Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
In 1965, when I was 15, I used to get the New Musical Express every Friday to check on my favourite acts. The LP chart was mainly occupied by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones until, one week, 17th April, The Sound of Music Soundtrack suddenly appeared, rubbing shoulders with the aforementioned groups, The Pretty…
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Thursday, 3rd July, 2026 saw the official launch of the inaugural Yorkshire Fringe. To celebrate this eight-day long series of events throughout the county, we were gathered in Leeds Conservatoire for a briefing, some snippets from the works on offer and a networking opportunity for those in the various strands of the arts featured to…
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I usually try to post my reviews within a couple of days of seeing the work, but, as this play runs until 11th July, and I don’t have an editor screaming at me, I thought I would take an extra day or two to do it justice. It is always difficult reviewing a piece which…
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Now here is a useless fact about ABBA, only tenuously connected with this show. Before curtain-up, there was the usual reminder regarding mobile phones etc, before a trigger warning that the show contained platform boots and white lycra. The reason that they wore such outlandish outfits was not a fashion statement per se, but came…
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I approached this show with a degree of trepidation in that, although never having seen the film of the same name, I had read the blurb on Leeds Grand Theatre website in order to write my monthly theatre preview for Welcome To Leeds and discovered it to be aimed at the age demographic about half…
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Being an only child I tended to do a lot of reading and Enid Blyton was one of my first go-to authors. It is probably the Yorkshire influence that, whilst the other readers I knew were into The Famous Five books, I opted for The Secret Seven series. Buy 5 get 2 free! I was…
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If ever a show differed from expectations it is this one. It should have been obvious before the curtain went up when the usual mobile phone warning against recoding and photography was issued, as it contained the pearl of wisdom that ‘memory is the best camera’. I avoided seeing the 1984 film as I was…
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The Zombies is one of the early 1960s groups (that’s what we called bands in those days) I missed out on seeing. I can only think that they were not on any of the packages whose tours took in Leeds Odeon cinema, as I saw most of those which did. It was really good to…
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After all the articles I have written about theatre you would have thought I had seen about everything, so did I, but here I was, leaving York Theatre Royal, munching on a piece of caraway bread that I had just seen been baked live on stage. The thing is that it wasn’t done during a…
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The wonderful Leeds Grand Theatre is going through a purple patch at the moment insofar as the variety of its presentations is concerned. The last three productions have been a conventional 1920s drawing room comedy, a juke box musical, a ghost story and this evening, we have a gritty prison drama, not for the faint-hearted.…
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Tyke It To The Limit 