The Fawlty Towers actor has often played the monarch in the past and has now recorded audio for a new production at the festival

At the age of 91, Prunella Scales has reprised one of her favourite roles. The actor, who was diagnosed with vascular dementia 10 years ago, has recorded the part of Queen Victoria for a production at the Edinburgh fringe this summer.

She played the character more than 400 times in An Evening With Queen Victoria, a play written for her by Katrina Hendrey in 1979. She returned to the show on and off in performances around the world until 2007 and brought it to an end only because she was finding it hard to remember the lines.

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Tron theatre, Glasgow
Thatcher stalks the stage like an untamed monster, but the rest of Barr’s account of growing up gay in the 80s is sentimentalised and soppy

On the page, Damian Barr’s 2013 memoir is subtle and seductive. His coming-of-age tale is like a Scottish version of The End of Eddy by the French novelist Édouard Louis ; two first-person accounts of growing up gay and working-class in the declining industrial hinterlands of the late 20th century. Both authors present themselves as bright and sensitive, ill equipped to deal with the domestic violence, homophobia and bullying that besets them.

Just as Louis understands his life in terms of political choices, Barr sees an equivalence between the end of steel-making at Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire, the iniquities of the government’s homophobic section 28 legislation and the messianic individualism of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Each is an expression of cruelty.

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I trawled archives, located a lost VHS, and spent £100 to watch the story of a Black gay man in the 90s. The gaps in our history are stark

In 1991, Channel 4 launched a documentary series called The Black Bag. It started with an investigation into racist policing, and featured episodes such as Racebusters , which documented everyday racial harassment in Britain. The show was groundbreaking, and stands as a magnificent record not only of recent multicultural life in Britain, but also of the emergent discourses around race that have now entered mainstream consciousness.

But here’s the question: if you wanted to watch an episode of The Black Bag today, where would you go?

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Margaret Bending adored her teenage brush with drama. More than half a century later, she began performing for paying audiences

At 67, Margaret Bending performed her first professional show. Taking to the stage at the 180-capacity stage@leeds venue in February 2020, Bending launched into a dance and theatre piece accompanied by an ensemble all aged over 60. “I was terrified but as soon as we got going, I realised that this is what I had been looking for,” she says. “Moving my body and being surrounded by all these wonderful performers, I felt completely liberated.”

The one-off show, entitled Crossing, was the culmination of a six-month collaboration between Bending and Leeds-based The Performance Ensemble , who produce shows with more than 30 dancers, actors and singers whose ages range from 60 to 90. “From the first time I stepped into their rehearsal space in summer 2019, I was hooked,” Bending says. “It’s so different from what I had spent my life doing.”

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The French photographer has been crowned Master of Photography at this year’s Photo London thanks to three decades of work exploring femininity and the body

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A tender film about the music of Mayan descendants is hampered by the alofty adherence to a documentary aesthetic where nothing is explained

This film about a flute player and farmer named José Pérez López from Zinacantán in Chiapas, Mexico, teems with beautifully shot images of folks playing music, embroidering, participating in days-long community rituals, and tending their crops of flowers in polytunnels – pretty normal everyday stuff. It feels a little more elevated because it affords a glimpse into the life of descendants of the Mayans who practice ancestor worship and polytheistic beliefs but also have shrines with Catholic saints. The film’s website has a handy chunk of text about Bats’i son ta Sots’leb, the traditional music of Zinacantán, described in fascinating musicological detail.

It’s a shame that kind of explanatory background can’t be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, the subtitles and dialogue never even give the names of the people we are observing for most of the running time. You can only work out that the old guy is named José, and the woman who laughingly scolds him for drinking so much is Elvia Pérez Suárez, presumably his wife, and that they also live with a hard-working younger man named Esteban Pérez Pérez (presumably José and Elvia’s son) and some even younger kids: Esteban’s children? Random kids from next door? Who knows, because this scrupulously verité-style film is determined to adhere to the high-arthouse documentary aesthetic wherein nothing is explained, nothing is contextualised, and there’s no sense of what point or purpose this all serves other than a little digital tourism to a far-flung corner of the globe.

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The British novelist’s first memoir is a sublime account of famed Welsh music studio Rockfield, where her indomitable mother ruled the kitchen in the 70s and rock’n’rollers were great fun – and infuriating

Sometimes the most compelling family memoirs are not those that recount particularly extraordinary lives but which, rather, are told in the most beguiling voice. Tiffany Murray recounts hers from the perspective of an eight-year-old and so fills these pages with the giddy, carbonated fizz of prepubescence. She erupts frequently into different-sized fonts whenever she needs to convey maximum glee and trips into onomatopoeia (“ujjjjj aaah caaaah”) when normal words simply won’t suffice. In this way, she is able to smuggle into the narrative, almost unseen, a correspondingly piercing pathos that, in the hands of others, might just have tipped this towards misery memoir. Instead, the abiding tone is one of wonder and joy.

An author with three novels to her name, Murray is making her first foray into memoir with My Family and Other Rock Stars . It recounts the time of her growing up in and around the famous Rockfield music studios in Wales in the mid-1970s. This was where her mother, Joan, served as its resident chef, cooking for visiting bands such as Motörhead, Showaddywaddy and Black Sabbath, who, between them, were demanding, entertaining and often exasperating.

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A documentary charts a profound moment in the understanding of Alzheimer’s. Plus: more twists in the case of slippery tycoon Robert Durst. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
If you were going to get dementia, would you want to know? Part terrifying, part hopeful, this documentary follows the children of Carol Jennings who, after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the 80s, lobbied for research into the disease being hereditary, which led to confirmation of a mutant gene. Charting what happened since, the film takes us to the question: are we in the Alzheimer’s treatment era? Hollie Richardson

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Creatives at Jamaica Street Studios fear building will be snapped up by a developer if they don’t raise funds in time

For three decades a collective of artists has worked away at Jamaica Street Studios in Stokes Croft , the bohemian Bristol enclave regarded as Banksy’s spiritual home.

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