Post Festival Blues

So the festival is over for another year. All that remains to do is take down the flags, clear up the office and relax...  NOT.

In a few weeks time we'll start all over again organising the 2017 Festival!

We had a great time this year and hope you all did too.  If you'd like to have your say on what was good or what was bad or if you'd like to give us some suggestions on how we can improve going forward then please take a few seconds to complete our online survey; there are only 10 questions so it shouldn't take more than a few seconds and your feedback is really useful to us.

Click here to take part in our anonymous feedback survey.

Thank you in advance for your participation and looking forward to seeing you next year.

Bye for now.

The Festival Team.

Ding dong! Maggie’s back!

Is Pip Utton going to give his audience a self- scripted, Margaret Thatcher monologue at Ashbourne Festival? No, that would be far too boring! He is actually going to take questions from the audience and answer them as Maggie. It will be like having an exclusive meeting with the Iron Lady herself and people attending this particular performance are invited to come prepared with a question or two. Pip’s courage cannot be denied. Previous reviewers of his ‘Playing Maggie’ show have commented on how well he has absorbed Thatcher’s way of thinking and given the audience a provocative and fascinating performance. 

This type of ad libbed show is unpredictable and absolutely anything could happen. Obviously Margaret Thatcher was a hugely controversial politician and people’s views of her legacy tend to be polarised. Sparks could fly and there’s one thing we can be sure of: if we get Maggie’s back up we won’t leave saying it was like being savaged by a dead sheep!

Pip Utton Playing Maggie is on at the Town Hall on Wednesday 29 June and tickets can be bought from the Festival website.

Pip was kind enough to answer some questions I put to him about his life in the theatre:  

Robin:  You were born and brought up in Cannock. Did you do any acting there?

Pip:       I did quite a lot of amateur pantomime and drama between ages 23-27 but then stopped. I didn’t start acting professionally until I was 42.

Robin:  You have appeared regularly at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for over twenty years. Why do you keep going back?

Pip:       It is the most exciting festival there is, as well as the biggest. This year for example there will be over 3000 different productions and over 50,000 performances. It is an opportunity to try new work and develop it in front of a great audience who want you to do well.

TO READ MORE CLICK LINK BELOW

An Islay Love Affair

Ashbourne photographer and film maker Clive Booth has spent 22 years producing a photographic record of the daily lives of the people of Islay (pronounced 'eye-la'), one of the Inner Hebridean islands off the west coast of Scotland. The people who live on the island are called Ileachs (pronounced e-lucs) and Clive has spent so much time on Islay that he knows more people there than he does in his home town of Ashbourne! He is giving a talk on the Ileachs project at this year's Festival and some of his photographs will be on display in the Summer Exhibition running from 18th to 25th June in the Town Hall.

Islay lies exposed and at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean, and the RNLI lifeboat crew based there have to embark on rescues in the most extreme weather conditions. Recently Clive has been supplied with a cutting edge pre-production camera by Canon (the EOS 5DS R) to help him capture the courage, character and professionalism of the crew. Did this expensive bit of kit get wet?  A little, as Clive reveals in his interview with me:

Robin:    In 1989 you filmed an epic climb of the Old Man of Hoy sea stack on the west coast of Scotland for the BBC. What memories do you have of that day?

Clive:    That was an exciting time for me. While running a design business I was away on these fantastic adventures. I filmed the Old Man of Hoy climb from a cliff opposite the stack. In those days the equipment we used was very heavy and filming the climb was extremely dangerous. At around the same time I filmed a climb up the Eiger for Blue Peter and also a trip to the Arctic. I remember the Eiger film was one of the first times compact video tape had been used and the quality was only just good enough to broadcast. I climbed draped in all kinds of equipment and when we reached the top we were helicoptered off. To keep fit for these kind of assignments I used to run up and down Thorpe Cloud.

Robin:   Which presents you with the greatest challenges? A fashion shoot or braving everything the elements can throw at you while photographing a lifeboat crew?

Clive:    Now that's a difficult one! They both raise different challenges and it comes down to preparation. For a fashion shoot you need the right model and a good team. When photographing a lifeboat crew the weather was important. I would check the forecast and only ask the crew to go out when conditions were bad so that I could get some dramatic shots. Fortunately I don't suffer badly from sea sickness but I think when the adrenaline is flowing it's a great help. Your’re shooting boat to boat with the Lifeboat Operations Manager at the helm of mine and the Coastguard  station officer making sure I didn't go overboard, taking care of the incredibly expensive camera that Canon had supplied me with. If it had got wet it would have been ruined. It's the only one of its kind in Europe and I only had a rain cover to protect it! So for both types of shoot- fashion and adventure- you need the right ideas, talent and execution.

