The Stage Newspaper's 100 Most Influencial People In Theatre

Luvvies' favourite The Stage has released a list of the 100 most influential people in British Theatre. Topping the list this year is Cameron Mackintosh (pictured), who has had successes including Les Miserables, Avenue Q and The Phantom of the Opera. Despite this however, he has been off the top spot for the last 7 years (primarily losing out to a certain Mr Lloyd-Webber) - so no doubt his smugness can now be well and truly restored.

So, to all the thousands of you struggling actors out there, this is where you should be addressing those CV's...

1. Cameron Mackintosh
2. Andrew Lloyd Webber
3. Howard Panter/Rosemary Squire (Ambassador Theatre Group)
4. Nicholas Hytner (National Theatre)
5. Nica Burns/Max Weitzenhoffer (Nimax)
6. Bill Kenwright (producer)
7. David Ian (Live Nation)
8. Michael Boyd (Royal Shakespeare Company)
9. Nick Thomas/Jon Conway (Qdos Entertainment)
10. Vicky Featherstone/John Tiffany (National Theatre of Scotland)
11. Sonia Friedman (producer)
12. Dominic Cooke (Royal Court)
13. Michael Grandage (Donmar Warehouse)
14. Kevin Spacey / Sally Greene (Old Vic)
15. Jonathan Church (Chichester Festival Theatres)
16. David Lan (Young Vic)
17. Graham Sheffield (Barbican)
18. Bill Taylor (Stage Entertainment) – New Entry
19. Jude Kelly (Southbank Centre)
20. Rupert Goold (director) – New Entry

...and 80 more too numerous to mention, including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Daniel Radcliffe, Anne-Marie Duff, Ewan McGregor, Lee Mead, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Trevor Nunn, Carlos Acosta and most surprisingly of all, Damon Albarn...!

Merton Losing The Midas Touch?

Hands up all those who feel Paul Merton is losing the plot on 'Have I Got News For You'? Personally, I've always felt audiences have been more than generous in their appreciation of Merton's often average comedy on the show, but on the basis of this week's performance (HIGNFY 17/12/07), this may not be for much longer. His gags often fell flat, his 'quirky' observational humour failing to deliver the kind of orgasmic responses to which he has become accustomed.

Comments on this gladly appreciated. I find Merton a difficult man to criticise, as he appears (on the surface at least) to have an army of passionate and unwavering supporters. But, despite my fears of being hunted down by the Merton-mob, I will say this: it's time someone else had a turn.

Rhydian's Fans Up In Arms Over Dodgy Phoneline Claims

Welsh grannies everywhere are up in arms about last Saturday's x-factor final. The reason? Apparently phone lines were "constantly blocked", meaning that many who tried to vote for Rhydian (the 1-3 favourite) could not get through. According to the BBC website, several grannies tried phoning "over ten times" without success.

Whilst it's difficult to work up much genuine passion about this story, it does nevertheless seem to show that the days of rigged phone-ins and dodgy TV comps are far from over. Although to be honest, anyone who phones in 10 times to vote on the x-factor deserves everything they get.

Lloyd Webber To Star In Hollyoaks?!

Rumour has it that Picasso-faced musical-supremo Andrew Lloyd Webber is to appear in 3 Hollyoaks episodes, due to be broadcast in January.

I can just imagine the scene when Lloyd Webber woke up one morning thinking 'what is it I still have left to achieve? Ah yes! I may have produced a crap piece of TV (How to Solve a Problem Like Maria), but I haven't yet starred in a crap piece of TV. Agent, get Phil Redmond on the line!

"Victoria Hart Is An Ambassador For Curves" Says Jacob Kimmie

Curvy jazz singer, Victoria Hart, has proclaimed herself as a fan of new designer Jacob Kimmie. The sultry singer says “I love Jacob Kimmie’s style – understated glamour. He really knows how to make a woman look feminine.”

