Business

Comment With... Barry Speker

Issue 47

The innovative, imaginative and delicious production of 'From Shore to Shore' played to packed restaurants in Newcastle, during a national tour. The play, written by Mary Cooper and M W Sun, is a drama in English, Mandarin and Cantonese with live music. It tells three stories of three interwoven lives and the complex journeys from China to the UK - featuring drama, pathos, love and loss, struggle and survival.

The play is presented in a restaurant setting and followed by a delicious Chinese meal, joined by the actors and company.

I was honoured by South Mountain and the Chinese Healthy Living Centre to welcome Newcastle’s Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress to the performance and lunch at Brunswick Church. The event was greatly appreciated and enjoyed by all.

The much awaited new series of Line of Duty proved to be a violent offer and something of a challenge. The depiction of AC12 gave the impression of ‘bent coppers’ being literally 10 a penny. While waiting to see who has already gone over to the ‘other side’, many people may have needed subtitles or a glossary to follow the dialogue smattered with acronyms. What with AFO UCO OCG ANPR SFC PACE DCC and FI this needed full concentration. One must hope that someone in the police cast will avoid being shot, garrotted or dismissed to appear in the next series.

On my last trip to China five years ago, the sight of the vast new Beijing airport was amazing. It included an entire second giant terminal already fully built to provide for future expansion. Surprising then to hear that Beijing is now constructing a second international airport 46kms to the South of Tian’anmen Square.

While we still debate and agonise over one new runway inLondon, the new Beijing Daxing International Airport to Open in September will have seven runways. There will be parking bays for 80 planes. The aim is to provide for 620,000 flights and 100 million passengers each year. That is almost double the population of the whole UK annually through one airport.

The good news is that the terminal was designed by British architects Zaha Hadid. This probably did not include detail of the carbon footprint. Don’t forget to turn off your TV standby light.

There are plenty of awards to be won, what with Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonies, Oliviers, Golden Globes but one less well known award has been in the news. In 2000 the Barry Award was named after comedian and Australian national treasure Barry Humphries to be presented at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for the best show. Former winners include Ross Noble and the Mighty Boosh.

Humphries, 85, has attracted criticism for comments on transgender people and referring to gender-reassignment surgery as ‘self-mutilation’. He also described Caitlin Jenner as a ‘publicityseeking rat-bag’. He claims that the comments were made when in character as Dame Edna. Humphries is now a victim to political correctness (What? In Australia?), as the festival is renaming the award.

Is this an opportunity for me to use the Barry award elsewhere? I may ask Dame Edna.

Credit to Israel on its attempt to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. Success would have made Israel only the fourth (and very much the smallest) country to achieve it after the Soviet Union, the USA and China. A late engine glitch resulted in a crash landing at 310mph, but still achieving a $1m award from Google Lunar Xprize.

The probe was called Beresheet which is the Hebrew first word in the Bible meaning ‘In the Beginning’. Work has already begun on Beresheet 2

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