The number of top talent earning more than £100,000 a year at the BBC has gone up, according to its accounts which were released today.

Sky Atlantic

Treme, the New Orleans-based Sky Atlantic drama from David Simon (creator of The Wire), provides great insight into the culture of a great city.

A number of hard questions will be asked at Twickenham this evening, not least at the front of the scrum, but let's start at the beginning.

Bad news – it turns out Victoria’s Australian nanny, the one who got dumped by the Greek guy by text, flew back to Oz today. Victoria rang me up and she’s all sobbing and I immediately think that something has happened to H-F?

At home in the Cooperdome all day as Victoria is off looking at premises for her new store. This meant that me and H-F were alone together for the whole day – the first time in months.

He’s the skate-boarding, Rastafarian felt mouse who solves crimes with a chilled-out mantra of “makin’ a bad ting good”. Yet it's parents and students who are helping to turn Rastamouse into the biggest childrens’ television cult hit since Teletubbies.

I was watching the downshift challenge on Daybreak TV recently (don't ask). Drop one brand level lower and you can save 40 per cent, claimed Martin Lewis, because people are fooled at Christmas into thinking they must have the best. He tried out two Christmas trees on children, one cheerful, the other deeply depressing. The suggestion that the depressing cheaper one was better because it was cheaper lacked conviction. He then road-tested a Christmas pudding and mince pie on a blindfolded Adrian Chiles who guessed both the more expensive ones correctly. Which suggests that while it may be worth saving on basic brands, when it comes to matters of taste, wine in particular, it's a false economy not to take the upshift challenge and enhance the enjoyment.

This week saw the release of figures from the Public Health Observatories which concluded that Birmingham is the fattest city in Europe. Some 29 per cent of adults in the city are obese, which is more than twice the European average. And the prospects don't look good for the next generation either: 25 per cent of 11- and 12-year-olds in the city are obese too.

Adrian Chiles is to present a new Sunday night talk show with regular guests including the former deputy prime minister John Prescott, musician Shaun Ryder and football manager Harry Redknapp.

Not since my schooldays, when a boy in my year called Ian Hunt was cruelly nicknamed Isaac, even by some of the teachers, has the surname of the current Culture Secretary struck me as potentially comical. So three cheers for Jim Naughtie, whose now-celebrated clanger on Monday's Today programme unwittingly kindled the schoolboy humour that brought some warmth to a freezing winter's day.

ITV1 morning show Daybreak has bounced back by drawing a million viewers for the first time since its launch week.

This column had been wondering when it could expect Gary Lineker's principled resignation from the BBC's Match of the Day over Panorama's FIFA investigation, given that he so quickly relinquished his Mail on Sunday slot when that paper's Lord Triesman sting put England's 2018 World Cup bid in jeopardy. "The story... and the actions of the Mail on Sunday in publishing it have undermined the bid to bring the World Cup to England," he said at the time. Yesterday, however, Lineker wrote in The Times that he was "unsettled" by Panorama's timing, but while there was "a lot of debate about whether media coverage has damaged our attempts to win... in terms of the bid, they are irrelevant." Lineker, 50 this week, glossed over his change of heart with a headline-grabbing birthday interview for BBC Sport, in which he confessed to having discreetly voided his bowels on the pitch during England's opening match at the 1990 World Cup. Meanwhile Manish Bhasin, after crying himself to sleep, dreamt once more of being trapped forever within the faux-warehouse walls of The Football League Show.