Newport events: Nerf battles, comedy and food market
Attendees are advised to arrive 15 minutes before their session.
On Sunday, August 3, the Festival of Comedy, headlined by Paul Smith, promises laughs at Coronation Park.
The event, featuring performers like Rob Thomas, Lori Smith, and Eshaan Akbar, will run from midday to 5.30pm.
Tickets start at £30.
For those who enjoy a more leisurely outing, Belle Vue Park's Local Producers Food & Craft Market will be in full swing on Sunday.
Commencing at 11am, the market promises a variety of stalls from local foodies, makers, and creators.
The weekend promises to be a lively one, with activities and events to suit all tastes.
Residents are encouraged to make the most of the weekend, enjoy the events, and support local businesses and talent.
The events are set to take place in various locations around the city, providing an opportunity to explore Newport while enjoying the entertainment.
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South Wales Argus
01-08-2025
- South Wales Argus
Newport events: Nerf battles, comedy and food market
Nerf Battles are set to take place on Saturday, August 2 at The Riverfront basement. Attendees are advised to arrive 15 minutes before their session. On Sunday, August 3, the Festival of Comedy, headlined by Paul Smith, promises laughs at Coronation Park. The event, featuring performers like Rob Thomas, Lori Smith, and Eshaan Akbar, will run from midday to 5.30pm. Tickets start at £30. For those who enjoy a more leisurely outing, Belle Vue Park's Local Producers Food & Craft Market will be in full swing on Sunday. Commencing at 11am, the market promises a variety of stalls from local foodies, makers, and creators. The weekend promises to be a lively one, with activities and events to suit all tastes. Residents are encouraged to make the most of the weekend, enjoy the events, and support local businesses and talent. The events are set to take place in various locations around the city, providing an opportunity to explore Newport while enjoying the entertainment.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- The Guardian
Comedian Paul Smith: ‘I'm not nasty enough.'
At the Hot Water Comedy Club in Liverpool, Paul Smith's standup double-header feels like a pop star's homecoming. Women are wearing his tour T-shirts as dresses and the bar is half a dozen deep with fans hoping to get roasted by the local comic famous for his audience takedowns. There are first-daters, girls' night outs, lads' night outs, tourists, locals, couples, mothers and their grownup sons clamouring for a spot on the front row. On stage, as on social media where his viral show clips from this venue led to international, sell-out-arena fame, Smith is as sweary as they come. During his 75-minute, banter-dense sets, little is out of bounds. So when I sit across from him backstage before the gig, in a room named in his honour, it's a surprise to find a quiet family man who, beyond the moments he relays jokes to me, barely utters a swear word. 'People get really disappointed when they meet me in real life,' says the 42-year-old. 'I'm really quiet. I'm never the biggest personality in a group.' Superficially, his path to comedy appears to have mirrored a modern road to music stardom: from YouTube fame to arena-size deals. In reality, however, he spent 12 years grafting before his first clips went viral on Facebook in 2017. He specialises in crowd work, which is particularly well-suited to bite-size online videos. He had been working in an office when he first entertained the idea of telling jokes on stage. 'I was working as a graphic designer and got a comedy club email saying, 'Do you think you're funny?'' Intrigued, he signed up for the course. 'Until then, I don't think I had the self-esteem to believe I could do it, but I always wanted to.' He became interested in comedy after seeing his first standup, the Irish comic Jason Byrne. 'I couldn't wrap my head around how he just got on stage and seemingly made up the whole hour of standup on the spot and brought the crowd into it,' says Smith. 'I found it fascinating.' Smith also loved Raw, a live recording of one of Eddie Murphy's standup shows, as a kid – 'Dead naughty' – which was passed round school. But it was laconic Irish comedian Dave Allen's laid-back, stretched-out storytelling and outrageous, controversial humour that sparked inspiration. 'When you come to a full show and see my longer-form material, it's a bit slower, like Dave Allen kind of stuff.' When I sit down later at his packed show, Smith will use front-row interactions with a mixed martial artist to tell the story of his 76-second total knockout delivered by reality TV's Jake Quickenden in a 2023 charity fight ('The walkout was longer than the fucking fight … I was button bashing in real life'), and a pregnant woman to describe the birth of his two kids ('Midwives, they're all shoulder'). His rapid and outrageous one-liners – he responds to a doctor's receptionist with 'I'm surprised you fucking answered me then' – generate the biggest laughs. