When asked which boy Bridget was mad about, Fielding merely raised one eyebrow enigmatically

No one is suggesting that Mr Sherborne and Ms Patry Hoskins behaved with anything other than propriety, but who is to know what happens when the wigs come off?

If, as Nigel Lawson said, the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion, then fly-on-the- wall documentaries about the NHS are the closest thing television commissioners have to Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. They are guaranteed crowd-pullers. As a result, one is rarely more than four hours away from the swabs, beeps and tears of a hosp-doc.

The Hacked Off campaigners are not shy about proclaiming what they have achieved, and what work they still see ahead of them. In an almost evangelical tone, they claim that their high-profile lobbying helped force David Cameron into setting up the Leveson Inquiry, and that victims of press abuse were able to tell their story with Hacked Off’s help.

Rupert Murdoch’s hopes of drawing a line under the financially toxic phone-hacking scandal will be derailed in the High Court on Friday when details of more hacking victims are announced.

Ultimately, players are more important than a manager's media profile or his comfort with the metrics of the modern game. Harry Redknapp's current set at Queens Park Rangers are inherently inferior to the familiar figures whose allegiance is to Andre Villas-Boas and Tottenham Hotspur.

A senior officer at Scotland Yard made an “extremely stupid” decision to give the News of the World information about a new police inquiry into phone hacking, her lawyer admitted today.

I've played a number of buttoned-up British women There is something in our national characteristic that is naturally repressed, and I do find that fascinating. Why do we repress so much? I suppose I must feel it myself, deep down.

A brief consensus about the need for press reform has given way to an increasingly bitter war of words

The prospect of the broadcast watchdog Ofcom having a role in newspaper regulation will be too much for an industry that has been free since 1695

Fanatical libertarians are feverishly awaiting Lord Leveson's report on Thursday. Some inquiry team members have been branded dangerous lefties and the nation is warned about ominous state censorship. I believe this whipped-up paranoia is bunkum and that some kind of statutory underpinning is essential for any future press regulatory body.

OK, so I haven't got the faintest idea who the bad guys are, but the car chases are brilliant

Dozens of people have been told by the Information Commissioner's Office they were the target of searches by a private investigator working for newspapers who was later convicted of breaching data protection rules.

The 'Noises Off' writer puts a chubby lecturer slap in the middle of a classical, saucy, bedroom-door-slamming farce