The strategy game "Abalone" was invented by two French musicians and has been selling like hotcakes in Europe for the past 10 years. It's not easy opening a restaurant these days, is it? RB Electric Avenue' is on C4, Tuesday at 11.40pm. The cut-glass accent is the hook in a documentary series full of engaging local characters; the foil is Garth - builder, handyman and amateur philosopher - whom Vincent engages to get his new restaurant ready on time (deadline: two weeks). One projected opening day passes, then another as Vincent's backers get anxious; the loo isn't ready for inspection and the Bishop of Stepney is called in to exorcise the demons. VINCENT OSBORNE'S accent belongs neither to south London nor the West Indies; it rather suggests Eton and Oxford - which is surprising, since Vincent, featured in Channel 4's Electric Avenue, is a Brixton restaurateur desperate to establish a new base there. Already installed in the Hogarth gym in London, there's also one at Kids Kingdom in Southend, and other Rocks will be touring on promotional roadshows this summer Great news Unless you're an abseiler of course IK Enquiries: 0181 994 3666.. The Rock is described as a "virtual mountain" and works like a vertical treadmill which can be adjusted in terms of speed and gradient to make a more challenging climb (no panoramic view at the summit though!).

Well, there's no need to bother now: if it's a bit of mountaineering you fancy, you'll soon need to go no further than the local gym. If Lars von Trier is doing a musical, my view is more power to his elbow. It shows that we are not all MTV braindead in terms of responding to the musical form."Adam Minns is chief reporter at `Screen International'.. "IF THE mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the mountain," the old proverb goes. "The films may not be conventional, and they may not work, but film-makers are experimenting with different forms of music, whether it's classical or rap, and doing something different. Director Michael Winner dismissed this, noting that another top-grossing film of 1974 was the re-tread of MGM classic musicals, That's Entertainment!At the very least, Wootton applauds the artistic ambition of von Trier and Branagh.

When Death Wish blew audiences away, jaded critics declared that modern tastes had changed: all the public supposedly wanted was psychopathic, misogynist juvenilia. Then all you got were films that might have been extended rock videos."Yet there is every reason that von Trier or Branagh or whoever comes next could find an audience today. "There was a classic period in the Fifties and early Sixties but then it faltered. They tried to revive the musical during the Seventies with disco Absolute Beginners tried and failed in the Eighties. Others, like Absolute Beginners, didn't (more's the pity).Wootton argues that faltering attempts to revive the musical over the past 25 or 30 years have largely produced films that are the precise opposite of timeless, being based inextricably in the music and style of their day. "A bad idea whose time has not come," retorted a Washington Post critic.Meanwhile, 1994's I'll Do Anything, starring Nick Nolte, Joely Richardson and Anne Heche, was so bad that the film-makers cut out all the music.