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Hayden James has the daunting task of arranging and conducting seventy five thousand singers and up to forty choirs at the international matches at the Millennium Stadium. He talks to Tudor about his career and his experiences with performers such as Tom Jones, Katherine Jenkins, Sir Geraint Evans, and others he refers to as the Welsh Mafia or Tafia.
Haydn explores the factors which contributed to the culture of choral singing in Wales, and how amateur choristers can respond to a top professional artist to reach a peak performance.

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Tudorama captures the drama of the Confidence Vote in Boris Johnson by the Conservative MPs in early June 2022. But does it result in a victory, defeat, or both?

Monday 6 June

The news breaks at 8.00 in the morning. The announcement comes from the man in charge of a possible confidence vote, Sir Graham Brady, in a hastily arranged press conference at Westminster.
The threshold of letters of discontent has been breached and a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister will be held precisely 12 hours later. Unseemly haste. 
The Jubilee has dominated the news for a week. Now it’s as if the pent-up demand has burst through. 
As the morning proceeds, more and more news items  emerge. The vote is to take place early evening, with a result expected around nine pm.  A flurry of interviews and tweets. His prospective successors are the most emphatic in their support of the PM. With the exception of Jeremy Hunt, who publicly declares his vote for change, a euphemism for dishing Boris.
Midday.
John Penrose, anti-corruption resigns for, er, roughly lack of faith in the PM’s probity. 
2.00pm
We learn that Boris Johnson has written a lengthy personalised letter to every one of his MPs.
4.00pm. 
The PM addresses his MPs in his last plea before the vital vote. A minister has stated anonymously that a hundred votes rejecting the PM is possible, but would be ultimately fatal. 
6.30pm
ITV coverage largely similar to BBC’s. Robert Peston keeps the tension going. ‘He may survive tonight..but we don’t know’. The reports of the letter written to his MPs saying they have a chance to deal with the media’s favourite obsession , brings to mind another departing leader ‘you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.
Thinking, it all goes back to messages MP’s are getting from their constituents. Another memory, of a friend, a committed Tory, bombarding his MP and local councillors with advice to help depose Boris Johnson. 
7.00pm
Scottish MPs declaring their intention to vote against the PM. David Gauke a former conservative minister dismissed by BJ says a vote with more than 100 against would be bad for Johnson, 130 near fatal. 
8.00pm
Daily Mail reports 150 conservatives have said they are voting to support the PM. The voting ends.
9.00pm
BJ win the vote but by a narrower margin than anticipated. 211 votes to 148. Harassed ministers are wheeled out to defend the indefensible. A disheveled Simon Hart lengthily asks ‘problem, what problem?’ Over 40% of his MPs has rejected him. Technically, he is safe from another vote of confidence for a year. 
The only immediate predictable outcome will be the residual pledges of support. 
Has Boris Johnson retained his reputation of the Teflon kid? It’s still true that a week is a long time in politics.
9.30pm
Another disheveled figure, the PM, claims a victory permitting him to carry on with delivering his policies. 
Then George Eustice appears with a similar unconvincing message. 
10.30pm
What the papers say:
Guardian. PM clinging to power
The FT. Johnson wounded in confidence vote.
The Telegraph. Hollow victory tears Tories apart.

Pundits for BBC say the vote is worse than was expected by anyone. Prof Menon says a difference in the PM’s situation might be absence of any big beast in opposition.
The following days reveal the political upheavals following the vote.

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A debate is raging over the value of time-consuming and stressful SATs testing. The children's author Michael Morpurgo thinks they divert attention away from creativity, towards excellence in grammatical knowledge that is mostly of little benefit to the writing and use of language.
TudoRama investigates the tests from the perspective of the parents and pupils. To add to his personal experience, Tudor takes a ten minute SPaG test himself (spelling, punctuation and grammar).

Study notes:
A good revision aid is  https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/at-school/primary-school-assessment-tests/ks2-sats/ks2-sats-spag/
The practice test taken by Tudor was https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/803816/STA198213e_2019_ks2_English_GPS_Paper1_questions.pdf

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Councillor Blue wants his Woodford constituency to hold the best street party in the country for the Queen's Jubilee celebrations. 
The councillor decides to enlist the help of the TudoRama podcasting team.  
Tudor reluctantly approaches the distinguished music conductor Haydn James to supply his choir and military band, but learns that the costs of hiring busses would be prohibitive.
Councillor Blue becomes embroiled in a political row as he attempts to persuade a parish council to accept him and his street party ideas.
Tudor applies some everyday creativity to the problem in an attempt to rescue the situation. As sometimes happens, there is an unexpected turn of events … 

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A school massacre at Robb Elementary School Texas comes ten days after a mass killing in a grocery store in Buffalo. 
TudoRama looks back at reports of incidents going back to Sandy Hook Elementary School ten years earlier.
The tragedies and polarities of views remain.  