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Does he consider himself offensive? When it comes to swearing, Smith says: 'It's just intonation for your brain. I think it's something to do with the sound, fuck, especially in my accent. Those words are so versatile and useful.' As for content: 'I really care about people. I'm never that bad to the point where they're not enjoying it. I'm not nasty enough. 'There must be a line somewhere,' Smith continues. The best example of navigating the line lies 'with a guy called Ade. It's quite a famous clip,' he says of a moment from a 2021 Birmingham show (which has 840,000 YouTube views) in which he called an audience member lazy for not working, only for the man to reveal he had cancer. 'I went with it, I said: 'You fucking selfish cunt, bringing that up,' and he was pissing himself. Afterwards, I thought: I don't know if that was too far. His daughter messaged, and said: 'That's the first time I've seen him laugh in a year.'' Ade is now a regular at Smith's shows. An early experience of not tackling a taboo came in 2011, when he discovered that a man he called 'rude' for ignoring his banter was, in fact, blind. Smith had tried directing his usual crowd work at him, and took his lack of recognition as an unwillingness to play ball. When he told Smith that he couldn't see, the comedian 'just didn't know how to deal with it. I flapped. I panicked in case he was offended.' The audience member saved it. 'He said: 'Can you do audio description on that?' That taught me a lot. It took a while for me to lean into this stuff.' Smith often makes light of his experiences parenting his 12-year-old disabled son, who is autistic and nonverbal: 'It makes it a bit more relatable when someone brings stuff like that up. One of the first clips I put up about him was how people feel sorry for him but he gets everything he wants. If you don't give him a biscuit, he just screams. Imagine if I tried that – my wife won't give me a blowjob so I just start screaming; it's not gonna work out. 'I got a bit of backlash online and I was like: should I be talking about this? Then I thought: hang on, no; I'm talking about my experience with disability, from a genuine place. I don't think anyone can have a problem with that.' If his son were the butt of someone else's joke, he would feel differently. 'This is why I won't do roast battles,' he says. 'Comedians make dark jokes; one of them will make a joke about my son and I will lose my temper. I know I would react badly.' He can handle jokes aimed at him, though, and like many comedians, being the target of his own comedy was a natural place to start. He opened his first sets with ginger jokes: 'I'm the G word – gorgeous.' Smith's heavily ad-libbed shows vary nightly. He concedes: 'I'm not technically the funniest comedian, I've not technically got the best material. I'm just good for morale.' His 1.2 million Instagram followers testify to the formula – and the power of morale – as does the scale of his year-long Pablo tour, which includes two sold-out shows at OVO arena Wembley, Sydney's 8,000-seater ICC and London's O2, this November. He finds fame 'mad', often leaving his 'more extrovert' wife and fellow comedian Lori Smith to buffer approaches. 'I got stopped in Disney World by a 55-year-old sheriff. How does he even understand what I'm saying?' He is still finding hard to get his head around playing arenas. 'As the shows get bigger, you can't see but you can feel 15,000 people,' he says. 'You can feel a crowd pull away and you can feel a crowd come back to you. If there's a fight in the room, you can feel where it is. It runs through you.' After his first tour, this emotional overload left him feeling depressed. 'Now I realise you're taking all their energy, washing it and giving it back to them. You can't have that up without that corresponding down.' On home turf, the Liverpool crowd is as lively as they come. He could not fail to make them laugh. 'Have you ever been on an OK date?' he says before we part. 'There are crowds where it's like: 'That was fine, I was fine, you were fine, but we're never gonna call each other again.' What you want is: 'We're getting breakfast together tomorrow.' That's the crowd you want.' And as his crowd head back into the bar – the first daters, the girls, the lads and the tourists – they all look set to stay for the morning after. Paul Smith: Pablo is touring the UK and Ireland, with its final show at the O2, London, on 13 November.
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- The Guardian
‘We had therapists on standby': Chris Tarrant on making Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire?
