Little Howard’s Big Question

Episode: What is the World’s Most Dangerous Food?

Broadcast Info: Wednesday, 15 Sep 2010, 16:00 (30 mins), BBC1

Synopsis: More adventures with the inquisitive six-year-old cartoon boy. A sudden fear of coconuts sends Little Howard off on a quest. What’s more dangerous – honey gathering in Nepal or eating a Dorset chilli?

And at this point, I thought Woo… That must be the Dorset Naga (one of the hottest chillies in the world).

The Dorset Naga. Photograph copyright Sea Spring Seeds.

So I phoned up Michael Michaud at Sea Spring Seeds in West Bexington, and he said: “Yeah, that’s us. They came down to see us. It’s a kind of half-cartoon, half-real-person thing. I ended up talking to a cardboard cut out and they filled it in with this little kid. It’s fun!”

Michael said the programme was shown last year but I never heard about it and, now it’s being repeated, I thought you might like to know to about it too.

“What I like about it is, it’s not patronising,” said Michael. “It doesn’t talk down to kids.”

I didn’t ask him which activity was judged to be most dangerous – honey gathering or Naga eating. I’d guess the former - what always surprises me most about the Naga is how fruity it is, not simply how hot - but we’ll have to see.

PS: While we’re on the subject of children’s TV programmes, it’s also worth watching out on CBeebies for Nuzzle and Scratch. Partly filmed in Weymouth, it’s about two alpacas who get sent out from an employment agency to work for different clients. It’s very funny. I particularly recommend the cinema episode.

Lush Places folk haven’t stopped talking about it since the workmen appeared on Friday with their Spiderman glue resin and fine white grit.

They knocked on doors to ask people to move their cars.

‘Sorry chaps,’ was the response at one door. ‘The person parked there is in Australia.’

So they went off for a fag to ruminate, cursing the powers-that-be for refusing to send out letters in advance to those who might be affected.

An hour or so later, they contacted the office and were told to knock on doors again and get on with it.

Luckly, the Aussie traveller’s car was not in the way and they created a matching crescent across the road in front of the old pub, with a Chesil Beach sandbar in lieu of a pavement down to the primary school.

We’re planning floodlit beach volleyball under the new streetlights this week.

Like Danny Boyle’s The Beach, here in Lush Places we’re living in a parallel universe.

Sales of the West Dorset edition dropped to just 317 a week during the first half of this year, according to official circulation figures.

The Sherborne edition fell to 445 a week.

What were they before?

Look at this.

Average circulation of the Gazette’s West Dorset edition for the second half of last year (July – Dec 2009) was 2,663.

Sherborne’s average sale over the same period was 2,841.

So the West Dorset edition has lost 2,346 of its buyers – that’s 88%.

The Sherborne edition has lost 84% of its buyers (2,396).

The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) certificate for the Western Gazette, over the first half of this year, is unusually revealing because of the paper’s merger between March and June of its West Dorset and Sherborne editions.

So you can see that at the start of this year the West Dorset edition was selling 925 copies a week, Sherborne 1,044.

If those numbers seem much less than the ones given above for the last six months of 2009, well, we must remember that those figures were averaged out over six months, and guess that they must have been considerably higher in the summer of 2009 than they were at the end of the year.

Anyway, come March 2010 the Western Gazette suddenly merged its Sherborne and West Dorset editions, with Sherborne initially given much greater prominence than West Dorset.

The merger was not well received in the Bridport area.

Nevertheless, sales for the joint edition from 18 March to 3 June averaged 2,304; that’s more than the combined total for West Dorset and Sherborne at the start of the year.

However, in June the two separate editions appeared again. At the time, a Western Gazette staffer told me, in conversation, that the merged edition had indeed proved to be particularly unpopular in the Bridport area, where readers had been deserting it.

Are they coming back? Buyers, once lost, can be hard to recover.

The ABC website only gives figures up until the end of June, which takes us back to where we started: West Dorset 317, Sherborne 445.

The Gazette’s circulation overall for Jan – June 2010 is recorded as 30,052 (down from 30,789 July – Dec 209).

So West Dorset now accounts for just over 1% of that, Sherborne nearly 1.5%.

Incidentally, the population of the area covered by West Dorset District Council, which obviously includes Sherborne, is about 97,000.

Editor’s Note: The drops above – 88% and 84% – look incredible, but they are based on official figures from the ABC, and they have been double-checked. Nevertheless, if there is some mistake lurking somewhere, I’d be pleased to have it pointed out to me.

