JLS are all over this year's Sport Relief – they've recorded the official single, they're on TV, at the O2, and running The Mall. Alan Carr meets the chart-toppers.

What are your most and least used pieces of kitchen kit?

Fifa probably wishes it could hold every tournament in Germany.

My earliest food memory... Sitting on my grandmother's knee in southern Taiwan, watching her wrap glutinous rice dumplings called zongzi in preparation for the Dragon Boat Festival. The other memory I have is trying avocados for the first time after we moved to South Africa when I was six. My mum's friend came over with two of them and slathered them all over bread. My mum took a bite and thought it was gross but then after [the friend] had left, she fried an egg, put it on top and then put some soy sauce on it. It's still one of my favourite breakfasts.

I can't remember a better year for soaringly imaginative Christmas shows aimed at the children-of-all-ages market. Following on from the seasonal smash hits at the National, RSC, Royal Court and the Young Vic, the Hampstead Theatre now weighs in with Beasts and Beauties, a wickedly gleeful and gruesome gallimaufry of tales by the Brothers Grimm as reworked by Carol Ann Duffy, dramatised by Tim Supple and Melly Still, and directed by the latter.

It is a fortunate minister indeed, but also a shrewd one, who announces a set of reforms in an unpopular area of policy to almost universal applause. We are talking here not about Iain Duncan Smith, who presented his plan for the most substantial reform to welfare "for a generation" with a disappointing lack of detail, but about the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, who gave the Conservative Party conference an outline of his plans for far-reaching change in prisons. From party stalwarts to officials and prison reform lobby groups, Mr Clarke's plans were warmly received – and rightly so.

The inaugural fillies' and mares' race planned for 4 December at the Bundall racetrack in Australia's Gold Coast City has run into a spot of trouble with the sport's state governing body, Racing Queensland Ltd. The idea of women in beachwear bursting from the stalls for a dash down the main straight in the Bikini Track Sprint, first prize £3,000, somehow doesn't appeal to the RQL chairman, Bob Bentley, but the Gold Coast Turf club aren't backing down. Perhaps they should leave the final decision to Gold Coast City's mayor, Ron Clarke, who spent quite a lot of time himself running on a track in skimpy clothing in the 1960s, setting 17 middle-distance world records in the process. No such fuddy-duddy attitudes in Sydney, where last week four sheilas set a world record for the fastest relay race in stilettos, teetering the 4 x 80m course in 1min 04sec wearing 3in heels. Stay classy, Australia.

Once upon an election campaign, John Prescott found himself struggling with his temper after an onlooker pelted him with an egg. Now it's the turn of the former deputy PM's photogenic wife, Pauline, to bare the brunt of a grassroots protest.

In chapter four, the author explains it was peer pressure that prompted him to a) throw big balls of soaked newspaper from the school bus window and b) watch Top of the Pops.