Among the many scenarios that can throw a husband into a quiet state of panic, few are as swift and unsettling as realizing that things aren’t working as they should in the bedroom. This situation is often perceived as a personal embarrassment, something to be dealt with quietly and without discussion.

However, what many men may not understand is that this issue could be more than just a personal predicament; it might actually serve as a vital warning sign.

The arteries supplying blood to the penis are significantly narrower than those that feed the heart. As a result, when plaque buildup and hardening of the arteries—precursors to heart disease—begin to develop, it often shows up here first. This could happen years before any symptoms like chest discomfort become apparent.

What’s concerning is that many men respond to this early warning by simply purchasing a discreet supply of blue pills and ignoring the underlying issue.

As men reach middle age and their bodies start showing signs of wear, the tendency is to look for the simplest explanation. These days, that explanation often comes with a name and a booming industry behind it: the andropause.

Midlife men experience a long, gentle slope of hormonal change as testosterone falls around half a per cent a year – which can slip by unnoticed.

The symptoms – irritability, low mood, lethargy, a vanishing libido and a slow retreat from the world – are so easily mistaken for character or dismissed as an inevitable part of getting older. The andropause is a contested diagnosis (it’s not formally recognised) and testosterone replacement is not something to wade into without proper medical guidance, though for some men it lifts their mood and returns a little energy.

Even so, I now routinely check testosterone in men who have changed in ways no one can explain. Usually, these men are dragged in by their wives, who tell me their husband has become a diminished version of the man they married.

A body that has gone quiet in the bedroom is usually trying to tell its owner something, says Dr Max

And sometimes, not always but often enough, hormones turn out to be part of the explanation.

But this is where I would advise caution. Whole businesses now exist to tell men that a daily gel or a monthly jab will hand them back their 20s. An online clinic, a quick questionnaire, a credit card, and the prescription is in the post.

Testosterone has somehow become the answer to everything – tiredness, feeling gloomy, a thickening waist or a flagging sex life.

The problem is that a low reading on a blood test is common as men get older, and most of the time it’s a result of something else. Too much weight, too much drink, broken sleep, sleep apnoea, depression, type 2 diabetes – all of these drag testosterone down.

Smearing on a gel may fix the initial problem, but it means you’re not going anywhere near the foundational issues. And my concern is that the symptom is rarely the thing that needs solving. It is what the symptom is pointing to that matters.

Some men shrug and put it all down to age. Others reach for the testosterone and assume that settles it. Both have missed the thing that counts.

For some men, low testosterone is part of the picture, and careful, well-supervised treatment helps.

But a body that has gone quiet in the bedroom is usually trying to tell its owner something, and the sensible response is to listen and get properly checked, not shrug and ignore it.

So, when a woman sits in front of me worried about her husband’s mood, I do not assume he is simply being difficult.

But neither do I assume it is one neat hormonal problem with one neat hormonal solution. Sometimes it is his mood. Sometimes it is the drink. Sometimes it is the first faint sign of a heart in trouble.

The job is to look properly, not to grab the easy answer. Because the easy answer, far more often than not, is the wrong one.

Within six months every NHS trust must put its leaders through training on combating anti-Semitism. I cannot decide which depresses me more – that we need this, or the fear that doing a little e-learning will not change a thing. 

Hannah’s dishy doctor 

Hannah Waddingham appeared on the red carpet, glowing at the Variety Power of Women event, and she wasn’t alone. Stood next to her was the new man in her life, Nick Beresford-Cleary. He is, as it happens, a consultant spine surgeon. The Ted Lasso star, 51, has gone and fallen for a doctor. Speaking as one, I’d like to offer her free advice on what she has let herself in for.

Nick Beresford-Cleary and Hannah Waddingham at Variety 2026 Power of Women London

The good news first. A doctor is the one person at the dinner party who doesn’t flap when a guest keels over into the trifle. But now for the not so good news. The hours are merciless: nights, weekends, on-call, the phone going off halfway through dinner. Years of breaking terrible news can leave a person oddly hard to reach once the front door closes. Then there is the ego. Spend long enough as the one everyone turns to in a crisis and a conviction that you are always right tends to set in.

I speak, I’m sorry to say, from experience. But Hannah seems happy and that’s what counts. Happiness, as all doctors know, is the best medicine.

There is one line in the coverage of the Henry Nowak case that I have not been able to shake. Vickrum Digwa, 23, was jailed for life last week for stabbing Henry, an 18-year-old student, to death. The killer’s mother, Kiran Kaur, hid the knife at her son’s request, and has now been convicted of assisting an offender. And the killer’s grandmother, speaking to this paper in the mother’s defence, said she had only done what any mother would have done. 

No. A decent mother would have taken her son by the collar to the nearest police station and forced him to face up to what he had done. It is that unspoken sense that the rules bend for our family that breeds children who grow up certain they can do anything and answer for none of it. Good parents teach their children that actions have consequences. A young man is dead. His mother is grieving a son who is never coming home and she is the only mother in this story who deserves our sympathy. 

Dr Max prescribes… joining a choir

If I could hand out a single prescription for the low, the lonely and the frazzled, it might be this. Find a local choir and sing. Singing alongside other people floods the brain with feel-good chemicals, it slows and steadies the breath in a way that settles the whole nervous system, and it drops you into a room full of strangers all reaching for the same note at the same moment. Studies tie it to reduced stress, brighter spirits and a deep sense of belonging, the very thing we need in our pandemic of modern loneliness. You don’t need to have a particular talent. You simply turn up and open your mouth. 

