We all need a break from time to time, especially now given the grim state of the world. So it’s not surprising that comedy is making something of a comeback in the West End: Operation Mincemeat; The Unfriend seen recently at this theatre; The Play that Goes Wrong and all its offshoots; and now Bleak Expectations, an affectionate send-up of the various tropes of Charles Dickens.

Here's a treat for those missing Dead Ringers (created by Bill Dare) as it takes a break on Radio 4. Dead Ringers Live has started a short season at Underbelly's London Wonderground, where live shows are being performed at its famous purple cow and big top, set within a family-friendly enclosure with fairground-style attractions, as well as food stalls and bars.

All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel?

In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet.

Like his most famous creation, Billy Elliot, Lee Hall left his native North East to pursue what turned out to be a glittering career in the arts. Although I can’t speak for the fictitious Billy, Hall has certainly never forgotten his working-class roots, which continue to inform and inspire his work.

Nicholas Parsons has been an actor – he is most adamant that he is first and foremost an actor – for almost 70 years, so it’s not surprising, given the erratic nature of his profession, that he has been obliged to assume a number of alternative guises over the years from leading man to comedy sidekick to quiz master. Yet despite this, he is no chameleon. He has somehow managed to pull off the trick of being supremely adaptable whilst remaining resolutely true to himself – you’ll never catch Parsons dropping his aitches or wearing age-inappropriate clothing. Always dapper, slightly prim and a little aloof, he is the consummate professional and, at the age of 87, more in demand than ever.

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis originally came to fame in the late 1980s as one half of the satirical sketch group The Mary Whitehouse Experience, with fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel and Rob Newman. Now, though, most people know them (as a double act, at least) as the lead performers in The Now Show on Radio 4.

The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning. Until recently, it would sit in a house for weeks on end while we (in decreasing numbers) watched. But the public as museum curators? That’s a new one.

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey joined BBC Radio 4 Call You and Yours to debate public arts funding, joining a panel and answering phonecalls and emails from the public. The government will be incorporating some of the public comments into its current decisions on arts funding. This is a simultaneously typed rough transcript of the programme.

If you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Peep Show on Channel 4 (written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain), in which Mitchell plays the insufferably self-important Mark and Webb the self-deluding idiot Jeremy, then you will easily recognise similar stock types being used in That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC Two, which goes to show you should never mess with a winning formula.