The script is woeful and the action hero so expressionless it will drive you to distraction. This allegedly high-octane train thriller is almost laughably abysmal

It’s a little bit Bodyguard (Jed Mercurio’s, not Whitney Houston’s) because there’s some terrorist activity on a train. It’s a little bit Idris Elba’s Hijack because the train is – well, hijacked. It’s a little bit 24 because it plays out in real time. And it’s a little bit Speed (for those old enough to remember) because a madman (or several) holds the fates of various passengers in his hands, and only one man and one woman in an unlikely pairing can save them. It is the new six-part drama from the BBC called Nightsleeper. It is set on the Glasgow to London overnight train and it is fantastically dreadful.

Most of it involves members of the cast standing round and staring doomily at a device that has been discovered attached to some wiring in the conductor’s cabin floor. “Is it a bomb?” asks more or less everyone as they come through the door. Personally, were I in a position of authority on the train, I would have firmly locked it behind me each time I entered, so as not to let every passerby in on the news that the train is now being remotely controlled by a person (or persons) who has also jammed everyone’s phones and is probably not in it for shits and giggles. They have cut off communications with the driver, too. I don’t know why the conductor can’t go up the train and bang on the door. But such niggles will soon be subsumed by much larger absurdities.

• Mark for 800m challenged at Diamond League final
• Olympic 200m champion Tebogo beaten by Bednarek

David Rudisha’s revered 800m world record from the London 2012 Games is safe for another year after a kamikaze attempt on it at the Diamond League final went up in a blaze of ­lactic acid and burning lungs.

On a cold night in Brussels, the thoughts of many athletes were inevitably on getting through a final night of competition before a well-earned rest at the end of a thrilling but long season. However the Canadian Marco Arop had other ideas.

West Yorkshire city to host magic, music, film and theatre performances celebrating local talent, plus Turner prize

A city centre magic show, the Brontës as you’ve never seen them before, and a bassline house symphony are all part of Bradford’s City of Culture lineup, which its organisers call a celebration of everything that makes the West Yorkshire city great.

Shanaz Gulzar, the creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, said the whole of the country was invited to come next year to a place she billed as young, diverse, creative and “the heart of the UK”.

Detailed analysis warns Keir Starmer it will take longer than five years to get waiting times back on track

Long delays for hospital, GP and mental health services are leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths and have ruptured “the social contract between the NHS and the people”, an inquiry has concluded.

The findings of the study by Lord Ara Darzi, commissioned by Labour when it came to power, will be cited by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who will on Thursday warn that the NHS has to “reform or die”.

British-born Dovid Efune understood to be in running to lodge bid but may need more investor backers

The owner of the New York Sun has emerged as the latest bidder aiming to take control of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

British-born Dovid Efune, who took control of the assets of the former newspaper the New York Sun three years ago, is understood to be in the running to lodge an offer before the deadline set for second-round bidders on 27 September.

Dr Michael Hall writes to inquiry saying he does not believe nurse received fair trial

A medical expert has criticised the opening remarks of the judge chairing the public inquiry into the deaths and collapses of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital for which the nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murder and attempted murder.

Dr Michael Hall, a retired consultant neonatologist and visiting professor in neonatal medicine who advised Letby’s legal defence team, has written to the inquiry maintaining his opinion that she did not receive a fair trial and that “important elements” of the medical evidence presented by the prosecution were “flawed or misleading”.

Emily Thornberry becomes head of foreign select committee, while Karen Bradley is sole Conservative given leading role

Emily Thornberry will chair the foreign affairs select committee, but none of Labour’s 2024 intake succeeded in their attempts to lead parliament’s various select committees, it has emerged, after the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle, declared the results of the elections for select committee chairs.

Thornberry, the member of parliament for Islington South and Finsbury, was surprisingly left out of Keir Starmer’s cabinet despite years serving in his shadow cabinet. The 64-year-old will head the highly influential foreign affairs select committee instead, while Labour MPs will also fill almost every other committee chair position.

The star endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 – but she has been decidedly tightlipped about the current race for the presidency

It was the embrace that launched a thousand tweets: on Sunday, Taylor Swift hugged Brittany Mahomes – the wife of NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes – at the US Open. A photo of the hug immediately had tongues wagging.

If you’re not Extremely Online, the only thing that might stand out from the innocuous-seeming hug photo is that Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce (also in the photo) has horrendous taste in hats. The broader context, however, is Mahomes’s link to Donald Trump. Last week the former president thanked Mahomes for “strongly defending me” after she liked one of his Instagram posts back in August. That post, titled “The 2024 GOP Platform”, outlined what a second Trump term would consist of – things such as “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Mahomes did not appreciate people criticising her for liking the post (which she seems to have later unliked), calling them “haters” with “deep-rooted issues … from childhood”.

This denouement had drug busts, forest face-offs and an epic fight between the matriarchs, but left many questions unanswered. Did too many arrows miss the mark – or are they being saved for season three?

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Sherwood on BBC One. Please don’t read it unless you have watched the series two finale.

• Ireland beaten 2-0 in interim manager’s first match
• ‘I feel like we’re in a good position with the players’

Lee Carsley has opened up to ­feelings of self-doubt over his ­ability to ­manage England but has been emboldened by the success of his opening game against Republic of Ireland on Saturday.

The interim manager saw his team win 2-0 in Dublin, the goals from Declan Rice and Jack Grealish ­coming during a dominant first-half per­formance. It got England’s Nations League Group B2 campaign off to a good start and, more significantly, did likewise with Carsley’s audition to replace Gareth Southgate on a ­permanent basis.

