The rain seems to have set in for days now. March is looming, but it's still gloves, hat and scarf weather. TV advertisers must be delighted, as the nation squashes into the sofa and watches the sort of dross that generally passes for televisual entertainment nowadays. Not that the propagators of those insidious little half-minute-long brainwashing exercises are having a hard time, despite the broadband internet revolution. Watching TV is easily Britain’s favourite hobby. 98% of UK households own TV sets. We spend an average of three hours a day watching that pixelated screen. Most of this time is clearly wasted. How many TV shows have you watched in your life? How many of them do you remember? At Viva Lewes we have made it our mission to inform you of what you can do in your spare time in and around this town that might actually stay in the memory bank. Scratch the surface and you’re lost for choice. This week there’s jazz, there’s blues, there’s cinema, there’s classical music. We have King Kong and Godzilla, dewponds and archaeological digs. There’s theatre galore. And there are penguins, hundreds of penguins, in a subtle French documentary that’s proved so popular (and, oddly, politically controversial) that it’s being shown EIGHT times this weekend at the All Saints. Turn off, go out. Enjoy the week.

• Archaeology: Downs Digging talk by Dave McOmish (12)
• Art: Needlemakers exhibition (21)
• Blues: John Crampton (15)
• Bricks and Mortar: Baldy’s Garden (22)
• Cinema: March of the Penguins (11); King Kong (14); Godzilla (17); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (18)
• Classical Music: Cerys Jones (8)
• Folk: Peta Webb (5); In Bob We Trust (16)
• Food: Seasons (24)
• Gig: Turning Green (10)
• Jazz: Anita Wardell (4)
• Museum: Newhaven Fort (23)
• Nature: Martin Snow talk on dewponds (7)
• Photography: Photo of the Week (25)
• Theatre: Great Expectations (6); The Winslow Boy (9); Humble Boy (13); Neil Bartlett talk (19); The Grand Inquisitor (20)

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A disappointed Kong had actually wanted the grill for lunch (page 14)

Jazz - Anita Wardell

Jazz singer Anita Wardell is no stranger to venues such as Ronnie Scott’s, the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and the Sydney Opera House, where she supported the great Sarah Vaughan, so it’s quite a coup that Lewes Jazz have pulled off bringing her down to the Constitutional Club. She is an Australian chanteuse whose voice is as comfortable singing gentle ballads and big-band solos as scatting and improvising ‘vocalese’ where made-up lyrics act as melodies on jazz instrumentals. She is famed for her ability to scat at breakneck tempo without faltering.

The Times’ jazz correspondent Clive Davis has written of her “Anita Wardell is a singer who takes no prisoners. The Australian vocalist is an uncompromising exponent of bebop and has won a cult following among her colleagues in London during her time here. Think of her, if you like, as the female equivalent of Mark Murphy.” Mr Murphy himself comments: “My Anita Wardell, a gift from Australia, is now blooming like a pure white music orchid in London.” You may be talking about this one for years.

Folk - Peta Webb, Ken Hall and Simon Hindley

Peta Webb and Ken Hall are a long-established revivalist harmony duo with a carefully researched sound. By listening to a combination of recordings of long-dead folk singers and performances from still-living traditional singers, they have managed to capture techniques, which might otherwise have died out. Their album As Close as Can Be is a bold reproduction of a number of solo and harmonised songs, completely unaccompanied by any instruments. Their speciality is Irish ballads, though they also have American and British songs in their broad repertoire. Together they run the folk website Musical Traditions, and run a London club which showcases traditional singers.

Tonight they are joined by guitarist Simon Hindley and will be selecting mainly from the American section of their repertoire, particularly drawing on the influence of brother-sister duos and bluegrass music, with its distinctive (and rarely heard on these shores) ‘high lonesome sound’.

Theatre - Great Expectations

Victorian revival? Have you noticed the men in frock coats? Women in long skirts and laced-up boots? Will this trend stop at increased foot fetishism and facial hair growth requiring separate grooming supplies? Or will it go deeper? The Victorians were reformist and energetic, and uncovered their own stuffy hypocrisy long before we thought to question our shallow hypocrisy. Maybe we feel the need to get serious again. "Zeitgeist is a real thing, and I think there is a real Dickensian zeitgeist…" says Neil Murray of Northern Stage, the touring company performing Great Expectations. When asked why, he says, “people love a good story", which is either nauseatingly pat or reformist and energetic, depending on how Victorian you’ve already become. "We’re not doing anything experimental or weird," he says, though his production will use film and physicality to emphasise the novel’s Gothic atmosphere. "We’re not just putting on some old pot-boiler. It’s not a play, it’s a piece of theatre."

