Few things date faster than silliness, so rumours of a Monty Python reunion lead Gerard Gilbert to wonder: why?

Hundreds of mourners gathered in Stafford for the funeral of Pc David Rathband, who was shot and blinded by the gunman Raoul Moat in 2010.

Television has been widely credited with making history fashionable again, with all those enthusiastic and engaging experts taking to the small screen. They have hauled what had become too often a subject constrained by the lifeless prose of academic books into the mainstream of public debate. Now there seems to be traffic the other way, for there is something televisual about God's Jury, an enormously enjoyable and very modern history of the Inquisition by Cullen Murphy, editor-at-large of Vanity Fair.

Tony Roche 's silly and often funny re-imagining of the furore that surrounded the release of Monty Python's Life of Brian received a bit of panning when shown on BBC4 last year.

1. Encounters at the End of the World

£10.99, hmv.com

Director Werner Herzog comes up trumps in this documentary about the polar explorers of the National Science Foundation Station.

Spike: the man, but not his work

A television presenter-turned-executive who ran three different ITV companies, Andy Allan is destined to be remembered as the man who axed Crossroads, but he was also responsible for some of television's biggest successes. When Ted Childs, his controller of drama at Central Independent Television, and the producer Kenny McBain proposed a crime series based on Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novels, with each story presented in a then unusual two-hour slot, Allan persuaded other sceptical ITV executives to accept it and the programme, starring John Thaw, ran from 1987 to 2000.

A dramatisation of the furore over 'Life of Brian' stayed true to the anarchic spirit of the Pythons

One of the UK's oldest map and travel shops, Stanfords, is moving into the 21st century with a new website, travel club and loyalty-points scheme.

Rail fare rises mean some commuters will have to pay more than £5,000 for season tickets from Sunday, the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) said today.

Aerial photographs showing more than 100 landscapes and scenes from around Britain will go on display on a city centre street, the Royal Geographical Society announced today.

Outlook So score one for the good guys? Vedanta – or perhaps "the world's most hated company" – suffered a reverse yesterday after its much-criticised plans to mine bauxite on sacred tribal land in the province of Orissa in eastern India were shot down by the country's environment ministry.