On TV

The Woman With The Remarkable Body (five)

MARTHA Stewart made a fortune peddling homespun tips for gracious living to American housewives, making her richer than the Queen, Madonna and Delia Smith put together.

She's the sort of person who emerges from five months in prison - which looks more like a country club than a jail - half a billion dollars richer than when she went in.

Film-maker Jamie Campbell went in search of both Stewart and her devoted fans in Martha And Me. He's a chip off the Louis Theroux block, a documentary-maker who's as much a star as the subject.

He put down a deposit on a trailer park home overlooking the sprawling grounds and sports facilities of a prison known as Camp Cupcake with the aim of transforming house and garden in the style of Martha Stewart.

Her devotees, like those who've waited outside the courthouse to cheer on Michael Jackson, are scarily obsessed with both her work and her innocence.

She had, one fan maintained: "created lots of things that have been good for working people". Quite why they'd want to know how to organise a cocktail party for 300 or create a garden like a Monet painting, I don't know.

Campbell did find some willing to say a bad word about her. Lots of them, including "greedy, snobby, unkind and mean" in the case of one old friend. Some friend she turned out to be.

Having been refused permission to visit her in prison, Campbell finally bumped into her outside the toilets in the courts during her appeal. Unluckily for him, no cameras were allowed inside.

Alison Lapper is a woman of achievement too. She hasn't let her disability stop her living life to the full. She is three feet ten inches tall, has no arms and very short legs. The Woman With The Extraordinary Body is a painter and photographer, whose main subject is herself.

She's outgoing and confident about herself and her body, thinking people are very narrow-minded about disability and sex. Five years ago she became a single mum. Carers help her but, as we saw in the film, she lives a much more independent life that you might expect.

There are still those who think she's doing too much, like the former carer who questioned her ability to cope with her son. This is clearly not the case, although she acknowledges that he has to put up with prejudice directed at her.

She can't give him a motherly hug. "When I see someone giving Paris a hug, I think it would be lovely to do that. But we have contact in a lot of other ways," she said. Despite those words, you felt this was her one regret about her situation.

Still, how many youngsters can point to a giant marble sculpture of a naked, pregnant and four times lifesize woman in the centre of London and say, "That's my mum"? The marble sculpture of Lapper will shortly occupy the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ripley Castle

THE setting and - on press night, at least - the weather were perfect for this promenade production of Shakespeare's magical play.

Spirite Productions, the company behind this outdoor staging, is a relatively new outfit, but has done wonders assembling the right ingredients in the right order for this spirited show.

If you're going to do outdoor Shakespeare, then the Dream is pretty much a dream of a show as four frustrated lovers are sent hither and thither through the forest as a result of the intervention of King of the Fairies Oberon, and his fleet-footed helper, Puck, as they play dirty tricks on Titania's Queen of the Fairies.

The action begins outside the Palm House and moves onto the lawns, before the audience is led into the woods to witness Titania's fairy queen falling for weaver Bottom making an ass of himself and two pairs of would-be lovers falling for the wrong partner after a sprinkling of a magic potion.

The audience finish up where they began as the rude mechanicals enact the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, a suitably knockabout ending as the sun sets on an evening of theatrical magic.

The settings are spectacular but the mainly youthful cast are by no means overshadowed. The thwarted lovers (Hester Evans, Tristan Beint, Joanna Croll and Glyn Williams) have real energy and passion, Peter Stephens' Bottom is a sight to behold and the final Pyramus and Thisbe comedy sketch gets the laughs.

l Until June 26. Tickets (01423) 771251.

Steve Pratt