Mr Murray was anxious about that last sentence being quoted, but he has a point. Perhaps the challenges we face today are again Victorian, and so Dickensian. And reader, will we ever not need to hear of love that is not returned, or youthful ambition gone wrong?

Dewponds

Let’s face it, the beautiful Sussex Downs are actually a desert with a thin layer of grass on top. A chalky, wet desert, but a desert nonetheless. It’s a miracle they haven’t been turned into an overspill car park for Brighton. Yet they survive, and as with all deserts must be appreciated for their austerity and the fragility of life they support. Since the age of 14, Martin Snow has been studying this desert’s oases, the dewponds found on the top of hills, away from any river, that seem to fill themselves. You can run into dewponds anywhere on the Downs. Some are concrete and look like giant lawn ornaments. Some are sand and look like UFO landing sites and one, just outside Whitehawk, features two burned out cars. Snow calls it a “sacrifice to the car gods”. Why just walk around when you can make a pilgrimage to one of these mysterious sites? What feeds them? Is it ‘the dew’? Does the water bubble up from the chalk?

The ponds are home to many species of birds, insects and amphibians. Where did they come from? Are great crested newts roaming the hills in packs, looking for reliable ponds? Are newt eggs blown around in the wind? Snow will answer these questions during his talk at Anne of Cleves House, which you can then snoop around with a glass of wine.

Dewponds:
(t) 01273 474610
(w) www.dewponds.com

Classical Music - Cerys Jones

When you hear that up-and-coming violinist Cerys Jones will be playing works by Beethoven, Richard Strauss and Ravel in Seaford, you might conclude that her recital will be a rather conservative affair. Don’t. “Ravel’s Sonata was written after a trip to America when he had just been exposed to black folk music - what we would now call blues – for the first time,” she says. “This type of music had never been played before in a formal setting in Europe. It is, to coin a phrase, a really cool piece.” Strauss’ piece is equally passionate, and equally difficult to play. “Strauss was a big opera fan and in his Sonata he translated this sound into the violin creating the huge roaring melodies of opera. It is not often attempted.”

Jones is a star in the making, with a string of scholarships and honours, currently studying at the prestigious Julliard School in New York. “People no longer go to piano recitals looking for comforting pieces they already know. They want something that will rouse other senses,” she says. Accompanied by Sholto Kynoch on the piano she will also be playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, another rarely played piece. “It’s a very moody, dark piece,” she says, “and like the other two was very ground-breaking in its time.”

Theatre - The Winslow Boy

In the 40’s and 50’s Terence Rattigan was the country’s foremost playwright with a string of successes including The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea, each a carefully choreographed analysis of human pain. He knew what his audiences wanted, and even had a pet name for his typical fan – Aunt Edna. In 1956 there was a paradigm shift in the British public’s notion of what made good theatre. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger introduced Jimmy Porter, who embodied the frustrations of life in post war Britain. The angry young man was born. And Terence Rattigan’s career was effectively over - his work deemed too stuffy and conservative.

Seaford Little Theatre’s choice of this play follows a resurgence in critical acclaim for Rattigan’s drama after well-received performances of Deep Blue Sea and Man and Boy at the Almeida and Duchess Theatres in London. The Winslow Boy deals with a posh family’s attempt to prove the innocence of their naval cadet son, accused of stealing a postal order. Sadly it is unlikely to appeal to many who weren’t already born when it first came out in 1946. Luckily there are still a few Aunt Ednas out there.

Gig - Turning Green

Listening to Turning Green, you think you’ve caught a snatch of something familiar. Wasn’t that XTC? Steve Severin’s guitar? Miles Davis? The Beatles? Johnnie Lydon? The Pixies? Each reference is fleeting, before you realise you were probably mistaken. This isn’t like Oasis’ studied and plagiaristic pop sampling: this is eclectic mayhem, surreal memories thrown together in a jazzy, funky, indie jumble, experimental pop with surreal lyrics surprising you at every turn. It’s dissonant; then it’s melodic. You want to sing along, even if you don’t know the words. ‘Everything you have ever heard,’ as they put it, ‘and nothing you have ever heard… things that did happen a very long time ago which some people thought they had forgotten and some things that will most probably for the best part not happen at all’.

