Entertainment News

Birmingham Hippodrome are delighted to announce three exciting, female-led musical theatre companies have joined its Associates programme. Burnt Lemon Theatre, The Good Enough Mums Club and Fat Rascal are the latest theatre makers to join the programme which is designed to support artistic ambitions and develop work to reach new and wider audiences.

Chris Sudworth, Director of Artistic Programme at Birmingham Hippodrome said: “We are delighted to welcome these fantastic female-led companies into the Hippodrome Associates family. As one of the UK’s best known venues for musical theatre, we felt it was essential to support the development of new voices telling fresh and different stories in this most popular of styles. All three companies make playful and powerful musical theatre with a contemporary twist.”

Jones’ recent single ‘Around’ expanded the breadth of her sound, adding the rhythmic grooves of London’s contemporary underground jazz scene to her core pop and soul roots. It was a twist that took her back to Radio 1’s airwaves with repeated plays from tastemaker trio Rickie, Melvin and Charlie who compared it to “The Internet meets Cleo Sol” while further support included BBC Introducing London, Jazz FM and Hoxton Radio.
 
Next from Jones is her brand new single ‘Read My Mind’, which is out now. It represents the second taste of her eagerly anticipated new EP ‘Blue Sunshine’ which follows next month. The track is released alongside a stripped-back vocal and guitar performance video. 

A set of 350-year-old embroideries have finally gone back on display at Birmingham’s Aston Hall after 10 years of painstaking restoration. The embroidered bed hangings adorn the 17^th century bed in the room where King Charles I stayed in 1642, thanks to the careful restoration by a team of conservators and volunteers at Birmingham Museums.

The linen had rotted away so badly that the embroideries were in danger of being lost forever. So, in 2009 the conservation team at Birmingham Museums enrolled the help of heritage volunteers from The Arts Society in Arden, Solihull and Friends of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery to help with the lengthy but important restoration project.

A new survey by language experts, Babbel, has revealed the UK’s favourite regional accents.   

Here in the UK, the average adult watches approximately six hours of TV a day, so it would make sense that we fill these hours with accents we love to hear and not the ones that make our toes curl.   

School of Rock - The Musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit, Olivier Award-winning West End show today reveals casting for its first ever UK and Ireland tour, which makes its Midlands premiere at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre next month from Tuesday 21 – Saturday 25 September 2021.

Jake Sharp from Lichfield is getting the band back together as it is confirmed that he will lead the cast as Dewey Finn having previously performed the role in the West End.

Recent research by Vertu Motors has uncovered that car lovers are most passionate about BMW, when compared against the other top 10 car makes in the UK. 

With 10,250 total edits and 4,802 editors, BMW is the world’s most frequently tweaked car brand on Wikipedia, closely followed by Toyota who have 4% fewer edits with 9,890 in total. In recent months, however, it is Toyota that has accumulated the most edits, far surpassing BMW.

Currently returning rock & roll to stages across the U.S., Foo Fighters today announce 4 UK stadium shows for Summer 2022. These must- see shows will no doubt be the concert highlight of next year and will be the band’s first shows in the UK since their headline slot at Reading & Leeds Festival summer 2019.

Following the release of their critically acclaimed #1 album, Medicine At Midnight, earlier this year, Foo Fighters made an historic return to the stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden, playing the city’s first full capacity show in more than a year. More recently, the band has begun a series of sold-out headline dates and a triumphant headline set closing out this year’s Lollapalooza festival in Chicago.

The Specials who enjoyed a triumphant 2019 with the release of the critically acclaimed “Encore”, their first ever number 1 album, coming 40 years after they exploded onto the music scene and launched the 2 Tone movement, make a very timely return with the release of their brand-new album “Protest Songs – 1924 -2012”.

Released on September 24^th through their new label Island Records, the album features twelve singular takes on specially chosen protest songs across an almost 100-year span and shows The Specials still care, are still protesting and still pissed off! You can also catch the Specials on tour across the UK, full dates below.

‘I’ve got a text!’ – If that sentence immediately makes you think of a villa in sunny Majorca, then congratulations, you are a Love Island fan like the rest of us. And whilst we get a summer of entertainment from watching the show, there are plenty of benefits contestants get as well, one of the most important being fame (and love, of course)!

