Cultured. On Sunday 26.04.26
Our weekend edition for longer reads and cultural recommendations
Welcome to this week’s Cultured. On Sunday.
There’s plenty to get stuck into this week, from hands-on creativity at BALTIC to stories that look both forward and back.
David Whetstone previews an exhibition that invites visitors to take part, while we also take a look at Jill Halfpenny’s latest TV role, starring alongside Sally Lindsay in a new thriller set in the world of daytime television.
Tony Henderson reports on a Gateshead community preparing to mark the 200th anniversary of a pit disaster, and in this week’s Sunday Column, New Writing North chief executive Claire Malcolm responds to a recent school book ban and the wider “reading crisis”, arguing strongly for the value of deep, engaged reading.
There’s a fresh recommendation for your bookshelf from Collected Books in Durham via the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, while photographer Jodie Beardmore shares a selection of images from her archive in this week’s My Life Through a Lens.
Elsewhere, Michael Telfer heads to the southern hemisphere to recommend a TV police procedural like no other, and this week’s Sunday Plate serves up a standout sweet treat from Dobson and Parnell’s head chef, Kyle Bowman.
Tuck in!
From banned books to shrinking attention spans, New Writing North’s chief executive, Claire Malcolm explores what’s at stake, and why protecting access to books has never mattered more.
As the National Year of Reading continues a pace and as national media coverage of what we are now calling ‘the reading crisis’ (the continued downturn in children finding the attention, solace and stimulation in reading books) continues it’s both enraging and deeply depressing that a Head Teacher in a school in Greater Manchester took it upon themselves to ban 200 books from the school library and to bring about the resignation of the school librarian through pernicious threats about ‘safeguarding’ young minds.
The books in question included Laura Bates’s study of the manosphere and contemporary misogyny Men Who Hate Women, a terrifying but important book when Andrew Tate has such a hold on many young men’s attention, Alice Oseman’s chart topping Heartstopper comics and somewhat ironically George Orwell’s, 1984, which in my day was something you were made to study for exams rather than ban from the premises.
You may be imagining a principled and dedicated teacher reading lots of books in search of offending material but of course the person doing the banning wasn’t actually doing the reading and apparently just asked an AI chatbot which books in the library should be removed. Good to understand both the dereliction of duty and the utter laziness there.
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.
As excitement builds in the book world for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in its 30th anniversary year, this week has seen the announcement of this year’s shortlisted books: Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Marcia Hutchinson’s The Mercy Step, Rozie Kelly’s Kingfisher, Lily King’s Heart the Lover, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion, and Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent. We’re delighted that Heart the Lover by Lily King – one of our favourite books of 2025 – is on the shortlist. We’re putting all our winning chips behind it and have been urging it into hands ever since its publication last October.
I just love Lily King - she writes the messiness of love and loss so well, delivering affecting, believable, and relatable love stories for those of us who don’t really read romance. Heart the Lover is all about first love, lifelong love, grief, regret, the mistakes we make when we are afraid, and - perhaps above all - the importance and impact of books and literature in our closest and most enduring relationships.
This interweaving of life and fiction is in this book from the off with a narrator who is also an author and so understands how to pitch and plot good love stories – the secrets they hide, the highs they ride, and the falls they suffer. But the greatest love story she knows is the one she lived, that didn’t follow the narrative conventions, and that she has never properly told...
Starting as a campus novel, our narrator is in her senior year of college when she gets drawn into and completely swept up with the lives of fellow students Sam and Yash. The friendship between the three is wonderfully youthful and geeky – nights spent drinking and debating, revelling in academic fervour and quickfire banter, and messing around playing the card game that lends the book its title. But the course of these intertwined relationships is not straightforward or smooth, and unpredictable passions and the pull of first love disrupts their happy, innocent trio.
Decades later, the narrator is a successful writer, living a happy, relatively typically domestic up and down life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present. No longer able to hold that past away from herself, the narrator is forced to confront and address the decisions she made in – and the things she has kept hidden from – her youth.
