Podcasts about Covent Garden

When Chicago blues pianist, singer and songwriter Johnny Iguana (The Claudettes) discovered bands like Minutemen and Husker Du as a teen in Philadelphia, it opened up a world of musical possibilities he's STILL unpacking. He eventually came into possession of The Roxy London WC2 - a live album of recordings taken from various punk bands that played at The Roxy club in Covent Garden, London between January and April 1977 - and the raw, unfettered performances of bands like Wire, Buzzcocks and X-Ray Spex captivated him like nothing else at the time.  Turn this episode UP! Songs discussed in this episode: (Stage patter, The Roxy London 1977) - Johnny Moped (Paul Halford); Touch You Back - The Claudettes; Oh Bondage Up Yours! (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - X-Ray Spex; I Love Living In The City (Live from The Decline of Western Civilization) - Fear; I'm On Fire (Live from Urgh! A Music War) - Chelsea; Tom Sawyer (Piano version) - Ian Hanson Piano; Viet Nam - Minutemen; Big Boss Man - Jimmy Reed; Show Me The Way (Live) - Peter Frampton; Turn The Page - The Streets; Runaway (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - Slaughter & the Dogs; Action - Oh My God; Boston Babies - GBH; Boston Babies - UK Subs; Boston Babies (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - Slaughter & the Dogs; Freedom (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - The Unwanted; Dot Dash, Lowdown, 1.2.X.U. (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - Wire; Gary Gilmore's Eyes, Bored Teenagers (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - The Adverts; Hard Loving Man (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - Johnny Moped; Don't Need It, Waiting For The Man (Velvet Underground Cover), 15 (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - Eater; Oh Bondage Up Yours! (Live at The Roxy London 1977) - X-Ray Spex; Dreaming - Poly Styrene; Everybody's Happy Nowadays, Breakdown, Love Battery (Live at The Roxy London 1977), Why Can't I Touch It? - Buzzcocks; Evidently Chickentown, Health Fanatic (Live from Urgh! A Music War) - John Cooper Clarke; (You Are My) Whole World - The Claudettes

Today I revisit one of my favorite singers of all time, the extraordinary Norwegian lyric-coloratura soprano Eidé Noréna (1884-1968), whose voice and artistry hit me like a bolt out of the blue when I first discovered her recordings several decades ago. Born Karoline Hansen, she made her concert debut at the age of 19 and in 1907 began her operatic career as Amor in Orfeo ed Euridice. In 1909 she married the actor Egil Eide, through whose coaching she became celebrated for her dramatic portrayals. Under her married name Kaja Eide she became one of the Norway's most famous singers, though her career was essentially a provincial one until, mid-career, she restudied her technique and rebuilt her voice, which led to her La Scala debut as Gilda under the baton of Arturo Toscanini (and under her new professional name, Eidé Noréna). She went on to an international career, performing in the world's most celebrated opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, the Salzburg Festival, and, particularly, the Paris Opéra. Her repertoire was a wide one, ranging from Ophélie to Desdemona, and her vocal technique was solid to the point of near-perfection, her legato singing being particularly remarkable. What sets her apart, and what makes her one of my favorite singers, is her profoundly musical interpretations allied to a keen dramatic sense, perhaps instilled in her by her husband. I originally introduced her to my listeners in Episode 71, and I think it's high time we spend some more time with her. In this episode I feature her exclusively in the music of Charles Gounod, beginning with the charming song “Sérénade” set to a Victor Hugo text and continuing with the Roi de Thulé and Jewel Song from Faust, concluding with extended excerpts from Roméo et Juliette. We are lucky that there exists a live recording of a complete (albeit heavily cut) performance from January 1935 of Noréna as Juliette, with the American tenor Charles Hackett (1887-1942) as her Roméo. Excerpts of that recording are supplemented by studio recordings from 1929 of duets from the opera with the Corsican tenor Gaston Micheletti (1892-1959) as her Roméo. Countermelody is the podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and author yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly or yearly support at whatever level you can afford.  

durée : 00:26:10 - par : Lionel Esparza - L'une des plus impressionnantes production du XXe siècle, Don Carlo dirigé par Carlo Maria Giulini et mis en scène par Lucchino Visconti, en 1958 à Covent Garden, est resté dans les mémoires. Quelques années après, le chef italien en gravait une version avec une distribution hollywoodienne... - réalisation : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

durée : 00:26:10 - par : Lionel Esparza - L'une des plus impressionnantes production du XXe siècle, Don Carlo dirigé par Carlo Maria Giulini et mis en scène par Lucchino Visconti, en 1958 à Covent Garden, est resté dans les mémoires. Quelques années après, le chef italien en gravait une version avec une distribution hollywoodienne... - réalisation : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

How do you convince people to spend £400 on a suit… and then wait up to eight weeks for it?That is exactly what Sam and Julian, the founders of Batch LDN, have managed to do.In this episode of Building The Brand, they share how two founders with no fashion background built one of the most interesting menswear brands in the UK by doing almost everything differently.Batch LDN is not a traditional fashion brand. They do not hold huge amounts of stock. They do not rely on fast fashion cycles. They do not lead with endless paid ads. Instead, they batch customer orders together, make every item to order in London using premium Italian fabrics, and have built a brand around quality, community, retail experience and smart casual menswear that actually fits modern life.But this conversation is not just about suits.Sam and Julian talk openly about why industry naivety became an advantage, why sustainability alone was not enough to drive sales, how a real-life robbery became one of their most successful marketing moments, why having the right co-founder changes everything, and why they chose to build through physical retail first when most fashion brands start online.They also break down how Batch LDN has attracted celebrities, sports teams and investors, why Romesh Ranganathan became involved in the brand, how they became the official menswear supplier to Burnley Football Club, and what comes next as they look to expand the product range, grow online and take Batch international.SHOP @ Batch LDN CONNECT WITH OUR BUILDING THE BRAND COMMUNITY▪️ How Batch LDN created a made-to-order casual suit brand▪️ How batching orders helps reduce waste, stock risk and cost ▪️ Why premium Italian fabrics and London manufacturing became core to the brand ▪️ Why Sam and Julian's lack of fashion experience became a superpower ▪️ How sustainability shaped the business internally but failed as the lead marketing message▪️ How a robbery at their store became a viral marketing campaign ▪️ Why the “See It. Say It. Suited.” campaign put Batch on the map ▪️ The importance of having the right co-founder in a startup ▪️ Why physical retail became Batch LDN's strongest sales channel ▪️ Why the founders hired a creator and doubled down on storytelling instead of paid ads ▪️ How celebrities including Romesh Ranganathan, Ashley Walters, Simon Pegg, Ant and Dec, Josh Denzel and others have worn the brand  Key Moments:0:00 — Intro03:33 — How Batch LDN's made-to-order fashion model works06:42 — How Sam and Julian started Batch LDN with no fashionexperience08:03 — The fashion waste problem behind the made-to-order model 12:00 — Why sustainability alone does not sell fashion15:32 — How startup experience helped Batch challenge the fashion industry17:41 — PAUSE POINT: Industry naivety can be a competitive advantage19:34 — The Batch LDN robbery story23:18 — Why the co-founder relationship matters in startup life26:36 — Why Sam chose Julian as his Batch LDN co-founder30:34 — PAUSE POINT: The right co-founder helps carry the weight32:58 — Building the Batch Members Club and fashion community35:20 — How the Covent Garden flagship store became a retail and events space36:54 — Why 80% of Batch LDN revenue comes through physical retail39:20 — Replicating the in-store fitting experience online40:58 — PAUSE POINT: Do not blindly follow the direct-to-consumer startup playbook43:35 — Why Batch LDN hired an in-house content creator46:59 — Doubling revenue without paid social advertising48:55 — Celebrities, social proof and Batch LDN suits in the wild52:17 — Why Romesh Ranganathan invested in Batch LDN53:59 — Taking Batch LDN to America and testing international growth54:30 — Becoming Burnley Football Club's official menswear supplier56:00 — Why sports teams and smart casual menswear are a major opportunity58:29 — New Batch LDN products: corduroy suits, cropped jackets and wider-leg trousers1:00:20 — The five-year vision for Batch LDN

This week we are giving you another chance to hear from Rivals actress Victoria Smurfit who joined Mark Wogan back in January 2025 for a spooning ahead of season 2 of the show being released this weekend.Victoria opens up on her film career, going to a boarding school, her daughter being diagnosed with stargardt's muscular dystrophy, her love of the 70s food cuisine and Mark tries to change Victoria's mind on duck.Dishes Served:Guilty Pleasure: Butterscotch Angel DelightDishes: Mash, Mince and PeasSpoon One: Chicken KievSpoon Two: Duck Spring RollsYou can see Victoria in Rivals season 2 streaming on Sky nowThis episode was filmed at Homeslice at their Christmas pop up in Harvey Nichols in 2024. You can find Homeslice now in The City and in Covent Garden.Follow Spooning With Mark Wogan on Instagram and TikTok by searching @spooningwithmarkwoganSenior Podcast Producer: Johnny SeifertFilming: Chris Jacobs and Louis ThomsonThis is a News Broadcasting Production Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Štefan Margita patří k tenoristům, kteří vystupovali na nejvýznamnějších operních scénách světa: v milánské La Scale, londýnské Covent Garden či Metropolitní opeře v New Yorku. Tento rok oslaví 70. narozeniny a na operním jevišti uzavře jednu část svojí kariéry. „Jsem pyšný na to, že jsem schopný odejít. Dokud mi to bude zpívat, chci dál dělat koncerty, ale už nechci studovat žádné nové produkce,“ říká v pořadu Hovory.Všechny díly podcastu Hovory můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

durée : 00:13:10 - par : Lionel Esparza - Longtemps version de référence du premier opéra de Richard Wagner, cet enregistrement de 1961 réunit, sous la direction colorée d'Antal Dorati, l'Orchestre du Covent Garden de Londres et un plateau vocal de légende : George London en Hollandais et Leonie Rysanek, inoubliable en Senta. - réalisation : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

durée : 00:13:10 - par : Lionel Esparza - Longtemps version de référence du premier opéra de Richard Wagner, cet enregistrement de 1961 réunit, sous la direction colorée d'Antal Dorati, l'Orchestre du Covent Garden de Londres et un plateau vocal de légende : George London en Hollandais et Leonie Rysanek, inoubliable en Senta. - réalisation : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

What happens when the person who has edited nearly 100 episodes of this podcast finally puts all those travel tips to the test on his own UK trip? In this episode, our editor Ryan Fairweather from New Zealand shares highlights from his two-month visit to the UK with his partner Tilly, and reveals how almost every experience on his list came directly from editing the show.Ryan covers his favourite moments in York and London: the wonderful Old York Tea House, the immersive Jorvik Viking Centre, the theatrical York Ghost Bus Tour, and a self-guided mystery adventure through Stratford-upon-Avon with a Mystery Guide. In London, the V&A, Westminster Abbey, and Churchill War Rooms all exceeded expectations, while an evening at Mr Fogg's Society of Exploration in Covent Garden turned into one of the trip's unexpected highlights.We also get into food and drink: Sunday roasts, cream teas, the great scone debate, the cheese conveyor belt at Pick and Cheese, Irn-Bru, supermarket meal deals, and the baffling brilliance of frozen mashed potato. Ryan also shares his top practical tip for any international visitor, and talks honestly about what he would do differently next time.Whether you're planning your first trip to the UK or your fifteenth, this episode is packed with recommendations, real talk and plenty of laughs.You can find links to all the places and experiences Ryan mentioned, plus some photos from the trip, in the show notes at uktravelplanning.com/episode-196.

"The amount of clothing going to landfill every year is astronomical. The stat that always hits hardest is 6 in 10 items of clothing made end up in landfill within a year. When you start to process that, it's pretty wild, it's eye-opening."FOLLOW US:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inside-commerce/ ABOUT THIS EPISODE:How Batch London Rewrites Fashion with Sustainability and Retail InnovationJames ran a panel with today's guest, Sam Matanle, at a Voyage in November 2025. He was impressed by the business story and positive mission to  raise the standard of sustainability in the fashion industry, by reducing waste and overproduction, and knew Sam's story would resonate with our podcast audience.For this episode, you'll hear how two Uni friends quit their corporate roles to launch something they're passionate about, and how they turned a vision into a successful business.Sam is the co-founder of Batch London, and shares his perspective on how the brand is transforming the fashion industry through made-to-order apparel, innovative retail strategies and a strong focus on sustainability. Discover how their approach is influencing consumer habits, retail environments and brand loyalty.Key topics:The origin story behind BatchLDN and its mission to redefine fashion consumption.The benefits of made-to-order manufacturing in reducing waste and increasing quality.Strategies for creating versatile, multi-use clothing for smart casual wear.Opening a flagship store in Covent Garden and the impact on brand awareness and sales.The challenges and opportunities of retail expansion for smaller brands.Building a loyal community through memberships, events and innovative loyalty programsThe importance of in-store experience and staff training for physical retail successLeveraging digital tools, agencies and website audits to optimise online presence.The evolving landscape of consumer consciousness, legislation and environmental responsibility.

