MANY of us are fortunate enough to be able to take a night out for granted. But for many more – particularly the elderly – it is no more than a happy memory and a present impossibility.

It is for these people that SG Productions have been touring the North East this week with a colourful show featuring songs from around the world.

SG Productions gives conventional theatres a wide berth, heading instead for nursing and residential homes, day centres, hospitals and sheltered housing.

The company philosophy is that if you can’t get to the theatre, the theatre will get to you.

Yesterday the London company was at Windsor Court, Wallsend, and Sycamore Care Centre, Sunderland; today it takes in the Grange Day Centre, Throckley, and the Kensington Care Home, Byker.

SG Productions is the brainchild of Simon Gross. His website biography says he reckons he emerged into this world belting out Life is a cabaret, which must have been a shock to his mother.

But actually he’s a farmer’s son from Banbury, Oxfordshire, and the only showbusiness antecedent he can point to was a great aunt, Terri Ansell, who appeared on TV in Up The Junction and Edna, the Inebriate Woman in the 1960s.