Add The Great British Bake Off to your watchlist It’s perhaps fitting that my meeting with Paul Hollywood and Nigella Lawson coincides with the kind of sweltering, high-summer temperatures that have long been The Great British Bake Off’s meteorological signature. Heat that melts chocolate, fritzes mixing stands to malfunction and liquefies baked Alaska to the point it has to be chucked in the bin. Heat that prompts overwhelmed amateur bakers to put dampened tea towels around their necks, sweat through aprons and flap haplessly at cakes that refuse to cool. Such temperature is in abundant supply as I make my damp-browed way through the airless, oven-door humidity of a west London studio complex on a 35°C heatwave day. Fans and cooling equipment are, apparently, in short supply in the building. And so, as I’m led into a little hair- and make-up room, it’s perhaps not too surprising to find Hollywood huddled beside a portable air-conditioning unit, while Lawson is sprawled out on a sofa, just a toga-wearing grape-bearer away from the full Cleopatra. Alison Hammond, …

Add Shaun the Sheep: the Beast of Mossy Bottom to your watchlist In an office reception in an unassuming business park in Bristol, there’s an Oscar on display. Other rooms contain multiple Emmys and Baftas. It’s here in Aardman Animations’ secondary studio space, which is located just down the road from their main headquarters, where the third and largest stop-motion Shaun the Sheep film yet has been made. The Beast of Mossy Bottom has 40 units, or sets, double that of a regular Shaun caper. In the company’s 50th year, why not go big? Shaun the Sheep made his debut on Christmas Eve 1995 in Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit short film A Close Shave. His cheeky charm and mischievous antics earned him his own series in 2007. “We had to invent a whole world for him, and a whole different look for him,” says animation director Claire Rolls, who worked on the first series of Shaun the Sheep and was part of the early conversations about how he should walk and look. “We have …

Add 70 Up to your watchlist Can this really be the end of the Up series, for which every glowing endorsement, from “groundbreaking” to “event television”, rings true? When it came out in 1964, following the lives of 14 seven-year-olds, it was the first programme to interview just children and in 2024, it was voted the “pro- gramme that changed television the most” over the past 50 years by the Broadcasting Press Guild. Seven Up! – with its Jesuit premise: “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man” – was conceived as a class experiment by Australian Tim Hewat, who worked for Granada’s current affairs programme World in Action and was appalled by the inequities in English society. Following its subjects every seven years, Seven Up! was originally directed by Paul Almond before Michael Apted, a researcher for the first series, took over for 14 Up in 1970 and remained in post until his death, in 2021, after completing 63 Up. This final series has been made by …