Radio column: The stuff of dreams

I'm not quite sure how I missed Radio 4's Wireless Nights the first time around. This is the late-night, awards-strewn show in which the Pulp frontman-turned-national treasure Jarvis Cocker reveals the peculiar stuff that British people get up to under cover of darkness. (Oh, stop it, not that).

Read more...

Theatre review: How To Host a Dinner Party, Brighton Fringe

The Sussex company Park Bench Dance Theatre’s show opens with two barefoot, smartly dressed women shuffling on to a empty stage with a dining table. They disappear again and return with some chairs. A long and wordless tussle ensues in which identical dining chairs are shifted and swapped, shunted and dragged, and swapped and shifted again.
Read more...

"If you want to know about me and Morrissey, Google it."

Around half an hour into my conversation with Johnny Marr, things take a distinctly awkward turn. Up until this point, the hallowed ex-Smiths guitarist-turned-serial collaborator-turned-solo artist has been warm, chatty, full of sunshine and bonhomie. As we are introduced, I mention that we met once before about 10 years ago and Marr – looking sharp in dark jeans, Crombie-style coat, his hair sculpted into the customary Mod cut – does a valiant job of pretending to remember.
Read more...

Theatre review: The Kite Runner, Brighton Festival

It was always going to be a tall order bringing Khaled Hosseini’s mega-selling 2003 novel about friendship, betrayal and exile to the stage.
Read more...

Music review: The Great Escape, Brighton

It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Great Escape, the annual three-day gigathon for new bands and Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-By-South-West, has grown too unwieldy for its own good. Certainly, the queues outside venues that snake all the way to Eastbourne offer little hope to the majority of seeing the year’s buzz bands such as The Strypes, Swim Deep or Parquet Courts.

Read more...

Comedy review: Daniel Kitson, Brighton Festival

Daniel Kitson’s new show is a reflection on reality, memory and our sense of self. Hardly wall-to-wall giggles, you might think, but this publicity-shy, TV-shunning, Perrier Award-winning comic’s talent lies in burrowing into the human psyche and dispensing profound nuggets through tales in which, more often than not, he is the hapless protagonist. After The Beginning, Before The End is like a TED talk with added LOLs.
Read more...

Radio column: Attenborough goes down a tweet

Did I awake at two minutes to six on Monday morning – a Bank Holiday, no less – to hear David Attenborough's inaugural Tweet of the Day on Radio 4, so as to bring you a wholly authentic report of the listening experience? Did I heck.
Read more...

Radio column: CBC's WireTap

I might, in the past, have mentioned my struggles with radio comedy. In writing this column, I have put myself through immeasurable torture – that is, listening to a parade of stand-ups bleating about traffic wardens, missing socks and sagging genitalia in the late-night slot – in the hope that somebody might cajole my face into something approximating a smile.
Read more....