The comedian Victor Lewis Smith once reduced the production staff at That's Life to a pool of gibbering liquid with a particularly savage telephone gag. Posing as a disabled trombonist, Lewis Smith rang to ask if he might be auditioned for the show. A member of Esther Rantzen's team showed growing excitement as Lewis Smith played the trombone passably. But the mood altered dramatically as he pretended to collapse out of his wheel-chair in a death swoon.

CHILDREN as young as three are forced to help care for disabled or terminally ill relatives, the association was told yesterday.

A MAN who sexually assaulted a girl of five in a swimming pool at Esther Rantzen's country home was jailed for 18 months yesterday.

A GRANDFATHER who repeatedly molested a five-year-old girl in a swimming pool at Esther Rantzen's country home was convicted of indecent assault yesterday.

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD girl was allegedly sexually assaulted in the swimming pool at Esther Rantzen's country retreat, a court was told yesterday.

JOHN PEEL, DJ: Somebody asked me if I would be interested in 170 Kenyan singles. I bought them unheard but it turned out to be a wonderful investment. They are stupendous. I've only heard about 10 of them because I don't want to spoil it by listening to them all at once. It's like getting a nice case of wine - you feel you ought to stretch it out.

We thought it was all over: the teeth, the striding through shopping centres in search of amusingly-shaped vegetables, the quizzical cocked eyebrow and 'But hang ons' in every show. Twenty-one years of fun, and serious stuff, too.

THE GOVERNMENT may provide training for parents to help them fight the war against illegal drugs, Brian Mawhinney, Minister for Health, said yesterday.

IF YOU want to stick the boot into That's Life, go no further than Rowan Atkinson's rant on Not the Nine O'Clock News in 1980:

THIS is the cruellest month - an observation that one section of the population will recognise immediately: 16-year-olds taking GCSEs. No, make that two sections: 16- year-olds taking GCSEs, and their parents.

One evening late in 1991 Carolyn Evans told her husband that she was taking her youngest son to the doctor. Since the boy had a bad ear infection, there was nothing very unusual in this, but Paul Evans couldn't understand why she was so keen to take her other three children along. When she hadn't returned two hours later, he began to get worried and rang the surgery, only to be told that Mrs Evans hadn't been seen for several weeks.

ESTHER RANTZEN, the Childline chairman, is calling on the Government to amend the Parent's Charter, to give children a guarantee that schools will investigate all complaints about bullying, writes Ngaio Crequer.

THE GOVERNMENT has halted its Aids and sexual health education programmes following rows over an explicit sex guide for teenagers and a condom campaign described by ministers as 'offensive'.

KENNETH ROBINSON was a man with a mission: to expose cant, muddled thinking and hypocrisy in all their myriad manifestations. The fact that he did this with optimum ridicule and scorn to radio listeners and television watchers in their millions got him into a lot of hot water. He once said, proudly, that his life as a professional irritant had been marked by a succession of sackings and suspensions.