Another chance to win a fantastic 42″ Flat Screen TV with the Performance Channel. All you have to do to enter is e-mail prizedraw to comp AT performance-channel.com (substituting the AT with an @) including your name and address as well as a contact number.

Good Luck.

Terms and Conditions
These rules apply to all prize promotions including free draws, prize competitions and instant win offers.

1 Promotions are open to UK residents aged 18 and over.
2 Prizes are non-transferable, non-negotiable and no cash alternatives will be offered.
3 Performance Channel reserves the right to substitute the prize for
another prize of equal value.
4 NO PURCHASE NECESSARY to enter the competitions unless otherwise stated
on the promotional activity with a specific competition.
5 By entering the prize draw, the entrant agrees to be bound by the rules and by any
other requirements set out in the promotional material accompanying the promotion.
6 By entering the promotion, the entrant agrees to the terms of the privacy policy.
In addition Performance Channel may pass your personal information to the promoters
and their data processors. However, we always demand that those parties adhere to the
same security procedures that we follow ourselves.
7 Winners will be notified by email or text on the day of the draw. Winners have five (5) business
working days to respond in full to the email/text or another winner will be drawn.
8 By entering the promotion, the winner(s) consent to any publicity generated as a result of
the promotion, and use on performance-channel.com or Performance Channel television
station at any time.
9 Prize draws are open to all residents of the UK, except employees of Performance Channel
and their immediate families and anyone else connected with the creation and administration of the promotion.
10 The site’s Editor’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Odds of winning
depend on the number of eligible entries received.
11 Only one entry per person. Spammers will be disqualified.
12 Performance Channel will not accept responsibility for loss through technical fault, incomplete,
illegible or other damaged entries. Proof of entry is not automatically proof of receipt.
13 The promotional draw is held by Performance Channel, 4 Farleigh Court, Old Weston Road, Flax Bourton,
Bristol, BS48 1UR.
14 Details of the winner(s) can be obtained by sending a SAE marked Wagner Competition
to Performance Channel, 4 Farleigh Court, Old Weston Road, Flax Bourton, Bristol, BS48 1UR,
within 21 days of the closing date of the promotion.
15 These terms and conditions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of
England and Wales.
16 The closing date for the 42″ flat screen TV competition is 30/09/08.

We have a winner for the 42″ TV competition, click here to find out more.

Boxing Day, 26th December on Performance MainStreet (SKY 271)

Queen Bejart – 3.00pm
Queen Magic Years – 4.00pm
Queen Live In Rio – 5.00pm
Phenomenon – 6.00pm
Queen Live In Milton Keynes – 7.00pm
Tribute Concert (Documentary) – 8.00pm
Tribute Concert – 9.00pm

Our Friends:
http://www.brianmay.com/
http://www.queenworld.com

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
Sunday 23rd and Wednesday 26th December at 13:00hrs

Performance Channel (270) are proud to announce that we will be showing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker this Christmas.

For those of you who are new to the Nutcracker, or would like to refresh your memory, there is a detailed explanation of the goings on at Wikipedia, click here for more.

The Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra
Conductor: Aleksandr Kopilov
Choreographer: Natalya Arkhipova
Performers: Yuri Grigorovich, Irek Mukhamedov, Yuri Vetrov

One of the greatest guitarists of our time, rock legend Eric Clapton comes to Performance MainStreet this Christmas.

Standing at the Crossroads is about Eric Clapton’s journey through life to where he is now, from his highs to his lows.

Standing at the Crossroads tells Clapton’s story in his own words accompanied by some of his great music and contributions from the likes of Sting, Keith Richards, John Lee Hooker and more.

Don’t miss it.

Performance MainStreet
Monday 24th December at 20:00

Great news for Cliff Richard fans.

Performance MainStreet (SKY 271) will be showing two Cliff Richard programmes filled with fabulous Christmas goodness over the festive period.

Christmas Day
9.00pm: “Together with Cliff Christmas Special”
10:00pm “Cliff Richard Video Collection”

Spread the word!

Poetry Series

Poetry on television? Is this an audience puller, or is it just another arty
idea that has no business in the pulp factory that is British TV? – a world of soaps, re-inventions, games shows, makeovers, repeats and reality fests.

The truth is… deep in its beleaguered heart, television is really old fashioned
show business. If this were not so, then breakfast TV journalists and racing drivers wouldn’t win dancing championships. And show business is, or should be, full of ideas, variety and possibilities. Likewise poetry – rich in drama, passion, love, protest and revolutionary ideas.

The television set is everybody’s best friend. It operates on a one to one relationship with the audience. And poetry is custom made for this.

Therefore the best way to do poetry on television is keep it simple. Give the poet’s words to an actor, put a camera in front of him and ask him to speak to the lens. The verse goes straight to the heart.

So, with this as our modus operandi, we set about selecting the poems.

We began with the classics we remembered from school… Gunga Din, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Owl and the Pussycat, “I wandered, lonely as a cloud…” And the list grew and grew – favourite poems, poems that inspire, narrative verse, comic verse, love lyrics, nature poetry, war poetry, verses of reflection, about relationships and about times gone by. The most famous writer in the English language could not be ignored either. 154 sonnets and hundreds of soliloquies – no shortage of material there…

We honed the mighty list down to 50 poems (the number we needed for the initial series) and started thinking.

How to do them? Well we had that worked out – put the actor in front of the camera and shoot.

So the next question was where and how? So we asked ourselves that one, only to realise there was an obvious clue – what the poem was about, should tell us where to shoot. Take for example “To be or not to be…”, someone said; where do we shoot that? The rationalisation – somewhere a man with a case of terminal confusion could think by himself with no interruptions. The conclusion – sitting on the loo.

After we’d all picked ourselves off the floor, we realised it made sense. Shooting Hamlet with his trousers down didn’t mean we were looking for laughs. In fact the dis-location of the words and the setting made the whole speech more interesting. We discovered WE HAD TO LISTEN.
So the style solution was simple. Put the actors into everyday situations.
Use locations in car parks, shopping malls, back streets, redundant urban wasteland; cliff tops, beaches, piers and promenades; churchyards, hillsides, woods and riverbanks; firesides, bedrooms and bathrooms. The more commonplace the setting, the better to make the words mean something.

Of course, many of the poems speak for themselves. From the heart and the guts. You don’t do anything ‘clever’ with Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” or John McCrea’s “In Flanders Fields”

We set this poem in a living room. A man clearing out a cupboard drawer comes across a box of bleached out old photographs – among them, a picture of his grandfather standing by a row of wooden crosses hammered into the ground on the side of a mud soaked trench. Stunned, he begins sorting through the pictures and he remembers some lines of verse…

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below…

Then he turns to the camera and looks straight down the lens

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

You don’t tinker with this stuff. No need to spin it, make it different or accessible. Simply introduce the viewer to it and let him react.

But you can give the Charge of the Light Brigade a bit of treatment – in this case done by a sports commentator with headphones and moustache mike.
Add to this, a Shakespeare sonnet in a shopping mall, a man telling a funny story to his dog, a piece of Shelley in a garage workshop, a snatch of William Blake’s “Jerusalem” sung in the bath…

Poetry is brilliant, wonderful, insightful, entertaining and full of emotion. It can make you laugh and make you cry and make you remember.

If you like what we have to offer, we’ll do some more. If your own personal favourite poem is not included in the current selection, then wait and keep watching. I’m certain we’ll get to it.

—————–
You can watch a few by clicking here

Performance MainStreet – SKY 271 – 22:00 – December 2007

Winner of the 2005 Gold Medal for best direction in the New York festival, Documentary category.

Since the early 20th century, musicians have come together in the name of human rights to fight war, hunger, corruption, oppression, AIDS, apartheid, and Third World debt. From single songs passed by word of mouth to star-studded, multimillion-dollar benefits, activists from Joe Hill to Bob Geldof have spoken up by singing out, drawing together disparate groups of people with unforgettable verse and universal harmony. GET UP, STAND UP serves as a timely reminder of the potent role music has played in a century’s worth of political protest.

