Cultured. On Sunday 12.04.26
Our weekend edition for longer reads and cultural recommendations
After a little Easter pause, we’re back - and straight into a particularly packed edition of Cultured. On Sunday.
There’s a rare chance to hear from Jimmy Nail as he prepares for his first tour in 25 years, with dates across the North East (and demand already high enough to add a fifth night at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music).
Elsewhere, Dave Whetstone catches up with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen about a new push to revive one of her best-loved bodies of work, and reports back from a major new exhibition at Laing Art Gallery.
We also hear from the North East family behind a short film making serious waves on the festival circuit, take a trip back to the region’s 18th century headlines with Tony Henderson and open the album of photographer Simone Rudolphi as she shares a selection of images from her archive.
There’s a space-inspired bookshelf courtesy of Collected Books, a TV binge recommendation promising plenty of laughs, and a sweet Sunday Plate from Pink Lane Bakery.
And - if you’re quick - a bonus prize draw for a family ticket to Unfolding Theatre’s Here Be Dragons at Northern Stage.
Tuck in!
No shortage of stories and songs for Jimmy Nail's first tour in 25 years
“Let’s put half a dozen gigs on and see what the response is like…”
Jimmy Nail is recounting the pitch of veteran concert promoter, Tony Denton who was tabling the idea of the 72-year-old singer and actor taking his back catalogue of music and memories on tour.
“He was too polite to say, ‘to see if anybody still remembers you!’”*
*I’d confidently take a guess Tony was easing him in, but there you go.
Cracking on for 50 dates later - including an unprecedented fifth night just announced in The Glasshouse’s Sage One - it was Jimmy who put the brakes on.
“I had to say ‘look, I don’t want to do more than 50 – I’m a pensioner!’ Where would it stop. But I mean, going from six to 50…. it’s incredible, really.”
Jimmy is shaking his head and laughing as we settle down for a chat in his Newcastle home – small elderly dog in devoted attendance and an open fire being tended as required.
The aforementioned proposal for the tour came during a sell-out run at Live Theatre in Newcastle during which Jimmy revisited songs from his 1990s TV series, Crocodile Shoes with a full band.
“I’d been chatting to Jack (McNamara, Live’s artistic director) about doing something and I said I could maybe do a few gigs to blow the cobwebs off.”
As it turned out, they couldn’t put extra dates on fast enough (anyone else detecting a pattern here?), resulting in a whopping 19 nights which ran either side of Christmas 2025 – including a gruelling run of 13 consecutive performances at the Quayside venue.
Help Sirkka's photo book dance to a new era in print
A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to give a new lease of life to a much-loved body of work by celebrated North East photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.
In the 1980s Sirkka took her camera to the Connell-Brown Dancing School in North Shields and photographed the girls and their mothers who attended the classes.
Later she was invited by some of the women into their homes and took more photographs in domestic settings.
This resulted in her dancing school project evolving into something broader, a portrait of the lives and relationships of working class women and their daughters.
Sirkka’s photographs were made into a book called Step by Step which was published in 1989.
Her work with the dancing school and its customers also spawned a drama documentary film by the AmberSide collective – of which Sirkka was a founding member – called Keeping Time.
The original book has long been out of print and the plan by Dewi Lewis Publishing, specialist publisher of photography books, is to reissue Step by Step as a high quality art book.
People watching at the Laing's brace of portrait exhibitions
For anyone fond of a bit of people watching, a portrait exhibition is a gift – a chance to stare without arousing suspicion or causing offence.
And there is so much to stare at in the Laing Art Gallery’s latest ticketed attraction, which is actually two related exhibitions in adjoining rooms.
The first room you enter has 27 portraits from the collections of North East Museums, all arranged under the nice, broad title Exploring Identity.
Historical context is the promise and in this regard it does deliver, with paintings in different styles and from different eras, although mostly dating from the 20th Century.
Anyone who has visited the Laing, Hatton or Shipley galleries over the years can expect to see some old favourites.
Family film company is doing more than canny
In less than two years, a North Tyneside-based, family-run film company has gone from launching its first projects to picking up major awards, travelling the festival circuit and turning heads across the industry.
At the centre of that rise is Gan Canny - a darkly comic, defiantly Geordie short film that has become one of the North East’s standout indie success stories of the past 12 months.
