Richard Henry Michael Clayton (William Haggard), writer and civil servant: born 11 August 1907; Board of Trade 1947-69, Controller of Enemy Property 1965-69; married 1936 Barbara Sant (one son, one daughter); died 27 October 1993.

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Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Vincent Ward is of the former party. The element of fire obsesses him, he says, both for its innate properties and for the curious ways in which it has blazed up throughout the history of his family. 'When my great-grandfather came to New Zealand from Ireland, he found this beautiful province that was all bush; it reminded him of home. Soon after he settled there, the whole area burnt to the ground, but he inherited a wife from that, because the husband of one of the local women had died fighting the fires. Then, years later, my grandfather came home from burying two children who had died of sleeping sickness to find that his house had been accidentally burnt down by a neighbour.'

ON THE face of it, Tales from the Map Room (broadcast Thursday on BBC 2) and Measure for Measure (BBC 2 last night) are virtually identical products. Both are excursions into the relatively new genre of primer television for adults (we have already had series on colour and furniture), both use elegant pans across prop-littered tables, elaborate video-effects, computer graphics and costume re-enactments to present information. But there is a difference between them, an important one for a corporation recently re-dedicated to the principle that its programmes should 'inform, educate and entertain'. The difference might be summed up as that between the phrases 'I'd like to change the way you think about maps' and 'here's a bunch of weird things I know about measurement'.

A six-parter on cartography is never going to set the ratings alight a la Darling Buds of May, but TALES FROM THE MAP ROOM (8pm BBC2) is no less intriguing for all that. Julian Stenhouse's 'A Tissue of Lies', the first episode, shows that many maps are as fictional as that drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson for Treasure Island (an act re-created on a very low budget in this programme). Map- makers are politicians or, at least, politicians' puppets. The locations of Siberian labour camps and missile bases were simply off the map in the former USSR, and secret British military sites are still uncharted. But it was ever thus. An 1800 Chinese map showed that country as the centre of the world, with Europe, America and Africa as tiny offshore sand-bars. A chart from 1904 exaggerated the actual size of Russia and is said to have enlarged the perceived threat to the US during the Cold War. And a recent Australian map turned the conventional world view upside down. But maps can also be used for satirical purposes: Peter Brooke of the Times has drawn a cartoon of Italy as a mafia boss being dragged under water by the stone tied to his ankles: Sicily.

THOUSANDS of people all over Britain are volunteering to adopt abandoned 'trig pillars', those familiar concrete monuments used by the Ordnance Survey to map the country.

WHAT IS A GENE?

THEY stole in under cover of the night. Carlton supplanted Thames at midnight on New Year's Eve. GMTV, ITV's new breakfast-server, opened six hours later. Hard to know what this says about confidence levels at these new franchises, but they chose to launch while the nation was first drunk and then asleep.

At the Bush, west London, you can currently spend a whole day in south-east Ireland without leaving the comfort of your theatre seat. Billy Roche's Wexford Trilogy, staged play by play at the same address over the last four years, has now been drawn together, allowing you to see all three in one day. And while you scarcely emerge with a cartographer's knowledge of Wexford (the plays are set in a pool hall, a betting shop and a church belfry, and do not budge outside those walls), you do leave well versed in the emotional geography of small-town life.