Whatever they are, wherever they come from, Turning Green have just made a brilliant album, What Have We Done, and they’re even better live. Pretty soon they’ll be put on the front cover of the NME, and snapped doing naughty things by paparazzi. Much later you’ll be able to tell your progeny that you saw them in the Lansdown. Not that they’ll ever believe you.

Talk - Archaeology on the South Downs

Last year, on Malling Hill, archaeologists discovered the headless bodies of seven Saxons, whose hands had been tied behind their back. It is a murder mystery that will never be solved and an example of how archaeology can be a shockingly interesting subject. The South Downs is an area rich in archaeological finds and David McOmish of English Heritage is talking today about the diversity of historical sites in our hills and how the public can get more involved in learning about and participating in digs. “This will not be a Man from the Ministry doing a stuffy talk,” says David, who comes armed with scores of slides. “We want to make archaeology more sexy, we want to share our enthusiasm and energise local communities into learning more about how archaeology helps them to understand their heritage.”

“There is something for everyone in the Downs,” continues David, “from Neolithic finds, through the Bronze Age into the Roman and Medieval periods and beyond.” His favourite local site is a Bronze Age settlement on Plumpton Plain, ‘an abandoned little farmstead from 1500-1000 BC. It’s just fantastic.’ David welcomes any queries about local archaeology via the e-mail link below right. Heritage in the hills? We dig it.

Theatre - Humble Boy

A middle-aged intellectual, Felix Humble, comes back to his Cotswolds home for the funeral of his father, and finds his past catching up with him. His overbearing mother is having a fling with the neighbour, George; Felix dumped George’s daughter Rosie over seven years ago; Rosie has a child of around six and a half. His mother’s best friend fancies George, too. Oh, and there’s a gardener called Jim lurking in the background. Felix decides to stay the summer.

Of course the characters develop, as the playwright, Charlotte Jones, pushes the plot along with humour and some poignancy, drawing attention when she can to the fact that the play is loosely based on the plot of Hamlet. Hamlet died a young man: this very modern version of his tale deals with the zeitgeistier theme of mid-life crisis. The play premiered in the National (with Diana Rigg playing the mother) to generally positive reviews in 2001: comparisons were drawn to Ayckbourn and Pinter. An interesting choice, and we’re intrigued to see how the Little Theatre copes with this highly rated contemporary play.

Lewes Little Theatre
(t) 01273 474826

Cinema - King Kong

When New Zealand director Peter Jackson was 12 years old he made his first movie, a remake of the Empire State Building scene of the 1933 classic King Kong, using his mother’s fur stole as the gorilla. After finding success with homespun Heavenly Creatures he tried to finance a Hollywood version of the film in 1999 – no producer wanted to touch it. Then he directed the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which finally gave him the licence to make whatever the hell film he wanted to make, whatever the cost.

And so we have King Kong, a three hour classic with amazing (BAFTA-winning) special effects, a monstrous epic starring Jack Black as a dodgy film maker who tricks his cast and crew into a trip to the mysterious Skull Island, Naomi Watts as an aspiring actress with a fine throat and Andy Serkis as the (eyes behind) the large ape which falls in love with her, captures her, and saves her from all number of prehistoric jungle nasties, including a particularly vicious T-Rex. It’s big, it’s exciting, it’s surprisingly touching. It’s so good that, as Stephen Fry has pointed out, in Denmark they named it twice. *

*Kong is Danish for King, so in Copenhagen the film was billed as Kong Kong.

Blues - John Crampton

Quiet-spoken John Crampton takes the stage with a 1930’s steel guitar, a harmonica strapped into a rack around his neck, and a stomp box. He looks an unassuming type. You don’t expect much from him. Then he gets started. A slow one, maybe, to get things going. Pretty soon he’s making the sort of racket you’d expect a four-man band to make, whippin’ up a pitch of frenzy that has this reviewer tempted to take the ‘g’s off all his ‘ings’. Crampton is a prodigious blues talent, a Londoner with a heart as big as the North Mississippi Delta, whose largely self-penned repertoire inevitably gets the crowd up on its feet.

