National Entertainment Champions of Great Britain, 2016

It's that time of year again - The National Entertainment Youth Brass band Championship of Great Britain. It means a trip to Blackpool in early February, which isn't for the faint of heart! It can be bitterly cold on that sea front! However, we don't have time to worry about how cold it is - we're far too busy with last-minute preparations for our performance at the Winter Garden! This is a very difficult contest to win, as not only does a band have to be spot-on musically, it also has to be very entertaining, which is a huge challenge in itself - especially for us! It would be great to be able to stage a huge "production" to wow the adjudicators, but given that we took part in the Butlins Mineworkers' contest - and won - and the British Open the week before - and won - we didn't really have a huge amount of time available! This year our theme was based around "Beyond the Tamar", which offered great opportunities for costumes. We went for a sort of "Napoleonic" theme - very simple and easy to prepare, but extremely effective, and our thanks must go out to all the mums who slaved over hot sewing machines to make up the costumes! We even had a snake being charmed out of its basket by our resident principal snake charmer! Did it work, well yes, it seems it did! We won!