Whitby's Fish and Ships Festival going virtual - here's a taste of the 40 videos you can see

Coming to a screen near you this weekend via the Discover Yorkshire Coast You Tube channel will be around 40 videos to view and enjoy, personally recorded and edited by local businesses and organisations passionate about Whitby’s maritime and fishing heritage and the widely celebrated fish and seafood industry the town is proud of today.

Contributors include Pannett Art Gallery, Whitby Museum, Captain Cook Museum, Magpie Café, Quayside Fisheries, Whitby Sea Festival, Scarborough Borough Council’s harbour team and North Yorkshire County Council’s Whitby Library.

Richard Grainger’s Whitby Sea Festival group is set to perform its new musical composition, Chips and Fish and year nine students from Caedmon College will join them for the song Old Whitby Town.

For a taste of the scrumptious there are cooking demonstrations from Magpie Café, and Quayside’s fascinating video gives a ‘behind the scenes’ view of the journey from the fish

merchants, to fish filleting, making the batter and peeling the potatoes to produce their fish and chips.

Actor, Steve Huison, best known as Lomper in the 1997 film, The Full Monty, and for his role as Eddie Windass in Coronation Street, will narrate the videos from Pannett Art Gallery.

The art gallery has also produced a slide show of some of their famous paintings set to a local Whitby sea song.

Captain Cook Museum shows off its exhibits and the tale of Jolly Jane Tar, a girl who went to sea, wonderfully performed by Bidi Iredale.

There are also children’s reactions to items found on Captain Cook’s voyage and demonstrations on how to make an underwater coral scene and how to measure longitude and latitude.

Whitby Library shows an interview from the archives with renowned photographic artist Frank Meadow Sutcliffe.

Children can learn how to make an Origami boat and listen to Liz Million’s stories.

Whitby Museum’s video looks at Scoresby’s Arctic and their amazing fossil collection.

A video about Whitby Harbour from Scarborough Borough Council’s Harbour Master is a modified Zoom presentation; demonstrating how something relatively mundane can be

adapted to form an engaging and informative video guide.

You can also enjoy Price of a Fish Supper, a one-act, one man play, written by playwright Catherine Czerkawska, where ex-fisherman Rab tells his riveting story of love, rivalry and disaster, which echoes the wider economy of the place where he lives and the coast on which he once worked.

The virtual festival replaces this year’s actual festival, previously ruled out by organisers at a time when there was no guarantee the event would be able to go ahead due to Covid-19

restrictions. It is hoped the festival will physically return to Whitby, bigger and better, in May 2022.

Janet Deacon, Scarborough Borough Council Tourism and Culture Manager, said: “The entertaining and informative videos they’ve produced are intended to give a taste of Whitby and the often surprising things the town has to offer."