Culture
During the summer of 2010, the television production company Wall to Wall filmed a series for BBC One in the town centre which was broadcast from 2 November 2010. Called Turn Back Time - The High Street, the series features a number of families running traditional bakers, butchers, grocers, and dressmakers shops, as well as a tea room, as they would have been during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, during World War II, and in the 1960s and 1970s.
A town fete called Collett Day is held in June in the town's Collett Park. Two annual agricultural shows are held close to the town: the four-day Royal Bath and West Show, which is held at the showground of the Royal Bath and West of England Society near Evercreech, 2.5 mi (4.0 km) south-east of the town, while the one-day Mid-Somerset Show is held on fields on Shepton Mallet's southern edge. Other events held at the Bath and West Showground include the New Wine and Soul Survivor festivals, the Shepton Mallet International Antiques & Collectors' Fair, the National Amateur Gardening Show and the National Adventure Sports Show.
The Glastonbury Festival, the largest music festival in Europe, is held in the village of Pilton, approximately 2.5 miles (4.0 km) south-west of Shepton Mallet. The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was held at Shepton Mallet in 1970. The town also hosts the annual Shepton Mallet Digital Arts Festival which was founded in 2009.
In 2007, The Amulet complex in the town centre became the base for the Bristol Academy of Performing Arts (BAPA), and the complex was renamed The Academy. In 2009, BAPA went into administration and was briefly replaced by the Musical Theatre School, before that also failed. The complex's auditorium has the only suspended seating system in the United Kingdom.
The town's weekly newspaper, part of the Mid Somerset Series, is called the Shepton Mallet Journal. The town is also covered by the Fosse Way Magazine and Mendip Times.
In 2007, Shepton Mallet came to international attention when Westcountry Farmhouse Cheesemakers broadcast the maturation of a round of Cheddar cheese called Wedginald, an event that attracted more than 1.5 million viewers.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)