on the day he turned 41 his company, Microsoft, was bigger than Kodak, MacDonalds and IBM ... Thus: "It is said he is to computer software what Thomas Edison is the to light bulb .. runs two-thirds of the computers in the world ... The voice-over, meanwhile, is the gravy-dark voice of mature US news anchors, of political advertising and other kinds of pour-over gravitas. All followed by Bill's informal leg - shorts, white socks, no shoes - up on the desk by his PC, as he looks at some impressive bar-charts.

First up are screen after screen of magazine covers with the geek as cover boy; then screens with music references - a CD (Gates as buyer-up of the world's culture) and a drop-in of young musicians playing strings. Its ad is almost entirely composed of Microsoft Windows screens, all about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Nasdaq is an American stock market, screen-based, virtual - and here it is on mainstream British TV. Now Here is Tomorrow Calling.

After Paul Weller made a comeback by copying their rural R&B, Traffic returned with an album and a tour They didn't play "Hole in My Shoe".Steely Dan, 1993 The customary tour-and-live-album package A new studio album seems forever in the pipeline NB. Lou Reed and John Cale stopped bickering long enough for a tour, but fell out again while mixing the subsequent live album Traffic, 1994. At least they were honest enough to call it the "Filthy Lucre Tour".The Velvet Underground, 1993. The New Wave guitar gods made a new album, which was very good, and played some live shows, which weren't.The Sex Pistols, 1996. They named their reunion tour after Henley's phrase, not Frey's.Television, 1992. Don Henley said that the Eagles would reform "when hell freezes over".

Glenn Frey said that "there will never be a greed- and-lost-youth tour". Have now been together for longer than they were first time round They haven't been as successful, though.The Eagles, 1994. Documentaries, videos, books, out-take albums and magazine articles aside, the actual reunion consisted of just two sort- of new songs.The Buzzcocks, 1989. The 1990s are the Reunion Decade in rock...The Beatles, 1995. What their fans will want to hear most are those early hits - which the Monkees never actually played.The Monkees: Newcastle Arena (0191 401 8000), 7 Mar; then touring.COMEBACK, ALL IS FORGIVENDON'T mourn the passing of your favourite band. The Monkees' voices have deteriorated over the decades, while their musicianship has hardly improved And now, the four insane middle-aged men are touring again.