When the young Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird on 11 July 1960, she didn't seem to see it as historically important. "I never expected any sort of success with it," she said much later. "I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement..."

Charlie Brooker, one comes to suspect, is a bit of a misanthrope. This collection of his Guardian columns of the past three years is an unforgiving rant against the follies of humanity and the ephemeral obsessions of newspapers. His talent is for skewering the ridiculous aspects of modern life – conspiracy theories, new child-centric learning methods, Katie Price – with his own well-honed ridicule.

TV presenter Konnie Huq has become engaged to Screenwipe host and writer Charlie Brooker.

Geri Halliwell is expected to add some extra spice to The X Factor by stepping in as a guest judge.

Gavin Henson's new TV programme, '71 Degrees North', is at the editing stage, with producers tight-lipped over whether or not the gap-year Ospreys and Wales centre made it to the end of the show's gruelling trek through Norway and across the Arctic Circle. Billed in advance as a kind of 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of the Tundra', it was filmed in March and though no transmission date has yet been announced, it will feature challenges including mountain trekking, climbing ice walls, reindeer herding and dog sledding.

*One person who won't be cracking open the bubbly at the thought of the Republican Chris Christie taking office as Governor of New Jersey is Michael Palin, the English documentary maker and former Python (not to be confused with Sarah, beehived US vice-presidential candidate, of whom the former insists he is no relation).

Now that David Davis has forsaken the trappings of a shadow minister, he must confront the everyday life of a backbench MP.

The house/flat I grew up in... was a Thirties semi on a corner plot, near Hanger Lane. The garden ran around three sides, with a pond, a swing and two cherry trees. The tree got a fungal infection and had to be cut down. It was heartbreaking.

Senior executives at the BBC have been given pay rises of more than £100,000 each after a year in which the corporation was dogged by phone-in scandals, job cuts, and revelations about editorial "fakery".

Take one openly gay former Blue Peter presenter, dress him up in drag, add sexually explicit content and light lampooning of his former employers' obsession with their squeaky clean image, and you have a show that is definitely one for after the watershed.