There are few people who know more about cabaret than the author, journalist and broadcaster Lisa Appignanesi, who starts proceedings off with an illustrated reading of her book about the subject, ‘The Cabaret’. Her work charts the genre from its early beginnings in the Chat Noir Club in Paris in the late 19th century (frequented by the likes of Debussy, Satie, Verlaine and Strindberg) to its peak in Weimar Berlin in the late twenties. The decadent, satirical, artistic journey she tells you about drops in on Les Quatres Gats in Barcelona (where the likes of Santiago Rusiñol and Pablo Picasso hung out) and The Cave of the Golden Calf, meeting place for the modernist avant-garde before WW1.

Between the talk and the film there’s the chance for you to raunch it up yourself as the 12-piece Southern Winds Ensemble perform a set of original cabaret songs (from such writers as Erik Satie and Kurt Weill) and Nigel Burch, ‘the troubadour of urban angst’, performs a set of his gritty ‘songs from the gutter’ on his mandolele. Burch is reputed to be quite an act: Charles Bukowski once wrote him a letter after capturing a performance, which read “you are the best cure for a hangover that I ever lucked across.”