Cultured. On Sunday 09.08.26
Our weekend edition featuring films, folk, flags, festivals and fiction
Hello and welcome to this week’s Cultured. On Sunday - back after a summer break.
If your ideal Sunday involves films, music, history, theatre and disappearing into the woods with a good book, you’ve done yourself a favour.
We’re taking a look at the 2026 programme for the Whitley Bay Film Festival; revisiting the BBC Proms’ latest North East adventure through Thomas Jackson’s lens; and hearing from Embrace ahead of their Newcastle date.
Meanwhile, David Whetstone reflects on the acquisition of Lord Collingwood’s Trafalgar flag for the region and previews the latest serving of inventive theatre from The Cultural Spring.
This week’s recommendation for your bookshelf comes from Collected Books - pointing us towards a quietly compelling novel about choosing a very different way of life.
Hope you enjoy it all
Whitley Bay Film Festival unveils packed September programme
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield will be the special guest at the opening of this year’s Whitley Bay Film Festival, which returns in September with a programme celebrating classic cinema, cult favourites and documentary film in some of North Tyneside’s most distinctive venues.
The festival gets under way on September 5 at The Crescent Club with a screening of Broomfield’s acclaimed documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love. Festival patron and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet co-creator Ian La Frenais will introduce the filmmaker before he joins audiences for a post-screening conversation and Q&A reflecting on a career spanning more than five decades.
The programme continues throughout September with screenings at venues including Jam Jar Cinema, St Mary’s Lighthouse, Stephenson Steam Railway Museum, the Rendezvous Café, Seaton Delaval Hall and Cullercoats’ Fishermen’s Mission.
Relic to ignite new interest in bygone North East hero
The symbolic nature of flags has fuelled much heated debate in recent years but then you come up against one that’s so much more than a symbol.
The flag recently acquired by North East Museums (NEM), and unveiled this week, does have symbolic resonance but wear and tear speaking more of sound and fury than the passage of time marks it as the real McCoy.
“I think the North East does tend to get forgotten about in the national story,” suggested NEM boss Keith Merrin, a little emotional as he surveyed the massive framed relic.
“Impressive,” murmured Susan Collingwood-Cameron.
The great-great-great-niece of Vice-Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, the man from the North East who secured victory at the Battle of Trafalgar after Nelson was killed, had descended, accompanied by the media, into the downstairs area of Newcastle’s Discovery Museum dedicated to conservation.
What'll be on the Bitesize menu this time round?
Somewhere out there, like diners studying a menu, a group of discerning folk are deciding which bite-sized fare should be served up to entertain people in the places they know.
They are members of the community panel tasked with sifting through the latest proposals put forward for Bitesize.
This is a scheme devised by The Cultural Spring which, since 2014, has been working to provide opportunities for people in Sunderland and South Tyneside to get involved in arts and culture.
Emma Scarr, producer at The Cultural Spring, remembers the discussions that brought Bitesize into being back in 2017.
“It was about how we could bring theatre-focused performance out into community venues, so not traditional arts venues.
“We felt it was great to have food as part of a show, so the way this works is that we invite people to stay for food and it becomes an integral part of the event.”
A large part of the success of The Cultural Spring has been in recognising that not everyone is served by the established arts infrastructure.
If people won’t or can’t go to traditional venues, thereby missing out on the benefits the arts can bring, then those dishing out arts and culture must go to them.
In pictures: BBC Proms in the North East 2026
The BBC’s decision to bring The Proms to the North East once again created a long weekend of memorable musical moments across Middlesbrough, Gateshead and Sunderland last month.
I had to admire them from afar while on holiday, but thanks to BBC Sounds and photographer Thomas Jackson of TyneSight Media, I’ve been able to catch up on both the music and the atmosphere.
See the full selection here
Embrace the moment says chart-topping rocker
It might have taken the best part of half a century but Danny McNamara, the evocative voice of chart-topping indie rockers Embrace, admits he’s finally coming out of his shell. Fatherhood, the passing of time and a determination to ‘live in the moment’ have all contributed to a shift in perspective and a change of outlook. Danny is a man — and a musician — making up for lost time.
“More and more I’ve found myself living with the idea that I don’t know what the answers are,” he admits. “It’s an uncomfortable place for an artist to be but it’s the only authentic place to be. You really don’t know.
“I’ve embraced that authenticity and found myself wanting to live in the moment. That’s the big lesson underpinning Avalanche. I’ve got two children under the age of eight and kids just don’t know how to live in the future. They can’t think three seconds into the future, let alone three months or three years.
“And so if, as a dad, I want to be present with my kids then I also have to live in the moment. Initially, it can be a very difficult place to be.
“As an artist, I’m very internal. I’m often thinking about my lyrics or wherever it is I’m going. And it’s very rare — or it was — that I’m actually in the moment. My family has forced me to come out of my shell.
“As a result, I’ve experienced all of these little moments — a lot of joy but also some darker stuff. I’ve seen things that I was previously oblivious to.
“It feels like I’m a blind person who’s just had the veil lifted. All this stuff has bombarded me and has come at me like an avalanche. And that’s why the new album feels more inspired — ironically by not trying to find songs and not chasing after songs internally but just by living in the moment and living life.
“I’ve never felt more inspired and more songs have ended up coming my way.”
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.
Emma says: For Collected’s reading recommendation this week we’re going with our August Book of the Month and delving into the publishing past with Faber & Faber’s recently reissued Gaining Gound by Joan Barfoot – a breathtaking tale about a woman who abandons everything for a life of woodland isolation.
First published in the UK in 1980 and then out of print for most of the intervening years, the book was unearthed by a Faber editor who found a secondhand copy and was astonished that no publisher currently had the rights.
Gaining Ground is a masterfully radical and ruminative read about starting over, survival and the beauty found in being alone. Following Abra as she leaves her family life for one of rural isolation, we join her on a beautiful journey of terror, transformation and self-preservation.
This is a wholly captivating read about freedom, belonging and living off the land. A wonderful and transporting book interrogating
the many complexities of motherhood, modern life and what it really means to live for yourself alone; about what is truth and what is pretence, about the full self that is waiting when all else is stripped away.
As we’re submerged in the manual, tactile nature of Abra’s daily routines, living for and focussing only on what is in front of her and dissociating from anything outside of that - including all memory of her life left behind - this is a quietly radical read, cosy and unsettling in equal measure.
I swear I loved them all, and I did the best I could. And then I left them, left all of it....
Abra has a perfect-seeming life as a wife and mother: until one day, she walks away, leaving only a note asking her family not to look for her. In a woodland cabin, her new life alone begins. There are no mirrors, no clocks, no memories: just the squirrels breathing in the forest, and silence of vegetables growing.
Years later, a young woman arrives, and the past-flashes begin. Daughter? A strange word. Is this her? And what will this mean? Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground is a both a provocative meditation on living on your own terms and an exquisite work of art. It calls to anybody who has ever wanted to escape - who has asked what it costs to be wild, to be sane, to be free.
We loved this book so much that it’s our book of the month of August, meaning you can cosy up with a free drink of choice with each purchase of Gaining Ground in-store! Alternatively, get your copy from our website now.