Bradford theatre audiences surge in City of Culture year
"The spotlight is on the city and district during this special year, and we are exceeding expectations," she added.
The latest figures also revealed that the four museums and galleries managed by Bradford Council saw a 12% increase in visits during the first six months of this year.In total, there were 97,368 visits to Bradford Industrial Museum, Bolling Hall Museum, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery and Cliffe Castle Museum and Park between January and June this year, compared to 86,992 in the same period last year.Visits to the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery were up by more than a third, from 23,603 to 31,447 during the same period, according to the authority.Ferriby said: "The impressive growth is testament to the diverse and vibrant cultural offering during Bradford's year as the designated UK City of Culture."Bradford being chosen for the prestigious title had played a "pivotal role" in attracting both local and international visitors to the city who were "eager to explore the rich heritage and diverse exhibitions", she said."Bradford's theatres, museums and galleries will all be building on this momentum with more impressive listings designed to engage and inspire audiences, and we are committed to continuing our efforts to make culture accessible to all."
Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Robin Williams said: 'I'll buy the club!'': how The Comic Strip set the UK comedy scene ablaze
It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise. At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4's The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television. This being a celebration of an iconic moment in UK comedy history, one might assume Edinburgh's Usher Hall or the 750-seat Pleasance Grand has been set aside to host. But one might assume wrong. 'When I started [showing these films] about a year ago,' Richardson tells me, 'we didn't have the money to advertise them. So we'd arrive at theatres that had about 30 people who had somehow read our minds that we were going to be there. And 30 people in a 300-seat cinema can be hard work.' The Comic Strip Presents … ran for three series on Channel 4 from 1982-1988, then it moved to the BBC in the early 90s before making a return to Channel 4 for one-off specials, the most recent in 2016. But it's not a big name in comedy – far less so than, for example, The Young Ones, the BBC sitcom starring some of the same talents and broadcast at the same time. 'It wasn't good television,' admits Richardson, 'because it wasn't repetitive, and television is about repeating a formula and people getting to know it well.' And was it even comedy? One of the show's stars, Mayall, argued that it shouldn't have been called The Comic Strip, and that 'Interesting Films' might have been a better fit. In fact, the series was – like Inside No 9 more recently – a tonally varying anthology show, a suite of standalone films united only by sensibility, and by the performers bringing them to the screen. 'I told Channel 4,' says Richardson, ''These performers are so good they don't need to be stuck playing one-dimensional characters. They can play all sorts. One week they can be a heavy metal band, the next week they can be The Famous Five.' You could call it bad television, because you're not seeing more of the same. But as it's gone on, it's become a collection of very memorable one-off moments and that's what people now remember.' The performers also included Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Richardson himself, with a rotating supporting cast that included Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and more. At the time, they were setting the UK comedy scene ablaze. That all started at the Comedy Store, a strip club and the anarchic HQ of what had recently been called 'alternative comedy'. Richardson's coup was to cherrypick the most exciting voices of that generation, and cart them off to another strip club, a little less anarchic, a few blocks up the road: the Raymond Revuebar. Here, with the financial support of the Rocky Horror Picture Show producer Michael White, he opened The Comic Strip club – a name that seems obvious, although 'the New Depression Club' was, according to Edmondson, a very near miss. For a year from 1980-1981, the Comic Strip was the hippest and hottest comedy night in town. 'The bouncers at Raymond Revuebar had a simple rule of thumb for who was directed where,' Sayle later wrote. 'If they reeked of aftershave they were sent to the strip show; if they smelled of beer they came to us.' Celebs piled in: Bianca Jagger, Dustin Hoffman. Robin Williams came and demanded to perform, to impress his guest, David Bowie. Sayle offered him 15 minutes. Williams said: 'I told [Bowie] I'd do an hour'. Sayle: 'You can't.' Williams: 'I'll buy the club!' Sayle: 'We don't own it. It belongs to a bouffant-haired pornographer.' The buzz even reached the pages of the London Review of Books, whose critic noted, 'within seconds, [Sayle] has the audience agape. Most of them, it seemed, had never been called cunts before.' Then Channel 4 came calling, looking for cutting-edge talent to help launch the new broadcaster on to the country's airwaves. Richardson was given carte blanche. 'They said, 'What do you want to do?' and I said, 'I want to make six films, all different.'' The first, Five Go Mad in Dorset, was transmitted on the station's opening night, and the controversy around its satire of Enid Blyton attitudes gave that event a front-page news fillip. But Five Go Mad will not be celebrated at the fringe this summer, says Richardson. 