Directional fashion designer Jacob Kimmie met Victoria Hart at a charity event earlier this year and straight away fell in love with her style. Jacob says: “I love her bubbly and spirited personality and the way it reflects in her music – that is her style. Victoria represents that new kind of cool that is a combination of quirky and chic – everything that Jacob Kimmie is about - so I invited her to come to my show at London Fashion Week in September and made her a dress to wear. She has a very sexy, womanly figure - Victoria could be an ‘ambassador’ for the curvy shape.”

Victoria wears Jacob’s dress in the album cover of her new EP, Mood Swings, due out for release on December 31st 2007. Victoria says “I love experimenting with fashion, especially with designers like Jacob who are up and coming and experimental like me. It was great to have Jacob Kimmie design a dress just for me that really suits my shape and character! The dress is reminiscent of 50s Hollywood but in a contemporary way – move over Moschino!”

As a self-taught designer, Jacob can be found in his Birmingham studio hand stitching delicate chiffons and silks. Jacob prides himself on intricate craftsmanship - his latest collection features a dress which is hand stitched with 1.4 kilometres of ribbon and retails at £11,000 aimed at his growing private client list. Describing himself as “post-Lacroix”, Jacob hopes to introduce a new generation of fashion lovers like Victoria to the spirit of couture and what Chanel is all about.

Jacob Kimmie will be showing his Autumn Winter 08/09 collection during London Fashion Week in February 2008.

Ghostly Goings On At Student Film Awards

Two friends and Salford University graduates went head-to-head on Wednesday 4 December when their film projects were short-listed for the Royal Television Society North West student awards.

On the night it was The Park by the BA Television and Radio graduate Nick Gillespie which finished ahead of Billy Wright made by his friend Ed Lilly, but both went away happy in the end as the two friends had helped each other out in the production of their films.

Nick’s film, which was successful in the Undergraduate Drama category, is a horror story based on a legend about a ghostly lady who is said to haunt Marbury Park in his home town of Northwich.

Since graduating, Nick has gone on to become a freelance camera operator and has worked on a number of projects including a new film of his own based around the Story of Little Red Riding Hood and work for Steve Coogan’s production company Baby Cow. Ed, meanwhile, has started his own production company producing music videos.

As a result of his success in the North West region, Nick will be taking The Park to compete in the national RTS Student Awards which are held next May in London.

One of Nick’s tutors at Salford, Channel M producer Paul Barron, was responsible for getting the entries into the competition. He said: “Both Nick and Ed were great assets to us on the Channel M project at Salford, so I had no reservations in putting their own films forward for RTS consideration. I had a gut feeling they would make a good impression. It was just a shame that they were both nominated in the same category, being such good friends, but they can both take pride in their achievements. I’m delighted for both of them, and feel sure they will find even greater success in the future”.

Nick, whose win contributes to over a decade of Salford success at the Royal Television Society awards, was honoured to just be nominated. He said: “Everyone involved with the film worked really hard and I suppose it’s a bit of a cliché, but I really wasn’t expecting to win. The whole night was a bit of a blur and having a chance to go to the national awards in London next year is very exciting.”

The Landscape Oil Sketch At The National Gallery

By the early 19th century, the practice of painting oil sketches in the open air was widespread across Europe. Oil sketching was seen primarily as training for the hand and eye, with artists exhorted to paint quickly to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. In the space of just two hours, some artists were able to make works of tremendous freshness and beauty. Artists from Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia were particularly attracted to the Roman Campagna but also found inspiration in their native lands.

These sketches were rarely intended for public exhibition. Painted on small-scale wooden panels or paper, they were piled in the corner of the artist’s studio, little valued and largely ignored until generations later. This National Gallery Room 1 exhibition celebrates the rediscovery and re-evaluation of these remarkable works of art, drawing on one of the finest collections of oil sketches in the world.

