Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-03-2017 i The Big Issue

WE BELIEVE in a hand up, not a handout... Which is why our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. WE BELIEVE in trade, not aid… Which is why we ask you to ALWAYS take your copy of the magazine. Our sellers are working and need your custom. WE BELIEVE poverty is indiscriminate… Which is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. WE BELIEVE in the right to citizenship… Which is why The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. WE BELIEVE in prevention… Which is why Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

I hosted an awards event last week. It was a good night. And despite the host, nobody asked for a refund (not that I’m aware of). It was the PPA New Talent Awards, the magazine industry’s celebration of the new entrants to the industry, the rising stars of the future. It was a collection of smart minds and energy, an encouragement for those coming next. These things are worthwhile. And it’s heartening that journalism, an under-the-cosh industry, still looks like something worth getting involved in. I spoke to some of them afterwards, many asking for tips on next steps. And I thought for most, you’ll do alright. You’re already on the ladder. You’re making waves, you have the opportunity and now you’ve got to get busy. But that isn’t the…

A company that employs people who have been through homelessness to set up stage rigging at music festivals has announced a major expansion. Connection Crew, supported by The Big Issue’s social investment arm Big Issue Invest, has opened a training centre and HQ in Brixton. The organisation employs a quarter of its crew from those who have been through homelessness, and has provided work for more than 157 ex-homeless people over the past decade. It is one of the first organisations to benefit from Big Issue Invest’s new £5m lending scheme – Impact Loans England – which enables social enterprises and charities to access funding of between £20,000 and £150,000. Find out more about Impact Loans England and how to apply at bigissueinvest.com…

“When I was seven my mother said to me, ‘I wish we had not adopted you’. Something I totally agreed with” WE’VE REACHED PEAK TRUMP. IT’S A STRANGE DELIRIUM – WAVES AND WAVES OF THE SAME STORY. LIKE BEING IN A NOISY CLUB. WE NEGLECT OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS. TO LIBERALS I SAY, ‘CALM DOWN, PULL BACK’ Adam Curtis has been looking through the BBC archives. Again. Britain’s most intriguing documentary-maker spends much of his working life sifting through old, often unused, footage from news items, investigative reports, arts and entertainment shows. He splices it together to make something strange and new – big, ambitious, sometimes puzzling visual lectures that try to make sense of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. Curtis has…

Some of my earliest memories are in libraries. After my mother gave birth to me at 19 she threw herself into education in order to provide the best opportunities for her son. While she was at university, I spent many a school holiday in a library or a lecture theatre. To this day, I see them as a place of learning, refuge and somewhere playing fields are levelled. She now holds a Master’s degree in English, and because of this, to me, libraries are one of our most precious public assets. My mother taught me the importance of education. Without it the future is bleaker, opportunities for those born into less privileged circumstances are more scarce and social mobility will continue to decline. We can change all of this by…

1. THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN Paula Hawkins With an unreliable narrator and an obsession with another woman’s life, this psychological bestseller digs into themes of lust, loss and self-doubt. The nameless lead in Rebecca is made vulnerable by age and inexperience; here she’s broken by alcoholism. 2. THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN John Fowles Lingering melancholy on the Cobb in Lyme Regis, this novel is all about atmosphere. Set, like Rebecca, in the South West, this marries suspense and drama in a tale of defiant romance and disgraced pasts. 3. GONE GIRL Gillian Flynn Should we trust what she is telling us? This thriller is packed with twists as we squint towards midnight, desperate to finish. So goes the mystery of elusive Rebecca, the alluring first wife who continues to…

How time flies! Memories of flipping pancakes recede as we hurtle through Lent towards Passiontide and Easter. Strictly speaking, it’s a sombre time but for choirs it’s a golden time too. The penitential period has inspired some of the greatest choral music ever written, from Allegri’s Miserere to Bach’s Passions and Victoria’s Tenebrae Responsories. Time and again, composers have been drawn to the dramatic narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection. The most recent example of this is James MacMillan’s Stabat Mater. The work received its world première last October and its première recording has just been released on Coro. Commissioned by the Genesis Foundation for The Sixteen and its conductor Harry Christophers, and featuring Britten Sinfonia strings, this is as searingly intense a piece as you’re likely to encounter. Little…

Top-drawer We’ve kitted local @bigissueuk seller Jeff out in a warm@thatthing.co sweatshirt! He’s an absolute legend, literally always cheerful, happy and upbeat despite anything, everything and the weather…! What a guy! He gives us a wave every day, and puts a smile on our faces, so we thought we’d treat him in return! thatthing.co, Instagram Taking liberties I was amazed that a responsible magazine such as The Big Issue could give space to the views of the members of the Sleaford Mods [February 27–March 5]. Asked whether protest marches were more legitimate because they were peaceful, Andrew Fearn replied: “The idea that it’s not great to smash windows as part of your protest… if that’s what you want to do, then it’s your freedom to go and do that.” Later,…

