Page 50 - Patsy Ferran News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Julia who had two ambitions in life. One was to be an actress and the second was to meet Mick Jagger.  She spent several hours in pursuit of the first and many, many weeks attempting the second by standing outside lots of stage doors. Julia Donaldson does now get to act out her own stories to children and adults all over the world, and while she never met Mick, thanks to his many children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren he’s now more likely to be a fan of hers than she is of him.

All Creatures Great And Small: Christmas Special This drama series about vets in the chocolate-box Yorkshire Dales is first-class comfort viewing (Callum Woodhouse, above)  This drama series about vets in the chocolate-box Yorkshire Dales is first-class comfort viewing. It’s Christmas Eve and James is trying to come to terms with the fact that Helen is marrying Hugh in the morning – although she doesn’t seem very happy about it. Tuesday 22, Channel 5, 9pm   Worzel Gummidge: Saucy Nancy Viewers of a certain age who recall Jon Pertwee’s Worzel were sceptical about Mackenzie Crook (abo...

Rating: Simon Russell Beale – an actor normally associated with the classical repertoire – is in his element as Scrooge in this cast- of-three version of A Christmas Carol. Normally the old skinflint is played by a manky-looking actor.  Sir Simon is more elegant. He comes on in a smart suit, nose raised, giving us a deep, un-hammy sneer of misanthropy that sets him up for his amazing conversion at the end. This is a story of Scrooge’s frozen emotional lockdown. The Christmas novella – 90 minutes’ running time on stage – takes place under a ceiling festooned with chains (metal no...

Sun 13 Dec 2020 05.30 EST It was as if all the doors of an advent calendar had been flung open at once. Last week, after the month of darkness, theatres rescheduled their openings, and scrambled over one another to pack everyone in – which is to say, arrange their diminished spectators so that the gaps between them felt like a healthy breath rather than the reminder of a threat. Excitement! Anxiety! And a sea change. Not only the spacing, not only the choreography, but the sound of the stalls has been altered. Instead of elbowing your way into the auditorium through a bar scrum, you process...

Verdict: A delicious nut roast   Rating: The first of this year’s cornucopia of Christmas Carols opened this week with the revered Simon Russell Beale as Ebenezer Scrooge at London’s Bridge Theatre. And, wholesome and nourishing though Sir Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation of Dickens’s festive tale is, it is, in all honesty, more nut roast than turkey with all the trimmings.  I suspect the story’s appeal is that like Scrooge, we’re all hoping to awake from the nightmares we’re enduring, feeling rejuvenated. But SRB is not the usual lean, mean stick of a Scrooge tormented by the g...