Barry Didcock

Senior features writer

Former feature writer and music editor of The Scotsman, former arts editor and features editor of the Sunday Herald, sometime contributor to BBC Radio Scotland on (variously) music, films, visual art and pirates.

Former feature writer and music editor of The Scotsman, former arts editor and features editor of the Sunday Herald, sometime contributor to BBC Radio Scotland on (variously) music, films, visual art and pirates.

Latest articles from Barry Didcock

The Thick Of It's sweary Scottish actor to star in story of cult Scots band

Wishaw-born actor Paul Higgins first grabbed the attention as Peter Capaldi’s even swearier Scottish sidekick Jamie McDonald in political satire The Thick Of It, and followed that with high-profile roles in much-loved BBC drama Line Of Duty and cult Channel 4 hit Utopia. Most recently he played Struan Loy alongside Gary Oldman and fellow Scot Jack Lowden in award-winning spy drama Slow Horses. A member of the original 2006 cast of National Theatre of Scotland smash hit Black Watch (Lowden featured in the 2010 revival), Higgins returns to the stage this month to star in one-man show This Is Memorial Device.

Sport? It's so male dominated it's such turn off

Choreographer and dancer Christine Devaney is the founder of performance company Curious Seed, whose work has toured to Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Norway. This month she takes her award-winning blend of dance and storytelling And The Birds Did Sing on the road for a Scottish tour with dates in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cumbernauld, Aberdeen, Findhorn, Stirling and St Andrews.

The lost women of the movies rediscovered

Ask the average filmgoer to list the greats of the Silent Era and they’d manage Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, of course. They might even name a director or two – king of the historical epic Cecil B DeMille, perhaps, or DW Griffiths, whose 1915 film The Birth Of A Nation is both hailed as a technical landmark for American cinema and decried for its explicit racism.

Edinburgh International Festival: Here is what you need to know now

August is festival month in Edinburgh, with hundreds of thousands of locals and visitors enjoying arts events and performances across Scotland’s capital. First out of the blocks with the unveiling of its programme is usually the city’s flagship event, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), and so it has proved again this year.

The Scot who took on Trump: 'I see parallels with him and Logan Roy in Succession'

Anthony Baxter is a journalist and BAFTA-winning documentary film maker who started his career in radio before moving to the BBC where he worked in factual programming. He is best known as the director of You’ve Been Trumped, the 2011 documentary which follows the construction of Donald Trump’s luxury golf course and hotel complex on a site of special scientific interest at Balmedie in Aberdeenshire. In the teeth of legal action from Trump’s lawyers he took aim at the same subject and at Big Golf in general in a 2014 follow-up, A Dangerous Game, and once more in You’ve Been Trumped Too, released to coincide with the 2016 American election He has now turned the entire of saga of Trump’s business association with Scotland into a new BBC podcast, Trumped, featuring updates alongside archive material.