Donal Lynch

Nathan Carter looks like he’s seen a ghost. I’ve cycled through the streets to meet him, and my hair is woefully misshapen from the helmet. His gaze fixes hypnotically on this follicular carnage.

The Diplomat’s season two arrives on the back of huge praise and its predecessor being an Emmy-nominated hit. But, inconsiderately, the real world outstrides the new series.

There was a tiny part of me that wondered if Biddy’s Cottage was real. That there was a woman called “Biddy”, who leaned so hard into that name that she lived in a rustic cottage. And that she said “Tis” and “Twas” like Peig Sayers, but looked like Kim Basinger?

There was a tiny part of me that wondered if Biddy's Cottage was real. That there was a woman called “Biddy”, who leaned so hard into that name that she lived in a rustic cottage. And that she said “Tis” and “Twas” like Peig Sayers, but looked like Kim Basinger?

Twenty-one years ago, an era-defining German movie, Good Bye Lenin!, was released. With its acute social observation comedy and feel-good family story set either side of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed to represent the high point of the country’s Ostalgie – the nostalgic feeling that things weren’t so bad in the GDR and, if they were bad, they were to be laughed at.

On Halloween Jennifer Lopez took to the stage at the Amphitheatre in Las Vegas to remind America who was the trick and who was the treat. “At Madison Square Garden he ­[Donald Trump] reminded us of who he really is,” she told the crowd, referring to Tony ­Hinchcliffe’s appearance at the Trump event where the comedian called Puerto Rico, where J Lo was born, “a floating island of garbage”.

A moment of code red tension kicks off Elton John: Never Too Late (Disney+, from December 13). There is a problem with the dolls. Elton is grimly regarding his own reflection in the mirror when something in his sightline seems unforgivably amiss.