She’s gone from ‘queen of the soaps’ to Loose Woman known for her outspoken opinions and rockstar son Matty Healy. Now sober, she is enjoying another reinvention

Denise Welch doesn’t seem the kind of woman who would turn up with an entourage. But here she is having her hair primped in a makeshift changing room by two people. One tickling her fringe, the other tweaking her tufts. Blimey, I say, have you got two assistants? She grins. “No. There are three.” And now it turns out she’s got a fourth. I offer to make her a cup of coffee. She warns me she’s fussy. “Three teaspoons of Coffee-Mate, please.”

Welch is having a moment. She calls it, with a fabulously camp flourish, her renaissance. The actor and Loose Women regular has hardly been invisible in recent years. But this is on another level. For most of the 2000s, she has been best known for dishing out blithe opinions about anything and everything, and being the mother of the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy. Now, though, it’s the acting that’s getting the attention. Earlier this month, she returned to the drama series Waterloo Road as the hopeless French teacher Steph Haydock after a 15‑year absence. This time around, she’s a supply teacher and is even more hopeless. Welch has also got parts in the new Russell T Davies drama series Tip Toe, the Josh Pugh sitcom Stepping Up, both on Channel 4, and the adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel Forever Home.

Gabrielle Goliath says Gayton McKenzie violating freedom of expression after ‘highly divisive’ artwork Elergy banned from SA pavilion

A South African artist is suing the arts minister after he blocked her from representing the country at the Venice Biennale, having called her work addressing Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza “highly divisive”.

Gabrielle Goliath filed the lawsuit last week, with Ingrid Masondo, who would have curated the pavilion, and the studio manager, James Macdonald. It accuses Gayton McKenzie of acting unlawfully and violating the right to freedom of expression and demands the high court reinstates her participation by 18 February, the deadline for confirming installations with biennale organisers.

The comedian on getting sacked from TK Maxx, looking permanently hungover, and his 90s crush

Born in London, Seann Walsh, 40, began doing standup in 2006. He was on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2022. His podcast is Class Clown and he co-hosts Oh My Dog! (with Jack Dee) and What’s Upset You Now? His tour, This Is Torture, starts on 13 February. He lives in London with his partner and two children.

What is your earliest memory?
My dad had loads of friends round, all smoking heroin and singing me Happy Birthday. I was three or four.

Catherine O’Hara's iconic moments as beloved Schitt's Creek character Moira Rose are being celebrated following her death aged 71.

Pilloried as a multimillion-dollar sweetener, Amazon’s Brett Ratner-directed portrait of the first lady has opened with a grand ‘black-carpet’ premiere in Washington and mysteriously empty cinemas around the planet

• Eggs, hats and unfettered political ambition: what we learned about Melania Trump from her documentary
• Review: Melania is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest

Thursday night in Washington saw the world premiere of Melania, Brett Ratner’s $40m film about the first lady and one of the most expensive documentaries ever made. At the lately renamed Donald J Trump and John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, guests including House speaker Mike Johnson and health secretary Robert F Kennedy waved to reporters from the black carpet (in homage to the first lady’s favourite colour) before making their way up steps emblazoned with her name in glowing monochrome block capitals. Once the film began, unreeling its profile of Melania Trump over the 20 days leading up to her husband’s January 2025 inauguration, press were barred.

Everyone was welcome to attend the UK’s first screening on Friday morning, yet all tickets to the 9.40am screening at Sittingbourne’s Light cinema’s 34-seater screen three remained unsold – until I bought one. Ten minutes before it began, doors to the multiplex were still locked and only gulls were patrolling the puddles outside the entrance. Screenings this early were rare, an usher confirmed, “usually it’s just kids films”.

Twelve showings of Melania – which technically counts as a children’s film, on account of its PG rating – are scheduled over its week-long Sittingbourne run, for which a total of six seats have so far been sold. By contrast, 59 seats have already been snapped up for the first-day screenings of Wuthering Heights in a fortnight, and 33 for Being Victoria Wood next Tuesday.

Ahead of the centenary of Davis’s birth, musicians including Terence Blanchard and John Scofield analyse his brilliance: from his soft phrasing and spiritual feel to his raspy cussing and leather outfits

The architect of the bestselling jazz album of all time, 1959’s Kind of Blue, trumpeter Miles Davis is a towering figure in the history of the genre. Possessed of a piercing tone, innate melodic sensibility and a singularly uncompromising approach on the bandstand, Davis spent his five-decade career presiding over numerous stylistic shifts: bebop to “cool” jazz, modal jazz, electronic fusion, jazz funk and even hip-hop. Always honing his ear for fresh talent, he turned his bands into incubators for rising artists, providing early starts for the pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, saxophonists Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, and drummers Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette.

With 2026 marking the centenary of Davis’s birth, I asked several of his surviving collaborators to select his greatest recordings and discuss his enduring influence, including the 95-year-old Rollins, who played with Davis in the 1950s; the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonist Bill Evans, who both played with Davis in his 80s fusion groups; and several contemporary jazz stars.

The ‘eighth Harry Potter story’ will no longer be performed in two separate parts

​In the fiercely competitive market ​of the online multiplayer game, Highguard​’s rocky start means it now has a lot to prove

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In the fast-paced, almost psychotically unforgiving video game business, you really do have to stick the landing. Launching a new game is an artform in itself – do you go for months of slowly building hype or a sudden shock reveal, simultaneously announcing and releasing a new project in one fell swoop? The latter worked incredibly well for online shooter Apex Legends, which remains one of the genre’s stalwarts six years after its surprise launch on 4 February 2019. What you don’t do with a new release, is something that falls awkwardly between those two approaches. Enter Highguard.

This new online multiplayer title from newcomer Wildlight Entertainment has an excellent pedigree. The studio was formed by ex-Respawn Entertainment staff, most of whom previously worked on Titanfall, Call of Duty and the aforementioned Apex Legends. They know what they’re doing. But the launch has been … troubled.

A fresh crop of young actors will play the Hogwarts students in HBO’s TV adaptation

The fashion designer was named a Chevaliere de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres on Monday

Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins contestant Emily Seebohm was accused of being a "selfish" mother during a brutal interrogation on Monday's (26 January) final.

Twenty-five years after its initial release, Not Such An Innocent Girl has become the best-selling and most downloaded song of the week

The Traitors’ Jack Butler is a 29-year-old personal trainer from Essex.

Sinners star Jack O'Connell has shared his amazement that traditional music he used to "belt out in the pub" featured in the film.

Legendary Grammy-winning US artist Jill Scott returns with her first album in a decade, the extraordinary To Whom This May Concern. In this clip from the latest episode of Good Vibrations, she and Roisin dive into their mutual experiences in relationships.