Jousting knights and juggling jesters will help recreate the spirit of medieval Sweden at the Medeltidsveckan Festival (00 46 0498 29 10 70; www.medeltidsveckan.se), in the walled city of Visby on Gotland island from 5-12 August. Sunvil Discovery (020-8758 4722; sunvil.co.uk/discovery) has a week from £1,385 per person including return flights on SAS Scandinavian Airlines from Heathrow via Stockholm to Visby, accommodation with breakfast and car hire.

The handover between "Over the Border" - a semi-spoken memoir about the powerful hold of pop over the young mind - and "I've Got Your Music" encapsulates everything that's great about Saint Etienne: one minute they're singing about great pop, the next they're actually doing some.

'I get frustrated by how good he is, but it inspires me to do better'

Dr Johnson was famously sniffy about dogs walking on their hind legs. So I'm not sure he'd have been entranced by Pudsey, the mop-haired pooch whose owner swept up a £500,000 prize at the weekend. Ashleigh Butler, who's 17, has trained her collie-cross to dance on his hind legs, and their barn-storming performance took them to victory in the final of Britain's Got Talent.

Notebook

Would you like to spend the night in a sleeping pod suspended from a tree as part of the theatregoing experience?

Emily Jupp meets the “Lilliputians” who work for theatre company "Royal de Luxe" and gets the reactions from the streets

Two magicians at crossed wands are heading to court over the rights to an illusion and the very principle of the secrecy of magic.

Roll up, a chic circus is in town

Smug Tweeters. Gurning Techno stilt loons. Naked am-dram mums. Bewildered teens. Key parts of any festival, says Nick Moore

Cirque Mandingue, who open the Roundhouse’s Circusfest season, have strong and exuberant acrobats, slightly hampered by a clichéd sense of theatre. The core team do pyramid balancing, tumbling and stomping dance moves. The energy dips when they start clowning or telling stories.

Workshopping is all the rage in experimental opera at present, and Tete a tete - with a distinguished history of making magic with limited means – has workshopped Circus Tricks in a wide variety of contexts, with numerous transformations.

No self-respecting billionaire wants to be seen as mean when it comes to celebrating a birthday, but they need to dig deep, says Genevieve Roberts