Setting a play in an office can make for a good bottom line. Time to put a suit and tie on, says Michael Coveney

Giles Brody braces his nostrils for the next generation of scratch'n'sniff movies, starting with Spy Kids 4D

Sandra Bullock is to appear in Ricky Gervais' new comedy series.

Tasty snacks that don't quite satisfy

BBC4's imported crime dramas have been TV hits, but its new foreign comedy may not fare so well, says Gerard Gilbert

Ricky Gervais didn't eat vegetables until he was 48.

Connoiusseurs of comedy will recall the excruciating sight of Ricky Gervais, sent to California to interview his comic idols for Channel 4, and squirming under the hostile glare of Garry Shandling (aka Larry Sanders of The Larry Sanders Show).

Slick, polished and smart, Ansari's stand-up delivers

Thanks to the awkward realism of The Office, the traditional sitcom has spent the last decade firmly out of fashion. But as the success of Miranda proves, a show filmed in front of a live audience can still have the last laugh. By Tim Walker

I had to get a mould of my head made last week. I'm about to start filming something in which I will need to be in disguise. For this disguise, I need to become an even older man than I am – hence the visit to the prosthetics experts.

If there is one scene that sums up the work of the French film-maker François Truffaut (the subject of a major retrospective at the BFI next month), it's a moment midway through his 1976 film, Small Change, about children growing up in a small town in France. A baby boy called Gregory is left alone in a high-rise apartment. He is playing with a pet kitten that refuses to come in from the window ledge and then gets stuck. Gregory playfully tries to rescue the kitten, loses his grip and falls downward to his certain death... but he doesn't die. "Gregory went boom!" the little youngster tells the adult onlookers as he dusts himself off on the ground dozens of floors below. His mother faints. Gregory makes no fuss. Nor does Truffaut. In his universe, no harm should ever be allowed to come to children. The film-maker was, as one friend described him, "a kind soul" and "a treasure trove of tenderness".

American television viewers must be wondering what's hit them.

Ricky Gervais has filmed a cameo appearance for the US 'Office'.