Although Metallica are screening a freshly recorded concert across America’s drive-in cinemas at the end of the month, we’re no nearer to actual gigs anywhere, especially the UK. Hold tight. We’ll get there. In the meantime, here are three events worth taking a look at.

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One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices.

In each of its incarnations – books, television series and theatre shows – covering more than 80 titles, Horrible Histories, created by Terry Deary, has been a hit. Children love the stories' anarchic humour and gory details, while parents and teachers know that their charges are retaining some information while having fun. 

The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021.

Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.

History, as protestors around the world currently insist, can be the art of forgetting – and erasure – as much as of memory. Although it explores a single incident from a century ago, Yuri Herrera’s brief, forensic but quietly impassioned account of a Mexican mining disaster may speak directly to the movements that now seek to reclaim a buried past from beneath official records.

David Olusoga’s A House Through Time concept (BBC Two) has proved a popular hit, using a specific property as a keyhole through which to observe historical and social changes. After previously picking sites in Liverpool and Newcastle, this time he’s chosen Bristol, the city where he has lived for over 20 years.

In retrospect, we will surely see that British battles over the Covid-19 lockdown harboured within them a bitter but half-hidden war of ideas. On one side, the behavioural scientists who first guided policy seemed to depend on a model of human beings as (in Rutger Bregman’s words) “selfish, aggressive and quick to panic”. Early signs, such as the spate of hoarding, served to confirm their stance. Then, after their belated tightening, the lockdown rules held much more firmly than government and its advisers foresaw. For most people, solidarity trumped self-interest.

Meanwhile back in the Dark Ages, Uhtred (son of Uhtred) is still seeking to reclaim his ancestral seat of Bebbanburg and manoeuvre through the treacherous currents of Saxon politics. The big question was, how would this fourth season manage in the aftermath of the death of King Alfred?