All Posts Tagged With: "Hay Festival"

Frost in June in Ludlow

June 25th, 2009 • Peter • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

Sir David Frost is and has been many things, but he is not Art, Music or Drama, which are loosely assumed to be the key criteria for inclusion in Ludlow’s annual festival, and there seemed no obvious reason for his appearing here. But this festival has become something of a cultural potpourri, and it’s hard to find a coherent theme in the choices made by the organisers. I’ve said this before, but of course, in some ways this doesn’t matter at all. They booked Frost for “An Audience with Sir David Frost (Followed by a Q&A session)” at Ludlow’s Assembly Rooms and I went along quite uncertain of what to expect.

To start with it turned out to be a truly enjoyable nostalgia trawl through ‘60s television satire, of which David Frost was the principle pioneer. Showing some evocative clips from That Was The Week That Was, and the Frost Report, he was obviously relishing his role in bringing so much great and subsequently famous talent to the screen for the first time – like Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, John Cleese, Ronnies Corbett and Barker.

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Bonhomie, Burlesque and Balls Up in Hay

June 2nd, 2009 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

There’s nothing so dead as a festival that’s just finished, but this year’s Hay Fest has passed on leaving some great memories of sun-soaked days, contented punters, gallons of laughter, spectacle, revelation and vision revived. Scattered among the keystone interviews and discussions – Tutu, Bennett, Fry, Paxman – was the usual plethora of smaller events, niche books, anorak authors, and the downright wacky, like Blaize, Immodesty – as she appears in the index – who put on a short but powerful display of Burlesque on Saturday night.

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Hay in May in Full Bloom

May 26th, 2009 • Peter • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

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This year’s Hay Lit Fest – one of my favourite events – has flowered as never before. Seduced by a full-on sun from dawn to dusk over the weekend, the punters have flocked in. After the utter drenching of last year’s festival, and wary of the effects of the recession on the bibliophilic public, Peter Florence and his dedicated gang of supporters took the decision to remove one venue and to reduce ticket prices. As it happens, last year they lost one tented stage to the torrents anyway, when it became instead a muddy tented swimming pool.

The result of the price cut has been that show after show has been selling out and the whole place is seething with thousands of people cramming walkways resounding with cries of ‘Sorry! So sorry!’ as they cannon into one another or splodge their neighbours with Shepherds ewes’ milk ice-cream.

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If Ian McEwan pinched it from Jeffrey Archer, who did Archer pinch it from?

August 9th, 2008 • Peter • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

A couple of months ago at the Hay Festival, Ian McEwan inadvertently added to his reputation as a plagiarist.

It had come to light in late 2006 that significant chunks of the hospital scenes in Atonement had been lifted from an autobiographical account of wartime nursing by the late Lucilla Williams, a well-known romantic novelist. McEwan did, in fact and in small print, acknowledge Lucilla Williams’ work as a research source in the back of his book. However Ms Williams herself was quite unaware of the substantial contribution she had made to his much-lauded novel until four years after it was published, when a post-grad research academic, Natasha Alden told her about it. McEwan’s error was, perhaps, a failure to mention more fulsomely and manifestly the extent to which he had used her work.

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