All these smoke signals about retirement are tiresome. Is the whole of Britain meant to mount a campaign to make the director change his mind?

While immersive cinema spectaculars like The Secret Cinema might be drawing in huge crowds to experience films like Prometheus in completely new ways, the mainstream cinema experience has barely changed for most punters. Beyond the introduction of gourmet popcorn and a slightly leggier seat for an extra fiver that is. But forthcoming zombie spectacular World War Z may change that.

There are already several great female characters in Dr Who. What's truly special about the long-running programme is what an unusual role model it offers for boys

So there turns out to have been a stupendous silver lining to a year so far spent waiting for winter to leave: all at once our incredibly tardy spring has arrived, and every blossom tree that would have sensibly spread itself over March and April has opened simultaneously.

Dawn French has married her partner Mark Bignell in a Cornish seaside town, it was reported today.

Rowan Atkinson’s Archbishop of Canterbury sketch for Comic Relief has received another complaint-this time from his own brother.

Atkinson gives a masterclass in awkward for return to the stage

Ultimately, players are more important than a manager's media profile or his comfort with the metrics of the modern game. Harry Redknapp's current set at Queens Park Rangers are inherently inferior to the familiar figures whose allegiance is to Andre Villas-Boas and Tottenham Hotspur.

Dawn French has revealed that she almost turned down her starring role in The Vicar Of Dibley because she did not think it was funny enough.

Charlie Bean, the deputy governor of the Bank of England and key interest rate setter, has poured cold water on the chances of an imminent expansion of the £375bn quantitative easing programme.

We’ve seen Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder going forth in the First World War, ruffed-up and ruffled as a courtier to Elizabeth I and trussed up in a wig as a stroppy Prince Edmund in the middle ages. But a ‘lost’ episode due to be revealed this week presents the character as we’ve never seen him before: Edmund Blackadder the Bethlehem innkeeper.

Ben Elton has written a new sitcom set in the dysfunctional world of local government.

He's an English actor who's as authentically bluesy as a game of cricket – but Hugh Laurie does a great impression of an American roots original

The UK Independence Party has more reason than any other to complain about the British election system: despite winning 900,000 votes at the last general election it has no MPs. In the European Parliament, which is elected by proportional representation, the party has a dozen MEPs.