Mensen vlogen naar Amsterdam om bij hem te eten — terwijl de zaak nog niet eens open was. Ron Simpson ging viraal met avocado's, haalde 212 miljoen views en bouwde een wereldwijd imperium. Van The Avocado Show naar Winwin Agency — dit is het verhaal van De Showmaker. Sponsors & Kortingen Deze aflevering wordt je aangeboden door Nobotel — bespaar tot 30% op je zakelijke telefoniekosten

What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura's Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there's a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie's 1926 disappearance.Laura, welcome.LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I'm such a fan of your Substack, as you know.OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that's what we like.Christie's Favorite WritersOLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don't you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—OLIVER: We've lost it? We don't have the typescript?THOMPSON: I've never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don't know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don't have to.OLIVER: Yes. There's Shakespeare in every book?THOMPSON: No, but it's there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.OLIVER: Yeah.THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there's a lot of Bible in her books, as I'm sure you've noticed.OLIVER: Yes. Yes.THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.Christie and ShakespeareOLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?OLIVER: Well, let's not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.THOMPSON: That's so interesting.OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don't like and I do—THOMPSON: Go on.OLIVER: It's called Murder Most Foul, isn't it?THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And there's something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can't walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting.OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She's not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.OLIVER: Much more rational.THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she's not mad, Margaret, is she? But she's upset.OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—OLIVER: Waspish.THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that's obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they're structured. That's not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that's obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.She's very—I hope I'm right in saying this—she's very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn't regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What's wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I'll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that's sort of the last thing they are. And they're very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they're full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.Christie on Shakespeare?OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn't. Why?THOMPSON: No. I don't think she ever liked being told what to do.OLIVER: [laughs]THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren't they?OLIVER: Yes, yes. I've only read what's in your book, but yes, I didn't warm to him.THOMPSON: I'm glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they're just thoughts for you.” I don't think she would've felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.OLIVER: Save it for the novels.THOMPSON: Yes, she's a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would've preferred to do that and use it to her ends.And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you've killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.I mean, Miss Marple was. She's quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”OLIVER: It's one of her most striking lines.THOMPSON: It is, isn't it?OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she's very modern, she's very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.Dickens and Christie's FamilyOLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It's obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I'm going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It's the first time there's a police detective in a major English novel.THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don't actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don't know. She had a lot of go in her.And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would've made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you're that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I've never quite got the habit.OLIVER: But if she's born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she's got a somewhat direct—THOMPSON: Yes, she was.OLIVER: You know, it's sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes. Isn't that extraordinary?OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It's crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It's like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.OLIVER: But worse, yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would've been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I'd never, ever thought of that before. Isn't that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I'm leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it's awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.I don't mean to make extravagant claims, but there's a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won't let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.Art and MusicOLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It's very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it's still there.And they used to do this thing—I think it's a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would've dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.THOMPSON: And there's a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn't strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would've been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant's Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it's all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don't, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.Christie's UniquenessOLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn't, to me, feel—she's obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn't feel the same as them somehow.THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: What is that?THOMPSON: Do you think it's her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn't write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that's in that book. It's a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There's a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she's also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.I don't think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she'd dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn't bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they're a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.She doesn't do that with Poirot. He's just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it's that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don't quite do. And at the same time, she's redefining it from within.OLIVER: There's something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don't know, two or three novels, that's gone, and he's Poirot as we know him, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes, yes.OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.Christie and the TheaterTHOMPSON: Yes. She's sort of conceptual and the others aren't quite, I think. She doesn't do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn't—it's not Cluedo, is it? It's not, there's six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it's: it's nobody, or it's everybody, or it's the policeman, or it's a child, or there's something bigger and bolder going on.And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she's incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl's a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there's 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It's all in there.OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan't reveal, but—THOMPSON: That's Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she's given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can't resist—OLIVER: Yes, but that's what I'm saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: No, no. We're crossed wires.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That's a reenactment.OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—OLIVER: I've seen it once. I've seen it—you know, I don't know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it's you.” It's very dramatic moments. You don't like it?THOMPSON: No, I think you're right. I wouldn't mind seeing it done really, really well. There's something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It's in Ordeal by Innocence. It's in Mrs. McGinty. That's, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it's not abandonment, but I think—OLIVER: Well, yes.THOMPSON: — it's not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we've said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I've always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.The TV AdaptationsOLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don't.THOMPSON: Yes, that's true.OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that's really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn't really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don't know. I don't know because I think they're mostly not very good. I don't know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that's deliberate, that they're less—if they drove you back to the books, you'd probably get quite a pleasant surprise.OLIVER: It's hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I'd finished reading her.THOMPSON: What did you think?OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what's she called?THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Hickson. I think she's just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It's all so cleanly done.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that's very good. It's very funny, you know, he gets it.THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn't he? It had gone very, very—OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn't watch them all, no, no.THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.OLIVER: Yes, you did.THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don't think I've ever got—OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they'd hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don't think I've ever got to the end of one of those.But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they're really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren't for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn't happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.Resurgence and PopularityOLIVER: No, they don't have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That's why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don't think—she's always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn't she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she's terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.I'm not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade's called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she's survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she's not real, she's true. I think she's incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there's a femme fatale who's murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can't resist men. She's prey; she's not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They're not predators. They're very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you're very—there's so much easy wisdom in there somehow.And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it's very, “I am wise and you're going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It's all very, “I'm very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything's so easy with Agatha. It's so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there's so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don't think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.Self-AdaptationsOLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?THOMPSON: Yes. That's such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That's not what my audiences are going to want from me. They're just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They're not distilled at all; they're quite the opposite.I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn't have to constantly—they're unresolved; they ask questions that don't have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I'm sure, but I think she would've thought people aren't coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.OLIVER: Hmm.THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn't take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I've just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn't emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.And I think it's extraordinary to me how—it's so difficult for us today, isn't it? We're so at the mercy of “That won't sell, don't do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she's doing, an instinctive sort of—there's a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she's doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don't know that she would be, really. What do you think?OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.THOMPSON: You might know he'd say it right.OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there's a—I think there must have been something about—I think it's in Poirot's Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would've thought the old man had so much blood in him?”And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there's quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she's good enough to run on instinct at times.THOMPSON: That's right. That's it. Exactly. That's absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it's terribly timely—whether it's better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that's when she quotes from the Book of Saul.And it's just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she's really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she'll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It's the whole—it's not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she's got this gift of knowing what flowers we're going to need.I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don't want be like one of those people who's writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It's not—I do think that's a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she's an interplay. And that's why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there's nothing more interesting. There's nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.And she does that—that's at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she's so all the things we've been talking about. She's so distilled, she's so simple, she's so smooth, she's so instinctive. And she's doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—Quick Opinions on ChristieOLIVER: Should we have—THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?THOMPSON: Please.OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—THOMPSON: Oh, god.OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]OLIVER: Hallowe'en Party.THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?OLIVER: I think it's a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.THOMPSON: I can't keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it's better to have experienced it. It's quite a mournful novel.OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Oh, sorry.THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don't you think? Such a clever character.OLIVER: Why didn't she do more of him?THOMPSON: Yes, that would've been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell'arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who's also a moral force, isn't he really? Or—yes, I wish she'd done more. They're marvelous.OLIVER: Towards Zero.THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don't you think?OLIVER: One of the best.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.OLIVER: It's very distinct in her. I haven't read all of her novels, but it's very distinct.THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She's very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there's a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it's so—it just drives along that book, doesn't it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.OLIVER: Death on the Nile.THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it's one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.And I feel that a little bit in that book. There's a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.THOMPSON: It's a great film, yes. Wonderful film.Other Mystery WritersOLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.THOMPSON: You've got me. I haven't read him. Should I?OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.THOMPSON: Can't get into her.OLIVER: No.THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.THOMPSON: No, somebody told—OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that's great.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn't—I read it in a book that she really hadn't liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I'm going to read one, try that, yes?OLIVER: Yes, that's a great book. Margery Allingham.THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I'm in a bit of a fog, but she's quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?OLIVER: She's good at the fog. She's good at that sort of whirligig sense that there's a lot going on—THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.OLIVER: —and you've got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.THOMPSON: You've got me again, Henry.OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You'll like this.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you'll like that a lot.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.THOMPSON: Didn't get on with him.OLIVER: Why not?THOMPSON: Don't know. Don't know. It sounds like I don't read the men, doesn't it? Which is not the truth at all.OLIVER: I think that's fair enough, isn't it?THOMPSON: Well, I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don't know. Why didn't I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don't know. I just didn't get on with it.OLIVER: Too glib?THOMPSON: Possibly.OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn't quite get hold of it in some way. I don't know.OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he's got a bit of a “he's a very clever boy” about him.THOMPSON: Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that.OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.THOMPSON: I haven't read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn't it? I'm starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that's what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don't know why I haven't read him.Christie and NostalgiaOLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?THOMPSON: No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would've written At Bertram's Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that's such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”I've written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she's—well, she's an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they're much more underlined about it. Again, I'm intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?OLIVER: I think there's definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that's disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.THOMPSON: That's true. That's absolutely true. That's The Mirror Crack'd. And it's—OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry's house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn't think hard enough before I answered your question.OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can't sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it's just useful material for her, you know?THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it's a bit sub–Brave New World, but it's very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who's completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it's so true. There's quite a lot of that going on.She's very clear-eyed. So if she—I'm a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can't help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack'd. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—OLIVER: And the adaptations don't help with that.THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it's that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there's no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that's nostalgic in a way.Christie's PoshnessOLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?THOMPSON: Good question. I've been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn't—and that there wasn't much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn't matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it's lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there's a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.It's amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that's how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.Inspirations for Miss MarpleOLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—OLIVER: Drawn from life?THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We're occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn't suitable or whatever, but she's almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She's an observer. She's not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she's the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that's in At Bertram's Hotel. She was—there's a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she'd seen her up in Harrogate, she would've known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she's a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I'm reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it's really astounding to me how there's a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who's kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there's not—it's not only nonjudgmental; there's literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It's really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that's maybe not recognized about her that much.Nursery RhymesOLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?THOMPSON: Yes, that's interesting. They're part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There's books where she—I don't think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that's right? Or do you think it's something more than that?OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it's part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I've—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that's the heart of her. And I also feel it's the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.Wartime ProductivityOLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And as you say, they're some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there's a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn't completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that's like, “You think I'm chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there's something about being in that adorable little flat—they're so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it's absolutely insane how productive she is.And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she's got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there's a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]The Mary Westmacott NovelsOLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I've never read them, but you seem very—THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?OLIVER: You're very up on them. You like them?THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they're very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it's just so dull.THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.OLIVER: I couldn't read it. I couldn't read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn't really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn't.THOMPSON: Well, I think that's probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you've ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I'm going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.Poirot vs. MarpleOLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?THOMPSON: Yes, I've wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don't really think she did. It's just something people say, isn't it?OLIVER: Well, it's a common thing about artists. They're supposed to hate their most successful work, but—THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it's certainly—OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn't he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn't it?THOMPSON: And very kind to her.OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn't do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that's it?THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he's a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.And he is—I don't mean to denigrate David Suchet because he's a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they've got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can't analyze, really. I don't—well, I can't. And that's how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.And she's incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there's no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—OLIVER: [laughs] That's great.THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that's right about Poirot? Do you think there's something more . . .Reader Preferences and SalesOLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader's prejudice involved.THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he's a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he's always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple's just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don't know.THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don't know that she would've been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I'm overdoing her—OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn't she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn't—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it's terrible.But I don't know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they're just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn't write anything at all because I think she thought, “What's the point?” But then, that wasn't her way. But I don't know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.Rereading ChristieOLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: Really?THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don't—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who's my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there's bits of—there is this kind of—there's bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.But there's something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I've said it on Substack—that they're fairy tales for adults. There's something about that. There's an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I'm not going to say she's quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there's something in it because the resolution is so—because it's character based, and at her best, she's character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There's something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I'm experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn't matter if you know who did it. There's so much pleasure in them.Thompson's CareerOLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I'm still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn't very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she's a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.But it's a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I've written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that's okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don't you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don't you think? Did you not find that with your book?OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don't think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it's sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that's fine.THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you've—well, you're in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.And it was about—I can't bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That's a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn't do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.Secretly Reading ChristieOLIVER: And you've said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.OLIVER: That can't be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it's intense.THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I've tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we've been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I've ever read—the best thing I've ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.OLIVER: Oh, thank you.THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it's been a good thing.OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?THOMPSON: It's only a short book—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn't—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.But mainly it's such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can't write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I'm intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.Henry on Agatha ChristieOLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura's always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I'm going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I've lost the taste, in a way.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don't know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I've always thought she's really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I've read this one. I know. Yes. It's the same as the other one, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it's not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don't think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she's great, but it's enough. [laughs]THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she'd written as many books as Agatha, you can't imagine it would've sustained the level of quality.THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn't have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.She has style—I don't know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there's something so fathomless about her, and that's what continues to compel me. But I think it's very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you've let me sort of—OLIVER: Well, it's not that I'm not an admirer. It's just that I don't—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don't know, somehow I've reached a point where it's—I sort of get it, but it's just not that funny anymore. I don't know, just need some time away.THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I'm a bit—she's part of my life now. It's like if somebody said, “You can't read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can't listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it'd be like a kind of death. She's part of my life the same way they're part of my life. She's now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you'll be reassured to know. [laughter]OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.THOMPSON: Oh, I've really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it's been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.OLIVER: Oh, it's been delightful.THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.OLIVER: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Many visitors see a lot in London but still leave feeling like they do not quite understand it. In this episode, Tracy Collins is joined by Robin Launder, founder of Fantastic Walks, to explore how walking tours and storytelling bring London's history to life.Robin shares how his background as a history and English teacher, plus years in education training, shapes the way he guides. You will hear why stories stick, what surprises first timers most about walking tours, and how guides balance humour with the heavier parts of London's past.We also chat through some of Robin's most popular themed walks including Soho Rock and Roll, Westminster Wonders, Hidden London (Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden and back), Churchill, and Jack the Ripper (informed by Robin's earlier career in the prison service and his criminology background).Use exclusive code UKTP10 for 10% discount when booking a London walking tour with Robin at Fantastic Walks.

When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its walls were the great abandoned ruins of antiquity, ‘the works of giants' as one Anglo-Saxon poet put it, and little else. For hundreds of years the site was patchily inhabited, but two features indicated its future importance. In 604, the first Bishop of London was appointed, leading to the continuous presence of Christianity and the founding of St Paul's Cathedral; and down the river, the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic near where Covent Garden is today confirmed the area's prime position as a trading centre. By the time Alfred repelled the Danes in the ninth century, London's value had been realised, and the symbolic movement of the royal court from Winchester to Westminster under Edward the Confessor set London's trajectory. In this episode, Rosemary is joined by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to trace this story of London through the multiple invasions, grand projects and power struggles that took it from a field of ruins to a flourishing medieval capital. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Further reading in the LRB: Eamon Duffy on Westminster: https://lrb.me/lrep301 Ferdinand Mount on Henry III: https://lrb.me/lrep304 Tom Shippey on Alfred: https://lrb.me/lrep302 Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the Strand: https://lrb.me/lrep303 Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Conor Gadd has just opened Burro in Covent Garden, and this episode captures him right at the start of that journey—equal parts excitement, pressure and controlled chaos. Only weeks into service, he reflects on what it feels like to step out from behind the scenes and suddenly be the person everyone wants a piece of. It's a rare, honest snapshot of a chef adjusting not just to a new restaurant, but to a completely new role within it.The conversation leans into the reality of opening: the moments that don't make the press release. Conor recounts a second night so disastrous he genuinely considered shutting the whole thing down, complete with broken lifts, missing tickets and a dining room running blind. He describes the process like sailing across the Atlantic—periods of calm, sudden storms, and the constant temptation to fix everything at once, even when you know that's the one thing you shouldn't do.From there, it opens up into a series of unforgettable stories from his career. There's the Trullo service interrupted by a full Home Office raid, the entire KP team legging it barefoot into the night, and the surreal calm of carrying on service as if nothing had happened. Elsewhere, he reflects on early kitchen days filled with relentless banter, flying onions and hard-earned respect, and the formative experiences that shaped both his cooking and his outlook on the industry.What emerges is a portrait of a chef grounded in instinct, humour and long-term thinking. Conor speaks candidly about what actually sustains a restaurant over decades, why consistency matters more than trends, and how much of the job is simply about people—staff, guests, and the culture you build around them. It's funny, chaotic, occasionally brutal and full of perspective: a conversation driven by stories, not soundbites, with one of the most compelling voices in hospitality.Pre Order Ben's Incredible Book - All You Can Eat - By Clicking Here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-You-Can-Eat-British/dp/1805221523Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/Order The Greatest Meat In The Country From HG Walter Here & Have Restaurant Quality Meals From Home - www.hgwalter.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

London has some of the best museums in the world — but with so many options, how do you decide which ones are right for you?In this episode of the UK Travel Planning Podcast, Tracy and Doug guide you through London's most popular museums to help you choose the ones that match your interests and plan your visit confidently.From iconic institutions like the British Museum and the V&A to the London Transport Museum and Royal Observatory Greenwich, we cover:Who each museum is best suited forWhich museums are free and which are ticketedWhen you need to book timed-entry slotsInsider tips to avoid crowds and museum fatigueThe best museum cafés and afternoon tea optionsWhich museum shops are actually worth your timeWe also share practical planning advice — grouping museums by area, pairing them with nearby sightseeing, and making the most of your time in South Kensington, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Westminster and Greenwich.Whether you're a first-time visitor, travelling with children, or returning to London for a deeper cultural experience, this episode will help you build a museum plan that works for you.We also tease a future episode covering some of London's smaller and lesser-known museums, including the Florence Nightingale Museum, the Foundling Museum, and more hidden gems.

