Let me confess immediately: Debbie Reynolds didn't mean a great deal to me beyond Singin' in the Rain, warbling "Tammy" and Being Princess Leia's Mother (and believe me, she gets plenty of comic mileage out of the Carrie Fisher connection). But I knew she had a fabulous Hollywood history, and having been smitten by old troupers Elaine Stritch and Barbara Cook in London, I wondered if she could match them. Half-sashaying, half-tittupping on to deliver her own abbreviated, adapted version of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", she immediately provoked the comparison.

The first cinema was two-thirds empty. A hundred seats had been laid out by the Lumière brothers in a Parisian salon, but only 33 of them were occupied. The small audience saw a film in which a crowd, mostly women in long dresses but also a large bounding dog, pour through a tall gate. None of them looks at the camera, as we would now. In 1895, stardom was not yet associated with film. The dog, as dogs will, gave much the most attention-seeking performance.

Is Eddie Izzard running a lot of marathons really worth three hour-long documentaries? No, but it was worth watching this first one. Having seen close personal friends gearing up to run the London Marathon, a process involving months of training sessions and muscle-group-specific workouts, it was barely believable to see a patently un-honed Izzard strolling into the Olympic Medical Institute in Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man, confessing that “I’ve run before, mainly for buses,” and proposing to run 1,100 miles round the UK in a month’s time.

What are the politics of comedy? The great thing about Trevor Griffiths's 1975 classic, Comedians, which opened last night in a solid revival directed by Sean Holmes, is that this subject is debated with grace as well as humour. As six apprentice comedians attend a night class run by the veteran stand-up Eddie Waters, they find that their hunger for stardom clashes with his desire to use comedy to make a difference, to change society. Is comedy just a piece of harmless fun, or can it be used as a tool for social engineering?