Comedy has been touted as the new rock’n’roll ever since Newman and Baddiel played Wembley in the 1990s. But now Michael McIntyre has proved the point by taking £21m –  nearly as much as the Rolling Stones – from his latest tour.

Some of Britain's top comics are putting away their one-liners to perform in straight dramas at the Edinburgh Festival

You see those two tiny dots in the distance? That's you, that is. Well, it was if "you" were Rob Newman and David Baddiel. Oh, how we chuckled at their "History Today" sketches in the early 1990s. How we roared as they took their shtick to Wembley Arena, becoming the first comedians to fill its 12,000 seats. How we wept when we realised we were sat so far from the stage that they might as well have been sarcastic marionettes.

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.

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.