Greetings, bonjour, what's happening?Welcome to Lager Time. This week, I delve back into the fictional word of my old mate Reece and share the first chapter of a new short story - no name yet but he's going on holiday with his girlfriend. Story belowIf you're out and about tomorrow in London, I'll be with the Poetry Takeaway in Covent Garden writing poems for anyone that wants one.Then of course, two weeks today, Friday 27th, I'll be doing a solo set at Poetry and Poppadums at Karamel, London.Have a banging weekendPaul This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cree.substack.com

Are the rumours true? Is Cold Feet coming back? Gaby brought Jimmy Nesbitt, Fay Ripley, John Thomson and Cel Spellman together to find out... They sat down at The Frog restaurant in Covent Garden, London, ahead of a charity lunch (for Children With Cancer) to discuss the show, their friendship and whether there could be....possibly...another series on the horizon!

Forth Bagley — Principal Architect at KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox) — is in good traffic this week for a conversation about designing at scale, threading the needle between progressive design and commercial realities, and why tall buildings owe a responsibility to the cities they define. As an architect involved in transforming places from Covent Garden, to Changi Airport, to Hudson Yards, to Central Hong Kong, Forth brings a strong perspective on what it takes to actually get ambitious projects built, and what happens when iconic architecture becomes the backdrop for everything — good and bad — in a city.Forth walks through how KPF finds itself embedded in neighborhoods for decades, often through clients who follow them across continents — like the developer who hired them in Hong Kong, then brought them to Covent Garden in London to upgrade what had become a tourist trap into a lifestyle destination for everyday Londoners. He explains how Hudson Yards, the largest private development in North American history, required building over active rail lines, threading complicated funding mechanisms, and pulling back architectural ambition at the right moments to ensure the project could actually get built and generate the tax revenue New York desperately needed. The conversation touches on Bill Pedersen's theory that tall buildings become the church spires of modern cities — responsible not just to owners but to skylines, wayfinding, and civic identity — and the uncomfortable reality that a decade-long project can launch in 2008 and emerge into a completely different world of Uber, Amazon deliveries, and viral photography.We also touch on: Why built precedent matters more than renderings. Threading the needle between pushing boundaries and staying on budget. Half of all designs ending up on the cutting room floor. Tall buildings as wayfinding tools and civic markers. Architecture as public relations and its downsides. Why Hudson Yards saved New York from deeper fiscal crisis. Austin's Waterline and green terraces. Hong Kong's seamless infrastructure.Timeline:00:00 Intro.02:24 Introducing Forth Bagley from KPF.02:47 The architect's perspective on the show.03:12 KPF's mission: elevating basic building blocks.03:47 From single buildings to neighborhoods over 50 years.04:09 How KPF gets hired for major projects.05:12 Covent Garden: from Hong Kong client to London.06:34 Upgrading a tourist trap for everyday Londoners.07:19 Hudson Yards: largest private development in North America.08:47 Building over active rail lines.09:12 The West Side as a net negative on tax rolls.10:33 Why built precedent matters.11:55 Threading the needle between ambition and reality.13:22 Half of designs end up on the floor.14:38 The difference between getting built and not.18:45 Bill Pedersen's theory of tall building responsibility.21:17 Tall buildings as church spires and civic markers.24:33 Looking different from different points of view.26:58 The responsibility to the skyline.31:42 Hudson Yards and the iPhone problem.34:19 Starting in 2008, emerging into a different world.38:27 Hudson Yards and New York's tax revenue crisis.41:53 Public school kids educated because of the project.44:14 Architecture as public relations problem.45:02 When iconic buildings become protest backdrops.46:21 Making buildings harmonious with existing skylines.47:07 Hudson Yards preventing fiscal disaster.47:51 Austin's Waterline and green terraces.48:14 The commute question.48:51 JFK to Hong Kong W hotel without stepping outside.49:42 Hong Kong's seamless infrastructure systems.50:02 Wrapping up.Further context:KPF's work.On Instagram.

This week we're talking new London perfume destinations and prescribing scents that whisk you straight to the medina or wrap you in a sensuous tobacco haze.Suzy visited the brand-new @nishane.official boutique in London's Mayfair, sharing why she's so glad this Istanbul-born house has a home on Maddox Street.Just across town, Suzy explored the new @matierepremiereparfums store in Covent Garden, and why their single-ingredient focus feels so perfect to explore in person. Suzy was wrapped in @matierepremiereparfums Encens Suave Extrait, a smoky-syrupy incense that feels like velvet in candlelight.Then it's on to your Perfume Prescriptions…Listener prescriptions!Katy Rosenbaum – “the good parts of a Moroccan souk”Katy asks for a fragrance that smells like the dreamy side of a Moroccan souk – oud, bakhoor, amber, saffron, orange blossom, incense and mint – but with no animalic growl or sweaty cumin.Suggested for Katy:@kayali Marrakesh in a Bottle Orange Blossom | 24 – sunlit orange blossom, shimmering spice, soft woods.@kayali Oudgasm Tobacco Oud – honeyed oud, spiced tobacco, praline-smoked warmth.Layering ideas:@emiratesprideperfumes Future Oud – inky-modern oud glow.@emiratesprideperfumes Future Bakhoor – smouldering bakhoor embers in perfume form.@27_87 Wandervogel – Moroccan mint, cool spice, wandering-soul musk.@sergelutens Fleur d'Oranger – narcotic orange blossom, honeyed white petals, shadowy spice.Scott / @blublazerguy's picks:@contesdeparfums Marrakesh – sun-baked spices, warm skin, a whisper of cumin.@aesop Marrakech Intense – vivid souk spices, dust, dry woods.@marrakechimperial discovery set – a wardrobe of Marrakesh-inspired scents to mix and match your own souk.Layering @jomalonelondon White Jasmine & Mint with Amber Labdanum – cool garden mint over golden, incense-warmed amber.Memoirs of a Perfumer Collector – A Night in Marrakesh – inky sky, spiced markets, flickering lantern smoke.Question from Cardamomefille – sensual, feminine tobacco (pipe, not cigarette)Cardamomefille is seeking a sensual scent built around warm pipe tobacco, with a clearly feminine side rather than ashtray smoke…Suggested for Cardamomefille:@sergelutens Chergui – honeyed pipe tobacco, sun-baked hay, incense-swirled amber.@guerlain Tobacco Honey – golden honeyed tobacco, plush woods, cozy purr of warmth.@guerlain Absolus Allegoria Tabac Sahara – smoky desert tobacco, tart raspberry shimmer, ambergris glow.Sonoma Scent Studio Tabac Aurea – boozy cherry pipe tobacco, dry amber, leather and spice wrapped in vanilla.

In this week's Outspoken Review I'm going into detail about the incredible makeup brands at the Beauty Concierge pop-up in Covent Garden. When I went there on Friday I spent time with some wonderful founders including Really Ree (Reeson), Suzy Griffin Dunne (Hildun) and Ruth Reneé de Leo (Dcypher and the woman behind the pop-up). Rum mascara by Sali Hughes, Sam Chapman and Jo Jones were also there.During the episode I talk about my favourite products from each brand and why I rate them so highly.If you have a chance to go there I thoroughly recommend it. Here's the link.

The Government yesterday published new guidance for schools in England on what to do when children question their gender. It says schools should not initiate steps towards social transitioning when pupils change their name or pronouns, and that toilets and changing rooms should be protected spaces, used according to biological sex. Branwen Jeffreys, the BBC's Education and Family Editor, joins Clare McDonnell to discuss this latest guidance.The one-child policy in China spanned a period of over 35 years. It led to large numbers of girls being abandoned by their birth mothers. And for many children, it's had a lasting impact on their lives. Eva Brookes has been reflecting on what that policy meant for her as she was adopted from China as a baby. Her new podcast series, Made in China, is out this week. In it she delves into her life in the UK and speaks to transracial children like herself, along with her own parents, and explores how it has shaped her own identity.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has selected his daughter as his heir, South Korea's spy agency told lawmakers yesterday. Kim Ju Ae, who is believed to be 13, has in recent months been pictured beside her father in high-profile events including a visit to Beijing in September, her first known trip abroad. BBC Seoul correspondent Jake Kwon tells Clare about how surprising this selection is and what we know about her.Covent Garden is nowadays a centre for high-end designer shops, theatres and award-winning restaurants. However back in the 1700s it was a hotspot for taverns, coffee houses and prostitution. This is the colourful backdrop for the fourth novel from Louise Hare. Called The House of Fallen Sisters, it follows the story of Sukey, a mixed-race girl and an orphan, who has recently moved to London to live with her guardian - the guardian also happens to be a madam who runs a brothel and Sukey knows that once puberty hits, she too will join the women earning their keep. Louise tells Clare what drew her to this story. Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Andrea Kidd

Step back into the early planning of London's West End, where the first purpose‑designed squares began reshaping a city still rooted in medieval streets and haphazard development. In this episode of Ye Olde Guide we explore the origins of London's earliest squares — spaces that bridged the chaotic post‑medieval city and the more ordered, elegant Georgian era to come.From Covent Garden onwards,  we uncover how these early squares transformed the way London grew, creating distinctive pockets of organisation that still define the character of Soho, Covent Garden, and Mayfair today. These are the foundations of one of the world's most celebrated urban landscapes.Send us a text

durée : 01:28:05 - Jakub Hruša, la fougue et la rigueur - par : Aurélie Moreau - Jakub Hrůša, entre autres directeur musical de l'Opéra royal de Covent Garden et à partir de 2028, de l'Orchestre Philharmonique Tchèque, est réputé pour sa direction énergique, précise et nuancée. Aujourd'hui: Suk, Dvořák, Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner… Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.

This week, we're with Rowley Leigh, chef, food writer and the food books assessor for the 2025 André Simon Food & Drink Book Awards to discuss the shortlist.Rowley is an award‑winning food writer himself, but it's his mastery of storytelling through the theatre of food that Gilly wanted to know about before we got on to the shortlist. His Notting Hill gastrodome, Kensington Place was all about being seen eating the coolest food in late century London, fashioned by his time with Roux Brothers in the kitchens of Le Gavroche and le Poulbot, and Joe Allen, Covent Garden's post theatre supper hang out. Gilly asks how that melting pot created one of the greatest stories of modern British food.Five out of seven of the shortlist have already been on the show. Click on the links below for the episodes.Julian Baggini: How the World Eats: Where Our Food Comes From and Why It MattersAlissa Timoshkina: Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern EuropeNoor Murad: Lugma: Abundant Dishes And Stories From My Middle EastRichard Hart: Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough BakingBee Wilson: The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen ObjectsRobin Sherriff: The Science of FermentationLa Mesa Mexicana: Rosa Cienfuegos Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From starting with £50k and family loans to building one of London's fastest-growing suit brands, this episode breaks down what it really takes to build a fashion business from scratch.The lads behind Batch London open up about why most brands fail, how their made to order model changed everything, and how they turned a smash and grab robbery into their biggest marketing moment ever.We talk cash flow, sustainability, celebrity customers, founder sacrifice, and the brutal reality of chasing something bigger than comfort.This is what building a £5M brand actually looks like.02:45 Why Fashion Brands Fail05:30 Made To Order Explained08:40 Killing Fashion Waste11:20 Does Sustainability Sell14:10 Choosing The First Store17:00 Building The Flagship20:10 Life Before Batch23:30 Starting The Company Fast26:10 Making A Fashion Brand29:40 Side Hustle Grind33:10 Why Brand Matters36:20 Cash Flow Advantage39:20 Would You Wait 8 Weeks42:20 Why Stores Build Trust45:30 The Robbery Story49:20 Turning Crisis Into Growth52:30 Celebrities Wearing Batch55:20 No Influencer Marketing58:10 The Barber Shop Effect1:01:10 Founder Sacrifice1:03:30 What Success Means1:05:20 The Future Of Batch

