WE love Scotland and are green with envy of the amount of time our favourite travelling chef, Philippa Davis from Shaftesbury, spends cooking for clients in the Highlands. On her latest assignment north of the border she found a new best friend … I only have pies for you … I knew this was going…
THERE’S something about the English and their dogs, and you couldn’t get more English than Mr and Mrs Dearly, human stars of the Tobacco Factory/Travelling Light production of 101 Dalmatians, on in Bristol until 11th January. Dodie Smith’s immortal story has been brilliantly adapted for this exciting, heart-warming family show, performed by five actors and…
IF the recent vote had gone the other way, I’d have been green with envy right now that Edinburgh belonged to a foreign country. As it is, I can feel a proprietorial pride that it still belongs to us! Scotland’s grand capital city is drenched in centuries-old history, but my five-day visit showed me some…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Kees Bakels: Conductor Ronald Brautigam: Piano BRITTEN: Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge MENDELSSOHN: Piano Concerto No. 1 MENDELSSOHN: Overture: Fingal’s Cave DEBUSSY: La Mer KEES Bakels, now approaching his 70th birthday, has been a regular and welcome guest conductor in Poole for many years….
THE versatile and talented Studio Theatre Company in Salisbury collects awards locally and nationally and produces a number of varied plays every year at its Ashley Road headquarters. They don’t do musicals and they don’t do pantomimes, so it’s no surprise at this time of year that no-one in the audience is required to shout…
FOR my ninth birthday, my godfather sent me a book and a letter saying “my goodness, it will be double figures next time!” (silly the things you remember). The book was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. From the first sight of that distinctive cover with its pen and ink drawings and maps, I was…
MARKING its new collaboration with the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Nottingham, the Nuffield on the Southampton University campus commissioned award-winning television comedy scriptwriter Georgia Pritchett to adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Snow Queen as a Christmas show with a different slant. And that she has done. The multi-talented eight-strong cast take the…
ONE day, more than ten years ago in Bristol, fledgling musician, singer and DJ Ed Patrick crawled into the Google underlay, found an anagram site, pressed a button … and out came Kid Carpet. Kid has been delighting children and their parents ever since, and his latest show, The Magic Elves, is playing at Bristol…
THE students at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School are ending the year with a colourful flourish at the Redgrave Theatre, with a new adaptation of the books of Lewis Carroll by Philip Monks. It all starts with a sepia image of Carroll (aka the Rev Charles Dodgson) and a group of friends posed in a…
MY first awareness of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, better known, in the same way as other early 20th Century writers HG, AA and TS, by his initials, PG, was through a strangely funny programme on BBC1 in the early 1970s called Wodehouse Playhouse, which I was encouraged to watch because it starred two people from…