What a joy to welcome Dara O Briain back into the stand-up fold. The Irishman has been away from live performance for five years because he has been busy hosting the panel show Mock the Week and mucking about in boats on various Three Men... series, both on the BBC, and writing a travelogue, Tickling the English, which is about to be released in paperback. His hunger to interact with an audience is almost palpable as he strides to the front of the stage.

If you stick with the Coen Brothers' new film until the end of the final credit crawl, you will notice the legend, in small print, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." I wouldn't be so sure: they certainly put their hero through the trials of Job. With a title like that, it ought to be a comedy, but the Coens customarily keep a protective, ironic distance from their fictional creations, and so you never really quite know where you stand with them. Still, A Serious Man may be their most personal, most revealing movie yet.

Hung is about a teacher with an enormous penis who becomes a gigolo, which might sound like prime Judd Apatow real estate, but is a surprisingly tender foray into the male and female sexual psyches.  Part two of HBO’s current male midlife crisis fixation is a completely different kettle of fish-out-of-water to Eastbound & Down – quirkier and less boisterous – and its pedigree (written by the creators of The Riches and shot by the director of Sideways) tells you a lot of what you need to know.

Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely popular and successful travel show presenter and writer. Palin has a lot to celebrate these next few weeks with the publication of the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, and, next month, Python's 40th birthday (can it really be possible?) Tomorrow Palin is giving a public interview in Ely Cathedral for the Cambridge Film Festival; on 15 October he will be honoured, along with his four surviving fellow Pythons, at New York's Ziegfeld Theater. In the meantime, this tireless globetrotter discourses, over tea in Turin, on all of the above.