Heart the Lover really is an ideal read. King writes with an incredible balance of precision and beauty, steering well clear of cliche or mawkishness while taking the reader through all the emotions – an epic on a perfectly relatable human scale. Lily King is an excellent novelist and a master in documenting and communicating the human experience. Prepare to laugh and cry just make sure to read it - you won’t be sorry!
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
Originally from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire and now based in Chester-le-Street, Jodie Beardmore’s journey into photography began simply enough. “I remember using a really basic handheld camera when I was still in high school,” she says. “Nothing technical or polished, but I think that’s where it started.”
Creativity had always been there - she “used to draw a lot” growing up - but photography quickly became something more meaningful. “Finding photography, and art more broadly, genuinely helped me figure out who I was,” she explains. “It gave me a sense of direction and something that felt like mine.”
As a teenager, she began experimenting more seriously, drawn not just to taking pictures but to the possibilities they held. “Early on, I was really drawn to more conceptual, otherworldly work,” she says, citing Brooke Shaden as a major influence. “Her work definitely shaped how I think about photography - not just as documentation, but as a way to create something more imaginative and emotionally driven.”
That idea of photography as storytelling has stayed with her ever since.
Every week, Michael Telfer – aka Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This week’s choice mixes sandals, swearing and a giant seal that eats tongues.
When Deadloch was recommended to me by a friend last year, she provided scant detail or description other than “Just watch it, and thank me later”, and so I had the rare experience of firing up a box set with no idea of what I was about to watch. Which may be the best way to blunder into this brilliant, quirky one-of-a-kind show.
And if you want to stop reading here and fire up the first season I won’t take it personally. Go for it, thank me later.
For those who need a bit more convincing, Deadloch is an Australian comedy murder mystery series, which debuted on Amazon Prime in 2023. When a dead body turns up in the sleepy coastal town of Deadloch it sets a fire under the previously peaceful existence and threatens to tear the whole place apart.
Fastidious local policewoman Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) is reluctantly teamed up with no-nonsense (or no shit, as she would undoubtedly say) Darwin based detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeline Sami) who is parachuted into Deadloch to provide homicide expertise.
Pairing two contrasting personalities – in this case the diligent, by the book, happily married lesbian Collins with the hair-trigger impulsive, radioactively tempered Redcliffe – is a well-trodden trope in police dramas, but the sheer gulf between the characters and approaches of the two policewomen in Deadloch gives them an irresistible chemistry.
Eddie gets some of the best lines I’ve ever heard in a TV show, but unfortunately none of them are repeatable on a Sunday morning. Imagine In The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker played by a horny Tasmanian devil and you’re in the right ballpark.
The Sunday Plate sees chefs from kitchens across the North East share a recipe for you to try at home - a taste of the region’s food scene, one dish/treat at a time.
This week’s Sunday Plate comes from Dobson & Parnell, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a major refurbishment and a fresh take on modern British dining on the Quayside.
Now centred around a more open, social kitchen, the restaurant continues to evolve while staying rooted in quality, seasonal produce from across the North East.
At the helm is award-winning head chef Kyle Bowman, whose near 20 years in the industry - and accolades including North East Chef of the Year - inform a style that’s creative, precise and grounded in sustainability.
While his favourite dish is whipped peas pudding with pork cheek, crackling, and pork jus, he’s delved into the dessert section of his recipe book for this week’s Sunday Plate.
Sticky Stout Pudding
Ingredients
200g self raising flour
200g dark brown sugar
200g chopped dates
1 bottle Saint Dominic Porter
54g butter
11g baking powder
1 tsp bi carbonated soda
2 eggs
Method
1) Place butter and sugar in a mixer and whisk until smooth and light.
2) Add in the eggs 1 by 1.
3) Place dates and porter in a pan and bring to a simmer, once simmered put in the bi carb and remove from the heat.
4) Add flour to the butter sugar mixture and mix until smooth.
5) Add the date mix and mix until incorporated.
6) Place in a greased tray and bake at 160°C for 30-45 minutes or until a wooden skewer comes out clean.
7) Serve with butter scotch sauce and vanilla ice cream.