One of the things people most associate with Newcastle after its engineering and sometimes chilly climate is its pubs and nightlife. When I created my first pub tour here, as with London, it became obvious there were just too many interesting old pubs to fit into one tour. I really like this photo I took of the High Level Bridge and Newcastle early one morning. In the U.K. Newcastle is often depicted in police or murder tv shows, even the funky High Level Bridge I wrote about a few days ago has been in modern detective dramas such as Vera. Perhaps the most famous film set in Newcastle is not j ..read more

One of my favourite films of the last few years is The Gentlemen. I watched it several times during Covid in an empty cinema and when I could, I went out to visit one or two of the locations I wasn’t familiar with. It’s a hilarious, stylish and sometimes very violent London gangster film by Guy Ritchie So I was thrilled to learn that 5 years later Guy Ritchie was working on an 8 part mini series of the same name albeit with different characters and story, Ritchie said there were themes and storylines which were “worth exploring” further following the film.  Critics have broadly welcomed ..read more

Some years I do a TV and Movies countdown and some I pick one or the other. This year it’s going to be my favourite films of 2023 though it must be said I really enjoyed the recent Boat Story, The Tourist and the incredible Happy Valley… plus Doctor Who has been great too. I went to see about 40 films this year and there were lots of good films, several very worthy and memorable films and one which I thought one of the most amazing experiences I’ve lived through at the cinema… and that includes one film being abandoned when the roof water tanks ruptured and trying to watch a Wesley Snipes acti ..read more

I’ve managed to see a lot of great films this autumn and the tail end of summer and one or two less good ones but one that I’d been waiting to see for months based on the trailer alone is Saltburn, written and directed by the up and coming Emerald Fennell. It looked audacious and outrageous and I wasn’t the only person who went into it thinking it may be a stylish horror film, perhaps like a cerebral Ready Or Not or intimate The Wicker Man. I think it is the first time the film I went to see wasn’t the genre I was expecting. It certainly has everything the trailer depicts but it is so much mor ..read more

Summer is traditionally the time for the biggest blockbuster, fan pleasing movies and whilst the recently opened Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still pulling in the punters, there is another company that is doing very well out of it all. They being Herbert Johnson, a 134-year-old London hatmaker that makes the original Fedora Hats for Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford The hat first donned by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” back in 1981 and though unerringly the sales of Fedora hats seem to rise and fall with every Indiana Jones film, recently there has been a seven fold incr ..read more

Whilst out and about on Tyneside, I wanted to visit a little spot that I’d never got to make it to previously, the one time home of Stan Laurel, one half of that legendary comedy duo of a century ago, Laurel and Hardy. Like myself, Stan was born in Cumbria and moved to Newcastle at a young age before moving away. Even though it is well away from where most visitors go, finding the site was relatively easy, helped a great deal with this fantastic statue that sits in the square outside the place where he lived in the appropriately named Laurel Park. At the base of the statue is a wonderful reli ..read more

A few weeks ago I was giving a Churchill Walking Tour to a family of 8 in London. It was a cold wintery Sunday morning and the streets were largely quiet until towards the end of the tour we came across a filming unit down a side-street near Parliament. There were a few doorways surrounded by sandbags and even a few old military vehicles parked up. They were making a huge new blockbuster film entitled ‘Blitz’. The photo above shows so many interest details about how life was like. You can see all the little boxes that around peoples necks. These for gas masks. Also as I always tell my touris ..read more

There was a time when the whole world seemed to love Tom Hanks, I never really knew why. He was always perfectly amiable but generally seemed to be just going through the motions in what happened to be often big and popular films. In truth I only really liked CastAway, Saving Private Ryan was too Hollywood, his earlier films like Big just didn’t appeal so I didn’t watch them, nor have I ever read or watched anything from the Da Vinci Code series. To me he seems just a regular secondary TV supporting actor, that’s not to say I dislike him but I just don’t see what the big deal is. Nevertheless ..read more

I’d been waiting to see Babylon for several months. Not that I knew that much about it but the advertising I had seen onscreen made me think this could be for me. Additionally, Burlington Arcade in London where I visit several times a week with my tours has been decorated in a Babylon theme for a few months. I knew it was an epic film and set in the 1920’s or 1930’s and that was all I needed to know. I was hoping to feel some of the breathtaking spectacle of Going To The Cinema Alone…. Specifically For The Great Gatsby (2013 film) and in no way was I to be disappointed. Babylon follows t ..read more

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