"Dance Talk” ® with Joanne Carey and special guests, Skylar Brandt and Vladimir RumyanstevIn this episode of "Dance Talk” ® , host Joanne Carey engages with Skylar Brandt, a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, and her fiancé, pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev. They discuss their artistic journeys, the cultural differences in music and dance education, and how they met through their shared passion for the arts. The conversation delves into the emotional experience of performing, the creative process behind choreography, and the significance of art in serving humanity. They also explore their future aspirations, including the idea of incorporating their artistry into their wedding celebration.Skylar Brandt began her training at the age of six at Scarsdale Ballet Studio. She attended the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre from 2005-2009. Brandt was a silver medalist at Youth America Grand Prix in 2004 and 2008. Brandt joined ABT II in 2009, became an apprentice with ABT in 2010, and joined the corps de ballet in 2011. She was promoted to Soloist in 2015 and to Principal in 2020. Among her leading roles with the Company are Giselle in Giselle, Medora in Le Corsaire, Kitri in Don Quixote, Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Gamzatti in La Bayadere, Olga in Onegin, Clara, the Princess in The Nutcracker, Young Jane in Jane Eyre, Columbine in Harlequinade, Princess Praline in Whipped Cream, the Lead Maiden in Firebird, the Golden Cockerel in The Golden Cockerel, and roles in The Green Table, Pillar of Fire, The Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda Divertissements, Sinfonietta, Symphonic Variations, and AFTERITE to name a few. Brandt was awarded a 2013 Princess Grace Foundation-USA Dance Fellowship. That same year, she was featured in the movie “Ballet's Greatest Hits”. In 2018, Brandt was the recipient of an unprecedented Special Jury Award for her performances on the Russian television show “Big Ballet”. In 2022, Brandt was named to the renowned "Forbes 30 Under 30" list of most influential leaders and entrepreneurs.https://www.skylarbrandt.com/ Vladimir Rumyantsev  is an internationally acclaimed pianist. At just seven years old, he made his debut at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory where he won Moscow's Glinka competition.Rumyantsev received his foundational training at the Gnessin Moscow Special School for Music under Mikhail Khokhlov and later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergey Dorensky, Alexander Bakhchiev, Elena Sorokina, Pavel Nersessian and Nikolai Lugansky. He earned advanced degrees at the Mannes School of Music in New York under Pavlina Dokovska and is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at The Hartt School under the mentorship of Jose Ramos Santana.Rumyantsev has performed worldwide at such prestigious venues as the Moscow Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Covent Garden, the Mariinsky Theatre, New York City Center, The Kennedy Center, to name a few. His performances led to collaborations with the Mariinsky Ballet. The New York Times describes his playing of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations as “excellent,” and The Wall Street Journal noting his “potent” interpretation.In 2024 he recorded "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Sean Hickey for solo piano. Most recently, Rumyantsev toured the world as a solo artist with Twyla Tharp Dance for her Diamond Jubilee and is producing his own concerts of piano and dance alongside Principal Dancer with American Ballet Theatre, Skylar Brandt. https://vladimirrumyantsev.com/“Dance Talk” ® with Joanne Carey wherever you listen to your podcasts. ⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dancetalkwithjoannecarey.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Joanne on Instagram @DanceTalkwithJoanneCarey Tune in. Follow. Like us. And Share. Please leave us review about our podcast! “Dance Talk” ® with Joanne Carey"Where the Dance World Connects, the Conversations Inspire, and Where We Are Keeping Them Real."

On December 18, 1679, England's leading poet, John Dryden, was attacked and beaten in a dark Covent Garden alley outside the Lamb, the area's oldest pub. The motive was literary. Dryden was wrongly suspected of having written An Essay on Satire, a venomous anonymous poem that skewered the corruption of the Restoration court and appeared to take aim at the Earl of Rochester. The real author was an aristocrat safely protected by rank, but Dryden, a professional writer, paid the price. This piece revisits a story previously told on the London Walks podcast, but from a new angle, exploring how satire worked in Restoration London, why certain lines were dangerous enough to provoke violence, and how words once carried consequences measured in bruises and broken skin.

What would Christmas be without a tour of London's lights? For the first of our free xmas podcasts, Kasia and Dan go UP TOWN for an outside (!!) walking tour through Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Known as stressful hot-spots for holiday season breakdowns, these Central London capitalistic hell-holes must have some redeeming features, right?!  We find out what London's markets were like in 1870, and why Covent Garden has become London's epicentre of festive fun. And we ask: why have Germanic Christmas markets sprung up everywhere via American films that make Christmas seem more idyllic than it really is? Admiring the neat Bratwurst, surprisingly acceptable beer and very poor puns, we throw ourselves into the Leicester Square ‘experience economy'. Finally, given that they want us to look up and marvel at the Christmas lights (rather than be terrified of oncoming traffic), why has the City of London not just pedestrianised central London?    Christmas is a time of giving, so consider supporting our Patreon: To listen to this episode and all the rest too - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

This week's Raw & Unscripted conversation hits straight at the truth you and I see every day: most people don't change until life forces them to.Host, Christopher Rausch, the #NoExcusesCoach, invites guest, Matthew Hill to the Raw & Unscripted Show, and he brings the kind of stories that smack you awake!From losing his entire income overnight to stumbling into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… to hitting rock bottom in Covent Garden with a single Belgian franc and choosing bold action instead of panic.And together, we dig deep into the real reasons people freeze, stall, self-sabotage, or cling to perfection… and why the moment that feels like the end is often the one that launches you into something far bigger than you imagined.We Get Into:Why “I know what to do… but I don't do it” is a symptom of deeper tolerations.How language — the words you casually use every day — quietly shapes your outcomes.How to train your mind to pivot without panic (even if you're used to living in survival mode).Why imperfect action beats perfect planning every single time.The moment leverage finally becomes strong enough to change you… or break you.You'll hear stories of real-life turning points, laughs from unexpected places, and the raw truth behind why some people rise while others stay stuck replaying the same patterns for years.Please connect with Matthew Hill at his Linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hillmatthew100/This is a conversation about courage, clarity, communication, and choosing to act before life chooses for you.If you've been waiting for “the right time,” if you've been telling yourself the same story on repeat, or if you're sitting on the edge of a change you can feel but haven't yet committed to…This episode is your nudge, your mirror, your call-out, and your call-forward.Are you subscribed to the podcast? Catch up on previous episodes at https://bit.ly/2Njtvf9 and get the audio podcast at Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3RHpNe8 or wherever you get your podcasts! We're on all platforms!!!#Legacy #PersonalGrowth #MasteringLife #Confidence #Results #NoRegrets #Beliefs #NoExcusesCoach For More Information please check out:www.NoExcusesCoach.comwww.Youtube.com/TheChristopherRausch

London at Christmas (with Dave Groll)I am stepping in while Sascha takes a short break, and I am taking you on a glittering whirl through London's festive season. From what is open and what is closed over Christmas to the city's most magical light displays, I will help you plan a stress-free, sparkle-filled wander.In this episode, I cover:What is open vs. closed over ChristmasThe best Christmas lights and festive spots: Leadenhall Market, Belgravia, Bond Street, Covent Garden, Oxford Street, Carnaby Street, Southbank, The Shard, Marylebone Village, Regent Street, Old Spitalfields Market, and SohoHow to see it all on a Christmas lights bus tourA royal nod at Buckingham PalaceA grand day trip to Blenheim PalaceLinks & ContactChristmas Lights Bus Tour (in the show notes): https://guided.london/christmaslightstourQuestions or itinerary help? WhatsApp me at +44 7700 182299More London tips: seeyouin.london'Grab something warm, plug in, and let us chase the glow together. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This special episode was originally recorded for the Germany Travel Planning Podcast, where Tracy joined Cate to share insider tips for making the most of a London layover.Turn your short stop in London into a compact yet rewarding adventure. Learn how to plan 24 to 48 hours in the UK capital without feeling rushed, from choosing a central base to making the most of every meal and moment.Discover how to stay smart, move efficiently and see a few essentials deeply rather than frantically. We cover where to stay, what to eat, and how to fit in the top sights while leaving time to simply enjoy being in London.In this episode: • Why Zone 1 locations make the perfect layover base • Hotel and area tips around Covent Garden, the British Museum and Borough Market • How to combine Tube, bus and river boat travel, plus when to book a black cab tour • Food favourites: Borough Market picks, Pick & Cheese, Café in the Crypt and the V&A café • Afternoon tea tips: traditional vs themed and when to book • Must-see highlights: Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral and the V&A • Why Greenwich belongs on even short itineraries and the best ways to reach it • Christmas in London: best lights routes, timing and warmth tips • Pacing your visit, footwear and layers to stay comfortable • Easy day trips from London, including Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and WindsorIf you have enjoyed the show, please leave a quick review or send us feedback via text. We love hearing from listeners, and your comment might even get a shout-out in a future episode.

This episode features several ghosts all associated with one place. And that place is a specific building with its own interesting history – the Theater Royal Drury Lane of London. Research: Appleton, William Worthen. “Charles macklin: An Actor’s Life.” Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 1960. https://archive.org/details/charlesmacklinac00appl/page/n11/mode/2up Benjamin, Victor D. “The history of the theatres of London, from the year 1760 to the present time. Being a continuation of the Annual Register of all the new tragedies, comedies farces, pantomines that have been performed within that period. With occasional notes and anecdotes.” London. Printed for T. Becket. 1771. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/historyoftheatre00victiala/page/n7/mode/2up Cibber, Colley. “An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.” Chiswick Press, London. 1889. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/44064/pg44064.txt “Dan Leno: A Victim to Overwork.” The People (London.) June 7, 1903. https://www.newspapers.com/image/811209994/?match=1&terms=dan%20leno “Dan Leno Dead.” New York Times. Nov. 1, 1904. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1904/11/01/101241446.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0 Dickson, Andrew. “Inside the world's most haunted theatre.” The Guardian. Oct. 29, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/29/most-haunted-theatre-ghosts-superstitions-theatre-royal-drury-lane The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Colley Cibber". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Dec. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Colley-Cibber The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Dan Leno". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Dec. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dan-Leno The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Drury Lane Theatre". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Jan. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Drury-Lane-Theatre The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Thomas Killigrew". Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Mar. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Killigrew “Ghost of Dan Leno.” The Register. (Adelaide, SA.) Dec. 15, 1923. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/65060035 Hoge, Warren. “A Major New Role As Theater Mogul For Lloyd Webber.” New York Times. Jan. 10, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/10/arts/a-major-new-role-as-theater-mogul-for-lloyd-webber.html "The humorous lieutenant, or, Generous enemies a comedy as it is now acted by His Majesties servants, at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane." In the digital collection Early English Books Online. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A39804.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. “Interregnum (1649-1660).” The Royal Family. https://www.royal.uk/interregnum-1649-1660 “Leno, Dan, 1860-1904.” University of Sheffield Archives. https://archives.sheffield.ac.uk/agents/people/308?&filter_fields[]=subjects&filter_values[]=Wild+west Lloyd, Arthur. “The Theatre Royal Drury Lane - Main Entrance situated on Catherine Street, Westminster, London.” Arthur Lloyd’s Music Hall. http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/DruryLane.htm#1 Maitland, Hayley. “Murder, Musicals, and Royal Romance: The History of Drury Lane, London’s Oldest—And Most Haunted—Theater.” Vogue. Sept. 14, 2023. https://www.vogue.com/article/the-history-of-drury-lane-londons-oldest-and-most-haunted-theater Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume. “The Drury Lane Actors' Rebellion of 1743.” Theatre Journal , Mar., 1990, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 57-80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207558 Morley, Sheridan. “Theatre's Strangest Acts.” Robson Books. 2014. Mullan, Kevin. “Charles Macklin (McLaughlin/MacLochlainn): The Donegal theatre radical and playwright who revolutionised Covent Garden in the 1700s.” Derry Journal. Sept. 24, 2024. https://www.derryjournal.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/charles-macklin-mclaughlinmaclochlainn-the-donegal-theatre-radical-and-playwright-who-revolutionised-covent-garden-in-the-1700s-4795038 “The Newly Renovated Theatre Royal Drury Lane Wins At The Stage Awards.” Andrew Lloyd Webber Musicals. https://www.andrewlloydwebber.com/news/the-newly-renovated-theatre-royal-drury-lane-wins-at-the-stage-awards Planer, Nigel. “The Ghosts of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.” Huffpost. Feb. 10, 2014. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nigel-planer/nigel-planer-drury-lane-ghosts_b_4426092.html Simon, Ed. “Here We Are Again!—How Joseph Grimaldi Invented the Creepy Clown.” JSTOR. May 4, 2022. https://daily.jstor.org/here-we-are-again-how-joseph-grimaldi-invented-the-creepy-clown/ Shand, John. “Drury Lane: London’s Oldest Theater. A Tercentenary?” The Guardian. July 8, 1939. https://www.newspapers.com/image/259462987/?match=1&terms=drury%20theatre%20ghost Shipp, L. “Charles Fleetwood, the 1744 Drury Lane Riots, and Pricing Practices in Eighteenth-Century British Theatre.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47: 405–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12956. “The Story So Far.” LW Theatres. https://lwtheatres.co.uk/theatres/theatre-royal-drury-lane/about-theatre-royal-drury-lane/ “The Story So Far …” Theatre Royal Drury lane. https://thelane.co.uk/the-history Wyatt, Benjamin Dean. “Observations on the design for the Theatre royal, Drury lane, as executed in 1812: accompanied by plans, elevation, & sections, of the same.” London, printed for J. Taylor. 1813. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=o58NAAAAQAAJ&rdid=book-o58NAAAAQAAJ&rdot=1 Zagha, Muriel. “The Puritan Paradox.” The Guardian. Feb. 15, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/feb/16/artsandhumanities.highereducation See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's London Calling is a double treat. First up, Adam tears into the London Calling Book Club Corner with a book so gripping you'll be ordering it before he's finished talking. Then Dr Ann takes the baton for a taster from her brand-new walk, Nooks & Crannies – Unseen Covent Garden. Books, ghosts, hidden corners – London doesn't get better than this.

