Jools Holland

When Mono's debut single, "Life in Mono", came out last year, it seemed almost impossibly modish and beguilingly retro at the same time. A perfect pop song built on a slow, rumbling, trip-hoppy, dance beat, with a John Barry soundtrack sample (from The Ipcress File) forming the backdrop to a pouting female vocal, it was Portishead meets Francoise Hardy in Burt Bacharach's bio-morphic kitchen, as filmed by Richard Lester. By the time the album came out at the beginning of this month, however, the Zeitgeist had moved on and there was a danger that the group would be left wearing the conceptual equivalent of thin, black knitted ties when everyone else was into fat, silk kipper jobs. You could almost hear the sound of Burt's kitchen being stripped down for a Habitat rustic-pine re-fit. Happily, though, Mono's songs are built to last.

1. Gave the miniskirt its name.

It was the first of its kind, a truly small car that could zip around the city streets and park in the smallest of spaces. The Mini, designed by Sir Alec Issigonis, became a symbol of the swinging Sixties when London was the hippest city in the world.

Taken as a whole, there's something vaguely heroic about the Simon Gray-Alan Bates collaboration. It stretches back across nine stage and TV productions to Butley in 1971. The roles may always be different but they share enough between them to make each one attractively familiar: thought patterns, verbal tics, a taste for defensive jokes. If you discount the interruptions and provocations contributed by the rest of the characters, who will insist on strolling in and out of the plays, the Gray-Bates combo can be seen to have provided us with a 25-year monologue: an exhaustively witty self- examination of the anxieties and irritations that have troubled the middle- aged English male. This persona (constant but changing) is one of the most enjoyable creations of post-war British theatre. With Life Support, the latest instalment in the series, we find Gray and Bates in excellent form, and the Gray-Bates character - not surprisingly - in pretty bad shape.

There are signs that Tony Blair is winning over the monied classes. Michael Caine, the actor and restaurateur who spent several years of the last Labour government in tax exile, is staying put.

It had to happen ... but who would have guessed that the Mandela story would inspire not one but three new films.

What's in a name? Quite a lot if you're a six-foot gunslinger christened Marion. John Wayne wasn't the first or last to opt for a change, writes Ann Treneman

Why would 200 people from as far apart as Arizona and Japan choose to drive more than 2,000 miles across Europe in ancient cars barely more powerful than lawn-mowers? Michael Booth joins them to find out

One of the 11 Victoria Crosses awarded for the legendary British military defence at Rorke's Drift - immortalised in the cinema classic Zulu - goes on sale next month with hopes of fetching a world record price.

Jonathan Church can't be the only person to have noticed the intriguing similarities and differences between Willie Russell's popular hit Educating Rita and David Mamet's infamous hit-below-the-belt Oleanna. One-set two- handers, they both explore the life-changing effect on a middle-aged academic of one of his female students. The young and newish artistic director of Salisbury Playhouse scores what I think is a first, though, in actually mounting studio productions of both plays in rep using the same pair of actors. The result, particularly if you see these works back-to-back, is a wonderfully thought-provoking dramatic diptych.

From Ms Julie Burchill

Viewed from an orthodox Christian point of view, Goethe's Faust is a drama which takes two plays, six-and-a-half hours and a great deal of fidgeting around the cosmos in order to arrive at the wrong conclusion. Howard Brenton's new version, staged now by Michael Bogdanov in the Swan, makes a pointed if slightly laboured joke about this, teasing us with a retributive false-ending.

MEGA MOVIE MIND-BOGGLERS!