Camilla Swift

Yesterday morning, driving along the main road back to Tarbert in the Outer Hebrides, we came across a large group of people parked up by the roadside, accompanied by their cameras and waterproofs. Perhaps they’ve spotted the Sea Eagle, we thought, and went to find out. But no, it was the White-throated Needletail. This bird, which winters in Australia and had only been spotted in the UK eight times before, is a type of Swift and the world’s fastest-flying bird. We stayed for a while to catch a glimpse, with many others pitching up too. It was quite a scene.

Coronation Day across the Globe was first broadcast in 1953, by the Home Service, and until last Sunday, it wasn’t broadcast again. In order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the cororation, the BBC decided to delve into their archives and re-broadcast it. It might have been the first televised coronation, but the BBC’s radio team were ‘determined to show off what they alone could do’, writes Kate Chisholm in her radio review this week.  This determination resulted in messages of goodwill to the Queen sent from places ranging from the Australian outback to the top of Ben Nevis. In 2012, however, the programme seems ‘weirdly outdated’.

Never accept meat from strangers. That seems to be the lesson of the horsemeat scandal – at least for the ex-commercial director of Freeza Meats. In September 2012, an Environment Health Officer arrived to inspect their meat stores. Discovering a large block of meat in one of their freezers, the officer decided to quarantine it. When the meat was tested for equine DNA, the meat was discovered to be 80% horse. And thus the mysterious case of the frozen horsemeat began. James Fairbairn, the commercial director at the time, appeared in front of the Efra select committee yesterday in a bid to explain things. In August, so his story goes, a meat trader named Martin McAdam, who owned McAdam Foods, tried to sell Freeza a ‘consignment of beef’, which they declined.

I’m So Excited is the latest offering from Pedro Almodóvar who, Deborah Ross says, she would usually love. But is I’m So Excited quite so, well, exciting? The trailer, which promises singing gay flight attendants, The Pointer Sisters, and plenty of booze, is below. And Deborah’s verdict? You can read it for yourself here. Do you have a favourite opera? In this week’s Spectator, Simon Courtauld declares his love for Verdi’s Don Carlos. It’s not about the structure, or the production, or all the little things that opera critics often criticise, he argues, but more about ‘the glorious music and the drama of the royal court in 16th century Spain.

Perched at number 3 in The Times' ‘30 Richest under 30’ list this week were Fawn and India Rose James, aged just 27 and 21 respectively and with an estimated fortune of £329 million. Who are they, and how did they get on the list? Their grandfather, Paul Raymond, was dubbed the ‘King of Soho’ for buying up swathes of the area, and was infamous for his Raymond Revue Bar strip club and his adult magazine empire. The Look of Love is his biopic and, says Deborah Ross in this week’s film review, is ‘visually fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick at’. The trailer’s below, and you can read what Deborah made of it here.

This year’s Grand National meeting attracted an exceptional amount of press attention, much of it due to a number of changes which were introduced in a bid to make the race safer. As a reaction to calls from animal welfare charities such as the RSPCA and Animal Aid – the latter of whom run a ‘racehorse death-watch’ website – Aintree organisers changed the cores of the fences from wood to flexible plastic, levelled out a number of the landings on jumps, and moved the start of the race away from the crowds. So did the changes make a difference to the race? Saturday’s Grand National race was for many an unqualified success, and fortunately no horses died -which indicates that the race was indeed safer than in previous years.

If you succumbed to Downton fever, then the BBC’s latest period-drama, The Village, might have attracted your attention. But if it was Downton Revisited that you were after, you might have been sorely disappointed, says James Delingpole in his Television column. Set in 1914 Derbyshire, The Village is everything that Downton is not: ‘taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics’, and according to James, both clichéd and clunky. Here’s a clip from the first episode: Classical quartets seem to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment, as this week’s Cinema review – Clarissa Tan on ‘A Late Quartet’ – illustrates.