For Morning Sir Productions, the journey has been as personal as it has been rapid.
“We are a mum (Lou), dad (Michael) and son (Aaron) production company and started Morning Sir Productions in June 2024 ahead of our first production, Bruised,” explains Michael Burns, who has successfully transferred skills developed during the running of the family recruitment company over to the role of film producer.
Auction shines light on 18th century North East life
For the Newcastle Courant newspaper of 230 years ago, it was a very big story.
The then sensational exhibiting of a live elephant in the Bigg Market was an early example of the location’s lively reputation for pulling in the punters.
The event is reported in one of a near complete run of 205 bound copies of the Courant, from January 1795 to December 1798, which will be sold on April 15 by Tennants Auctioneers in Leyburn, North Yorkshire.
Their pages paint a fascinating picture of life in the North East at the end of the 18th century, from the entertainments on offer in Newcastle to stolen horses, pubs for sale, and concerns over crime and what to do about the poor.
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: Our book recommendation this week is for everyone who has found themselves totally gripped by all the coverage of the Artemis II mission and the crew’s incredible flyby of the far side of the moon.
Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin, whose debut novel Wandering Souls was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023, is an absorbing, atmospheric, and compelling novel about love and sacrifice, ambition and loyalty, centred on a 10-year mission to Europa - one of Jupiter’s moons - and back.
It’s totally exceptional. A gripping, moving, and challenging read in all the best ways. The central question in this wonderful novel is what we owe our loved ones and what we owe ourselves when our ambitions and our loyalties conflict - but writ very large. Homer’s Odyssey for the 21st century - and in space! Complex, sad, and very, very hard to put down.
Oliver Ines is born in a small English village in January, 1986. At the same time, moments after launch, the Challenger shuttle falls from the sky.
Ollie spends his childhood in a bedroom covered in glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, bearing the planets and stars. One summer he meets Philly and a friendship forms that will rekindle as love when they meet again years later. After school, university, and a career in the Navy, Ollie becomes one of the most renowned astronauts of his time. When an enterprising billionaire approaches him to lead the landmark, 10-year mission to Europa, Ollie cannot resist the call of history.
As the mission advances deeper into uncharted territory, Ollie finds himself retreating into the past: his childhood and youth, relationships found and lost, becoming a husband and father. But will the world he remembers still be waiting for him when he returns?
Celestial Lights is an arresting and impressive blend of heart and head, a novel full of warmth and love as well as great acuity and insight on the power – and potential destructiveness – of ambition. A wonderful, and timely, read.
We’ve been asking asking North East-based photographers to open up their archives and select two handfuls of images which encapsulate life as they’ve captured it
Simone Jimena Rudolphi grew up in Germany - her primary school years spent “on a hill overlooking Mayen, roaming the forests of the volcanic Eifel area”. Rheinhessen, the largest of Germany’s wine regions, was home during her adolescence, offering job opportunities during the grape harvest.
Now in her mid-50s, she has spent more than 30 years in the North East, but says she feels “the migrant element of my identity more and more every day” - blaming post-Brexit political policy.
It was the old black and white photos in the bottom drawers of her grandparents’ oak ‘Schrankwand’ which first piqued a young Simone’s interest in photography.
“Sadly, much of this archive has dispersed and cleared out over the years, but I used to be fascinated by handling the small serrated-edge prints and looking at negatives,” she says.
“Once I had my own simple cheap camera I loved documenting family moments first as a daughter, later as a mother. My eldest daughter has five albums documenting her joys and sorrows of the first two years of her life.”
Every week, Michael Telfer – aka Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This week’s choice is a laugh a minute, for the viewers rather than the contestants.
Recently there has been a spate of documentaries uncovering the darker side of some of the biggest TV reality series of the 90s and noughties. Contestants from shows like America’s Next top Model or The Biggest Loser talk hauntingly about how they were bullied into dental surgery they didn’t want, or nearly killed by over-enthusiastic personal trainers in the name of light entertainment.
I like to imagine contestants from Last One Laughing telling similar stories on Netflix documentaries 20 years from now.