Crampton made his name with the legendary Brighton skiffle band Daddy Yum Yum, then realised that he could do it all on his own. Since the late eighties he’s been gigging the world, in his own right, or supporting the likes of Van Morrison, Dr. Feelgood and Nine Below Zero. He cites Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Ry Cooder as his influences: his music is what music reviewers love to call ‘low-down and dirty’. His voice has the sort of quart-of-whisky-and-a-packet-of-non-filters quality that makes Tom Waits Tom Waits. He rocks, basically.

Tribute - In Bob We Trust

Though he never really went away, Bob Dylan is back. 2005 saw a massive resurgence in interest in the Minnesotan singer, with the release of Martin Scorsese’s brilliant documentary No Direction Home and the paperback release of the equally gob-smacking autobiography Chronicles. Both projects deal with the same area of Dylan’s career, the early part, when, after a period in New York playing Woodie Guthrie covers, he started penning his own songs, became labelled a ‘protest singer’ and changed folk music forever. Then, controversially, he turned his back on the genre, alienating his fan base, and broadening his scope and appeal. It’s a fascinating tale of a man who refused to be pigeonholed, or owned, or guided, or to do anything that anyone else wanted him to do. A tale peopled by fascinating characters such as Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, John Lennon, Mike Oldfield and Woodie Guthrie.

It might have slipped under the radar of many Dylanheads, but 2005 saw a third Dylan project ‘In Bob We Trust’ a night dedicated to his music from a group of musician-fans, which did the rounds in the autumn, and is returning to Pelham House tonight. It will be candle-lit, it will be nostalgic, it will be passionate. It may just be electric. Judases.

Cinema - Godzilla

Reviewers think they're soooo smart when they talk about Godzilla. It’s not just a monster movie, they say. No, they tell us. Godzilla ("or ‘Gojira’ as it was originally called!") is actually a thought-provoking comment on the horrors of nuclear war. How pathetic is that? The Japanese military invaded its neighbours, and then started a war against the most powerful country on earth. The people sent their sons to fight, then had the crap bombed out of them with atomic weapons. The white devils occupied their country. But no one questioned the policies of the right wing power structure which had got them into the mess in the first place. Even now what happened in China and Korea can’t be put in Japanese text books. Japan inflicted and suffered a collective nervous breakdown in East Asia and how did they face up to it? They dressed up a guy in a rubber suit and had him knock over cardboard buildings!

Is that the best they can do? The Germans had the Nuremberg Trials, South Africa had the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, America had the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests, and the Japanese got this? Great movie though. Raaaaaarr!

Cinema - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Here is an action movie for people who don’t normally like action movies, featuring a brilliant central performance by Robert Downey Junior, surely by now mainstream America’s finest contemporary actor. RDJ plays a New York thief who ducks straight from a botched robbery in which his partner is shot into a film audition where he has to act out – a New York thief who has just escaped a botched robbery in which his partner is shot. Naturally he passes the audition with flying colours – and is sent to Hollywood.

There he is teamed up with gay cop Harry Kilmer, notionally there to help him learn to method act his first role. But you never know what’s real in this film – and when the bodies start piling up and RDJ’s High School heartthrob (Michelle Monaghan) appears on the scene, the plot really starts going haywire. It’s always nodding and winking at the audience, however (they could use it in the future to explain the notion of post-modernism to school kids): debut director Shane Black has managed to produce a work which stands up with Pulp Fiction for its ability to make a shoot-em-up acceptable fare for the more discerning moviegoer.

Literary Club - Neil Bartlett

The Lyric Theatre is a wonderful space. It’s always a surprise when you pass though the doors of its modern blocky facade and enter into its sumptuous 550-seater 19th century auditorium. So the drama world was aghast when, in 1994, it looked like closing down, £350,000 in debt. Cometh the hour, however, cometh the actor/director/novelist/translator.

Neil Bartlett, all of the above, took on the tough job of director of the Lyric. First he raised the cash, then he put on a production of Portrait of Dorian Gray, which won accolades of public acclaim. Having started with a crowd-pleaser he staged the first English production of Jean Genet’s Splendids. He cast Julian Clary in the lead role. Clearly life at the Lyric was going to be fun. In his (presumably ironically titled) talk ‘Bringing Glamour to the Masses’ Bartlett tells of the ups and downs of his 11 y