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There's a great exhibition on at the Leicester Adult Education Centre in Wellington Street at the moment. The Art School Dance Goes on Forever looks at the achievements of alumni of Leicester Art School in the 1960s.
Those alumni include Tony Kaye, a founding member of Yes; the members of the band Family; and the actor Charles Dance. Many more made their names in fields related to art.
The exhibition closes on 17 March. It's open Monday - Thursday, 8.30am - 8.30pm, Friday 8.30am - 4.30pm and closed on Saturday and Sunday.
I had intended to include a video about the exhibition here, but can't find one I can embed. So instead here's Family's lead singer Roger Chapman reviewing the week's new releases back in 1969.
It's a reminder that the idea the Beatles were above criticism is a modern heresy.
The actor Barry Evans died in the Leicestershire village of Claybrooke Magna in 1997. The circumstances of his death were mysterious, but no charges have ever been brought.
This video told me much I didn;t know about his career - in particular that he had grown up in care. It would be interesting to know how he managed to get to the Italia Conti Academy and then the Central School of Speech and Drama from such a background.
The clips of his early work here, and the fact that he acted at the Royal Court and the National Theatre, suggest he was capable of far more than the light comedy he became know for and eventually trapped in.
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is a likeable film, and not only because it has both Traffic and the Spencer David Group on its soundtrack, but after that things went downhill.
The Doctor sitcoms were popular, but they looked back to the Dirk Bogarde films of the Fifties. I never watched Mind Your Language, but it had a reputation for low-grade racism.
Meanwhile, the only films being made in the early Seventies were sex comedies or films of popular situation comedies.
Evans moved to Claybrooke Magna in the Harborough district in 1993 and became a taxi driver. Four years later he was dead.
An author is writing a new book about a tragic TV star whose death at his home in a Harborough village is still a real mystery - and he wants your help.
Daniel Ward has carried out over 80 in-depth interviews with the former colleagues and co-stars of much-loved actor Barry Evans - who lived in Claybrooke Magna, near Lutterworth.
And he’s now asking for anyone who knew Barry after he moved here to Harborough to share their personal memories with him as he puts together his biography.
You know that film I'm always going on about? Well a version of it has appeared on YouTube.
I say "a version" because this one last only an hour, whereas Talking Pictures TV has shown one ("with previously lost scenes restored") that lasts at least 20 minutes longer.
It's a dark film - in both senses of the word. As I blogged recently, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, No Room at the Inn was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945.
You can see this in the way that at least some of the children are not, as even the film seems to think, wartime evacuees but in local authority care and fostered. At the start of the film one of them is living in the town where she lived with her mother, while others - as the O'Neill brothers were - have been sent far from home.
You can also see it in the way the local councillors are pictured. In the case of Dennis O'Neill, it was the education committee of Newport council in South Wales, which had sent him and his brothers to Shropshire, that aroused the anger of the press.
And, in the film, the detail of Ronnie being locked in the coal shed is obviously inspired by the abuse of Dennis O'Neill too.
The film is dominated by the performance of Freda Jackson, a ferocious actress who was Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and still around to appear in Blakes 7 more than thirty years later.
I've already told the story about audiences of the original play standing and cheering when her character, Mrs Voray, met her fate.
A Guardian interview with her son Julian Bird, who became an actor in his sixties, went further:
She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. "There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her."
Notable too is Joan Dowling as Norma Bates. I find that I posted a film about her before I'd ever heard of No Room at the Inn. She was to marry her co-star from Hue and Cry, Harry Fowler, and take her own life when she was 26.
On a happier note, you can enjoy Dora Bryan's film debut. As the girl in the bar she steals Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
The original play No Room at the Inn was written by Joan Temple, but the film's screenplay is by Ivan Foxwell and Dylan Thomas. Temple's best line survives almost intact though.
In the film Mrs Voray says:
"There ain't much you can tell me about kids. I've buried two of my own."
Whereas in the play it was three., but then jokes in the theatre tend to be broader.
I thought of the 1970s, when the North American Soccer League came to British attention because of an influx of ageing world stars like Pele and Bobby Moore.
We smiled when we found out that the Americans could not cope with the concept of a draw - the saying "a draw is like kissing your sister" was widely quoted at the time.
Instead, the league had a penalty shoot out in case of a draw at full time. Later it introduced a revised version in which a player ran towards the goal from 35 yards out and had five seconds to shoot.
Now this mentality has invaded cricket - limited overs cricket at least - with the advent of the super over.
This strikes me as unfortunate: the reduction in outcomes from three to two makes the game a little less subtle and a little less complex.
The same mentality has even invaded chess. It used to be that the world champion kept his title if a match ended with the scores level. Now there are play-off games at increasing rapid time limits until a winner can be declared.
I can't help thinking we all need to grow up a little.
* Though I might well have watched Talking Pictures TV's screening of Cliff Richard's 1973 Birmingham-set musical Take Me High instead.
Talking Pictures TV continues to be a marvel. The other day it showed Hitchcock's Sabotage, made in 1936 before he left for Hollywood.
The film is loosely based on Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, which I blogged about in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. As the film shows the destruction of a bus, it is even more reminiscent of those outrages.
Reading that post 15 years on confirms the past is a foreign country, because I quote an article by Brendan O'Neill with approval.
Well, I did write a couple of articles for Spiked in 2001 and I would still recommend Frank Furedi's Culture of Fear as an analysis of what happened to Britain in the 1990s.
His view has much in common with that of Adam Curtis in that it emphasises the role of government in talking up threats so that it can then claim credit for protecting us
After you have seen the film you may enjoy the Hitchpod episode on it. It contains spoilers (which I have tried to avoid here), but the two hosts both rate if highly among Hitch's films.
Finally, don't worry about young Stevie, the unwitting carrier of the terrorists' bomb. The actor who played him, Desmond Tester, grew up to be a big name in Australian television, particularly children's programmes, and gave Rod Hull and the Bee Gees their first breaks.
"Liberals around the world need to define our cause," says Rob Davidson. "In the absence of a clear vision of liberation politics, we are left in the vacuous, uninspiring 'middle'."
A discussion on Democracy Now! looks at the obstacles being placed in the way of Black, Latino and student voters in the US.
Simon Court on William Godwin's contribution to the radicalism of the Romantic movement.
Parul Sehgal reviews The Mirror and the Light - the concluding volume of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
"The liquid that is so essential to life is also, in Roeg’s film, a harbinger of death, from the persistent rain on the pond in the very first shot to the murky canals in which murder victims are found." David Thompson watches Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now,
Tom Cox hunts the numinous in East Anglia: "We crossed the common, where the author Penelope Fitzgerald claimed to have spotted Black Shuck late during the last century."
"Brexit has given nationalists the confidence to cast suspicions upon a wide array of independent public bodies, from universities to the Bank of England. One thing that neoliberals and nationalists can agree on is that anyone whose education and career has been spent in publicly funded liberal institutions, telling a story about 'the public interest' is a fraud." William Davies on the Conservative attack on the humanities.
"The report that Johnson wants civil service briefings to be short and simple is not so remarkable – many politicians share that desire – but the suspicion must be that he also wants them to pander to, rather than to challenge, his pre-existing beliefs." Chris Grey finds that Brexit is going feral.
Mary Beard, who grew up in Shrewsbury, says the prime minister should be visiting flooded settlements. "People who have been inundated need to know that those in power have some sense of the reality of flooding beyond the words and the headlines."
Harry Potter’s dwindling popularity dismays Patrick West.
"His anguished cry, “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand” is more relatable than ever in these toxic times." James Gent watches John Cleese's 1986 film Clockwise.
