Soho Bites Podcast

Black coffee and cigarettes.

Soho and coffee are synonymous. In this episode we talk to London tour guide, Nika Garrett about the 1950s coffee revolution and find out where she goes for the best Espresso Martini in town. HINT

Nika moved to London from Warsaw 10 years ago for love (that of a charming Irish man) and subsequently began a second love affair – with Soho. Nika loves coffee, art and history and runs walking tours on all of these subjects.

You can book a tour and find all her social media contacts at www.mylondonwalks.co.uk

And Sioned Wiliam joins us to discuss her favourite Soho film, Expresso Bongo from 1959. Starring Laurence Harvey, Sylvia Syms and a very young Harry Webb (AKA Cliff Richard) as Bert Rudge (AKA Bongo Herbert), it’s a satire on the entertainment industry and a kitsch classic.

Sioned is a writer & broadcaster. She is the former Controller of Comedy at ITV and currently the Commissioning Editor of Comedy at BBC Radio 4. You can follow her on Twitter at @sionedwiliam

Expresso Bongo trailer

Drink a flat white / espresso martini while listening to the Soho Bites specially curated coffee songs.

Watch Expresso Bongo at the BFI website HERE

The originator of Soho Bites, Dr Jingan Young, has launched a new research project. Find out all about it on the Cities in Cinema website and follow the project on Twitter.

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Check out our spin-off series Mural Morsels

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Skive Sports.

Episode five is our sports related episode! Producer Dom visited the Soho Cricket Collective.

The Collective has been running as a team for over a decade and is made up of keen amateur cricketers drawn mostly from the film and media companies that have their homes here. A love of the game is pretty much the only requirement to bag a place on Soho’s only cricket team. If you’re itching to play, as long as you know which end of the bat to hold and are an all round good egg, you might be in with a chance!

The team picture from April 2018

Later, we hear Dom speak to Dr. Melanie Williams at the Soho A Go Go Film Festival in October with host Aidan McManus about ‘Rattle of a Simple Man’.

Directed by Muriel Box, the film is a 1964 British comedy-drama starring Diane Cilento, Harry H. Corbett and Michael Medwin. It’s based on the 1963 play by Charles Dyer (who also appears in the film) and is about a naive young football fan, down in London from Manchester for the FA cup final, who meets a sophisticated working-girl in a Soho night-club and has a night that will change his life.

Live on stage at the Regent St Cinema, Dom talks to Aidan McManus and Melanie Williams about Rattle of a Simple Man

Jingan and Aidan talk about The Shakedown at the festival on the previous day

Episode 5 is founder, Jingan Young’s last episode with Soho Bites as she wears many hats! You can still follow her Soho on film research here, and her new project Cities in Cinema.

Follow Dr. Melanie Williams on Twitter here.

Learn more about the Soho Cricket Collective here

Thank you for listening.

Follow us on Blue Sky (our Xwitter account is no more)

We're now on YouTube

Email us at [email protected]

We'd love it if you left us a lovely REVIEW.

And if you'd like to help support the show we'd be very grateful.

Check out our spin-off series Mural Morsels

In fact, see all relevant links HERE

In Episode 4 we welcomed Dr Adrian Smith to discuss ‘Secrets of a Windmill Girl’, an exploitation film produced by the infamous Compton-Cameo team Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser. The two were fierce property magnets in their own right and owned, alongside their film production arm, a number of casinos and porn cinemas in Soho. They bought the Windmill Theatre in 1964 and converted it into a cinema.

The film is an attempt to ‘exploit’ their new purchase of the theatre and to ‘exploit’ what, beyond a surface level, appears to be the aftermath of the Profumo affair and the exponential explosion of porn magazines and seedy Soho. Filmed in glorious colour – the film follows a pair of friends who are desperate to be ‘windmill girls’.

As Adrian elaborates on his wonderful article here, the film “is naive and quaint, depicting the lives of young people in the mid-sixties as filtered through the contradictory viewpoint of middle-aged men, who both gaze with desire at these sexualised women whilst simultaneously condemning them for choosing that lifestyle.”

Adrian brought a whole load of Compton film related ephemera he picked up a few years ago. There are some examples HERE

To kick off the programme Dom attended a screening of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary, “Tales from Tin-Pan Alley”, which is about the history of the UK’s only music street, Denmark Street. The alley has been devastated in recent years by the expansion of Tottenham Court Road station as part of the Crossrail project and Dom chatted to film-maker Henry Scott-Irvine about his groundbreaking film and about the historical significance of the street, one of the most important locations in London’s music history.

Watch the filmmakers discuss their journey on London Live

Dr Adrian Smith on Twitter and his blog

Henry Scott-Irvine on Twitter and the film’s official website

Thank you for listening.

Follow us on Blue Sky (our Xwitter account is no more)

We're now on YouTube

Email us at [email protected]

We'd love it if you left us a lovely REVIEW.

And if you'd like to help support the show we'd be very grateful.

Check out our spin-off series Mural Morsels

In fact, see all relevant links HERE

Double Hitch.

In our third episode we were invited on a Soho gangland tour guided by Aidan McManus of London Flipside Tours!

We then hosted the podcaster, Adam Roche to discuss two of Hitchcock’s London films, his silent offering The Lodger and the colour-serial-killer-70s-frenetic-horror film Frenzy. Among Adam’s many podcasting achievements is a 20 hour long biographical masterpiece called, The Adventures of Alfred Hitchcock. He is also the founder of The Official Talking Pictures TV Podcast and Attaboy Clarence.

Alfred Hitchcock and crew, during the filming of Frenzy (1972)

You can find all links to Adam’s works here, and you can follow Adam on Twitter .

You can buy The Lodger on DVD here and Frenzy here.

Please do check out Aidan’s radio show on Portobello Radio

Thank you for listening.

Follow us on Blue Sky (our Xwitter account is no more)

We're now on YouTube

Email us at [email protected]

We'd love it if you left us a lovely REVIEW.

And if you'd like to help support the show we'd be very grateful.

Check out our spin-off series Mural Morsels

In fact, see all relevant links HERE

We made it to episode 2!

In our second episode, we discussed little known ‘B’ film Street of Shadows (AKA Shadowman in the US Market) which was directed by Richard Vernon and released in 1953. The film imports American star Cesar Romero (CESAR ROMERO! Who starred in everything from ‘The Thin Man’ to ‘Batman’) as an Italian immigrant who owns a pin-table saloon in Soho and is falsely accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend. The film has some great sequences shot on location and even a shot of the Marquis of Granby pub in North Soho. Kay Kendall co-stars and the ubiquitous Victor Maddern gives a memorable performance.

Street of Shadows trailer

We were joined by Mel Byron to discuss the film. Mel is a comedian, writer, trainer and one of the three person team who makes and presents the Talking Pictures TV Podcast.

Mel Byron in action, performing ‘Old Movies Changed my Life’.

We also chatted to Jessica Martin, actress, singer, artist, author/illustrator and impressionist about her father Placido Martin (known as ‘Ido’ to his friends) who was a musician and bandleader who operated in Soho during the same 50s/60s period. Her latest book Life Drawing: A Life Under Lights is available now.

Click HERE to see two of Ido martin’s record covers, kindly provided by Jessica

Visit Jessica Martin’s official website

Visit Mel Bryon’s official website.

Street of Shadows is available from Amazon.

Thank you for listening.

Follow us on Blue Sky (our Xwitter account is no more)

We're now on YouTube

Email us at [email protected]

We'd love it if you left us a lovely REVIEW.

And if you'd like to help support the show we'd be very grateful.

Check out our spin-off series Mural Morsels

In fact, see all relevant links HERE

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