Since 1999, when the renowned Gere collection was entrusted to the National Gallery on long-term loan, the Gallery has become one of the most important destinations for the study of this now unusual art form.The challenge of attributing individual sketches has been a key concern for art historians at the Gallery. Sketches were almost never signed and close-knit circles of artists frequently painted in a remarkably similar manner.

When the Gere collection was first displayed at the National Gallery in the summer of 1999, the curators received several letters from members of the public disputing the subject and authorship given for several important works. Experts had speculated that Lord Frederic Leighton’s Coastal Landscape was inspired by a site in Cornwall. That was until resident Mark Collins realised that Leighton’s stretch of coastline precisely matched a photograph he had taken near Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.

Even more remarkable was the discovery by American painter, Susan Bull Riley, who recognised that a Landscape with Cumulus Clouds – confidently attributed by experts to Gilles-François-Joseph Closson – in fact bore a striking resemblance to a painting in the V&A, Landscape near Haarlem, 1839, by the Dutch painter Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870). Thanks to the expert eyes of these visitors, both works will now go on display with their amended attributions for the first time.

Featuring around 50 small-scale works, the exhibition will include Théodore Rousseau’s The Valley of St-Vincent, one of two landscape oil sketches purchased by the National Gallery in 1918 at the Paris sale of Edgar Degas’s private collection. Also on display will be scenes by such admired figures as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Simon Denis, Giovanni-Battista Camuccini and eight works by Lord Leighton (1830–1896), who was President of the Royal Academy for eighteen years and the first artist to be raised to the peerage in Great Britain.

In the latter part of the 19th century the immediacy and spontaneity of oil-sketching was adopted by the Impressionists, including Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, who exhibited their own sketch-like paintings as finished pictures. Meanwhile the importance of oil-sketching in academic artistic practice declined.

The Landscape Oil Sketch
15 December 2007 – 6 April 2008
The National Gallery, London
Room 1
Admission Free

Winehouse Is A Dud Under The Mistletoe, And Men Would Do The Un-Thinkable To Avoid The Xmas Crush

Amy Winehouse’s fall from grace seems to keep on coming. This Christmas season, the troubled singer not only finds herself with a jailbird husband and a string of cancelled tour dates, but a Nuts TV nationwide poll conducted amongst men aged 16 – 34 has now revealed that Winehouse is the least favourite girl to pucker up with under the mistletoe this year. Amy topped Nuts TV’s poll with a landslide 48% of the vote. One celeb who should be filled with festive cheer this year is Keira Knightley who was judged the girl men would most like to take to their Christmas Party.

Christmas spirit seems to be in short supply this year amongst the men of Britain who have spoken out on their hatred of Christmas shopping. Whilst recent research showed that women prefer Shopping to sex, Nuts TV revealed that rather than spend the day in the Xmas shopping crush, men would be prepared to do a string of unthinkable acts including giving up sex and beer for a week, cleaning the house for a month, driving a pink banger and even wearing their rival teams kit on a match day.

Nuts TV has recently launched its Man Time nationwide campaign highlighting that every night between 9pm and 1am is Man Time. The nationwide poll was conducted to support the campaign and was designed to research what constitutes the ideal Man Time as well as gain an insight into the things men love most including girls, sport and comedy. To coincide with the campaign Nuts TV will be incorporating a Man Time editorial strand into the channel from Monday 10th December.

Q1 Which comedian from the list below would you most like to see give an alternative Queens speech at Christmas?

1. Peter Kaye - 25.60%
2. Lee Evans - 18.3%
3. Lenny Henry - 18.60%
4. Jimmy Carr – 10%
5. Ricky Gervais - 8.60%
6. Russell Brand – 9.30%
7. Eddie Izzard – 5.10%
8. Jack Dee – 5.40%
9. Frank Skinner – 3.40%
10. Ross Noble – 2.70%

Q2 Which of these girls would you most like to take to your office Christmas party? (If you were to have a Christmas Party)

1. Keira Knightley - 23.60%
2. Kelly Brook – 22.50%
3. Gemma Atkinson from "I'm a Celebrity” – 15.30%
4. Kate Moss – 9.60%
5. Cheryl Cole – 8.8%
6. Leona Lewis – 7.30%
7. Lucy Pinder – 5.90%
8. Victoria Beckham – 3.10%
9. Amy Winehouse – 2.71%
10. Chanelle from “Big Brother” – 1.30%

Q3 Which of these girls would you LEAST like to kiss under the mistletoe?