A puzzle about circulation

There is a further question about all these figures that I don’t understand, which is how exactly it’s been worked out that the Western Gazette’s average circulation for Jan – June 2010 is 30,052.

According to the ABC, it’s selling 3,847 in North Dorset, 12,345 in Yeovil, 3,482 in Crewkerne and 5,253 in South Somerset. That’s 25,017 in total. Then there’s an average of 280 added for multiple bulk sales, making 25,297.

The average figures for West Dorset and Sherborne are more difficult to work out, because of the odd periods of time that different editions were for sale, but let’s just – as an indicative figure – add up the different numbers for each edition and divide them by three.

We’ll cut the number for the merged West Dorset – Sherborne edition in half, giving 1,152 of the total recorded sale of 2,304 to each.

So, West Dorset: 925 + 1,152 + 317 = 2394, divided by three = 798.

Sherborne: 1,044 + 1,152 + 445 = 2641, divided by three = 880.

Add 798 and 880 to the previous total of 25,297 and you’ve got 26,695.

That is an indicative figure only but it’s still not very close to 30,052.

As I hinted before, I’ve got a horrible feeling I’m missing something here, or that there’s a mistake lurking somewhere, which is why I’ve been worrying at these calculations.

So I’ll say again: if anyone can enlighten me, please do.       

Mark Titchner, London

Mark Titchner is fascinated by belief, and specifically how we sell it. This former Turner nominee’s sculptures, posters and videos assault and seduce with the totems and typeface of religious sects, propaganda, pop-culture jingoism and cultish arcane symbols. His latest works address the illusion that things last. Pitching modern industry against ancient religion, new video works and newspaper headlines are set against one of the oldest bits of land art, the Cerne Abbas Giant, a chalky outline on a Dorset hillside.

Still from Man, Hill, Sky, Seven Days, Seven Nights (2010), by Mark Titchner

The Rude Man, as he’s known, might be ancient, with a global rep as a fertility symbol, but Titchner undercuts assumptions about the club-wielding fella’s big qualities by making him rise from the ground and kneel in prayer.

Vilma Gold, E2, Thu to 3 Oct

Skye Sherwin 

Antoinette Hächler, Walsall

Art is a game in which the artist creates, or at least recreates, the rules. Then, of course, the artist must play at it with full conviction if the viewer is to be convinced. On New Year’s Day 2007 the artist Antoinette Hächler made a resolution: on every one of the next 365 days, she would paint a portrait of a person she encountered that day. Friends, family and chance encounters would be photographed during daylight, with these images used in the evenings as source material for the paintings. The format was the same throughout and once a portrait was begun, it couldn’t ever be discarded. The accumulated result is a fascinating community of painterly eccentricities.

The New Art Gallery Walsall, to 3 Oct

Robert Clark 

Caroline Bergvall, Southampton

Compared to today, the first half of the 20th century was a golden era for art and poetry crossbreeding, from the dadaists to concrete poetry. Thank heaven then for Caroline Bergvall, an artist and poet pushing the boundaries of language in a blogged-up and twittering digital world. Conceived with collaborators including architectural team DvsN, composer Zahra Mani and designer Alex Prokop, her architectural installation and web project, Middling English, explores word media. Using the visual, audio, kinetic and print forms, her new lingo reads like a wild blend of Chaucer, SMS-speak and Anthony Burgess’s droog slang.

John Hansard Gallery, Tue to 23 Oct

SS 

Andrew Stonyer, Kettering

A peculiar contraption is suspended from the branches of three alder trees. Corresponding with changes in daily sunlight, solar photocells in the tree canopy trigger low-voltage charges, activating plectrums that pluck wire strings within the body of the sculpture. This is Andrew Stonyer’s Audio Kinetic Solar Sculpture, a kind of sunlight-driven Aeolian harp. In the past, Stonyer has worked with more urban scenarios – one piece responding to the vibrations set off by trains – but the Fermynwoods sculpture is unashamedly rural in its open-ended perspective. And Stonyer avoids spaced-out cliches through the sculptural rigour and sheer sonic effectiveness of his come-to-life objects.

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, to 26 Sep

RC 

Male, London

This group show is a love letter to the male form, one seemingly dashed off late at night in the grip of erotic fervour. A photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans captures the rosily sunburned nape of a skinhead’s swan-like neck as the photographer and his subject brush past one another. Paul P paints a youth in shadowy profile, like a classical hero. Jack Pierson revels in corny fantasy in his carefully composed photo portrait of a buff, chiselled guy falling out of his clothes. Peter Hujar photographs a quartet of Puerto Ricans. In other works, artists draw imagery from vintage gay porn and internet hook-up sites. It’s all part of an ongoing exploration of male identity and desire by curator Vince Aletti, original Rolling Stone disco columnist and present-day photography critic for the New Yorker. He bills the work as “ardent, obsessed, freaked out, blissed out, sexy”, and it certainly delivers.

