Nancy Groves

If there is one thing I have learnt on this job, it's that you can never second guess how an interview is going to turn out.

It's a sure sign of summer when suddenly it becomes acceptable to wave Union Jacks in public.

When director David Harradine started work on a new children's show about light, he did not know it would end up being about darkness. But that's a child's imagination for you. Think back to when you were three. Was there anything scarier than the moment your mum flicked that switch?

A low-fi movie about two middle-aged men on a week-long roadtrip through California's wine country, Sideways never had the glam factor.

A play about the founder of the Christian Science faith sounds about as thrilling as a night in drinking cocoa with Mary Whitehouse.

It is just as well that Stephane Annelli looks good in white. The Laine Theatre Arts graduate has sported a lot of it over his 10-year career, from Tony Manero's suit in Saturday Night Fever to the skintight T-shirts of his latest role at New Wimbledon Theatre.

When Reading-based indie rockers Does It Offend You, Yeah? chose We Smoke Fags as support for their 2007 tour, they must have known what they were doing.

When a mid-40s Roy Dotrice first played ageing Elizabethan John Aubrey in his one- man play Brief Lives, the transformation involved a lot of prosthetics and a rather wispy wig.

"I still believe that the best plays are about people," said Terrence Rattigan, "not about things." The reason, perhaps, why Rattigan work was for so long out of fashion, overshadowed first by the kitchen tap of the 60s and more recently by the faceless threat of post-9-11 terrorism.

At first glance, it is hard to know whether to eat them or sit on them. Two succulent red cherries on a waxy green stalk, they form the centrepiece of the latest group show at Twickenham's Karen Taylor Gallery, entitled Larger Than Life.