DORSET food producers, including Dorset Pastry, were among the winners of the 230-plus coveted three star awards in this year’s Great Taste Awards, run by the Guild of Fine Food at Gillingham. The pastry company, based at Crossways, is renowned for its all-butter puff and shortcrust. The family-run business was founded by Moira Blake in…
ONE of the most famously memorable phrases uttered on the silver screen since in 1927 Al Jolson declared ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet’ in The Jazz Singer, the film which heralded the beginning of the Talkies, came six years later in the film 42nd Street, from which this show is taken. The whole future of…
TWO leading West Country organic food businesses are getting together. Devon-based Eversfield Organic Ltd, one of the UK’s top organic grocery services, has announced the incorporation of Coombe Farm Organic, based near Crewkerne in Somerset. This strategic move will double the size of Eversfield Organic’s online butchery business and the company says this will enhance…
MASSENET’S exotic and dramatic opera Le Roi de Lahore is rarely performed now, but the huge success of its opening at the Paris Opera in 1877 cemented the composer’s position as one of the most popular in Europe, and the work became a regular feature of operatic seasons. When Rod Kennedy decided to stage it…
AFTER my mother died, I inherited a little oil painting of a sailing vessel. I knew it from my parents’ house but had never looked on the back of it (why would I?) When I did, I found a typed note with the story of the boat and of my great-great grandfather, who had sailed…
BEN Weatherill’s new play Frank and Percy, a two-hander for Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam, is at Bath until 5th August, and there’s hardly a seat to be had. Perhaps the bright “young” London critics who slated the play at its Windsor opening will attribute that to an older, more staid audience in the…
THEY say it is hard to keep a secret, but it can’t be that difficult because well over 10 MILLION people over a 70 year period have managed to keep the identity of the murderer to themselves after seeing a production of The Mousetrap. That is the audience numbers recorded firstly in London’s Ambassadors Theatre,…
SOMETIMES, the weather gods just get their own way, and all the determination of summer touring actors and the stoicism of their audiences goes for naught. Such was the case when Slapstick Picnic planned to return to the wild, wide open spaces of Dorchester’s Maumbury Rings and the wind howled and the rain poured. And…
The writer Henry James famously wrote in The Portrait of a Lady: “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” WHATEVER your view on the cream or jam on top scone debate, most of us can agree that the South West has the best…
IT’S a rare occasion when any entertainment involving pop music asks the audience to resist the temptation to sing along with every song they recognise – but that was the request to the excited audience who gathered in the Bristol Hippodrome to watch The Bodyguard. The reason was that, left to their own devices, this…