Somerset venues hosting TV legend Harry Hill in his first tour in 10 years
Hill has chosen two Somerset destinations for his 'Diamond Jubilee UK Tour' which consists of 80 confirmed dates to 'celebrate 60 Glorious Years of fun, laughter and low-level disruption.'
READ MORE: McFly's Dougie Poynter performing in Somerset this weekend
READ MORE: TV Burp and You've Been Framed star to perform stand-up gig
The TV personality, best known for appearing in Harry Hill's TV Burp and You've Been Framed, is coming to Bath and Yeovil in 2025.
This tour is Harry Hill's first UK tour in 10 years as he revealed a 77-date tour for the year.
Hill will be in Bath's Theatre Royal on Sunday, March 9 and Yeovil's Westlands on Thursday, September 11.
Tickets have officially sold out for Hill's Bath appearance but are still available to purchase online if you want to see him in Yeovil.
Pricing to see Harry Hill start at £31.50 - with bookings subject to a £2 transaction Fee.
"The Badger Parade is back on," said Harry Hill about his tour. "Join me on my Diamond Jubilee lap of honour as I celebrate 60 Glorious Years of fun, laughter and low-level disruption.
"Marvel as I offer new insights into the hot topics of the day such as the demise of the SCART lead, The Culture Wars, the differences between crab sticks and rhubarb and the origins of Tiramisu.
"Guffaw with delight as I delve into my back catalogue using my patented 'Old Bit Randomiser' for old favourites like 'Interspecies Tennis', 'The time I went up in the Space Shuttle' and 'When Nan got her hair caught in the knitting'.
"Cough Awkwardly - As Gary,(my son from my first marriage) attempts to take over the business again.
"Watch in Wonder! at the return of The Badger Parade with guest appearances from The Knitted Character and Abu Hamster Plus one lucky audience member will get to join me in a double act.
"So get on board the laughter train".
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Ward's Censoring Queen Victoria, Lucy Worsley's Queen Victoria, and Julia Bard's Victoria: The Queen, have attempted to excavate the woman from the monarch and her public image. They're increasingly frank about the realities of Victoria's life as a woman, including her desires, the toll taken by so many pregnancies, the postpartum depression, even her rocky experience of menopause. We know now, for example, that Victoria dreaded pregnancy and struggled with severe postpartum depression. She was physically very attracted to her husband: 'his love and gentleness is beyond everything, and to kiss that dear soft cheek, to press my lips to his, is heavenly bliss,' she wrote in her journal just days after they married. That reassessment extends to the topic of her relationship with Brown: 'There are few subjects as wildly speculated about and poorly documented as Queen Victoria's relationship with John Brown,' writes Baird. Still, she concludes: 'What is certain is that Queen Victoria was in love with John Brown.' Meanwhile, Worsley is skeptical that their relationship was a sexual one, chalking the scandal up to 'the unspoken belief that a widowed woman of middle age, as Victoria was, must inevitably become sexually insatiable.' The royal family is still staying silent on the topic of Mrs. Brown. As Baird revealed in her book, researchers who use the Royal Archives are required to agree that any quotes and 'all intended passages based on information obtained from those records' must be submitted for approval. And she was asked to remove 'large sections' from her book based on material found outside the archives, including Victoria's requests for the items in her coffin. Riddell enters the chat Riddell wades into the debate with a new approach, re-examining the existing evidence while looking much more closely at Brown, his family, and the community around Balmoral. 'I've always been fascinated by the idea that there was this man from a crofting farmer's family who stood at Victoria's side, the most powerful woman in the world, at this point, for 20 years, and we knew so little about him,' Riddell says. And she finally confirms the existence of that letter from Victoria to Brown's brother, as well as the Brown family archive, hinted at in Cullen's Empress Brown, much of which is now accessible at local archives in Aberdeen — and reveals much more about its content. For instance, Victoria had a cast made of Brown's hand just after his death, nearly identical to the one she had made of Albert's. There's also a New Year's card inscribed, 'To my best friend JB / From his best friend V.R.I.' (V.R.I was Victoria's royal cypher, meaning 'Victoria Regina Imperatrix.') Pointing to an account of a deathbed confession by Victoria's royal chaplain of marrying the pair and Victoria's documented behavior regarding Brown, including her demands that her sons shake his hand, as though he were their social equal, Riddell makes the case that Victoria and Brown likely had an 'irregular' marriage. Scottish marital customs were notoriously flexible at the time, and it had become common for couples to 'marry' by simply swearing vows. 'We'd only ever considered this possibility of a marriage from an English lens—there had to be a priest, there had to be marriage banns, there had to be a church wedding,' says Riddell. 'No one had ever considered it from his community's perspective.' Most interesting is Riddell's discovery of an enduring Brown family story which tells of a child. Angela Webb-Milinkovich, a pierced and tattooed care worker from Minnesota descended from Brown's brother Hugh tells Riddell: 'We were always told that we were the illegitimate line.' Hugh and his wife emigrated to New Zealand in the mid-1860s and registered a daughter's birth, the couple's only child. The couple stayed for only a decade, returning to the United Kingdom in the 1870s, child in tow. Their return trip was paid for by Victoria. There are plentiful reasons to be skeptical about a potential secret child—family stories about lineage are often unreliable, and Victoria was in her early 40s when her relationship with Brown developed. Plus, Victoria suffered from a painful injury, a prolapsed uterus, that her doctor discovered only after her death. But Riddell argues that none of that rules out the possibility that Victoria had another child. 'There's no evidence to support the idea that she had a prolapsed uterus immediately after [her youngest child's] birth,' Riddell says, and it's common for the injury to happen later in life. Nor was she too old: 'Many women in this period have their last baby between 45 and 47,' Riddell says. Plus, a pregnancy would have been easier than many might assume to conceal. Victoria was deep in seclusion, wearing voluminous mourning gowns. 'No one saw the queen naked. No one touched her body, apart from the four women who were her dressers,' says Riddell. Of course, there are Victoria's own words. She was famously vocal about her difficulties with pregnancy and doctors had advised Victoria not to have any more children over concerns about postpartum depression. But after Albert's death, Victoria longed, one of her daughters wrote, 'for another child.' Proof, though, would be difficult to establish. When it comes to DNA, 'it's much more complicated and much more delicate than television and culture has given us the impression of,' says Riddell, who makes no definitive claim regarding the story, simply presenting the evidence for and against. But what does become clear in Riddell's book is that Brown's own family understood that a relationship existed. The rumor of Mrs. Brown will no doubt endure; it's just too tempting to speculate about the private lives of the powerful, particularly when the details are so at odds with the public image. What Victoria's contemporaries saw between the monarch and her Highland Servant says as much about their society's fears, preoccupations, and messy realities as it does about these two individuals, and the modern fascination is no different. Everybody wants to know what happens behind closed doors, especially palace doors.
