With his relaxed style, detailed knowledge and musical passion he was a natural on TV and radio

A British teenager has died in Spain after falling from a hotel fire escape on the ninth floor.

Movie blockbusters, including  Man of Steel, Les Miserables and Iron Man 3, helped box office takings at British cinemas to smash expectations and rise 8.5 per cent to £578.7m in the first half of this year.

Out of America: The CIA whistleblower struck a blow for us all, but his 1970s predecessor showed how to win

Freak Like Me! Girl-groupers are back together and better than ever

There comes a time in one's life when instead of switching channels when Gardeners' Question Time starts on BBC Radio 4, you find yourself soothed by discussions of wintersweet, sawfly and lousewort. Devotees of the programme will know of Iford Manor because of its garden, designed by Harold Peto to the Italian model, its terraces heavy with wisteria, its cloisters peppered with statuary from long abandoned churches. For those of us who can kill a pot of basil with a single glance, it hosts the most enchanting of the summer festivals, Iford Arts.

Personally, I'd say that the biggest obstacle to my working in the adult entertainment industry would be telling my mum, "I'm, er, giving up journalism, to go into ...." No, I just couldn't do it.

The voice is scrunched a little tighter now, and frayed, and the tunes seem worn to the bone, but… Well, you can't keep a good man down.

The story so far: man meets woman and the pair soon discover that their singing voices have more chemistry than a science lab.

"Less is more" is generally a good aesthetic whatever the creative endeavour, as is never looking back.

Reviving the super-optimistic music of the 1980s has usually been the province of marginal indie types (Passion Pit), novelty oddballs (Maarty Broekman) or both (Andrew WK).

Free-jazz violinist Bang, who died in 2011, had a life of operatic intensity: school with Arlo Guthrie, active service in Vietnam, black revolutionary activity, drugs, guns and the avant-garde.

The first thing to note in Shemer's beautifully measured Goldberg Variations is the pitch of his Franco-Flemish harpsichord, a whole tone lower than modern concert pitch.

Katmen are Slim Jim Phantom, the snare-beating Stray Cat, and Darrel Higham, who twangs a fat Gretsch behind his wife, Imelda May, plus bassist Al Gare.