Maureen Paley, E2, Sat to 3 Oct

SS

Mixtapes, Cork

Mixtapes, for those in the 1980s, pre-download era of cassettes, were home compilation recordings of pop music that one might send off to friends or lovers. So the Mixtapes exhibition brings together the works of visual artists who have an interest in the paraphernalia around the actual sounds: the posters, fanzines, videos, club projections, album covers, clothes, codes of behaviour and social attitudes. In film, drawing, photography and installation, the likes of Anne Collier, Sarah Doyle, Jim Lambie and Dan Graham reveal themselves as the sort of fans that identify with particular aspects of pop music more than any other contemporary cultural medium.

Lewis Glucksman Gallery, to 24 Oct

RC

Eadweard Muybridge, London

When Eadweard Muybridge took his legendary photographs of horses in motion in 1877, no one knew for sure that a horse’s four feet lifted into the air simultaneously as it cantered along. His photographic series of animals in motion changed how we think about existence itself. Life was no longer a smooth ride through time, but could be examined as splintered moments. His vast influence has spilled into the work of writers and artists from Proust to Freud, the futurists to Francis Bacon, Duchamp to Douglas Gordon. This survey reveals there was more to Muybridge than motion, including his landscape photography and output as a documentarist, war correspondent and inventor. Created at a time of rapid technological advances, it’s a revealing snapshot of the artist’s changing times.

Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 16 Jan

SS

Edith Mak, Derby

The title of Edith Mak’s installation, Visible To Invisible, indicates the tremulous interland she treads between sculptural presence and the emotional tinges of its subject matter. Mak plays with multimedia and sculptural reflections, shadow plays and cryptic visual codes. Her allusions might be unclear, but the work is presented with such finesse it’s always convincing. There are hints of braille and intricate computer networks; a vulnerable signalling in the dark; information transformed into a silent but stunning baroque ballet. This distinctive exhibition – shown alongside work by Deb Allitt and Justine Nettleton – marks her as young artist to watch.

Deda, to 16 Oct

RC

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010 

An estimated £2 million is needed to reverse the deterioration of the Grade II* Listed Building that  has occurred since 1997, when it stopped being a public library.

Bridport Area Development Trust (BADT), supported by Bridport Museum Trust, wants to turn the LSI into a Heritage and Study Centre based on Bridport’s centuries-long industrial and cultural involvement with rope and net.

At the High Court this week, LSI leaseholders Dorset County Council argued that BADT should only be given nine months, at the end of which the council should be allowed to put the building up for sale.   

But High Court Master Nicolas Bragge accepted the argument put forward by BADT volunteers Charles Wild and Crystal Johnson that 18 months was needed to make bids to funding bodies.

Bridport County Councillor Karl Wallace testified to the court that the LSI was an important Bridport building and that local people supported BADT’s ideas.

However, Dorset County Council was authorised to investigate the market for a possible sale of the building.

But – it is worth repeating – the council was told it could not place the building on the market or  dispose of it.

Charles Wild, who is also a Bridport town councillor, said: “We are pleased with this outcome. This is a big challenge and the Court decision leaves an enormous amount of work to be done. But the Museum project has been gaining a lot of local support, and Crystal Johnson has put together an exceptional project proposal which includes a workable ten-year business plan.

“We feel it is right that the time should be allowed to give the proposal a chance of succeeding and bringing a much-loved and important building back into community use.

“Dorset County Council will be invited to appoint a representative to the project development group and we hope they will play a constructive role in trying to make this work.”

A spokesman for Dorset County Council said: “The High Court order has given the Bridport Area Development Trust (BADT) 18 months to develop a business plan for the future of the Bridport Scientific and Literary Institute, including proposals to meet the building’s estimated £2.2 million refurbishment costs.

“Bringing the building back into community ownership is our preferred way forward, but it is crucial that progress is made by the BADT in developing a sound business plan and we will be supporting the Trust towards that goal.”

Some quick background information: In January 2010 the High Court issued an Order that approximately six months should be allowed for BADT to establish itself as a body in which the LSI could be vested for a use in line with the charitable and educational objectives of the original trustees who founded the Institute in the 1850s.

During the course of this year, the Development Trust has become fully constituted and is now a registered Charity.

This week’s High Court hearing was held to establish whether the Trust should be given more time or whether Dorset County County should be allowed to seek a sale. The outcome was as above.

