It influenced The Simpsons and sparked the careers of Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy and many others. Now this extraordinary Canadian series is finally getting its due

SCTV – short for Second City Television – is one of most influential comedy shows ever created. In the 1970s and 80s, while North American comedy fans worshipped at the altar of Saturday Night Live, the comedy nerds loved SCTV. The Canadian sketch show was weird. It was dark. It was multilayered and years ahead of its time.

Dave Thomas, head writer and an original cast member, was there from the start. “Conan O’Brien said that he used to watch and he thought, ‘This show is being written specifically for me,’” Thomas tells me. “There were references in it that he was absolutely sure only he got. We wrote at the top of our reference level. And the idea was to see if the audience would meet us there.”

The star takes on her biggest challenge yet: resurrecting her family’s Cantonese restaurant. She discusses the stress of rewatching her sitcom, nearly becoming a meat inspector … and her beloved matriarch, who passed away after filming

I’m embarrassed I didn’t bring anything. It’s 10-something in the morning, and I’m meeting Nora Lum, 38 – best known as rapper, comic actor and writer Awkwafina – the morning after the Bafta TV awards. I feel that I should have brought her a pastry pick-me-up. Yet here I am empty-handed. “It could have been Chinese buns,” she playfully suggests.

Yes, it could have been. Especially because we are meeting to discuss her new series on Apple TV, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook. It sees the star of box-office hits Crazy Rich Asians and Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings travel across the US to learn from a new generation of Asian American chefs, in the hope that she might revive her own family’s long-closed Cantonese restaurant. But there’s one problem: she can’t cook.

As Jean-Luc Picard in seven seasons, four films and a sequel, Stewart made us believe the most interesting person in the room might also be the most humane

• Patrick Stewart dies age 86

• His life in pictures

• Patrick Stewart brought gravitas and complexity to the screen, from Star Trek to X-Men

• ‘He stood for the best of us’: William Shatner and more pay tribute

What might humanity look like in 400 years’ time if we really do become wiser and more compassionate with each passing decade? The creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation clearly felt the answer closely resembled Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86 after a short illness. Their decision may well have opened up an entirely new future for Gene Roddenberry’s enduring, resolutely utopian space saga.

Prior to the casting of the classically trained Yorkshireman in 1987, Star Trek was best known for the interplay between William Shatner’s charismatic, impulsive Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy’s drily logical Spock. Stewart brought something of both men to the captain’s chair as Jean-Luc Picard, combining analytical rigour with a depth of feeling his imposing formality could never quite conceal.

She plays a depressed fisherwoman. He plays a man made of wicker who is solely dedicated to her pleasure. How did the actors feel about this strange, emotional connection – and what did Colman draw from her own marriage?

Another year, another raunchy comedy-drama in which Alexander Skarsgård is the answer to a social outcast’s erotic dreams. “I fucking loved Pillion so much!” says Olivia Colman, reliably sweary straight out of the gate, as she brings up last year’s British indie hit starring Skarsgård as a leather-clad dom with a timid traffic warden as his submissive. “And when they kissed at the end … Aww.” The 52-year-old Oscar-winner for The Favourite gives a mock-sniffle and a little shake of her frizzy grey locks, then pretends to dab her eyes.

Seated beside her in a London hotel room and wearing a bright orange “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, Skarsgård tilts his head appreciatively. In Pillion, it was Harry Melling who had the privilege of being ravaged by the 50-year-old Swedish actor. Now it is Colman’s turn in Wicker, an earthy adult fairytale filmed in Budapest and set in a medieval village populated almost exclusively by British comic actors who converse in language both archaically formal (“Happy to transact with you”) and bluntly colloquial (“I’d better fuck off”). Among them is Phil Daniels as a leering butcher and Richard E Grant as a doctor who is even more inept at his job than Grant was as a Celebrity Traitor.

Keira Knightley returns for more chaos and thrills with guns in an espionage drama. Plus, Owen Wilson is back as charming washed-up golf pro Pryce Cahill

Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is now the prime minister’s wife. Will that temper her treachery? Not a bit of it. This hugely entertaining espionage thriller returns with Helen cracking a safe (and adding to her spectacular body count) at an official engagement. The Black Doves spy ring is now in chaos after a key disappearance and, worse still, Sam (Ben Whishaw) has become a loose cannon, forced to take on hit jobs without much due diligence. Soon, absolutely everyone is somehow on a direct collision course. It’s a glorious mess of motive, morality and murder, and the superb cast – which now includes Ambika Mod and Babou Ceesay – are clearly having a ball. So will you.
Netflix, from Thursday 5 November

From Jean-Luc Picard to Charles Xavier, the actor’s Shakespearean training – and that sonorous voice – made him a unique charismatic force in Hollywood

• Patrick Stewart dies age 86

• His life in pictures

• O Captain, our Captain: on Star Trek, Patrick Stewart could make anyone feel hopeful for humanity

• ‘He stood for the best of us’: William Shatner and more pay tribute

No actor showed the commercial potential of blue-chip British classical training like Patrick Stewart. With style, technique and the most minutely self-aware, almost vaudevillian sense of mimicry, Shakespearean thesps can turn their hand to American movies and high-end American television and show the American method actors how it’s done – sometimes, even, at the beginning of their screen careers, at a competitively low wage.

Stewart was one of the thoroughbreds of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1970s stage generation who had also had classy small screen roles, such as his intimidating Sejanus in I, Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi. But he effected a warp-speed leap to pop culture stardom by getting the role of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation starship USS Enterprise, in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hugely successful reboot of Star Trek that ran from 1987 to 1994, spawning four separate feature films and then another series, Star Trek: Picard.