I was once invited to join a book club by a bunch of friendly, clever women. But their conversation began with whether they liked the novel’s central characters enough to imagine having dinner with them and from there, descended into swapping tips about conquering visible panty line and the effectiveness of various moisturisers. I didn’t last long (two sessions, maybe three), which is one way to warn anyone bothering to read this one star review, that I am probably not the ideal demographic audience for Book Club: The Next Chapter.

Netflix’s hit show Drive to Survive has proved that F1 can grab ratings, but Villeneuve Pironi: Racing's Untold Tragedy (Sky Documentaries) is a more esoteric offering.

One wonders if Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan pondered long over their debut musical’s title. Silvio might invite hubristic comparisons with Evita (another unlikely political leader), but Berlusconi feels a little Hamilton – too soon? They went with the surname of their anti-hero which appears a mite unwieldy on the playbill.

The cartoonist Gerald Scarfe – or his equally mordant forebear George Cruikshank – couldn’t have drawn a seedier Eurotrash excrescence than the crooner, Richie Bravo, who dominates Ulrich’s Seidl’s Rimini.

A hasbeen still purveying his Eighties-style Schlager pop to his few surviving female fans, porcine Richie – he of the dirty-blonde mane, sealskin coat, sexagenarian bloat, and oily seduction shtick – rivals in cringeworthiness the Demis Roussos lusted after by Beverly in Abigail’s Party.

Why did Maui work better than Taormina? Mike White’s second series of The White Lotus, which has relocated for its second season from an upscale Hawaiian resort to the fleshpots of Sicily, is still a worthwhile watch, but it’s hard not to wonder where that special savour has gone this time. 

Antonioni was a poet of enervated alienation, sold, like early Godard, by profoundly beautiful actors, and perfected in the sun-bleached lassitude of Monica Vitti’s search for her missing friend in L’Avventura (1960).

How people dance always gives them away. Alone on the floor of a Sardinian coastal nitespot in Silent Land, the bourgeois Polish couple Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieska Żulewska) fling themselves around as dementedly as if red ants are swarming on their bodies.

Their manic grins are unnatural. When Anna is dragged into the locals’ folk dance in the town square, the unease that grips the pair in the film’s second half emerges on her face.

The clarinet-player, clarinet-owner or clarinet-lover in your life is going to want and need this record. The combination of a glorious sound, lyricism that is lived and (okay, obviously) breathed, contrasted with insane finger-busting at crazy speed is irresistible. There is a less-is-more lightness about the whole enterprise, and there are some ear-wormish tunes too.

After gender-flipping the National’s Malvolio, the director Simon Godwin might have been expected to be equally bold with Much Ado About Nothing at the same address. A same-sex Beatrice and Benedick romance? Dogberry in bondage gear, zonked out on poppers? True, Godwin has been free with the text, cutting freely and turning Governor Leonato into a hotel owner with a wife instead of a brother, but this production is still unexpectedly trad.

For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First Violin Sonata (adding that he inclined to the fleshly). It provided the perfect epigraph to the four Ravenna Festival performances I attended this year, three of them as stunning as any hybrid event I’ve ever witnessed.