✨I always lose myself in this photo. 📷 A moment of serenity for Twixmas: the jaw-dropping Gothic beauty of Salisbury Cathedral, mirrored in the shimmering reflection of William Pye’s font. 📸✨

A Yorkshire Tragedy links, Beyond Shakespeare !

Save Audio Drama at the BBC - Sign the Petition! chng.it/GhXqtGC4vK via Change.org UK

Just writing about Beatles covers at the minute, so this really did make me laugh.

On the train to the ThatThere for some silly clown stuff, we've just passed a Crewe arts venue called Chuffchuff. That's brightened my day!

St. Hedwig calls out a nun who has a hedgehog "up her sleeve..." 🦔🥰 Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XI 7

Dickens does Ben Jonson, Beyond Shakespeare

The Higham Hall College brochure has just arrived, and I have to say this looks pretty cool. I've had a great time researching and choosing material. Now I get to teach it! Bookings via highamhall.com

I was in one of these hugely enjoyable workshops last month. This epic (sit)-comedy, with up to ten different actors reading the same role, pushes all my clown/improvisor/early drama nerd buttons. Got my weekend pass for the May readings already!

It's about time for another victory lap for this academic work probing the beliefs of the Elizabethan clergyman Hugh Sexey. Still the most dontastic chapter title ever!

It's been around 45 years since I wrote and performed comedy sketches with Mike Haskins. Last night 'Lutwidge', in which Lewis Carroll (Steve Wallis, here) attempts to explain Jabberwocky to his publisher, won an award at Liverpool's Weird and Wonderful festival!

This raised a chuckle - Plato's theory of Forms, applied to the LFC-PSG game: 'a smash-and-grab of such Platonic perfection that it belongs among the great thinker's higher realm of Ideals'.

I love these 16th century grotesques!

🃏 The Fool – A Card of New Beginnings Happy April Fool's Day! Today, we're sharing The Fool card from the Tarot de Marseille Gassmann deck (c.1865). Symbolising adventure, risk, and new beginnings, The Fool invites us to embrace the unknown and take a leap of faith. #Tarot

RIP. WSI really gripped my imagination as a theatre student, mostly via the Engineers of the Imagination handbook and the few videos I could find mid-80s. A pioneer vision blending visual arts, humour, ritual, performance and community. theguardian.com/stage/2025/apr…

So excited! Ten 'new' funny early modern plays. I got the weekend pass to see the lot. Proper jokes, generous comic humanity; the same characters, different situations. I'm cast as a grumpy farting old git. Bit of a failure of the imagination there, I feel, but hey. Come!

My best Shakespeare on the Spot so far, at the King's Arms Salford for the Greater Manchester Improvisation Festival on Saturday. In the misery pic I'm soliloquising about Julius Caesar's assassination - the audience suggestion was that a piano dropped on his head.

At Hampton Court yesterday, with Henry VIII's fool Will Summers.

We're kicking off Crossed Wires festival with a piece of audio history! Jarvis Cocker has recorded a special version of the Shipping Forecast to mark its centenary. It'll be played in full at a special Ships live show at the Crossed Wires Festival/BBC Sounds Fringe today. Thanks Jarv!