Each week, Ben Hopkinson looks back at a serious, crazy, and happy news story from the past week.
Serious News
Greenwich is about to be the location for London’s largest theatre, as plans for a 3,000-seat venue were given the green light.
Troubadour Theatres (who have similar venues in Wembley Park and Canary Wharf) will operate the event space which will be located on the eastern part of the Greenwich Peninsula.
There will be two auditoriums which will host 1,500 people and is set to overtake the 2,359 London Coliseum found in the West End.
The planning permission was granted for a temporary period of 10 years, which will then see the land follow the Greenwich Peninsula Masterplan and be home to tower blocks for residential use.
Sylvia Williams, of the Greenwich Millennium Village Residents' Association, says the venue will be a “welcome addition” to culture and wants schools to use the theatre too.
Crazy News
A cash point in Manchester was seen with a login screen for an operating software which was first released in 2009.
Unable to enter Windows 7 (which ended support in 2020) due to the account and password details needing to be entered on a numeric keypad, the cash point looked pretty useless at its job.
Even though there are no more security patches, this is a pretty common thing in the technology world – airplanes and trains use floppy disks to update their onboard computers and we all saw what happened globally back in 2024 with the Crowdstrike outage.
Happy News
A London filmmaker has patented a wheelchair camera system.
Believed to be the first of its kind, Chris Lynch from Stratford teamed up with engineers from Tilta – a company specialising in cinematography equipment – which will allow filming to become more accessible. A Steadicam is attached to the wheelchair with a mount, with a control panel then placed on the operator’s lap.
The invention has already been put to the test in productions on both Channel 4 and the BBC, Paralympic Homecoming and In the Driving Seat respectively.
Speaking of the device, Lynch says: “Filming wasn't accessible, so I decided to create a camera system that could be not only be viewed as a gateway to disabled filmmakers, but a product that would add production value to any set. I wanted to make more of these wheelchair operated cameras and show aspiring disabled film-makers that production is possible for them”.
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