Celebrity Interview – Adam Buss
Are we going to spend the rest of our lives bemoaning the fact that something’s not happening or are we as a city going to do something collectively about it? Critics have found it comical that Derby, whose leading entertainment venue has been closed for more than seven years, has submitted a bid to become UK City of Culture in 2025. They may also titter at the fact that the executive leading the bid was once classed as Derby’s funniest man. But Adam Buss who runs QUAD, Derby’s £11 million art gallery and cinema, isn’t laughing. He regards it as a “massively tough” competition, especially as a record number of applications, 20, have been submitted for the 2025 accolade. So, does Derby have a chance of success? “Absolutely.” Adam, a former actor, stand-up comedian and marketing expert, explains how Derby can come out on top despite being without the Assembly Rooms since March 2014 because of a fire that caused extensive damage. “City of Culture isn’t a beauty contest. In terms of the challenge that Derby’s got, we’ve been very open about them in our bid and said we want City of Culture to be a catalyst for change. “In terms of the Assembly Rooms, it would have been great if it was all sorted six months after the fire happened but it wasn’t. “Are we going to spend the rest of our lives bemoaning the fact that something’s not happening or are we as a city going to do something collectively about it?” Adam, Derby’s City of Culture interim bid director, is loath to criticise previous UK City of Culture winners Derry-Londonderry, Hull and Coventry. He points out that Derby would do things differently. “What other Cities of Culture have done is they’ve largely brought in a group of culture professionals to deliver a year of exciting stuff. What we’re saying is we want to build from within, so we want to prioritise the talent that exists within Derby.” This is from a man who grew up on a council estate in Hastings, East Sussex, with little access to the arts. When he was at secondary school Adam showed an aptitude for drama and his teacher impressed on him that he could have a career in the creative industries. When it came to choosing a university that offered a drama course, Adam drew up a shortlist of four. He rejected Winchester – “not the sort of place you want to go to when you’re 18 or 19” – before turning down Birmingham because it felt “too big” and Bretton Hall, part of the University of Leeds, which was “too remote”. “Derby was the only place that I didn’t go and visit. I chose Derby because I didn’t want to go to the other places! “It wasn’t a big city but it was a city and it had a course that was a bit more flexible that gave me the opportunity to try out different things. “It was by far the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, coming here in the first place.” While at university Adam met a lecturer who was a former stand-up comedian. He started up a group for budding comics. He had contacts which enabled Adam to get short slots as a stand-up and he was on the comedy circuit for about three years. The pinnacle was when Adam reached the final of the Leicester Mercury comedian of the year contest in which he came up against Jimmy Carr, John Bishop and Miles Jupp. “Basically everyone else who was in the final is now a very successful, professional stand-up comedian and I’m not. So that tells you all you need to know!” Adam didn’t win the competition, so he decided a change of career was necessary. But there’s one title he hasn’t relinquished. “The university and the Students’ Union ran a comedy competition for about three years. I was the last person to win it, so I’m still Derby’s funniest man!” Adam then secured a job at a London marketing agency working with big companies including Sony PlayStation, mobile phone provider Orange, Top Man and Air France. “Our job was to turn commercial brands into live experiences for people to be able to understand the brand and ultimately sell more stuff. “It was a great experience and I learned a lot. But one of the key things I learned was that I’m not well suited to the commercial world. I understand it but I don’t care enough about it, to be honest.” Adam began to look at other jobs that were not in London. A vacancy for a press officer at Derby Playhouse, as it then was, brought him back to the city. “It just felt right straightaway because it was a venue I knew from my time at the university, I knew the city and I still had friends here. Fortunately I got that job and I’ve been in Derby ever since.” Adam had been doing odd acting jobs which enabled him to get his Equity card and an agent. But he never fully committed to being on stage. “I was able to do work with people like 1623 theatre company and do some really interesting Shakespeare stuff. Artistic director Ben Spiller is the person who got me to understand Shakespeare and love it.” Adam performed at the National Theatre and in a Royal Shakespeare Company festival but he still regarded it as a second job. His full-time work changed again when he joined Q Arts, the organisation which merged with the Metro Cinema to become QUAD, although it would be another two years before its £11 million building took shape and became its Market Place home in 2008. There was a feeling at the time, says Adam, that there was a lack of ambition in Derby. “Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe it was a sense of ‘things are okay as they are’. QUAD was a disruptor to that and said we can
Celebrity Interview – Stephen Booth
