About this issue: Overview
On our cover this week, comedian Matt Lucas, who writes a letter to his younger self in which he candidly admits he wouldn’t make Little Britain again. “I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.”
There are moments in God’s Own Country that might leave urban softies queasy but Yorkshire film-maker Francis Lee tells Christian Lisseman they were essential if his rural love story were to accurately reflect the farming environment he grew up in.
Some simply died, one fell out of favour when a reader copied a murder in his book and another just stopped writing because of a bad review. Christopher Fowler resurrects the lives of writers who should never have been forgotten.
Conservation engineer Emma Cochrane and her firm have been shortlisted for an award for the complex installation of Manchester Cathedral’s new organ. In the latest in our series The Way I Work the Cumbria-based engineer talks about suspending the 14 ton instrument at first-floor height with invisible supports and walking along rotten timbers over the River Tyne .
Plus news of Mad Pride in Bacup, one of the first events in the north in which people with mental health problems show they don’t inhibit their creativity and intellect, and the GPs in Manchester who are doing their best to improve healthcare for homeless people.
In our arts and entertainment section there’s everything from a preview of a new play about the 1976 Grunwick strike by South Asian women workers to reviews of the new Liam Gallagher album and independent cinema.
Columnist Roger Ratcliffe takes an axe to Theresa May’s magic money trees, and there’s our crossword, Sudoku and more.