Last time in this column I mentioned that there seemed to be a lot of Sun-Gemini people associated with superficial TV quiz/game shows. Since then I have been looking more closely at the TV presenters with cardinal Suns.

The list of successful presenters with Sun in Aries is phenomenal - Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Philip Schofield, Chris Evans, Jeremy Beadle, Jeremy Clarkson, Graham Norton, Ruby Wax, Gloria Hunniford, Sue Cook, Rolf Harris...and many more. There is a kind of "Look, this is my show" attitude about many of them, but what they do they seem to do very well. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine them doing anything other than "fronting" a TV show.

The Cancerian TV presenter often comes across as a "mother hen" figure. One instantly thinks of Lisa Riley, Esther Rantzen, William G Stewart,Gaby Roslin and Fern Britton. However, they are no pushovers. Rantzen spent many years building up the Childline organisation and Stewart has been a leading TV producer since the 1960's. They are sometimes prone to name dropping and the use of repetitive catch phrases, but you always know where you are with them. You always feel "at home" with them.

The Sun-Libra presenters are often the cultural/intellectual/academic type, for example,Clive James, Melvyn Bragg, Chris Tarrant (a former schoolmaster) and Anne Robinson. There seems to be an air of "I don't suffer fools gladly" about this crowd, although each of the four I have mentioned here has a strong sense of humour. At least three of them have cardinal Moons: Bragg Cancer, Tarrant Aries and Robinson Capricorn. James who is one day younger than Bragg, may also have Moon in Cancer, but his birthtime is not known.

I am often at a loss when trying to describe the attributes of Capricorn to people who don't know much about astrology, perhaps because this sign contains the largest number of types. When you think about it, Capricorn is sandwiched between the two most unconventional signs, Sagittarius and Aquarius, so there must be millions of people with Sun in Capricorn and the two personal planets Mercury and/or Venus in Sagittarius and/or Aquarius. We often associate Capricorn with longevity and, indeed, this sign seems to produce the "once and future" type of TV presenter, i.e. the ones who seem to have been with us forever and will continue to be so for as long as they can. Four names instantly come to mind here: the Countdown pair Richard Whitely and Carol Vorderman, Des O'Connor and Michael Aspel. All four have done a wide variety of things on TV; the urbane Aspel began as a BBC newsreader but has since presented shows as varied as Crackerjack and This is your Life. Capricorn types appreciate that it's a long hard slog to the top of the career mountain,but once they reach the summit they are determined to stay there. (By the time that you read this, O'Connor will be 71 and Aspel 70.)

Many astrologers will be aware that there's many a birthdate which harbours strange bedfellows. A classic example is 13th October 1925 which was the birthdate of both Margaret Thatcher and controversial US comedian Lenny Bruce, although they had different Moon signs. This is just the sort of information that non believers of astrology love to pounce on, their notion being that astrology cannot possibly work if a particular birthdate throws up such different characters.

It's some years now since I met my "astro twin", although she was about six or seven hours older than me. (Are you reading this Angie?) Although there were many differences between us, we discovered that we had lived "parallel" lives inasmuch as our "ups" and "downs" generally occurred at the same time. However, only a few months ago I was both intrigued and delighted to discover a much more accurate example of this. There was a TV documentary about Esther Rantzen's hugely successful series That's Life. Now, I already knew that she had the same birthdate as the late Charles Harvey - 22nd June 1940 - but I was not prepared for the information that was given out in the documentary. Viewers were told that the programme had run from 1973 to 1994, and instantly those dates rang a bell. Of course, they are the same 21 years as Charles' Presidency of the Astrological Association!

I am often dismayed to discover, when discussing predictive astrology, that many people place such little value in secondary progressions. "Oh," some people remark, "they are merely symbolic." I beg your pardon! Certainly transits cannot be dismissed either, but I have found from my own experiences that they represent phases we are going through for a limited time. Secondary progressions, on the other hand, seem to represent well defined milestones, the benefits or penalties of which seem to stay with us for the rest of our lives. To give you an example: I had been skirting around the subject of astrology since 1970, but it wasn't until 1974, when my progressed Mercury reached my natal MC, that I commenced the Faculty of Astrological Studies' certificate course. It's almost as if all that interest in astrology was lying dormant all those years and the progressed Mercury triggered it off. After only a couple of years I felt as if I had been doing astrology all my life and, out of all the subjects in which I have had an interest, astrology is the only subject I stuck solidly with all these years.

I suppose secondary progressions, since they are extensions of the birth chart, represent the changing "you" from within, whereas transits are forces or "happenings" affecting the chart from outside. Ideally, of course, secondary progressions and transits should complement each other in predictive work. Sadly, there are not many books on the market which deal exclusively with secondary progressions. I have two. One is a British book which gives many examples of secondary progressions from the lives of famous people, but it also shows that reader how to calculate progressions. The other is an American publication which already assumes the reader knows how to calculate them, and it's merely a catalogue of delineations, written (I'm sorry to say) in that rather glib manner which permeates so many American astrology books these days. Is there room for another book on secondary progressions out there somewhere?