The producer behind Monty Python And The Holy Grail yesterday told the High Court that the cult film would have been "much less funny" without his input as he sued for an equal share of its profits.

The Monty Python team are not “unpleasant shifty people” who try to cheat people out of what they deserve, the High Court was told toay.

Pensioners give more to charity

Where to go and what to know

Recipe for a bestseller: just add spice

Sir David Jason has signed a deal to publish his memoir after almost half a century in the entertainment world.

A smart comedian brings off that tricky first novel with energy and wit.

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.