Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.

After scoring a hit in 1966 with the distinctive folk-pop of her jazz-inclined debut single "Walkin' my Cat Named Dog," US singer-songwriter Norma Tanega (1939–2019) seemed to melt away. Three follow-up 45s weren’t hits. Her album wasn’t a strong seller. Latterly, though, one of its tracks, “You're Dead,” has been heard as the theme of the TV and cinema versions of What We Do In The Shadows.

Manchester Collective, now very much a part of the establishment world of new music, are still enlarging their territory. For this set, performed in Leeds and Manchester and repeated in Liverpool, Nottingham and the Southbank Centre, they are revisiting some ground but have a world premiere, commissioned by themselves, to offer too.

Henry Gee’s previous book, A Brief History of Life on Earth, made an interestingly downbeat read for a title that won the UK’s science book prize. He emphasised that a constant feature of that history is extinction. Disappearing is simply what species do. A few endure for an exceptionally long time (hello, horseshoe crabs), but all suffer the same fate in the end. Some at least go down as ancestors of succeeding species. Many more just vanish. Evolution permits gradual development of more complex forms.

Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”

Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation.

Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag’s producer has brought Weather Girl to London, after a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, mirroring the path taken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation. But the new show is a much tougher assault on modern mores.

Before there was Barbie: The Movie, before there was Legally Blonde, there was Clueless, the Valley Girl movie that measured out life in designer handbags at the same time as signalling the grit behind the glitter. A pert and pampered response to Jane Austen’s Emma, the 1995 film defiantly whooshed to the top of film charts and launched the sale of millions of tartan miniskirts, breathing new life into the teen movie as it did so.

Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a pianist to match the Budapesters’ Igor Levit, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. He seemed as delighted with Stasevska and the players as they were with him; the post-performance embraces spoke volumes about communicative kindred spirits.