After exiting the Europa League, Celtic face a season-defining fortnight in the fight for the league and Scottish Cup.

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The notoriously private Manchester painter agreed in 1972 to be recorded by a young fan. The results, broadcast here for the first time, are tender, revealing – and desperately moving

In 1972 a young woman pitched up at an artist’s home to meet her idol. Angela Barratt was 27, with no experience in journalism, art criticism or interviewing blunt northern men of a different generation. LS Lowry was 84, a notoriously private painter who lived alone and increasingly at odds with a world changed beyond all recognition from the industrial heartlands he’d spent a lifetime documenting. Over the next four years the unlikely pair struck up a bond. They met at least 15 more times in Lowry’s home. On each occasion, amid his parents’ portraits, paintings propped up on the piano, and the whirr of the reel-to-reel recorder, the artist bared his soul.

It’s an amazing story, and one that could so easily have been lost. Barratt never did get round to writing up her interviews, the last of which took place just one month before the painter’s death. In 2022, after her own death, the tapes were discovered by her son. Now they’re broadcast for the first time in LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes. This landmark BBC film is a dense collage of dramatised scenes in which the interviews are reconstructed by lip-syncing actors alongside archive material and commentary from a multitude of talking heads: Jeanette Winterson, Stuart Maconie, critics, curators, biographers, even a psychotherapist. In short, there’s a lot going on.

LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes is on BBC Two / iPlayer

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Co-hosts Sri Lanka crash out of the T20 World Cup after collapsing to a 61-run defeat by New Zealand in Colombo.

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Huw Pill warns combined effect of national insurance and minimum wage rises have ‘acute’ effect on youth employment

The negative effect of a combined increase in employers’ taxes and minimum wages has been “particularly acute” for young people, the Bank of England’s chief economist has warned.

Huw Pill said on Tuesday that the increase in national insurance contributions (NICs) from April last year and the government’s efforts to equalise the “national living wage” had caused a particular problem for young people trying to find jobs.

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After an immature winter, Harry Brook's mature and majestic century against Pakistan proved he is England's leader for the future, writes Matthew Henry.

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New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme
The cast in this four-person capsule telling of the Conan Doyle thriller bring vigour and charm but it’s hard to discern any point to the exercise

To get the measure of how tiresome this Sherlock Holmes adaptation is, you just have to think of its antecedents. The joke is that there are only four actors to represent the famous detective, his sidekick John Watson, various members of the Baskerville family, plus servants, neighbours and yokels, not to mention number 221B Baker Street, windswept moorland a country pile. The impossibility of achieving such a task comes at the expense of theatre itself: the shaky props, the hasty costume changes and the over-stretched stage manager.

Laughing at the medium is an old idea. But when, say, Victoria Wood did it in Acorn Antiques, she had a reason. Yes, daytime TV soaps were an easy target for satire, but a target nonetheless. And when the National Theatre of Brent attempted two-man epics such as Wagner’s Ring Cycle or The Messiah, the crazy ambition was funny in itself.

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Boxing greats Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather agree a professional rematch at Sphere in Las Vegas in September.

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