A little self-parody can go a long way in an acting career, says Gerard Gilbert. Just ask Matt LeBlanc...

A little self-parody can go a long way. Just ask Matt LeBlanc...

In a tiny upstairs theatre, a man in a wig and kimono asks us to imagine we’re in the Albert Hall. We never discover his name though, in his role in a glittering production of Madame Butterfly, he is known as “Second Japanese villager on the left”.

Guest contributors include John Bishop, Jimmy Carr, Rob Brydon and more…

The vagaries of celebrity that have blown Cheryl Cole back across the Atlantic will strike terror in many British performers, but James Corden need worry no longer. He turned his back on television just before it consumed him, with a wise decision to return to the theatre that launched him. His acknowledgement of a standing ovation at the first night of the National's latest hit, One Man, Two Guvnors, last week, was modest and relieved. The returning sinner was not merely forgiven but greeted with rapture. The son of a Christian bookseller, Corden was almost lost, but now is found.

Today being the day after April Fool's Day, it now seems safe to report that Scotland really may be the launch pad for the space tourists of tomorrow; that police in Cornwall really did question a 13-year-old schoolboy on suspicion of common assault after he threw a marshmallow at a fellow pupil; and that, much to the chagrin of local residents, there really is a bakery in the Bedfordshire village of Henlow called "Nice Baps". Readers familiar with the newspaper tradition of inserting an outrageous, fake story into the 1 April edition could be forgiven for having believed otherwise.

As claims to fame go, it's not a bad one: Wilhelmina, pet rabbit of Professor Robert Winston, was one of the first living beings to be photographed by MRA scan. Winston had been down the pub with some friends who had, he explained, rushed in bearing news of a machine they'd built. An old TV, a few bits of wire, and there you have it: one of the first MRA scanners in the history of the universe. Understandably, they wanted to try it out right away. And so off they went to collect Winston and his rabbit.

"Desperate to be taken seriously aren't you?" Rob Brydon wryly points out to Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom's sublime mid-life crisis comedy, which is a boozy, barbed blend of Sideways, Withnail and I and Curb Your Enthusiasm (the story is fictional but based around their real personas).