Well versed

THE last time I saw Robert Webb he was dancing around the stage in a wig and leotard performing as that female welder from the musical Flashdance.

It was not only a surprise but surprisingly good, worryingly good even. No wonder he won the series, Let’s Dance For Comic Relief.

He’s more usually seen as a comic, often as one half of the Mitchell (as in David Mitchell) and Webb double act.

Their BBC series returns next week, but in the meantime here’s Webb being much more serious as he reveals My Life In Verse as part of the BBC Poetry Season.

He explores the first poem and poet that captured his imagination, The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot, in the series that takes famous faces on a journey of discovery into the poems that have inspired them and helped shape their lives.

He was a 16-year-old schoolboy when he first heard about Prufrock in a classroom encounter which sparked a lifelong passion for the verse.

Returning to his old university, Cambridge, he meets his former tutor, John Mullan, who helps him delve deeper into Eliot’s work. He also gives him a tutorial on The Journey Of The Magi.

Webb travels to Paris where he discovers that the young T S Eliot shocked his respectable American family by spending a year in the famously decadent city. He also visits East Coker, Eliot’s final resting place and the inspiration for one of his greatest poems.

He’s used to performing in front of an audience, but Webb faces his toughest critics when he goes to a London school to introduce a class of teeangers to The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock.

He explores why modern poetry has a reputation for being difficult but he thinks it can touch at the heart of what it means to be human.

The big question is whether he can provoke the same passion and inspiration in the youngsters that he found in the poem all those years ago.

Along the way, he meets contemporary poets, including multi-millionaire publisher Felix Dennis and two-time winner of the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry, Don Paterson. The latter tells him about Eliot’s legacy and influence on contemporary poets.

IT’S something of a blast from the past for both the team and viewers of Numb3rs when former Happy Days star Henry Winkler makes his second appearance as defamed FBI agent Roger Bloom.

More than that, there’s something oddly familiar about the latest case for Nikki when she, David and Colby are called to a bank heist.

She soon realises it’s an exact copy of a robbery she investigated when she was a rookie cop. Flinging open a filing cabinet, she even leads the team straight to the corpse of one of the burglars.

Back at base, she reveals that the original robbers were never caught, and to add insult to injury, Don learns that Bloom ran the original investigation.

Seeing how Don recently fired him for theft, it doesn’t seem likely he’d be willing to help out. But when Nikki and David visit the police library, they make a startling discovery.

YESTERDAY, Davina McCall launched the tenth series of the reality show.

While the cameras have been trained on the fresh-faced residents for just about a full day, the gamut of spin-off shows are cranked into action.

Among them is Big Brother’s Little Brother, fronted by George Lamb and Zezi Ifore. They have the latest news from the compound and will be poking a nosey eye into every corner of the abode.

But it’s not just a look at life on the inside that’s on offer here, oh no. The nearest and dearest of those incarcerated inside the house are in the studio to let the entire nation know what their loved ones inside the famous abode are really like.

There’s also a word or two from celebrity fans of the show, who will drop by to offer their thoughts on whatever’s happened in the past 24 hours.