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Humourist, broadcaster and journalist Simon Fanshawe talks to Andrew Kay about the need to attract high value jobs to Sussex

What originally brought you to Sussex?
I came to university here. I had a place at Oxford to study law. I went up for an open-day and I was sat on a bone-shaker train to Didcot and it came to me that I shouldn’t do it. I don’t know why but it was possibly to do with sexuality. Sussex was my second choice so I came here. I arrived and there was a rent strike and I liked it. At Sussex I met my best mate, who now lives in California. For six months we were both Maoists, there was a bookshop on Gloucester Road run by a man called Alan Mitchell who was the sexiest revolutionary that I had ever met. Sussex has this incredible grip on ones life. It changed mine.

After university did you think that you had to go to London?
No, after graduation I was taking my hired gown back and as I left the shop it struck me that I had forgotten to get a job and had to move out of my flat. I went and had a coffee and then went to Manpower and asked if they had any jobs. I got a temp job at American Express then bumped into this nice woman that I knew who had a room to let in her house. I had also been volunteering at the Community Arts Project in Brighton. By accident I became a community development worker and fund raiser. That was 1978, Thatcherism was about to happen and oddly we had not been told. The Argus called us the home of Marxism when really we were doing play schemes and mother and baby groups. Funnily, in 2000, when we went for city status I met a lot of the same community leaders and they were still passionate about community.

You then went to War on Want?
Yes, they gave us some funds for a project and I just got drawn in. I became fascinated by ‘charitable status’. I met Laurence Harbottle and he helped me and the centre gain charitable status. Eventually I was on the board of War on Want and then became chairman in 1985 when I was about 30.

‘‘I became a community development worker and fund raiser. That was in 1978, Thatcherism was about to happen and oddly we had not been told’’

Were you already performing as a comedian?
Oh yes, the resource centre burnt down and I organised a benefit and booked myself. I performed with a troupe called the Last Resort with Kim Fuller who wrote Spice World and stuff for Lenny Henry. Vicky Pile who invented Green Wing and Martin Clarke who became a political journalist in the Far East.

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Robin Cousins Olympic Gold medallist and world free skating champion talks to Andrew Kay about a career that combines creativity and athleticism

What was your introduction to ice skating?
I was five and we were on holiday in Bournemouth. It was a hot summer. My dad was playing golf with my brothers and my mother and I were wandering around the shops and there was a very cold breeze coming from this doorway so we stood there to cool off and it was the entrance to the ice rink. In the entrance was the poster for the Bournemouth Ice Follies of 1964-65 and the pictures got my attention. There was public skating happening I asked to go in and look. The next thing my mother remembered was paying one and sixpence for me to be on the ice and I remember whizzing around.

Could you do it straight away?
I don’t remember, my mother’s recollection was that a man came up and said: “Oh, your son’s very good, where does he skate?” and she said: “No, it’s his first time, he’s never been on the ice before”. She told him that we were from Bristol, and he said that he knew there was no ice rink, only then could he believe that I had never actually been on the ice before. But he made the mistake of telling me that there was going to be an ice rink built in Bristol.

On Saturdays, we would all go and get hair cuts and the only way I would go is if we drove past where they were building the ice rink. Something about it that had obviously captured my imagination. I asked for skating lessons for Christmas, there was a board with all the professionals names and my mother said you can have so many lessons with this one or two lessons with that one and I said that I wanted lessons with that lady because she just smiled at me. It was Pamela Davis who had skated alongside John Curry in Birmingham. She took me from my ‘learn to skate’ class through to my first World Championship.

“I tell kids when they get nervous, just look at the panel of mean, nasty old judges and imagine them naked, it will make you smile and you won’t be able to think about them”

Where did you come?
Fifteenth. Not a bad start, 15th out of 29 and I was the youngest by a year. I had three major coaches in my life and the other two both said that the reason I was winning was because of the way Pam had taught me at the beginning. She was only 19, Bristol was her first teaching job and she was passionate. There were probably 8 or 9 of us competing regionally and locally at club levels. We were all at her house picking our music. She was taking us out to look at fabrics for our outfits and we were very involved in the whole process. She did not say, “This is what you are going to skate to and how you are going to do it”, it was “What do you want to do? How would you like to skate? What do you want to feel like? What music do you like?”.

Did that give you your ability to choreograph?
Absolutely, there is no question that what Pam instilled in us as pre-teenagers was the magic of show business even though we were on the ice. It was always about how we looked, and how we did it not what we did. There were people that were trying complex jumps when we were only allowed to do singles but we did the most beautiful perfect singles. I did not win the Olympics because of what I did, I won it because of how I did it.The technique is wonderful but it is that extra, the ‘IT’ factor and she had it and passed on what she could to her students. I was the one who made it the furthest but there were four or five of us that were great performers and I credit everything to that ‘Learn to Skate’ class.

You were part of a wave that was a change in the way ice dance and free skating looked, very much a British thing.
There was no ‘this is how it has to be done’, until I had to move to London and started to work with the great Gladys Hogg, a world champion in her own right, and had taught five or six world champions. She was old school, this is how it is done and this is how it is.

