Cruise Entertainment

She turned heads with her plunging neckline at Margaret Thatcher's funeral and a few days later completed the London Marathon in 5 hours 26 minutes to raise more than £25,000 for Macmillan Cancer Care. Both of which brought Katherine Jenkins a thoroughly unjustified blast from a notorious newspaper columnist. The singer's next move is to announce she will be performing on two P&O cruises. The Welsh soprano will be appearing aboard Oriana during two four-night party cruises leaving Southampton on October 31 and November 27. Fares start at £399. Russell Watson has sung on P&O cruises, and the line's Azura [...]

Would you complain if the service you received on a cruise ship was better than expected? One Yorkshire couple did, unhappy that the unexpected kindness led them to hand out more in tips than they had expected. That's just one of the bizarre complaints from cruise passengers received by online travel agency bonvoyage.co.uk over the past year. The company has compiled a Top 10 of the craziest - and none of them include ships breaking down, or having to miss ports of call because of bad weather. 1. A lady on a Mediterranean cruise - it must have been her [...]

Cunard was not the first cruise line to introduce behind-the-scenes tours to allow passengers a glimpse of life behind the doors marked "Crew Only." Princess were possibly the first to seize upon the idea as a money-making opportunity, and it was soon followed up by others. I joined an enthusiastic group on Allure of the Seas just over a year ago to be taken on an exhausting trail from the coldest food stores to the hottest crew bar. Although various cruise news websites and bloggers have picked up on Cunard's offering in the past few days, I found it difficult [...]

By day - and night - Eddie Thomson is hotel director on board MV Voyager, currently in South America on its lengthy maiden voyage after being christened in Portsmouth at the beginning of December. In his spare moments Eddie, whose career has taken him to sea with Cunard, Royal Caribbean and Renaissance Cruises, finds time to put pen to paper now and again. A couple of years ago he compiled his reminiscences into an entertaining little volume called What Time's The Midnight Buffet?. He became Jim McCabe and his supposed employers were Scotia Cruises, but as the book's blurb explained, [...]

The West End musical shows on three of Royal Caribbean's cruise ships are some of the best entertainment to be found at sea. Almost full length, and with top production values, they are a world away from the 30 or 40-minute singing-by-numbers shows built around a theme or a composer which are the staple theatre diet on many ships, and which have done much to foster Simon Cowell's contempt for cruise ship singers. When I saw the premieres of Hairspray on Oasis of the Seas, and Chicago a year later on Allure of the Seas, I was delighted to discover [...]