Our last First Friday of 2012 is… Nigel Kneale’s The Year of The Sex Olympics

The BBC first broadcast The year of the Sex Olympics in 1968. Nigel Kneale (author of the Quatermass series) wrote it, it starred Leonard Rossiter and an almost unimaginably young Brian Cox, and it predicted reality-TV nearly 30 years before Big Brother arrived. In the play’s dystopian future the underclass are kept pacified by lowest-common-denominator TV – porn, cookery shows, and a reality show where strangers are stranded on a remote island.

And we’ve decided it’s the perfect way to round off this Olympic year. Join us for a rare screening on 7 December. Lights down and curtain up at 6.30pm.

GEEK 2013: Hide&Seek to curate launch event; order your limited-edition ticket vouchers

Picture credit: Mike Massaro

We’ve signed up a guest curator for opening night…

We’re beavering away like, well, beavers to make GEEK2013 bigger and better than GEEK2012. So we’re delighted that Alex Fleetwood of game design studio Hide&Seek has agreed to guest-curate the opening event.

Hide&Seek believe that play – as a theme, a way of being, and design tool – is integral to understanding how culture will develop in the 21st century. And they’ve done some fascinating things, like their 99 Tiny Games for the 2012 Olympics, and their Drunk Dungeon game for New York University’s Game Center. We don’t know what to expect, but we know you’ll want to join in.

…and you can buy Xmas GEEK vouchers now

We’re releasing bespoke ticket vouchers to 50 lucky gift givers – and just in time for Xmas. Just call +44 (0)1843 282 219, tell us what you need, pay for it, and we’ll send you a voucher with your gift-ee’s name on it.

Our coworking space will help seaside-loving Amy Lamé develop her ‘turns’

Our coworking space is home to independent workers who want a flexible way to have as little, or as much, work space as they want. And it’s a place to get a dash of inspiration, a seaborne whiff of what-could-be.

Which is why Amy Lamé has chosen Marine Studios for a creative retreat. The Huffington Post described her recent one-woman show Unhappy Birthday as ‘a fantastically entertaining, retro throwback of a knees up’.

But while Amy’s a writer/producer/presenter/performer and a nightclub promoter, she’s never done a ‘turn’. So she and her seaside-loving producer, Scottee, have booked in to develop a few ‘turns’ (music-hall lingo for a short performance) to follow up on their success with Unhappy Birthday.

You can catch Amy at the Tom Thumb Theatre on 17 February at a charity performance of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for the Oasis Women’s’ Refuge.

A rainforest entry for The Great Tree

Our first AIC3 entry lumbers in...

We’ve had our first entry for Adventures in Comics 3 (AIC3), all the way from Sarawak, Malaysia. Sarawak has vast areas of lowland and highland rainforest, but one of the highest deforestation rates in Asia. Maybe the brief for AIC3, The Great Tree, struck a chord.