Writer-director Bill Condon has reanimated the reputation of James Whale, one of film's forgotten heroes - and won himself an Oscar.

Nina Gold is a freelance casting director specialising in film, television and commercials. She is currently casting a film for Kenneth Branagh

JAMES WHALE: A NEW WORLD OF GODS AND MONSTERS BY JAMES CURTIS, FABER & FABER, pounds 14.99

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING PLAYHOUSE THEATRE LONDON

OUR CHILDREN learn that professors are mad around the time they start reading the Beano, imbibing a tradition that goes back to the alchemists. But the 19th century gave us the most memorable mad scientist of all, Victor Frankenstein.

Normal, sexy, boy-interested girls play hockey, and look like a horse

The Gingerbread Man, Broadway, Nottingham (0115-952 6611) 8pm

It's time to scrap those cyborgs. Scary genetic science owes popular culture a new mythology, argues Marina Benjamin

A first-time film director on set with Kenneth Branagh, Paul McGann and Pat Cash

EXCITING times for the Duchess of York. If you've wondered why she's been more ubiquitous than usual in the media world - hanging out with the cast of Friends, flirting with Chris Evans - it's because she is soon to be launched as the hostess of a television chat show. Sky TV have signed her up and, having already pre-sold the show to America, Australia and New Zealand, have made a gratifying amount of cash out of the newly- slender ex-Royal before she utters a single word of the Funny Opening Monologue.

ALL INDUSTRIES need to fight for attention, love and favour from ministers, but the film industry does rather seem to get more than its fair share. It even has its own think-tank in the Department of Culture, the Film Policy Review Group, and Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary, is constantly banging on about the need to do more to help.

The self-deprecating Phyllida Law didn't have a `blazing career' until her son-in-law, Kenneth Branagh, made her a star in `Peter's Friends'. Now she is co-starring with her daughter, Emma Thompson, and, she tells James Rampton, she found the experience both easy and emotional.

Some are born great, and some are picked by BBC2. Great Composers launched its preferred seven (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Puccini) on Sunday with a synthesised collage of juicy bits by them all. In case you hadn't got the message about supermen, it cut to a space shuttle lifting off. And if you stayed with it, the programme then sprang its surprise: a documentary about Johann Sebastian Bach so respectful and decent that it could have stopped Lord Reith turning in his grave.

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