The Peak District’s beauty and charm are undeniable – but the area can also be full of dangers and mystery. Especially if you live in Edendale, a place that has experienced almost as many murders as the picturesque yet doom-filled Midsomer. Never heard of Edendale? It’s where writer Stephen Booth sets his crime novels which sell in impressive quantities. It can be as hazardous living there as in the fictional county of Midsomer where Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby has been solving dastardly crimes on television for more than 20 years. Stephen’s 18th book featuring the double act of detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, Fall Down Dead, will appear on bookshelves in hardback next month. His latest work showcases Stephen’s knowledge of the hidden dangers lurking in the Peak District in general and Kinder Scout in particular. “There are lots of cases where people go out onto those hills totally unprepared, unable to read a map or a compass. They’re putting their lives in danger. “In Fall Down Dead a party of walkers get lost on Kinder Scout in the fog and have to be rescued. One of them doesn’t make it alive. That location, as with many of my books, is absolutely central to the story. The story couldn’t happen anywhere else because the landscape is so specific and influences the way people lead their lives. I think it’s just a fascinating place to write about,” says Stephen who lives in rural Nottinghamshire with his wife Lesley. Stephen ventured into the Peak District’s dark subterranean world for his 17th thriller Dead In The Dark which came out in paperback a couple of months ago. The landscape has always been an integral part of Stephen’s stories, going right back to his first book, Black Dog, in 1998. He was a huge fan of crime fiction but noticed that the central character was nearly always a “world-weary, middle-aged, alcoholic loner”. He wanted to do something different. “I decided to make my characters young and junior police officers. So Ben Cooper and Diane Fry are both in their twenties at the start of the series and they’re both detective constables, giving a different perspective on a police investigation because they’re not in charge. They’re on the bottom rung of the ladder. “I wanted one of them to be a local boy. That’s Ben Cooper who grew up in the Peak District. He’s from a farming family and knows everybody. I wanted the other character to be an outsider from the city. So Diane comes from Birmingham and moves into Derbyshire. That gave me two very different pairs of eyes to explore the setting. “Those two characters see the Peak District in very different ways. Really that was all I knew about them when I started to write the first book. Immediately when I began to write about them they came alive off the page. It was quite an experience that hadn’t happened to me before. “I’d written other novels. But those two characters just seemed to take on a life of their own straight away. Everything else about them, their background, their personalities, their families – I discovered all of that as I was writing about them. “I decided to give those two characters their freedom. They drove the story. I was very lucky that they came to me in that way.” The pair have proved so popular that Stephen has sold two-and-a-half million books all over the world. The novels sell well in the USA and Canada and have been translated into 16 languages including Russian and Japanese. “One of my books sold more copies in Russia than it did here just because it’s such a big market,” says Stephen. “And Scandinavia too. Although the populations are small, they read huge numbers of books in places like Sweden. They love crime fiction and my books do very well over there.” Despite that Stephen still gets a thrill when he sees his work in print. “I think no matter how many books I published it would still feel the same. Every time I pick up a new book it’s wonderful. “The hardback is a rare thing these days. I know a lot of people read ebooks. In America about 95% of my sales are ebooks. But here so many readers say to me ‘I still like the feel of a proper physical book in my hand’. There’s nothing like it really.” Stephen Booth was born in 1952 in Burnley, Lancashire. He wrote his first novel when he was 12 and knew he wanted to be a writer. But first he became a trainee teacher only to leave the profession after a terrifying spell at a big comprehensive school in Manchester. He moved into journalism, working for the Wilmslow Advertiser and other local papers before becoming deputy editor of the Worksop Guardian. Eventually the business changed so much that he wasn’t enjoying the job any more. So he single-mindedly set about achieving his ambition of getting a book published. “I came home every day from work and wrote in the evenings. Every single night, religiously. I was very disciplined about it. When you have a limited amount of time to write in, it’s surprising how well it concentrates the mind. “I produced that first Cooper and Fry novel in about four months, just writing in the evenings and a bit at weekends. It was there waiting to come out, I think. So I actually feel quite embarrassed about the fact that it takes me a year now (to write a book).” Black Dog won an award for best British crime novel in 2001 and the follow-up, Dancing With The Virgins, picked up the same accolade. Stephen was still a working journalist while his writing career was taking off: “I was very lucky that Black Dog did so well and my publishers loved the second book when I delivered it. I was able to give up the day job before the second book
Celebrity Interview – Kay Mellor
