Stacey Dooley is a chirpy media personality from Luton who first created TV ripples in 2008 on a BBC Three show called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. She made an impression then as a high street fashion fan who bridled at the Third World labour involved in much cheap garment production.

CSS appeared riding the 2007 “nu rave” music media furore – their catsuit-wearing lead singer, Lovefoxxx, even dated one of scenester leaders The Klaxons for a while. That whole business is ancient history but, unfortunately, a host of great bands associated with the hype – notably The Klaxons and New Young Pony Club – have had a job finding purchase since their initial moment in the sun. The same applies to the Brazilian four-piece Cansei de Ser Sexy, a creative man down since the only male member of the band, Adriano Cintra, left last year.

The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty".

Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.

With the customarily narrow perspective that informs much film distribution in the UK, we might be forgiven for assuming there is just one subject in Brazilian cinema: crime; in particular, the drug-related gang wars in the favelas. We certainly haven’t seen much to suggest otherwise, since City of God.

There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. By contrast, Pablo Larraín’s No chronicles how a team of ad men in 1980s Chile, led by Gael Garcia Bernal’s maverick René, put together a campaign to topple a dictator that we know will succeed against all odds.

Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.

Marcos Valle: Marcos Valle/Garra/Vento Sul/Previsão do Tempo

We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.

If you are tired of life, tired of London, or even tired of love, muster the remaining fibres of your frazzled being and do whatever it takes to get tickets for ...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si... or any of the other performances in the Pina Bausch "World Cities" retrospective on at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican over the next four weeks.