From Hollywood to Highlights… meet our community programmer, the actor and charity worker Joel Phillimore.
His latest screen appearance was in the 2023 movie, The Boys in the Boat, which was produced and directed by George Clooney and celebrates the University of Washington rowing team’s inspirational journey to gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Joel, 35, who played crew member Gordy Adam, describes the three months he worked on The Boys in the Boat, an American movie filmed in the UK, as the most exciting of his life. He hit the red carpet for the film’s première at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in LA, but it was the camaraderie of pizza and beer with fellow cast members afterwards that he treasures most from the evening.
Joel joined the Highlights team last September and works three days a week in a new role combining responsibility for Participate, which programmes performing arts workshops for schools and community groups, and for Creative Arts workshops. At the end of 2023 Joel had returned to his home town of Lancaster, where he lives with his partner, after 13 years in London:
“I wanted a challenge closer to home, to be part of the wider community of the north.”
Parallel to his acting, Joel had worked for nine years in marketing and development for not-for-profit sports ball manufacturer, Alive and Kicking, which gives improved access to ethical jobs, play and health education in sub-Saharan Africa. He had also been a private tutor, teaching history, English, art, and history of art at GCSE and A-level. He was very excited, he says, when Highlights advertised the community programmer role: “To get experience of putting programmes together and of Highlights’ interactions with the National Rural Touring Forum, to help programme artists into educational spaces, and to deliver amazing workshops for kids with limited opportunities.”
Joel says he was lucky to inherit an excellent framework from Kate Halsall, who headed up Participate before leaving Highlights in August last year.
“I realised quickly how important the relationship is between myself and the head teacher of a primary school. Kids are growing up with throw-away content on small screens but there will always be performers and singers to speak to them.”
Participate workshops help children understand, for example, that Ed Sheeran is part of a pyramid of artists learning, exploring and giving their talents. “If you book a dance workshop in a school in Shap, it gives you an idea of being part of a wider cultural industry and of all the vital pieces that go into its success.”
The artists Participate engages for its workshops come mostly from the north of England and reflect the region’s wealth of talent, says Joel. This season’s workshops include rap and raga (Indian classical music), circus skills, poetry, folk music, animation, video game design, theatre skills and storytelling. “What’s great about Participate is that freelancers not only get a chance to engage with the next generation of performers and audiences, but they also know they have an income stream around which they can build the development of their craft.”
Programming workshops in secondary schools is challenging because the schools have so little flexibility in timetabling and budgeting. But Highlights hopes to gain funds through Big Give to run performing arts and career-focused workshops in six secondary schools – two each in Cumbria, County Durham and Northumberland, says Joel. “The schools would just have to make the time and space available.”
Joel grew up in a family that was encouraging and supportive of the arts and went often to The Dukes in Lancaster, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and Theatre by the Lake in Keswick.
“A big part of growing up in Lancaster was that proximity to the arts and I’m very aware there are areas which have so little of that,” says Joel.
He took classes at Stagecoach Performing Arts in Lancaster until he was 16 and it was through Stagecoach that he was picked to play Thomas Alcock, the son of Gary ‘Chef’ Alcock in The Lakes.
“I had a shaved head and a big gap in my front teeth, and looked cute, as though I could have been the child of Charles Dale, who played Gary,” says Joel. His parents recorded the show, which was renowned for its sex and violence, but he wasn’t allowed to watch it. “It was an amazing experience of acting from day one but I never thought I’d do it as a career.”
Joel went to Lancaster Royal Grammar School then to St John’s College, Oxford, where he read history of art. He rowed at Oxford; only for a term, but it was enough to give him the experience needed for The Boys in the Boat.
“It was Sliding Doors stuff,” says Joel. “My granddad died in Freshers’ Week. He was a rower and he was keen that I have a go so I signed up for the Novices’ Boat at St John’s. Then acting and playing in a band took precedence.”
It was only after leaving Oxford that “people said it was worth my giving acting a go,” says Joel, whose screen credits include the movies Tolkien, Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot and the 2012 film of Les Misérables, and the TV shows The Bay and The Halcyon.
Joel’s dream role would be Hamlet: “I love Shakespeare and always thought I would be a classical actor. All my experience as a student performer was on stage but the opportunities I’ve been given in my career have all been on screen.”
Joel still rows, with Lancaster John of Gaunt Rowing Club, and has just launched his own community interest company, Ginnel Pigs, to tour productions reviving “lost voices” of the north. Malkin, the first show, will be about the Pendle Witch Trials.
“I’m interested in becoming a creator of opportunities rather than just a receiver of opportunities. That’s part of why I like working for Highlights so much – there are daily chances to create opportunities for others,”
– Mary Ingham, Highlights Trustee