Arena: Pavarotti - The Last Tenor (BBC2) - Antony Beevor And The Chekhova File (BBC4): The critics, we were told, would have been happy to see him quit ten years ago.

But it's not over until the fat man doesn't sing and it wasn't until a decade later, when he was coming up to 70, that Luciano Pavarotti embarked on his retirement tour.

This lengthy (well, it felt like it) documentary failed to produce any of these detractors, or anyone else to say anything other that what a jolly good chap he was.

People spoke of his childish enthusiasm for life. "He's a big baby with a beard," declared one friend.

There was the time the Italian authorities made him repay millions of lira, although he was cleared of filing false tax returns. But that was a minor blot on the copybook of a performer regarded as the greatest ambassador opera has ever had.

I doubt he'll ever retire totally. He spoke of wanting to spend more time with his family - his wife, daughter, granddaughter - but admitted that "the moment I stop I will miss this beautiful life".

He seems to have it all: family, friends, money. But is he happy?, I hear you ask. All the signs indicate he is. Perhaps because he's kept in touch with his roots in his home town of Modena. He still has friends made in childhood when - and this is hard to believe considering his present girth - he was a footballer.

The film-makers had access to family occasions, including his wedding and the christening of his new baby Alice. His wife Nicoletta had nothing to say as she's been suspicious of the press following the publicity surrounded the dead of Alice's twin brother during childbirth.

But his manager Terri Robson talked about the secret of his success. He's the one who decides which of the many offers to take, always using his own instincts and ambitions to drive his career. Not that he doesn't listen to other people, taking advice on roles, voice and technique.

Most of all Pavarotti has broken from the confines of the opera stage to become a successful solo performer. The World Cup success of the Three Tenors was no accident, bringing together his love of football and taking opera to an audience outside the big opera houses.

The baker's son saw that he could become both pop idol and opera star. Over the past 40 years, he has achieved that aim.

Olga Chekhova achieved fame of a different kind - as an actress, as the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and Hitler's favourite actress. Less known, but revealed in Antony Beevor And The Chekhova File, was the fact that she was a secret agent.

Historian Beevor trawled through documents to find the truth but had to admit that her story was "still full of mysteries".

As a Russian migr living in Berlin, she became close to the Nazi leaders. She appears to have been recruited by her brother Lev to spy for the Russians and, on one occasion, helped with an assassination plot against the Fuhrer.

She lived through the war and in the 1950s founded a cosmetics business. Olga was, above all, a survivor who came through the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges, the Nazism and the Second World War. Surely it's only a matter of time before her story is turned into a movie.

Northanger Abbey,

York Theatre Royal

LAST summer's revival of Amadeus was a conspicuous hit for director Tim Luscombe. This year he takes on the dual roles of adaptor and director to bring Jane Austen's novel to the stage.

Stage versions can get bogged down in bookish detail and a reluctance to leave anything out. Luscombe smartly avoids that with a production that's both fun and funny which, to be honest, is not something I expected from Jane Austen.

Another big plus are Mark Bailey's settings which switch with speed and conviction from ballrooms to carriages to the gothic gloominess of Northanger Abbey itself. Matthew Bugg's music is used well to comment on the action and move us on to the next scene.

The actors are equally in command, achieving the right balance between seriousness and comedy as the heroines go in search of romance.

Jenni Maitland is wonderfully gauche and gushing heroine Catherine Morland, a young lady with an overactive imagination whose somewhat melodramatic choice of reading is dramatised before our very eyes.

In real life, her search for a suitable suitor is beset by problems - most of them caused by devious John Thorpe (Morgan George) dropping hints about Catherine's poor financial situation to interested parties. What a bounder.

She's given enthusiastic backing in her plan by Olivia Darnley's flighty Isabella and Charlotte Parry's more sensible Emily. The older folk, notably Susan Bovell's wonderfully acerbic old biddy and Mark Payton's curmudgeonly St Aubert, are less encouraging.

Freddie Stevenson's cleric, Henry Tilney, is such a nice boy and so obviously the right man for her that the outcome is never in any doubt. But it's fun getting there as her imagination runs riot.

Until June 12. Tickets 01904 623568.

Steve Pratt

Published: ??/??/2004