Not even Glenn Close can save this Ryan Murphy disaster from its dismal plots, clueless characters – and the worst kissing scenes ever filmed

I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevents any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong. The new series from Ryan Murphy, All’s Fair – starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Niecy Nash as the founders of an all-female law firm delivering divorce-y justice to incredibly rich but slightly unlucky women under the azure skies of California – is terrible. Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible. While I try to get my thoughts in order after bearing witness to the first episode, I’m going to give you a few direct quotes, so you can see why I’m struggling.

“Let’s put the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork’.”

The chancellor is levelling with us about the pain to come. Is there anyone outside Planet Rachel who couldn’t see that truth two years ago?

This would actually have been quite an understandable day for Rachel Reeves to cry at work. “I’m really clear,” the chancellor told the CBI less than a year ago, “I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes.” Can I shock you …? “We did wipe the slate clean,” she continued less than 12 months ago. “[We] put public finances and public services on a firm footing, and as a result we won’t have to do a budget like this ever again.” Again: can I shock you …?

So, then, to Reeves’s podium appearance from Downing Street this morning. Vibes-wise, it was like knowing you were going to be very incompetently mugged in three weeks’ time, but having to listen to a speech from the mugger about the context of it all. Or maybe a speech from an asteroid trying to get out in front of what people are going to say about it when it craters the West Midlands.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
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A company called Strike 3, owner of Vixen and Tushy, has clogged US courts with lawsuits, mostly against porn watchers who feel shamed into settling privately

When 73-year-old Tom Brown*, a retired police officer from Seattle, received a letter from Comcast, he might have mistaken it for a broadband bill. Instead, it was a subpoena. He had been sued in federal court for illegally downloading 80 movies. Some of the titles sounded cryptic – Do Not Worry, We Are Only Friends – or banal, like International Relations Part 2. Others were less subtle: He Loved My Big Ass, He Loved My Big Butt, and My Big Booty Loves Anal.

Brown, who had spent decades investigating sex crimes, claimed he had never watched any of them. His years “dealing with pimping”, he wrote in a court filing, left him “with no interest in pornography”. He had been married for 40 years, he did not need to download Hot Wife, another title in the list. But the subpoena did not seem like something he could laugh off. It said he could face damages of up to $150,000 per movie – as much as $12m for all 80 films. If he did not respond promptly, the letter said, Comcast would identify him to the plaintiff in the case: a company called Strike 3 Holdings.

Modelling has changed hugely over the decades. Two models from different generations discuss the highs and lows of the industry, from the joy of travel and dressing up to predatory behaviour and physical pressures

It’s easy to think of models as people whose lives are full of glitz and glamour, who “don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day”. But according to New York-based Danielle Mareka, 27, and 62-year-old Dee O, who lives in London, the reality for most models is a constant hustle to get noticed.

That’s not to mention keeping up with the fashion world’s changing landscape: since O began modelling in 1983, the internet and social media have transformed the way the industry operates. And models are now navigating innovations such as AI models appearing in Vogue and the impact of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on the sector. O and Mareka met to discuss their careers past and present.

A child going into an actual shop and buying a vinyl record? It will make you feel old and decrepit, and it’ll utterly bamboozle young people … but shut up – it’s Christmas!

The weird thing about tradition is that it has a tendency to long outlive its usefulness. Bonfire Night, once a way for the government to remind the public of its capacity to murder revolutionaries, has simply become an excuse to eat a jacket potato in a field. Church bells still ring on Sunday mornings, when it would be quicker and way more considerate to ping the congregation on WhatsApp. And the John Lewis Christmas advert is somehow still a thing.

True, it wasn’t so long ago that the John Lewis Christmas advert was a cultural institution; a teargas grenade lobbed into the television schedules to make viewers cry in the middle of The Cube. But now it is the year 2025, and things have changed. The John Lewis advert is a linear television commercial about a department store, even though the only way to describe either of those two things to a child is as a YouTube with no search function and an Amazon you actually have to walk to.

In a hugely successful TV and film career, her waitresses, neighbours, moms and daughters ranged from comedy to drama to David Lynch films, always with compelling authenticity

• Diane Ladd, Oscar-nominated star of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, dies aged 89

Diane Ladd was part of a Hollywood aristocracy of character actors who from the golden period of the American New Wave onwards lent star quality to supporting roles. She brought an authentic, undiluted American screen-acting flavour to everything she was in, and ran hugely successful movie and TV careers in parallel for decades, playing waitresses, neighbours, moms, sirens and daughters, and ranging from comedy to drama.

She was famously the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and wife of Bruce Dern, and repeatedly acted with Laura in a remarkable mother-daughter partnership in which the two women’s closeness always shone through. You might compare it to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, or Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher — although Diane Ladd and Laura Dern were far more trouble-free and without that kind of angst. They were Oscar-nominated together for their joint appearance in Martha Coolidge’s Depression drama Rambling Rose from 1991. And they also both appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth, and in Mike White’s HBO drama Enlightened – and in three of these they played, naturally, a mother and daughter. In Joel Hershman’s 1992 comedy Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Ladd acted alongside her own mother, the stage actor Mary Lanier.

Chancellor says she needs to respond to challenges in speech intended to frame tough choices UK faces

• Analysis: Reeves aims to prepare voters and markets for tax rises

• UK politics live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves has refused to rule out tax rises in this month’s budget, insisting she must “deal with the world as I find it, not the world as I might wish it to be”.

The UK chancellor foreshadowed an income tax increase, a breach of Labour’s manifesto commitment, as a result of the public finances being in a worse state than expected after “years of economic mismanagement”.

LNER employee Samir Zitouni, who was hospitalised after Saturday’s incident, hailed by police and transport secretary for ‘bravery beyond measure’

A “heroic” member of staff who was seriously injured after the mass stabbing onboard a train in Cambridgeshire on Saturday has been praised for his “incredibly brave” actions to protect passengers.

Samir Zitouni, 48, who has worked for London North Eastern Railway (LNER) for more than 20 years, remains in hospital after the attacks.

Government settles claim from former post office operator more than 20 years after he began his campaign for justice

• Business live – latest updates

Sir Alan Bates has agreed a multimillion-pound settlement with the government more than two decades after he began the campaign for justice for post office operators over the Horizon IT scandal.

Bates has previously accused the government of presiding over a “quasi-kangaroo court” system for compensation, and last year said that post office operators may return to court over delays with settling claims.

Exclusive: Lawyers tell Home Office about health issues of man who says smuggling gangs make it too dangerous for him to go back to France

An Iranian man who returned to the UK on a small boat after being sent back to France under the “one in, one out” scheme is facing his second removal on Wednesday despite mounting concerns about his vulnerability.

He is being held in a UK immigration detention centre and receiving hourly welfare checks by staff because of concerns about his mental health. He claims to be a victim of modern slavery at the hands of smugglers in northern France.