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Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers

Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.

In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth.

More than 100 prominent people from literature, the arts, science, academia, human rights and the law have signed a declaration urging newspaper and magazine publishers to embrace the royal charter system of press regulation.

They join people who have been victims of press misbehaviour in arguing that charter will give "vital protection to the vulnerable" from abuse of power by the press.

The signatories include broadcasters Stephen Fry, Clare Balding, Gary Lineker and Rory Bremner. Actor Emma Thompson has signed, as have Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir Jonathan Miller.

Several film directors are on the list, such as Stephen Frears, Alan Parker, Mike Leigh, Beeban Kidron, Guy Ritchie, Stephen Daldry, Bill Forsyth, Peter Kosminsky, Terry Gilliam and Michael Apted.

Among the writers and playwrights are Alan Bennett, William Boyd, Alan Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard, Monica Ali, Helen Fielding, Michael Frayn, Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, David Hare, Alan Hollinghurst, Jk Rowling, Salman Rushdie,...

Tomorrow's (April 11) edition of Question Time has been moved to Margaret Thatcher's former parliamentary constituency of Finchley.

The move marks the ex-prime minister's death on Monday (April 8) after she suffered a stroke. She was 87.

Executive producer Steve Anderson said: "To reflect the death of Baroness Thatcher, we are changing our scheduled location and taking Question Time to her constituency of 33 years.

"Our audience will include people who voted for and against Baroness Thatcher, plus many young people who weren't old enough to vote at that time.

"Our panel comprises colleagues and opponents of Baroness Thatcher throughout her 11 years as Prime Minister."

The panel is made up of Conservative cabinet minister Ken Clarke, Labour's former home secretary David Blunkett, former leader of the Liberal Democrats Menzies Campbell, The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee and Thatcher's authorised biographer Charles Moore.

The April 11 edition was due to be filmed in Rochdale, which...

Celebrity splits are perfect teen preparation for the inevitability of heartache – which will come no matter how cute your bum is

Stop what you're doing, right this second, guys. There is very important news to impart, and I need your full attention. Forget Polly Toynbee – the coalition's sustained, calculated erosion of the welfare state is of no interest to you now, because Robert Pattinson and his co-star Kristen Stewart hit a bad patch following a fling she had with the director Rupert Sanders. They may even break up. Let's all take a minute as the world stops turning.

The phenomenon of people giving a toss about people they have never met has reached new levels of insanity. Within minutes, the hashtag #robsten had been devised, and statements like "no one can destroy Robsten" and "I want this nightmare to end" were clogging up our internet feeds. Perhaps because the superfans...

This week the Government U-turned on charity tax relief, a New England teacher of Latin won the Orange prize, and the Scots rebelled against their new funding regime

• The Government has performed a U-turn on tax relief (BBC website) for charitable donations. Fifth policy climbdown this week, say Randeep Ramesh and Juliette Jowit. Our Polly Toynbee won't like it. But lots of people in charities and the arts will.

• Michael Haneke's Amour took the Palme D'Or at Cannes. Not a surprise: it was nearly everyone's nearly favourite film, though some felt that the memorably barking Holy Motors, by Leos Carax, should have taken the big prize for its extraordinary vision. Also Cannes-related: a really entertaining interview with the star of Ken Loach's The Angels' Share Paul Brannigan, though I doubt it will warm the hearts of the chiefs of Glasgow City Council.

• Against the odds, debut novelist and...

Gossip abounds at the Oldie of the Year lunch as the great and good gather to exchange jokes, jibes and a bit of mild filth

Off to the Oldie of the Year lunch and some of the nicest gossip of the year. I noticed the magazine's slogan – "Buy it before you snuff it", which does not have quite the same cheery ring as, say, "It's naughty but it's nice". I bumped into the great children's illustrator Shirley Hughes, who was chatting to the celebrated TV critic Philip Purser, whom she had met only once since they learned ballroom dancing together in Wirral, Merseyside, some 70 years ago.

There was Lord West, the former First Sea Lord (the head of the army told him he envied his splendid title. West replied: "Then you would be the First Land Lord.") The former terrorism minister arrived wearing the first bowler hat I've seen, on a head,...

