Be it the thankless shifts of Blue Lights or the wage-free stressfest of The Bear, onscreen employees are having a very bad day at the office. And things are about to get worse

In the first series of Slow Horses, MI5’s Jackson Lamb gives a motivational speech: “You’re fucking useless. The lot of you. Working with you has been the lowest point in a disappointing career.” This is actually fairly uplifting from a man who is as likely a contender for a “World’s Best Boss” mug as The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker.

On TV, staff morale is at an all time low. From hellish hospitality to callous corporate overlords, going to work has never looked less appealing. Instead of bumbling idiots for bosses, we have tortured geniuses and masochistic maniacs. The daily grind is one of high stakes, long hours and limited rewards – with not an HR department in sight.

The general election hopefuls have revealed their viewing habits, but how come Rishi Sunak didn’t mention that Bridgerton sex scene?

In 1998, then-prime minister Tony Blair asked the home secretary, Jack Straw, to look into the release of wrongly imprisoned Weatherfield resident Deirdre Rachid. “It is clear to anyone with eyes in their head she is innocent and she should be freed,” he said. Opposition leader William Hague followed suit: “The whole nation is deeply concerned about Deirdre, Conservatives as much as everyone else.” They were, of course, talking about a fictional character on one of the UK’s most popular soaps, Coronation Street. Politicians had just realised the power of talking telly.

Here we are more than 25 years later, then, in the age of prestige TV and streaming – and an election that could end the Tories’ 14-year run. Soaps may have lost their grip, but television is stronger than ever, and MPs are desperate to be relatable. It makes sense that a party leader naming their favourite show has become part of the PR machine. But with so much more choice comes more opportunity to succeed or fail in reaching voters – and this election’s frontrunners are clearly trying to get messages across with the shows they named in a Radio Times article this week.

Hollie Richardson is the assistant TV editor for the Guardian

Enlarge / A mysterious assassin is targeting Jedi masters in The Acolyte. (credit: Disney+)

The Star Wars franchise is creeping up on the 50-year mark for the original 1977 film that started it all, and Disney+ has successfully kept things fresh with its line of live-action Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian and Andor were both unquestionably popular and critical successes, while The Book of Boba Fett ultimately proved disappointing, focusing less on our favorite bounty hunter and more on setting up the third season of The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka fell somewhere in between, bolstered by strong performances from its leads but often criticized for sluggish pacing.

It's unclear where the latest addition to the TV franchise, The Acolyte, will ultimately fall, but the first five episodes aired thus far bode well for its place in the growing canon. The series eschews the usual Star Wars space-battle fare for a quieter, space Western detective story—who is killing the great Jedi masters of the galaxy?—with highly choreographed fight scenes that draw heavily from the martial arts. And like its predecessors, The Acolyte is recognizably Star Wars. Yet it also boasts a unique aesthetic style that is very much its own.

(Spoilers below for episodes 1 through 5 of The Acolyte.)

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Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his uproarious performance as a swivel-eyed news anchor – a cross between Billy Graham and Donald Trump

‘The time has come to say … is ‘dehumanisation’ such a bad word?” The speaker is Howard Beale, the sweat-drenched, swivel-eyed TV news anchor in this classic 1976 satire from screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky and director Sidney Lumet, now on rerelease. Depressed by the loss of his wife and by getting fired due to dwindling audiences, Beale proclaims he will kill himself live on air and is then re-hired as a colossal popular and then populist success, his celebrity delirium turning him into a crazy prophet, telling millions of Americans to scream out of the window that they are as mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Beale is a mixture of Billy Graham, radio star Orson Welles telling America the Martians are coming, and that notorious ratings-obsessive Donald Trump.

Network finds its place in the distinctive Hollywood tradition of showing TV as meretricious, mindless and corrupt … as opposed, presumably, to movies. It’s a classic 70s mainstreamer, a terrifically well-made, well-written talking point to put alongside other richly enjoyable small-screen dramas such as Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George from 1968, James L Brooks’s Broadcast News in 1987, Robert Redford’s Quiz Show from 1994 – and Antonio Campos’s Christine, about Christine Chubbuck, the American TV news reporter who in 1974 really did kill herself live on the air. Chayevsky denied she was the inspiration for this film. Peter Finch gives an uproarious performance as Beale, for which he posthumously won the best actor Oscar after succumbing to a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel – a fate hardly less satirical or poignant than Beale’s own.

The Mercury Prize winner reflects on Glastonbury festivals past. Plus: Hilary Swank’s Eileen is off to the country fair on Alaska Daily. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Two
Glastonbury 2024 headliners Dua Lipa and Coldplay have already been profiled in this pre-festival hype strand. Now the spotlight falls on Little Simz, the 2022 Mercury prizewinner poised to make her Pyramid stage debut on Saturday night. It has been a fascinating journey for the rapper and Top Boy star, who first played Glasto in 2016. Here, she reflects on her previous experiences in deepest Somerset and shouts out some of her favourite festival sets. Graeme Virtue

The Desperate Housewives star’s Spain-set series is the TV equivalent of comfort food. It’s full of romance, warmth and gorgeous countryside – even if it won’t set the world alight

It’s fish out of water time! It’s also feelgood, low-stakes, lusciously shot drama time, so pull up a comfy chair, pour yourself a drink and enjoy, with the 75% of your attention it was designed for, the Apple TV+ dramedy Land of Women.

