Up Close and Personal - You Are Here Immersive Theatre in Leeds

I’m on the bed in a Leeds city centre hotel room with a half-dressed girl I’ve just met.

We’re alone, surrounded by her intimate possessions – clothes, dressing gown, make up – and we’re talking about love, and life. She gently raises my fingers to her throat to feel the pulse in her neck.

A nymph, not unlike her bronze sisters I’ve just left behind in City Square, this girl is easily young enough to be my daughter. She strokes my arm as she talks and cajoles, and then plants a bright red lipstick kiss on the back of my hand.

It’s theatre. But Toto, in this piece I originally wrote for the Leeds Culture Vulture website, I’ve a feeling we’re not in the plush velvet stalls at The Grand anymore.

Reports of a Death Are Premature ...

Radio's dead. It's official .. there's been a notice in the Telegraph.

OK, maybe not dead but dying, according to Gillian Reynolds, on licence fee life support and Osborne's hand is on the switch. Oh hang on ... she's not talking about radio, she's talking about BBC Radio 4.

Which of course is radio if you're in London and you're writing a column for a posh broadsheet, allowing for a bit of Radio 3 when the Proms are on and maybe the frisson of a brief liaison with 6 Music if we're feeling frisky.

Don't get me wrong. I'd be sad if Radio 4 died, or became severely emaciated. It's one of those things that makes the country worth defending, and for which I'd certainly go to the barricades.

But radio is a lot more than Radio 4, which is local radio to London and the South East in the same way that Crossrail is an affordable little transport upgrade and the National Theatre has something on worth seeing now and then. I started looking around the dial, and at online listen again services, on just one Saturday in June here in Yorkshire.