Updated with comment from Dorset County Council on September 6.

The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest is meant to encourage the return of a kind of experimental and eco-friendly craftsmanship.

The first graduate students on the Association’s new Design and Make course will arrive this autumn – and West Dorset will then be able to boast Britain’s first campus devoted to alternative uses for wood.

As was first reported on Real West Dorset earlier this year, the Architectural Association has been given outline planning consent for staff and students to design and put up more than a dozen new buildings in the 350 acres of Hooke Park.

The forest already has several unique buildings from the 1980s and the 1990s, when it was controlled by the Beaminster furniture maker and designer John Makepeace; others have been constructed this century by visiting AA students.

There is nowhere else quite like it.

The Hooke Park Workshop, by Richard Burton of ABK and Frei Otto, with the engineers Buro Happold. The building uses spruce thinnings from Hooke Forest to form a compression grid-shell structure. Completed in 1989. Two of the three bays of the roof accommodate a large fully equipped timber workshop, the third contains an office-studio with computing facilities and a small library. Photograph by Valerie Bennett.

A Separate Place. A hanging retreat in Hooke Forest built in 2007 during a month-long summer workshop by a student group led by Jesse Randzio. Photo by Jesse Randzio.

The AA is the world’s most renowned and influential school of architecture, set up 162 years ago.

The Hooke Park vision is – and I quote – “to combine the global experience and talent of the world’s most international architectural school with that of local craftspeople, whose wood-working, building, boat-making and other skills [will help] to create a unique new setting for architectural education.” 

It will be hands-on, back to nature.

In other words, as the editorial puts it in the new issue of Crafts magazine, “it aims to re-introduce craft skills into practice… Do we detect a backlash against the computer-led funny-shapism which has dominated the [architectural] profession for the last 15 years.”

Hooke is supposed to reflect the idea that if you’ve physically put something together yourself, you’ll better understand why buildings stand up or fall down.

Hence, perhaps, the Wakeford Bequest, given by the family of Norah Garlick in the name of Norah’s parents, Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford. Horace Wakeford’s building firm was a favourite of Sir Edwin Lutyens. The company continues today as Stepnell Ltd, which has an office in Poole.

Brett Steele, Director of the AA School of Architecture, said in a statement: “We are enormously grateful to Norah Garlick and her family, who share our vision of a woodland campus dedicated to fostering a re-connection between hand-on design and construction cultures as a path forward towards new ways of thinking, working and building.

“The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest is an unprecedented commitment to not only the AA, for which we are deeply appreciative, but also demonstrates great optimism in our open experimentation with not only new kinds of architecture, but as well, new forms of teaching and learning.”

The Crossings Project, completed in 2007. An experimental footbridge within Hooke Forest. An AA student-built project led by Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Nathalie Rozencwajg. Photograph by Martin Self.

Car boots are open on the hall forecourt, spilling out dahlias, leeks the length of Chile and spikes of gladioli sharp enough to impale yourself on. Gardeners, bakers, photographers and handicraft makers walk into the hall steadily, carefully, so as not to trip.

A gardener from Lush Corners, Lush Places’ smaller neighbour, clutches a mother-in-law’s tongue and peeks out from the stiff leaves to find her way in through the lobby, which is lined with decorated paper plates all in a class of their own.

She is annoyed with herself because she has left her tomatoes and her longest runner bean at home and time is running out.

There is muttering over marrows too heavily polished and slurpy-looking jam. A late entry is brought in by a tousled-looking woman who stayed up until 3.30am playing Pictionary, making buttonholes and cooking chutney.

Over on the photographic table, people surreptitiously swap their entries around, hoping their top left spot will make their picture stand out that much more than the opposition. People new to the village are eyed suspiciously, as they bring in beautifully decorated cakes and artwork good enough to line the walls of Sladers Yard at West Bay.  Bloody incomers.

This year I have submitted eight pictures in the photographic section. I am hoping for success with my entry in the ‘wildlife’ category. It’s a close-up of our local lottery winner pointing at the camera. He has a face carved from Mount Rushmore and hair of steel grey wire.

It could win, I tell him, agreeing to split the prize money if it does.

His eyes light up.

‘That’ll be all of 20p then,’ I say.

Two days ago, an upside down rainbow hung in the blue sky above Lush Places, like a multi-coloured smirk in the air.

Winning entry? I should be so lucky.

Aerial photographs taken earlier this summer revealed three sides of a lightly built defensive enclosure in a barley field near Bradford Abbas.

Marks showed up through the crop because the long hot days of June had parched the ground.

