5. Entertainment – Page 237

Kathy Maniura: ‘I’ve played a paper straw, a nervous smoke alarm and now a middle-aged cycling man’ | Comedy

Why did you get into comedy?
I’ve always loved making people laugh. I was raised on a diet of sketch shows (French and Saunders, Mitchell and Webb, Monty Python) and took any opportunity I could to be silly for an audience. I have a vivid memory of a very elaborate performance of We Three Kings for the Year 5 talent show (“sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, DYING!”) – I won. I’m drawn to big, playful characters – wigs, costumes, silly voices. At uni I started doing sketch comedy and never really stopped.

How would you describe what you do?
Gentle absurdity. It’s a silly good-natured sending up of recognisable things. In my last show, I brought to life a series of inanimate objects – including an annoying Californian paper straw, a pathetic electric scooter desperate to be unlocked, and an incredibly anxious, sensitive smoke alarm. My new hour merges this kind of absurd character comedy with drag. I’m pretending to be a middle-aged cycling man, complete with Lycra bulges, devastating divorce, outrageous income and zero emotional intelligence.

What inspired the show?
I used to cycle to work through central London, wearing jeans like a normal person, and I’d be overtaken by these guys all kitted out in the gear and I would just think to myself … surely, surely they cannot be cycling much further than me. Where are they going? From their central London flat to their slightly more central London office? Why won’t they put their feet down at the traffic lights? Are they OK?

Around a similar time, I became aware of drag kings as an art form (like drag queens, but performing heightened masculinity instead). I was so energised, inspired and amazed watching the iconic drag king collective Pecs and the Man Up! competition. It’s such an exciting, varied, DIY, punky art form and I started to wonder if I had a drag king character in me. The two ideas combined, and The Cycling Man was born …

‘Try and fail!’ … Kathy Maniura. Photograph: Akta Photography

What’s been one of your all-time favourite gigs?
Sometimes the weird gigs are the most unexpectedly fun. Last summer I did a spot at a small festival. I was with some brilliant comedians (Rosalie Minnitt, Lorna Rose Treen and Emily Bampton). We turned up and the person on the stage before us was giving a very earnest presentation about his research into arctic foxes. Getting into drag in the cold backstage area of the tent listening to the lecture I thought, ah – they may not be in the mood for absurd character comedy after this. How wrong I was! The audience were wonderful, and all the more wonderful for defying our expectations. That’s a pro and con of the job – you never know quite what you’re going to get until you turn up for a show.

Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny?
When I was doing a show with my comedy partner Derek Mitchell, we booked a spot at one of the stages on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. It’s the main flyering thoroughfare during the fringe and there’s an open-air stage for acts to perform a snippet of their show. Lovely, in theory. Except what does well on that stage is juggling and a cappella singing, not alternative sketch comedy. I performed a solo piece – a wordy parody song. It was raining. The small crowd quickly dispersed. Derek laughed his head off as the light left my eyes while I continued to perform. There were two other people watching under an umbrella – my parents.

Any bugbears from the world of comedy?
There’s still a lot of unpaid and poorly paid gigs, many of which you travel for and, while the Edinburgh fringe itself is still seen as a rite of passage, it’s becoming prohibitively expensive. Many working-class comedians can’t do it. A lot of comedy spaces are inaccessible in other ways – male dominated, all white, in basements or upstairs in old pubs. It puts comedians in marginalised groups at a huge disadvantage in an industry that’s already hard work.

Worst advice you’ve ever been given?
A prospective agent once said to me that if you have a day job you like, you’re a “hobbyist”. Actually, creative work doesn’t have to be torture, and I think the idea that creative brilliance is born of hardship and that you have to give up everything to pursue your dreams is actually pretty toxic. That person did not become my agent!

What’s an important lesson you’ve learned from being a standup?
To try and fail! The only way you get better at comedy is by saying a joke out loud, in front of people, and seeing what happens. Once you’ve bombed a decent number of times, you learn that dying doesn’t actually mean dying.

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July 16, 2025

Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams returns for a third series

The critically acclaimed, Bafta nominated and RTS award winning Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams is back for a third series with sporting legend Freddie Flintoff taking on an even tougher challenge.

Determined to prove that his previous success wasn’t a one off, having created a cricket team like no other in his hometown of Preston and taken them on a life changing tour to India, he’s now set his sights on a much more ambitious plan.

Freddie wants to supersize the project right across the North West of England: He’ll attempt to form boys teams in Manchester and Liverpool while also attempting to create his first ever girls team in Blackpool at a club without any youth teams. Can he prove his blueprint for a league of dreams can work against a backdrop of a lack of funding, uninspired teens and derelict cricket clubs?

Joining Freddie in an extended coaching team is former Lancashire fast bowler Kyle Hogg and new recruit, current England Women’s international player Kate Cross.

