December 2018 - The Diary

Final days of rehearsal at Knightswood before we began our run of SLEEPING BEAUTY at Barmulloch Community Centre with two wonderfully noisy and excited audiences! It's a cracking show with all the classic panto favourites and John Binnie's script is brilliant as is Aileen Ritchie's direction. Great to be back at Barmulloch again for the 3rd year in a row kicking off Christmas touring shows & a huge thank you to the Staff and audiences there for a brilliant start!

Next up was The Lodging House Mission for a matinee and lovely to be back in my old manor! Great fun and brilliant audience again and lovely to have John Binnie and Bill Wright in the crowd for this very special show. Am revelling in the role of The Dame and appeared on Christina Littleson's radio show on Pulse 98.4FM for a chat and an unexpected appearance from 'Dame Nellie!' Then off to the

Drumchapel Community Centre for a wild gig with a fab vocal audience and then to Pennilee and Knightswood Community Centres for 4 wonderful shows with superb audiences and the show went down an absolute storm with kids and parents alike. Delighted to catch up with my niece & nephew after the matinee in Knightswood and they were very proud of 'Auntie Sie' as they wrote on a card!

Also this month we announced the upcoming tour of our THE BENNY LYNCH STORY tour of Scotland for May & June 2019 with nationwide coverage in the Press. Huge thanks to George Mair and Simon Houston for helping ensure blanket coverage and delighted with the response so far. All ticket details are now available on our new website https://www.thebennylynchstory.co.uk/ And huge thanks to Writer Davie Carswell for the photo here and handling the entire production whilst I am on tour, and for Stephen Purdon to take time out from his own busy panto run to appear in the shoot.

More self-tapes and press interviews squeezed in to this week before donning 'Nellie' again and heading to our next raft of shows, kicking off again at Ruchill, followed by Barrowfield Community Centres and again the audiences were simply brilliant & thoroughly enjoyed every second of them.

Time to squeeze in some more press appearances, this time in character as 'Nellie Nae Dosh' for Glasgow Lives with Elaine Livingstone, who took this wonderful photo below! Read it here: https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-lives-nellie-nae-dosh-15544284

Then to the Geoff Shaw Centre in Toryglen, followed by another great crowd at the Bellcraig Community Centre before heading back to Barmulloch for another two sold-out shows. Garnered more press for our The Benny Lynch Story tour and appeared on Rocksport Radio to chat about the ongoing Cathkin Park restoration work. Recorded a great, fun interview with TheFootyBlog lads

at Cathkin before heading to Media Co-op for an enjoyable voice-over for The Scottish Recovery Network. More self-tapes for some great screen projects this month, before heading back to 'pantoland' and two more shows at Barlanark Community Centre. Again brilliant audiences here

and at the four shows at Pollock Community Centre, followed by a welcome return to Castlemilk for our final two-show day. Utterly exhausting but great fun and the shows went down really well in our last week of this fun tour. Managed to squeeze in another hysterically funny and entertaining night with our very own 'Hellfire Club' annual gathering in Glasgow with these bad boys below!

Then back to panto duties and we had our final show at 1pm on the 22nd of December at the lovely Shettleston Community Centre once again and it was sadly time to say goodbye to 'Nellie Nae-Dosh' and to all of our wonderful cast and crew. I have absolutely loved playing my first ever 'Dame' role 

and it has been a superb tour and been a joy to have been a part of it all. However within two hours of walking off the stage for the last time I was hit with an awful Flu that lasted throughout Christmas! It has been another rollercoaster of a year work-wise but thoroughly enjoyed it all and hoping lots of hard graft this year pays dividends in 2019 with the release of more of my work on screen. So a huge

thanks to everyone I worked with in 2018 and to my agent Luc Chaudhary at IAM. Lots more to look forward to already in 2019, which promises to be another year of Film, Fitba & much laughter ahead.