Gilbert and Sullivan series

No excuses for the huge gap in my blogs, but a possible reason: I have been very busy with running the first Holt Summer Festival and producing and directing a five part series about Gilbert and Sullivan for Sky Arts. Of course this is a poor apology, but it will have to do.

The first Holt Festival was a resounding success, wonderful artists, beautiful weather - and we broke even! I am now planning next years festival, anyone within striking distance of North Norfolk, or interested in taking a holiday here in the first week of August 2120 should keep their eyes on the festival website: www.holtfestival.org More information will follow in due course.

As for Gilbert and Sullivan - well, I know a lot more about them than I did a year ago and its all pretty fascinating stuff. The enlightened folk at Sky Arts were keen to find an answer to the question why - why are G&S as popular now as they ever were? Simon Butteriss, G&S patterman extraordinaire and my co-conspirator in many theatre and television projects over the years, has written and presented a fascinating account. We are currently editing some six months of interviews and performance excerpts, which will be broadcast around the middle of next year. In the meantime, we are going to be exploring new initiatives to ensure that Capriol Films continues to make worthwhile music and arts films and - very importantly - gets them out to an increasingly important market.

We need people to buy our films on order that we make more of them. I intend to be a lot more organised about communicating our ambitions to all you arts starved bloggers - I promise! But you can help this process by buying our wares, details are on the homepage. As retail stores become less and less geared to selling anything other than major films and television series, we must embrace the power of the internet. The much vaunted down loadable future is still some way off - copper wires do not make for easy access, but DVD's of our material are still a very viable delivery source. We need to make our very high quality DVDs more universally available, even allowing for the present postal problems - and we will. More news soon.