Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s cultural highlights

In Prescot, one of the UK’s most deprived boroughs, there’s a replica of an Elizabethan cockpit theatre. No one is ever more than a few feet away from the action. It brings Shakespeare to life in a way that makes his words punch through. Actors make a really strong connection with the audience, entering by clambering over seats, and they get people involved in it. It feels a bit like a nightclub atmosphere.

This installation of 100 cast-iron figures on Crosby can be covered by the tide entirely. When halfway submerged, people call the coastguard thinking people are drowning. I run there every morning and it’s amazing how different it is, how it allows me to measure changes in the landscape. A lot of art tries to capture a moment, but with this installation, it’s the other way round: they stay still, but the landscape moves.

This film set in Zambia is incredibly gripping and magical. It feels tense, but I have no clue what’s really going on. I can’t figure out the depths of it at all – there’s something great about watching a film you don’t understand. We don’t talk enough about mystery in art. I love that feeling of being held by a story, in bewilderment and enchantment. Very few film-makers can enchant, but that’s what Rungano Nyoni, who wrote and directed this film, does. I think she’s incredible.

This ad hoc group of musicians do a different Bach cantata in a different Liverpool church every month. It’s like the rave scene in the 1990s: you have to find out where they’re doing it. Formally, every cantata is different from the other, so you never know what you’re going to get. It’s extraordinary, chasing this experience – which always feels brand spanking new – knowing I’m exploring my own city, too. Because the music is performed in a church as part of a Sunday service, it feels alive in a way that it wouldn’t elsewhere.

I’ve been reading this academic book about the impact of austerity, and why it was a shit idea, as I go round early-years settings in my role as children’s laureate. I can feel the impact of austerity: not Brexit or the pandemic – the damage was done before. The loss of Sure Start, for example, hit children hard; the housing crisis has disrupted their lives. Austerity took away youth groups, youth workers, space, playgrounds, stability. It’s good to have the detail in this book.

We’ll go to this cafe near the waterfront on a Saturday morning as a treat when our kids are home (we have seven, and the youngest is 21). It only serves breakfast: just ordinary, familiar food done well. For example, their breakfast pancakes never have that bicarbonate of soda taste to them. And they do an eggs benedict that is unbelievable, because they do it on proper bread instead of a muffin. The eggs are perfection and the bechamel sauce is “wow”.