A Tigger’s guide to northerners

It's 50 years since Joseph Losey's movie liberated British filmmaking. Ahead of a special screening, Geoffrey Macnab considers its legacy

"This song is about drinking... and disaster," frontman John Bramwell drily announces before launching into the astringent "To the Brink".

1. Mormonism.

Luke Wright, Latitude’s Poetry Arena host and co-curator, is one of the UK’s top stand-up poets.

What is a poet's "real" work? Is it the best, canonical poems – the writing he or she is known for? Or is the poet "really" located somewhere else, among the false starts and revisions, both personal and writerly, that produced this canon?

Winter solstice: the longest, darkest night of the year. How better to spend it than with a top soprano, a theatrical knight, and six viols, and where better than in the soft blue gloom of Kings Place? All came with promising baggage: the Fretwork ensemble had just released a remarkable viol-arrangement of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations'; Clare Wilkinson had dazzled us a few days previously with her a cappella exploits with I Fagiolini; and Sir Tom Courtenay – well, we knew where he was coming from. Fretwork would provide instrumental music, Courtenay would give us poems.

The programme notes for Rattle of a Simple Man quote Philip Larkin's poem "Annus Mirabilis" - "Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)..."