'Taking the piss out of racism and sexism [in that way] is long gone,' he says. 'It's not a funny issue like it was when we did it in the 80s.' One option might have been to re-edit the episode – a course of action in which Richardson, now 73, has freely indulged as the Edinburgh shows have come together. Not for him a bask in the glory of his youthful success. 'What we've done,' he says, 'is revisited the films and said, '30 years later they need some adjustment.' Because things go faster now.' Western spoof Fistful of Travellers Cheques has been 'cut back a bit'. So too has late-period favourite Four Men in a Car. And a scene has been trimmed from The Strike, the show's faux Hollywood movie making mincemeat of the miners' strike. That one bagged a Golden Rose of Montreux comedy award, and starred Richardson (the only performer to appear in every episode) as Al Pacino playing, er, Arthur Scargill. 'I could do Pacino much better now,' he laughs, 'because I worked with John Sessions on Stella Street.' So now, he says, slipping into a convincing Italian-American accent, 'I can do Al.' Stella Street was another of Richardson's TV hits, undertaken when The Comic Strip Presents, by any measure his life's work, was in abeyance. Even when he was a jobbing comedian, in double act The Outer Limits with Nigel Planer, Richardson was a child of amateur film-makers and a wannabe film-maker himself. With The Comic Strip, he made movies for cinematic release: The Supergrass in 1985, and Eat the Rich two years later. Further TV specials included Red Nose of Courage, telling the tale of John Major's flight from the circus to parliament, and 2011's The Hunt for Tony Blair, imagining the ex-PM on the run having been accused of a series of murders. Both will be screened at the fringe, MC'd by comedian Robin Ince and with special guests including Sayle and Allen. Richardson is modest about the achievement of having brought these 30 years' worth of films to the screen. 'I always thought we were the new Ealing comedies. And [Ealing Studios at its peak] made about 150 films over 20 years, of which about 15 are remembered. So our strike rate isn't too bad. We made some flops, but at least one or two out of each series are really good.' Some, indeed, are carved on this writer's heart – notably Bad News Tour and More Bad News, the show's two-part heavy metal spoof, which predated This Is Spinal Tap and ended up with Edmondson, Mayall and co performing live on stage, under a hail of beer glasses, at the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Richardson is at peace with the under-appreciation of The Comic Strip Presents, acknowledging that, as a bloody-minded sitcom refusenik way back when, he is the auteur of his own misfortune. He is delighted to be bringing the remastered films to Edinburgh, a city in which, back in the day, he and Planer once toured as a support act to Dexy's Midnight Runners. 'FrontmanKevin Rowland complained,' he says, 'that we didn't do new material at every performance.' Expect no new material at these screenings – but a new experience, perhaps. 'It's a great thing,' says Richardson, 'to show them in the cinema. You don't often get to share comedy television with an audience, and it changes the whole experience: people laughing around you. We've discovered that there is an audience around the country who want to see these films on the big screen and talk about them. It's fantastic that something we created 30 or 40 years ago is still creating laughter. I love it.' The Comic Strip Presents … is at the Fringe is on 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 August at Just the Tonic, Edinburgh
Daily Mail
44 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Double delight for Matildas fans as two of the team's stars drop huge news about their love lives
Matildas fans are cheering this week after the heartwarming news that both Clare Wheeler and Alex Chidiac have experienced happy milestones with the loves of their lives. Wheeler, who plays for Everton in the UK, announced her engagement to partner Jeremy with an Instagram post on Monday. Sharing a photo of herself showing off a sparkling ring alongside Jeremy on an Italian beach, Wheeler captioned the photo with six digits: '17.07.25'. The news sparked a wave of Australian teammates rushing to congratulate the newly engaged couple. Mary Fowler posted: 'Yayyy congrats you cuties.' Hayley Raso wrote: 'No way, this is sooooo beautiful. Congrats you two.' Teagan Micah posted: 'Screaming! So happy for you both.' Meanwhile, Melbourne Victory star Chidiac tied the knot with her long-term partner Erin. The A-League star posted a series of photos from the ceremony at the Sun Theatre in Melbourne's inner-west, which left her Matildas teammates overjoyed. 'Congratulations you two! Looked amazing,' posted Courtney Vine. 'Love it Chids, so happy for you both,' wrote Emily Gielnik. The dual celebrations come at an interesting time for the Matildas after some mixed results so far in 2025. However, new coach Joe Montemurro is confident the team will be ready for the 2026 Asian Cup. 'I've had less time to prepare teams for big tournaments,' Montemurro said earlier in the month. Chidiac, who plays for Melbourne Victory, also received many well wishes from teammates 'The good thing about it, we're going to have a lot of players who are in season [for the next window], so they're going to be at least physically - and from a rhythm perspective - in tune. 'That was the biggest thing over the last 20 days - you saw the players, the rhythms were up, down, everywhere. 'All of them had to be managed physically. 'We won't have that problem [next time]. So at least we can go forward with players that are ready to go.'
