review

Review: The Little Book Of Birmingham

Books make ideal low-impact presents, they’re easy to wrap, they pretty much always describe their contents so you can be roughly sure that you’ve got something acceptable, and they are so portable that unthankful recipients can pop them down to the British Heart Foundation shop and say “yes, it was so good I’ve been lending it to people” to explain its absence from their bookshelves. Publishers know this and will knock out any old tat around Christmas, books aimed at becoming presents for people you know or care very little about. Why else would Jeremy Clarkson be a published author, why else would tedious collections of Shakespeare’s unfunniest jokes clog the tills at WH Smiths (when all you really want is to pay for your fountain pen cartridges and get out of there, and no I don’t want a slab of Dairy Milk the size of Belgium for 5p thanks)? But every so often there’s a book which, despite having the a title starting “The Little Book of…”, you can safely read without bemoaning the crass commercialisation of the spectacle. Such a book is my, as yet unpublished, Little Book of Cliff Richards’s Girlfriends, but another one is Norman...

Dick Whittington defeats Nigel Havers in a short swordfight, so the Sultan of Morocco hands him the girl and the Mayorship of London; an odd election process, but if that’s what’s in the Tories’ Localism Bill we’ll have to deal with it. It’s how Boris got the job after all, besting Nick Berry in two rounds of Greek wrestling. Sion Simon will no doubt be spending the Christmas break practising manipulating his foil.

Review: Sleeping Beauty at the Hippodrome

I love panto, I love its traditions, its history, its very Englishness and its tendency to throw up hairy men in backless dresses and tights. So much that I’ve spend way too much time dragging the medium into the 21st Century on Twitter, but last night I went to see my first actual in-the-flesh with-well-know-people panto for about 20 years. The Hippodrome’s Sleeping Beauty is a thoroughly modern panto too, the 3D (yes really), a character out of adverts (although everyone loves Churchill the dog) and a star that has risen only in the environs of reality TV. That said it still has all the proper ingredients: a dame, the chameleonic (as long as it’s within the tall bloke in dress category) Ceri Dupree, fart jokes, songs that seem to hold up the action, references to nearby towns being uninhabitable, everything you’d expect. I’m no great Joe Pasquale fan, as indeed I wasn’t a big Russ Abbot fan the last time I went to a panto (that too was at the Hip, Aladdin), but it’s odd how some actors or comedians seem only to really be at home in this special brand of theatre. It’s difficult to see how...

I recently had the pleasure of photographing the interior of Blue Mango Indian restaurant and the proprietor kindly invited me for a meal there. I don’t frequent Broad Street very often, and I before my photo mission I wasn’t aware that the restaurant was there! It’s kinda off the beaten track of Broad Street and can be found in Regency Wharf which also houses a couple of other eateries. The interior is stylish and spacious – you won’t be bumping elbows with the people at the next table! The waiters were attentive and efficient. The food was elegantly presented and more importantly it tasted very, very good! It made for a sophisticated dining experience. The week before I went to the very popular Al Faisals on Stoney Lane, which was a different event altogether! A good event, but still very different to Blue Mango. It didn’t have the calm ambiance, was very noisy, the waiters were efficient but maybe a little too much – no sooner had I taken the last bite of my starter, out came the main course. It was a bit more rushed. Having said that, I enjoyed eating there, and loved the food but the Blue Mango...

The wonderful Flatpack festival has sort of started, sort of. Although the proper launch of actual screenings you go to is not until the 11th, there’s a sort of “retail outreach programme” going on right now that should bring film and the festival to more people. Five pieces of filmic artwork have been installed in shop windows around the City Centre, and they’ll be showing now for the duration of the fest (that’s until the 16th of March). The works are in Urban Outfitters (lovely Vaudeville work by Chris & Kier), Up and Running (Temple Street, a clever animation I couldn’t see well for the throng of viewers), Nostalgia and Comics, the big yellow second hand clothes shop in Digbeth (it’s called Cow, who knew?) and personal favourite the film(s) by Rill Marchant in ‘a too’ on Ethel St. Nepotistically, Rill’s ‘Dead Air’ is my favourite — but not just because our telly is one of those in the shop window — it makes great use of the intallation by having separate looping films that will cross and mesh to produce a different narative with each watch. It’s also got a noir-ish vibe and a maneki neko in it,...

