Consistent Lump Sum can land Imperial Cup on way to County Hurdle at next week’s premier jumps fixture

The bonus-chasers are out in force once again in the feature race at Sandown on Saturday, with 10 of the 17 declared runners for the Imperial Cup Handicap Hurdle holding an entry for at least one race at the Cheltenham festival and hoping for a chance to pick up an extra £100,000 at the season’s showpiece meeting next week.

The most likely candidates in a typically competitive renewal of the last significant event before the festival include last year’s winner, Go Dante, who has not managed to add another win to his record in six subsequent starts but looked to be working his way back to form when seventh in the valuable William Hill Handicap Hurdle at Newbury last month.

Ayers’ genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another – and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling

• Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84

There’s a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians – and by all accounts already showing talent as a pianist – he was famously presented with his first set of vibraphone mallets backstage at a gig by Lionel Hampton. If you wanted to take a romantic view, you could look on that as an act of benediction: the man who had more or less singlehandedly popularised an instrument that had previously been viewed as a novelty passing on the mantle along with his mallets. Hampton had broken racial barriers in the process: at a time when jazz bands were almost entirely segregated, Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson’s work with Benny Goodman’s quartet was subtly acclaimed by one critic as “the most beautiful example of men working together to be seen in public today”.

For a time, it looked as if Ayers was following in Hampton’s footsteps. By the time of his debut album, 1963’s West Coast Vibes, Ayers was clearly carving out a space for himself in the jazz world. Running through versions of Charlie Parker’s Donna Lee or Thelonious Monk’s Well You Needn’t, he was already his own man: a little hotter in his approach to the vibraphone than Milt Jackson, less inclined towards the avant than his friend Bobby Hutcherson.

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The Battle of the Buffet. Ferguson v Wenger, Keane v Vieira. Martin Keown whoopin’ and hollerin’ right in Ruud van Nistelrooy’s grill. Thierry Henry’s volley, David Platt’s header; Cristiano Ronaldo’s Big Cup double. Title-winning goals from Marc Overmars and Sylvain Wiltord; the 8-2. Ryan Giggs’s remarkable chest hair. The 21-man Highbury brawl. Mark Hughes v Tony Adams; Ian Wright v Peter Schmeichel. Louis van Gaal taking a dive. Arsène in the Old Trafford stands, arms outstretched. “Squeaky bum time,” isn’t it? Forgive your misty-eyed Daily from channelling Ron Manager once again, but at its height, Manchester United v Arsenal was the Premier League’s greatest rivalry. Fuelled by a mutual enmity between Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, the former delaying his retirement to fend off Arsenal’s arriviste – “He’s come from Japan and he’s telling us how to run English football,” Ferg said in 1997 – the bitter rivals traded titles and served up box-office battles until José Mourinho (and Roman Abramovich) pulled up at the Bridge.

Maybe you laugh, but for me it was a good result because the way we performed the [defeat] could have been bigger” – José Mourinho, there, seemingly relieved to have only lost 3-1 at home to, erm, Rangers, who have been turned over by such powerhouses as St Mirren and Queen’s Park in recent weeks.

When I read Barney Ronay’s description of Alisson’s phenomenal performance in Paris as “cinematic” (yesterday’s Still Want More, full email edition), I suddenly realised something. Witnessing the Liverpool goalkeeper dive, roll, parry, smother, snaffle, jump and fling himself all over the place had indeed felt like watching an action film. In fact, with the yellow suit and hordes of stealthy opponents closing in in wave after wave, the performance felt like an ode to Bruce Lee in Game of Death, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Danny Chan Kwok-kwan in Shaolin Soccer. I’m looking forward to Volume 2 next week! Pass the popcorn!” – Peter Oh.

Following Fenerbahce’s humiliating home defeat by Rangers, it would be fascinating to hear what the Specious One would have called PSV’s 7-1 home capitulation against Arsenal? Presumably ‘a great result’ followed by ‘it’s not over’?” – Adrian Irving.

While agreeing with Gordon MacLeod’s praise of Ally McCoist (yesterday’s Football Daily letters), I feel he is ill-served being part of Darren Fletcher’s and Rio Ferdinand’s attempts to fill every second of games with obscure historical facts and football cliches. While my Liverpool proclivities are probably a factor, exposure to this trio for both the Bigger Cup Madrid derby and cunning plan against PSG left me trying to manipulate the volume control to retain some element of the atmosphere while muting the commentary. I don’t know who decides which commentators are an asset, but there are times when Discovery+ feels exceedingly expensive” – Alan Gellion.

Cost of second-class service to rise to 87p in sixth increase in little more than three years

• Business live – latest updates

Royal Mail is to increase the cost of first- and second-class stamps for what will be the sixth time in little more than three years.

From 7 April, the price of a first-class stamp will increase by 5p, or 3%, to £1.70. The cost of the second-class service is going up by 2p, or 2.4%, to 87p.

Cost of second-class service to rise to 87p in sixth increase in little more than three years

• Business live – latest updates

Royal Mail is to increase the cost of first- and second-class stamps for what will be the sixth time in little more than three years.

From 7 April, the price of a first-class stamp will increase by 5p, or 3%, to £1.70. The cost of the second-class service is going up by 2p, or 2.4%, to 87p.

The standup is hitting new heights of pastiche with Clementine, a riotous one-woman show about a Regency belle seeking a tailcoated beau. As the Edinburgh hit goes on tour, Minnitt explains why her mum’s doing the driving

Every now and then a comedy concept comes along that seems so obvious, you can’t believe no one has done it before. How can Rosalie Minnitt’s Clementine be the first character-comedy show to really mine the absurdities of our love of all things Jane Austen, all things frilly-bonneted and Bridgerton? OK, it’s not a completely untapped seam of funny: think West End improv perennial Austentatious or that fantastic touring theatre hit Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of). But Minnitt is the first to distil it into a single comedy character, and to make it far funnier than we have any right to expect – not by doubling down on period pastiche, but by making her alter ego both none-more-Regency and thrillingly 21st century too.

The character debuted in 2022 and Minnitt, 28, has been threatening to retire her for a while. But demand never quite goes away and a UK tour now beckons for a character her creator didn’t initially envisage as a comedy act at all. Lady Clementine’s genesis took place under lockdown. “Everyone had lost their minds a bit,” says Minnitt, a graduate of Durham University, where she performed with the Durham Revue. “And I had lost a bit of confidence in myself. I was working in a bar, then in a summer camp, then for a charity. Then I lost my job and was on furlough. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was lost and directionless. Then I went through a breakup – classic!” She rolls her eyes. “So I was like, ‘I need to put this energy into something.’ And it was this.”