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Flagging

I first became aware of the Festival flags a few years before we moved to Ashbourne. On one of our many journeys from the West Midlands to good walking territory in the Peak District, I remember seeing them and the bunting as we crawled through Ashbourne in the car. I thought at the time that they helped to give the town a lively, carnival atmosphere but I didn’t realise that they had anything to do with an arts festival. You need to get up close to them to work that one out. Neither did I give any thought at all to the people who put them up and, of course, I had absolutely no inkling that in a very few years time I would be one of the volunteers helping to erect them outside shops and businesses around the town. Who knows how these things work at a sub-conscious level, but maybe this impression of a cheerful town bedecked with flags and bunting influenced our decision to settle down here.

Everybody associated with the Festival knows that it always rains on the evening that we put the flags up, but this year somebody had the crafty idea of avoiding a nasty weather system by making a last minute decision to delay the job by 24 hours. Trying to wrong-foot fate is risky because, as Anita said in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, fate just keeps on happening; but on this occasion it worked and we managed to dodge an absolute soaking.

The flags were attached to poles and carried to various points around the town by a team of volunteers, while another team climbed up the ladders and fixed them in place. The flag poles are quite heavy because they are re-cycled scaffolding, but this didn’t stop some cruel person suggesting that they needed to be even heavier to give the ladder climbers more of a work-out.

We soon finished and retired to Smith’s Tavern to restore our energy levels.

Choral Workshop

Everyone suddenly burst out singing
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom.

(Siegfried Sassoon, from ‘Everyone Sang’)

Singing. Can there be a better way to spend a summer’s day? The popularity of ‘The Choir’ TV series and the success of an NHS choir, which held the UK’s Christmas number one spot in 2015 (thanks, Justin Bieber), are evidence of the recent explosion of interest in amateur singing. 

On Saturday 25 June 2016 the Festival will be holding a choral workshop, hosted by Ashbourne’s Chameleon Choir. Information on how to book a place can be found on the Festival website.

Sue Tansey, the Chameleon Choir’s Choral Director, kindly gave a few minutes to answer some questions about the choir and workshop.

Robin: Where did the Chameleon Choir get its name?

Sue:     The name was first thought of by Ray Taylor who set up the choir. The concept was that as a chameleon has the ability to change its colour, the choir would sing a great variety of music from many genres.

Robin:  How long has the choir existed?

Sue:     The choir started in January 2011, with Ray as the Musical Director, but when two years ago Ray relocated to the north, I moved from singing soprano to the role of  M.D.  We have given numerous concerts in and around the Ashbourne area to raise money for local churches and charities.

On the Road

This Bank Holiday weekend saw the arrival of thousands of Festival programmes from the printer. Boxes of them were piled up at the bottom of the office stairs and I soon found that just staring at them sternly did not help to get them delivered. Fortunately the people that have been organising the Festival for years have a well-rehearsed routine to distribute the programmes to pubs, cafes, visitor information centres and caravan sites all over the southern part of the Peak District.

I grabbed my list of 29 drop-offs in the Ashbourne, Buxton and Bakewell areas, heaved a few boxes of programmes into the boot and spent a couple of hours on Friday evening delivering them to pubs, some of which were unknown to me — honestly! Seeing customers tucking into tasty-looking food as I handed over piles of programmes to landlords made me hungry, and I made a mental note to re-visit places such as  the Watts Russell Arms, the Druid Inn and the Miners’ Standard when I had more time.

A young volunteer gets to grips with the problem of programme distribution

The following morning I did a circuit of the caravan sites around Ashbourne and it was surprising to see how busy these were on a weekend when the forecast was not brilliant. They were positively buzzing with families setting off on bike rides, kids playing football and even younger kids charging around the well-equipped play areas. A sudden sleet shower sent everybody scurrying at Ashbourne Heights.

By Bank Holiday Monday I only had a few more deliveries in Bakewell but the place was absolutely rammed, with all car parks full by 11.30am. As I left it was pouring with rain as people patiently queued for parking spaces. 

Mint Tea and Mutterings

When you begin work as a volunteer in the Ashbourne Festival office you are given lots of useful information, such as where the kitchen is, how to fill the kettle with water, how to switch it on and how to do the washing up. But nobody tells you about some of the risks associated with the position of ‘office junior’s assistant’. On your first day not a single person warns you about the frequent occurrence of mint tea bag avalanches when the cupboard door is opened or that the room downstairs, which you have to walk through to get to the kitchen, sometimes has life drawing classes,with the potential for an extremely embarrassing entrance. Or that the slightest accidental touch of a cable with a restless foot under a desk will crash the whole computer system, threaten the very existence of the Festival forever, and provoke curses from your colleagues.

But despite these minor setbacks it was rewarding to see how the skilful use of mobiles, mice and marker pens, together with the enthusiasm and cooperation of local people, led to the marvellous series of events which was the 2015 festival. 

The organisation of the 2016 festival is proceeding well and I am told that it promises to be one of the best ever. You can smell the excitement in the office- or is it just another mint tea brewing?