Table of contents for 2/24/2025 in The Big Issue

I like shrinkflation stories. It’s the unalloyed fury they unleash. They come in earnest around Christmas. Somebody will find a box of Celebrations or a multi-pack of Mars bars and rant about the size. They are too small. There are too few inside, there are TOO MANY BOUNTY BARS – and they’re the same price as before. IT’S THE END OF DAYS!! The contents may diminish but the interest in hashing out the stories remains bullish – a seasonal essential. Get ready for a rash of them. There is a global coca shortage. Stockpiles, according to the International Cocoa Organization, are just over a third lower than at the same time last year. This will raise prices, which is probably good for some cocoa merchants, but less good if you’re…

I think I am being driven into the early 19th century as a kind of defence from the surrounding confusions thrown up by contemporary politics. Sorry about that, but I seem to have developed a passion for Jane Austen and have read books by her and about her recently. I have even tried my hand at writing one. I am sure that this is what human beings do when they feel challenged: they try to disappear into the undergrowth rather than face up to the big issues of everyday life. This is certainly the reason people take to drink and drugs – because life just gets too hard to handle. Recently I passed through a group of drunken and offensive people shouting and threatening each other. They were all in…

“I had no idea that he existed. Or that anyone like him existed. This man from Jamaica, who came to London to be a lion tamer and became a boxer…” Actor Malachi Kirby is sitting with co-star Stephen Graham at the Café Royal Hotel in London – the exact place where the original Queensberry Rules for boxing were established in 1867. And he still looks stunned by the true story of Hezekiah Moscow, the man he plays in new Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows. “In terms of how it has been documented, you only see black people of that era in servitude or enslaved,” continues Kirby. “So that was the fascination. Because you don’t hear these stories.” You couldn’t make up Moscow’s story. And luckily, writer Steven Knight didn’t have…

REVIEWS The love we Cher Cher is cool, funny, smart and resilient. This much becomes abundantly clear in Cher: The Memoir, Part One, an absorbing account of one woman’s gradual rise from near Dickensian poverty to pop and TV superstardom in tandem with a man she loved. It’s essentially the story of her abiding bond with two of the most important people in her life: her beloved mother Georgia Holt, a jobbing Hollywood actor who never quite made it, and Sonny Bono, the songwriter/producer and Phil Spector lackey who recognised teenage Cher’s innate talent. Despite an unstable childhood spent with Holt and a series of surrogate fathers (her biological “deadbeat father” was a heroin addict who abandoned his family; Holt briefly had to place her daughter in a children’s home),…

THE LAST LAUGH Echoes of the funny men It’s 25 December 1972. I’m six years old and I sit cross-legged on the brown swirly carpet, in front of the television. There are two men on the screen in brown suits. One of them, the tall, funny one with the glasses, is holding a 12ft-long comedy leg. I look around the room and my whole family is doubled up laughing. We are not alone. It’s the same in millions of households up and down the country. During the 1970s, The Morecambe and Wise Show brought the nation together in collective hysteria. At 8.55pm on Christmas Day 1977, a staggering 28 million people, half the UK population at the time, sat down to tune in to BBC1 to watch Eric and Ernie…

BRIAN AUGER Key figure After 60 years in the business, Brian Auger, keyboardist, composer, ferocious Hammond organ player and commander of the Oblivion Express, seems to finally be getting his flowers. This is in part due to the gradual reissuing of his vast back catalogue by his friend, manager and Soul Bank label boss Greg Boraman over the past few years. “His amazing body of work has never had a higher profile, and all manner of superfans have voiced their love for his music,” Boraman tells me. “From Elton John and Andy Summers of The Police to younger artists like hip-hop giant 9th Wonder, Emma-Jean Thackray and Rebecca Vasmant.” It’s not that music fans or fellow artists were unaware of Auger’s music, more that he has been so prolific as…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Change can come Each year I look forward to the Changemakers issue [1651, 27 January-02 February], because it is so inspiring to read how ordinary people have given their time to make a positive difference to people’s lives. It gives you hope for humanity. I believe you should send an issue to every MP in Westminster, so they read what these incredible Changemakers are doing for the benefit of their communities and in most cases, costing very little. Therefore, just think of what impact they could have with a little bit of government funding. Come on Labour, stop trying to reinvent the wheel, when the solutions are contained in this…

When I first started researching the late great British mining industry, I found the affection with which it was still held, despite its obvious shortcomings, bewildering. Some suggested that such attitudes were sheer “smokestack nostalgia”. However, after speaking to over 100 former miners, it became clear to me that there was something more at play. As someone who once got trapped in a faulty lift for what felt like an eternity, I find it hard to imagine a worse workplace than a coal mine. In The Road to Wigan Pier, his 1936 account of the industrial north of England, George Orwell presented a hellish vision of the conditions miners faced underground, with “heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air and, above all, unbearably cramped space”. Memorials to lives lost in the…

