I never mentioned Hockney on here before yesterday, but I've mentioned Fred Spencer, with good reason. He used the internet as I feel it should be used, broadcasting hope, sharing his sadnesses, and living without embarassment. I'm glad he got back together with Sharon, as evinced in the video above, even if she's not interested in taking trips, and he definitely is. Of course he is. He's a pioneer. One of the first wave of YouTube celebrities.
Long after the video that made them both famous, Fred kept proving content creation wasn't just a job for him, but a calling. For over a decade he used this new platform to make whatever he wanted, whether it was Music Videos...
Satire...
Or whatever this is...
And the initial attraction of his output for me, obviously, was that so much of it was bafflingly bad. Or baffling and bad. Or bad and baffling and charming. And raw. Laziness was no impediment to his creativity, clearly. Fred would just throw the doors open and wait for poetry to happen – or to risk happening but then get derailed by him thinking about sex, then stopping thinking about sex but then thinking about volcanoes, as in the video below, which generates an emotion I have no name for.
Once relegated to life aboard the mobile home "Starship Betty" however, after his initial split from Sharon, he started to document a real life and, as I've written here before, I became genuinely engaged by and grateful for the candour of those unsponsored video diaires. I was sad to hear when things with Sheryl Ann hadn't worked out...
And when I shared my condolences in the comments, Fred was generous enough to reply. Then, a decade later, once things seemed happily patched up with Sharon, my comment received a second reply...
And that's how I learnt Fred Spencer had pasta way.
I couldn't find any confirmation of his death online, but that only made me realise how small a digital footprint he left outside of his own channel.
I've put off writing this for over a year – possibly because I've had, you know, as I'm sure a lot of us have, actual people I deeply love pass on in that year – but I knew I wanted some part of the internet to commemorate the passing of this particular Fred Spencer. And so here it is. He always kept things personal, and kind, and weird, and I hope his work stays up forever, because I honestly think it epitomises a kind of Internet before the fall, a pole star of the lived experience shared fearlessly, and a paradise we can return to whenever we like. In spite of all the algorithms trying to turn us into Hamlet, this invention is still ours, to do with whatever we like, for as long as we can pay attention to each other. Thank you. Where you've gone, I don't know, hope it's warm and sunny. Here's David Lynch.
For some reason, colours always seem happiest working with David Hockney. Here's a small, room-sized fusion of Renaissance Florence, Bruges and
Ghent he built for a BBC Omnibus in 2003 because television was also his thing. I'm surprised to find I've not written
about him before on here, because I think about Hockney a lot. And probably what I think about most often is his discovery – I don't think that's too
strong a word – chronicled – I don't think that's too strong a word
either – in this programme. Art as Science as Art, it's a typically beautiful piece of thinking, and a brilliant watch.
Studying the accuracy with which Renaissance painters represented
the play of light on a suit of armour or a chandelier, despite the fact
no naked
eye could stay still enough to capture the same gleam twice – and inspired by the perceived similarity of Ingre's line when turning out small
portraits of English tourists in 1812 to Warhol's tracing of old
photographs over a century later, despite the former predating the actual invention of photography – Hockney meticulously deduces that the reason why "from about 1500 to 1860 you never see a badly done basket" is not, as had been assumed previously, that everyone just suddenly got better at drawing, but rather that artists had been using camera obscura and – before the perfection of those lenses – convex or "burning" mirrors to transform the three-dimensional image in front of them into a two-dimensional, reversed projection that can be accurately traced. I think too about the scorn with which Art Critics greeted this theory, and I think about Hockney's calm counter-argument: then why are all the people in these paintings left-handed?
For this and many other reasons, he was my favourite living artist. Until today. I really loved you, David Hockney. Thanks for getting me back on the blog.
Iranian artist Soheila Sohjkanvari's "Leave to Remain" features a number of old passports stamped with incongruous advertising slogans. The one above is from Burger King (which now I think about it, I should have been able to guess). I saw it today at Tate Britain while catching up with my friend Viv with whom I enjoyed rooms one through eight. I was a little late meeting her though, because I'd stopped to take some video...