How old were you then?
13 or 14, I was Junior National Number one and I was doing a cross over between junior and senior, and, I have to be honest, it was not that I was that good, it was just that there were not that many boys competing so I did jump through the ranks quite quickly, although, you have to reach a standard to be able to move on. We would go up once a week to do a day of training in London with Gladys. I was learning from one of the greats and of course training in London alongside our national rank team. It was interesting but Gladys and I clashed a lot over my ideas, how I wanted to look and the type of music. A woman who befriended a few of us at the rink took what I had learned from Pam a step further and introduced me to some obscure American music, folk singers, rock or a bit of this and that – the diversity of what I was exposed to was going to make me who I was to become.

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Peter James novelist and film producer talks to Andrew Kay about the art of committing crime fiction to the page

AK:When did you write your first book?
PJ: The first published was a terrible spy thriller I wrote in 1981 called Dead Letter Drop. I really wanted to write crime, but it was a nowhere genre back then. I read an article in The Times that said with Ian Fleming’s death there was a shortage of spy thrillers, I thought I could writeone. To my amazement I got an agent and to my bigger amazement he got it published - to my even bigger amazement still it completely flopped. I wrote a second one and that was called Atom Bomb Angel that flopped too.

Have they been re-published?
I bought the rights back and I keep them out of print, they are really not very good.

So, your first big break was Possession?
Which veered on crime, in that someone actually committed one, but it was not a crime novel. I wrote Possession, kind of a one-off book, and my publishers Gollancz said to me “You know I think we can build your name up if we pigeonhole you as horror” and at that time in 1987, horror was in the ascent. You had Steven King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert and it was the big genre. I was grateful to have a publisher who was enthusiastic and I said yes. It was a poisoned chalice because within five years, four or five books for me, the genre had gone into decline and crime was starting to rise out of the penny dreadful ghetto. Gollancz had done a marvellous marketing job, kind of Britain’s answer to Steven King - but not wanting to be. I moved from the supernatural and wrote a science fiction novel. I moved publishers to Orion hoping to get repositioned as a crime thriller writer but they just did not do it.

Did they want more horror, psychic thrillers?
They said they wanted crime but they kept marketing my ‘horror’ tag, I got very frustrated. I was half way through a two year contract and I changed agents, to the wonderful Carole Blake. She asked if I was brave enough to buy myself out of my contract. I bit the bullet and did it.

Was it an expensive business?
Very, and traumatic - I had to do it before my new agent was able, ethically, to approach anyone else. I had quite a white knuckle ride for about a year - it was the first time in two decades I was without a publisher.

And no crime writing record, was it a gamble?
Yes, it was really, and I didn’t know how, my old horror. Luckily my film career was going well so I could afford to take a risk. It turned out to be the best decision ever.

You had produced films in your twenties.
A raft of horror films and then at the other end of the spectrum we did Spanish Fly which I wrote and produced with Terry Thomas and Lesley Phillips. Barry Norman described it as “The decline and fall of the British family film”.

It didn’t put you off?
It did put me off. I decided comedy wasn’t my thing! Although Barry Norman admitted to me later that his mini cab driver really liked it. I co-produced Biggles too, more successfully.

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Sometimes shocking, but always funny, the self confessed grumpy old woman Jenny Eclair returns to Crawley with her new tour. After all, she explains to John Clarke, she has to pay for a pension somehow.

Jenny Eclair is musing on the deep sense of hurt you feel when a favourite item of clothing lets you down. “Isn’t it awful when your best dress turns against you and you can’t zip it up? That’s a terrible betrayal. You’d forgive girlfriends more easily for sleeping with your husband.”

Forthright, feisty and - above all - killingly funny, this is typical of Jenny. And you’ll be very pleased to hear, there is much more where that came from. For the first time in six years, Jenny is setting off around the country on a solo stand-up tour.

After time spent co-writing and performing in the enormously successful Grumpy Old Women Live tour – to say nothing of writing and starring in her own plays, penning a wellregarded novel (Camberwell Beauty), and hosting a regular Saturday morning radio show on LBC – Jenny can no longer resist the call of the stand-up stage. She is embarking on a major nationwide jaunt, with her felicitously titled Because I Forgot To Get A Pension Tour.

“When it goes well, there is nothing to match the buzz of live comedy,” she beams, unable to suppress a grin at the very thought of returning to her first love. Jenny adds, with characteristic wryness, that “obviously I won’t be standing up all the time - I’ll need to sit down now and again to stop my ankles swelling.”

Jenny, who became the first solo woman ever to win the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995, is coming soon to a theatre near you. She urges you to laugh and clap very loudly, “because I’m a bit deaf and my hormones are all over the place.”

The comedian, a huge favourite with audiences who lap up such winning selfdeprecation, is offering lots of material about “being the mad side of forty, the odd joke about front bottoms and a bit of swearing.” As a bonus, Jenny also promises to wear a shiny new jacket from the sale at Selfridges, “down from £199 to £49.99 – what a bargain!”

“If Amy Winehouse had a northern mother, she wouldn’t be getting up to all these terrible things. She’d be sitting quietly at home eating meat and potato pies with her elbows off the dinner-table”

Jenny, now a vivacious 47-year-old mother of an 18-year-old daughter, goes on to be more specific about the subjects she will be covering in her hotly anticipated new show. As well as a lustful tribute to the actor James McAvoy, the stand-up is going stomp through, “a big diatribe about the rom-com. I despise the mawkishness and the emotional manipulation and the contrivance of those films,” she fumes. “All those overheard phone conversations and unlikely coincidences. And as for the infuriating taglines - ‘it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry.’ No, it’ll make you puke!”
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