This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension, as we explore one of the UK's most talked-about immersive experiences.Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who have brought The Traitors Live Experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous.So, how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling, guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game… and who's about to be banished…Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on LinkedIn. Show references: The Traitors Live website: https://www.thetraitorslive.co.uk/Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-connolly-499054110/Neil Connolly is a creative leader of design and production teams focused on development, production and installation of live theatre, entertainment, multi-media and attractions for the themed entertainment industry worldwide.Neil began his career as a performer, writer, producer & artist in Londons alternative theatre/art scene. It was during this time Neil developed a love and passion for story telling through the platform of interactive playable immersive theatre.Having been at the vanguard of playable & immersive theatre since 2007, Neil had a career defining opportunity in 2019 when he devised, wrote & directed an immersive experience as part of Sainsbury's 150th Birthday Celebrations. Making him the only immersive theatre & game maker in the world to have HRH Elizabeth Regina attend one of their experiences.In a distinguished career spanning 20 years, Neil has brought that passion to every facet of themed entertainment in the creative direction and production of attractions such as; Handels Messiah, Snowman & The Snowdog, Peppa Pig Surprise Party, Traitors Live, The Crystal Maze Live Experience, Tomb Raider Live Experience & Chaos Karts, an AR go-kart real life battle. Other clients and activations include: Harrods, Sainsbury's, Camelot/The National Lottery, Samsung, Blenheim Palace, Land Rover and Warner Brothers.Neil has worked across 4 continents for many years with private individuals; designing, producing and delivering live entertainment on land, sea & air. A world without boundaries requires freethinking.Neil is currently working with Immersive Everywhere on creative development of show and attraction content for projects across U.K, Europe, North America & Asia. Transcriptions:  Paul Marden: This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension as we explore one of the UK's most talked about immersive experiences.Paul Marden: Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who've brought The Traitor's live experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous. So how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game and who's about to be banished.Paul Marden: So, we're underground. Lots of groups running currently, aren't they? How did you make that happenNeil Connolly: Yeah, so now we're two floors under us. There's a lower basement and some other basement. So the building that we are in, there's a family in the 1890s who owned all of the land around Covent Garden and specifically the Adelphi Theatre.Paul Marden: Right.Neil Connolly: And they wanted their theatre to be the first theatre in the UK to have its lights powered by electricity. So they built their own private power station in this building. Like, literally like, all this, this is a power station. But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this building until the 1980s when the establishment was assumed through the important UK network.Neil Connolly: And then it was sat there empty, doing nothing for 40 years. And so the landlord that is now started redeveloping the building 10 years ago, added two floors onto the top of the building. So now what we're in is an eight-storey structure and we've basically got the bottom four floors. Two of which are ground and mezzanine, which is our hospitality area. And the lower two floors, which are all in the basement, are our experience floors. What we're looking at right now is, if you look off down this way to the right, not you people on audio, but me here.Neil Connolly: Off this side is five of the round table rooms. There's another one behind me and there's two more upstairs. And then I've got some Tretters Towers off to the left and I've got my show control system down there.Neil Connolly: On the floor above me, we've got the lounges. So each lounge is connected to one of the round table rooms. Because when you get murdered or banished, one of the biggest challenges that I faced was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished? Because you get kicked out of the game. It's not a lot of fun, is it? Therefore, for me, you also get kicked out of the round table room. So this is a huge challenge I face. But I built these lounge concepts where you go— it's the lounge of the dead— and you can see and hear the round table room that you've just left. We'll go walk into the room in a while. There's lots of interactivity. But yeah, super fun. Neil Connolly: But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this establishment until the 1980s when the establishment was considered through the important UK network.Paul Marden: Yeah. So we've got 10 million people tuning in to Traitors per episode. So this must be a lot of pressure for you to get it right. Tell us about the experience and what challenges you faced along the way, from, you know, that initial text message through to the final creation that we're stood in now.Neil Connolly: So many challenges, but to quote Scroobius Pip on this, do you know Scroobius Pip? Paul Marden: No. Neil Connolly: Great, he's amazing. UK rapper from Essex.Neil Connolly: Some people see a mousetrap and think death. I see free cheese and a challenge.Neil Connolly: There's never any problems in my logic, in my thinking. There's always just challenges to overcome. So one of the biggest challenges was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished. The truth of the matter is I had to design a whole other show, which happens after this show. It is one big show. But you go to the Lounge of the Dead, there's more interactivity. And navigating that with the former controller, which is O3 Media and IDTV, who created the original format in the Netherlands, and basically designing a game that is in the world and follows the rules of their game with some reasonable adjustments, because TV and live are not the same thing.Neil Connolly: It takes 14 days to film 12 episodes of The Traitors. Paul Marden: Really? Okay. Neil Connolly: So I was like, how do I truncate 14 days of somebody's life down into a two-hour experience and still deliver that same impact, that same power, that same punch?Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: But I knew from the beginning of this that it wasn't about time. There is a magic triangle when it comes to the traitors, which is time, space, atmosphere. And time was the thing that I always struggled with. I don't have a Scottish cattle show, and I don't have two weeks. No. So I'm like, 'Cool, I've got to do it in two hours.' So our format follows exactly the same format. We do a breakfast scene, then a mission, then a roundtable banishment, then there's a conclave where the traitors meet and they murder somebody. And I do that in a seven-day structure, a seven-day cycle. But it all happens within two hours around this round table.Neil Connolly: I'm the creative director for Immersive Everywhere. We're a vertically integrated structure in the sense that we take on our own venues. So we're now standing in Shorts Gardens in the middle of Covent Garden. So we've leased this building. We've got a lease that is for a number of years and we have built the show into it. But we also identify the IP, go after that ourselves, we capitalise the projects ourselves. We seek strategic partners, promoters, other people to kind of come involved in that journey. But because we're also the team that are licensing the product, we are also the producers and I'm the creative director for that company. So I developed the creative in line with while also getting the deal done. This is incredibly unusual because other producers will be like, 'Hey, I've identified this IP and I've got it.' Now I'm going to approach a creative agency and I'm going to get them to develop the product. And now I've done all of that, I'm going to find someone else to operationally put it on, or I'm going to find a venue to put it on in, and then I'm going to find my ticketing partner.  But we don't do that. We have our own ticketing platform, and we have our own database, so we mark our own shoulders.Neil Connolly: As well as other experiences too. Back, we have our own creative industry, we are the producers, we are the female workers. So we cast it, we hire all the front of house team, we run the food and beverage, we run the bars. The operations team is our operations team because they run the venue as well as the show at the same time. So that's what I mean. We're a vertically integrated structure, which means we do it, which makes us a very unusual proposition within... certainly within the UK market, possibly the world. It makes us incredibly agile as a company and makes us to be able to be adaptive and proactive and reactive to the product, to the show, to the market that we're operating in, because it's all under one roof.Neil Connolly: This show started January 24th, 2023. Right. It's very specific because I was sitting on my sofa drinking a lovely glass of Merlot and I had just watched... UK Traitors, Season One. Yep. Because it came out that Christmas. Immediately I was like, 'Oh my God, this is insane.' And then I got a text message that particular night from our head of licensing, a guy named Tom Rowe, lovely man. And he was like, Neil, I'm at a licensing event with some friends of mine and everyone's talking about this thing called Traitors. I've not watched it. Have you watched it? Sounds like it might be a good thing. And so I sat back and drank my Merlot. And about five minutes later, I text him back and I was like, Tom, get us that license.Neil Connolly: And then I sent him a bunch of other details of how the show in my head would work, both from a commercial standpoint, but also from a creative standpoint, because I'm a commercially minded creative. Right. So I instantly took out my notebook and I started writing down exactly how I thought the show was going to do, the challenges that we would face and being able to translate this into a live thing. But I literally started writing it that night. And then he watched the first episode on the train on the way home. And then he texted me the next morning and he was like, 'I love it.' What do we need to do? And I was like, 'Get us in the room.' Two days later, we were in the room with all three media who own the format globally.Paul Marden: Okay.Neil Connolly: So we sat down and then they came to see one of our other shows and they were like, 'Okay, we get it now.' And then that was like two and a half years of just building the show, getting the deal done and facing the myriad of challenges. But yeah, sometimes it just starts with the text message.Paul Marden: So they get to experience all the key parts of the TV.Neil Connolly: All the key beats. Like right now, I'm holding one of the slates. They're not chalkboard slates. Again, this is... Oh, actually, this is a good challenge. So in the TV show, they've got a piece of slate and they write on it with a chalkboard pen. This seems so innocuous and I can't believe I'm talking about this on a podcast.Neil Connolly: Slategate was like six months of my life. Not in its entirety, but it was a six month long conversation about how we do the slates correctly. Because we do... 48 shows a day, six days a week. And those slates will crack. They will bash. And they're kind of a bit health and safety standards. I was like, can't have them. Also, they write on them with chalk pens, white ink chalk pens. But in the TV show, you only do it once a night. Yeah.Paul Marden: And then you have a producer and a runner.Neil Connolly: They just clean them very, very leisurely and set them back for the next day. And I was like, no, I've got to do a whole bunch of roundtable banishments in two hours. So we talked a lot about material, about style, literal viewership, because if you take a seat at the table. Yeah. If you're sitting at the table here, you'll notice that we've got a raised bit in the middle. If I turn mine around, the other person on the other side can't see it. So I was like, 'Okay, cool.' So we had to do a whole bunch of choreography. But also, the room's quite dark. Yes. At times, atmospheric. Yeah. In that magic triangle time-space atmosphere. So anything that was darker, or even that black slate, you just couldn't read it. And then there was, and then I had to— this is the level of detail that we have to go into when we're designing this kind of stuff. I was like, 'Yeah, but I can't clean off these slates with the white ink because everyone will have to have like a wet cloth chamois. Then I've just got loads of chamois around my venue that I just don't need.' And so then we're like, 'Oh, let's use real slates with real chalk.' And I was like, 'No, because dust will get everywhere.' I'll get chalk just all over my table. It'll just ruin everything. It'll ruin the technology that's inside the table because there's lots of hidden tricks inside of it. Paul Marden: Is there really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Neil Connolly: There's loads of hidden tricks inside the table. So after a while, going through many different permutations, I sat down with Christian Elenis, who's my set designer and my art director. And we were, the two of us were nearly in tears because we were like, 'We need,' and this only happened like.Neil Connolly: I would say two, three weeks before we opened. We still hadn't solved how to do the slate, which is a big thing in the show. Anybody who's seen the show and loves the show knows that they want to come in, they want to write somebody's name on the slate, and they want to spell the name incorrectly.Neil Connolly: Everyone does it on purpose. But I wanted to give people that opportunity. So then eventually we sat down and we were like, Christian, Neil. And the two of us in conversation went, why don't we just get a clear piece of Perspex, back it with a light coloured vinyl. And then Christian was like, 'Ooh,' and I'll make it nice and soft and put some felt on the back of it, which is what I'm holding. And then why don't we get a black pen? And we were like, 'Yeah,' like a whiteboard marker. And then we can just write on it. And then A, I can see it from the other side of the table. Thing one achieved. Two. Every marker pen's got an eraser on the top of it. I don't know why everyone thinks this is important, but it is. That you can just rub out like that, and I'm like, 'There's no dirt, there's no mess, and I can reuse this multiple times, like dozens of times in the same show.' And I know that sounds really weird, but that's the level of design I'm going to need.Paul Marden: I was just about to say, and that is just for the chalkboard. Yeah. Now you need to multiply that. How many decisions?Neil Connolly: How many decisions in each game. But also remember that there are eight round tables in this building. Each round table seats 14 people. And we do six sessions a day. So first ones at 10 a. m. Then we do 12, 2, 4, 6, and 8 p. m. So we do 48 shows a day, six days a week.Paul Marden: I love the concept that these are shows. This is not this is not visitor attraction. This is theater repeated multiple times a day for multi audience is concurrently.Neil Connolly: And I've just spent five minutes describing a slate to you. Yeah. But like, I haven't even got— it's like the sheer amount of technology that is in the show. And again, theatrical, like, look above our heads. Yeah. You've got this ring light above every seat. It's got a pin light. There's also microphones which are picking up all the audio in the room, which again is translating to the lounge of the dead. Every single one of the round table rooms has four CCTV cameras. Can you see that one in the corner? Each one of them is 4K resolution. It's quite high spec, which is aimed at the opposite side of the table to give you the resolution in the TV. In the other room. Then you've got these video contents. This is constantly displaying secret information through the course of the show to the traitors when they're in Conclave because everyone's in blindfolds and they took them off. They get secret instructions from that. There's also a live actor in the room. A live actor who is Claudia? They're not Claudia. They're not pastiches of Claudia. They are characters that we have created and they are the host of The Traitor's Game. Right. They only exist inside this building. We never have them portrayed outside of this building in any way whatsoever.Neil Connolly: They are characters, but they live, they breathe— the game of Traitors, the world of Traitors, and the building that we have designed and constructed here. And they facilitate the game for the people. And they facilitate the game for the people. One actor to 14 people. There are no plants, even though everyone tries to tell me. Members of the public will be convinced that they are the only person that's in that show and that everyone else is a plant. And I'm like, no, because that would be insane.Neil Connolly: The only actor in the room is the host.Paul Marden: 14 people that can sit around this table. How many of them are in the same group? Are you with your friends or is it put together where there are other people that you won't know in the room? If you book together, you play together.Neil Connolly: Yes. Okay, so if you don't book 14 people... Ah, we also capped the number of tickets that you can purchase to eight. Right. So you can only purchase a maximum of eight tickets unless you do want a full table of 14, at which point you have to then purchase a VIP package because you are booking out a whole table for yourselves. The game doesn't work if there's less than 10 people at the table. So there has to be 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14 people sat at a round table for the show to actually happen, for it to work. By capping the number of tickets that you book for eight, then that guarantees that strangers will be playing together. And that is the basis of strangers. Yeah, yeah. Like, you need to be sat around a table with people you know, you don't know, that you trust and you don't trust. Yeah. Fact of the matter. And do you see people turning on the others in their own group? Every single time. People think genuinely, and I love this from the public, you would think that if you're turning up as a group of eight and a group of four and a group of two, that the bigger group would just pick everybody off to make sure that someone in their group gets through to the end game.Neil Connolly: I'm sure they think that and they probably plot and plan that before they arrive on site. As soon as this game starts, gloves are off and everyone just starts going for each other. We've been open nearly two months now. I have seen, like, children murdered of their mothers.Neil Connolly: Husbands murder their wives, wives murder their husbands. I've seen, like, three generations—like, we get, because it's so intergenerational, like our lowest, the lowest age that you can play this is 12. Right. And then it's upwards. I've seen three generations of family come in and I've seen grandkids murder their own nan.Neil Connolly: Absolutely convinced that they're a traitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Or they banish them. Like, it's just mental. I've also seen nans, who are traitors, murder their grandkids.Neil Connolly: Like, and this is in a room full of strangers. They're just like, 'No, I'm not going to go for Barbara, who I met two hours ago in the bar. I'm going to go for my own grandson. It's mental.'Neil Connolly: The very, very first thing that I always think about whenever I'm creating an experience or whenever I'm designing a show is I put myself in the position of 'I'm a member of the public.' I have bought a ticketNeil Connolly: What's the coolest thing that I am going to do for my money? What is my perceived value of my ticket over actually what is the value of that ticket? I wanted to give people the experience of knowing what it was like to be sitting in one of these chairs at this table and feeling their heart. The pounding in their chest and I mean, the pounding in their chest, that rush of adrenaline from doing nothing— from sitting in a chair and all you were doing was sitting in a room talking to people and your heart is going.Neil Connolly: Because you're either being accused of being a liar. And trying to defend against it. And trying to defend against it. Or you actually are lying and you're trying to whittle your way out of it. And that feeling is the most alive that you will ever feel. Not ever. Like, I'm sure they're... No, no, no. But, like, give people that opportunity and that experience, as well as, like, access to the world of traitors and the law and everything else. But also, it's like any other theme park ride. People go on roller coasters because the imminent fear of death is always there. Yeah. And you feel alive. You're like, you've got such a buzz of adrenaline. Whereas, arguably, we do exactly the same thing as roller coasters, but in a much more longer-drawn format and multiple times. Yeah. And people do feel alive. When people walk out of the show, you see them go upstairs to the bar, and they are... Yeah.Paul Marden: You've said to me already that you don't use the word 'immersive,' but you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sat. The company is called 'immersive' everywhere. I'm sat behind the scenes. Okay. I'm sat in the room and the room is hugely convincing. It's like the highest fidelity escape room type experience that I've ever sat in. It feels like I'm on set, yeah, yeah. Um, I can totally believe that, in those two hours, you can slip. I sat on a game. It was only a two-minute game at iApple, but I was being filmed by one of the team. But within 30 seconds, I'd forgotten that they were there because I was completely immersed in the game. I can believe that, sitting in here right now, you could forget where you were and what you were doing, that you were completely submerged in the reality of the land that you're in.Neil Connolly: Yeah, 100%. Like, the world does not exist beyond these worlds. And for some people, like, I have my own definition. Everyone's got a different definition of what immersive is. I've got my own definition. But... I can tell you right now, as soon as people enter this building, they're in the bar, they're kind of slowly immersed in that world because the bar is a themed bar. It's done to the same, like we designed and built that bar as well. But as soon as they start descending that spiral staircase and coming into the gameplay floors, into the show floors, they just forget the rest of the world exists. And especially when they sit down at this table, it doesn't matter. I'm sat next to you here, but you could be sat at this table with your loved one, strangers, whatever. The gloves come off and just nothing exists apart from the game that you're about to go through.Paul Marden: You've been open now for a couple of months. More success than you were anticipating, I think. So pre-sales went through the roof? Yes. So you're very happy with the results?Neil Connolly: Yeah, yeah, we were. Yeah, well, we still are.Neil Connolly: We were very confident before we'd even started building the show, like the literal structural build, because we did very well. But then that set expectations quite high because I had a lot of people that had bought tickets and I was like, 'OK, I need to put on a good show for these people. And I need to make sure that they get satisfaction relative to the tickets that they bought.' But I don't feel pressure. I do feel anxiety quite a lot. Creatively? Yeah. I mean, I meditate every day.Paul Marden: But you've created this amazing world and you're inviting people into it. And as a creative, you're opening yourself up, aren't you? People are walking into the world that you've created.Neil Connolly: Yeah, this was said to me. This is not something that I came up with myself, and I do say this really humbly, but it was something that was said to me. It was on opening day, and a bunch of my friends came to playtest the show. And they were like, 'Oh, this is your brain in a building.'Neil Connolly: And I was like, 'Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.' But yeah, it is my brain in a building. But also that's terrifying, I think, for everybody else, because I know what happens inside my brain and it's really quite chaotic.Neil Connolly: But, you know, this I am. I'm so proud of this show. Like you could not believe how proud I am of this show. But also a huge part of my job is to find people that are smarter than me at the relative thing that they do, such as the rest of my creative team. They're all so much smarter than me. My job is vision and to be able to communicate that vision clearly and effectively so that they go, 'I understand.' The amount of times that people on the creative team turn around to me and go, 'Neil, that's a completely mental idea.' If people are saying to me, 'No one's ever done that before' or 'that's not the way things are done.'Neil Connolly: Or we can do that, but we're going to have to probably invent a whole new thing. If people are saying those things to me, I know I'm doing my job correctly. And I'm not doing that to challenge myself, but everything that I approach in terms of how I build shows is not about format. It's not about blueprints. It's not like, 'Hey, I've done this before, so I'm just going to do this again because I know that's a really neat trick.' I go back to, 'I made the show because I wanted people's heart to pound in their chest while they're sitting in a chair and make them feel alive.'Paul Marden: Is that the vision that you had in your head? So you're articulating that really, really clearly. Is that the vision that you sold to everybody on, not maybe day one, but within a couple of days of talking about this? No, it was day one.Neil Connolly: It was day one. Everyone went, that's a completely mental idea. But, you know, it's my job to try and communicate that as effectively and clearly as I can. But again, I am just one man. My job is vision. And, you know, there's lighting design, sound design, art direction, there's game logic. We haven't even gotten to the technology of how this show works yet, or how this room works.Neil Connolly: Actually, I'll wander down the corner. Yeah, let's do that. But, like, there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks. Like, this is one of the games, one of the missions. In the world and the lore of the show, the round table is sacrosanct.Paul Marden: Yes.Neil Connolly: Traitors is the game. The game is in other people. I can do so many missions and there's loads of missions and they're really fun in this show. But the game is in other people. It's in the people sat on the other side of the room. But also I wanted to do a thing where people could interact directly with the set. And so I designed one of the missions to be in the round table itself.Neil Connolly: So there's a course of these moon dials, which you basically have to align through the course of it. And there are sensors built into the table so that they know when they're in the correct position. How you find out the correct position is by solving a very, very simple puzzle and then communicating effectively to a bunch of strangers that you just met.Neil Connolly: And the sensors basically read it all. And when that all gets into position, the lights react, the sound reacts, the video content reacts, the whole room reacts to you. So I wanted to give people something tangible that they can touch and they make the room react to them. Yes, it's. I mean, I've designed, I've got background in escape