The Archbishop of Canterbury will play the theme tune from the BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley when he makes his radio presenting debut on Easter Sunday.

BBC pay-offs to be investigated

Arsonist killer's bid to burn suburb

Homeless families in B&Bs doubles in year

Sophie Dahl, Fern Britton and Anne Diamond have all gone skinny of late

The climax of ITV1's Superstar pulled in only half the audience which the finals of Andrew Lloyd Webber's previous BBC shows attracted.

Given that Ann Widdecombe spent her prime promoting Victorian attitudes to abortion and homosexuality, you could argue she has some atoning to do, and her self-reinvention certainly makes a start.

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.

Edinburgh-bound for the first time in eight years, comedy's nearly woman says she's just glad she still has a role to play. Andrew McCorkell meets Helen Lederer

Social Studies

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

As the 'Independent' writer embarks on a new feud, Tom Peck finds out if the years have mellowed her other great enmities

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."