Mixing nightclub vibes with West End production values and the raw impact of a music gig, BLAZE is a high-energy show of non-stop dance from some of the world’s hottest DJs, B-Boys and streetdancers. Directed by top West End director and choreographer Anthony Van Laast (Mamma Mia!, Sister Act), BLAZE features 16 of the best streetdancers and breakers in the world.

BLAZE makes its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells’ Peacock Theatre before  commencing an international tour.

Could this mean we are all going to live longer?

A new version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s eighteenth-century poem – a fantastical story of a man’s voyage through nature and his own mind – with music by Southbank Centre Artists in Residence Bellowhead, Lemn Sissay in the title role and a 150-strong community choir of children, teenagers and adults taking part in a performance billed as a ‘people’s opera.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was young I  hated rhubarb. That didn’t stop the good people of my home town of Wakefield having a rhubarb festival every year. To make matters worse my grandad is  a rhubarb farmer.  The location of his  farm is within the three hallowed vertices of the Rhubarb Triangle which covers the area in between Wakefield, Leeds and Bradford (some suggest it also stretches to Rothwell but i’m a purist when it comes to the sacred Triangle).

Over the years I warmed to the taste of this non native (it was brought back to the uk by soldiers who faught in the Crimean war),  sour,  herbaceous perennial to the point that I now relish a good crumble after my sunday lunch.  I also enjoy my Grandads frequent regailing of rhubarb based memories. One of my favorites is about 1953. That year the harvest was partuicularly good and my grandad and my uncle Norman went out and bought deluxe fur coats for their wives. I love this mainly because my grandad always maintains a desheveled, farmer look with tatty wooly jumpers and dungerees.  The thought of him ambling down the lane with my gran glammed up to the nines makes me smile.

My uncle passed away a couple of years ago and as I have an interest in photography my grandad gave me some boxes of his old slides. I was going through them a while ago when I  found this gem. Behold the bumper crop and the two rhubarb beauties.

I went to first school in a small village and in the time I was there the number of pupils was never more than 60. If it snowed or a family moved away or went on holiday, the numbers could plummet to below 10. I mention these numbers because there were never less than 4 teachers which meant a very good teacher/pupil ratio. You would think this would allow the teachers to go into more detail on subjects and generally teach us more but in reality it just meant there was more time to fill and it turned out they often filled the extra time by just making stuff up. For example;

On his first day of middle school a friend of mine was in a Science class when the teacher asked someone to explain colour. My friend excitedly raised his hand and started making uhhh, uhhhhh noises, straining to raise his hand higher than anyone else, the way you did in school when you knew the answer. The teacher nodded at him and he proudly began to explain colour to the rest of the class, as it had been explained to him in first school. He confidently stated that the sky is filled with invisible buckets full of different coloured paint and as the earth spins round and round, the paint buckets tip over and all the paint mixes together to make colours which then land on everything in the world and that is what colour is.

The teacher gawped at him like he was a retarded mule, half the class laughed uncontrollably whilst the rest just looked on disdainfully, their tiny little faces filled to the brim with pity. From that point on he thought twice about answering questions in class, worried to explain that lemonade came from bee tears just in case it was just something Mrs. Green had made up to fill time.

N.B. My time at first school was utterly amazing and despite being presented with the odd bullshit I loved it more than anything.

How was this not horrifying to me as a child. Watching it now makes me want to give up everything and shiver myself to sleep in a shop doorway with only a thin blanket of paranoia to keep me warm.

Perhaps my only hope is to marvel at this amazing list of the shows guest appearances. Garry Glitter, George Best, Geoff Capes, Eric Bristow, Bernard Cribbins, Willie Thorne and Barbara Windsor. Splendid.

I love this music video and was wondering how they’d managed to make it look and feel so authentic. It turns out the footage is taken from a 1977 public information film for British Transport called The Finishing Line. You can watch the actual film here (part 1, part 2). It was deemed so controversial at the time that it was replaced by the slightly less brutal but still harrowing Robbie, which is the one we all got shown at school. You can watch Robbie here (part 1, part 2). I remember sitting in assembly at middle school watching Robbie and all the other utterly terrifying films they showed us, convinced that I would meet a similar horrific fate at some point in my childhood (in my mind I was going to die being electrocuted whilst retrieving an Aerobie from an electricity substation).

This brought to mind the Friday Film Specials, and some of the scarier Children’s Film Foundation productions, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to scare the living shit out of children thus making them utterly scared of adults, the outdoors, modern technology and life in general. I particularly remember One Hour To Zero about a boy who runs away from home. Upon his return he finds his village deserted and is unaware that the village has been evacuated due to danger of explosion at a nearby Nuclear Research Station. The message is clear; even if you’re being beaten to within an inch of your life, starved or abused at home you better not run away or else a nuclear holocaust will get you and everyone else in the world.

I still have a corner of my mind filled with disconnected scenes from these films just waiting to haunt my dreams. A young Dexter Fletcher breaking into old ladies houses while bunking off school only to be caught by the police and sent to prison for ever and ever and ever. That shit scary guy from Lovejoy who played the googly eyed Tinker chasing children round deserted woods and taking them to an island where nobody would ever find them. A kid who was posessed by a pair of red trousers that made him steal things and break into his school only to be caught by the caretaker who was probably played by the previously mentioned googly eyed Tinker. There was also apocalyptic films like Threads, the 1984 television docudrama depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the United Kingdom with the bomb landing in Sheffield (clip, full film). I watched it recently and it’s really ace and really harsh.

Ahhhhh, those were the days.

Really nice short from Gavin McInnes. I particularly like the succinct description;

“Vincent Allen goes to the doctor and finds out he’s an asshole.”

Directed by Mat Whitecross and starring Andy Serkis, Ray Winstone, Olivia Williams and Naomi Harris, the film follows the life of Ian Dury who was stricken with polio at a young age and defied expectations by becoming one of the founders of the punk-rock scene in Britain in the 1970s.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is released on Jan 8.