So to Gigbeth on Saturday. The weather outside was frightful, was the line-up delightful? Well there were enough interesting-sounding acts, and seeing more than one band would be an improvement over yesterday. The 4Talent stage started with a bonus half an hour from Pete Ashton and The Thingamigoops, they’ve got one great song — don’t know the name, we’ll call it the one that goes “widdly widdly widdly weeeeep” — and it can sustain 30 minutes. I’m a big fan of the little one, he should go solo. Rich Batsford had the bonus of a crowd bolstered by people arriving to see the (metal, judging by the fans’ appearance) band on downstairs who were locked out of the room (and in a masterpiece of planning all of the blokes’ toilets in the building). He managed to captivate them with nothing more than his piano and good nature, despite the fact that contemplative and mellow probably wasn’t their reason for turning up. Bizarrely, one guy liked Rich enough to be intently taking photos, but not enough to listen — he’d got his iPod on and turned right up. Maybe he’s got a thing for beards. I hated Iain Woods and...

We didn’t get to see much at Gigbeth on Friday, our stupidity was the problem. But stupidity driven by the pace of technological change. We’d got those fancy QR Code tickets sent to Jules’s mobile phone. She then went and bought an iPhone, losing all the texts. We were ready with our boots blacked, then had to spent a good hour finding confirmation emails and printing out the little pictures to take with us. We were cheered up by one of the codes looking like a monkey’s face (or Andrew Marr in a new BBC political journalists version of Planet of the Apes for Children in Need): Then we got there and the guys on the door hadn’t a clue what to do with the QR Codes anyway, but they found our names on a list and were lovely — and agreed that ours did indeed look like a monkey. The Custard Factory area looked pretty deserted when we arrived, so I’m guessing everyone was ensconced watching the Gulliemots, but we really wanted to see the Young Knives so to the Sanctuary we went. We must have arrived at a bad time as there were no bands in any...

Great to see so many people at Stan’s Café‘s ‘Of All The People In All The World’ — the show where there is a grain of rice for every person on the planet. That’s a lot of rice, some on it’s own, some in piles that would soak up a skip full of balti. What could be a spectacular but worthy and static thing is brought to life wonderfully, by the factory setting — that remains untouched — and by the playful statistics sitting along with the serious. You might find grains lurking where a missing brick should be, or tucked into a foreman’s room. You can tell it gets people thinking, there are conversations happening all around the venue. And it’s ever changing, there were three or four statistics added while we were there — a couple tiny, but some a bag or two in size. The proper seventies sitcom brown overalls are great too: The factory even smells good, I’m guessing that moisture in the air plus the few rays of sun that have snuck out are slowly resulting in George Orwell and co cooking. You can see plenty of photos and reactions on a website built...

Retail Birmingham is a BID – Business Improvement District – with is (stop me if I’m wrong here) kind of a government approved council for businesses in its area, they have a few tax breaks or something and power to spend a bit of cash on things to improve their locale. They’ve got a new website - lovingly and beautifully designed by local dudes 383. The site itself is smart, but the content doesn’t seem to know what it is – is it for customers (nice maps and guides, event listing) or the BID itself (don’tcha think that huge title might be a little confusing?) ? For Brum geeks tho’ – the fun is, subscribe to the RSS feed and get news that doesn’t get the ‘huge Jamelia forehead shot’ treatment on the site – including (how the hell do they calculate?) footfall figures for the city centre: January footfall figures: -5.8% on last years figures Birmingham City Centre – busiest days in January Sat 26 Jan – 284,263 Sat 12 Jan – 242,032 Sat 19 Jan – 238,871 Fri 25 Jan – 206,262 Fascinating stuff – and there’s nice jetwash-porn with before and after pics of when Ramora...

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review

Review: The Little Book Of Birmingham

A sign of Dick, Hippodrome Panto review

Review: Sleeping Beauty at the Hippodrome

Friday Photo by Karen Strunks

Shop window night

Thingamigoops can only get better

Sharpening Knives

Pilau talk

Retail Repackage Remodel

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