. Because I resisted couple-swapping I was forcibly separated from my wife as a punishment – and ordered to live in a different commune on my own.

There was also an even darker side to the Children of God that I was trying to shut my eyes to. Berg had released a written decree which permitted adult cult members to have sex with children. I never witnessed any sexual contact with children, and while I did read that decree when it was released in the 1980s, I refused to accept it. Still, it horrified me.

Forcibly separated from my wife, and with Berg’s teachings becoming more twisted, I was in a state of spiritual turmoil. But it was only when I heard REM’s song Losing My Religion that I was pushed to action. Cult members were allowed to own Walkmans, because the Children of God released their own music on cassette, but we were forbidden from listening to “worldly” music. As my will to blindly obey crumbled, I began to secretly tune in to the American armed forces radio station that broadcast in Japan. (Technically, I’d always had the power to covertly listen to music this way, but it’s a sign of how indoctrinated I was that I had never allowed myself to do so before.) One day, Losing My Religion came on, and I remember hearing it for the first time and freezing. I physically stopped walking.

You can tell a lot about someone from the vehicle they drive, as Martin Roemers’ collection of photographs show. Introduction by author William Boyd

In my novels I find that I very rarely write “a car” or “a van” or “a lorry” – I always tend to specify the marque and the model, often with some pedantic precision. Why should this be so? After all, I am a non-driver, someone who claims to be able to drive (I did learn), but who never passed his driving test. And yet, paradoxically, I’m something of a car enthusiast – a sort-of petrol-head, I confess – perhaps a consequence of spending many hours, or maybe that should be years,  in the back of minicabs that conveyed me here and there around London. In my long experience of minicab use I’ve found that most conversations with minicab drivers often end up being about cars. I’ve learned a lot.

There is another reason why I like to specify. I have a conviction that the type of car, or vehicle, that you drive is as much an expression of your personality as the clothes you wear or the decor of the home you call your own. Even the blandest of mid-price cars – the Toyota Prius, the Kia Picanto, the Volkswagen Jetta, for example – are making a covert statement about you, the owner. You chose that car – and your choice is surprisingly eloquent.

Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
An imaginatively programmed concert featured Anders Hillborg alongside Sibelius and Shostakovich – with Alban Gerhardt the impeccable soloist in the latter’s second cello concerto

Cadavre Exquis was the game – akin to Consequences – in which surrealist artists such as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró made separate contributions to a single piece of work without sight of what anyone else had done, to see how a picture might evolve, or just for the hell of it. Anders Hillborg took the principle as inspiration for his composition Exquisite Corpse but, where the surrealists hoped for signs of an unconscious collective sensibility, the emerging components of Hillborg’s piece bear his consciously singular imprint while also incorporating references to composers as disparate as Stravinsky, Ligeti and Sibelius.

In the performance given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under their chief conductor Ryan Bancroft, the unfolding layers of sound were never less than brilliantly alive. Hillborg’s instinct for a remarkable range of instrumental colour – delicate tendrils of harmony, monstrously growling bass registers, insistent conga drumming, shrill piccolos – taunted and teased the ear before finally fading into a gentle haze.

Study of man often featured in works by the Flemish master reveals hidden painting of woman beneath model’s beard

Is it a bald elderly man with a big bushy beard and a wine-addled stare? Or a friendly young woman with flowing locks and a crown of braids?

To Belgian art dealer Klaas Muller, an answer to that question mattered less than the fact that this particular take on the duck-rabbit optical illusion was painted by one Peter Paul Rubens.

After roles in everything from ‘EastEnders’ to ‘Black Mirror’, the actor is now going head-to-head with Stephen Graham in the second round of ‘A Thousand Blows’. He speaks to Annabel Nugent about channelling trauma, on-set therapists, and his funny side

The alleged acts are reported to have taken place during the New Mexico production of Fox crime series ‘The Cleaning Lady’

After WNO announced their departure, the Trump Kennedy Center claimed the decision was due to a ‘financially challenging relationship’

Harold Pinter theatre, London
Crudup and Denise Gough lead a tense adaptation that turns the film into a debate play whose McCarthy-era roots resonate powerfully today

How do you turn a classic Hollywood western into West End musical fare? Add songs, many of Bruce Springsteen’s in this case, along with a few rounds of line dancing and a sizzling star in Billy Crudup. Still, it’s an odd experience initially as Thea Sharrock’s production switches from one brief filmic scene to the next, and the endeavour seems as wooden as the clapboard saloon-bar slats that comprise the handsome set.

As a piece of theatre, it finds its flow. As a debate play, though, it gathers a locomotive energy as it travels towards the showdown between Frank Miller (James Doherty), who is returning to this “dirty little village in the middle of nowhere”, and the marshal Will Kane (Crudup) who put him behind bars. That is mostly because of the uncanny and urgent relevance of this 1952 film about a community working out (or rather, squirming out of) its civic responsibilities around institutional wrongdoing.

Artistic director of US’s national opera also cites ‘shattered’ donor confidence and box office revenue

The Washington National Opera (WNO) announced on Friday it is moving its performances out of the John F Kennedy Center, in what could be one of the most significant departures from the institution since Trump took control of it.

“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the opera said in a statement to the New York Times. A separate website appears to be set up for the opera.