Hair today, gone tomorrow

As anyone who has watched Back to the Future knows for a fact, reaching back into the past, even with the best of intentions, is unnatural and bound to end badly. Yet here are three horrifying history-tinkering proposals that make Elon Musk's decision to buy Twitter seem really quite clear-sighted by comparison.

- JANE CLIFTON

Paul McCartney is getting together with the surviving Rolling Stones to record an album track, John Cleese is co-writing another Fawlty Towers, and Prince Andrew is threatening to revive his ...ahem... "business" career. At 63, he's found out that the pocket money he always had from his mum might finally be stopped.

The first item has an Old Testament-baiting air about it. Lions and lambs aren't supposed to cuddle up unless there's an actual Second Coming, so, by all that's sacred, a respectful distance should be kept between the Beatles and the Stones. Decades before Harry Potter, "Beatles or Stones?" was the ultimate societal sorting hat.

As for a rerun of Fawlty Towers, Cleese has burdensome alimony obligations, but to seek to update his beloved masterpiece seems as gratuitous as if Michelangelo had decided to have another crack at the Sistine Chapel in his dotage because he reckoned he had another Creation of Adam in him.