In the mid-Seventies they pretended to belong to the mid-Fifties so in the mid-Nineties there's

In the mid-Seventies they pretended to belong to the mid-Fifties, so in the mid-Nineties, there's no reason not to pogo wildly to an equivalent pretence.Even after watching Wet Wet Wet in a sweat sweat sweat-drenched Wembley Arena I find it hard to understand their appeal - beyond Marti Pellow that is, who has the teenage girls in the crowd (ie, more or less everyone) screaming. He plays up to his fans, grinning and waving without being too obviously patronising. He'd make a good father, and there are thousands of girls who would love to arrange it for him.But as for the music ... The new singles, "Don't Want to Forgive Me Now" and "Julia Says", are summery celebrations, all Beatles harmonies and watered-down soul After the initial buzz, though, it gets a bit dull. The big tunes aren't big enough, the zest isn't zesty enough.

Still, they could be worth seeing now in case they make any Hugh Grant jokes before "Love is All Around".Wet Wet Wet: Birmingham NEC, 0121-780 4133, Mon-Wed.. THERE is a short straw for journalists doing interviews and it is marked "young actress" The young actress interview can be a nightmare. They are fresh out of drama school, with little work to their credit. They are often not terribly bright, which is not at all their fault, since what is required of a young actress is intuition and feeling rather than academic learning. And they are worried about their future careers and so all they will ever say about their recent production was what a pleasure and a privilege it was to work with the director and everyone else Not Sophie Marceau. An interviewer in the French film magazine Premiere recently admitted to being intimidated by "sa beaute, son eclat, sa simplicite, et son energie".

I'm not sure that I saw too much eclat, but I would go along with the rest of the sentiment. Beautiful she certainly is, though more striking than the sort of conventional cover-girl beauty which Hollywood seems to require of its ingenues these days. She is tall, about 5ft 10ins. There doesn't seem to be a polite way of describing a woman of good size, because most readers take it to be a euphemism for fat. "Big-boned" is about the worst thing to accuse an actress of being.

Perhaps "well-formed and athletic" is just, in Marceau's case "Handsome" also springs to mind. She is very pregnant at the moment, and carries it magisterially.On film the 28-year-old actress has enormous energy, which is evident when she speaks. She looks you straight in the eye and talks forcefully, simply, and with a degree of personal honesty which can be unnerving. And she certainly isn't worried about keeping potential employers sweet. After her work on the forthcoming French film D'Artagnan's Daughter, it seems unlikely that she will be working with director Bertrand Tavernier again. Their farewell at that film's finishing party was almost certainly an adieu rather than an au revoir.Her parents now run a coffee shop in the Paris suburbs, although her father had worked previously as a truck driver, barman and painter Her mother had sold clothes in a department store.

Sophie was only 12 when she began modelling.She has been working steadily in films for 15 years now, but you could be forgiven for not recognising her immediately. Her first film La Boum, when she was barely 13 in 1980, for Claude Pinoteau, was a tremendous hit worldwide with the sole exception of Britain and the US. Its success spawned a sequel in 1982, imaginatively titled La Boum 2. After an appearance in the Foreign Legion epic Fort Saganne, she took a leading role in Maurice Pialat's Police which was an art-house success in this country at least, although Pialat often stirs violent antipathy among his own countrymen. Marceau was playing a young criminal girl, a chronic liar with a suitcase full of dirty money, who comes under the eye of Gerard Depardieu, a flic in the drug squad He falls for her and becomes deeply mired in her corruption. No one pushes their actors to such extremes of tension and conflict as Pialat, and she was more than a match for the mighty Depardieu, and carried a weight of conviction as a criminal which belied her years.Since then it has been a steady stream of French films, which are the sort of daily fodder which French audiences still lap up in their native cinemas, but which hardly ever make it across the Channel, thanks to the vagaries of our distribution system. "You know the sort of thing," she says, "three people sitting in a cafe, falling madly in love with each other, and then rowing in public." She even turned down the role of Roxane opposite Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac, because the only role she wanted to play was that of Cyrano himself.All of that is about to change.