Veep, Charlotte Blease

With Samira Ahmed

From the creator of the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It comes a new sweary star - none other than the Veep of the USA. Armando Iannucci's new comedy stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame as the Vice President (or Veep) who lurches from gaffe to gaffe with an entourage of incompetent, squabbling staff. Kerry McCarthy (MP for Bristol East) has the verdict.

The novelist Elizabeth Taylor has been described as one of the hidden but greatest writers of the 20th Century. To mark the centenary of her birth, comedian David Baddiel and biographer Nicola Beauman reappraise her work.

New Generation Thinker Charlotte Blease, from Queen's University Belfast, examines historical and contemporary deceptions in medical practice and asks to what extent it is a necessary evil.

An exhibition of photographs currently on display in Berlin reveals the surprising number of deserted or radically depopulated modern cities across the globe: speculatively built cities in China; ex-Soviet towns on the Caspian Sea; Centralia in Pennsylvania, America; Hashima in Japan. Curator Brigitte Schultz, the historian Timothy Stanley and Wouter Vantisphout of Delft University in the Netherlands discuss the phenomenon of the modern empty city and looks at the perhaps even more sinister half-empty city, like Detroit or Rotterdam, that may already be in irrevocable decline.