1. Amy Winehouse – 48%
2. Victoria Beckham – 24.60%
3. Chanelle (Big Brother) – 13.40%
4. Kate Moss – 4.90%
5. Keira Knightley – 2.30%
6. Lucy Pinder – 1.70%
7. Leona Lewis – 1.70%
8. Kelly Brook – 1.60%
9. Gemma Atkinson from "I'm a Celebrity” – 1.10%
10. Cheryl Cole – 0.60%

Q4 Which sports personality from the list below would you MOST like to invite to Christmas dinner?

1. David Beckham – 23.90%
2. Lewis Hamilton – 19.40%
3. Jonny Wilkinson – 13.80%
4. Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff – 13.10%
5. John Terry – 7.9%
6. Steve Redgrave – 6.50%
7. Wayne Rooney – 6.50%
8. Rodney Marsh – 3.50%
9. Theo Walcott – 2.70%
10. Andy Murray – 2.60%

Q5 Imagine that your partner is at their office Christmas party giving you space to indulge in some “Man Time” – what would be your ideal night in?

1. Getting your mates round with a crate of beer – 26.80%
2. All night games console session – 22.7%
3. Action Movie and a pizza – 12.30%
4. Watching Football all night – 12.20%
5. Playing poker with the boys – 11.20%
6. Watching TV with full control of the remote - 6.20%
7. None of the above – 8.70%

Q6 If your partner was at their Christmas party and you knew for certain you wouldn’t get caught, which of the following would you like to try?

1. Watch a porn movie – 33.50%
2. Have a candlelit bath with candles and bubbles - 11.90%
3. Invite another girl around for a romantic evening – 11.80%
4. Read girly magazines - Heat, Closer etc. – 9.30%
5. Go through their emails – 9.20%
6. Cook naked and leave the washing up – 8.70%
7. Watch a chick flick – 6.60%
8. Go online shopping with your partner's credit card 5.60%
9. Try on partner's underwear – 3.90%
10. Try on partners make-up – 2.80%
11. None of the above – 37.90

Q7 Which of the following would you be prepared to do rather than being dragged Christmas shopping for the day with your partner.

1. Go without beer for a week – 38.6%
2. Do all the cleaning in the house for a month – 19.40%
3. Go without sex for a week – 17.50%
4. Spend the day baking Christmas food with your whole family – 13.60%
5. Drive a pink clapped out car for a week – 13.50%
6. Only eat vegetables for a week - 11.70%
7. Spend New Year's Eve watching TV with your in-laws – 10.70%
8. Only eat vegetables for a week 11.70%
9. Dress up as a woman to go to your local pub for the night – 8.30%
10. Kiss your partner's grandma on the lips – 4.90%
11. Walk around in your rival team's football kit on the day your team are playing - 5.1%
12. None of the above – 28.80%

Today Is The 27th Anniversary Of John Lennon's Death. RIP John.

Led Zeppelin Hit The Big Screen!

Gutted you didn’t get tickets to see Led Zeppelin in O2 Arena next Monday? How about travelling back in time to check out some of the most incendiary live performances ever?!

In what promises to be the concert of the decade on 10th December, Led Zeppelin are back and will headline at the O2 Arena Tribute Concert to the Late Ahmet Ertegun. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones will be joined by Jason Bonham, the son of their late drummer John Bonham for this historic concert of a lifetime that sold out in record time.

