This is a critical year for BBC comedy, when it will finally seek to address previous failings in giving a television platform to the funniest women in Britain.

Social Studies

Carol Vorderman and Sally Lindsay are joining the panel of 'Loose Women'.

Lenny Henry, who re-entered the comedy world when he appeared on Live at the Apollo last autumn, is bona fide heritage material. The 52-year-old entertainer's latest show looks at his history through his passion for music. Family, first loves and fame are all set against a musical backdrop, from reggae rent parties at his parents' house in Dudley (where relatives gave him white rum that was "63 per cent alcohol, 37 per cent hospital") to the musical compromises made in marriage (to ex-wife Dawn French, though she is never explicitly mentioned), where Sade is the only common ground.

I know that we were meant to don black armbands and fly the flags at half-mast when Dawn French and Lenny Henry went bang, but personally I was pleased. I've had beef (and how fitting is that word, considering how fat we both are!) with that bitch since way back in the day, when I refused to be in a 1994 South Bank Show. This was some sort of celebration of morbid obesity – sorry, a "personal celebration of Big Women, drawing on art, photography, fashion, film and sculpture to ask why Big Women, who were revered and celebrated throughout the history of art, are now ignored by today's culture."

Opera is rarely laugh-out-loud funny; nor is it as consistently witty, as stylish, as quirkily captivating as Laurent Pelly’s staging of Donizetti’s Tyrolean romp, first seen in 2007 and now revived with pretty much its entire original cast once again firing on all cylinders.

Opera is rarely laugh-out-loud funny; nor is it as consistently witty, as stylish, as quirkily captivating as Laurent Pelly’s staging of Donizetti’s Tyrolean romp, first seen in 2007 and now revived with pretty much its entire original cast once again firing on all cylinders.

The Cadbury Cocoa House is coming soon to your high street. It will serve afternoon tea and chocolate and is an attempt by Cadbury – now part of Kraft – to take advantage of the booming, soaring, runaway success of coffee shop chains in this country.

They were the power couple of British comedy, national treasures in their own right and part of a 25-year marriage that was deemed one of the strongest in showbusiness.

Celebrity couple Lenny Henry and Dawn French are to separate after 25 years of marriage, their spokesman said today.