LOVE IS THE DEVIL (18) DIRECTOR: JOHN MAYBURY

After a grubby dispute between Equity and the advertising industry, Britain's finest thespians are at last free to sell washing powder. Nicole Veash gives a tantrum-by-tantrum account of the voice-over war

The British Academy Television Awards (8.30pm ITV) The Oscars get Billy Crystal - we get Bob Monkhouse, who will probably be dusting down his famous joke books as we go to press. This year the awards for film and television have been separated, and tonight is the turn of the TV folk. Francesca Annis, Kathy Burke, Derek Jacobi and Robert Carlyle are amongst those up for the famous gilded masks.

Theatre's reservoir of talent is drying up because of low wages, says Paul McCann

Audiobooks are, much more than the written word, "the words of a dead man modified in the guts of the living", as Auden puts it in "In Memory of WB Yeats". Badly done, they are infuriatingly intrusive on the intimate tete a tete between book and reader. But converts to audiobooks know how much added value they can provide: readers who enrich thrillers with suspenseful menace or illuminate difficult texts with lucid emphases, a painless dripfeed through dauntingly long classics, the opportunity to hear a great actor or, most fascinating of all, the voice of the author himself. On journeys they are especially attractive, shortening the longueurs of motorways, soothing one to sleep in strange hotel rooms.

It wasn't really a film about code breaking, it was a film about social attitudes to homosexuality. A few of the facts were altered within the bounds of dramatic licence: Turing, for example, started working on the Enigma machine before the war and not after.

the week on television

Why are British actors always being asked to play Nazis? And why do they look so good in the bad guys' clothes? Maybe because the Nazis themselves were so very theatrical. By Jasper Rees

There's a story that one of our greatest actors was once wooed to appear in a production of Uncle Vanya but that he took great offence (and indeed took off) when he realised that it was Astrov he was being invited to play. "That is not the name on the title page," he majestically reminded the director.

site unseen

Boxing Night was, for no apparent reason, medieval mystery night. On BBC2, Colin Firth swapped Darcy's jodhpurs for a smock and a fancy cod-piece to do battle for truth, justice and porcine rights in 14th-century France in The Hour of the Pig (BBC2). Meanwhile, a alrge part of the ITV schedules was consumed by a feature length version of Cadfael, the adventures of Derek Jacobi's 12th-century monk with the 20th-century forensic skills. The kind of night, you might think, when charades seem like a good idea.

In a hi-tech, fast-paced world simple pleasures can often be the most satisfying. And few pleasures are more simple or more satisfying than listening to a good story well told.

THE bestselling writer Ellis Peters, who created the Brother Cadfael medieval mystery novels, died yesterday aged 82 after suffering a stroke.

Olivier did it. Garrick did it. And now Jacobi's doing it. But do actors make good managers? Georgina Brown puts the question to Sir Derek, Chichester Festival Theatre's new artistic director, and his minder, the West End producer Duncan Weldon