The Week In Books

If your legs start twitching when you hear "Jack Your Body" and the scent of Vicks VapoRub sends you into a nostalgic reverie; if you still dream of havin' it large at the Ministry of Sound at the weekend but can't stomach the cost of a babysitter; if you're an ex-raver of a certain age then you could do worse than switch on to Radio 2 on a Saturday night and listen to the network's latest appointment, the long-serving dance DJ Dave Pearce.

A glorious Easter weekend is a perfect opportunity to do some spring-cleaning. Not the kind requiring a vacuum cleaner, but a far less strenuous undertaking involving no more exercise than sitting in a chair in the sun and doing a spot of contemplation. Scientists have been trying to work out why, as we get older, our memories appear to stop working. It certainly drives me bonkers – I spend ages trying to remember the name of a bore who worked for me 10 years ago. Or where I put that recipe for slow-cooked shoulder of lamb. Or why my reading glasses vanish every two hours. The list is endless. We waste hours rifling through the messy Rolodex in our heads, trying to put it into some sort of coherent order, trying to retrieve all sorts of lost information, that will suddenly pop back into circulation ages after you actually needed them.

The biggest surprise in Long Lost Family is that it's not been made before. Ancestry, investigation, lost relatives: it is, surely, a match made in wall-to-wall heaven. After all, these are the people who brought us Who Do You Think You Are?. This was but a moodboard away.

Margaret John came into her own as a comic actress in the part of Doris, the outrageously saucy, octogenarian neighbour in the hit BBC series Gavin and Stacey who propositions the embarrassed young man, newly married, with a lascivious wink and the words, "If you are interested in that sort of thing, you know, I'm very open-minded and discreet, OK?"

Even committed political agitators need a hobby. In a blog for the Daily Record, George Galloway reveals he's working on – what else? – a musical about Dusty Springfield. The fiery former MP recently spotted a CD of 1960s hits at a service station. Soon, he writes, it was gracing his car stereo. "The star who shines brighter than all the rest on this trip down memory lane is Dusty Springfield – as fresh today as a spring field should be. And, as it happens, one of the many projects on which I'm working – with Scots writer Ron McKay – is a stage musical, eponymously entitled Dusty." McKay and Galloway must've bonded over Springfield's hits while campaigning for Gaza. Yet Diary feels obliged to inform them their idea is not an original one. Dusty musicals have already been staged in Australia, The Netherlands and Bromley. Last year a theatre producer even appeared on Dragons' Den hoping to persuade Britain's best business minds to back her version (also eponymously entitled Dusty). Needless to say, they declined.

When Les Dawson walked on to the set of Blankety Blank as the new host of the popular 1980s quiz show, he ruffled more than a few establishment feathers.

Gordon Brown pledged to stand with gay people until "justice was achieved".

Tributes were paid today to British jazz legend Sir John Dankworth after he died aged 82.