OVO Arena, Wembley, London
This highlight reel of totemic routines interspersed with some dazzling cast numbers showcases the couple’s former greatness and timeless elegance

A painfully mirthless Dancing on Ice skit during Torvill and Dean’s farewell tour stages an assault on their signature Boléro. Set to a grating banjo version of Ravel’s score, the scene encapsulates our fear: will the former Olympians trash their legacy by taking to the ice in their nana era?

But Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are a class act, and leave the memories intact. This final show, a glide down memory lane, narrates their highlights and revisits totemic routines. With filmed chat and nifty graphics, they take us from childhood meet at Nottingham Ice Stadium (their personae of “blond prince” and “queen bee” established early), through to Olympic gold in 1984 and a resurgent career in reality TV.

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The therapeutic role music can play is the focus of a string of new books and even an entire BBC radio station. But why can’t we just listen to music for music’s sake?

Growing up, I never questioned the intrinsic value of classical music. My father practising classical and jazz guitar was the aural wallpaper to my childhood, and at my rural state school I took lessons on the recorder, the violin, the cello, the trombone, the piano. The after-school clubs on offer included, somewhat implausibly, an ocarina ensemble. Music was art, and wasn’t art the point of it all, when you got right down to it? The reason to live, after we cater for all our basic needs? It was certainly what led me to become first a classical musician, and then a music historian.

But when my dad died unexpectedly in 2019, it threw my relationship with music into sharp relief. All of a sudden, I couldn’t bear listening to it. It was too painful, or it grated on my nerves and made me angry. I started to question how and why music mattered to me. And, as I learned to care about it again, I started to wonder about the ways in which music might care for me in return.

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Charges follow investigation into alleged cheating related to bets over when last year’s election would be held

The Gambling Commission has charged 15 people with offences under the Gambling Act 2005 after an investigation into alleged cheating related to bets placed on when last year’s general election would take place.

Former Tory MP Craig Williams was among the 15 charged. He was Rishi Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS), one of the former prime minister’s closest aides.

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Steve Bray cleared of flouting police ban on playing anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit music through speakers

Steve Bray, 56, known as the “Stop Brexit Man”, has been cleared at Westminster magistrates court in London of flouting a police ban on playing anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit music through speakers outside parliament in March last year.

More details soon …

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The country is the most deadly to be an environmental activist – and the brutal murders of Juan Bautista Silva and Juan Antonio Hernández are the latest in a long line of violent acts against defenders

At about 6pm on Wednesday 26 February, Ana Luiza Hernández Raudelez saw her partner, Juan Bautista Silva, 70, receive a phone call. A land defender who had spent more than 20 years working for the local environment, Silva was preparing to leave on a motorcycle trip to photograph illegal logging near Las Botijas, in Comayagua, central Honduras , to support a complaint to the prosecutor’s office.

As he was about to set off, Ana suggested he take their son, Juan Antonio Hernández, 20, with him, as his new mobile phone took better photos.

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Despite all Copenhagen zoo’s best efforts, pandas Mao Sun and Xing Er have been playing chase, squeaking, wrestling and napping – doing everything but procreate

Spring is properly here, potent, pollinated, fecund. The garden is electric with sex and postcoital doings: sparrows are shagging on the roof, nests are being frenetically constructed and grubs transported to nesting mamas. I spend my days voyeuristically peeping at tits (I got a nestcam for my birthday and I’m obsessed). Even educated fleas are doing it and I dread to imagine what filth the squirrels are up to.

I tell you who isn’t doing it, though: Mao Sun and Xing Er, the Copenhagen zoo pandas. Since their arrival in 2019, the pair haven’t managed to mate. This is my third year tuning in to the intense will-they-won’t-they soap opera, shared by keeper Nadja Søndergaard on her extremely entertaining Instagram account @thegoodbearsandme . The pandas are solitary creatures, only coming together for Mao Sun’s 36-hour oestrus window. But to maximise their chances of actually having sex, there’s a whole elaborate lead-up of letting them see each other, swapping enclosures, spreading urine and “secretions”, and checking for the telltale tail raise that shows Mao Sun’s hormones are peaking.

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A sweet dessert with potato in it? You’d better believe it, plus it’s inspired by an Italian culinary legend

Writing in 1891, in his cooking manual La Scienza in Cucina e L’arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), Pellegrino Artusi introduces the potato as a tuber from the solanaceae (nightshade) family that was native to South America and introduced to Europe in the 16th century. He goes on to note that large-scale cultivation didn’t begin in Italy until the beginning of the 18th century, due to the “obstinacy of the masses who were averse to eating it”, adding that, little by little, the potato became more than accepted (by the poor as well as the rich), because of its good taste, ability to satisfy hunger and the way it lent itself to being cooked in so many ways.

If my counting is correct, of 790 recipes in that seminal book, 30 of them include potatoes or a significant proportion of potato flour. What is especially interesting is that even though the first recipe that includes potatoes is recipe 14 (a tasty-sounding brothy minestra with little gnocchi made from potatoes, boiled chicken, yolks and cheese), plus 14 more savoury potato recipes that Artusi waits to introduce, it isn’t until the chapter entitled Torte e dolci al Cucchiaio (Cakes and Desserts Eaten with a Spoon) that the potato is formally presented. In recipe 661, budino di patate , a soft, blancmange-style pudding that definitely requires a spoon, is made from floury potatoes, sugar, eggs, milk and lemon zest. In that same chapter, and the preceding biscuit and pastry chapter, 13 other recipes also include potatoes or potato flour: three types of biscuit, two souffles, a bake with amaretti biscuits, a shortcrust-type pastry, a sweet focaccia, another sweet bread, another budino (this time with almonds), and three cakes.

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A high school-style training academy is the setting for Tomomi Kamiya and Shigeyuki Miya’s punky anime tale of a volunteer army’s battle against the Godzilla-like kaiju

Kaiju, as Japanophiles will know, are Godzilla-style giant monsters that double up as A-bomb and/or natural disaster metaphors, and Naoya Matsumoto’s YA spin is a smart addition to the outsized genre. This film is an omnibus recap of the 2024 TV anime’s first season, directed by Tomomi Kamiya and Shigeyuki Miya, and tacking on a new 20-minute episode. Taking place in a high-school-style training academy for anti-kaiju troops, it plays like Pacific Rim meets Starship Troopers meets The Incredible Hulk.

Kafka (voiced by Masaya Fukunishi) wants to join the Defense Force like his childhood buddy Mina (Asami Seto), who has become the kaiju-reaping star of the outfit. But having flunked the entrance exam, he is stuck as part of the cleanup crews who dispose of city blocks’ worth of gore after the battles – and is normally assigned intestine detail to boot. After newbie faeces-mopper Reno (Wataru Kato) encourages him to reapply and they both scrape through, Kafka is invaded by a parasite that allows him to transform into a hench skull-headed kaiju; an alter ego he must, of course, conceal from his new colleagues.

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Ageas acquisition will unite two ‘complementary’ firms to create UK’s third-biggest home and motor insurer

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The Sheilas’ Wheels owner, Esure, will be sold to the Belgian insurer Ageas in a £1.3bn deal that will create the UK’s third-biggest home and motor insurer.

Ageas is buying the UK insurer from the private equity firm Bain Capital in a deal funded through a combination of surplus cash and debt or equity.

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