Is it a help or a hindrance to have Tony Blair endorse your election campaign? It seems odd that the question should even have to be put, given that Mr Blair was the most effective vote-winner the Labour Party ever had.
Nice guys, they say, come last. Or do they? Certainly not everyone would have agreed that Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair and legendarily successful businessman, was a nice guy. Yet his relatively recent promotion of a kinder, gentler type of budget air travel seems to have been paying some commercial dividends.
The results of a recent NSPCC Childline survey last week revealed the extent to which children were exposed, addicted and even making and using pornographic imagery and videos. It showed how for many children and young teenagers, porn is a part of everyday life. One in five young people surveyed said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them.
When does an expertise become a straitjacket? It is not only actors playing a long-running role in a soap or a detective series who can find themselves "stuck" with a character: pity the opera singer who happens to be good at Carmen. Playing Bizet's seductive, fate-obsessed gypsy over and over again, in city after city – not just recreating her personality, but reliving her murder by her lover at the end of the opera – could drive anyone towards insanity.
Ricky Gervais is set to premiere a new comedy film on Netflix next year.
A quick guide to the new judgemental animated faces
