Digested week: Serena Williams’s return and the superior branch of evolution | Emma Brockes

The seven-time Wimbledon champion’s comeback plus why Penelope Keith was rarer than rubies The week starts with Penelope Keith, sad news of whose death on Monday sends everyone over the age of 40 screeching back to her greatest hits – and they really were great, weren’t they? There are those sitcom characters from the late 1970s who have more or less faded from view – if I try really hard, I can just about summon the image of Wendy Craig and Geoffrey Palmer in Butterflies – but the Good Life never waned, remaining as stubbornly embedded in the national memory as Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army and the winter of discontent. If Tom and Barbara were the beating heart of the show, the real star was Keith as Margo Leadbetter. We loved Margo for her wardrobe and her innocence, for her giraffe-like frame forever curling itself into slapstick contortions while Jerry rolled his eyes in the background. Margo was as emphatically a creature of her time as the women of Motherland are today, airily disdainful, endlessly perplexed and as English as they come. In the tradition of Joyce Grenfell, there was a guilelessness about Keith that, even at her most imperious, somehow hurt one’s heart. Some things

Jul 3, 2026 → Jul 3, 2026