The institution hopes to ‘shift the dial’ and encourage a more diverse range of students to apply

A key obstacle in the path of poorer aspiring actors is to be removed at one of the UK’s leading drama schools, the Observer can reveal. The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, one of the country’s top drama schools, where Dame Judi Dench, Andrew Garfield, Riz Ahmed, Jason Isaacs, Cush Jumbo and Martin Freeman all learned their craft, is to scrap audition fees for prospective students in an effort to broaden its intake.

“None of us want drama schools to be the preserve of the well off. Ideally, they are places where people from all backgrounds can come together and learn from each other,” said Freeman, a Central graduate and star of The Responder , Sherlock and The Office . “Without my grant from Richmond council many years ago, I would never have been able to enjoy my three years at Central. That seems to have become harder and harder in recent years; who knows how many young actors are lost to us, due to lack of funds. I hope this inspires others to follow suit in trying to make attending drama school fairer for all.”

Having set the stage for some of the world’s most iconic bands over its wild, debauched lifetime, Mojos is still drawing crowds more than 50 years later

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Behind a painted red, blue and yellow 1900s-era shopfront, an indie-pop band called Little Guilt is stepping onto a small stage framed with velvet curtains. They’re launching their new single to a sweaty throng of 20-somethings at Mojos Bar on a Saturday night in North Fremantle. It’s a scene reminiscent of Berlin, or perhaps even Austin: a heady blur of mullets, moustaches and midriffs, pool table flirtation, graffitied toilets and hazy conversations, surrounded by crumbling paint likely older than the punters themselves.

This fresh-faced crowd mightn’t know it, but they’re standing on hallowed turf for Western Australian music. Since the late 1960s, Mojos has been a testing ground for some of the country’s (and the world’s) most loved bands including homegrown icons Tame Impala, the Triffids, the Farriss Brothers (who later became INXS), Pond, Jebediah, Spacey Jane, John Butler, Abbe May, San Cisco and too many others to name.

From a young Paul Kelly and bop dancing in the streets to legends like Ray Charles, music fan and photographer Brian Carr has spent 50 years documenting the notable and not so well-known musos who make up Melbourne’s vibrant live music scene. He has now published a book, Music City , from his extensive archive

The award-winning Bristol-raised novelist on his new book about a teenage Rastafarian living in the city in volatile times , how he was influenced by The Catcher in the Rye - and being celebrated by a Tory politician

Ugly truths emerge when two very different reality shows go under the microscope. Elsewhere, a star turn from Ted Danson, and why bands break up

The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace | Wondery
The Price of Paradise | Wondery
Beef and Dairy Network episode 109: Ted Danson | Maximum Fun
Split Ends Radio 4 | BBC Sounds

Reality TV shows. How did we ever live without them? (Answer: we managed fine.) In the 24 years since Big Brother was first broadcast, reality shows have become the UK’s everyday media fodder, providing genuine news as well as silly gossip. And now: prime source material for podcasts.

“The act of hand weaving and dyeing cloth is extremely labour intensive – it can take months to make one piece,” says British artist Ptolemy Mann, who has been creating textile works of extraordinary colour and vibrancy for nearly 30 years. In 2021, after a period of experimenting with painting on paper, she turned her brush to her painstakingly dyed and handwoven cloths – the striking results can be seen in Mann’s first monograph, Thread Painting (published 9 May, Hurtwood Press) , and a solo show at Cromwell Place, London (15-19 May) . “There’s something radical about taking a precious handwoven cloth and applying a wet, loaded paint brush to its surface,” she says, noting that most traditional paintings are done on woven (albeit plain) canvases. “People are astounded that I am willing to take the risk. They love the madness of them.”

The celebrated US photographer’s haunting new series, documenting the locations where people have died in encounters with police, is a quietly devastating commemoration and a critique of modern American culture

In their monochrome starkness, Diana Matar’s images of modern America possess a melancholic undertow that is both familiar and unsettling. Whether a deserted backroad fringed with sun-burnished grass in rural Texas or a single-storey liquor store in a sprawling Californian suburb, there is the sense that these often nondescript places are not where locals tend to linger, never mind gather to mourn and to remember.

And yet the 110 photographs in her new book, My America , are of sites where civilians were killed by law enforcement officers across Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. “I chose those four states because Texas and California are where most people die in encounters with law enforcement,” she says, “while Oklahoma and New Mexico have the highest per capita deaths. I would have liked to have photographed in other places like Chicago and Georgia, but I simply ran out of money.”

Singer’s attorney says agreement gives his client the ‘freedom’ that ‘she desired’

Britney Spears and her estranged father have agreed to settle a legal dispute that continued between them even though it had been more than two years since a court had terminated the conservatorship that put him in control of the US pop star’s life.

Terms of the settlement between the singer of chart-topping hit Womanizer and Jamie Spears weren’t disclosed in statements that their attorneys distributed to media outlets on Friday.

The politician and lawyer on Salman Rushdie’s remarkable new memoir, Manchester’s magnificent music students and powerful depictions of wars both real and imagined

The human rights lawyer and campaigner Baroness Shami Chakrabarti was born in Kenton, north-west London, in 1969. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as an in-house lawyer at the Home Office before becoming director of the advocacy group Liberty in 2003, a role she held until 2016. That year, she became a life peer and was appointed shadow attorney general for England and Wales (until 2020). Chakrabarti lives in south London and has one son. Her third book, Human Rights: The Case for the Defence ,is published by Allen Lane on 2 May.