“It was devastating, no one ever fancied me” – lovesick RALF LITTLE’S YOUNGER SELF “Faulks, Barnes, Amis and Swift… Zweig, Roth, Llosa, Marquez… Kundera, Klíma, Bohumil…” ROY HODGSON names his dream team “Our chemistry was immediate” – JOSH GAD LUKE EVANS “When you see me on a panel show you’ll know I’ve gambled it all on a horse” – HARRY HILL Plus: don’t miss out on MOTHER’S DAY TREATS at The Big Issue Shop bigissueshop.com…

More radical than Angelina Jolie but largely forgotten since her 1920s heyday, silent movie siren Nell Shipman was movies’ first action-adventure heroine, producer and director. Controversial – she appeared in one of the earliest nude scenes – she ran away from Hollywood with 70 animals including eagles, elk and bears that she rescued from maltreatment on-set. After almost a century in the wilderness her story has been resurrected in Kickstarterfunded documentary, Girl from God’s Country: The History of Women in Film. And Nell’s film The Grub Stake screens at the Festival of Silent Cinema, Bo’Ness Hippodrome (March 22). Girl from God’s Country ; gcgproductions.com…

Timeless children’s favourite Anne of Green Gables gets a brand new feature-length adaptation starring Martin Sheen, which is set to arrive on DVD courtesy of Second Sight. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved and enduring book Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies. Based on this all-time classic, a heart-warming new film is out now on DVD, digital and on-demand. The film will also be shown on ITV. When ageing couple Matthew (Martin Sheen) and Marilla Cuthbert (Sara Botsford, The Lizzie Borden Chronicles) offer to take in an orphan boy to help on their farm, they are mistakenly sent chatty, bookish redhead Anne Shirley (Ella Ballentine, Standoff). They reluctantly agree that she can stay. Soon the loveable, feisty Anne turns their lives upside down with her mischievous ways,…

I was very pleased to see our local vendor Stuart featured [My Pitch, March 6-12]. We always try to buy our copy from him and look forward to having a chat every week. He is always cheerful whatever the weather (and we have a lot of rain in Cardiff!) and a real inspiration. The determined way he has overcome his problems is an example to us all and I hope he continues to get the help and support he needs when times are tough. I hope he realises how much we value him. Rosamund Jones, email…

Can the UK learn from Finland’s bid to end homelessness? Community Secretary Sajid Javid is off to check out the Scandi nation’s Housing First plan – an approach already highlighted in The Big Issue – where a person is given a house to help them sort out addiction and mentalhealthproblems,instead of the bureaucratic circus homeless Brits must negotiate before they are entitled to help. The Centre for Social Justice says Housing First would cost the UK £110m a year, and would pay for itself within threeyears.…

“Credit was frowned on – only used sparingly to get a telly with more inches” “Up in the morning and off to school, the teacher is teaching the golden rule” are the opening words of a Chuck Berry song. It bounces along. It is about a schoolgirl who, once she lays down her schoolwork, she can really live. The first part of the day is like living in exile from the real schoolgirl’s aspirations. She wants to get to the jukebox and play records until she’s exhausted but then has to go home and do the stuff that adults expect of you. Since that song was released in the late ’50s, probably three generations of schoolgirls have grown up to become mothers. And each one of them will have had…

My childhood was horrible. I am a war baby, born in 1944. My mother was in the Women’s Royal Air Force and was a very clever working-class girl from east London. She met a Canadian officer and I was the result. It really fucked up her life. She was on a fast track to become an officer in the RAF and they threw her out because she was pregnant. Her father wouldn’t let her keep me. The poor darling tried to get an abortion, which was then illegal. And I don’t blame her. I was adopted by a family who belonged to a fundamentalist evangelical sect called the Peculiar People. And they were. There were millions of things they disapproved of – it became a sort of wish list. They…

Teenagers from the post-industrial town of Greenock, on the banks of the River Clyde, generally don’t waste time dreaming about the day when they’ll be phoning in interviews from the hammock of their back garden in Los Angeles. Not even after they’ve been given a dream ticket by one of the most respected film-makers in the world. Yet here’s Martin Compston, on the phone, in a hammock in the back garden of his Los Angeles apartment in 75˚F heat, talking about a film he’s just finished with Keira Knightley. And still he has the good grace to laugh when I ask where it all went wrong. “Sweet Sixteen was a monkey on my back for a while,” says the actor, thinking back to his gritty turn in the 2002 Ken…