Review: John Peel's Shed in Pocklington; Lost In A Sea Of Tin And Glass in York

JOHN Osborne likes to do things quietly, travelling up to Pocklington alone and returning home to Norwich in the one day with his record player, box of John Peel's records, collection of his grandad's Radio Times editions and copies of his poetry book for sale.

He even declined the management offer of chocolate for the journey through the night ahead. Listening to the radio would be sustenance enough on the evidence of his hymn to the wonders of the wireless.

He has revived John Peel's Shed to accompany Circled In The Radio Times, his thoughts on radio now being complemented by his reflections on his late grandad's viewing habits and how the way we watch TV has changed.

John Peel's Shed had begun with devoted Peel listener Osborne winning a box of 150 records in a competition on the Radio One jock's late-night show in 2002 and working his way through the obscurities to discover the often humorous stories behind the bands.

A script writer and poet most comfortable in the quiet of creativity, he is still endearingly shy after more than 100 performances, regularly playing with his hair. Yet there is such charm, warm humour and eloquence, such delightful powers of observation, that the audience in the Pocklington Arts Centre bar was entranced by storytelling that made you feel that you too knew his policeman grandad. Should you be going to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, be sure to see Osborne's new show about dementia.

On record: John Osborne in John Peel's Shed

Claire Hind and Gary Winters have been making experimental performance pieces and gallery works for eight years; you may recall their Gillygate shop project.

Embracing more than the spoken word, the 2019 York Literature Festival has accommodated a series of performances in the York Theatre Royal Studio, and Thursday night was the chance to experience university lecturer Hind and theatre maker Winters' latest outré, entirely unpredictable mixed-media work.

First staged at the Defibrillator Gallery in Chicago, it combines the spoken word; electronic music; pretty lights; repetitive film projection; a chair being smashed; Winters taping a party cup, balloon and lights to his heavily bearded head and singing unfeeling, cod crooner versions of Song To The Siren, Tainted Love et al, inspired by a seaside entertainer apparently.

Hind, face painted as blue as her party dress, and the white-suited Winters move between evoking David Lynch's film noir and Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter theatre as they contemplate what it means to leave everything we ever knew behind, to seek solitude.

Hind's swan of a character is leaving her home fully stocked for a new tenant: "everything is fine", she keeps saying, putting on a happy face before breaking a chair in uncontrolled rage.

Where can we go and what can we become, Hind and Winters ask, when the party is over? The answer is escape, to turn your back on the materialist world, to embrace the solitude of hermits, as they don rudimentary, primitive coats, stop talking, and instead squeak and parp at each other as they lead us out into the night, across Exhibition Square, down the side of King's Manor. Everything is fine? No it clearly isn't; there are times when only destroying a chair or a Tim Buckley song will do.