Hello and welcome to this week’s Cultured. On Sunday, coming to you direct from a Lindisfarne Festival field. Gusty but glorious.
David Whetstone is back from his holidays and has wasted no time getting out and about, starting with a preview screening of Forever Home, a new TV drama filmed in the North East.
He’s also been looking ahead to Live Theatre’s autumn season and has news of one of the first exhibitions heading to Sunderland’s soon-to-open Culture House, featuring the work of Sunderland-born artist Audrey Amiss.
Elsewhere, Tony Henderson turns his attention to the documentary photography of Chris Killip and a new book bringing together images from his remarkable archive.
And then there’s football.
Sam Patterson introduces us to Nutmeg Salad, the new newsletter and online platform she’s launched with her other half, The Futureheads’ Ross Millard. The pair admit to an “unhealthy obsession” with the beautiful game, but are out to celebrate how much more to football there is than football.
Finally, Collected Books are back with another recommendation for your bookshelf – this time their Book of the Month for September.
Hope you enjoy it all, and have a great Sunday.
Graham Norton’s novel gets North East TV treatment
The relative conviviality of a preview screening shouldn’t perhaps be taken as a surefire guide to the nature and content of a forthcoming TV drama series.
If you’ve read Forever Home, the fourth novel by Graham Norton – chat show host with a talent for plots and prose to match his gift of the gab – then you’ll know it’s not all sweetness and light.
But conviviality there was in abundance at the Tyneside Cinema on Friday night as cast, crew and other interested parties got a first glimpse of what we’ll be seeing on our screens from September 14, when the first of six episodes airs on Channel 5.
This ‘invitation only’ preview arranged by North East Screen, energetic promoter of the region’s many filmic attributes, was another brilliant showcase for its native talent and still largely unexploited potential.
Rich and radical autumn pickings at Live
The North East has a well-documented history of radical discourse and it gives rise to an event Live Theatre is hosting in partnership with the New Statesman magazine.
The North East has a well-documented history of radical discourse and it gives rise to an event Live Theatre is hosting in partnership with the New Statesman magazine.
It takes the form of a panel discussion focusing on the question The Radical North East: Is This Our Moment?
It is timed, of course, to whet the appetite for Live Theatre’s forthcoming co-production of Our Friends in the North with Newcastle-based Eastlake Productions and the Theatre Royal, where it is to be staged from October 15 to 24.
Peter Flannery’s play – turned into the famous BBC TV drama series which has been the inspiration for this new adaptation 30 years on – spanned decades, taking in regional and national politics, industrial unrest, police corruption and all manner of dodgy dealings.
It presented the region as a ferment of radical thinking, building on a colourful history that has given us plaques, statues, a wealth of challenging archival material (peruse the shelves of the Lit & Phil to get a flavour) and perhaps a certain nonconformist attitude.
Among those speaking at the event on Friday, September 11 (8pm) will be North East Mayor Kim McGuinness, Middlesbrough playwright Ishy Din and cultural commentator Alex Niven, author of The North Will Rise Again.
It will be chaired by Tom McTague, New Statesman editor in chief.
Is this our moment? You’ll have to be there to find out and tickets are on sale (tenner a time) from the Live Theatre box office.
Meanwhile this famous crucible of radical theatre has taken the wraps off an autumn season of wide-ranging appeal.
Recognition at last as Audrey’s art comes home
“I think you will become one of the greatest painters of the age,” wrote the headmistress of Bede Girls’ Grammar School to a promising pupil called Audrey Amiss.
Audrey was born in Sunderland in 1933, the daughter of shopkeepers Arthur and Belle, and she showed an aptitude for drawing and painting when she was very young.
Her headmistress’s perhaps rash prediction might not have been fully realised but the fact it’s now preserved in the archives of the Wellcome Collection, in London, tells you Audrey’s was no ordinary life.
Another clue is that a display of Audrey’s work will be among the first things we see when the long-awaited Culture House Sunderland opens in the city on September 12.
Called Kitchen Sink Realism, it’s the inaugural exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) in its new home (previously it was at the National Glass Centre and before that above the old City Library on Fawcett Street).
It’s a brilliant idea for an opening show.
Chris Killip’s North revisited in new book
It was a time when the industrial and social landscape of the North East seemed to change in the blink of an eye as shipyards, mines and big factories vanished and terraced rows of communities were demolished.
There to capture it was photographer Chris Killip, recording the last years and later what remained, in terms of people and places, of what he himself called “another country”.
His images were often powerfully bleak. A picture of the demolition of swathes of Bensham Bank in Gateshead looks like a scene from the end of the Second World War.
They filled his 50-image book In Flagrante, published in 1988, which propelled him to national prominence.
Killip died in 2020, aged 74. Now a new book, Chris Killip: North, has been published by Thames & Hudson, in a fresh interpretation of the photographer’s work between 1975 and 1986, featuring many previously unpublished pictures.
Ross Millard and Sam Patterson both have an ‘unhealthy obsession’ with football culture, which they’ve started channeling into a new newsletter and online platform. Over to Sam...
After I (Sam) left my creative job working with some of the biggest names in football, including Nike and adidas, to move into corporate life, I missed that connection with the game.
I’m a trustee at the National Football Museum and, after being asked to contribute to conversations about football culture and women’s sport on radio and TV, the idea for Nutmeg Salad was formed.
Ross, a lifelong Man Utd season ticket holder, is a musician, songwriter, photographer and festival director.
He has spent the last 20+ years as a recording artist, playing gigs around the world with Sunderland band The Futureheads, and watching as much football as he can along the way, and seemed like the perfect person to partner with.
Especially since we live in the same house…
Nutmeg Salad isn’t about match reports, transfer rumours or breaking news. There are plenty of others who do that much better than we could. Instead, we’re interested in the culture, mythology, design and traditions that make football magic. Read more
Founded by Emma Hamlett, Collected Books is an independent bookshop in Durham, with two floors of books to browse as well as coffee, wine, and cake to enjoy. They specialise in writing by women but stock all genres of fiction and non-fiction as well as books for kids, YA titles, poetry, and classics.
With the Booker Prize shortlist announcement fast approaching, we’ve been chatting in the shop (between booksellers, with customers) about this year’s longlist, and which books on it we have most enjoyed.
Having read our way through all of the female-authored titles between us, from blazing climate fiction to expansive explorations of friendship in which the whole of the human condition is laid bare, we’re going the bookish equivalent of backing a horse with our recommendation for you this weekend – and Collected’s September Book of the Month – in The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis.
The Shadow of the Object is an atmospheric and unpredictable story as well as an incredible, sensitive, and unexpected read. After an unusual connection is formed between an elderly German woman and protagonist Flora, we follow the unfolding and shifting repercussions of this bond borne out of a chance encounter.
A thoughtful and evocative novel about grief, deception, disguise, ownership and what can and cannot be recreated. Moving between Mexico and London, Aridjis masterfully crafts shifting panels and rotating illusions, playing with shadows, playing with time, place and expectation, creating a wonderful ode to the endless possibility of the present.
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments.
The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. But when things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, but also strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.
Find out more about the 2026 Booker Prize Longlist as well as many more of Collected’s current top reads and recommendations on Collected’s website.