Our regular look at some of the faces which have made the news this week. Above are JAY LENO (main picture), with Sir PETER USTINOV,BETSY DUNCAN SMITH,VIVIENNE WESTWOOD and ALISTAIR COOKE.

JAY LENO

The American chat-show host, Jay Leno, has signed a five-year contract worth more than �50m to continue fronting NBC's Tonight Show. His salary will still lag behind that of his rival David Letterman at CBS, despite Leno's superior audience rating of a daily 6.2 million, compared with Letterman's 4.4 million.

One in 10 Americans use the late-night chat shows as the main source of their news, according to recent surveys.

When a guest says something newsworthy on them millions more see it on subsequent news programmes, or read about it in the papers.

It has become a prime advertising slot, particularly as the shows popular with the key 18 to 49 age group.

According to Fortune magazine, Leno's Tonight Show earns NBC $100m per year, some 15% of its profits.

Since Leno began fronting the programme in 1992, he's made the company $1 billion. No wonder it can afford to pay him silly money.

For 53 year-old Leno, it's a great victory. He was a controversial choice to take over the programme from the venerated Johnny Carson. Letterman was furious he was passed over and, after moving to CBS, trounced Leno in the ratings.

Leno asks Hugh Grant "What WERE you thinking of?"

But within two years, Leno had increased the length of his opening monologue (a format bequeathed him by Carson), brought in a new set and, with the aid of the ripe-for-laughs OJ Simpson trial, and the guest appearance of Hugh Grant fresh from being caught in flagrante with a prostitute, turned it around.

The central tenet of his appeal is his jokes. Leno is a stand-up comedian by trade and, to this day, still performs at least 125 gigs a year for $100,000 a throw.

Half the show is comprised of his own material, but it also enables him to test out some of the jokes, some 200 or so, that a team of 18 writers delivers to him each evening for the Tonight Show.

Criticism

"Earlier today," he said recently, "President Bush admitted that his pre-war intelligence wasn't what it should have been...but, hey, we knew that when we elected him."

When tales of sexual misdemeanours arose at the start of Arnold Schwarzenegger's governorship campaign in California, Leno dubbed him "the governor-erect".

In fact, Schwarzenegger announced his decision to run for office on the Tonight Show. And when, on election night, Leno introduced the victor, his critics accused him of overstepping the line between politics and entertainment.

Arnie tells Leno he's running for California's governor

Leno has been constantly criticised for being soft on his more serious interviewees and was pointedly left off a list of America's 50 funniest men by Entertainment Weekly.

Despite the fact that he doesn't drink or smoke, ate chicken wings for lunch every day for a year, never goes on holiday and always dresses the same, Leno's appeal is of the regular guy.

He inherited his sharp wit from his wisecracking insurance salesman father and his modesty from his Scottish mother, whose advice to him was always to "stay humble".

His only vice is his extraordinary fleet of 180 cars, trucks and motorbikes, which he keeps in two aircraft hangars. He has been seen driving around in his antique fire engine giving the thumbs-up to fans.

At a time when its flagship sitcoms Friends and Frasier are coming to an end, NBC has deemed it vital to secure the services of Jay Leno, their self-acclaimed MVP, Most Valuable Performer.

Sir PETER USTINOV Sir Peter Ustinov, who has died at the age of 82, was a man of many talents. Besides being an actor, director, writer, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and Unicef ambassador, Sir Peter was an accomplished mimic. His biographer, John Miller, says: "He used to do imitations of motorcars at the age of four so accurately that people used to leap out of the way thinking it was coming towards them." Full story

BETSY DUNCAN SMITH The wife of the former leader of the Conservative Party has welcomed a Parliamentary report which cleared the couple of wrongdoing over his employment of her as a diary secretary. Betsy Duncan Smith said that she was looking forward to putting a "terrible time" behind her. Her husband, Iain, said that his wife had been through "all shades of hell in the last six months". Full story

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD With a Union Jack dress and a pair of silver horns peeping through her apricot hair, Vivienne Westwood was keeping the spirit of punk alive at the opening of her first major retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Westwood was once hurt by a television audience laughing at her clothes, but as the sole owner of her profitable company, she can now afford a quiet chuckle.

ALISTAIR COOKE Alistair Cooke's biographer, Nick Clarke, said Cooke believed the end of Letter From America would signal his own passing. Cooke's death, at the age of 95, came just a month after his last Letter, his 2869th. His judgment wasn't infallible; a BBC executive was once reportedly despatched from London to sack him. But Alistair Cooke's elegant 14-minute reflections across "the pond" were universally admired. Full story