Arts Diary: Will marriot

"We've had an absolutely exhausting, back-breaking week getting everything ready for the first performances of this new play by Leeds playwright Gemma Head. Among the usual organised chaos of a get-in and tech, the Mooted Theatre Co cast and crew were subject to a somewhat ironic, if completely unpleasant, experience for a group performing a play about the final days of highway robber Dick Turpin.

"While beavering away on stage prepping and rehearsing, the company was robbed themselves – some low-minded individual deciding to relieve the dressing room of a wide variety of cast and crew possessions, much of which was financially valuable, some

of which was very specifically sentimentally and emotionally valuable. There was no performance of dashing bravado or kissing the hands of fair maidens here, rather more a snatch and grab.

"However, we're made of far sterner stuff than this miscreant – and as always THE SHOW MUST GO ON!"

And on it has gone – with a performance tonight at the Friargate Theatre in York. Tickets on www.mootedtheatre.com

We'd normally tell you all about the Beverley Festival, which runs next month, closer to the date, but there is a proclamation we need to make ahead of time.

One of the festival's most popular acts is already on the way to being sold out, so if you want tickets, you better hurry along.

The Proclaimers play the festival on June 20 – and tickets for their headline gig have almost all gone.

The festival, which runs from June 18 to 20, also features comedy, literature, and poetry as well as music events. Full details – including of those much in demand Proclaimers tickets – are on www.beverleyfestival.com

Yorkshire folk are ace – it's official. And hopefully that will be confirmed on June 6, at this year's BAFTA Television awards.

Red Riding and Unforgiven, both filmed in Yorkshire with funding and support from Screen Yorkshire, are two of only four television drama productions to be short-listed in the Drama Serial category for the awards which will be hosted by Graham Norton and broadcast on BBC1.

Red Riding, the adaptation of David Peace's novels set in Yorkshire in the late '70s and early '80s and Unforgiven, the story of a woman newly released from prison after serving 15 years for killing two policemen, are up against Occupation, which follows three soldiers over four years as they each choose to return to Iraq; and Small Island, based on Andrea Levy's novel about immigration and prejudice during the Second World War.

The crew behind Red Riding, many of whom are from the region, are way ahead in the nominations at the British Academy Television Craft Awards which honour the unseen heroes of television.

The series is nominated for Costume Design, Editing Fiction, Original Television Music, Production Design, Sound Fiction and Make Up and Hair Design sponsored by MAC for the 1974 episode and Photography and Lighting, Fiction for 1983.