This week’s feature on Good Money After Bad Theatre spotlights The Strangers: Chapter 3, now available on Starz. This marks the conclusion of an arguably unnecessary trilogy that stretches a mere 58-minute storyline across an exhausting four-and-a-half hours. Quite the feat, isn’t it? The original 2008 film, The Strangers, was a landmark entry in the home-invasion thriller genre, renowned for its straightforward and chilling murder narrative. Its sequel wasn’t financially successful enough to warrant immediate follow-ups, leaving the concept dormant until director Renny Harlin decided to resurrect it. Harlin aimed to expand the simple concept into a trilogy, delving into the backstory of the masked killers. Unfortunately, the execution fell flat, and despite the commitment from all involved, the series trudged on, bringing us to this final chapter. At last, viewers can breathe a sigh of relief that the saga has concluded.

The Gist: Chapter 3 picks up from where Chapter 2 left audiences—bored and restless. The story focuses on Maya, also known as Jenny Finalgirl, portrayed by Madelaine Petsch of Riverdale. In the previous film, she managed to kill one of the antagonists, Pin-up Girl. However, instead of diving back into that climactic moment, the film rewinds to three years earlier, introducing unnecessary sequences that add little to the plot. This setup leads to one of the least inventive slasher scenes in cinematic history, further reinforcing the film’s lack of originality.

Returning to the present, we find Maya observing from the woods as Scarecrow (also known as Sackface) and Dollface discover Pin-up Girl’s body. Flashbacks reveal that Scarecrow and Pin-up Girl shared a romantic history, stripping away any remaining mystery. Meanwhile, Maya maneuvers through the forest, dodging Sheriff Rotter, whose name screams “villain.” As expected, Maya is eventually captured by the remaining killers, who haul her and Pin-up Girl’s body to a sawmill, providing a grim nod to Fargo’s infamous scene.

While Sheriff Rotter meanders aimlessly, the plot awkwardly jumps back and forth in time. Maya’s sister, played by Rachel Shenton, arrives with friends to search for Maya, predictably becoming fodder for uninspired kills. The film is peppered with drawn-out, silent scenes meant to evoke tension but seem more like an effort to reach the conventional 90-minute runtime. Ironically, despite its aspirations, Chapter 3 feels more like an overextended episode than a genuine feature film. Meanwhile, Scarecrow expresses a bizarre desire for Maya to join as the third killer, which she resists, evoking the same reluctance Petsch should have felt before signing onto this trilogy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Remember The Divergent Series? Initially planned as four installments, it ended with just three because of poor reception and dwindling interest. Unlike The Divergent Series, The Strangers Trilogy failed to heed the same warning signs, doggedly completing its lackluster journey.

Performance Worth Watching: Good on Brake for capitalizing on one of the most hateful, hateable faces ever. He’s just making use of what the good lord gave him, by gum.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Just last night I was flim-cricketsplaining to some poor suffering party about how horror is where the medium’s true innovators are cultivating exciting new visual and narrative styles, and experimenting with the form. There are piles and piles of examples that deserve praise, multiple viewings and bigger budgets for their makers: Weapons, Bring Her Back, The Ugly Stepsister, Undertone, Backrooms, Obsession, etc., and those are just from the last 18 months or so. And it’s therefore shocking how regressive and uninspired these Strangers films are, playing like bottom-rung direct-to-VHS junk from the mid-1980s, feeding off the scraps left behind from the slashersplosion era. They all but scream don’t bother to watch us! in our faces. 

However, I can say that Chapter 3 is the best of the trilogy, for what it’s worth, and it’s worth jack squat. It’s still a bleary, wearying trudge from one pointless scene to the next. Perhaps there’s one coherent movie to be hacked together from the three, but even then, there’s still not a single memorable kill to be found — the Scarecrow fella just swings his ax until someone croaks — and these characters function as if they don’t exist on the same time-space continuum as common sense. At least the three films are consistent in the way they feature an upsetting lack of imagination, which is far more upsetting than anything that happens in this conclusive chapter, which TRIES SO HARD to chill yer buns off and disturb your brain, but doesn’t seem to really know how to do that. It can’t muster enough oomph to even be a merciless downer. It’s remarkably inept for a veteran director like Harlin who, never forget, helmed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I guess there’s just no following that.

Our Call: Sometimes there’s no beating around the bush. Eloquence be damned: these movies suck. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.

A Louisiana woman operating a daycare from her residence has been charged with negligent homicide following the tragic drowning of a 3-year-old boy in her backyard pool. The child remained submerged and unconscious for approximately 20 minutes before being retrieved from the water, according to local authorities.

The Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office apprehended 37-year-old Joann Johnson from Prairieville, Louisiana. She faces charges related to the boy’s drowning, as surveillance footage revealed the young boy struggling in the pool and eventually becoming unresponsive.

“The most heart-wrenching aspect of the video is witnessing young Ian’s desperate fight for survival,” Donovan Jackson from the APSO informed WAFB in Baton Rouge. The boy has been identified as Ian Perez.

“Equally distressing is the sight of him remaining in the pool for over 20 minutes without any supervision,” Jackson further commented.

Joann Johnson, aged 37, has been charged with negligent homicide following the death of Ian Perez. The unlicensed daycare provider reportedly left him unsupervised, leading to the tragic incident, as stated by the police. (Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office)