00:00This week in Leeds, Leeds International Festival of Ideas 2025 is back behind me in Leeds Playhouse.
00:06We will be going through 11 events with 48 different speakers and 5,000 people coming along to listen to conversation,
00:14listen to keynote speeches and panel events, addressing all manner of important social issues that we're all talking about at work and at home to our friends and family.
00:24Some that we're frustrated by, some that we're inspired by.
00:26Finding hope in creativity. Music is medicine.
00:30It's about the power of the arts, and in this case, music in particular, to really transform the lives of people living with dementia.
00:38And we're going to hear from our dementia choir, who featured on a number of BBC television documentaries with the brilliant Vicky McClure.
00:46Now, we know Vicky is an actress, line of duty, just sensational, very good singer as well.
00:51But the common link for all of us who are involved is dementia is personal to her through a grandparent.
00:58It's personal to me through my mum. It's very personal to the third member of our panel, Dr. Nicky Taylor as well, who's a dementia expert.
01:06And the choir are going to sing for us.
01:07And as we come in, we're going to be serenaded by a fabulous guy called Duncan Goodwin.
01:12He's now in his early 80s. He lives with dementia.
01:14And he was one of the finalists on Channel 4's The Piano.
01:17So it's a really lovely evening in store.
01:21One of the objectives of Liffey is what we'd refer to as Place Marketing Festival.
01:25So that is very much about singing the song, showing off Leeds, showing the cleverness, the innovation, the bravery of the personality of Leeds,
01:33and shouting about it confidently and with an exciting angle to it.
01:36So that's kind of what Liffey's doing for the brand of Leeds as a city.
01:40We are an incredibly inventive, incredibly innovative and creative city.
01:44But sometimes if you want other places to know you and think you're a certain thing, you have to tell them.
01:50You have to shout about it.
01:51I've lived and worked in Leeds for 30 plus years.
01:54I was a presenter on BBC Radio Leeds for 30 years.
01:57But the thing of all the work I've done that touched people the most was towards the end of my career
02:03and literally at the end of my mum's life because my mum was diagnosed with dementia.
02:08Like a lot of people, there was a run-up to that before any formal medical diagnosis
02:11when we thought things aren't quite normal with mum.
02:15And I began to record a weekly audio diary called Mum and Me, The Dementia Diary.
02:20And of all the work I'd done over literally decades, it was the thing that touched people most
02:26because I wasn't speaking as a broadcaster.
02:28I was speaking as a son coming to terms with this awful disease.
02:30And given we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people in this country living with dementia,
02:38about a million and rising at the moment, this is relevant to so many of us.
02:42The breadth is the power of the topics at Liffey.
02:46And it's about interest, connection, curiosity and conversation.
02:51How do we learn things?
02:53How do we improve things in our own little bits of the world?
02:56We talk about them.
02:57So yeah, that's the Liffey magic.
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