JACK Dickson, a member of the art department at Bryanston School, Blandford, was featured on a recent edition of Bill Bailey’s BBC series Extraordinary Portraits. The programme featured Jack’s portrait of a remarkable, life-saving, railway worker, Rizwan Javed. East Londoner Rizwan, who works for London Underground, has saved 29 people from taking their own lives…
A £65,000 crowd-funding campaign has been launched by Greg and Nicky Parsons of Devon of Devon cheesemaker Sharpham Dairy, to enable their business near Totnes to invest in renewable energy and water recycling. The campaign, called Curd Is The Word, offers cheese-centered rewards that people can bid for, ranging from £20 to £2,000. As well…
DORCHESTER has a rich history, and one of its most recent important contributions not only to the town, county and country has been its community plays. It has staged seven – the greatest number of community plays anywhere in the world. The most recent, Spinning the Moon, was due in 2020 and was scuppered by…
EAST Devon’s Shute Festival continues its series of inspiring talks on 12th March at the Peek Chapel in Pound Street, Lyme Regis, with Julia Hailes, ambassador for the Rainforest Trust. She has recently returned from the Guyanas – British Guiana (as it was), Suriname and French Guiana – where the forests still stand, 83.5%, 93%…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s film version of John Buchan’s 1915 novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, and every subsequent iteration is judged by this 90-year-old behemoth. So perhaps it is no surprise that a member of the audience, leaving Salisbury Playhouse’s terrific new production of the Patrick Barlow four-handed version…
SHAKESPEARE is back at Bedminster’s Tobacco Factory, in a stunning new production by Heidi Vaughan, the venue’s artistic director and CEO. It seems a long time since the company Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory was last performing on the cigar packing room floor of the former Wills Factory. Andrew Hilton’s company ran for 20 years…
THERE was a running joke in my family, and the younger members regularly pulled my maternal grandfather’s leg, that as a lifelong trade unionist he was still fighting the General Strike 50 years after the event. Looking at Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, 40 years after it first appeared on BBC 2, adapted for…
THE story of Hairspray is set in 1962 Baltimore, with its period costumes and hairstyles, when concrete-solid -with-hairspray, tall, back-combed-within-an-inch-of-their-lives beehive hairstyles were all the rage. The story of personal prejudices that were so prevalent at the time against anyone who does not conform to the accepted norm, “chocolate box” beauty for the girls, sharp…
IT is one of the most famous films of all time, with a threatening, drumming score that still sends shivers down the spine – amazingly, it is 50 years since Jaws savaged its way into the collective nightmares of a generation. But what happened out at sea when the cameras stopped rolling? Broadway and West…
THE big spring exhibition at the Somerset Rural Life Museum at Glastonbury, on until 8th June, is Strength and Resilience: Somerset Women in the Second World War, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, by focusing on the lives of four women who played their part during the conflict and…