Halfway through Hyde Park I'd heard cheers and car horns to the south, and realised something potentially cheerful might be up outside The Iranian Embassy, so I made a small detour and arrived just in time to see someone climb out onto the balcony (I'm pretty sure it was out, not up, is that possible? UPDATE: No) take down the flag of the Iranian Republic, and fly in its place the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun. (At this point my camerawork gets a bit shaky because I had to take my gloves off to zoom in.)
The police sirens were clearly for somewhere else, and I guess the van driving up and down was
showing Fox Newson its flank, but cropped, so your only clue is Sean
Hannity – does Hannity still work at Fox? Of course, a lot of rotten kings and clowns with no history of supporting #women, #life or #freedom will want to take responsibility for this if it ends happily, but let's not let them. Picking up speed as I headed on to Pimlico, I sent what I'd shot to a friend at BBC Persian whom I hadn't seen since 2022, with love and hope that her family in Iran was safe. But how would she know? And walking home I learnt a little of it had been published online, which is how I can identify the flags.
Stop editing things, Simon! Sorry, me. But sometimes there's an itch you have to scratch, and sometimes that itch is wanting to see Lucky from "Waiting for Godot" perform Yvan's speech from Yasmina Reza's "Art" and you've had these two clips lying around on your desktop for over a year, and if it hadn't been snowing out you'd probably have gone for that long walk then come back to write those thousand words instead, but it was, and your neck gets cold now at night anyway, so you've spent the day all knotted, which a long walk would probably also have sorted out and now it looks like you might be trying to write a pastiche of the long speech above but that's honestly only just occurred to you and back to that itch, you can edit it all on your phone now which means you can't see the results very well, sure, but it doesn't really matter whether you scratch it very well at all, that's not the point. The point is it's scratched.
(Here I appear to have cropped out most of the snow in this photo of it snowing)
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
"This is the record of our second expedition to the site of Britain. It was a grim undertaking. But we had to go, otherwise all the members of the first expedition would have died for nothing..." We never find out what killed that first party in the end. Maybe they swooned themselves to death at the site of a porcelain cockapoo.
Because, despite its intriguing opening, what must be one of television's first ever post-apocalyptic visions settles almost immediately into a sneering fantasy upon the ruination of ghastly ghastliness. Ken Russell is directing, however, so nothing's done by halves, everything's shot with a warring mixture of love and hate rather than just disdain. Maybe the voiceover was scripted afterwards because Monitor thought it looked too beautiful. I have no idea why it was made, but that might be what's most enjoyable about it. Anyway this is your occasional reminder to check in on the BBC Archive's youtube channel, and I hope you're all recovering this new year's day, and continue to recover.
Sure, another reason I haven't blogged so much might simply be procrastination. I didn't write much about Edinburgh, but as this year began with me wondering whether to take a show there, let's finish 2025 by sweeping up the spoils. I got a trailer out it for a start...
Pow. Huge thanks to DMLK for making it look like there were more than eight people in. Audiences averaged around ten in the end (for a room that sat around eighty) and one of the many lessons I learnt from taking JONAH NON GRATA to the Assembly Rooms was stars on posters don't necessarily mean bums on seats, so bums on posters next time? Maybe stars on bums? I'll stick links to the reviews that the trailer quotes from at the end of this post, but purely in tribute to the unimpeachable work done by this show's hype machine – ie Madelaine at Gingerbread – not for my sake. This isn't about me.
But I mean, look at that. It's not easy to PR a twenty-year-old show either. You're not up for any awards. Still, Madelaine worked actually literally round the clock to get me press even if I had to write it myself. I shared some of those think pieces back in July, but not the lot, so let me slip into italics now, as I present an article I wrote for Gareth Vile's Analogue magazine about why JONAH NON GRATA's a clown show...
I
remember an old interview with Dylan Moran where he stated an ambition
to do absolutely nothing on stage, and have the audience get it.