Six guest curators including Hannah Tilson, Gemma Padley and Marta Marsicka have chosen an array of miniature postcard-sized original artworks by all-female identifying artists to be bid upon as part of Art on a Postcard’s annual International Women’s Day Auction. The bidding starts at just £50 and 100% of money raised will go to the Hepatitis C Trust. The trust will use funds raised to continue its important work in women’s prisons, where many test positive for hepatitis C, and the majority of women affected or at risk of hepatitis C are marginalised and often face complex multiple needs. The colourful artwork pictured, titled Pink Study, will be among the postcards auctioned. It’s by Elizabeth Power, a St Leonards on Sea based painter whose work incorporates themes such as memory,…

Standing at the top of a mountain in Antarctica can change the way we see the world. The more we look, we find that polar regions reveal how dramatically our planet can change and, at the same time, give us glimpses into our future. Bedrock rises through the ice in places, making for summit vistas that extend uninterrupted across the polar ice cap for hundreds of miles. But from where I stood during my expedition, there is a view inside the rocks that is every bit as awe inspiring as the drama of the landscape. Here, sediments were formed in tropical rivers and lakes 380 million years ago. Among the grains in the rock lie fossilised remains of sharks and fish that are closely related to us in evolution. The…

Fats Timbo’s star is on the rise. She has three million followers on TikTok, has modelled for Vogue and is a growing presence on our TV screens, thanks to her wit and charisma. And she is doing it all while standing up for the black disabled community. But being different has not always been easy. Born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, she was relentlessly bullied growing up, and had to rely on humour as a defence mechanism. “As a teenager, you want to be accepted by people. I’d often be confused why people didn’t like me, and overcompensate within friendships, and people would take advantage of that,” Timbo says. She recalls a distressing incident where a group of boys picked her up and put her in a bin, as…

When Futureheads singer Barry Hyde was commissioned by Sunderland City Council to create an album detailing the cultural heritage of the northeast coalfields, he started mining local history and unearthed a rich seam of balladry, poetry, folklore and storytelling. He also found a personal connection to a mining tragedy from 1882 “A friend of mine, Keith Gregson, who is a historian, discovered that some of my ancestors were killed in the Trimdon Grange explosion in 1882. So this commissioned album became even more personal,” says Hyde, when he calls Big Issue from his pub, The Peacock, in Sunderland. What began as a three-minute piece of music, then a 25-minute live performance, is now an album. And next, it looks like it’s going to be a musical. “Researching the album was…

I think I was a happy boy when I was born. Then, well, my parents were very severe and they didn’t love me very much. I think I can say that. There was one thing that my younger self wanted and that was making music and making people happy. I think I like to make people happy now because I was not so happy when I was young. I was the third of six children and we were all encouraged into music from an early age. I tried all sorts of instruments and the violin won. I was five years old when I started to play the violin and my first teacher was an 18-year-old blonde girl. That’s good for a little boy. I fell in love with her, so…

REVIEW Showing out She will forever be synonymous with Baywatch but Pamela Anderson only joined the daft, sun-dappled 1990s lifeguard drama in its third season. Her character CJ is introduced as a capable outdoors type living in the mountains, first glimpsed skillfully navigating some wild rapids in a canoe. But by the time David Hasselhoff ’s beefcake Mitch catches up with her, CJ is posing in a skimpy top honking away tunelessly on a saxophone. It’s a scene framed for laughs. Check out the gorgeous blonde bombshell struggling to expand her artistic horizons. Or even more reductively: we love looking at you Pammy, do we really have to listen to you as well? That seemed to set the template for Anderson, even as the former Playboy model helped propel Baywatch…

On the last train from Ludlow, I notice that one of my knuckles is squeaking. I know why. The day before I punched eight melons (galia, honeydew, water), a cabbage, a lettuce, a coconut and three tomatoes. It was for scientific and slapstick research. My Edinburgh Fringe show of 2023, MELONS, began with me drawing the face of Vernon Kay on a melon as Nick Cave’s Jubilee Street played, before punching it to a pulp and singing Mustang Sally. Variety is very much alive. As I was hosting many events for Bristol’s Slapstick festival, I suggested to the organiser that I create a show where I punch various melons while a material scientist, Mark Miodownik, explains the different properties that make them splatter as they do. The nervous venue asked…

MARIA, 39 I’ve sold Big Issue for two years now. I started because I didn’t have a stable job and I needed some extra help. I’m actually really pleased with how things are going at the moment on my pitch. It’s pretty good for me here. The people are really nice to me and they are understanding and they help me where they can. They buy the magazines every day from me so that’s quite helpful and they have a little talk with me. Having a chat with them really makes your day when you’re a bit down. Selling the magazine in the winter can be a bit harder when it is colder, but I still go to my pitch because I still need the support. I do enjoy selling…