Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre commissioned a play. And yet the drama that emerged was not about deals struck in back rooms by the Cameron-Clegg government. Instead, This House spirits its audience back to 1974, the year Labour embarked on five years’ of horse-trading as it sought to govern the country with an overall majority of three.

Has any living pianist had a richer or more charmed life than Idil Biret? As a child prodigy she studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot, and both there and in Germany with Wilhelm Kempff. At the age of four she was reproducing Bach Preludes and Fugues on the family piano in Ankara simply from hearing them on the radio. When she was seven the Turkish Parliament passed "Idil's Law", enabling not her but also other gifted children to study abroad.

A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.

David Yates is not the best-known film director in the world, but he has been at the helm of four of the most successful. All of them had “Harry Potter and the” in the title. After the last Potter movie he took a break among the computer-generated jungle foliage of The Legend of Tarzan, but he’s now back working in the service of JK Rowling’s imagination with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

David Troughton (b.1950), a familiar face on television and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, is a versatile actor. His most recent RSC appearance before Gloucester displayed his talent for comedy: he was a funny and energetic Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in his favourite theatre, the Swan at Stratford. Previous roles for the company have included Kent in an earlier Lear with John Wood as the king, Bolingbrooke in Richard II and the title roles in Richard III and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.

What's a world-renowned mezzo-soprano in her middle years to do? Slimline of voice, tall and handsome in person with piercing and slightly intimidating blue eyes, Stockholm-born Anne Sofie von Otter isn't likely to sing what is known in the operatic world as "all those old bag parts", though she's a good enough actress to have carried off a few.

New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven.

Marc Almond (b 1956) grew up in Southport, on the Lancashire coast. He first achieved fame when Soft Cell, his Leeds Polytechnic art school electronic project with Dave Ball, much to both their surprise, had a huge global hit in 1981 with their electronic cover of an old soul song, the 1965 Gloria Jones B-side, “Tainted Love”. In its wake the band were leading lights of early Eighties synth pop, releasing three albums and a string of successful singles, including “Say Hello Wave Goodbye” and “Torch”, before splitting in 1984.

Theatre was not Lucy Bailey’s first target. At school she was a flautist, headed probably for music. Then, in her gap year, she took a job as a telephonist at Glyndebourne, and noticed a vigorous man with a beard – name of Peter Hall – moving people around on stage. She asked what he was doing. Directing, she was told. That changed her.

It was first released on 23 November 1979, comprising three 45rpm, 12in records housed in 16mm metal film cans, and then reissued the following February as Second Edition, in the more friendly and familiar format of a double album, 33rpm, gatefold sleeve, lyrics on the back, no song titles, with just the PIL logo on the record label. The previous July, "Death Disco" had entered the Top 20 at No 20 for two amazing weeks and Metal Box itself – in film canister format – would stay in the charts through to December 1979, reaching No 18.