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In search of everyday creativity, Tudor learns about the work of Jeff Goldberg who has written eight thousand film reviews. In his interview, Jeff explains his work, all documented on the website The Four Word Film Review.
The first creative surprise. Every review is no more than four words.

Explaining his hobby, Jeff explains that he sometimes reverses the process, coming up with an amusing turn of phrase after which he searches for a film to match the entry for The Four Word Film Review. 

Another creative surprise: Contributors do not have to have watched the film.

Jeff explains how a love of wordplay helps his productivity, and describes his prize-winning entry for 2017. It is for a little-known Iranian film Disappearance.

His four words?  Searching for missing Persian.

The interview takes a surreal turn as the phone line starts breaking down. But not before a discussion of creativity in chess, and a final flash of everyday creativity, as the interview was about to end. This leads to a discussion of the theories of creativity and play found in the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

You can find Jeff's prize-winning four word review on http//fwfr.com  

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This TudoRama podcast describes a dream in which news items about the so-called Wagatha Christie libel case get hopelessly muddled up with the plot of the classic English novel, Vanity Fair.

 It might have been an over-generous glass of Three Barrels VSOP too late at night which contributed to a most peculiar dream. That, and an evening news item about a libel trial which is gripping the nation, with its cast of famous footballers and their celebrity wives and girlfriends or WAGs. I leave it to listening poddlers to make what sense of my dream they can. 

My dream plays out as a courtroom drama. Its main characters are those in the film Vanity Fair which I watched recently on a TV replay station. The lead role in the film was that of Becky Sharp, a delightfully amoral adventuress played by Reece Witherspoon. But to make things more confusing, the dream jumbled up characters from the film with those appearing in the on-going libel case.

Confusing? It is for me. I’m going to stick with the names in the film for what follows. So, in the dream I watch unfold the story of Becky and Amelia, who are International fashion icons and internet influencers. Then there is Becky’s husband, Rawdone, and Amelia’s husband, Jamie, who are both winners of a TV show Bake Off  Island, and who are also rivals for a place in the next I’m a celebrity chef get me out of the kitchen programme. 

The dream ends. The trial draws to its conclusion. I try to disentangle fact from fiction in interpreting my dream.

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The bloodshed in Ukraine continues, creativity in negotiation has been replaced by mindless slaughter. Tudor returns to a classic book, The Myth of the Strong Leader  examines how so-called strong leaders such as Vladimir Putin lose their capacity for creative responses to the situations they have helped create.

Its author, Professor Archie Brown, is one of the most distinguished political scientists of his age. He has been recognised after fifty years of diplomatic efforts in The Queen’s honours list ‘for services to UK-Russian relations and to the study of political science and international affairs’.

As he writes at the outset of the book, a strong leader ‘is generally taken to mean a leader who concentrates a lot of power in his or her hands’.  He goes on to explain the myth in the title of the book. ‘The idea that the more power one individual wields the more we should be impressed by that leader is, I shall argue an illusion’
as Brown puts it ‘Self-consciously strong leaders … have a tendency over time to become still more impressed by their own judgement  … they also tend to be afraid of nothing so much as being perceived to be weak or to have shown weakness’ 

This helps explain how such so-called strong leaders lose their capacity producing for creative responses to the situations they have helped create. 

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Tudor describes his widely applied method for developing skills at creating ideas in everyday business or leisure situations.
The podcast invites listeners to take part in a thought experiment. It has been designed particularly for for use by individuals or as part of team session for developing creative idea generation skills.  Thought exercises are included to engage listeners  in the processes of idea generation and development .
A recent example is used throughout, involving  ideas for improving a sporting experience. 

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Joe Root announces his resignation as Captain of England's Cricket team. William and Tudor discuss the next Captain. They are undeterred at the problems of recalling the names of earlier captains.
Tudor is interested in the process of selecting a captain and the possible preference of the selectors for safe pairs of hands of charismatic leaders. He likens this to the preference shown in the election process of a new Pope.
As the podcast ends, news arrives of the appointment of a captain of England who may meet the characteristics of a Charismatic leader

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