Patrick Ranger, property director, said that no replacement for Mr Roscoe had yet been selected, but that he expected headhunters to have a shortlist for the company by next month. Mr Roscoe left after disagreements with Manny Davidson, the chairman, whose family owns most of the company. The group also announced flat profits of pounds 5.06m for the six months to June. Earnings per share rose to 3.9p from 3.3p, and the interim dividend was 0.9 p against 0.85p.. Bass sells interests in Carlsberg-Tetley Bass, the brewing and leisure group, has exercised and completed its option to sell all of its interests in brewer Carlsberg-Tetley to Denmark's Carlsberg for pounds 110m in cash. Bass exercised the option following a decision by Margaret Beckett, President of the Board of Trade, to block its proposed merger with Carlsberg-Tetley. Under the terms of the merger agreement signed between Bass and Allied Domecq in 1996, Bass said it had also asked Allied to return pounds 30m paid by Bass for Allied's stake in Carlsberg- Tetley..

Vaux sell hotels and nursing homes Vaux Group has sold five three-star Swallow Hotels comprising 385 bedrooms to Chasley Lifestyle and has also completed the sale of all 38 nursing homes to Highfield Group, for a total of pounds 48m. The company said the proceeds would be invested in hotels, pubs and brewing. The sale will also enable Swallow to proceed with a project to install air conditioning in a significant proportion of the rooms in each hotel by September 1999. New pubs are either under construction or planned in the city centres of Nottingham, Sheffield, Middlesborough and Halifax.. Graphics deal boosts VideoLogic VideoLogic said graphics seller Matrox Graphics has signed a strategic alliance with NEC Electronics for the supply of high-performance 3D graphics processors from VideoLogic and NEC.

The first product will be the new Matrox m3D, a graphics board based on the latest NEC PowerVR PCX2 3D processor. The Matrox m3D would be shipping in the fourth quarter of 1997 and available world-wide, VideoLogic said The shares rose10.5p to 64.5p.. Calidore pays pounds 3.58m for Keystone Calidore Group has agreed to buy the whole of the issued share capital of Keystone Solutions for pounds 3.58m, with further payments depending on Calidore's profit performance over the next three years. Calidore is also proposing to consolidate its ordinary shares on a one-for-20 basis and has placed new ordinary shares at 90p per share to raise pounds 1.5m for the development of the Keystone business, which develops software for legal and accountancy firms.. Gerard McLarnon was a playwright who never sought popularity Nor did he ever find it. But he knew how to make us sit up in the playhouse, which is half the battle.

If he never bothered to fight the other half, it must be because his dialogue and his characters came to him in such a vivid if baffling rush that there was no time to sit down and shape them for Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway, Hollywood or television. Yet directors and actors liked the sense of theatricality which pervaded his work. There was thought behind it - muddled thought maybe - but it had without doubt a stagy tang amid its Celtic twilit flow and self- conscious flourish. McLarnon was an Ulsterman and a man of the theatre He had known that from his youth. Even so, at this juncture it looks as Sir Iain has got away with it after all.. Cathy Newman BSkyB will become the first broadcaster to ask viewers to pay to watch a music concert when it screens a charity event for the victims of the Montserrat volcano next month. News of the concert was yesterday revealed in so-called exclusive front page story in The Sun, the newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the dominant shareholder in BSkyB.Sky will put its substantial marketing budget behind the venture, which will inevitably increase its commercial profile as it seeks to introduce more pay-per-view events.

News items are often unique, and totally irreplaceable: Dud and Pete at least have had a selection of their output preserved, and scripts are surely available for other material. Furthermore, the fact that clearances from the archive concentrated on light entertainment and drama, leaving news coverage behind, owes much to the short-sighted behaviour by the likes of Equity on behalf of their artists. Scientific accuracy demands an assessment both of the strength of the evidence and of the power of the conclusion Facts are not sacred, they require interpretation.. Sir: Whilst the wiping of Not Only ... But Also may be undesirable ("BBC recorded local news over classic Pete 'n' Dud", 21 August), it uses questionable logic to reach the conclusion that news coverage which replaced it is of lesser value. There can be no doubt about the lethal nature of cigarettes yet this message is still being fudged three decades after it became a certainty.On the major issues of public health - smoking, heart disease, cancer - where there is a measure of agreement, we need scientists to sign up to the basic thesis rather than squabbling over the finer points. He claimed the disease's biological cause had "still to be established".Technically he may be right, but morally his position is bankrupt. We have to learn to live with uncertainty and accept that scientific understanding proceeds like football - with much, apparently purposeless, running around punctured by occasional flashes of brilliance that move the game forward.The drawback is that this leaves openings for those who wish to exploit the uncertainty for their own commercial advantage.