Kay Mellor can hardly contain her excitement. The scriptwriter and director who was behind such gripping television dramas as Band of Gold, Playing the Field and The Syndicate has come up with her first musical which will visit Nottingham on a huge tour – and she can barely stop herself from attending every night. She’s teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s son Nick to write Fat Friends the Musical. The popular characters from her TV series Fat Friends, which aired for five years from 2000 are back, but are now living in a world of mobile phones and social media. Kay says the themes featured in the work are even more relevant now. “The diet industry is absolutely booming and people are feeling really bad about their body image. Magazines are showing super-skinny people and saying ‘you need to look like this to be of any worth to anybody’. And I’m trying to challenge that.” The cast includes Jodie Prenger as Kelly Stevenson, a bride-to-be who works in her father’s fish and chip shop; former cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff as her fiancé Kevin; The X Factor winner Sam Bailey as Kelly’s mother Betty; former Coronation Street actor Kevin Kennedy as Kelly’s dad Fergus; and ex-Atomic Kitten singer Natasha Hamilton as slimming guru Julia Fleshman. Originally Flintoff was not going to take to the stage in Nottingham because of other commitments. Now he will be in the show from Monday until Thursday, with Joel Montague sharing the role on Friday and Saturday. “Freddie loves this musical. You can see when he’s on stage how much he loves it,” says Kay. “Joel is fantastic so nobody’s seeing something second best if they come at the end of the week. He’s amazing and has the voice of an angel.” Kay says everyone she approached to be in Fat Friends the Musical agreed straight away. “I’ve got a dream cast. I didn’t know whether Sam Bailey could act. She came to audition for me and I knew within five seconds of her saying her lines that she could play this part – she’s amazing.” She pays tribute to composer Nick Lloyd Webber for being very careful about who he chose for the ensemble. “He had a sound in his head that he wanted for the chorus. Sometimes I’d say about a singer ‘they’ve got a lovely voice’ and he’d say ‘it’s not quite what I want’. When the ensemble sing it’s incredible. It just fills the auditorium.” Lloyd Webber also wrote the music for Loves, Lies and Records, Kay’s 2017 TV series which was set in a register office. “He gets my work and that’s not always easy. You could turn it into a dirge or it could be too poppy. But Nick understands it. He’s got an understanding of character. I think he’s a really smart man.” So what’s the difference between writing a stage play and writing a musical? “It’s different inasmuch as you have to think where the songs will come in. A song has to tell you something different from what the dialogue says – it either needs to let you in on a thought that you’re not privy to or it needs to move the plot on. “It was very difficult because I didn’t know the language of musical theatre. I’d sat in many auditoriums watching musicals and loving them but I didn’t know how to go about it. “A song’s a poem with a melody going on in my head. And Nick would say ‘well, just sing it’. I’ve got the most terrible singing voice to be honest with you, so I croaked down the phone what would be in my head. I’m sure he had a good few laughs but it gave us an idea. And then he’d come up with something absolutely stunning.” Kay Mellor OBE was born Kay Daniel on 11 May 1951 in Leeds to a Catholic father George and a Jewish mother Dinah. She has an older brother, Robert. Her parents divorced when she was young and she was brought up by her mother. She trained as an actress and secured parts in the soap opera Albion Market and the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. Her writing career began in the 1980s with Granada Television. She worked on Coronation Street and also wrote for Albion Market. She then penned seven episodes of the Channel 4 drama Brookside. Bosses at Granada spotted her talent and broadcast her first major series, Band of Gold. Starring Geraldine James, Cathy Tyson, Barbara Dickson and Samantha Morton, the programme revolved around the lives of a group of sex workers in Bradford’s red-light district. She also branched out into theatre. Her play A Passionate Woman featuring Derby-born Gwen Taylor had a run at the old Derby Playhouse in 1995 and a later version was seen in Nottingham. “I missed it in Derby but I did see it in Nottingham,” says Kay. “It went down so well there. Sometimes people immediately get my work and it seemed that the Nottingham audience did. “Gwen is a fabulous actress and I love her to bits. She’s a wonderful woman.” Kay was awarded the BAFTA Dennis Potter Award in 1997 for outstanding writing for television. She was appointed an OBE in the 2009 birthday honours and in 2014 she was awarded the Writers’ Guild Award for outstanding contribution to writing. Kay is hoping to have a holiday after Fat Friends the Musical finishes its tour. She has had a really busy time, penning two television series as well as the musical. After Loves, Lies and Records, she wrote and directed Girlfriends, a series about three middle-aged women. They have been friends since their teenage years and get into all sorts of scrapes. It starred Miranda Richardson, Phyllis Logan and Zoë Wanamaker. Kay says she couldn’t believe her luck to get such great actresses for the six-part series. Girlfriends also featured Rachel Dale who trained at the University of Derby and
