News March 21st 2009

So last week was the wonderful Flatpack Festival in Birmingham, congratulations to Ian and the team who did an incredible job.  There was a real buzz around our beloved Digbeth and, what with St Paddy’s day as well, a weekend to remember was had by all.  The two events at the Edge were wonderful.  First up, on Saturday was ‘Outersight’. the psychedelic psynema night, which showed the usual great mix of shorts with some great musical backing, with the central feature film being a film by William Castle using amazing ‘Illusion-o’. So you were given a set of glasses with blue or red lenses and if you wanted to see the ghosts haunting the hapless all-american family in the film you used the red filter, if you ‘didn’t believe in ghosts’ you use the blue filter.  A great interactive film experience all round, tons of fun, I especially liked the ghost lion and lion-tamer, and developed RSI by trying to watch the film with red, blue and no filter simultaneously.

On Sunday Friction had our Flatpack Picnic, which became a celebration of the pubs, past and present around Digbeth.  The Edge had loads of bar accoutrements in, a cafe serving pub food, darts, bingo, skittles and of course beverages for the punters.  There was table service from the ‘Two Dorises’ (Sandra Hall and Mitra Memarzia in performance mode, slightly evil waitresses you would tip to leave you alone) and every variation on the cheese cob you could imagine from the frustrated tea shop owners of Twinkle Jones – I particularly enjoyed Mark Storor stopping the quiz to announce that there were still ‘corned beef specials’ available and almost forcing Battenburg cake on unwilling customers.

staff photo

Ben Waddington gave the required gravitas to a great quiz with lots of nice ambiguous questions, mostly about pubs, but also looking at other Digbeth-centric topics.  What does B My Chip mean?  Harry Palmer and Dr David Ethics got the improvised bingo randomizer out looking even more Heath Robinson than ever and Jackie Roxborough led the assembled throng in a couple of Brummie folksongs – complete with ‘bouncing ball’ lyrics, courtesy of Si Walker.  A proper afternoon of fun and a fitting start to Echoes From the Edge. We are launching phase one of the project next month so look here for more information and to book a place on one of the tours.

bingo