Garden guru Chris Beardshaw is recommending a new technique for bigger blooms - blast your plants with heavy metal.

Forget about “Ding Dong! the Witch is Dead”, today marks the 60th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite song “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” topping the charts.

Sadler's Wells isn't where you go to hear folk tunes; it's the home of top-flight ballet. But the audience at Thursday's opening night of Petrushka was treated to a brief burst of Irish song when – after a cock-up with a rope ladder – the director burst on stage to keep everyone entertained. It was a brilliant bit of improvisation by Michael Keegan-Dolan, the youthful Dubliner. He sang; the hitch was fixed, and a warm fuzzy feeling enveloped the auditorium when the show went on. Everyone felt they were in it together.

Music

Ringed by fences, electronic gates, CCTV cameras and a  24-hour contingent of security guards, St George’s Hill in Weybridge, Surrey, is one of Britain’s most exclusive and secure private estates.

England fans' spokesman Mark Perryman expects up to two thirds of the 2,500 supporters who travelled to Poland for the World Cup qualifier to attend the rescheduled game this afternoon.

Our writer is sceptical about those who find it easy to be happy

At the end of this most English of celebrations, we now know what it feels to be French. The French calendar is stuffed full of bank holidays – among them, Ascension Day, Bastille Day and Assumption – and many of them, it seems to me, are rounded up into four-day breaks.

It's the county that some of the UK's best-known business moguls, Premier League footballers and entertainers call home, so it comes as no surprise that Surrey has been declared the UK's richest property hotspot.

Popular songs about contemporary fads can be hit-and-miss affairs. For every "Surfin' USA" that captures the zeitgeist and endures in its own right, there is a "Convoy", those novelty records that sound laughable as soon as the trend (in this case, CB radio) passes its sell-by date.

As the BBC recreates the pairing of Bailey and The Shrimp, Mike Higgins recalls meetings that defined the decade

Does all modern music sound the same to you? Do you hanker for the days when rock stars knew how to be rock stars? Does the sight of teenagers with their trousers at half-mast make your spleen explode? Have you – though you swore it would never happen – finally morphed into your parents? If so, perhaps it's time to embrace the inexorable slide towards an old age of liquidised ready-meals and Antiques Roadshow.

At times, Example's third album gives the impression that this hip-hop malarkey is just too easy for him, spraying out lines that other MCs would give their tongue for.

The CIA has explored many unconventional methods of sabotage, as Jon Ronson explored in The Men Who Stare At Goats. But reflecting on recent events, the mystery is why the agency neglects the one guaranteed method of destroying its enemies. All it need do is hire Mr Tony Blair to befriend them. Look at global villains of the age, and there he is, caught on camera winking, embracing and a-schmoozing. Mubarak, at whose Sharm el-Sheikh palace the Blairs enjoyed all those hols; Gadaffi, Mr Tony's partner in that manly hug; Berlusconi, on whose yacht he reposed when Casa Mubarak was taken ... and now Rupert Murdoch, for whom he vainly tried to fix a satellite deal with the Italian Stallion; and Rebekah Brooks, at whom we saw him waving coquettishly on a state visit to Wapping in footage replayed last week. If Cherie is a creature from Greek myth (half woman, half supermarket trolley), her soulmate is a supernatural hybrid spanning the ages. Mr T is the lovechild of Zelig and the Angel of Death. God knows who's next, but right now you wouldn't want to be Sir Cliff Richard.