Latest 7 magazine

Dani finds herself suddenly thankful for the loyalty of those around her

Over these past couple of weeks I have learnt a few lessons I should have always known. The main one being that friends are so much more important than I ever thought. And that I have a lot more good friends than I gave myself credit for.

Over the past two years, I have seriously neglected my friends and it ended up at a point where they stopped trying to get me to go out with them because they all knew that I wouldn’t and that I would put my relationship first. And although my relationship was very important to me, I now know that my friendships with other people are almost as important. Because, when that one person you are having the relationship with isn’t there anymore, your friends will be. And my friends are.

I want to say a big thank you, right from the bottom of my heart to my friends who have let me phone them at all hours, who have been inviting me out, sending me lovely text messages and just generally letting me complain to them at all hours. These are friends who would have been surprised to have heard from me before, or would have called me not actually expecting me to answer. And yet they are here, when I need them most. And I am so grateful.

“Over the past two years I have seriously neglected my friends”

So I suppose you might have gathered from what I have written that my relationship is on hiatus. You would be right but I don’t want to talk about it. So that’s that.

The one thing through all this that has surprised me most is that the panic attack prone, nervous breakdown side of me has remained relatively calm. Like I said before, I’m putting it down to the Vitamin B. I am not a doctor, so if you’re thinking it might be a good idea to try taking some vitamins yourself that’s great, but do all the things you are supposed to. Don’t just take the advice of a 20-year-old lovesick puppy as grounds for taking certain tablets, check with a doctor or nutritionist first!

Now that I am out and about nearly all the time, and stocking up on vitamins, I have noticed a lot of things about Brighton. Having to buy vitamins means I frequently venture into a certain shop that sells them and I was horrified to see a girl who was quite clearly suffering with anorexia. I know I complain when people ask me if I have a eating disorder, but if anyone has actually really paid attention they will notice there are certain ways your body changes when you starve it as opposed to just not being able to gain weight. So anyway, this girl was looking at the diet pills section. She picked up a bottle and took it to the counter. Now, I don’t know if there are laws against this – pubs can refuse to serve you if you are too drunk and I presumed shops could refuse to sell you diet pills if they didn’t think it was safe. But she was sold the diet pills and I stood there gobsmacked. I left to buy my vitamins somewhere else, thinking that girl could really do with the kind of friends I have.

Local entrepeneurs out the frying pan, into the fire

One of the high points of the current television week has to be the hare-brained business schemes showcased on BBC 2 series Dragon’s Den, which recently made a triumphant return to our screens with its fifth hit series.

I hear one of the more fiery Dragons, silver-tongued entrepreneur Theo Paphitis, recently swooped in to everyone’s favourite Italian restaurant Donatello, where he was seen enjoying dinner with diminutive ex-Chelsea star Dennis Wise. I wonder whether Dennis was doing a private audition for the show, perhaps seeking business advice on his patented WAG magnet!

Brighton has been massively represented on the Den already this series, with at least two local business people pitching their ideas to the stony-faced team of entrepreneurs.

First up was Dominic Ponniah, the owner of Brighton’s eye-catching fleet of tuk-tuks, who put himself at the mercy of the Dragons to ask for funds to keep his show on the road. Unfortunately, the panel shot him down in flames and he left without a penny. Never fear though; I’m sure the tuk-tuks will be back on our streets very soon!

The next Brightonian up in front of the Dragons was much more successful, securing a highly impressive £35,000 in return for 25 per cent of her very unusual business. Freelance designer Sarah Lu came up with the idea for Youdoodolls, small, canvas, unisex dolls complete with trousers, skirts and other clothes. The beauty of Sarah’s invention is that the dolls can be customised to resemble anyone, by printing photos of friends and family onto a special paper, which is then ironed on to your new little friend.

I think we can expect great things from Sarah and her dolls, particularly as I hear she recently secured a deal with high street giant Topshop, who will be trialling the product in 25 of their stores nationwide. Watch this space!

Katie and Peter: the new Richard and Judy?

Staying on the theme of TV, you may have noticed a couple of more famous Sussex-residents have been getting their fair share of the ratings recently, with the launch of Katie and Peter: Unleashed on ITV2.

