On TV

Alive: Back To The Andes (five)

WHEN Cilla Black had a number one hit with Anyone Who Had A Heart, little did we know she was singing about one of her favourite foods.

Growing up in Liverpool during rationing, her mother had to be resourceful in putting food on the table. Offal was the answer. No part of the beast went to waste. Hearts, brains, feet, tails, liver and tongues of animals were affordable and tasty food.

Cilla's love for such food remains. Cooking liver and bacon, she declared that everyone should have offal once a week. Or to misquote Dick Emery's catchphrase, "Ooh, you are offal, but I like you".

The recipe for the Eating With series is simple but effective, combining the life story of a celebrity with their food likes over the years.

Cilla introduced us to the odd combination of Oxo and oranges. She'd rub the cube on half an orange and suck the result. It got her into trouble because, as a Catholic, the slightest taste of meat on a Friday was a sin, and Oxo counted because it was a meat cube.

As a successful pop singer, she was thrown into a world of hotel room service and fancy restaurants, where Beatle George Harrison introduced her to avocados by ordering it as a starter. Today, she still loves avocado with prawns.

Her late husband Bobby Willis was a better cook than her, although one Sunday lunch ended in disaster after she criticised his crackling ("yer crackling had got to crackle") and failure to stuff the joint like her mother used to do. "Stuff you and stuff your mother," he shouted, opening the door and throwing the meal over the balcony of their flat.

Today, offal is an expensive, much sought-after delicacy. Cilla visited a restaurant that charges £15 for a plate of animal innards that her mother used to buy for a few pence.

The only food on the menu in Alive: Back To The Andes was raw meat. It should have been human flesh but even celebrities draw the line at eating each other for the sake of ratings.

An intriguing mix of celebrities - Adam Rickitt, Carole Caplin, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Lord Frederick Windsor - are recreating the ten-day trek in the Andes made by plane crash survivors 33 years ago.

As we watch their efforts, real life survivors recall their horrific ordeal after an aircraft carrying an amateur rugby team crashed in the Andes.

The bit the celebrities can't recreate is eating their dead companions, as the original survivors did to stay alive. They've been given raw meat instead which is particularly hard on ex-Corrie star and prospective Tory MP Rickitt as he's a vegetarian.

Survivors told how they took the decision to eat the corpses of their companions because, as one said, "Protein was in the muscles of our friends, it's the energy you need."

Survivor Nando Parrado had no doubt what others would do in similar circumstances: "One hundred per cent of people watching would do the same thing."

La Boheme, Sunderland Empire

THE first thing that struck me about this production, from the Chisinau National Opera through Ellen Kent and Opera International, was the youthfulness of the cast. They looked as though they really could be living through the days spent in their freezing attic, sharing whatever they had and always hoping Fate would propel them to fame and fortune.

Irina Vinogradova as Mimi is pretty and convincingly fragile with a pleasing vibrato in her voice and Ruslan Zinevych's Rodolfo swings between ecstatic declarations of love for her and cold indifference. The audience knows, of course, that he's so in love that he's prepared to let Mimi go rather than see her health deteriorate in their unheated room.

Elena Gherman is outstanding as the flirty Musetta, getting all she can from the men in her life and yet prepared to give anything to help the dying Mimi. The singing was wonderful and the wild dancing and carousing in the local hotspot when the friends came into a bit of money was beautifully contrasted with the freezing despair of their everyday life.

The children from local Stagecoach schools acquitted themselves very well, as always, with one shy lad even singing a bit in Italian.

But it's the romance and the pathos that La Boheme is really all about; the beautiful and moving aria Your Tiny Hand is Frozen can't fail to bring a lump to the throat. At the moment of Mimi's death there's a telling silence during which I distinctly heard a sob in the audience.

l Runs until Saturday (Tonight is Verdi's Rigoletto). Box office 0870 6021130

Sue Heath

Old Big 'Ead, The Spirit Of The Man, Billingham Forum Theatre

IT doesn't sound like a promising idea at first... Football legend Brian Clough receives a message from an angel and comes back from the dead to help pen a play about Robin Hood? But somehow writer Steven Lowe pulls together this bizarre scenario and merges the worlds of theatre and football to create a hilarious tribute to the great man. Complete in green sweater and with plenty of Cloughisms delivered in that familiar deadpan drawl, actor Colin Tarrant is eerily like the Middlesbrough-born former Nottingham Forest manager. This time it's not footballers who are on the other end of his outspoken advice but a team of actors who need knocking into shape. It's a very funny and clever script with plenty of laughs.

John Lloyd Fillingham is superb as the disbelieving thesp, Jimmy, who hates football but has to admit Brian's blunt words are just what a bunch of luvvies need. It's certainly not your typical football play - as Jimmy points out, there are no slow-mo pitch scenes with three actors waving scarves and trying to look like a crowd - thankfully. The grand finale is unashamedly cheesy though as Cloughie's head appears in the middle of a football pitch singing My Way.

Regrets? He's had a few - mainly not scoring the England job. But you don't have to be a footfall fan to appreciate the humour of this play and to enjoy the spirit of this working class hero.

l Runs until Saturday. Box Office: (01642) 552663. Sunderland Empire April 20-22. Box Office: 0870 602 1130

Michelle Hedger