Audlem on Radio Stoke

The village and AudlemOnline were featured yesterday afternoon on the James Watt Show on BBC Radio Stoke.

After a brief chat about how AudlemOnline was started ten years ago and the various features of the website, we turned to some recent news stories.

First up was the great music broadcasts that go out every week from Audlem. They were described as similar to the BBC's Jools Holland show, with a couple of zany presenters – that's Pete Marshall and Ian Haughey – a band or musician in the studio and clips of other acts, all in front of a live audience. They go out every Tuesday evening on YouTube and AudlemOnline. How many villages can boast that?

Next up was the Canal and Tourism workshop that was here on Monday afternoon. The result was local people and groups working with the Canal & River Trust to make Audlem's canal an even bigger tourist attraction. We talked about how popular the canal is, about Audlem Lass and how a film about the canal made a few years ago by the Parish Plan team and John Owen had even won recognition at a Film Festival in Bulgaria!

It was then on to the fact that Audlem has its very own Referendum coming up on March 24th. Nothing to do with Europe, this, we explained, is all about Audlem's Neighbourhood Plan which will hopefully help the village to get the developments it wants rather than the ones the developers want.

Finally, and James Watt loved this story, we talked about the chocolate fountain drama at our Youth Club last week. If anything can go wrong, it did. For starters, organiser Kate Parkes finds that the essential piece of equipment for melting the chocolate, a microwave, isn't there.

Result, a car drive home, a bowl over a hot pan of water, then the hot bowl of melted chocolate into the car for a 'no sudden braking' race to chocolate fountain machine before the chocolate sets. After pouring all 1kg of melted chocolate into the machine, the extension cable blows a fuse, so needing to move the table with overflowing chocolate fountain near enough to a socket to plug in without extension and with no spillages!

The next 15 minutes involves pushing paper plates under multiple wobbling constructions of marshmallow and fruit on skewers bathed in dripping chocolate with the 'Fountain' almost fountained out, more pools than flow until finally a young person trips over the cable, bringing fountain and chocolate cascading to the floor.

The story was told brilliantly by Kate Parkes on AudlemOnline and hopefully Radio Stoke's listeners enjoyed the tale too.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.