Media and Culture
Since 1974 Winchester has hosted the annual Hat Fair, a celebration of street theatre that includes performances, workshops, and gatherings at several venues around the city.
Winchester is the home of the award-winning Blue Apple Theatre, an inclusive company of actors with and without learning disability.
Winchester hosts one of the UK's largest and most successful farmers' markets, with close to – or over – 100 stalls, and is certified by FARMA. The farmers' market takes place on the second and last Sunday monthly in the town centre.
Three newspapers are published for Winchester. The paid-for broadsheet Hampshire Chronicle, which started out in 1772 reporting national and international news, now concentrates on Winchester and the surrounding area. There are also two free tabloid-sized papers for the city: the Winchester News Extra and the Mid-Hants Observer.
Winchester had its own radio station, Win FM, from October 1999 to October 2007.
In 2003 Winchester was ranked 5th in a league of 50 'crap towns' in the UK nominated by readers of The Idler magazine. In the 2006, however, the Channel 4 television programme The Best And Worst Places To Live In The UK, broadcast on 26 October, the city was celebrated as the "Best Place in the UK to Live in: 2006". In the 2007 edition of the same programme, Winchester had slipped to second place, behind Edinburgh.
A number of public figures and celebrities were students at Peter Symonds College in Winchester, including TV presenter and model Alexa Chung, Andy Burrows - singer/song writer and drummer of band Razorlight, glamour model Lucy Pinder and comedian Jack Dee.
The Punk Rock singer-song writer Frank Turner comes from Winchester, a fact that he often mentions at concerts as well as in his songs. The band Polly and the Billets Doux formed in Winchester, and are still based there now. Actor Colin Firth is from Winchester and was educated at Montgomery of Alamein School (now Kings' School).
2011 saw Winchester's first ever Oxjam Takeover music festival, on 22 October.
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Famous quotes containing the words media and/or culture:
“Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so—called educational system, which is nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one’s ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the “educational system” are the prime sources of racism in the United States.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)