Observers, noting that Vic's brother is none other than Joe Cocker, the famous singer, are even saying that Severn Trent is finally "up where it belongs".Joe Cocker was a gasfitter before he became a rock singer in the Sixties - clearly utilities run in the family.When Tom Cruise appears in the soon-to-be-released blockbuster thriller Mission Impossible, the big-screen version of the television classic, he will be wearing British suits. Apparently Yorkshire Water's disastrous performance during last year's drought was headline news in Portugal, and the poor chaps are fearful of going thirsty during their stay.Vic Cocker, the chief executive of Severn Trent who last year told you to concrete over your lawns to conserve water, is ebullient following the company's sparkling results. Scarborough's town council have paid pounds 25,000 to put the Bulgarians up in a local hotel, and apparently liberation from Communism has given the players an insatiable appetite for meat of all kinds - the more beef the better.The Portuguese, in contrast, have parked a huge refrigerated truck outside their hotel near Rotherham, in which they keep all the food they'll need during their perilous stay in the UK.The truck also contains huge amounts of water. Even if the executives involved are non-smokers, which a number of them are The condition is written into their contracts.

Pass the ashtray.The antics of Paul Gascoigne and his team-mates apart, Euro 96 does not seem to be fostering much Euro-togetherness among the competing teams, at least not in Yorkshire.Indeed the county is considered something of a culinary disaster area by the Continentals staying there.The Danes, the Spanish, the French and the Portuguese are all steadfastly refusing to eat any British beef.Only the Bulgarians are tucking into the stuff. We're going to have an order-driven system for Footsie 100 companies [something Mr Lawrence was keen on]. It wasn't the change, but the process of change that annoyed people."When not pulling the Exchange into the modern age, Mr Casey will probably be found at his small cottage in Dorset with his wife and three children. He also enjoys sailing and shooting - "not very well," according to one observer.The papers may be full of the evils of smoking, but it is still compulsory for all executives of US tobacco giant Phillip Morris to ask for a seat in the smoking section whenever they fly anywhere on company business.

But Mr Marks insists that Mr Casey is not "the market-makers' man". "He's an accountant by profession, he came from NatWest, he wasn't involved in that side of the business," says Mr Marks."The debate has moved on. "He did a tremendous job for us putting our settlement and IT in order. He's got a great sense of humour, he's like a dog with a bone, he worries at problems until he solves them." Michael Lawrence, the last incumbent, claims he was ousted by a cabal of market-makers, including Smiths. But group profits up from pounds 47.3m to pounds 50.8m owed most of their growth to foreign exchange benefits, which added pounds 4.5m to the bottom line. Healthcare, the pharmaceutical and diagnostic division, has continued to grow on the back of Amersham's already strong position in nuclear medicine. The main Ceretec brain imaging agent saw sales dip 8 per cent to pounds 22.3m under the onslaught of competition from Du Pont's Neurolite, but Metastron, for pain caused by bone cancer, now sells nearly as well and the hope for the future is Myoview, the heart imaging agent.

Amersham will receive a boost to earnings from raising its stake in the Japanese Nihon Medi- Physics to 50 per cent from October and give it a third of the world market for nuclear medicine.The omens are better than they have been for some time for Amersham, but even profits of pounds 63m this year would put the shares, up 28p at pounds 10.43, on a prospective p/e ratio of 17 Hold.. Michael Marks is sorry to see his colleague Gavin Casey leave the portals of Smith New Court, now under the wing of Merrill Lynch, to take the top job at the Stock Exchange But Mr Marks thinks Mr Casey will do a good job. The improvement helped return Amersham's main life sciences division to growth in the second half. Its drug development services, used in testing and screening new pharmaceuticals, molecular biology, where Amersham leads the market, and genetic sequencing, increasingly used by drugs groups to short-cut the search for new drugs, reported sales growth of between 10 and 17 per cent last year.

The change in "tone" in the industry, evident in the second half, is already boosting sales of Amersham's technology and services. The most important is there are now clear signs of an end to the malaise in the pharmaceutical industry which has hit sales of Amersham's research and laboratory equipment to the drugs giants. The group should be one of the best placed ahead of full deregulation in 1998 Hold.. Amersham International, the medical instruments to pharmaceuticals group, seems to have resolved the problems which wiped 7 per cent off its shares when it reported its interim results in November. However, the figures were further complicated by the release of an pounds 11.4m restructuring provision and a pounds 20m gain on the disposal of the last of the peripheral operations. Even so, management can be well pleased that it held the fall in operating profits to pounds 189m, down from pounds 208m before, given that the price review cost pounds 31m.The group has cut prices by 2.7 per cent this year and will have to find another pounds 30m of savings to offset the regulatory review.