Green’s characters are running out of new places in the northeast to come from In Reckless, he hailed from Sunderland This time he’s from Durham. Not long now till the only Northumbrian option left is to play a Dominican sleuth from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.And then there’s Bodyguards (ITV, Thurs), in which our hero is issued with a history of psychological damage, his female sidekick is feisty and – hello, what’s this? – another side-order of interdepartmental squabbling. Sean Pertwee, who plays one of the eponymous, er, bodyguards, rejoices, like Robson Green, in a blonde wife of no dramatic significance whatsoever. She’s so unimportant that, in part one, Bosnian Muslin terrorists are allowed to take her hostage and kill her. The farfetched plot involved a villain played by a fruit-vowelled thesp (in this case, Anton Lesser).Shampoo (BBC2, Wed), a film for Modern Times, argued that most people go to the hairdresser to have not only their hair done but their head seen to as well. It degenerated quite rapidly into the audio version of the letters pages in the top-shelf press But sadly not the video version.

In one of Bafta’s mile-wide categories (see this year’s Remembrance Sunday vs Monday Night Football Monday), it may find itself up for an award against the BBC’s coverage of the State Opening of Parliament.. In the long hot summer of 1976 every corner shop is an oasis of bright yellow Wall’s ice-cream, while Tonibel or the more worryingly named Mr Softee ice-cream vans tinkle and meander their way through hot suburban streets, dispensing a white, spiralling mixture in a cone. In November, Roy Hattersley, Prices and Consumer Protection Minister, pronounces Wall’s frozen foods a monopoly, though a “fair” one

Then along comes 1989 and the new ice age. Haagen-Dazs, a New York-based specialist manufacturer using a soft scoop but a hard sell, brings sexy advertising to change the cosy, fluffy ice-cream industry for ever. Compare the ingredients – fresh cream, egg yolk, fresh skimmed milk, sugar, crushed vanilla beans from Madagascar – with Wall’s Blue Ribbon Vanilla Soft Scoop: skimmed milk, dextrose, sugar, vegetable fat, whey solids, glucose syrup, emulsifier E471, stabilisers (sodium alginate, carob gum, guar gum), natural colours (curcumine, anatto), flavouring. Haagen-Dazs starts to win the cold war, gaining 8 per cent – from nothing – of the market in 1989.
Wall’s fights back with its Twister lolly, a strawberry and vanilla ice- cream made using “rotating extrusion nozzle technology”. But they’ve got the wrong end of the stick: in their new factory in Gloucester.

with 32,000 litres an hour, they’re producing quantity rather than quality Times have changed. “With totally natural colours it is harder to create eye appeal,” claims their general development manager. But there’s also taste appeal …Profits for Unilever, the multinational owner of Wall’s, plunge for the third quarter of 1992. Then in May 1994 another American brand pokes its icy toe into the British market. Ben & Jerry’s, a tiny company founded from a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, launches its eco- conscious Rainforest Crunch to win the once-hippy, baby-boomer vote.Unilever licks its wounds.

Profits fall by pounds 64m for 1995, the hottest summer on record, although the UK ice-cream market has risen by 62 per cent in the Nineties.You can still get Wall’s vanilla ice-cream. But Unilever’s Vaseline is probably a tastier product to market.James Aufenast. Friday am, New York City: straight from Calvin Klein’s sutumn/winter 97 show into another busy day at the SoHo offices of Visionaire. The rough- and- ready office space is the home of both the cult quarterly art and fashion magazine and its 31-year-old editor, Stephen Gan

Gan is celebrating. He is scanning the papers for mentions of the cocktail party he hosted for his 21st issue, which is cleverly constructed as a deck of playing cards in a jewellery box All New York was there, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Iman. Liz Tilberis, the all-powerful editor of Harper’s Bazaar, the glossiest of mainstream fashion magazines, stopped Gan after Calvin’s show to apologise for a photograph that appeared that morning in the New York Daily News. The caption under her picture reads, “Visionaire editor Liz Tiberis”.

But the only similarity between silver-haired Tilberis and this man-about-Manhattan is their shared ambition to produce the world’s best-looking magazines.
It’s 13 years since Gan left the Philippines for Parsons School of Art in New York. A career as a photographer quickly turned into a fashion job with Details, the magazine which provided the experience and then the severance pay which enabled Gan to fund the first issue of Visionaire with just $7,000. That was in April 1991.The first issue had the theme of “Innocence”, reflecting the naivety of Gan and his colleagues – 30-year-old make-up artist James Kaliardos and sometime-model Cecilia Dean, 28 The cover price was $10 But each issue cost closer to $20 to produce. Now production costs are “20 times that”, and the magazine sells for more than most coffee table art books – $60 in America, and pounds 60 in London – and it still only breaks even.Gan and Kaliardos had met at Parsons, and the idea behind the first issue was to assemble a portfolio of work by artists and designers they knew. “We asked them for personal work, images that the artist most loved doing, the stuff that doesn’t usually get published in magazines,” says Gan.Then, as now, the contributions were free of charge. With the help of a small editorial in the New York Times, issue one sold all its 1,000 copies in two weeks.