What’s it like to live on the set of a soap opera? Or above Ted Lasso’s favourite pub? The residents of the homes made famous by hit TV shows tell all

Half the world recognises the apartment that Carrie Bradshaw lives in. Or the New Jersey mansion where Tony Soprano ate, slept and obsessed over the ducks in his swimming pool. In the 1990s, if you asked a good chunk of the global population where Will Smith lived, they would instantly picture a huge, white abode in Bel Air.

For the real people who call those places home, this can be an issue.

Why bother to improve people’s lives – or even show up – when getting votes is this easy? In many ways, though, the stunt hasn’t paid off

What can Clacton possibly have done to deserve this? Is this some cosmic karma for a past existence in which the town executed hundreds of innocent women and children? Surely, even then, enough is enough. For the past few years Clacton seems to have been the centre of some abusive psychological experiment. The sort the Americans used to run in the 1950s and 60s, that have long since been banned. One run by Nigel Farage and designed merely to fuel his narcissistic dreams, with the voters mere cannon fodder.

Clacton’s relationship with Nige is and always has been entirely one-sided. The town’s job is merely to vote for him, whenever he commands. Even for byelections that are entirely unnecessary and will possibly have to be re-run before the end of the year. On a turnout of just 44%, little more than 60% of the voters duly obliged on Thursday, even though none of the main parties were standing and Nige’s main opponent was a man with a bin on his head. Maybe parts of Clacton are waking up, and are fed up with Farage taking the piss out of them.

The artist’s latest swerve sees her creating an alien inflatable landscape for New York’s Balloon Museum

Oversized inflatable blades of grass graze my face as I wind a path through the glowing white gallery space. Little papery squares of snow blow, some sticking to my hair. The path through the room curves so that only what is right in front of me is visible: initially, it seemed like I would reach the far side of the room in mere seconds but still my journey, magically, continues. I am at Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z, the latest installation by the performance artist Marina Abramović. It opened earlier this month at New York’s newly opened Balloon Museum, which bills itself as “the first permanent home for inflatable art”.

“I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” a smiling Abramović said, speaking on Zoom from her Manhattan apartment. “But if you give me an assignment then I’ll try to see what I can do with it.” As she began researching balloon art her first thought was that it was “so kitschy – basically for kids and games”. However, the more she contemplated the balloon, the more she saw its resonance with her own practice. “You put air in it, and at some point the air comes out. Or you pinch it and it disappears. The temporality of this is very close to what I’m doing: performance art.”

Nigel Farage has won the Clacton byelection he triggered by resigning from the seat because he wanted to allow voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the entire establishment’. The Reform UK leader’s political finances were under investigation at the time. That process has now resumed, posing the risk of another byelection if Farage is found to have broken the rules. Has his party emerged stronger or weaker as a result of the byelection? And what next for Reform UK and its leader? Alexandra Topping and Rowena Mason discuss the fallout, and what it means

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Stressed out, endlessly scrolling and never satisfied? Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, the Buddhist monk with off-the-charts levels of contentment, may have the answers …

By some metrics, Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is the happiest man on Earth. In brain scans, researchers noted that Mingyur’s neural activity showed off-the-charts levels of activation in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm and joy. In other tests conducted when he was 41 years old, his brain reportedly “resembled that of a 33-year-old”. He also laughs a lot.

Can happiness be taught? I met Mingyur (Rinpoche is an honorary title meaning, roughly, “precious one”) to discover his strategies for a richer life.

Weather forecasts once gave Britons something safe to chat about. Not any more, and that’s a problem for the experts – indeed, for all of us

In this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. Collectively, we have created and maintained a national climate narrative of small disappointments and pleasures. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that “tomorrow would be rather windy”, but “a good day to hang out the washing”. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.

Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. “Met Office considers issuing red ‘extreme heat warning’ across Britain while nation enjoys ‘incredible summer’,” said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website on Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have increasingly struggled to find the right language to describe this transformation’s daily consequences. Their struggle influences and exemplifies that of many Britons to understand, and work out what we think about, the apparent end of the weather patterns we expected to shape our whole lives.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

PM urges people not to risk lives and homes by starting fires as military brought in to help deal with wildfires

• UK politics live – latest updates

Downing Street has issued a temporary GB-wide ban on the sale of disposable barbecue and brought in the military to help deal with wildfires as Andy Burnham urged people not to risk lives in “tinderbox” Britain this weekend.

The prime minister spoke from Stourbridge in the West Midlands, where at least 19 people have been taken to hospital during eight fires that have ripped through several homes.

Reform UK leader’s return to Clacton restarts inquiry into £5m gift from crypto-billionaire and support from fraudster

• UK politics live – latest updates

The suspended parliamentary standards investigation into Nigel Farage over accusations he failed to declare gifts and donations has resumed after the Reform UK leader’s re-election as the MP for Clacton.

The twofold investigation by Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, was paused after Farage resigned from his seat and called a byelection in protest at what he said was unfair scrutiny of his finances.

Greater Anglia incident happens day after two passengers seriously injured in East Sussex derailment

A train has derailed in Essex, less than 24 hours after two people were seriously injured in a similar incident in East Sussex.

British Transport Police (BTP) confirmed the rear carriages of the train derailed “in an upright position” at Wickford railway station, adding that there were “no reported injuries”.

Israeli PM criticised by political rival for attacking an international ally and overseeing ‘horrific diplomatic failure’

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the UK “the Islamic republic of Britain” in a podcast interview, where he also described the country as the “first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon”.

His comments, made during an interview for Israel’s army radio, played into a common far-right Islamophobic trope about Britain’s small Muslim population.