There is a bread and circuses feel to this scandal. A wise public would see red flags; instead it sees entertainment

One upside of adversity is art, inspiring cultural output that seeks to process and channel suffering. “I’ll say one thing about Thatcher, some fantastic songs were written during her reign,” said the Irish singer Christy Moore once – before belting out a goosebump-raising rendition of Ordinary Man by Peter Hames, a song about the 1980s recession. That is, so far, the only upside of the publication of Olivia Nuzzi’s book American Canto, an affliction to journalism, politics and publishing: there has been some fantastic writing since it all kicked off.

Masterful reviews. Very funny commentary. Scathing analysis. But first, a summary of events for readers of this column, most of whom I assume are well-adjusted, offline people, with better things to do with their time than follow what can only be described as a niche beef. Nuzzi is (or perhaps was, keep reading) a celebrated US political journalist who had a “digital affair” with Robert F Kennedy Jr while he was running for president, broke all sorts of journalistic rules while doing so, and was fired from her job at New York magazine. RFK Jr went on to become Donald Trump’s anti-vaccine health secretary, Nuzzi has published a book about the whole affair, and her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza – another political journalist – has been dripfeeding revelations about how she cheated on him, and a litany of other personal and professional transgressions. There are no heroes here.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Seventy-five years after its release, Billy Wilder’s melodramatic satire on celebrity culture and faded stardom – starring Gloria Swanson as its grotesque heroine – retains its tragic grandeur, writes Xan Brooks

Painting of Enlightenment figure, whose constitution for the island inspired revolutionaries in US, is up for auction

Thirty years ago, a painting by the British artist Sir William Beechey was sold as “portrait of a man”.

The anonymous buyer, however, knew precisely who the unnamed man in the picture was: Pascal Paoli, the 18th-century Corsican independence leader and icon of the Enlightenment.

Until she reached her 50s, the actor was a constant presence on stage and screen. Then the offers disappeared. Now, as her renaissance continues, she is taking on Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals

After six decades as an actor, Patricia Hodge says she still gets nervous before a play opens. “I think nerves are always the fear of the unknown,” she says. “Particularly with comedy, where there is no knowing how the audience will react: you’ve got to surf that.”

We meet on a sunny winter morning at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, south-west London, where Hodge is about to appear in The Rivals, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Richard B Sheridan play, in which she plays the ironic – sorry, iconic – Mrs Malaprop. “You’re sort of in a tunnel, your entire being is focused on this,” she says. She was here in rehearsals until 11pm the night before. Today, she is sitting at a table with a large coffee. Does she enjoy this bit, the putting together of a play? “I think it’s love-hate actually. The process is really why I do theatre.” She says she finds it energising, “but it’s also very trying, and you just don’t want to be left with your own limitations”.

He is the prickly, hotheaded journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Making Cover-Up, a film about his astonishing life and countless scoops, was never going to be easy

One morning last month, Seymour Hersh set off to buy a newspaper. The reporter walked for 30 minutes, covered six blocks of his neighbourhood, Georgetown in Washington DC, and didn’t see a single sign of life. No newsstands on street corners selling the glossies and the dailies. No self-service kiosk where you can slide in a dollar and pull out a paper. “Finally, I found a drugstore that had two copies of the New York Times in the back,” Hersh recalls. He bought one for himself. He can’t help but wonder whether anybody bought the second.

Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937, the year the Hindenburg airship blew up and the aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. That makes him a man of hot metal, the media’s ancient mariner, with metaphorical newsprint on his fingers and a cuttings file that reads like an index of American misadventure. Hersh has been a staff writer at the New York Times and the New Yorker. He’s broken stories on Vietnam, Watergate, Gaza and Ukraine. But the free press is in crisis, newspapers are in flux and investigative journalism may be facing a deadline of its own. “I don’t think I could do now what I did 30, 40, 50 years ago,” says the now 88-year-old. “The outlets aren’t there. The money’s not there. So I don’t know where we all are right now.”

Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw are miscast in BBC and Disney’s last joint Whoniverse offering

Chase Infiniti starred in ‘One Battle After Another’ earlier this year

Final was between YouTuber Angryginge, actor Shona McGarty and ‘Celebs Go Dating’ host Tom Read Wilson

The headliners include Wolf Alice, Elbow, Mogwai and Garbage

Dodgy character names, zero subtlety, a dubious approach to female roles … Russell T Davies’s show about fishfolk is entertaining – but feels like a wasted opportunity to make genuinely great TV

The fishmen cometh. Or, to put it another way – The War Between the Land and the Sea, the long-awaited Doctor Who spin-off from Russell T Davies concentrating on the adventures of Unit rather than the double-hearted man from Gallifrey, is finally here.

RTD stalwart Russell Tovey stars as Barclay, an everyman figure who soon – two excellent puns incoming – finds himself out of his depth, nay a fish out of water, as he is forced to take the lead in the geopolitical crisis that surrounds him. Barclay is a low-level clerk with Unit who, through the kind of bureaucratic snafu that you may in your salad days have believed was confined to fictional romps aimed largely at children over the festive period until age and experience poured slugs into them, ends up being part of the operation sent to deal with the discovery by a group of Spanish fishers of – well, fishmen. Fishfolk.