Steve Knightley and Jim Carter from TV’s Downton Abbey will join forces in Remembrance week on national TV and radio.

poppies

The BBC multi-award winning songwriter and triple Emmy nominated actor who plays butler Carson in the hugely successful ITV drama, collaborated on the recent WW1 commemorative double CD release Centenary - Words & Music of the Great War - a powerful and poignant poetry and music collection performed by Show of Hands, the distinctively-voiced Jim Carter and his BAFTA and Olivier award-winning actress wife Imelda Staunton.

Says Steve: “I’ve known Jim since the Eighties. We used to share a house in Maida Vale. He was in the basement flat and I lived upstairs; I was on the rock music scene then and he was at the National Theatre”. Carter later provided narration on the 1990 Show of Hands tour de force song medley Tall Ships.

“It was great to work together again after all this time on Centenary. We thought of the pieces as brief cinematic scenes and treated the songs as half-remembered, distant reveries that, with the extraordinary voices of Jim and Imelda, just came alive”.

Next Tuesday (November 4) Knightley and Carter head to BBC Radio 2 to talk to drivetime host Simon Mayo about the Centenary project, with a reading from the album by the actor and a performance of The Lads in Their Hundreds - the A.E.Housman poem set to music by Knightley.

On the morning of Remembrance Sunday (9th) the pair will be interviewed on BBC-1’s The Andrew Marr Show with a performance of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem To Victory, one of 22 classic poems featured on the album. They will be joined by fellow Show of Hands members Phil Beer and Miranda Sykes.

This will be followed on Tuesday, November 11 with Steve featuring on BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music, a series which explores the stories behind pieces of music with powerful emotional impact - in this case George Butterworth’s original song setting of Housman’s poem The Lads in Their Hundreds (from the collection A Shropshire Lad)and Knightley’s new arrangement.

Material from the “uplifting and redemptive” Centenary album forms a key part of Show of Hands current autumn tour - the first outing in a year for Knightley, inspired instrumentalist Beer and dazzling double bassist/vocalist Sykes.

The tour continues on November 5 at Cheltenham Town Hall, revisiting some of their favourite haunts but also includes first time appearances at several venues -Royal Hall, Harrogate, St George’s Hall, Liverpool and Lyceum Theatre, Crewe as well as a capital date at London’s Cadogan Hall (November 12) and an appearance at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall (November 20).

The show at Yeovil and both performances at Exmouth are now sold out with Poole, Sheffield and Shrewsbury also close to sell-out.

        SHOW OF HANDS AUTUMN TOUR 2014

Nov 5: CHELTENHAM Town Hall 

Nov 6: BIRMINGHAM Town Hall 

Nov 7: HAYES, Beck Theatre. 

Nov 8: POOLE Lighthouse  LAST FEW TICKETS

Nov 12: LONDON Cadogan Hall 

Nov 13: HARROGATE Royal Hall

Nov 14: LIVERPOOL St George's Hall - Concert Room 

Nov 15: SHEFFIELD City Hall Ballroom LAST FEW TICKETS

Nov 19: DARTFORD The Orchard Theatre

Nov 20: CARDIFF St David's Hall T: 029 2087 8444

Nov 21: CREWE Lyceum Theatre 

Nov 22: SHREWSBURY Theatre Severn

LAST FEW TICKETS

Nov 26: SALISBURY City Hall 

Nov 27: YEOVIL Octagon Theatre SOLD OUT

Nov 28: BASINGSTOKE The Anvil

Nov 29: BARNSTAPLE The Queen's Theatre

Dec 2: ST IVES The Guildhall T: 01726 879500

Dec 4: WORTHING The Pavilion Theatre

Dec 5 EXMOUTH Pavilion SOLD OUT

Dec 6: EXMOUTH Pavilion SOLD OUT