It is of course sold out, but to celebrate this event, Vue cinemas have teamed up with Warner Music to screen an exclusive 'best of' selection of Led Zeppelin live performances on the same night as the O2 concert across eight Vue cinemas.

Featured are performances from the Royal Albert Hall in January 1970, just one year after the release of their debut album, their triumphant five-night run at Earl's Court in May 1975 and their record-breaking shows at the Knebworth Festival in August 1979, just one year before the death of drummer John Bonham led to the band's dissolution.

These rare performances have been painstakingly restored, remixed, and remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround - under the personal supervision of Jimmy Page and director Dick Carruthers.

Mark de Quervain, Sales and Marketing Director for Vue Entertainment, said, "We are really excited to be able to give many fans who missed out on getting tickets for the reunion gig the chance to see these amazing performances on the big screen."

Conrad Withey, President, Warner Music Entertainment, said, "Led Zeppelin are an awesome live band and this is a great opportunity to experience these stunning performances in a cinema. We expect there to be a real sense of occasion. The two disc DVD, from which these performances are taken, is superb way for fans, both long term and new, to delve deeper into the band’s history."

Vue will be showing the film in eight UK sites, including the cinema at the O2 Arena in Greenwich. Seats are limited to just 2,000 and priced at normal adult rates. Tickets can now be purchased online from www.myvue.com, by phone via 08712 240 240 or directly from box offices at participating cinemas.

Start at 8pm, the locations are:

Greenwich O2
Manchester Lowrey
Leeds Kirkstall
Birmingham Star City
Bristol Longwell Green
Thurrock Lakeside Shopping Centre
Edinburgh Ocean
Dublin Liffey Valley Shopping Centre

MTV UK Searches For A New Presenter Using MySpace

MTV UK has partnered with MySpace to search for a brand new presenter to host MTV News. From today, anyone will be able to audition for the job of a lifetime simply by using their MySpace page.

Budding presenters can apply for the role by uploading video showreels onto the Random Report profile page: uk.myspace.com/randomreport, where MTV producers will be poised and ready to assess all applications.

By bagging one of the top showbiz jobs on TV, one lucky online auditionee will be plucked from obscurity to follow in the footsteps of ex-presenters Cat Deeley, Edith Bowman, Russell Brand, Alex Zane, Trevor Nelson and Kelly Brook – all of whom started their illustrious careers at the world-famous studios in Camden. Presenting daily bulletins across MTV ONE, MTV Hits, TMF, MTV Base and VH1, the successful candidate will also get the chance to travel the world and brush shoulders with A’ list stars such as Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent and Cameron Diaz. And as if that wasn’t enough, the new presenter will also be in line to present from the MTV Europe Music Awards 2008 – being held in Liverpool next November.

To help potential candidates create the perfect showreel, MySpace has persuaded MTV News stars Trevor Nelson and Rickie Haywood-Williams to come up with some top tips. To view Trevor Nelson’s video blog simply log onto uk.myspace.com/randomreport and follow the links.

Top Tips on the perfect show-reel from MTV presenter Rickie Haywood-Williams:

1. Be Yourself. Let as much of your personality shine through as possible
2. Have a Laugh. Don’t take yourself too seriously
3. Know who your audience is. This helps with the way you convey information and carry yourself.
4. Practice, Practice, Practice. Use every opportunity to hone your skills.
5. Keep an eye on the competition. It keeps you on your toes
6. Look after your body – no one wants to watch or listen to a minger
7. Ignore No.6 – PARTY EVERY NIGHT LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW
8. Get hooked up with a celebrity to get into the showbiz pages
9. Never complain, never explain because this job ROCKS!

To audition

Just upload a video of yourself presenting to camera that is no longer than two minutes before December 21st.

MTV will then sift through all of the videos and invite the very best to London to audition for the fulltime position.

There’s no experience necessary, all that MTV ask is that you’re fun and won’t be fazed by interviewing some of the world’s biggest stars from the film, music and entertainment world.