If you can't beat 'em, cook 'em dinner? That's the route Meryl Streep recently took with a group of prominent female journalists from England, following a screening for her latest film, "The Iron Lady." Although Streep has been praised for her performance as Margaret Thatcher, some across the Atlantic have expressed consternation over the way the film portrays the former UK prime minister. That hubbub may have led to the decision to host a personal screening and dinner party (with food cooked by Streep herself) on Nov. 12, 2011. Unfortunately, the evening seemed more awkward than auspicious. As the New Yorker's Lauren Collins stated, after the screening: "Streep plied the journalists with chicken curry and an American apple pie; she smoked in the garden, gossiped about face-lifts, did the dishes ... But the evening had its awkward moments. 'Somebody with massive, detailed knowledge of the events in Thatcher's time would sort of sniffily say,...

The prime minister, David Cameron, announced this week that any referendum on Scottish independence must take place in the next 18 months and feature only one simple question: stay in the UK on present terms, or leave.

But the leader of the Scottish National party, Alex Salmond, is emboldened by recent election success. He is in no mood for such a compromise. He has restated his intention to hold the referendum in 2014, coincidentally the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn.

With relations strained between London and Edinburgh, the panel discusses who will prevail in the all-important struggle to set the date, format and question(s) in a vote that could radically and permanently alter Britain's electoral landscape.

In the studio are columnists Martin Kettle and Polly Toynbee and the Snp's chief whip in Westminster Stewart Hosie. They discuss what Scottish independence would mean - not only for Scotland, but for the rest of the UK.

From Piers Morgan to Polly Toynbee, Jemima Khan to Jarvis Cocker – David Cameron takes questions from public figures who want answers

Hear what the Pm has to say in our audio interactive

David Mitchell, comedian

Do you wish you were less posh?

"[Laughs] No. You can't change who you are. For a long time I thought my full name was 'The Old Etonian David Cameron'. I had parents who gave me a wonderful start in life, who sacrificed a lot to give me a great education. So I don't ever want to change – I don't want to drop my accent or change my vowels. I am who I am."

Piers Morgan, TV presenter

If you could relive one moment in your life, excluding births of children and marriage, what would it be?

"God, that's a really good question. Piers, why don't you ever ask really good questions like that normally? I...

Meryl Streep, who plays Thatcher in The Iron Lady, invited me back for apple pie after a screening. But that didn't lessen my hatred for the former Tory leader

Meryl Streep is undoubtedly a great actor. Amazingly, I am not. So I did my best to act casually when she served me apple pie that she had baked herself. But my stomach was churning because of the film in which I had just seen her. She plays Margaret Thatcher in the biopic The Iron Lady. She is mesmeric on screen and indeed in the flesh.

I have never before been to a screening and then taxied with a handful of female journalists to a house where a superstar cooks for you. On the way we were given readymade gin and tonics. "I have never had one of these before," said my colleague Polly Toynbee, "it's rather lovely."

"But what are we going to say?...

Being a Christian in the 21st century is difficult at the best of times. Even without Mel Gibson constantly putting his foot in it, or Westboro Baptist Church spitting venom at the very people they are supposed to be helping, we have to contend with a media backlash whenever a seemingly ‘Christian’ film is released.

The problem seems to be that people don’t mind Christianity per se: if people are Bible-bashing in the streets, they can ignore them or talk back. What they resent, or appear to resent, are films with Christian undertones – allegories or parables which introduce Christian beliefs or ideas in a supposedly secular context. When The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe came out in 2005, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee accused it of “invad[ing] children’s minds with Christian iconography… heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.” Ouch.

Polly Toynbee claims (Comment, 28 July) the government wants to replace public funding of the arts with private. That is simply not the case – I have always argued that private funding should be in addition to, not instead of, public money. Why? Because state funding offers stability over many years which usually philanthropy cannot. It also, with a proper arm's-length relationship, allows creative risk-taking and artistic freedom that is not always possible with other forms of funding. But the arts, too, should play their part in helping to reduce the deficit.

So we need to protect the arts, which in this country are probably the finest offered anywhere in the world. We also need to explore whether the government can do anything else to help. That's why I returned the lottery to its original four pillars, which will lead to a significant boost in arts funding. That's why I am concentrating...