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'If You Don't Know Me By Now' by Sathnam Sanghera

March
PICK OF THE MONTH
TV
Lily Allen
The nation’s liveliest wallflower talks frankly with her celeb chums. The terms ‘car-crash TV’ and ‘field day for the tabs’ should cover it.
Spring, BBC3.

TV
'He Kills Coppers’
Four years after the BBC’s superb adaptation of ‘The Long Firm’, Jake Arnott’s sequel is taken on by ITV1 and Adrian Shergold, with Rafe Spall and Kelly Reilly leading the cast. The lives of a demobbed soldier, a disturbed hack and a corrupt policeman collide when a copper is, well, killed, and a decades-long manhunt begins.
Mar, ITV1

Feature continues

BOOKS
‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ by Sathnam Sanghera
Second- and third-generation Asians often complain about living a ‘schizophrenic’ existence. But they don’t generally mean it literally. Sanghera’s account of his Wolverhampton childhood blighted by mental illness is a rigorous and thoroughly intelligent rebooting of the misery memoir that recalls Dave Eggers’ ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ and deserves to do as well.
Mar, Viking, £16.99

MUSIC
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Reported to be working on their first new studio album since 1998’s ‘Munki’, the reunited Scottish outfit will be taking over The Roundhouse for a two-night residency. Expect tickets to sell out fast.
Mar 11-12, The Roundhouse

DANCE
New York City Ballet
Visiting London for the first time since 1983. The two-week season showcases four different programmes, including an array of modern masterpieces by choreographers George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and British-born Christopher Wheeldon.
Mar 12-22, London Coliseum

NIGHTLIFE
Licence to Thrill
Any excuse for four parties: it’s 20 years since Turnmills was granted its ‘Music and Dance’ entertainment licence and the club’s promising ‘all the big names’ over the four days of the Easter weekend. Don’t go away.
Mar 20-23, Turnmills

NIGHTLIFE
Minus 10th Anniversary Party
Ritchie Hawtin’s hugely influential label is minimal by name and by nature, but it’s about much more than stripped-down techno. Minus takes over all three rooms at Fabric on Easter Saturday with Mr Hawtin and his protégé, Magda, in room one.
Mar 22, Fabric

'Poppy Shakespeare'

TV
‘Poppy Shakespeare’
Clare Allan’s highly praised debut novel satirising the mental health system gets a fantastic cast (Naomie Harris, Anna Maxwell-Martin) and an Emmy Award-winning director (Benjamin Ross) for its TV adaptation set in a north London psychiatric ward, where a new day-patient arrives, insisting she’s sane, and befriends a long-serving resident.
Mar, C4

BOOKS
‘Something To Tell You’ by Hanif Kureishi
Kureishi’s new novel is his best for years. It’s a panoramic black comedy about the raging that comes with ageing, and finds middle-aged psychoanalyst Jamal looking back on the complicated passions of his youth in 1970s London.
Mar, Faber, £16.99

FILM
‘Flight of the Red Balloon’
Make sure you don’t miss this tiny gem from Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Commissioned by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Hou’s film adopts a typically muted approach to narrative, offering us a brief glimpse into the busy life of puppeteer Juliette Binoche (in one of her best performances) while simultaneously examining the relationship between life and cinema, East and West, mothers and sons, reality and fiction, and the banal and the transcendent. A genuine treat.
Released Mar 14

'China Design Now'

AROUND TOWN/ART
‘China Design Now’
Obviously, Beijing will have entirely cleaned its air of pollution and brushed up on Western etiquette and all world languages in preparation for the Olympics, so it’s only fair that we bone up on what it might mean to be Chinese. As part of a wider cultural festival called ‘China Now’, the V&A focuses on the hip youngsters producing the country’s new-wave of influential architecture, graphic design and fashion.
Mar 15-July 13, V&A

AROUND TOWN
St Patrick’s Day parade & festival
Knees-up for everyone who can claim an Irish connection – or simply fancies a Guinness.
Mar 16, 12noon-6pm, Trafalgar Square

SOCIAL CLUB
Immodesty Blaize
Crowned the world’s queen of burlesque (in Las Vegas, no less), Immodesty Blaize will be donning her promoting hat once again to put on a two-night show, this time at the opulent north London venue Koko.
Mar 18 & 19, Koko

GAY
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Established in 1986, the LLGFF has grown beyond all expectations, with 30,000 visitors attending last year’s festival. The twenty-second festival will showcase the best in LGBT film and video from around the world.
Mar 27-Apr 10 (www.llgff.org.uk)

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