In a time of such social upheaval no-one even noticed it, Woody Allen made three comedies – in a row –
about the assassination of a political leader: “Bananas, “Sleeper”, and
“Love and Death”. In each, the ethical and religious arguments against
taking human life were inextricably tangled with the protagonist’s
solipsistic, Bob-Hope-inspired cowardice and laziness.
When
people ask me what “Jonah Non Grata” is about, I say it’s about that
story – “sort of” – but it doesn’t matter if the audience don’t know it.
When I’m asked what it is, I say it’s “a clown show”, because that’s
what all my friends were making when I first devised it in my bedroom
back in 2005. And if they ask me what a clown is, I‘m stuck.
The
word means something. It has to. But read any casting breakdown of an
advert calling for a “funny bones” or a “Zach Galifianakis/Martin
Freeman/Jack Black type” (I only get the male ones, sorry) and you’ll
see it’s hard to put into words. “Yes!” is one I remember from a
clowning weekend sometime last century given by the great Angela De
Castro – head of the “Why Not Institute” – and if you only have one word
with which to teach someone how to be a clown, “Yes” might be the best.
But doesn’t that then run entirely counter to my opening? Yes. And Why
Not? Harpo and Chico try to steal a painting. Chico hears someone coming
and hisses at Harpo to hide. Harpo stands on his head in the middle of
the room. He’s still saying yes, just to something else. “If thy mind
dislike anything,” Horatio tells Hamlet, “obey it.” Yes. Exactly. No.
I
had a good pandemic. I hadn’t performed Shakespeare in a while, but
with all the theatres shut, I decided to try performing the Complete
Works on YouTube in my pyjamas, using a range of radio sketch show
voices to differentiate characters, and some home-recorded foley,
because why not? I hope the tone didn’t read as taking the piss. Or at
least, no more than Rylance at the Globe – who never winked at the
audience, but always let them in fully onto how weird everything going
was. I like it when actors pretend to be the audience’s friend.
Weirdly
though, I don’t like it when stand-ups do it. Maybe because stand-ups
are pretending to be themselves. Every solo performer – or at least
every solo performer with decent enough PR – is wildly outnumbered by
their audience, which I find inherently, situationally funny. But
stand-ups can’t acknowledge this power imbalance, because they’re not
playing a character, so it’s just awkward. But Jonah is a character. And
the audience’s friend, because – although he never uses the word “God”
(or indeed “Jonah”) – they are clearly his congregation. The audience
however, playing themselves, are under no obligation to be on Jonah’s
side in return. That’s the motor of not just this show, but a lot of the
work I was lucky enough to make with Shunt that inspired it: “Dance
Bear Dance”… “Money”… The audience outnumbers the performer, but the
performer knows the territory. I’ve made it sound like we’re at war.
We’re not. But it’s nice if we’re strangers.
I
assume most people know the story of Jonah, even if they’re not, like
me, culturally Christian – or Jewish – and even if they don’t know
that’s the story I’m telling. Old stories are good, because you don’t
have to worry about making anything up, you can just get on with
depicting people, and you can’t be blamed for the horrible things they
want to do. And I’ve always thought Theatre was a good place to stage
demons. But those attending have to feel it’s their own demons they’re
watching, not those other fuckers’. They didn’t seem nearly so
prevalent, even back during “The War on Terror”. So, I’ve added one line
since which I hope will help keep us safe: “Waiting is also way of
joining in."
Production shot taken during the technical rehearsal by John Scott.
(I think I was thinner by the time we shot the trailer.)
Back to the italics, as I present next an interview(by which I mean they emailed me questions and I emailed them answers) with the British Comedy Guidefrom the 10th of August, illustrated with more of John's production shots, which is why it's important to get production shots (and of course a press release, otherwise what are they going to ask me about, which is another thing I learnt)...
You describe Jonah Non Grata as "Hamlet, only sillier - or Tommy Cooper, only slower." What's the most ridiculous thing that happens onstage?
