The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure, deftly sketching in a bit of socio-historical background on the side with a bit of help from the props and archive department. And, as this low-rent effort to drill into the emotional life of the beloved comic actress Hattie Jacques amply demonstrated, you'd be completely wrong.

What's the Greek for "oy"? All the bouzouki dancing and retsina in the world wouldn't be enough to make a satisfying play out of Onassis, Martin Sherman's rewrite of his own Aristo, seen two years ago at Chichester with the same director (long-time Sherman collaborator Nancy Meckler) and absolutely invaluable leading man (Robert Lindsay). The star gives the piece his customary highly theatrical all, in the process making you think perhaps the material really is the stuff of genuine tragedy. But all the high-flown talk of "destiny" and whatnot can't shift what Onassis actually is - less a fully realised drama than a celebrity flow-chart on stage.

Celebrity Autobiography, like most of the world’s best ideas, is simple yet inspired. Eugene Pack’s creation, developed with Dayle Reyfel, was first seen in Los Angeles three years ago, then in New York and other American cities, and was a sellout hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Both creators, along with a bunch of actors and comics, appeared last night to read from various celebrities’ autobiographies. That’s all it is, folks.

If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which, ironically, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joy Adamson’s unexpected bestseller.

The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.

The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard.

Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell.