BP Zoom named after a Fifties petrol brand used in mopeds are straight from the cabaret/ music-hall tradition

BP Zoom (named after a Fifties petrol brand used in mopeds) are straight from the cabaret/ music-hall tradition. “The characters are based on our natural proclivities,” admits Collins, who, by some sacrilegious quirk, finds himself performing inside Winston Churchill’s frock-coat. Crouched behind the wheel of a curvy Fiat Cinquecento, the portly Mr B (Bernard Collins) purses his lips and peers through his bottle- glasses with the air of a fat gourmande in a sidecar, while his 6ft 8in chum, Mr P (Philippe Martz), keeps a lookout for fresh hazards. The year of opera, 1998, staged not in a city but in the county of Suffolk, was somewhat handicapped by the fact that there is no opera house in Suffolk.

Tyneside did better two years ago as Year of Visual Arts, with Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North.Architecture and design is the last in the series. Perhaps surprisingly, it has attracted the most interest, with 25 cities competing. The Arts Council contribution in each case is a modest pounds 400,000. The rest of the money, if any, is the responsibility of the host city. In Glasgow’s case the total budget is pounds 45m, of which pounds 6m came from Glasgow City Council and the Glasgow Development Agency. The rest has been found from European money, lottery funding, private sector sponsorship and commercial investment.The year involves constructing a demonstration housing area on Glasgow Green, the old heart of the city, which will be the catalyst for redeveloping the area Glasgow Green is where the city started.

The wealthy built mansions here in the 18th century and swiftly abandoned them. The plan allows for the construction of a genuine slice of city, not a suburb in the city centre, and will look at how you build in the city and how the general standard of new housing can be transformed. It is a pointer for the research the government is currently engaged upon, aimed at accommodating the millions of new homes Britain needs on brown-field sites rather than the green belt.We didn’t have the money to build the houses, so we advertised for developers who would be ready to work with the architects we nominated. The homes are now up to seventh-floor level and, when they went on sale at between pounds 55,000 and pounds 135,000, people spent the night queuing for them.By the summer of 1999 more than 100 apartments will have been completed, involving Scottish architects as well as Ushida Findlay’s Tokyo practice and London’s Rick Mather and Ian Ritchie.Half a dozen public spaces are the product of a collaboration between architects, designers, artists and the community. A fund has been established to allow grassroots initiatives to be realised, everything from exhibitions of Sikh banners to flood-lighting water towers.

The Glasgow Collection of design prototypes encourages Glasgow-based manufacturers to use design to expand their product ranges, and Glasgow designers to use the purchasing power of city institutions. A new museum of design, the Lighthouse, will open this summer in what was Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s first public building, the offices of the Glasgow Herald.What makes the project so exciting is the opportunity that working with an entire city brings to deploy the widest possible range of talents. We at Glasgow 1999 have realised a project that will have longevity in its impact. What do I hope people will say at the end of the year-long event? Simply, “It worked.”.

FOR DRAMA students and young unemployed actors it is the perfect part-time job. Free to attend classes or auditions during the day, they are paid about pounds 4 an hour to continue their education in the evening by seeing more experienced performers in action. Granted, they have to sell programmes and help the audience find their seats or the nearest toilet, but there are many more exhausting and less congenial occupations than that of theatre usher. We won’t have realised it at the time, but many of us have had our ticket for a West End show checked by a future star of stage and screen. Jonny Lee Miller, of Trainspotting and Regeneration fame, was on duty at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the early days of Miss Saigon.
Jennifer Pride and Prejudice Ehle may have pointed you to the bar at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue. Long before Inspector Morse, Kevin Whately inspected tickets at the National, as did Simon Callow and Christopher Ecclestone The list goes on.