Tourists should be spared the trauma of staying in Basil Fawlty- style hotels when they visit Britain by being offered a national star-rating system for holiday accommodation, a cross-party Commons select committee said.

Writer and comic BEN ELTON talks with James Rampton

It's official. Jane Austen can stand up to transatlantic travel. It's chiefly a matter of casting. By Adam Mars-Jones; EMMA Douglas McGrath (U)

San Francisco's Greg Proops has been over here long enough now to work out what makes a British audience tick. Many's the visiting American stand-up who loses his way in a maelstrom of socio-political references.

The one thing you have to say about Bill Cosby is that the guy is seriously cool. He doesn't bother playing a single UK date in 30 years of show business (who needs to impress the Brits to become one of the highest-paid entertainers in the world?); and, when he does finally show, he turns up as part of the Capital Radio Funk, Soul and Jazz Festival, touching down from the south of France on the afternoon of the gig in his private jet with absolutely none of the trappings of the on-the-road showbiz millionaire. Elton John, we learnt in Sunday night's kiss-and- tell rockumentary, tours with his own personal travelling hair stylist; Bill Cosby flies in with an entourage of none, on his tod, without so much as a publicity assistant in these showbiz days when even publicity assistants need publicity assistants. Presumably he pilots his own jet.

With creaky old sitcoms continuing to pull in the viewers on UK Gold, the BBC has gone one better and remade two of the Seventies' biggest hits. James Rampton reports

Also Showing: SGT BILKO Jonathan Lynn (PG) CUTTHROAT ISLAND Renny Harlin (PG) BALTO Simon Wells (U) LAWNMOWER MAN 2 Farhad Mann (12) DUNSTON CHECKS IN Ken Kwapis (PG)

THIS IS IT by Joseph Connolly, Faber pounds 8.99

Andrew Sachs plays Einstein in a new two-part documentary. James Rampton met him

With a reverential love of classic comedy, the double-act behind Father Ted is pushing TV gagdom in a new direction. By James Rampton

I didn't watch the first episode of The House, the BBC's behind- the-scenes look at what really goes on at the Royal Opera House. I had imagined that it would be about opera, a dead art form I am, sadly, congenitally unable to enjoy.

James Rampton meets Richard Wilson, aka lovable, long-suffering Victor Meldrew

Comedians invariably trip themselves up when negotiating the language barrier. A subtitled Monty Python movie can clear a Spanish cinema quicker than an ETA bomb scare; and even though Eddie Izzard fancies his chances of pulling off a show in French, it's by no means certain that phrases like "la plume de ma tante" will have them guffawing helplessly in the theatres of Paris. So it is with trepidation that you pull on the simultaneous- translation headset at the start of Issey Ogata's City Life.

Richard Longhurst finds entertainment with the help of the latest search tools and, opposite, reveals how you can keep your children away from the seedier sites