rooms as well, right? Um, so I've done a lot of that kind of stuff as well. So I wanted people to feel in touch, same, but like, there's more tangible props over here. Um, yeah, that is a model box of the room that we are stood in, yeah. Also, there's an exact replica of it on the other side of it. There are very subtle differences between it, and that informs one of the missions. So that is two model boxes in this roundtable room. There's one of these in every single roundtable room. So there's 16 model boxes of the show that you're stood in on the set. And again, theatre. It's a show. But it's one of the missions, because I wanted people to kind of go, 'Oh, there's a live actor in front of me.' I'm having fun. Oh, look at all these lights and all the sound. Oh, there's a model box over here. That's in theatre land and blah, blah, blah. But that is also a really expensive joke. It's a really expensive joke. And there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks.Neil Connolly: Let's go look at backstage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.Neil Connolly: I say backstage, like how we refer to it or how I always go. I use 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably. Like right now you're on the set. Like you're on the stage. Yes. We're just wandering around a long corridor. There are round table rooms off to either side. But like, you know, there's a green room upstairs where the actors get changed, where the front of house team are, where the bar team all are. But as soon as they go out onto the show floor, they're on stage—yes, completely. We'll very quickly have a look at the gallery—yes, show control. Hi, Robbo. Do you mind if I stand in your room for the purposes of the audio? I'm talking to the technical manager, Thomas Robson. We're recording a podcast.Paul Marden: Robbo, oh yeah, okay. My mind is absolutely blown. So you've got every single room up on screen.Neil Connolly: Yeah, so that's great. There's 164 cameras—something like that. But every roundtable room has four cameras in it. Each camera is 4K resolution. So we've got cameras on all of them. We've got audio into those rooms. That's two-way, so that if show control needs to talk directly to them, they just press a button here and they can talk directly to the room itself. Mainly just like, stop misbehaving, we're watching you.Neil Connolly: We've then got cameras into all of the lounges, all of the show spaces, all the front of house, all of the bar areas, the mezzanine and back of house. And then you've got QLab running across all of the different shows. We've got backups on all of these screens. So if one... of the computers goes down, we can very quickly swap it in for a backup that's already running. We've got show control, which is, there's a company called Clockwork Dog, who, they're an amazing company. What COGS, their show control system, is doing is pulling in all of the QLab from sound, all of the QLab from lighting, and also we built our own app. to be able to run the show. So there's a whole logic and decision tree based on the decisions that the public do through the course of the game. So yes, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end in terms of our narrative beats and the narrative story of the show that we're telling people. But also that narrative can go in. Hundreds of different directions depending on the actions and the gameplay that the people do during the course of the show. So, you haven't just learned one show— you have to learn like You have to learn a world, and you have to learn a whole game.Neil Connolly: Like, there's the server, stacks, which we had to build. You had to network and cable the entire building. So we have built an entire new attraction, which didn't exist before. And also we're pulling in information from the front of house system which is also going into the show itself because again, you put your name into the iPad when you arrive on site and then you tick a box very crucially to say, 'Do you want to be selected as a trader? Yes or No.' Because in the game, it's a fundamental rule. If you say no, you cannot be selected as a traitor by the host during traitor selection. That doesn't mean you can't be recruited.Paul Marden: By the traitors later on in the game. So you could come and do this multiple times and not experience the same story because there were so many different pathways that you could go down.Neil Connolly: But also, the game is in other people. Yes. The show is sat on the opposite side of the table to you because, like, Bob and Sandra don't know each other. They'll never see each other ever again. But Bob comes again and he's now playing against Laura. Who's Laura? She's an unknown quantity. That's a whole new game. That's a whole new show. There's a whole new dynamic. That's a whole new storyline that you have to develop. And so the actors are doing an incredible job of managing all of that.Paul Marden: Thanks, Robbo. Thank you. So you've worked with some really, really impressive leading IP, Traders, Peppa Pig, Doctor Who, Great Gatsby. What challenges do you face taking things from screen to the live experience?Paul Marden: Challenges do I face? We're wandering here.Neil Connolly: So we are in... Oh, we're in the tower.Neil Connolly: Excellent. Yep, so we're now in Traitor's Tower. Good time for you to ask me the question, what challenges do I face? Things like this. We're now stood in Traitor's Tower. Paul, let me ask you the question. Without the show lights being on, so we're just stood on a set under workers, what's your opinion of the room that we're stood in?Paul Marden: Oh, it's hugely impressive. It feels like, apart from the fact you've punched the fourth wall out of the telly, it does feel like you're on set.Neil Connolly: It's a really faithful reproduction of the set. So that's kind of one of the challenges is managing the public's expectations of what they see, do and feel on site. So that I don't change the show so that people come and play the game that they're expecting to play. But making reasonable adjustments within that, because TV and live are two very, very different things. So first and foremost was making sure that we get the format right. So the game that people play, which informs the narrative of the show and the narrative structure of the show. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. I've designed a whole bunch of new missions that are in this, taken some inspiration from missions that people know and love from the TV shows, whether that's the UK territory or other territories around the world. And also just other stuff is just clear out of my head. So there's original content in there. paying homage and respect to the world that they've built and allowing ourselves to also play and develop and build out that world at the same time. Other challenges.Neil Connolly: This is not a cheap project. No, no. I mean, the production quality of this is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It is stunning. When people walk in here, they're like, 'Oh my God, this is... High end.' I am in a luxury event at a very affordable price.Paul Marden: Thank you. And then we're going back upstairs again. Yes. And in the stairwell, we've got the crossed out photos of all of those that have fallen before us.Neil Connolly: No, not quite. All of the people that are in this corridor, there's about 100 photos. These are all the people who built the show.Neil Connolly: So this is David Gregory. He's the sound designer. This is Kitty, who is Immersive Everywhere's office manager. She also works in ticketing. That is Tallulah and Alba, who work in the art department. Elliot, who's our lighting designer. So all of these people are the people who brought the show to life.Paul Marden: Amazing.Neil Connolly: And we wanted to pay homage to them because some of them gave years of their lives to building the show from literally the inception that I had in 2023. Through to now and others are the people who literally spent months of their life underground in these basements building hand-building this set and so we wanted to pay homage to them so we got all of their photos we did the iconic red cross through it yeah and we stuck them all up in the corridor just because we thought it'd be a nice thing to do.Paul Marden: You're in the business of trading and experiences and that ranges from art exhibitions to touring shows. There's always going to be a challenge of balancing innovation and profitability. What is the formula? What is the magic formula?Neil Connolly: I believe, first and foremost, going back to what I was telling you earlier about us being a collaborative organisation. We are not a creative crack that has been used for the show. We are also the producers of the show. And to make my point again, I'm a commercially minded creative. So I actually sit down with the producers and go, 'Okay, cool.' There are 112 seats in the show.Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: Therefore, how many shows do we need to do per day? How many shows do we need to do per week? How many shows do we need to do per year? Therefore, let's build out a P &L. And we build a whole business plan based around that.Paul Marden: By having everybody— that you need in the team— makes it much easier to talk about that sort of stuff. It makes it much easier for you to design things with the end result in mind. You don't have a creative in a creative agency going off— feeding their creative wants without really thinking about the practicalities of delivering on it.Neil Connolly: Exactly. So you've got to think like, literally, from the very, very beginning: you've got to think about guest flow. You've got to think about throughput. You've got to think about your capacities. Then you've got to basically build out a budget that you think— how much, hey, how much really is this going to cost? Yeah. Then you build out an entire business plan and then you go and start raising the money to try and put that on. And then you find a venue. I mean, like the other magic triangle, like the traitor's magic triangle is, you know, time, space, atmosphere. That's how you do a show. Like with my producer's hat on, the other magic triangle is show, money, venue.Neil Connolly: The truth of the matter, like I make no bones about it, I can design shows till the cows come home, but I'm always going to need money to put them on and a venue to put them in. Also, I want to stress this really important. I use the words 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably.Paul Marden: It's a team effort.Neil Connolly: You can see that in that corridor. I am not a one-man band. I am the creative director of a company. I am a cog that is in that machine, and everybody is doing... We are, as a team... I cannot stress this enough. Some of the best in the business are doing what we do. And everyone is so wildly talented. And that's just us on the producing side. That's immersive everywhere, limited. Then I've got a whole other creative team. Then we've got operations. Then we've got... It's just mad. It's just mad, isn't it? This is a job. Who would have thought, when you were at school, this was an opportunity? Not my principal or my maths teacher.Neil Connolly: So, sorry, just to balance the kind of economies of scale. That was the question, wasn't it?Paul Marden: Well, we were talking about what is the formula for making that an investment, but you know, the authority here is the effort you've put in to do this feels high, but at the same time, you have to find this thing. There is a lot of investment that goes into the front.Neil Connolly: But that comes back to creatives. Caring and I'm not saying the creatives don't, but I care. I care about building businesses. Yeah, not necessarily like building my own CV, like there's so many projects that across our desks. I'll be like, 'Yeah, that'd be really fun to work on.' But do I think that I can make that a touring product? Can it be a long-running location-based entertainment sit-down product? Can it be an art shop? Like you've kind of got a balance with what do you think is just creatively cool versus what can we do as a company that is a commercially viable and financially stable product? And so all that comes through in terms of the creative, but also in terms of the activities of how we run the building, how this model realizes. Because if you think about it, let's make Phantom of the Opera run in the West End. Yes. The show is very obvious, with many casts on a room, away, fruit team away, terrace, it's a big activity. If they haven't sold half that away, they have to use the whole show and play all those people.Neil Connolly: But if they haven't sold half that away from one of my shows... I only have to activate four of my rooms, not eight of them. Therefore, I don't have to call in four actors. I don't have to call in a bunch of the other front of house team and I can scale in the operations on the back. It's an entirely scalable process. Flexible, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. But also, like, we've got eight rooms here. If we decide to take this to another territory, and that territory demands a much higher throughput, then instead of eight rooms, I can do 20 rooms, 30 rooms. As long as we know that the market is there to be able to kind of get people through it.Neil Connolly: I love this show and I'm so proud of it. The main reason why I'm proud of it is when the show finishes, let's go into one of the lounges. Have you been into one of the lounges?Paul Marden: I've had a nose around a lounge.Neil Connolly: There are different shapes and sizes. We won't go into that one. We'll go into this one down here. That one, that one. It's always such a buzz when you're stood in the bar and the shows kick out, and you see tables and tables of 14 people going up into the bar.Neil Connolly: Area and before they've even gotten a drink, they will run straight over to their friends, families, strangers, whoever they were playing with in that table of 14, and instantly be like, 'Right, I need to know everything that was going on inside your head, your heart, and your soul over the last two hours of my life because this was my experience.'Neil Connolly: And they'll just go, and they'll be like, 'And this is what I was thinking.' And then I thought it was you because you did this and you touched your nose in a weird way. And then I thought you were sending secret signals. And then everyone's like, 'No, that's not what I was doing.' I was just trying to be a normal person. And they were like, 'Well, why did you say that thing?' It sounded super weird. And they're like, 'That's just what I do.' And it's just totally mental. And then they all get a drink from the bar. And we call it the bar tab chat.Neil Connolly: It's another revenue stream.Neil Connolly: I do talk about this like it's a show. And it is a show. You've walked around, do you think it's a show? Completely. I talk to established houses all the time. Like, you know, the big theatres of the land. Organisations that are national portfolio organisations who receive a lot of Arts Council funding. The thing that they want to talk to us about all the time is new audiences. They're like, 'How do I get new audiences through my door?' What can I do? And I'm like, 'Well, firstly, make a show that people want to go and see.'Neil Connolly: Again, they're like, 'But I've got this amazing writer and he's a really big name and everyone's going to come because it's that name.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, that's wicked. That's cool.' And they can all go pay reverence to that person. That's really wonderful. Whereas when you look at the attractions landscape or the immersive theatre landscape or like anything like... Squid Game, or The Elvis, Evolution, or War of the Worlds, which has also laid reality, or any of that kind of stuff, across the landscape, it is nothing but new audiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is nothing but actual ticket-buying audiences.Neil Connolly: And they come from all different walks of life. And what I love is that they do come in to this experience and we hit them with this like secret theatre.Neil Connolly: And they're like, 'Oh my God.' And often it's a gateway to them being like, 'Oh, I didn't realise that.' Maybe I'll go see a Western show or maybe I will go to the National Theatre and see something. Because that's the level of archery. Because those organisations, I love them and I've worked in a few of them, but those buildings can be quite austere, even though they're open and porous, but it's still very difficult to walk through that threshold and feel a part of it.Paul Marden: Whereas coming in here, coming into an event like this, can feel like a thing that they do.Neil Connolly: Because it's the same demographic as theme park junkies. People who love going to theme parks love going to stuff like this because it's an experience, it's an otherness, it's an other nature kind of thing. Because modern audiences want to play and do, not sit and watch. But we all exist in the kind of same ecosystem. I'm not taking on the National Theatre.Paul Marden: Gosh, no. I always talk about that. I think the reason why so many attractions work together in the collaborative way that they do is they recognise that they're not competing with each other. They're competing with sitting on your backside and watching Netflix.Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah.Paul Marden: Our job for all of us is to drag people away from their screens and drag people off of their sofas to do something. And then that's the biggest challenge that we all face.Neil Connolly: I think then that kind of answers the question that you asked me earlier, which I didn't answer. And I'm very sorry.Neil Connolly: is about identifying different pieces of IP. Like, yes, we largely exist in the world of licensing IP. And how do we identify that kind of IP to be able to translate? Not just how do we do it, but like, actually, how do we identify the right thing that's going to... How do you spot the winner? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that is one of the biggest challenges to your point of we're talking directly to people who consume arts, culture and media and technology in a slightly more passive way, whether that's just at home and watching Netflix and then bringing that to life. In a very, very different way. If you have a very clear marketing campaign that tells people what it is that they're buying and what they're expected to see or do on their particular night out, because that's what modern people really care about, what they do with their money. Yeah. And they want to have a good night out. And I'm in the business of giving people a good night out. We also happen to be murdering a lot of people in the course of the show.Neil Connolly: Still a good night out. Still a good night out. But I'm in a place where the dead sit. Yeah, exactly. Lounge of the dead. And like, you know, this is a really cool space. Oh, it's just beautiful. You know, we've got the telephone really works. There's lots of information that comes through that. The radio works, that does different things. The TV screen on the wall, that has the actual live feed into the round table room that you've just left. And there's other little puzzles and hints and tricks in this room, which means that after you've been murdered or banished and you come to the Lounge of the Dead, you're still engaged with the game to a degree. You just don't directly influence the outcome of the game. But you're still involved in it. You're still involved in it. It's super fun. Oh, and you can have a drink in here.Paul Marden: I don't let people drink in the round table. Even more important. What's this?Neil Connolly: The dolls, the creepy dolls. What this is, this is the void. Creatively speaking, this is where all the gold goes when people win or lose it. And the creepy dolls are from the TV show. Ydyn nhw'r un gwirioneddol o'r sioe? Felly, gafodd studio Lambert, sy'n gwneud y sioe tebyg, llawer o brops o'r sioe tebyg i ni eu rhoi ar y ddispleiddio yma. Felly, mae gennych chi'r Dolls Creepy o'r lles 3 yno. Rydyn ni'n mynd i fyny. Yn ôl yma, mae'r peintiwch Deathmatch.Paul Marden: Which is from season three.Neil Connolly: And they get the quill and they write the names and got the quill upstairs. We've also got over here, the cards that they used to play the death match with. Excellent.Paul Marden: So you began your career in theatre. How did that evolve into the world of immersive live experiences?Neil Connolly: Life story. I am the son of a postman and a cook. And if you haven't noticed already, I'm from Ireland. There was no theatre in our lives, my life, when I was growing up. And I stumbled into a youth theatre. It's called Kildare Youth Theatre. And the reason why I joined that is because there was a girl that I really fancied.Neil Connolly: She had just joined this youth theatre and I was like, 'Oh, I'm gonna join that as well' and that kind of opened the world of theatre for me. At the same time, I then got spotted by this guy, his name's Vijay Baton, his real name's Om, but he converted to Hare Krishnanism in the 90s. And he set up a street theatre company in Ireland. He just taught me street theatre. So he taught me stilt walk, he taught me juggling, he taught me how to build puppets. And so I spent years building puppets with him and going around Ireland doing lots of different street theatre while I was a teenager. And doing street theatre and doing my youth theatre and then kind of all of that kind of came to a head when I had to decide what I was going to do with my life. I applied to go to drama school. And I applied to two drama schools. One was Radha. Didn't get in. Didn't even get an audition. And the other one was Rose Bruford. And they took me. And the reason why they took me— I probably wasn't even that good. But on the day that I was auditioning to get into Rose Bruford was the same day as my maths exam for my final exams at school. You call them your A-levels, we call them the leaving certificate.Neil Connolly: And while all of my friends were back in Ireland doing their maths exam, I was in an audition room pretending to be a tree or the colour black.Neil Connolly: Who knows? And they kind of went, 'Well, if I fail my maths exam, I don't get into university in Ireland.' Like, it's just a blanket thing. And so I was like, 'I literally sat across the panel' and I was like, 'eggs, basket.' And they were like, 'cool.' So they let me in based off of that. So I got a classical training. Then what happened is I came out of university. I was living with two of my friends, Natalie and Joe. And we had our own little production company called The Lab Collective. And we just started making shows. In weird ways, we joined a company called Theatre Delicatessen. Let's get away from this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Neil Connolly: So Theatre Deli was a company set up to take over disused spaces in London and convert them into art spaces.Neil Connolly: Basically legalised squatting. It's the same as like a guardianship. But we weren't living in the buildings. We were just putting on shows and we put on art shows, we put on theatre shows. We did Shakespeare for a while. We wrote our own work and we just did lots of really, really cool stuff. And I worked in music festivals, classically trained actor. So I was trying to do shows. I did a lot of devising. I also joined an improvisation group. And kind of through all that mix, like those years at Delhi, which was making these weird shows in these weird buildings, were very, very formative years for us. The Arts Council wouldn't support the kind of work that we were making. We were like, 'Cool, how do we get space?Neil Connolly: How do we get or make money to support ourselves? And what are the shows? There's the magic triangle all over again. Space, show, money. And that's your apprenticeship, I guess, that brings you to here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, again, I make no bones about it. 10 years ago, I was selling programs on the door of the Royal Festival Hall while doing all of that stuff. So in one of the Theatre Daily buildings, we did a show called Heist, which is you break into a building and steal stuff. That's what the public do.Neil Connolly: And a bunch of us did that. I mean, it's so much fun— kind of doing it. And off the back of that, somebody else basically tried to chase down the crystal maze. And then they went away, and then they called me up and they were like, 'Hey, I've got the rights. Do you want to make the crystal maze?' And I was like, 'Yeah, sounds like fun.' So I got involved with that, did that for a while. And then, from there, this is the end of a very long story. I'm so apologised. Yeah, from there, all of those different things that I've done through the course of my life in terms of operations, designing experiences, being a creative, understanding business.Neil Connolly: Building a P&L, building a budget, talking to investors, trying to convince them to give you money. All of that stuff kind of basically came together. And over the last few years, like the wildest ride is that pre-2020.Neil Connolly: We were just a bunch of people doing a bunch of weird things, making weird shows and weird attractions in kind of different ways. And then that year happened. And I don't know what happened, but literally every single major studio, film, TV production, game designer, licensor in the world, suddenly just went— brand extensions, world extensions, and they all just started calling us. And they were like, 'Hi, I've got this thing.' Can you develop it into a thing? Because I need to extend my brand or I want to build a world and extend that for the public. And we were like, 'Yeah, okay, cool.' And we were just lucky, serendipitously, to be in the right place at the right time. To be those people that people can approach. And we're always, we're very approachable.Neil Connolly: As you can tell, I talk a lot. And, you know, so the last five years, it's just been a mad ride.Paul Marden: So look, Neil, it's been amazing. I have had the most fun. Last question for you. What's next? Are you putting your feet up now because you finished this? Or on to the next? Neil Connolly: Very much on to the next thing. So we're already in production with our new show, which is called Peppa Pig Surprise Party. And that is opening at the Metro Centre in Gateshead next year. Oh, how exciting is that? It's very exciting.Paul Marden: So quite a different demographic.Neil Connolly: The demographic for Peppa Pig is two to five year olds. It's been a really fun show to design and create. To go back to a question that you asked me very early on, there is no blueprint, there is no format. I have embraced the chaos tattooed on my arm. And always when I approach things, any new show or any new creative, I am thinking of it from a ticket buying perspective: 'I have paid my money.' What is the coolest thing that I can possibly do with that money? And so therefore, I'm now looking at families and, like, what's the coolest thing that they can do for that ticket price in the world of Peppa Pig?Paul Marden: Let's come back in the new year, once you've opened Peppa Pig, let's go to Gateshead and see that. That sounds pretty awesome to me. I reckon there's a whole new episode of Designing Worlds for two to five-year-olds that we could fill an hour on.Neil Connolly: Oh yeah, 100%. It's a totally different beast. And super fun to design.Paul Marden: Oh mate. Neil, it has been so wonderful having a wander around the inside of your crazy mind.Paul Marden: If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like it and leave a comment in your podcast app. It really does make it so much easier for other people to find us. This episode was written by Emily Burrows from Plaster, edited by Steve Folland, and produced by Sami Entwistle from Plaster and Wenalyn Dionaldo. Thanks very much. See you next week.  The 2025 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsTake the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report