The Roman camp discovered near Bradford Abbas in West Dorset. Photograph copyright English Heritage.

English Heritage say the camp provided basic protection for Roman soldiers on manoeuvres in the first century AD.

It’s one of only four discovered in the south west of England.

Aerial photography was developed as a technique to uncover archaeological secrets by OGS Crawford before World War Two.

You can read more about him and Dorset by clicking here.

English Heritage say they were lucky to avoid the effects of the Icelandic ash which grounded thousands of other flights, but not their Cessnas.

Damian Grady, English Heritage Senior Investigator based in Swindon, said: “Fortunately the piston-powered Cessnas used by aerial archaeologists were not affected by the ash, so it was easier to undertake planned flights inside airspace around Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Bristol airports.  

“Promising signs started to emerge in late May when the dry conditions had started to reveal cropmarks on well drained soils, especially river gravels and chalk in the East and South East of England. By June it became clear that the continuing dry conditions would produce good results across most of the country. We then targeted areas that do not always produce cropmarks, such as clay soils, or have seen little reconnaissance in recent years due to recent wet summers or busy airspace.

“Unfortunately July saw deterioration in the weather which reduced the amount of flying we could do and the cropmarks started to disappear just before the harvest got underway.

“It will take some time to take stock of all the sites we have photographed, but we expect to discover several hundred new sites across England.” 

Despite the bad weather and the resulting ‘No Show’ of the RAF Red Arrows, the Fun Day afternoon and the evening Summer Dance were enjoyed by hundreds of locals and visitors alike when otherwise they would have stayed at home fed up with nothing to do. What an achievement!

The sky wasn't blue for the Red Arrows over Drimpton this year... but next year?

We set out months ago with a plan to foster community spirit, to have fun and to raise funds for village-based good causes. Did we succeed?

Did we foster community spirit? Fun Day has been talked about for ages. It has caused a buzz in the village and it could not have been made without the help of no less than 61 volunteers, all of whom put their hearts and souls into making the day such a wonderful success. Yes, we achieved that aim.

Did we have fun? We attracted a lot of locals and visitors, many of whom were disappointed with not seeing the Red Arrows, and all of whom were fed up with the weather. But did they drop their heads and leave? No, they stayed, spent their money and enjoyed the cracking show that we had put on for them. At 5.00pm children enjoyed their happy party, and ‘Summer Dancers’ returned in the evening to enjoy one of the best social evenings the village has enjoyed for a long time. Yes, we had fun.

Did we raise funds? Yes! As a result of all the good work put in by the committee and  volunteer helpers over the months, and thanks to the generosity of local people and businesses, the Drimpton Fun Day Fund has £1900 to award to village-based good causes. The first donation of £500 has already been authorized. It is to Drimpton Village Hall & Recreational Trust who manage and maintain the Hall and Playing Field for the benefit of the community. This sum is to cover the cost of providing long awaited access to the Playing Field.

Anyone in Drimpton, Netherhay, Greenham and district can now apply in writing for money to support local causes however small. Requests will be considered by the Drimpton Fun Day Trust Committee.

What about next year? The Red Arrows called at 5pm on Saturday to express their disappointment that the weather had called a halt to our eagerly awaited fly past and to offer support for our day next year. So, watch this space!

Yes, opera.

“The building was originally erected for dual use as a cinema and opera house for the Palmer brewing family, who wanted to bring opera to Dorset.”

So reads the citation for the Grade II listing of the Electric Palace by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on 29 April, 1999.

I found my copy of this document by chance after it was first reported (on Real West Dorset) that the Palace wanted to install an expensive satellite dish so as to be able to broadcast live high-definition performances from the Metropolitan Opera in New York and perhaps also the National Theatre in London.

And I thought – fancy that…

[Note added Saturday, August 28: You can now read the Electric Palace listed building details online by clicking here]

So, even though I have almost no appreciation of opera whatsoever, I’m going to report that this Thursday evening (August 26) West Dorset MP Oliver Letwin will be taking to the stage of the Electric Palace to show his support of the venue’s efforts to reinvigorate opera and reach out to a broader public.

The opera shown will be Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, directed for the stage by Franco Zeffirelli, and starring Fiorenza Cedolins, Marcello Giordani, and Juan Pons.

Madama Butterfly

The aim of this benefit screening is to raise money for the costly purchase and fitting of the bespoke dish required to receive a season of 11 Met Live performances.

This will be the fifth year that shows have been broadcast live from New York; they now reach more than 1.6 million people in 35 countries.

Tickets for Madama Butterfly cost £15, including a glass of wine.

They are on sale now from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901.