Clare Sillery, Head of Commissioning BBC Documentaries says “Freddie Flintoff has proved himself an exceptional role model. To see his passion for and commitment to cricket shine through and the transformational impact it has had on the lives of the lads from Preston playing on his team has been incredible to witness. I’m so pleased that he is back for another series building on the success of the last one.”

Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams was commissioned for BBC One and iPlayer by Clare Sillery, BBC Head of Commissioning, Documentaries. The series is produced by South Shore, and the Executive Producers are Andrew Mackenzie and Naomi Templeton. The BBC Commissioning Editor is Fran Baker.

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July 16, 2025

The decline of small Romanian cinemas / Romania / Areas / Homepage

Plaza Romania Shopping Mall, Bucharest @ Radu Bercan/Shutterstock

Romania has the lowest number of cinemas per capita in Europe. Of the more than 400 cinemas that existed after communism, most have been closed or converted. Modern multiplexes in shopping malls do not compensate for the loss of neighborhood cinemas, places of culture and identity

In 2024, Romania had, according to data from the Statistical Yearbook of Cinematography, 108 active cinemas. Is that few or many?

An article published by Thrillist in November last year, which went quite viral on the internet, tried to answer the question “What is each European country worse at?”. While Italy “took the lead” in tax evasion and France, for example, in poor knowledge of the English language, Romania stood out for having the lowest number of cinemas per capita: only 3.8 cinemas per million inhabitants.

“Can you imagine what it was like the day Guardians of the Galaxy came out?”, wrote Thrillist. “The lines must have been hundreds of meters long, and no one wanted to sit in the front row.”

The irony is that if you look at the statistics of recent years without considering the local and historical reality, the situation might not even seem so dire. In fact, the number of cinemas has remained fairly stable or even slightly increasing.

To really grasp the meaning of this phenomenon, you have to go back in time — much further than 2009. To its credit, Romania, despite communism, censorship and a history that was anything but forgiving, has cultivated a vibrant cultural scene. In 1990, just after the fall of the regime, the country still had 430 movie theaters.

The 1989 revolution opened the doors to freedom of expression and the Western world, but it also left a trail of disorder in its wake: the post-communist administration found itself having to reorganize entire sectors from scratch, including the cultural sector.

The reins of the movie theaters were taken by RADEF – the Independent Directorate for the Distribution and Exhibition of Films, known as RomaniaFilm. But the dream of a cultural revival soon collided with reality: inefficient management, limited funding and total political disinterest. The result? Year after year, those theaters — once the beating heart of the communities — began to fall apart. Culture quickly slipped into the background; in a radically changed world, the priorities were survival and adaptation, certainly not the preservation of cultural heritage.

The slow decline of Romanian movie theaters reached its turning point in 2008, with the approval of Law 303, which transferred the management of the theaters from RADEF to local authorities — namely, municipalities and county councils. From then on, the fate of each theater depended on the political will and cultural sensitivity of individual territories. Some administrations have chosen to invest in their conservation, transforming these spaces into meeting places or small community theaters. In the most fortunate cases, the halls have found a second life. But it has not always been this way. Many buildings have been converted into bingo halls, places of worship, clubs, discos or shops. Others, more sadly, have been left closed, walled up or forgotten, condemned to a slow decay between infiltrations, dust and silence.

Today, walking through the streets of Bucharest, we find ourselves surrounded by still tangible traces of history. Some of these old movie theaters are still standing, resisting time, but they bear the signs of abandonment. They are fragments of urban memory that speak, but without a voice.

The rise of real estate interest in buildings located downtown, often of great architectural value, has accelerated the decline. Then there is the invasion of cable TV, video cassettes, DVDs, pirated films, and finally shopping malls: each new convenience has stolen audiences from the old theaters, one screening at a time.

And yet, as we said at the beginning, the numbers tell a paradox: in the last 10-15 years, the theaters have increased. Yes, but these are modern multiplexes in malls — temples of consumption where blockbusters, comfort and caramel popcorn reign. A glossy experience, light years away from the rough charm of the old neighborhood movie theaters.

Circ al foamei, Rahova @ Joe Mabel, Wikipedia

“Do you know what these shopping centers, so-called Malls, really are?”, architect Ileana Apostol tells me. “They are the old hunger circles. That’s what they were called, in the days of Ceaușescu, those large buildings with domes, designed as centers for the rationed distribution of food, at a time when finding food was a real feat. “It wasn’t to do good,” she specifies, “but to control access to food.” Many of those buildings, never completed during the communist regime, were reconverted into malls years later. Places created to manage scarcity, now transformed into temples of consumption.

They have simply changed their face, but they still maintain — in a subtle way — the same logic of consumption and dependence.

The real problem is not that there is a lack of movie theaters. The tragedy is that an important piece of our history is slowly disappearing before our eyes. What do we do with these spaces full of memory and beauty? And, above all, what happens to the people in small towns, where there may be a mall, but no real cinema — no place to see an arthouse film, a documentary, a festival title?

“Whenever we look for theaters for the One World Romania festival,” director Alexandru Solomon tells Euronews