It’s a highly unlikely storyline: in 1984, a group calling themselves Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners set about fundraising for strikers in a small Welsh mining village, overcoming local prejudice and defying media ridicule to form one of the most unlikely – and powerful – allegiances in the history of civil rights. Implausible, yes. Incredibly, it’s a true story.
This article was initially published in SME Insider.
Kat Heathcote is not a nationalist. In fact, she’s not even Scottish – she’s a Labour-voting Welsh woman whose publishing business exports mainly to Singapore. But in Thursday’s referendum, she’s voting yes.
“Directly, it doesn’t affect my business,” she says, “[but] a country that has 60% of Europe’s oil and 20% of the world’s fish stocks should be a wealthy and successful country.”
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Here I am interviewing Oggi Tomic, whose film Finding Family, co-directed with Chris Leslie, won two BAFTAs and has had enormous international success. More importantly, he’s one of the loveliest people in the film industry (if not the world), with an incredible personal story.
Powerful performances and sublime cinematography help to make this thoughtful Estonian gem one of the highlights of this year’s Festival.
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Pioneer of a mid-20th Century movement that centred around Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive art, Gustav Metzger sought to find a way of integrating art with scientific and technological advances – or even to remove the artist from the process of creation altogether. Now, his site-specific sculpture-experiments have been recreated in an intriguing retrospective at Kettle’s Yard.
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Recently redesigned and peppered with fascinating temporary exhibits, the Scott Polar Research Institute captures the high drama of polar exploration with an emotive urgency that makes it one of Cambridge’s most powerful cultural gems.
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Li Ka Shing Gallery | Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Centuries before the Gutenberg Press revolutionised the spread of Christian and secular thought across Europe, the words of another great religious leader were being expertly printed all across South-East Asia.
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Don’t get me wrong, the Fringe is the best culture festival in the world. But it’s also an Alien-style mass hatching ground for future Mock the Week panellists who, given half the chance, will sneak up on you, plaster themselves over your eyeballs and violently force their way down your gullet.
To cut through the scuttling scrum for eyeballs and eardrums, performers venture further and further into both the avant-garde and the offensive, devising ever more unusual subjects, daft show names and experimental concepts. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it is shite. A lot of it sounds like an in-joke from The Mighty Boosh. Improvised comedy in the style of Jane Austen? An absurdist collective that dances badly to exaggerated French music? Both genuine shows at this year’s Fringe.
So, after extensive trawling, here are the 10 most ridiculous, pretentious and downright weird-sounding shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2014.
Breaking Bad. True Detective. House of Cards. This year’s Television Critics Association Awards saw some seriously high calibre shows recognised with the accolades they deserve. But sashaying triumphantly to the tip of everyone’s tongue was a slice of cultural critique that the Hollywood Reporter described as an “historic win”: the utterly fabulous RuPaul’s Drag Race. Continue reading →
Lindsey Kennedy 