“You aren’t going to get another one of them, are you?” asks Alex Turner, rhetorically, with regard to John Cooper Clarke. He should know. The first explosion into the public eye by his band Arctic Monkeys, with their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, owed a direct stylistic debt to the Mancunian poet.

It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21^st birthday, when the play opens.

The death of Robin Gibb was announced last night. He had been diagnosed with cancer following surgery for a blocked intestine in 2010, when it was discovered that he had cancer of the colon. This April, it was announced he had contracted pneumonia. His death leaves brother Barry as the only surviving Bee Gee.

A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma".

Some things just don’t need saying. “If you know the chorus to this one, please join in” comes the invitation from the stage just before “Dreadlock Holiday”. On the final date of 10cc’s 40th anniversary tour it was unlikely that anyone at the Royal Albert Hall didn’t know the chorus. Actually, it’s unlikely that anyone, anywhere, doesn’t know the chorus.

Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”.

Manchester was once  known as Cottonopolis, since the city was once at the centre of the vast global industry reponsible for its growth and prosperity.The Whitworth Art Gallery, which is part of Manchester University, has in its collection a wealth of textiles, providing not just a colourful history of local cotton manufacture, but tracing the trade’s international links. However, this exhibition is less historical overview, more discursive exploration of the cotton trade’s social impact.

Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.

The world premiere here of Monkee Business the Musical was planned long before the untimely death in February of Davy Jones, the Manchester-born member of the manufactured band that outsold The Beatles and the Rolling Stones half a century ago. The coincidence lends a poignancy to the event and the Manchester run has been dedicated to his memory.

Like a streamlined sandstone-coloured satellite berthed unexpectedly in Manchester’s medieval quarter, the new addition to the country’s largest specialist music school, Chetham’s (pronounced Cheetham’s), makes a confident statement for the future. It looms seven storeys high amidst atmospheric buildings dating back as far as 600 years.