I was responsible for the schedule. I'd listened to Chris Tarrant doing this game on the radio – Double or Quits – which was brilliant. I was intrigued by its TV version, called Cash Mountain, because it was well known in the industry that various people had turned it down. I invited the producer, Paul Smith, to pitch the full idea to me and Claudia Rosencrantz, ITV's controller of entertainment. My main worry was: how likely was it to bankrupt the network? Four multiple-choice answers seemed too easy. I played the game with Paul in the office, with Claudia as my phone-a-friend, and quickly realised that as the amount of money at stake got higher, more and more doubt crept in. 'We're not going to call it Cash Mountain. I think that's a terrible name,' I said. 'Let's call it Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' It's the title of a song written by Cole Porter for the 1956 film High Society. I agreed to commission it, so long as we could do a non-broadcast pilot. It was clear that the quiz never really drew to an end: one contestant would win or lose, then another comes on and does the same thing. There was no natural climax. So I thought we should launch it as a strip – on every night – to maximise the drama. Initially I was going to schedule it at 7pm, but I already had Emmerdale working well at five times a week at 7pm, so I decided to go for broke and play it at 8pm, in the hope that the tension of someone potentially winning a million quid would create gripping prime-time drama. Rather brilliantly, it did very well and became a hit within its first week. Because everyone was talking about it, the ratings got bigger, and we had a phenomenon on our hands. Then the whole world recognised that what was happening in Britain was quite extraordinary – and everybody wanted their own version. I was at Capital Radio presenting the breakfast show, and also doing the clip show Tarrant on TV. David Briggs, my former producer at Capital, had left to seek his fortune on TV. We'd done a game on the radio called Double or Quits, where your pound doubled with every correct answer. Briggsy said over a lunch one day: 'I'm trying to turn it into a TV format.' I was so bloody busy, up at 5am, I only did the pilot as a favour. We shot it in July. The producer Paul Smith said: 'It needs more menace.' Composers Keith Strachan and his son Matthew were given 24 hours to rewrite the music, all those stings and 'Da da das …' so we could shoot a second pilot straight away. We knew the prizes had to go up fast. Nobody would say: 'Better not put the kettle on in case somebody wins a quid.' It was my job to add tension. The prize was a cheque, so I'd say: 'We don't want to give you that …' The pauses were added to really milk the tension. The show was filmed the day before, with rough spots where we needed to break to the adverts. I'd deliberately choose the most dramatic places to cut to commercials, usually between the contestant giving their final answer and me saying whether it was correct. I always wondered if, when the first person played for a million, I'd still have the guts to say: 'We'll take a break.' But I did when Judith Keppel was on her way to winning the first million, and she looked at me like: 'You bastard!' Briggsy said it was about the shoutabilty: people shouting at the television. My screen didn't show the answer. Even if I did know the answer, I'd taught myself to do this really gormless face, not even raising an eyebrow. I remember one contestant, this really nice guy, a fireman. His £500,000 question was: which of Henry VIII's wives did Holbein paint a portrait of? It's weird what you remember from school. I was thinking: 'For fuck's sake, just say Anne of Cleves.' He didn't answer and settled on £250,000. I'd have bet a million quid I was right. The press thought winning such high amounts of money would ruin people's lives. We had therapists on standby, but no one who won £500,000 said: 'Take me to my therapist.' Before the first show, I was in my dressing room with my wife and manager. I said to them both: 'Do you mind giving me 10 minutes?' I must have thought: 'You better take this one seriously, mate. It might go big.' The Grand Tour had just gone from weekly to two specials a year, freeing up a lot of time. Wayne Garvie, president of Sony Pictures Television and an old mate from the BBC, had worked out he owned the rights to Millionaire, and asked if would I like to host it. Kevin Lygo, the managing director of ITV Studios, said: 'That sounds like good idea.' I signed on the dotted line right there. We went through a couple of runs on a laptop in my office. Before I knew it, I was learning how to use the Autocue in the TV studios in Manchester. The main problem is that the Autocue is so far away, I've had to start wearing spectacles. I didn't think I needed to stamp my personality on the show. I thought: 'Chris Tarrant did a pretty good job. I just have to do what he was doing.' One of the new things was the 'Ask the host' lifeline. I don't think there's any shame in not knowing about Greek mythology or tiramisu. Sometimes you luck out. I was asked: 'What was the first American spaceship to orbit the Earth?' I knew it was Friendship Seven, and thought: 'I'm going to look like an absolute genius.' Other times you're asked, 'What's a four-legged animal that barks?', don't know the answer, and feel like an idiot. Donald Fear is the only person who has won a million on my watch. He was unbelievably cool. The million-pound question was something about pirates that I didn't know, even though I'd just done a programme about pirates, but he knew it was Blackbeard. I'm supposed to wear hearing aids these days – I'm deaf as well as blind – but people would assume it was an earpiece and I'm feeding people the answers, so I thought I'd better not. These days you can even get spectacles that translate any language in real time. Presumably you could use similar technology to help you answer various questions, but they have an independent adjudicator to spot any anomalies like that. How the coughing thing ever happened was incredible. When you watch it, you think: they must have known something odd was going on. It's a show I really look forward to. I get up with a spring in my step when I think: 'I'm off to ask people what the capital of Ecuador is.' It's great. I get to sit in a nice, warm chair and make people happy. You can't ask much more than that.