At 74, Spain’s finest director has won the Golden Lion – incredibly, his first major victory at a film festival – for his debut English language feature. Better late than never, even if The Room Next Door isn’t quite his finest work

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door is a tender, heartfelt drama about a driven former war correspondent who’s in search of the perfect final scene. She wants an ending that she can script and control, and a handpicked loving audience to applaud her when she goes.

As played by Tilda Swinton, the heroine doesn’t have it entirely her own way. But the film itself has fared rather better. It bowed out in a blaze of glory and scooped the crowning Golden Lion award in the dying seconds of this year’s Venice film festival.

• Interim manager’s side face Ireland in Nations League
• ‘It’s something I’ve never done. I am in a zone’

Lee Carsley has said he will not sing England’s national anthem when he takes charge of his first match as interim head coach against the Republic of Ireland on Saturday.

Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but won 40 Ireland caps having qualified through a grandmother, is set to return to Dublin after succeeding Gareth Southgate for at least the start of the Nations League campaign.

The actor’s character is flawless to the point of being dull in this second outing based on Nick Hornby’s novel. It’s an invitingly warm and gentle watch, but it feels like a soap

Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was about a woman with the mind of a comedy nerd and the looks of a pin-up model: Barbara Parker may have been crowned Miss Blackpool, but she was desperate to escape her home town and follow in the footsteps of her idol, Lucille Ball. It’s no spoiler to reveal that she becomes a star – albeit in the musty world of mid-century British sitcom rather than its glamorous US counterpart.

Funny Woman, the Sky adaptation of that novel, stripped away this fixation with comedy. In series one, Parker – who changes her name to Sophie Straw at the behest of a sleazy agent (Rupert Everett, in an off-puttingly hammy performance) – moves to London simply to “be someone”, ending up a TV sitcom star mainly by chance. It was slightly disappointing to see the book’s USP played down in favour of something more generic, but – ironically – Funny Woman did improve on its source material in one crucial way. In the book, we are told Sophie is hilarious, although we rarely witness it. Gemma Arterton actually managed to imbue our deceptively daffy protagonist with quick wit and exemplary comic timing.

Spy cop confessions, stressful wire-wearing scenes and a sheriff down … as the series enters its home stretch it’s certainly not making for relaxing viewing

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Sherwood on BBC One. Please don’t read it unless you have watched series two, episode four.

• USA reverse result of Tokyo final to earn gold medal shot
• ParalympicsGB still have opportunity to win bronze

Revenge is a dish best served while knocking somebody sideways, and the USA earned retribution for defeat in Tokyo by denying Great Britain progress to the wheelchair rugby final with a performance of no little style but maximum aggression.

Three years ago the British side made history by beating the team who made murderball what it is and to claim Paralympic gold in Japan. In Paris, Uncle Sam struck back. A blitz of blocking, pressing and crashing in the second quarter of this semi-final did the damage, with Britain ceding possession and valuable points. In the end it was not even close and the USA ran out winners by a seven-try margin, 50 to 43.

• Young fourth and Hahn sixth in T38 100m finals
• David Weir finishes eighth in T54 5000m race

The growing strength of ­parasport across the globe was brought into sharp focus in a packed Stade de France on Saturday night and, unfortunately, it was British stars who paid the price.

Thomas Young, Sophie Hahn and Paralympic legend David Weir were all the subject of chastening defeats in their marquee events as new stars from the USA and Colombia, and Kuwait too, finished ahead of them.

Film among host of sexually explicit features on this year’s lineup as erotica returns to screens after years of chastity

It’s been 25 years since Nicole Kidman starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotic classic Eyes Wide Shut opposite her then husband, Tom Cruise.

Although the Oscar-winner has evaded sexually explicit roles in recent years, she is making a comeback to the genre by playing the lead in one of the most risque feature films to premiere at the Venice film festival this year.

• Teenager wins ‘unreal’ S14 100m women’s butterfly
• Tully Kearney adds second gold in S5 200m freestyle

Britain’s first gold medal of the Paralympic Games went to a teenager, and in world record time, as Poppy Maskill cleared the field in the pool to win the S14 100m women’s butterfly, a moment she described as “unreal”.

The 19-year-old from Middlewich, competing in her first Paralympics, led from the front and held off the challenge of Hong Kong’s Yui Lam Chan to finish in 1min 03sec, shaving 0.33sec off the previous record. Unusually, that record had been set only four months ago by another British teenager, 17-year-old Olivia Newman-Baronius, who finished in fourth place on Thursday.

Trumpism’s route to the White House is paved with bricks of election theft in the battleground state

The latest election-protecting lawsuit filed this week in Georgia goes straight to the heart of the contest in the country over the survival of freedom’s most basic institutions: our vote and the rule of law. The suit is also vital to the more immediate outcome of this election, and whether Donald Trump can find a way to win by any means necessary.

Trump and his Maga allies seek to permanently dismantle the architecture of government established by our founders 235 years ago. The route there this November runs through Georgia, a key battleground state where undoing any electoral victory by Kamala Harris would be vital to Trump’s return to power. Trump and his acolytes will do whatever it takes to win. That includes not certifying the people’s actual vote.

Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

PM says trip is part of wider efforts to restore ‘broken relationships’ with EU countries

Keir Starmer has promised to “turn a corner on Brexit” and rebuild productive relationships with EU member states in advance of a flying visit to Berlin for talks with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, expected to focus on defence and trade.

The prime minister said the trip was part of wider efforts to restore the “broken relationships” with European neighbours left by the last government.