Comedian recalls useful advice that started him on the path to glory

Common sense has finally prevailed in the case of Paul Chambers, the Doncaster man whose conviction for sending a "menacing electronic communication" on Twitter was quashed yesterday in the High Court.

Celebrities appeared in court yesterday to support the right of a man to joke about blowing up an airport.

Nobody should have been surprised by the news that the 55-year old comedian Frank Skinner is to become a father, after all, he’s never lost the glint in his eye. Grey-haired he may be, and perhaps a little bit more stately at times, the veteran joker can still nurture an audience.

It's not the first programmes you think of when you're planning a television season that cause the problems, it's the last ones, as you scrape around trying to make up the numbers. Because the problem with a season – as a scheduling strategy – is that it provides a protective umbrella for all kinds of programme ideas that you'd never dream of commissioning as one-offs. And, from the viewer's end, it isn't always easy to tell which are the core ideas and which are the hangers-on.