Marches.TV at the Hay Festival: Wednesday 27th May

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Well this is feeling much more like Hay Festival weather I must say!

Monday had a slight chill in the air but on the whole the weather behaved itself. Tuesday was also pretty dry throughout, although the wind picked-up but today the rain arrived, although not quite with a vengeance.

Having said all that, the change of temperature didn’t affect the feeding frenzy of literature, arts and comedy that is the Hay Festival, and we met-up with Tony Davis from Bookchase and Athene English, owner of the Great English Outdoors in Hay. You can see their interviews in tomorrow’s video update.

We also attended a fascinating event with Anna Barford and Daniel Dorling who produced the book, The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way we Live. Essentially, it shows the globe mapped not by landmass but by health, wealth, and a fascinating and revelatory variety of indices. You will never see Earth in the same light again.

Here we show a map from their research website, worldmapper.org that shows All Deaths, Aged 1-4. These maps really speak for themselves.

As we move into the second phase of the Festival we have seen so much and witnessed so many cultural luminaries, such as Stephen Fry, David Frost, Frank Skinner and Stephen Jones to name but four. There’s been music from Asian Dub Foundation and Hugh Masekela and we’ve had Ruth Padel resigning her Oxford professorship of poetry shortly before stepping on-stage at the Festival and the amusing thought of how the numerous MPs present asking for receipts at the Tyrells bar. And yet we’ve hardly started.

Coming-up on Thursday Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury talks to A.N Wilson on Dostoevsky, Roger McGough showcasing his new slapstick anthology before Archbishop Desmond Tutu joins his Church of England counterpart for the Michael Ramsey Prize Lunch.

Friday welcomes Kate Adie, Alan Bennett, Jo Brand and Dara O’Briain before a whole other host of literary and cultural heavyweights arrive for the weekend. Some sun would be nice too.