Tributes have poured in for Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86. The distinguished actor had a long and varied career that began on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before going on to global stardom on the screen in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises. Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940, and had spoken of a challenging childhood marred by alcoholism and domestic violence – something he campaigned against for much of his life. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw
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.”
Actor first shared his childhood experiences as part of Amnesty International campaign and became Refuge ambassador
When Patrick Stewart was growing up in the 1940s, he witnessed how, after his father beat his mother, home doctors and ambulance workers would tell her: “You must have done something to provoke him.”
Stewart knew the violence was never warranted, a conviction that became the spark for a lasting commitment to campaigning for greater understanding of domestic abuse.
Actor first shared his childhood experiences as part of Amnesty International campaign and became Refuge ambassador
When Patrick Stewart was growing up in the 1940s, he witnessed how, after his father beat his mother, home doctors and ambulance workers would tell her: “You must have done something to provoke him.”
Stewart knew the violence was never warranted, a conviction that became the spark for a lasting commitment to campaigning for greater understanding of domestic abuse.
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.
The actor was an exemplary bald star, embracing his hair loss and the freedoms it brought. He didn’t go grey or recede – and he didn’t wear a wig like William Shatner as Captain Kirk
Patrick Stewart managed to be lots of different things at once. He was a towering figure on stage. He was a literal superhero onscreen. And, at times, he wasn’t above sending himself up. It also needs to be said that he was a bald man.
And a pioneering one at that. Nowhere was this more clear than during his stint on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Previously, Star Trek had been a kind of space-set action show, where the relentlessly virile Captain Kirk would beam down to new planets to either punch or get off with all the aliens there. But then came its successor, and Kirk was replaced by a nonviolent intellectual called Jean-Luc. Worse still, he didn’t have any hair. What a sign of weakness.
The Yorkshire born actor was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for 16 years. Stewart became a global star when, aged 47, he was cast as a Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation, the 1980s live-action reboot of the classic 1960s sci-fi TV series. In 2000 he played Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men for the first time, a role to which he would repeatedly return.
The Rotterdam band are a riot of sound, look and attitude led by Eva Kah, who is as much a living artwork as she is a phenomenal live performer
From Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Recommended if you like Gnod, Discharge, Gwar Up next
Debut album Big Enemy out now via Tartarus, playing Le Guess Who festival
Rotterdam’s Bombstrap are a riotous and theatrical fusion of sound, look and attitude. An embodied version of John Milton’s Pandæmonium with the amp turned up to 11, the band revel in hardcore alternative living, internet wormholes, art-school pretensions and a gungy form of hardcore. Based in and drawing succour from one of the most famous squatted centres in the city, Het Poortgebouw, Bombstrap are a noisy counterblast to the increasing and overwhelmingly witless “circuses-and-bread” gentrification of Rotterdam.
Minihorror by Barbi Marković; Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch; Hafni Says by Helle Helle; Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov
Minihorror by Barbi Marković, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14.99)
This eccentric and fantastical collection of very short stories is bursting with weird life. Mini and Miki (the Disney mouse names in Serbian) are a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. They visit Mini’s family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it (when she told Miki “they’re dragging me down”, he thought it was a metaphor). They visit Miki’s family, where a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her. Things swing from hopeful – “they’re having fun like a couple in an advert” – to dismal: a hair dye goes wrong and “Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog”. Minihorror combines a Bernhardian comic gloom (“in summary, everything’s tainted, and existence is a particular hardship”) with antic energy. “Miki isn’t sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad?” It’s everything, just like this book.
Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula, £12.99)
“Stories, if you give them an order, aren’t stories but lies.” Catalan author Guasch makes the point vividly in this novel which flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It’s set in a changed climate – “One only knows it’s winter now by the shrunken days and long nights” – where young men join a firefighting service and fight “wildfire simulations of blazes that could not be put out”. The central characters are friends Rita and Líton, but Líton is dead when the book begins – “twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet” – so the story goes backward, to find out why. The jumpy narrative ranges from Rita’s childhood diary, to three “crafty old biddies” in the neighbourhood, to Líton and his lover René. But inside the hectic structure is a tribute to the value of friendship, and how a friend “has to be the net beneath the tightrope that is life”.
Why is he not made of willow? Why is he plaited and not woven? World’s basket makers have plenty of questions
Hollywood heart-throbs are known for their good looks and charisma. But in a classic plot twist, the latest big-screen dreamboat causing viewers to get hot and bothered isn’t even human.
Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker Husband character in the romcom Wicker has sent the internet into a frenzy.
Voicing the main character in Black Tides Draga’s Wake led to me making the kinds of noises I haven’t made since my honeymoon but also one of my favourite moments as a father
“I listen to you on the radio and I keep hearing your voice in my head!”
Not a typical opening to a creative partnership, but that is how Greg Strangis introduced himself to me 16 months ago, when he asked me to come to his garage in the middle of nowhere and have a look at a game he was making called Black Tides Draga’s Wake.
Manhood, a new documentary about “girth enhancement,” explores how wellness professionals are encouraging men to undergo increasingly extreme procedures to be sexually desirable.
The meme appeared to reference gender-swapping “Malfoid” fan fiction, a term with incel roots. When asked about it, the DOE responded by quoting Dumbledore.
The British novelist on discovering Molly Keane, coming to Dickens late, and the books that taught her the importance of writing about history
My earliest reading memory
My mother always read me a bedtime story, but by around age three, I was not looking at the pictures but reading the text. After that, I read to myself, and would read four books a week from the library.
My favourite book growing up
As a child I read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, and the combination of history and gothic fantasy was very powerful for me. It’s realistic and charming and frightening without being nightmarish. It started my love of historical fiction, and has since become a family favourite for my own children.
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
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.
Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism
The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.
The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.
For Halloween, Guardian writers have picked the most efficiently terrifying films outside of the horror genre from How to Have Sex to The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Minor spoilers ahead
Hiding in plain sight throughout Lee Chang-dong’s deliciously enigmatic Burning, in which a spirited young woman (Jeon Jong-seo) disappears, and a wealthy playboy (Steven Yeun) gives serial killer vibes, is a disaffected male rage. That’s perhaps the most commonplace horror of our times, whether on the internet or politics, and you feel the tremors of it steadily breaking the surface in Yoo Ah-in’s performance. He plays Jong-su, an aspiring writer, quietly frustrated with his lot in life. Jong-su works odd jobs and tends to his incarcerated father’s dilapidated farm, growing more desperate to grasp some sense of control over the world around him, which is where the scary part comes in. Lee is the master dramatist who with Burning tilts violently into thriller territory, navigating elements from Taxi Driver, The Vanishing and Michael Haneke’s Caché, using the language of horror movies to conjure up a creeping anxiety and dread that erupts into pure existential fear. Radheyan Simonpillai
(Rough Trade) Collecting traditional songs of female struggle and strength, the Irish singer invests them with staggering power
Lankum singer Radie Peat’s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low, each breath like air vibrating through the metal reeds of a harmonium. Singing Hares on the Mountain to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for 1964’s Folk Roots, New Routes, Peat accompanies herself subtly on Fender Rhodes piano before adding layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. Her simple, quiet approach is consistently startling and profoundly moving.
No Human Tongue Can Tell collects songs of female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance, although Peat only realised this, she writes in her liner notes, after limiting her choices by her “own mind and abilities” and “personal preferences”. Epic statements clearly aren’t her bag; her gut-deep connection with songs she’s sung live for years clearly matters more, with many delivered in new versions, pulsing with urgency.
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