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

With his TV show on Britain starting tomorrow and his film in cinemas later this week, the 'Super Size Me' film-maker is never off our screens. Genevieve Roberts meets Morgan Spurlock

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.

You have to have a big appetite for superlatives if you're to consume an entire MasterChef final.

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.

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

It takes a brave man to make a joke, in front of a live audience, for which the punchline is: "So I gave him some Kendal mint cake." But that's exactly what Nick Clegg did last week at the Lib Dem conference, telling a story about how he and the French Prime Minister exchanged gifts. Mr Clegg is a pretty good speaker, and, in private, appears to be game for a laugh. But I don't think that Michael McIntyre need worry just yet.

The comedian who threw a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch has had his jail sentence reduced on appeal.

Poor old Berlioz. The moment Terry Gilliam was announced as director of this new ENO staging, it was obvious that the composer would scarcely get a look in, at least in advance.

It is a measure of how far voice-control technology has come that you have just read this sentence. The original idea was that your correspondent would speak a line into a machine that turns what you say into text and then open with the gobbledygook the machine had "recognised". Sadly, the ugly facts rather killed the beautiful theory (or, as the machine, still not quite perfect, would have it, "the beautiful scenery").

When I was invited to a Swedish comedy festival to appear at a question-and-answer session on my "life's work", I assumed that it was a joke. I checked and double-checked but the invite seemed to be serious, and the town of Lund did indeed have a comedy festival.