With that in mind, Top10Casinos.com sought to find out which Love Island UK contestants have become the most famous from being on the show. To find that out, Top10Casinos.com looked at Google search volumes for each contestant, across all Love Island seasons, to see which Islander is the most searched-for on the web.

On Wednesday, August 11 underprivileged children from around the Nottingham area were invited to Fantasy Island.

Owners of the theme park and Nottingham based company, Mellors Group, partnered with children’s charity, The Toy Library, to bring together the local kids and gift them a free day out to the theme park, in the hopes to raise community spirits following the cancellation of last month’s popular Nottingham Beach event.

The UK's competition watchdog has said ticket resale firms such as Viagogo and StubHub should face tighter rules.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said current laws meant it was not possible to act swiftly and effectively against touts. Another problem came from resellers who speculatively sold tickets they did not own, the regulator said.

Jazz FM have announced that they will be broadcasting a special show later this month from B:Music venue Symphony Hall to celebrate the return of live jazz music to the world-famous venue and the rich and diverse talent of the city’s jazz scene. The return of the eagerly anticipated Jazzlines Summer School, after its absence last year due to Covid-19, and the first ever week-long B:Jazz Fest will both feature in the programme.

Jazz FM’s host Nigel Williams will broadcast his Saturday Show direct from Symphony Hall on Saturday August 28 and will feature a number of interviews and performances from musicians and summer school participants. The show will be the culmination of a week of live jazz performances and music-making at Symphony Hall, as for the first-time ever the Summer School is run in conjunction with the B:Jazz Fest, in partnership with Jazz FM.

Afro-retro singer & soulful storyteller Ibejii follows his previous release Gonto, which received love & support from BBC 6Music, The Face, Culture Custodian and others, with Happy Me, the second single from his upcoming EP Intermission – a body of work that explores the emotional rollercoaster foisted on many by the combination of a global health pandemic, a global movement for racial justice, the #EndSARS campaign to end police brutality for Nigerians & the daily challenge of keeping it together amidst aloneness, social isolation & multiple lockdowns.

Happy Me is the final puzzle in the EP’s story that sees the listener reclaim mental and emotional wellness after a long season of loss, fear, lockdowns & uncertainty. Produced by DopeL at Natalio Studios in Lagos, Happy Me’s inception came about when Ibejii received a call from a friend saying “I deserve to be happy don’t I?” Having reassured the caller, Ibejii then began a journey to ‘catch happy’.

Motionhouse today announced the addition of several dates for its world premiere tour of its new production, Nobody. Marking the Company’s return to live theatre performance following lockdown, Nobody will receive its world première at The Peacock Theatre in London from the 22-25 September 2021.

This will be followed by an extensive tour which sees the company visit Denmark, England, Germany, Scotland and Wales. Several of these are first time visits, including three new venues in Germany, Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford and The King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. This marks the Company’s first visit to one of the city’s main stages. 

Amazon Studios’ £336m production of Lord of the Rings should be filmed in Birmingham, UK owing to the city’s close association with Tolkien, a film expert at Birmingham City University has said.

Frank Mannion, producer, director and Senior Lecturer in Film Marketing and Distribution, who is currently enjoying US and European success with his directorial debut, Sparkling: The Story of Champagne starring Stephen Fry, spoke following the news that the Peter Jackson-led production is moving from New Zealand to the UK.

From his chart-dominating time in JLS to his solo smash ‘Get Stupid’ and a sensational star run on ‘The Masked Singer’, Aston Merrygold has proved to be one of the UK’s most popular personalities. Having returned to Radio 1’s airwaves earlier this year with ‘Share A Coke’, Aston now shares an attention grabbing new song ‘Emergency’.

‘Emergency’ brings a soundsystem of energising elements into a track that sparkles with summertime spirit. It’s got the rhythmic mix of dancehall, and those pop flavours are revealed via a dash of ultra-addictive hooks that hint at JLS’s chart-conquering years. As ever, Aston’s vocal magic is essential to unlocking the track’s potential, with his enlivening mix of Motown soul and bold British personality.