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Parallel Path by Jenn Ashworth review – a soul-searching walk across England
When Jenn Ashworth set out on Alfred Wainwright's 192-mile coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees in the west to Robin Hood's Bay in the east, she was stepping out of character. Her daily circular walks round Lancaster during lockdown were no real preparation, and a brief orienteering course was no guarantee that she wouldn't get lost. She wasn't walking for charity or running away from a marriage or, like the fell runner who'd done the route in 39 hours, trying to break any record. A homebody 'inclined to slowness', she was a 40-year-old novelist, professor and mother of two going off on her own for two-and-a-half weeks for reasons she couldn't quite articulate. Not that there weren't contributory factors. Lockdown had left her with post-Covid cabin fever, itchy to be elsewhere after the long months of caring for her family and students ('a one-woman battle against entropy'). She also knew that at every pub and guest house she'd booked en route supportive letters would be waiting from her terminally ill but brilliantly animated friend Clive. Most importantly, although her walking wouldn't be solitary, since she couldn't avoid bumping into other (potentially annoying) hikers, she'd be 'the sole owner of my own skin again'. As she flogs herself 'onwards towards impressiveness', her journey is marked out plainly. The chapters detail the distance and destinations of each day's walk. They also convey how brittle, sour and grumpy she can be, and how blistered and footsore she gets: she might be 'off on a jolly' but there's a price to pay, in pain and guilt. She doesn't go in for nature writing: when she evokes 'the damp green air and the heavy, alive smell of the still-wet branches and mulchy undergrowth', it's a plain-as-muck authentic response, not a 'soft' poeticism. Maybe that's down to her being grittily northern. She does reflect on what it means to come from the north, but her version of northern-ness isn't Alfred Wainwright's, whose 'gruff complaining' she engages with throughout – enjoyably and sometimes scathingly. He's not the only fellow traveller in her head. Nor is Clive, with his letters, nor Ben, her late first husband, whose 24 marathons in 24 months, completed after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, were an amazing achievement. Mostly it's writers she carries with her – Henry David Thoreau, William Hazlitt, Werner Herzog (who walked from Munich to Paris to see his dying mentor) and Virginia Woolf – whose ideas inspire her own. (Had it come out sooner, David Nicholls's novel of last year covering the same route, You Are Here, might have featured too.) What's captivating about her book is all the thinking she does mid- or post-trek: on writing, friendship, welfare, illness, Charles Atlas, climate change, protest marches, knitting, and why it is that in popular mythology 'walking women' are either models on a catwalk or sex workers. As she wanders, her mind wanders. Solvitur ambulando: she's not sure what exactly it is she's trying to solve by walking, but the book's as much an invigorating mental workout as it is a hard physical trudge. Memories surface, too, from childhood and adolescence: of a girl called Alice she knew who died in a 'horrible accident' when Ashworth was 10 and whose photo she hid in a bottle; of her volunteering for the Samaritans as one of the women (Brendas, they were called) who'd listen on the phone to distressed or lonely callers, including men who'd masturbate as they talked; of how she returned to Preston from Cambridge University 34 weeks pregnant at the age of 21 and made it her home again. In her last nonfiction book, Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth devised a method that married narrative fragments with philosophising lyrical essays. Here the storyline is simpler – a walk, start to finish – but the method is much the same. Towards the end comes the threat of failure. She loses her balance and falls – no injury is sustained, but the dizziness feels ominous. Then a heatwave arrives, making the scheduled completion of the walk impossible. The complications gather to a major health crisis, closer to home than the one affecting Clive. Mercifully, there's an upbeat outcome, adding another layer to the motif of care. The walk that the author saw 'as a break from the labour of care turned out to be a path that led me deeper into understanding my own need for it'. 'Not until we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves,' Thoreau wrote. Ashworth didn't walk 192 miles in order to find herself. But she's newly conscious afterwards not of her stamina and sure-footedness but of her frailty, of how 'my body is more fragmented and vulnerable than I wanted it to be'. Despite her guise as an 'armoured little being stomping her way across the entire country', she's forced to embrace a new kind of gentleness. And rather than exulting in independence, she's back among friends and freshly available to 'the traffic of love'. Chastened but buoyant, she's stimulating to be with, her book the best kind of walking companion. The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North by Jenn Ashworth is published by Sceptre (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