The new chat show is different, in that it mixes the celebrity chat with behind-the-scenes footage of guests and Katie and Peter themselves. Knowing this couple, I’m sure there are lots of twists and turns in store!

Big Yin mobbed by female admirers, likes it

Spotted! Hibernian funny-man Billy Connolly being molested in the car park outside The Brighton Centre. Apparently, the bearded Scot was pounced on by no less than four scantily-clad vixens, dressed in stockings, suspenders and very little else. The girls asked to have their photos taken with him, and looked like they certainly made his day!

The best fest

Samantha Maxwell-Reed (Expand Recruitment), Annalisa Hammond (Lime), Nick Harvey (Harvey Marketing), Lynne Richards (Brighton Dome & Festival Ltd), Catherine Anderson (Oriental Hotel)

A slightly more sober picture to round off this week – of the lovely Brighton Festival team and guests at Hotel du Vin. The Festival held a business to business reception in the Ship Street hotel, where guests were treated to fantastic canapés and a rousing speech by Festival Chief Exec, Nick Dodds. This year’s festival broke all records in terms of sales and media coverage and attracted massive investment to the City. Roll on May!

Jo Brooks is director of Brighton-based PR company JBPR Ltd,
01273 622555, www.jb-pr.com

Victoria Nangle goes off-script to reflect on a comedy-filled October in Brighton

I saw some excellent gigs during the Brighton comedy month of October. Obviously, with so many flying about at the Paramount, the Fresh Meat and the Brighton Comedy Fringe festivals we should all have seen some fandabidozee clangers of excellent gigs. However, the ones that have stayed freshest in my mind are the ones that no one else will ever see again. Sure, the comics may continue their tours but no one will catch the off-script off-kilter random-madness and absent-minded cleverness that certain stand-ups managed to deliver, chiefly because they have no idea how they got there this time either.

Off-script. It’s great. And really demonstrates quite how the random mind of a good comic works. To think on your toes and still find unexplored tangents that captivate – from a set they’ve been performing for the last three months non-stop – sure shows a madly active mind more than anything else I could name. When a comic looks round furtively and asks if there are any journalists in and then rubs their hands with glee, my smile is already there. Then, as he explains the joys of riding on his gran’s Stanna stairlift you know he’s doing that because he’s having fun too. Hence, the cycle of unique one-off fun continues.

“They’re brave adventurers mining out extra laughs for the sheer joy of the experience”

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with staying on-script. Comics have worked long and hard to get their finest gags together, lined up in quick succession in some semblance of an order. It’ll be grand, and more likely to have you laughing out loud with merry amusement. Off-script is more likely to leave me smiling knowingly with a slight chuckle than loudly guffawing and falling off my chair with merriment, but I still love the magic of the one-off musing. It just demonstrates quite how genuine the rest of the set is.

To see the comic brain in action – if it’s a good comic brain, obviously – is a thing of awe. Russell Howard does it, Robin Ince does it, Zoe Lyons does it. They’ve all been standing in front of a crowd for enough years to be concentrating more on how interesting what they’re saying is – to them as well as to us – than how scary it might be to make a balls-up of it all. It leads me to trust them, because no one’s written that tangent for them in the style of the rest. It just jumped into their heads and they thought it might make us laugh ’cos it made them chuckle. Surely the most intimate thing we can share in polite society is a sense of humour.

I feel I know the comics that went into unknown territory a little better than the straight scripted ones. They’re brave adventurers mining out extra laughs for the sheer joy of the experience. Now that’s what I call a pioneering comic.

Andy Vella has been a professional designer, photographer and artist for over twenty years and is best known for his designs and images that grace much of The Cure’s output, for whom he still works. Penile Dementia is his first solo exhibition and features huge canvases and sculptural pieces depicting grumpy, ageing and deformed nudes. Vella’s fascination with the grotesque stems from watching monkeys masturbating at Longleat and seeing old men playing pocket billiards whilst waiting for the bus. It’s an exhibition that is bound to cause a stirring in more areas than one.

Andy Vella: Penile Dementia, Unit 03, Portslade.