this cultural life. let s take you to the beginning. what s your earliest cultural memory? as a kid, we had, iwas exposed to pantomime, live theatre of various thoughts, circus, the circus was a big deal, variety, live variety, descendants of the music hall, including at the age of nine a trip to the ardwick hippodrome to see laurel and hardy live on stage on the famous tour, which i later realised was the famous tour, and the two important things about that were one, two extraordinary things, one was it was in colour they were in colour and two, that oliver hardy com pletely couldn t get his act together at all, he was absolutely out of control, and of course later we realised that that was because he was cracking up and it was the end of their of their career. were they funny? no. but i was fascinated, it didn t make any difference. of course, in school, from the earliest age, i was drawing, putting on sketches, generally wanted to be creative in all kinds of differen
and a once in a decade flyby, as an asteroid passes between the earth and the moon. hello and welcome to bbc news. security forces in france remain on high alert, after legislation to raise the state pension age caused massive protests. the dispute, and outbreaks of violence, forced the authorities to postpone a planned state visit by the british monarch, king charles. separate demonstrations are expected on an unrelated issue in western france, linked to concerns about water usage by large scale agricultural producers. it s feared the disputes could converge at a time of growing tensions. our correspondent simonjones reports. sirens wail police patrolling the streets of paris last night, trying to prevent a repeat of scenes like these. commotion on thursday, what had been largely peaceful protests against the president and his pension reforms turned violent. that night, piles of uncollected rubbish in the capital were set alight. the french authorities say almost 1,000 fires