What's happening pals. Got a special bonus episode for you here, recorded live at Topologie's flagship store in Covent Garden.Topologie are a French brand that take inspiration from climbing culture, creating modular bags, phone slings and accessories that balance function and design. They asked me to come down and host a live My Own Garms session with a few brilliant guests to talk about creativity, community and the things we carry.You'll hear from:Lawrence Midwood, Creative Director at Topologie and former Y-3 designer, talking about process, collaboration and how design actually happens.David Keyte, Co-Founder of Universal Works, on craft, heritage and why physical stores still matter.Cara Hayward, Fashion Director at Gaffer, on styling footballers, print magazines and finding her lane in the industry.Nectar Woode, singer and songwriter, on honesty in her music, community, and the road to her biggest headline show so far.Big thanks to Topologie and Sane Comms for inviting me down, and to everyone who came out on the night.

October 1956: the Bolshoi Ballet lands in London with 80 tons of scenery, KGB minders in tow, and a troupe led by Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya. Covent Garden reels at their scale and power – 45 minutes of applause, queues in the rain, a stage too small for their vast sets. Meanwhile, across Europe, the Hungarian Uprising explodes. Ballet, politics, glamour, tanks — three weeks that shook London and rewrote the story of British ballet.

Welcome to a very special live edition of the Women Authors of Achievement Podcast, hosted for the first time in UK, right here at the Amano Hotel Skybar in London, overlooking Covent Garden. My guest today is Nikki Trott, strategist, podcast host and author of her new book Sacred Business. Her story bridges two worlds: the ambitious drive of London's fashion and branding industry, and the expansive, intuitive energy she discovered in Berlin.Nikki started out leading global fashion and lifestyle campaigns, working with big names across London and New York. But at some point, success as she knew it started to feel off. Thats when she made a radical choice, she left it all behind to follow a different kind of calling.In this conversation, we talk about what it means to walk away from conventional success, how Berlin helped her reconnect with her intuition, and why business can, and should, be an expression of who we are at our core.If you're in a moment of transition or simply craving more purpose in your work, hear this episode!Read more about the Women Authors of Achievement (WAA) Podcast via waa.berlin/aboutFollow us on Instagram & find us on LinkedInSubscribe to our newsletter via waa.berlin/newsletter ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

It's Rosebud's second birthday, and we're celebrating with another conversation with our very first guest: Dame Judi Dench. This time, it's been recorded in front of an audience, at the Concert Artists' Association in Covent Garden, London. Dame Judi treats us to some more stories from her amazing career. She tells Gyles about working with Tommy Steele, Johnny Depp and Clint Eastwood. She tells Gyles about having Eric Morecambe over for lunch. She talks about Macbeth and Twelfth Night and gives us some speeches from those plays - which will stop you in your tracks. We're extremely lucky to hear from this legendary actress once more. And we're extremely lucky to have been able to give you Rosebud for the past two years! Enjoy this. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

durée : 01:58:37 - Sir Thomas Beecham l'excentrique - par : Christian Merlin - La vie musicale britannique n'aurait pas été la même sans lui. Chef d'orchestre, mécène et producteur, il créa la saison lyrique de Covent Garden, fonda le London Philharmonic et le Royal Philharmonic et fit connaître Strauss et Sibelius en Grande-Bretagne, avec une excentricité très anglaise. - réalisé par : Marie Grout Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.

The anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL) and the Achilles tendon captures much of our ankle attention. As JOSPT Insights listeners know, there's plenty more to the ankle than the ATFL. Today, Liz Bayley shares her approach to diagnosing, managing and ideally, preventing ankle pain in active people. Liz covers diagnosing the problem, where imaging fits, and how to support return to function, including high-level sport. Liz is a former professional dancer, who now works as a dance-specialist physiotherapist. Her clinic is in London's West End, in close proximity to the freelance professional and student dancers she works with, at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and on 'Matilda The Musical' in Covent Garden. ------------------------------ RESOURCES Lateral ankle ligament sprains clinical practice guideline: https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2021.0302 Updated model of chronic ankle instability: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31162943/ Predictors of chronic ankle instability: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26912285/ Intrinsic foot muscle training systematic review: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35724360/ Neuromuscular electrical stimulation for foot intrinsic muscles: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35142810/

Its been a year since our live podcast with Clare Pooley so I thought I'd give it another spin, to entice you to come to our next live podcast event at Club Soda Monday 8 Sept in LondonDitched the booze and want to inspire others?Connection is key Incredibly, The Sober Club is 6 years old in September, and to celebrate we're having a gathering and podcast recording at Club Soda in Covent Garden on Monday 8 Sept 7.30 Because the club is so focused on the 'holistic' approach to sobriety I thought we'd make it a Wellbeing in sobriety event, and so I am jacking up some specialguests and hopefully goody bags, and I would love to hear your top tips for wellbeing too.⁠⁠https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clubsoda/1798978⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/⁠⁠Mind, Body, Freedom: Celebrating 6 years of The Sober ClubAn inspiring evening of connection, conversation, and clarity. One confirmed guest is Sarah Holland who is an EFT expert, she will share a really effective tapping technique that really works for reducing anxiety.I know its a long way for some, I know its a school night, but come if you can, its amazing to be in a room with like minded people.  You will leave with some inspiring ideas for what REALLY works when it comes to regulating your nervous system.https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/New to Sobriety? Sober Curious?Check out The Sober Club, for low cost support, accountability, inspiration, connection and a whole host of content on holistic living. Membership includes and online course Get the Buzz without the Booze, our private non judgemental community online and regularzoommeetings, plus a whole library of exclusive wellbeing contentIf you want to support the work go to www.buymeacoffee.com/janeyleegraceThank you for listening! Please share, rate and reviewIf you're struggling, always reach out, tell someone you're doing this! @janeyleegrace Ditched the Booze and want to inspire others?Janey offers holistic sober coachtraining, ournext course starts October 18-19, email Janey for a chat to see if its right for you – janey at janeyleegrace.com Supplements for recoveryThe BEST Magnesium blend ever is the blend from Clive – if you use this my link for everything you buy, a bitgoes into our Sober Club giveback fund If you can afford it,also get Vit D3, Amino Acids and Iodine (if you're menopausal)⁠⁠https://clivedecarle.ositracker.com/315625/11489⁠⁠ Check out my new Substack, you can be a free subscriber or paid for some juicy extras Sobriety Rocks…& TheWooWorksFollow Janey on socialmedia@janeyleegrace

Paul Weller has just covered it on his new album. Morrissey played it to Noel Gallagher who took the idea and ran with it. What explains the enduring appeal of a record that stalled at number 22 all those years ago? Actor/musician Brian Protheroe doesn't know but he's certainly grateful that it's being reissued once again. His story takes us back to:…the days when young musicians hitch-hiked to London…the way the sun shone on the day “Sgt Pepper” came out…when Soho was a village and an out of work actor could afford to live in Covent Garden…when being dumped by a girl could inspire that actor to diarise his daily routine…when the jazzman who played the solo on the record couldn't remember it for “TOTP”…how it feels to take your grandson to Abbey Road to watch your album being remastered.Pre-order the Chrysalis Red reissue of the first Brian Protheroe album: https://brianprotheroe.lnk.to/PNBFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a weekend at The Wellness Way festival I am reminded again of the importance of the holistic approach, great to give a talk on holistic sobriety and meet Barbara O'Neill, and then to come back to concerns from clients around weight loss jabs! I thought I'd re-run an interview with author and NLP practitioner Caroline Thywhitt on her great book The Mindset Diet https://amzn.to/3HxLf6mDitched the booze and want to inspire others?Join for a free non salesy webinar on Thursday August 21st at 7.30pm Its a great way of exploring what you want for the future, often quitting alcohol gives us a newsense of purpose.  There are so many different ways of using the skill sets offered in this comprehensive training,and we will talk through them and answer any questions.  Lots of people do the training because they want to lay the foundations for their own wellbeing, and while it is a biginvestment, several packages of coaching and wellbeing trainings would amount to far more, and you get biz skills included.Feel free to share with colleagues and friends, its free but you do need to registerRegister ⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠Connection is key Incredibly, The Sober Club is 6 years old in September, and to celebrate we're having a gathering and podcast recording at Club Soda in Covent Garden on Monday 8 Sept 7.30 Because the club is so focused on the 'holistic' approach to sobriety I thought we'd make it a Wellbeing in sobriety event, and so I am jacking up some specialguests and hopefully goody bags, and I would love to hear your top tips for wellbeing too.⁠https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clubsoda/1798978⁠⁠https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/⁠Mind, Body, Freedom: Celebrating 6 years of The Sober ClubAn inspiring evening of connection, conversation, and clarity. One confirmed guest is Sarah Holland who is an EFT expert, she will share a really effective tapping technique that really works for reducing anxiety.I know its a long way for some, I know its a school night, but come if you can, its amazing to be in a room with like minded people.  You will leave with some inspiring ideas for what REALLY works when it comes to regulating your nervous system.https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/New to Sobriety? Sober Curious?Check out The Sober Club, for low cost support, accountability, inspiration, connection and a whole host of content on holistic living. Membership includes and online course Get the Buzz without the Booze, our private non judgemental community online and regularzoommeetings, plus a whole library of exclusive wellbeing contentIf you want to support the work go to www.buymeacoffee.com/janeyleegraceThank you for listening! Please share, rate and reviewIf you're struggling, always reach out, tell someone you're doing this! @janeyleegrace Ditchedthe Booze and want to inspire others?Janey offers holistic sober coachtraining, ournext course starts October 18-19, email Janey for a chat to see if its right for you – janey at janeyleegrace.com Supplements for recoveryThe BEST Magnesium blend ever is the blend from Clive – if you use this my link for everything you buy, a bitgoes into our Sober Club giveback fund If you can afford it,also get Vit D3, Amino Acids and Iodine (if you're menopausal)⁠https://clivedecarle.ositracker.com/315625/11489⁠ Check out my new Substack, you can be a free subscriber or paid for some juicy extras Sobriety Rocks…& TheWooWorksFollow Janey on socialmedia@janeyleegrace 

Ever tried an AF comedy night?  Janey chats to MartynDavies, from Sober is Fun, promoter of the first alcohol free comedy club, he shares his powerful story and chats all things sobriety and humour.Connection is key Incredibly, The Sober Club is 6 years old in September, and to celebrate we're having a gathering and podcast recording at Club Soda in Covent Garden on Monday 8 Sept 7.30 Because the club is so focused on the 'holistic' approach to sobriety I thought we'd make it a Wellbeing in sobriety event, and so I am jacking up some specialguests and hopefully goody bags, and I would love to hear your top tips for wellbeing too.https://www.tickettailor.com/events/clubsoda/1798978https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/Mind, Body, Freedom: Celebrating 6 years of The Sober ClubAn inspiring evening of connection, conversation, and clarity. One confirmed guest is Sarah Holland who is an EFT expert, she will share a really effective tapping technique that really works for reducing anxiety.I know its a long way for some, I know its a school night, but come if you can, its amazing to be in a room with like minded people.  You will leave with some inspiring ideas for what REALLY works when it comes to regulating your nervous system.Ditched the booze and want to inspire others?Join for a free non salesy webinar on Thursday August 21st at 7.30pm Its a great way of exploring what you want for the future, often quitting alcohol gives us a newsense of purpose.  There are so many different ways of using the skill sets offered in this comprehensive training,and we will talk through them and answer any questions.  Lots of people do the training because they want to lay the foundations for their own wellbeing, and while it is a biginvestment, several packages of coaching and wellbeing trainings would amount to far more, and you get biz skills included.Feel free to share with colleagues and friends, its free but you do need to registerRegister HEREI'm going to be speaking at the Wellness Way festival with the amazing Barbara O Neill I'll be talking on Saturday 9th August 1-2 pm on the Deep Dive stage – about how tolive an amazing and liberated Alcohol Free Life!Tickets available athttps://www.thewellnesswayfestival.com/ticketsUse my code JANEYLEEGRACE15 for 15% off tickets!https://www.thesoberclub.com/events/New to Sobriety? Sober Curious?Check out The Sober Club, for low cost support, accountability, inspiration, connection and a whole host of content on holistic living. Membership includes and online course Get the Buzz without the Booze, our private non judgemental community online and regularzoommeetings, plus a whole library of exclusive wellbeing contentIf you want to support the work go to www.buymeacoffee.com/janeyleegraceThank you for listening! Please share, rate and reviewIf you're struggling, always reach out, tell someone you're doing this! @janeyleegrace Ditchedthe Booze and want to inspire others?Janey offers holistic sober coachtraining, ournext course starts October 18-19, email Janey for a chat to see if its right for you – janey at janeyleegrace.com Supplements for recoveryThe BEST Magnesium blend ever is the blend from Clive – if you use this my link for everything you buy, a bitgoes into our Sober Club giveback fund If you can afford it,also get Vit D3, Amino Acids and Iodine (if you're menopausal)https://clivedecarle.ositracker.com/315625/11489 Check out my new Substack, you can be a free subscriber or paid for some juicy extras Sobriety Rocks…& TheWooWorksFollow Janey on socialmedia@janeyleegrace 

I was walking along a stretch of my favourite canal path about a month ago with the barking machine and my good friend, documentary photographer Giles Penfound, when we encountered Dale Thomas running toward us. Usually, runners are reasonably head-down and on a mission, except Dale wasn't.  He wore a running top promoting the Ollie Young Foundation and was happy to stop briefly to talk about the cause. What came from our ten-minute chat convinced me that he had several human stories to share. And while he's not a photographer, Dale is certainly an encounter, and I'm always championing encounters as those magic, serendipitous moments where we connect, maybe make a portrait, and talk about life. So, Dale is today's guest, with a story about community, a race across the desert that, in many ways, saved his life, and an outlook shaped not by medals or miles, but by a belief that life is for living, fully, curiously, and with your family never far from your heart. Also from the mailbag, Johann van der Walt, artisan camera bag maker and, frankly, my new best friend, and like London buses, another Johan appears! Johan Rispling is here to ask whether photographers are secretly moonlighting as painters, poets, or pianists, and Andrew Scriven checks in from Andalusia via Covent Garden. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to Arthelper, who sponsor this show, plus our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week. WHY: A Sketchbook of Life is available here.

'Dying for Sex' and ‘Catastrophe' star Rob Delaney joins the show. Over iced coffees and schnitzel, Rob tells me about getting sober in his twenties, his surprising start in musical theatre, and life as an American raising three kids in London. We also talk about his role opposite Michelle Williams in Hulu's ‘Dying for Sex,' what gets harder (and easier) with age, and why he finally walked away from social media. This episode was recorded at Brasserie Max at the Covent Garden Hotel in Covent Garden, London. Want next week's episode now? Subscribe to Dinner's on Me PLUS. As a subscriber, not only do you get access to new episodes one week early, but you'll also be able to listen completely ad-free! Just click “Try Free” at the top of the Dinner's on Me show page on Apple Podcasts to start your free trial today. A Sony Music Entertainment & A Kid Named Beckett production. Get 15% off your Saily plan with the code ⁠⁠⁠dinnersonme⁠⁠⁠. Just download the Saily app or head to ⁠⁠⁠https://saily.com/dinnersonme⁠⁠⁠. Stay connected — and don't miss your dinner reservation. Stay connected — and don't miss your dinner reservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we're continuing Storyteller Summer with a stand-up comic who proves you can turn any job into a climate job — even one that usually involves jokes about socks.Our guest is Stuart Goldsmith, a veteran stand-up comedian and host of The Comedian's Comedian podcast, who now focuses almost entirely on the climate crisis. But instead of lectures or charts, Stuart brings humor, humility, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation to a topic that's often overwhelming.We talk about:The long, strange road from Covent Garden street performer to climate comedy evangelistWhy “the problems are the material” — especially when it comes to eco-anxietyThe art of bombing (a lot) while trying to make ocean acidification funnyMaking your own hypocrisy the butt of the jokeWhy climate storytelling needs more action and less guiltAlso: sticky jokes, snow leopards, tariff metaphors, LinkedIn mic drops, and the surprisingly dark comedy of unaffordable insurance premiums.This is climate storytelling at its smartest and most disarming. (And if you're hiring a climate comic, please drop this man a line — his American clients have all fled!)LINKS:Website: https://www.stuartgoldsmith.comInstagram: @stuartgoldsmithcomedyLinkedIn: Stuart Goldsmith (but only if you're a decision-maker!)All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member and get an ad-free version of the podcast: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/Please subscribe and tell your friends about Everybody in the Pool! Send feedback or become a sponsor! in@everybodyinthepool.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

British Olympic diver Tom Daley joins the show. Over fresh pasta, Tom tells me about becoming an Olympian for the first time at age 13, his special relationship with his late father, and becoming a dad with his partner ‘Milk' screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. This episode was recorded at Bancone in Covent Garden, London. Want next week's episode now? Subscribe to Dinner's on Me PLUS. As a subscriber, not only do you get access to new episodes one week early, but you'll also be able to listen completely ad-free! Just click “Try Free” at the top of the Dinner's on Me show page on Apple Podcasts to start your free trial today. A Sony Music Entertainment & A Kid Named Beckett production. Get 15% off your Saily plan with the code ⁠⁠dinnersonme⁠⁠. Just download the Saily app or head to ⁠⁠https://saily.com/dinnersonme⁠⁠. Stay connected — and don't miss your dinner reservation. Stay connected — and don't miss your dinner reservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices