FOR a TV series that lasted only two series – 64 episodes between 1964 and 1966 – The Addams Family has remarkable longevity. Helped by continual showings on late night TV and four films featuring the characters, it was almost inevitable that someone (Andrew Lippa) would add music and, adapt (Marchal; Brickman and Rick Elice)…
MORE contradictory stories and legends – including how she acquired the nickname of Calamity Jane – have probably been told about Martha Jane Canary than of any other frontierswoman of the second half of the 19th century. Thanks to Jean Arthur’s portrayal in Cecil B DeMille’s The Plainsman, and the wonderfully effervescent Doris Day, in…
JAMES May, the television presenter who owns the Royal Oak pub in Swallowcliffe between Shaftesbury and Salisbury, will be taking audiences through time and across thousands of miles in his new stage show, coming to Southampton Guildhall on 23rd October. The Top Gear and Grand Tour star is presenting a very different – and generally…
FOR many years, one of the great teats a group of us enjoyed was to go on Shrove Tuesday to a friend’s house to enjoy home-made pancakes. Good cook as she was, we were never offered the first pancake made, because she said it was never up to the standard of those that followed. Anyone…
WITH a few brush strokes in his paintings The Finish and The Greyhound, artist John Skeaping created all the power, grace and beauty of two horses fighting out the finish of a race, and a greyhound’s elegance of movement. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first and best known of his seven…
SINCE its first performances in 1957, in French and later in English, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has been subjected to endless debate, interpretation and controversy, by academics, students, theatre-goers and critics. Regarded by many as the greatest work by the Irish Nobel literature laureate, the play was written while the writer lived in France, where the…
PHILIPPE Sands is probably this country’s most famous and respect human rights lawyer. He comes to the Marine Theatre at Lyme Regis, in conjunction with the East Devon-based Shute Festival, on Thursday 25th September to talk about his latest book, 38 Londres Street, in which he uncovers some of the darkest secrets of Chile’s history,…
THERE are several definitions of the term Pot Licker, and the one that describes mischievous Icelandic Yule Lads pranksters fits Dorset-based playwright Ed Viney’s play extremely well. Just as the Yule Lad licks a pot clean, leaving not a morsel behind, so Viney explores the fate of three school teachers who, faced with the problem…
JOHN Godber’s 1977 play Bouncers was once voted the nation’s most popular play, and has been performed at the National Theatre, toured the world and been staged by countless amateur companies in its almost 50-year long life. The current production at Sherborne’s Studio Theatre, directed by Sarah Webster, is my first encounter with this story…
AN exhibition, at Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, from 27th September to 10th January 2026, A Life Outside: Hope Bourne on Exmoor, offers a new appraisal of the work and life of the Exmoor writer and artist. Created in partnership with The Exmoor Society, which cares for The Hope L Bourne Collection, the exhibition considers…