This is the new vehicle for Eva Longoria, still best known for her role as Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives more than a decade ago (though true fans may cite her four episodes as Jake Peralta’s girlfriend in Brooklyn Nine-Nine as her finest work). Here she plays Gala, an affluent and happily married New Yorker of Spanish extraction and mother of one who is countering empty nest syndrome as her daughter begins university by opening a wine shop. Yes, a … wine shop. It was clearly the first thing that came to the writers’ minds to signify happiness, wealth, New Yorkery and go-gettery. Don’t dwell on it. They clearly didn’t.

This documentary’s plunge into the fight to regain editorial independence for Oklahoma’s Muscogee Nation is a murky, twisty tale

It can take decades to win a free press, but only a moment to lose it. Bad Press, a woolly but instructive documentary in the Storyville strand, begins by showing us one such moment. A group of casually dressed people are hunched round a long table in a room cluttered with filing cabinets and spare chairs. This is the legislative council of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, sitting in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. After a brief debate, the motion in front of them is carried by seven votes to six. With that, the Nation’s government‑funded newspaper and radio station lose editorial independence.

This is 2018. Three years earlier, the Muscogee Nation had enshrined the freedom of its press in law. Native American tribes are not bound by the US constitution – which includes that protection – because they govern themselves independently. Almost none of them have chosen to legislate to protect a free press; the Muscogee was one of only five of the 574 federally recognised tribes to have done so.

From inter-dimensional battles at Piccadilly Circus to a grime and drill soundtrack, the team behind Rapman’s epic sci-fi series Supacell talk about a fantasy saga like nothing before

This is a superhero origin story. That is, the story of Andrew “Rapman” Onwubolu’s triumphant round-trip from south London to Hollywood and back again. Supacell, Rapman’s epic sci-fi fantasy series, which lands on Netflix this week is something subtly different: “I call it a superpower story,” says Rapman – “Raps” to his friends – with a relaxed grin. “Everyone is out for themselves. They’re very much flawed, ordinary individuals. No one’s got capes on. No one’s trying to save the world.”

Like Rapman’s 2019 box office breakthrough, Blue Story – Lewisham’s answer to West Side Story – or the irresistibly soapy tale of badman betrayal that is 2018 YouTube series Shiro’s Story, Supacell has a Black-majority cast and a south-east London setting. Unlike those previous hits, this series forgoes the film-maker’s trademark rap narration and features characters who can do things like teleport. Or turn invisible. Or move objects with their minds. Even so, realism of a kind was important: “If me or you get powers, would the first thing we’d do be to stop a bridge falling in China? Probably not. We’re probably going to figure out how to use this to advance ourselves and our families.”

The now famous Channel 4 lesbian kiss became a symbol of LGBTQ+ progress that resonates to this day

As my Brookside co-star Anna Friel and I prepared to film our on-screen kiss 30 years ago, I could never have anticipated the cultural significance this simple act would have.

It was 1994, when section 28 was in full force, prohibiting the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, when Channel 4 aired the now famous lesbian kiss between my character, Margaret Clemence, and Friel’s, Beth Jordache, on the popular soap opera; the first time a kiss between two women had aired pre-watershed. It would for ever change the British media landscape and society’s perception of LGBTQ+ relationships.

Nicola Stephenson is a TV, film and theatre actor

In a significant move aimed at aiding victims of cyberattacks, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced the distribution of more than 7,000 FBI decryption keys associated with the notorious LockBit ransomware decryption. This initiative comes as part of ongoing efforts to mitigate the devastating impact of ransomware attacks on businesses worldwide.   […]

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Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest captivates millions of viewers across Europe and beyond, turning a simple music competition into a cultural phenomenon. This popularity extends to various forms of betting, with numerous gambling sites offering odds on Eurovision outcomes. Eurovision has grown from a small song competition into a massive international event, drawing in […]

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Enlarge (credit: Witthaya Prasongsin)

Elon Musk, back in October 2021, tweeted that “humans drive with eyes and biological neural nets, so cameras and silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.” The problem with his logic has been that human eyes are way better than RGB cameras at detecting fast-moving objects and estimating distances. Our brains have also surpassed all artificial neural nets by a wide margin at general processing of visual inputs.

To bridge this gap, a team of scientists at the University of Zurich developed a new automotive object-detection system that brings digital camera performance that’s much closer to human eyes. “Unofficial sources say Tesla uses multiple Sony IMX490 cameras with 5.4-megapixel resolution that [capture] up to 45 frames per second, which translates to perceptual latency of 22 milliseconds. Comparing [these] cameras alone to our solution, we already see a 100-fold reduction in perceptual latency,” says Daniel Gehrig, a researcher at the University of Zurich and lead author of the study.

Replicating human vision

When a pedestrian suddenly jumps in front of your car, multiple things have to happen before a driver-assistance system initiates emergency braking. First, the pedestrian must be captured in images taken by a camera. The time this takes is called perceptual latency—it’s a delay between the existence of a visual stimuli and its appearance in the readout from a sensor. Then, the readout needs to get to a processing unit, which adds a network latency of around 4 milliseconds.

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Spy warez: Assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division Bryan Vorndran (pictured) might have the key to unscramble your files.

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