Harriet Kemsley will describe trying (and failing) to keep a straight face while Richard Ayoade, Rob Beckett and Lou Sanders took turns butchering the chorus from Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You. Gbemisola Ikumelo will recount being in tears trying not to laugh at Diane Morgan reciting Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and poignantly breaking wind between lines. The internal scars will last a long time.
The Sunday Plate sees chefs from kitchens across the North East share a recipe for you to try at home - a snapshot of the region’s food scene, one dish/treat at a time.
This week’s recipe comes from Pink Lane Bakery, the much-loved Newcastle institution which has been baking since 2012 and steadily growing its footprint across the region, from its original city centre base to sites in Gosforth, Jesmond, Morpeth and a partnership with Fenwick.
Recently named one of Britain’s best bakeries by Felicity Cloake in The Times and awarded the Best Bakery in the North East at the National Bakery Awards, it’s a place known for being at the top of its game.
Here, head pastry chef Lindsey Quinn shares a recipe for one of their most popular bakes - the friand. Introduced to the bakery by Melbourne-born director Abe Chirgwin, these almond-rich little cakes - lightly crisp on the outside, soft at the centre and often studded with fruit or chocolate - are a well-trodden treat in Australia.
The description supplied says they “taste like someone distilled the best parts of a buttery sponge and a macaron into one neat little oval… It’s the kind of thing you can eat with zero ceremony and still feel like you’ve treated yourself.”
We need no more details to get baking.
Blueberry & Almond Friand
This will make approximately 10 friands (depending on mould size)
Recommended moulds: 20mm (H) x 53mm (W) x 33mm (D) non-stick oval silicone moulds
Ingredients
200g egg whites
180g icing sugar
300g ground almonds
200g unsalted butter, browned (caramelised)
Approximately 150g blueberries (fresh or frozen) (Free free to swap out for raspberries or a blackberries)
100g flaked almonds
Honey, for finishing
Method
Preheat the oven to 185°C (fan 175°C) / Gas Mark 3–4.
Lightly grease the moulds using a non-stick spray or a small amount of butter. Place onto a baking tray for stability.
In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it begins to foam, then continue cooking until it turns a golden brown colour and develops a nutty aroma. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool slightly.
In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks, ideally using an electric whisk for efficiency.
In a separate bowl, combine the icing sugar and ground almonds.
Fold half of the almond and icing sugar mixture into the whipped egg whites using a spatula or wooden spoon.
Gradually drizzle in half of the melted butter, ensuring it is just warm to the touch (not hot), and gently fold to combine.
Repeat with the remaining almond mixture, followed by the remaining butter, folding carefully until the batter is smooth and fully incorporated.
Divide the mixture evenly between the prepared moulds.
Press 3 whole blueberries into each friand and sprinkle with flaked almonds (approximately 10 flakes per friand, or as desired).
Bake for 18–20 minutes, or until the tops are golden brown
Remove from the oven and, while still warm, drizzle generously with honey.
Allow to cool slightly in the moulds before turning out. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Welcome to our bonus weekend newsletter prize draw - offering our subscribers an extra (and still exclusive) opportunity to win tickets to see or do something great.
This time, we’ve got four tickets to Unfolding Theatre’s latest famliy show, Here Be Dragons which is at Northern Stage on April 14 and 15 this week (performances at 11.30am and 1pm on Tuesday and Wednesday).
Written by Lindsay Rodden, it follows Em – 10 (and three quarters) and sceptical about anything mythical – as an unexpected encounter near the River Wear nudges her towards something more magical.
Blending music, storytelling and a sense of local adventure, the piece is performed by Bridget Marumo, Hannabiell Sanders and Tim Dalling.
Designed for ages 6–11, it sounds like. perfect way to spend an afternoon in the Easter holidays.
The prize (four tickets) is available for any of the four performances at Northern Stage on April 14 and 15.
HOW TO ENTER:
To be in with a chance of winning, simply email MePlease@culturednortheast.co.uk using the subject line: It’s Dragon Time! by 10am tomorrow (Monday, April 13, 2026).
The winner, who will be selected at random, will be notified within 12 hours of the entry deadline.
Terms and conditions: Only subscribers to the Cultured. North East newsletter are eligible to enter the Newsletter Prize Draw competition. Prizes are as stated - subject to availability - and non-transferable. No cash alternatives will be offered. You must be over 18 years of age to enter. The Editor’s decision is final.