Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/1/2024 i The Big Issue

BIG PICTURE There is plenty to discover in the new diorama of Dundee created for the city’s V&A Museum. From the ship that took Scott to the Antarctic to cow pie-munching Desperate Dan, the icons of the city are everywhere to be found. The new five-metre-wide collage, made up of 20,000 individual images, has been created by artist Sohei Nishino. It forms part of a new exhibition looking at how photography changed the way we see the cities we live in. It was famously jute, jam and journalism that put Dundee on the map. In recent decades, industrial decline led to deprivation. But culture has been at the heart of regeneration projects, exemplified by the V&A, which celebrated its fifth birthday last September, and the city was named the UK’s…

COVER FEATURE This Town is the ambitious new drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. It features social unrest, gangs, violence, conflict, and a whole lot of music. The BBC One series is set in Coventry and Birmingham in the early 1980s – but it is not hard to see modern-day parallels. The UK is in the grips of a recession following an energy crisis, and working-class communities are bearing the brunt. Unemployment is rising, tensions are high and the heavy-handed policing of black communities is triggering protest. The series opens with the 1981 Handsworth riots, which came in the wake of similar protests in Brixton and Toxteth. In the Midlands, the IRA are also readying a new campaign of violence. But in the white heat of this social unrest…

IO CAPITANO ‘It was very important to finally show to the world what it means to make this journey’ Last year was the deadliest ever for migrants, with almost 8,600 people dying worldwide. At least 3,129 people were lost crossing the Mediterranean, according to the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration. As broken-record Rishi Sunak repeats “stop the boats” with increasing desperation, Europe seems powerless in the face of the crisis. Repressive tactics have proven not only callous, but ineffectual. Can the Oscar-nominated drama Io Capitano change minds where arrests, the threat of deportation to Rwanda and the risk of death have not? The film’s director, Matteo Garrone (known for 2008 mafia film Gomorrah and his 2019 live-action adaptation of Pinocchio), and script consultant Mamadou Kouassi certainly hope so. Io…

Crossword CRYPTIC CLUES Across 1.Father puts worker in charge when desperate (7)8. Girl has a long drink, one hears (7)9. Tries an alternative that is not as nice (7)10. It may be for each new hasp (7)11. 17 Down’s prepared a pasta dish (7)12. Stations through which no trains go (7)14. Called about the new diets after six (7)18. Jack’s abnormally thin liqueur (7)20. Waste a very long time in prison (7)21. A sharing out of the spoils at table perhaps (5-2)22. Present at present? Not present .... (7)23. .... but presented again in sketchy fashion (7) Down 1.The last thing an investor expects to receive (5,8)2. Endlessly help one town in Italy (6)3. Object of a restless night (5)4. Favourite vehicle first found on the floor (6)5. Sign on…

DWP ‘We shouldn’t write the DWP off’: Ex-work and pensions secretary Stephen Timms thinks DWP can change lives under Labour The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has the capacity to do a “fantastic job” under a Labour government, according to the chair of the work and pensions select committee. Sir Stephen Timms, Labour MP for East Ham, said: “I don’t think we should write the DWP off. I don’t think our work on the committee pushes us into doing that.” In an exclusive interview with The Big Issue, Timms said he hopes Labour reforms social security. He wants a less “hostile” benefits system which supports people into employment, rather than “forcing” them into unsuitable jobs. “I think there is every possibility for the DWP to do a fantastic job,”…

“This is my happy place,” says Big Issue vendor Jack Osborne-Richardson, sitting on a bench looking out over Bristol’s Berkeley Square, a small Georgian park that overlooks the city. Jack sells The Big Issue on nearby Park Street and returns to his favourite bench in the square most days to read, think, and feed his beloved crows, who all know him by sight and will literally eat out of his hand. “It’s amazing for my mental health,” he says. “It’s like regenerating sanity.” If it wasn’t for his glasses, it’s a daily ritual that would be simply impossible for him. “My eyesight has always been terrible,” he says. “When I was younger, they didn’t realise my eyesight was bad and I was actually put in remedial classes. Then they did…

When Newsnight suddenly announced they had an exclusive, hour-long interview with Prince Andrew to discuss his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in November 2019, the country was gripped. An hour of unfiltered television. People in positions of power and privilege simply don’t do that these days. It was absolute must-see television and did not disappoint. The sight of a senior member of the royal family being held to account by a skilled journalist of Emily Maitlis’s calibre was compelling. New Netflix film Scoop, starring Gillian Anderson, Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes and Rufus Sewell, tells the story of how the interview happened. We all know Prince Andrew talked about going to Pizza Express in Woking and being unable to sweat. And we all know it was a PR disaster for…

SMILEY CHARITY FILM AWARDS Olivia Colman has bagged another award. This time, though, it’s not for playing a promiscuous monarch or a dogged detective. Her voice can be heard while watching Change the Ending, a heart-rending animation for Alzheimer’s Research UK that’s just taken the top gong at the 2024 Smiley Charity Film Awards. Telling the story of a prince and princess who have happily-ever-after disrupted by dementia, the film from Alzheimer’s Research UK scooped up the Grand Prix Charity Film of the Year at the seventh edition of the awards on 20 March. The stars of the show at London’s Leicester Square – normally a venue more used to film premieres – were not seasoned actors and producers, but charities who’ve used film to win hearts and minds. Among…

INTERVIEW The last decade of Mhairi Black’s life tells a story of the last decade of UK politics. The activist in her was awakened during campaigning for the independence referendum in 2014; the SNP may have lost the vote but they went on to win 56 out of 59 Scottish seats at the 2015 general election. At age 20, Black became the youngest MP in 200 years, representing Paisley and Renfrewshire South while she still had a final exam to sit to complete her Politics and Public Policy degree. The independence campaign switched younger generations onto politics in Scotland, but it shifted debates towards identity and ideology in a way that exposed divisions in communities and families that didn’t seem to exist before. Then the whole of the UK got…

In the early days of the novel, English writers were known for their tales of the countryside. Brontë’s moors, Hardy’s chalk downs, the rolling fields of DH Lawrence’s Norfolk, and Austen’s great estates. Even today, American films use an establishing shot of a car struggling along country lanes to tell the viewer they’re in Limeyland. But by the start of the new millennia, the novel in England became the home of the big city, with scarcely a pleasant pasture or cloudy hill in sight, and with that change, large parts of the country are now facing cultural invisibility. It would be wrong to say publishing completely forgot the countryside. Helen Stanton, owner of Forum Books in Northumberland, suggests there has been a “brace of non-fiction” in the region from Pip…