... Diverse menu of fine acts Wimborne BFP Entertainments Scene Showcase 2000 This event at Cobham Sports and Social Club had been rescheduled from the autumn due to a fire. In truth one speculated whether it was still smouldering, for the temperature in the packed cabaret room was such that jackets were soon divested and programmes vigorously utilised as fans. Fortunately, discomfort was to be ...

... Hawthorn Entertainments Trecco Bay, Porthcawl Neville and Anita Williams, the principals of Hawthorn Entertainments, welcomed their many guests to the spacious surroundings of the Show Dome to see a selection of managed and touring artists. Compere Steve Saint really had the most difficult of tasks. The enormous audience was largely made up of revellers from the South Wales clubland fraternity ...

... Great British R&B Festival Colne Numbers may have been down on last year's record crowds, but an estimated 50,000 revellers still assembled to turn this annual event into a joyous occasion. With a quality line-up of American talent on the main stage, supplemented by a host of homegrown musicians ai more man a aozen venues around town, there was certainly no shortage of live music for the ...

... Morag McLaren Pizza on the Park During her show celebrating the work of American Dorothy Fields, Morag McLaren marvels at the versatility of a lady who was able at different stages in her career to write lyrics for such contrasting songs as I Can't Give You Anything But Love and Nobody Does It Like Me. And yet the audience could really say just the same of McLaren, for this thoroughly ...

... Making a lasting impression By JOHN MARTLAND So successful has the topical Impressions sketch show Dead Ringers (R4, from F/iday, November 17) become, that it is now possible to download certain extracts from the Internet. These mostly feature prank telephone calls by Tom Baker impersonator Jon Culshaw, in the role of Dr Who, to various stores, individ uals and organisations. However, in ...

... Viva Las Vegas Blackpool There are bigger shows in Blackpool this summer, there are more lavish shows -- but it is questionable whether there is one with harder working performers to be found than at this year's summer-long production at the Trades Club on Chadwick Street. Last year's triple whammy of headlining Scottish vocalist Christian, locally based Gina Johnson and the perennial whirl ...

... Money, Money, Money! Poole After a five year absence, the summer season has been reinstated at Poole Arts Centre's Towngate Theatre. Historically, the venue, which flourishes from September to June, has a poor record of holidaytime business due to the lack of tion for visitors to the town. The challenge is formidable but this production from John Warwick Associates, presented Tuesdays to ...

... Maybellene-- The Living Fashion Doll Pleasance Wade through the dark sea of black-garbed media wannabes in the Pleasance courtyard and there in a tent in the corner you will stumble across an oasis of colour. Here you may purchase a ticket to camp heaven in the form of two 15-minute shows featuring a human head stuck through a black backdrop on to the dancing body of a barely two-foot high ...

... White Men with Weapons Pleasance Armed with just a script, a lone performer takes on the entire army of pre-Mandela South Africa as writer and actor Greig Coetzee attacks both flanks of a hellish boot camp for training teenagers to kill rebels in the desert. There are the staff: a captain instructing how to fill forms in tripli cate, a mad Anglican chaplain, an NCO who swears fluently in ...

... Splendour (and Outside a Crowd is Listening) Traverse This is another triumph for Paines Plough, beautifully played by an exceptional cast and directed with empathic precision by Vicky Featherstone. Abi Morgan's play centres on a defining moment in an unspecified dictatorship. The gener al has fled, leaving his vain wife Micheline (Mary Cunningham) and her traumatised best friend Genevieve ...

... Cock-Tales Hill Street Theatre Phil is a well-to-do businessman without hang-ups about being a homosexual, having always had his parents' and friends' acceptance. Yet he is unfulfilled, unable to commit, and compulsively indulging in The problem starts when the newly-discovered thrill of sado masochism, provided by exception ally dislikable Steve (credit to Alan Fellows), begins to permeate ...

... Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour Pleasance There is something heartwarming about Nicholas Parsons dragging the bright, young things of this year's festival on to his Happy Hour to talk about, or perform excerpts from, their shows. What a marvellous chap, ladies and gentleman, as he might say. Not that Parsons doesn t have his say. There is a ten-minute slot at the start when he tries out some ...