This series of programmes traces the birth of protest songs back to the American union movement and explores the impact of pop culture in politicising the baby boomer generation during the Vietnam era. It delves into the history of politics and protest in black music, from the civil rights movement and pacifism to black separatism and gangsta rap.

By weaving together historical footage and commentary from today’s musicians and music critics, the program puts the power of pop into perspective. From the 1970s on, American musicians began taking on larger and larger issues in countries as diverse and far-flung as Bangladesh and Tibet. Benefit concerts and individual hit songs, including Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” raised millions while capturing the attention of billions worldwide.

Ultimately, GET UP, STAND UP is an investigation and a celebration, a reminder that pop can be so much more than simply “popular” music. Using songs as punctuation, the series chronicles the way music has been used throughout this century to convey social dissatisfaction, from highlighting labour unrest to denouncing terrorist attacks.
“http://www.pbs.org/wnet/getupstandup/about.html”

Click on the link below for your chance to watch some of the Poetry that will be broadcast throughout December. These programmes have been made in-house.

So enjoy and let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

Number 1: All the World’s a stage
As You Like It, Act II Scene 7 – William Shakespeare

Number 2: Come live with me
Christopher Marlowe

Number 3: I Am
John Clare

Number 4: Tim Turpin
Thomas Hood

Number 5: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Macbeth, Act V Scene 5 – William Shakespeare

Watch Now

We have a WINNER.

The prize winning number was selected on the basis that each entrant was allocated a separate number and Eicom’s lawyers were asked to make a random selection.  A PDF of the letter from our lawyers can be found here. The winner’s name will be provided to anyone who wishes to send a stamped addressed envelope to Performance Channel, 4 Farleigh Court, Old Weston road, Flax Bourton, Bristol BS48 1UR.
(Draw information)

This Competition is CLOSED.

The Winner will be announced shortly. Thanks to everyone who took part.

HURRY!! The Competition closes at Midnight tonight.

WIN a fantastic 42″ Flat Screen TV with the Performance Channel. All you have to do to enter is e-mail prizedraw to wagner AT performance-channel.com (substituting the AT with an @) including your name and address as well as a contact number.

Good Luck.

Terms and Conditions
These rules apply to all prize promotions including free draws, prize competitions and instant win offers.

1 Promotions are open to UK residents aged 18 and over.
2 Prizes are non-transferable, non-negotiable and no cash alternatives will be offered.
3 Performance Channel reserves the right to substitute the prize for
another prize of equal value.
4 NO PURCHASE NECESSARY to enter the competitions unless otherwise stated
on the promotional activity with a specific competition.
5 By entering the prize draw, the entrant agrees to be bound by the rules and by any
other requirements set out in the promotional material accompanying the promotion.
6 By entering the promotion, the entrant agrees to the terms of the privacy policy.
In addition Performance Channel may pass your personal information to the promoters
and their data processors. However, we always demand that those parties adhere to the
same security procedures that we follow ourselves.
7 Winners will be notified by email or text on the day of the draw. Winners have five (5) business
working days to respond in full to the email/text or another winner will be drawn.
8 By entering the promotion, the winner(s) consent to any publicity generated as a result of
the promotion, and use on performance-channel.com or Performance Channel television
station at any time.
9 Prize draws are open to all residents of the UK, except employees of Performance Channel
and their immediate families and anyone else connected with the creation and administration of the promotion.
10 The site’s Editor’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Odds of winning
depend on the number of eligible entries received.
11 Only one entry per person. Spammers will be disqualified.
12 Performance Channel will not accept responsibility for loss through technical fault, incomplete,
illegible or other damaged entries. Proof of entry is not automatically proof of receipt.
13 The promotional draw is held by Performance Channel, 4 Farleigh Court, Old Weston Road, Flax Bourton,
Bristol, BS48 1UR.
14 Details of the winner(s) can be obtained by sending a SAE marked Wagner Competition
to Performance Channel, 4 Farleigh Court, Old Weston Road, Flax Bourton, Bristol, BS48 1UR,
within 21 days of the closing date of the promotion.
15 These terms and conditions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of
England and Wales.
16 The closing date for the digital radio competition is 30/06/07.
17 The closing date for the 42″ flat screen TV competition is 31/12/07.