Barry Didcock

The madness, as Graeme Armstrong refers to it, was the life he led as a boy embedded in gang culture and its attendant dangers: violence, drink, drugs, criminality.

Pat Collins is an Irish film-maker from West Cork who has made over 30 films, many of them documentaries. To date he is best known for Song Of Granite, a film portrait of Irish traditional singer Joe Heaney. His latest work is That They May Face The Rising Sun, an adpatation of the 2002 book of the same name by the great Irish novelist John McGahern. Released in UK cinemas on April 26 it captures a year in the life of a lakeside community in the 1980s and stars Barry Ward and Anna Bederke as a couple returning to Ireland after having lived in London. Meanwhile on May 4 Edinburgh’s Folk Film Gathering will host the Scottish premiere of Collins’s 2024 film Songlines, a documentary portrait of the singers within the Irish traveller community.

Beth Bate is director of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), the cinema, art gallery and print studio located in Dundee’s so-called Cultural Quarter. Voted one of Scotland’s top 10 buildings of the 20th century by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, DCA has just celebrated its 25th anniversary.

Amy Winehouse has been given the big screen treatment in a new film released this week and directed by a filmmaker with previous experience of turning the lives of iconic musicians into biopics.

One of the world’s most famous paintings, by one of the world’s most famous artists, is coming to Edinburgh next month as part of an ambitious project of loans to celebrate the anniversary of London’s National Gallery.

This podcast by Scottish journalist and film-maker Anthony Baxter follows on from You’ve Been Trumped, his award-winning 2011 David and Goliath documentary about the local people protesting the building of Donald Trump’s luxury hotel and golf course at Balmedie in Aberdeenshire. Baxter has made two more films on the subject, and in this podcast he brings it all together alongside new interviews. A great chance to be outraged all over again.

On BBC Radio 4 last Monday morning, while plugging the Today programme’s associated podcast, presenter Nick Robinson said: “I had a letter recently from someone who didn’t even know what a podcast was.” There was amusement in his voice, but though a glance at the calendar revealed the date to be April 1, this was no joke.

Amy McEntee started ballet lessons aged five at the Helen Chambers ballet school in Glasgow. She went on to train with the Dance School of Scotland, Scottish Ballet’s Junior Associate programme, and after leaving school studied dance at the prestigious Central School of Ballet in London. Returning to Scotland, she joined Scottish Ballet in 2017 and is now a First Artist. She can currently be seen performing in the company’s latest production, David Dawson’s re-telling of Swan Lake.

Glasgow’s much-loved People’s Palace museum is soon to close in order for a major (and much-needed) refurbishment to take place. It will result in the attraction being out of action for some years. As a result, locals and tourists are being advised that if they want to visit, they should do so before the shutters come down next month.

“To understand contemporary Scotland you have to really do the Reformation,” says Rona Munro. “The legacy of that is so live. I mean we are really living with the legacy of that in terms of sectarianism and everything, far more than we are with some of the other events which have been shown in the James Plays. So you have to understand where it came from, and from early on I knew this play had to be about the Reformation.”