SECOND THOUGHTS

TUESDAY, for today's young televiewers, means Batman and maybe EastEnders, but once upon a time it meant Andy Pandy and Teddy, and Looby-Loo skipping in a spotted print skirt. Batman goes out at 6pm, which used to be bedtime.

It's a piquant spectacle - the Union Jack lowered and the Stars and Stripes hoisted in its stead on the main stage of the National Theatre of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But, this droll frisson aside, Christopher Morahan's production doesn't suggest many compelling reasons for mounting the Devil's Disciple (Shaw's inverted melodrama set during the American War of Independence) in the Olivier, a venue where you go hoping to see something more than mild diversion.

WHEN the bidding reached pounds 13,000, the coolest kid in the room was an eight-year-old. The other juveniles, those in their thirties, forties and fifties, were hot under the collar.

Office daydreamers and Clark Kent types can now fulfil that Superman-quick-change-phone-booth fantasy. Simply don one of HMV's Superman T-shirts under your regular office garb, find a suitable outlet and proceed to strip off.

Hard-core comic collectors may well sneer at the likes of jolly, saltless Biffo the Bear in the light of Viz's relentless ridicule, but no one can deny that Biffo has his place in classic comic history, right alongside other British comics like the Beano and Dan Dare.

30 May:

THE etymology and grammar of song lyrics have been exercising the minds of our correspondents over the past week, starting with 'a wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom'.

THE latest episode in the uphill campaign to wean Americans from owning guns features a Batman comic and a hardly draconian proposal to limit Virginians to buying only one gun a month. Nothing in it, though, is meant as a joke.

Robert Shayne, actor, died 30 November, aged 92. Played Inspector Henderson in the television series The Adventures of Superman.

SOLICITORS will again be exhorting people to make wills in The Law Society's second Make a Will Week, writes Lucy Reese.

THESE things are never written in stone, of course, but it is probably safe to predict that few ordinary women will be seen going about their daily business in the coming months wearing made-to-measure replicas of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman outfit. An emporium in Camden, north London, is doing off-the-peg versions in rubber but, astounding though they are, these require guts and the right measurements for optimum impact. Never mind. We devoted fans of the Fabulous Feline do not have to buy the suit in order to feel her influence surging through our veins. Contrary to popular opinion, the reason Catwoman dominates Batman Returns is not entirely because of Michelle Pfeiffer's mouth. It is because of Catwoman herself.

Sir: I do not agree with the article that Reggie Nadelson wrote (16 July). I lie on my bed reading for hours and hours (mum gets really irritated sometimes). I read books like The Secret Garden and The Little Princess that are both by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I enjoy them too. I do not like reading books like Batman and stories about killing each other. They scare me even though I know they're not real.

ONCE IN a great while, when facing a difficult choice or a crisis of conscience, Superman would retreat to his Fortress of Solitude for some severe introspection. On these special occasions, the Man of Steel took on the pose of Rodin's Thinker. Batman, on the other hand, first in the film of the same name, and now in Batman Returns (12), seems to regard his vigilante duties as interruptions of an existential brooding that is more or less continuous. The Batsign summons him to bouts of strenuous crime fighting that do not apparently alleviate his mood. In his insistent melancholy, despite an enviable life, he is more like Byron than Biggles.