A comedy club has hired a sign language interpreter to make sense of the jokes for deaf customers

Sale 21 Harlequins 17

Edinburgh's shabby-chic civic chambers became the spiritual home to the best and brightest comic talents. Carol Sarler can't stay away

After receiving his silver medal for second place in the 400 metres at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Wayne Collett stood on the podium alongside the gold medallist Vince Matthews.

Carpenter and his cousin accused of locking teenagers in house then burning it down

With the fractious energy born of frustration that puts one in mind of an evil Lee Evans merging with the verbal assaults of the "equal opportunities offender" Jerry Sadowitz, this taut, scrawny ginger comic, with his strangulated London twang, fires his ire any which way.

Jonathan Ross marked his return to television today by repeating his apology for the Andrew Sachs scandal.

"If I pull back this curtain you can see the rest of the venue. It's massive, and at the end of it there's a big picture of Lee Evans." So went Russell Howard's self-deprecating take on a concertinaed Wembley Arena and previous comics who filled the full version. Nevertheless, the gig rounds off a sold-out 70-date tour that has included a number of nights like this where Howard's audience has topped 3,500.

After the record-breaking success of his auction at Sotheby's in September, there is more good news for Damien Hirst.

The home I grew up in... was a flat in Middleton Square in London's Islington, a beautiful Georgian square with a huge church in the middle. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I remember flats in Walthamstow, Clapton, Stoke Newington and Edmonton, as well.

It was the biggest fashion statement in history: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gloved fists raised on the Olympic podium in Mexico in 1968. Now we all knew about civil rights.

Giovanni Trapattoni will plan for the World Cup qualifying campaign confident that his message is getting across to his players.

On the eve of a national tour, the award-winning comedian Harry Hill tells James Rampton why he's glad to be back on the road - and how he plans to take the audience out on to the street

Al Murray would be more than justified in looking back at 1999 as his year. He won the Perrier award on his fourth time on the shortlist. Within a few days, he'd also picked up the Edinburgh Fringe People's Choice Award, landed a sitcom development deal and become a dad. Admittedly, the fatherhood part probably didn't have much to do with his comic aptitude, but the other achievements certainly did. His tours de force as the Pub Landlord are astonishing on every level: energy, ideas, characterisation, spontaneity, you name it. It's a scandal that it took Sky to get him on television.