Jesca Hoop: "It feels good to tell people how it was."

Several years ago Jesca Hoop was sitting in the bath in Los Angeles when the phone rang. At the other end was Elbow's Guy Garvey. He had heard her debut album, Kismet, and wanted to know more about its author. It turned out to be a pivotal moment. As well as interviewing her on his radio show on BBC6 Music, thereby introducing her to a British audience, Garvey invited Hoop to support Elbow on tour. Through that she met her current partner, the band's manager, Tom Piper, prompting her move from sunny LA to the earthier environs of Chorlton in Manchester.
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Radio column: Ulysses blooms once more

Like many others before me, I attempted Ulysses in my late teens. I managed to read the whole of the spine before uttering an exhausted "Sod this" and turning my attention to what I felt was a more deserving literary cause: Jilly Cooper's Riders.
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Radio column: How Richard Branson grew up and found his wings

When Richard Branson was five years old his mother stopped the car, ordered him to get out and told him to make his own way to his grandparents' house. This, it turns out, wasn't an act of cruelty but an effective lesson in learning how to stand on your own two feet.
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Radio column: a cringing royal appointment

How do you do the Jubilee on the radio? Is it actually possible to discuss the impending royal knees-up without archive films of trestle tables bisecting drab Seventies streets, and of the young monarch gamely watching "exotic" performances under a canopy in an unnamed African country, the Duke silently rolling his eyes in the background.
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Radio column: How the Brits lost their Blitz spirit

Whatever happened to stoicism? At what point did we Brits give up on the chilliness enforced by centuries of corporal punishment and parental indifference and yield to the impulse to get everything out in the open?
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TV review: Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, BBC Four

Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.
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Music review: Live Transmission: Scanner and Heritage Orchestra rework Joy Division, Dome, Brighton

Finally! Thirty-two years to the day that the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen comes an event celebrating his musical legacy rather than wallowing in the myth and melodrama of his demise.
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Theatre review: The Jolly Folly of Polly the Scottish Trolley Dolly and Other Mini-Marvels, Brighton Fringe

In a tiny upstairs theatre, a man in a wig and kimono asks us to imagine we’re in the Albert Hall. We never discover his name though, in his role in a glittering production of Madame Butterfly, he is known as “Second Japanese villager on the left”.
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Graham Coxon: All a blur

On an unusually bright morning at Graham Coxon's house in Camden, north London, his girlfriend Essy lets me in and directs me upstairs to the attic room where Coxon is having his picture taken. I am followed by Frankie, the couple's hyperactive terrier, who spends much of the next hour trying to insert her nose in my sheepskin boots, despite the very visible obstruction that are my legs.
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TV review: Tales of Television Centre, BBC Four

“It’s like Big Ben. It’s like the Houses of Parliament. It’s like St Paul’s,” observed Susan Hampshire, reflecting on the iconic properties of Television Centre, the BBC’s 52-year-old nerve centre. Steady on, Susan, you thought, let’s not overdo it. But that was before we’d seen some of its most long-serving and frankly terrifying employees, Paxman, Attenborough and Bakewell among them, getting all misty-eyed over this unprepossessing lump of concrete and glass, and mourning its imminent demise.
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Radio column: Leaving it to the listeners

"I'm relying on your wit because I've left mine in a caravan in Altrincham," announced Liza Tarbuck at the start of her new show on Radio 2. Alas, she wasn't joking.
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Theatre review: A World I Loved, Brighton Festival

Among the many heartening aspects of last year’s Arab uprisings was the visible role of women in the protests. These women might easily have looked to the writings of Wadad Makdisi Cortas for inspiration.
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Music review: The Great Escape, Various Venues, Brighton

The Great Escape, Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-by-Southwest festival, has grown at an alarming rate in its six-year existence. Now hosting 300 bands across 30 venues, the most visible result of this expansion is a problem with queues.
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Radio column: Portrait of a gospel great

Mahalia Jackson was a woman on fire," said Cerys Matthews in Conjuring Halie in that tremulous half-whisper of hers. "Her hair danced madly when she sang out in her rich contralto voice, and (she) moved her listeners to shout and cry."
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Book review: Banksy - The Man Behind the Wall, By Will Ellsworth-Jones

Portrait of the artist as an urban vandal and control freak
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