Midweek - 04/08/2010

This week Libby Purves is joined by Shazia Mirza, Jeff Goldblum, Cecilie Skog and Bill Tidy. Shazia Mirza is an award winning stand up comedian, writer and Guardian columnist. Her routines concentrate on her upbringing, relationships and religion. In her latest show, 'Multiple Choice', at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she reveals her conclusions about dating and relationships and along the way casts light on other dark recesses of her life so far. Jeff Goldblum is an American actor who is well known face from such popular films as The Fly, Jurassic Park and Independence Day. He is currently appearing on the West End stage in Neil Simon's play 'The Prisoner of Second Avenue' which is at the Vaudeville Theatre. He stars with Mercedes Ruehl and they play a Manhattan couple who are tipped over the edge by his character Mel's unemployment, economic downturn, a burglary and a summer garbage strike. Cecilie Skog is a Norwegian adventurer who was the first woman to summit the tallest peaks on all seven continents including Mount Everest and Mt Kilimanjaro, and reach both the North and South Poles. Two years ago she was on an expedition to K2 in which her husband Rolf Bae lost his life, along with ten other climbers, the biggest single disaster in K2's history. To mark the second anniversary of the disaster, a book 'No Way Down - Life and Death on K2' by Graham Bowley is published by Penguin/Viking. Bill Tidy is the much-loved and celebrated cartoonist best known for 'The Cloggies' and 'The Fosdyke Saga', cartoon strips which revel in their northern working-class settings, tripe and all. The latter was famously dropped from The Daily Mirror by Robert Maxwell in 1985, but Bill has recently revived it online.