The main event.
It was a perishingly cold Saturday night on Mare Street, and the Empire was sold out.
Staff were taking photos of each other, old friends were hugging and saying hello, before saying goodbye. It was the last hurrah for the current sta[…]

And just what did the Internet look like when Bis’ major label debut Tell It To the Kids came out? In this post I present to you another piece of unearthed arcana, now that the BBC’s never-lamented “Gateway to the Stars” is no[…]

A lively discussion was had last night amongst several FT regulars about why basketball and soccer don’t lend themselves to a Moneyball-style stats revolution where conventional wisdom about “character” and coming through “in […]

Well I must have been onto something in my last audition roundup because Roland Muldoon has echoed my observation that today’s young comedians eschew, by and large, political or social commentary. Muldoon – the guy who ran the Empire for […]

What exactly are good times, according to Chic? The lyrics refer to jitterbugging being involved, but it’s hard to believe many people on the dancefloor actually jitterbug to it (past tense of jitterbug: jatterbug?). The jitterbug isn’t a[…]

You’d think that “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” would be the ideal way to open a movie about Michael Jackson. In This Is It, though — patched together from four or five rehearsals for the 50-concert extravaganza which famously ne[…]

One oddity about this year’s hopefuls* is that not one has done political material. What are the chances? This is a fairly catholic smattering of forty or so comedians from all over the UK (though mainly London) and after a few nights of hearin[…]

Stand-up comedy, like all art forms, has a few hardy perennials. In the plastic arts you’ve got landscapes painted with oils, for example. In standup you’ve got jokes at the expense of disabled people. In theatre, say, you’ve got bi[…]

The last big event the Hackney Empire will put on before it goes dark for an indefinite amount of time next year – thank you Arts Council – is the New Act of the Year. Theoretically anything goes, but “new act” has come to pre[…]

I’ve left it a little late, huh? The season could be over tonight, around 11pm. That’s Eastern Standard Time, Bronx Time, the time at Yankee Stadium, where the World Series returns this evening after a brief and inconclusive middle eight […]