Pants in the Park - Roundhay Park Leeds

A 5km charity fun run in aid of Prostate Action will be held at Roundhay Park on Sunday June 12th. Fancy Dress is encouraged and wearing your pants outside your trousers is doubly encouraged at this event. Tickets cost £ and under twelves go free. All entrants will recieve a medal for their endevours.

You can register for Pants in the Park from 10pm on the day, the race begins at 11am and prizes will be awarded for the best decorated pants on show at 12.00.

To sign up visit http://www.prostateaction.org.uk/pantsinthepark

Dave Gorman Waterstones Leeds Book Promotion

The witty beardy chappy of Googlewhack fame Dave Gorman will be in Leeds on Wednesday June 16th reading from his new book Dave Gorman Vs the Rest of the World which is due to be published on June 2nd.

Tickets cost a meagre £3.00 and can be picked up from the counter at Waterstone's. The ticket price is also redeemable if you happen to want to pick up a copy of the book.

Dave Gorman is a familiar face on TV these days, after being catapulted into the public eye in 2003 with his sellout Googlewhack Adventures tour. If you haven't read the book or seen the DVD about Dave's utter failure to write a book and the Google-esque escapades that this dragged him into, then it's about time you did. Tears of laughter are coming your way and watch out for the anecdote about the tattoo.

Bounce for Leeds - Yorkshire Cancer Research

Yorkshire Cancer Research is running a Guiness World Record attempt for the most people bouncing on a space hopper for one minute on July 30th at Roudnhay Park. If you want to participate call 01423 877210 or visit the website here: http://www.yorkshirecancerresearch.org.uk/events/space_hopper_bounce.aspx.

Entry costs £10.00 and includes a space hopper and a teeshirt (minimum age is 6 years). Once you've entered you'll be sent a sponsorship form and fundraising pack to use to raise money for Cancer Research. You even get to keep your space hopper. Two thousand entrants are needs to beat the current world record. Or just come along on the day, enjoy the fun and make a donation. There will be fairground rides and inflatable games as well as the beautiful scenery of Roundahay Park.

Frankenstein's Wedding Kirkstall Abbey Leeds

This televised performance event took place at Kirkstall Abbey on Saturday March 19th and adapted Shelley's gothic novel into something which aptly but unintentionally had a bit of an identity crisis. Great venue, great scenery, great set and effects, but then again the Abbey was taken over by the set builders and crew for about two weeks beforehand.

The problem was that the show was unsure whether it was a Leeds city council event like Opera in the Park or a television show or whether it was a musical event or a drama or a dramatic comedy. Different elements of the event were sewn together with the slightly over-enthusiastic crowd-rousing compere-ing that we get at Classical Fantasia and Opera in the Park with musical interludes shoehorned inbetween rather hammy acting and ocassionally rather embarrassed looking actors who obivously knew that the whole thing was off kilter. In short the whole thing was sewn together like a badly constructed Frankenstein's monster flailing around trying to figure out what media it belonged to, what genre it was and who it's audience were.

All this I got from the first eight minutes on the television before I was too nauseated to go on. It was a misguided pastiche of media and types of entertainment which tried far too hard to please the crowd and the viewer at home, and like all ungodly creatures desperately searching for a sense of place and belonging doomed to failure. I'm sure that everyone held up their end and did their jobs adequately and even well, but ultimate responsibility has to rest with the producer who cobbled this together - they really should have known so much better.