This thoroughly sweet look at the grime artist and TV chef making a pilgrimage is that rarest of things – an intimate profile of being male and Muslim

There’s no one way to be a religious person. For some, it’s all about a deeply personal connection between you and God. For others, its value comes from how it places you within a larger community of like-minded believers. Either can bring comfort and meaning to a person’s life, and in the case of the grime musician and award-winning TV chef Big Zuu, he is fortified by both as he makes a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Big Zuu is a thoughtful and charming host who is able to find the heart and humour in even the most typically solemn moments. This hour-long BBC documentary follows him through Ramadan, where he is giving up his “sinful” ways – even as a committed Muslim, he loves the ladies, a bit of hash and the odd tipple. Despite being “westernised” and not the most pious of believers, he decides to go on the umrah pilgrimage to Mecca (in contrast to the hajj, this can be undertaken at any point in the year) to work out what Islam means to him. He is surrounded at most points by a small group of friends (his “mandem”) who are also Muslims and just as endearing as Big Zuu himself. For him, this experience isn’t about being a perfect, sin-free person. “This ain’t some fake religion documentary where I’m pretending to be some great Muslim and convert the world,” he tells us. Instead, he is sincerely trying to figure out his faith and become the very best version of himself.

Big Zuu Goes to Mecca aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer

Kate Winslet and co are all at sea in Sky’s directionless political satire; British Asians recall the bleak 1970s; a stalker steals a very dark comedy; and heads roll (and bounce) in Disney’s Samurai epic

The Regime ( Sky Atlantic )
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Baby Reindeer ( Netflix )
Shōgun ( Disney+ )

Chapeau (of sorts) to The Regime , Sky Atlantic’s new HBO political satire(ish) starring Kate Winslet, who did HBO’s Mare of Easttown . It’s been a while since something so rammed with illustrious names and production pedigree capsized with such gusto.

This documentary about the Nirvana singer’s demise is at its best when it uses archive interviews with fans to show the scale of their loss. Otherwise, it struggles to really convey his impact

Unfathomably, for those of us who remember it, Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago this month, at the age of 27. Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music has been scheduled as the centrepiece for an evening of programming that celebrates Nirvana’s music and legacy, but the emphasis of the documentary itself is firmly on Cobain killing himself and the days surrounding his death. It uses archive video of news reports and amateur footage from people attending a vigil held in his memory, in a Seattle park, just days after his body was found. There is no Nirvana music, other than their covers of other people’s songs.

Presumably this is a rights issue, and no fault of the film-makers, but the absence of the band’s original music does highlight the documentary’s singular focus. It spends less than five minutes on the astonishing, world-dominating success that Nirvana achieved in just a few short years – and, for Cobain, the concomitant dread that seems to have accompanied that – but, at the beginning, it does contextualise them as a band concisely. There is an old Reddit thread about how 1991’s Nevermind was released closer to the Beatles’ Love Me Do than to today, and this is a stark reminder of how long ago it was that Nirvana were the biggest band in the world. We see footage of Tiananmen Square, of President George HW Bush talking about the menace of crack cocaine. There is a news report about the band’s second album, Nevermind, knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts. It is all bookended by a short, sweet interview with Cobain, conducted in the summer before he died, in which he reflects on marriage, love and being a father.

Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer

The successful clothing store is the focus of a new film that uncovers shadowy business practices and a bigger picture of environmental damage

If you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large swath of Gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic, but very trend-aware, girl.

Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also secretly want.

At 80, the comedian, author and presenter is off on his travels again - this time to Nigeria. He discusses grief, comedy and confrontation

The strange thing about Michael Palin is you feel you know him; that he’s an old friend or much-loved uncle you’ve not seen for a while. He decides to come to Guardian HQ for our interview, and nobody seems surprised to see him, despite the fact that it’s his first time in the building. People smile at Palin with easy familiarity: ah, Michael’s popped in. He smiles back with that fabulously genial smile: a little bit cheeky, a little bit shy, and very warm.

We have never met before. But he’s been in my life for 50-odd years. First as part of Monty Python, the surrealist comedy troupe I quoted ad nauseam as a youngster (“Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!”), then as star of the wonderful TV series Ripping Yarns, which I also quoted ad nauseam (“Oh shut up, you boring little tit!”). There were also the films: Time Bandits, A Private Function, A Fish Called Wanda and, more recently, The Death of Stalin. For the past 35 years, he has travelled the globe for TV shows, and written books to accompany his odysseys. In 2019, he was knighted for services to travel, culture and geography – the only Python to receive a knighthood.

This is grim, gut-punching viewing. But it can’t represent the sheer extent of the carnage

The concept of “balance” in BBC reporting is a cornerstone of the corporation’s journalistic ethos, but it may well come to be seen as a key factor in its decline. On everything from Brexit to climate change, the obsession with giving equal exposure to each participant in an unequal dispute has proven to be a poison. So it is with The Darkest Days: Israel-Gaza Six Months On, an assiduous application of the BBC’s famed ability to see both sides.

The process of distribution here is stark. The Darkest Days is split into two separate programmes, bookended by brief remarks from the BBC’s chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet. Equal time is given to the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas, during which Israeli authorities say about 1,140 people were killed, and the six months of attacks on Gaza that followed, during which Palestinian authorities say at least 33,000 people have been killed so far.

The presenter on his love of architecture, being too shy for TV, and losing his dad aged seven

Born in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, in 1974, George Clarke is an architect and television presenter. After gaining a first-class degree from the School of Architecture at Newcastle University and a postgraduate diploma from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, his media career began in 2005 as the host of Channel 5’s Build a New Life in the Country. He has since launched a string of architectural franchises on Channel 4: George Clarke’s Remarkable Renovations, Amazing Homes and Old House, New Home, as well as campaigning for better social housing. His children’s book, How to Build a Home , is out now.

This was taken in the garden of Oxclose, our estate in Washington . That wasn’t my bike – I must have seized the opportunity to sit on my sister’s while she wasn’t looking. Hence the cheeky expression. There are more photos of me on a bike than not as a child, and, to this day, two wheels – well, a motorbike – remains my preferred mode of transport.

This interview format is a breath of fresh air: funny, endearing, novel – and the Welsh actor is charm personified. Expect tears, laughter and unexpected celebrity beatboxing

First question: “Was John Taylor from Duran Duran your first ever crush?” Answer: “I thought he was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, man or woman. His hair was like a miracle.” And so begins The Assembly, in which 35 autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people quiz one Michael Sheen, the award-winning Welsh actor. I think we can safely assume in more than three decades of interviews that Sheen has never been asked whether he knows “anything about the long-term celebrity Tom Jones?” It’s a question that leads to an anecdote about Sheen bonding with the Welsh singer’s sister over a broken toe in hospital in LA. You won’t find this sort of thing in Sight and Sound magazine.

I love the concept of this special, which airs during Autism Acceptance Week at a time when diagnosis is increasing and support has never been more stretched. The Assembly is simple and profound. I say this as the parent of a 10-year-old autistic boy who asks me about 100 questions a day, the revolving top two of which this week are: “Can we go skiing?” (we’ve never been) and “are you wearing tights?” (a sensory thing). My son loves to ask highly specific questions as much as neurotypical people in positions of power love to evade them. As for answering them? Not so much. He didn’t, indeed couldn’t, answer questions for years. He still answers very few, and finds open-ended ones especially overwhelming, incomprehensible, meaningless – or perhaps has entirely another feeling about them that I don’t yet understand.

The Assembly aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer.

The final part of a trilogy of documentaries about the TV presenter’s husband’s battle with Covid is honest, sweet and unsentimental. It’s a beautiful testament to the miracle of love

There are several miracles on show in Kate Garraway: Derek’s Story, the final part of what has become a trilogy of documentaries since the TV presenter’s husband, former Labour adviser Derek Draper, was felled by the catastrophic consequences of Covid four years ago.

The first is the absolute resistance by the makers of any temptation to wallow in the sadness. Like Garraway herself, all the films have been brisk, to the point, honest and deeply loving. This last part, despite covering the final year of Draper’s life, is as short, punchy and sweet as all the others.