I don't want to give too much away, but possibly my entrance. And I'm
not saying it's all downhill from there - my final exit's pretty
ridiculous as well - but when you're presenting a solo immersive piece
without any scenery, inspired by a three-thousand-year-old story about a
prophet who lives in a fish, with self-penned soft techno songs (one of
which is purely a three-verse summary of the Scrap Brain Zone of Sonic the Hedgehog) it's... Do you know, I think it's when I try to mime getting the air nozzle working on a plane. It's not good.
Is it true you've performed the complete works of Shakespeare on YouTube in your pyjamas?
No. But it is five thirty-eighths true. I performed - forgive the
abbreviations, but they're long titles and I'm a massive wanker - Two Gents, Shrew, Titus, Julius Caesar, and Richard the Second, that last one twice because I didn't like the first version. I absolutely nailed the others though.
It was lockdown. Everyone was making stuff online, and I'd always
been YouTube-curious, so I started reading aloud Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.
When I finished that, I looked around for something else to read, and
realised if I did a Shakespeare a week, I'd be done by Christmas -
performing one act a day, with summaries and regular content warnings -
but that didn't happen in the end, because it turned out to be a lot
harder than just reading a book, and things were beginning to open up,
and Black Lives Mattered so distractions became less useful. But I'm
incredibly proud of both the quality and quantity of that work. I
remember everyone making so much during lockdown. We thought it was the
internet keeping us from having hobbies. Turns out it was pubs. Oh, and
they weren't my pyjamas.
What's harder - writing an existential clown show or delivering legal advice in EastEnders?
Both are phenomenally easy, it turns out. In the first case, you just
take a really old story everyone knows, make a mix tape to accompany
it, listen to it while pissing around in your bedroom, and write down
anything you might want to do again in front of an audience. Then you
wait twenty years until you land a nice advert and can take it to
Edinburgh.
In the second case, you send in a self-tape playing one of a million
faceless interfaces with authority soap characters have to face daily,
then get a phone-call saying you've landed the role of "seedy lawyer".
You turn up knowing your lines. Everyone is brilliant. Danny Dyer's brilliant. Kellie Bright's brilliant. The director's brilliant. You're brilliant. Three cameras record it, and it never happens again. It's brilliant.
What's the most absurd line you've had to say in character?
That "had to" is interesting. So is "in character". I actually got to
play Hamlet once. When Horatio tells him the ghost of his dead father
has been sighted in a suit of armour on the battlements of Elsinore, his
response is "This is very strange" which always got a laugh.
"You wouldn't shit on a bun" from the Shunt show Money also
gets quoted back to me sometimes, but I wrote that one. The line I'll be
declaiming on pavements in my final days though, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, is Sir Maxwell House's intro to The Monster Hunters
podcast: "Take two elements. Any two elements. Say, electricity and
water. On their own, perfectly harmless. But mix them together, maybe in
a bowl... Dynamite!"
Who's your dream audience member for this show - and who would be absolutely baffled?
Exactly. Yes. Them.
The following day, August the 11th, I did an actual interview in person, with Peter Green who was lovely and posted a slightly expurgated (ie minus me gushing about my PR) recording HERE. It's a good reflection of where I was two weeks into the run, and includes a few other lessons I'd learnt, such as how to describe the show when handing out flyers: it had become clear from the look of those walking out halfway through having clearly expected a Play about a Man from the Bible, that a stronger contract with any future crowd might be forged by abandoning the initial pitch "it's based on the Book of Jonah" in favour of "it's a mad show about nothing." I also reflect in the interview on having totally missed the "Art Comedy" bus: whether or not to bill the show under Comedy, rather than Theare, had always been a quandary, and it turns out – due partly to the brilliant and queer work produced that year by BigHead Comedy – that 2025 might have been the year to make that switch. Anyway, I hope Art Comedy remains a thing long enough for me to try and take some credit for it. There's more.
musical accompaniment
Back to the press. My final piece was for a music magazine, Fame, published along with a few more production shots on August the 14th...
While I make not claims for it as a "process", I went about making my first solo show the same way I would advise anyone to: I chose a very old story everyone knew as my starting point – in this case the Book of Jonah (of "and the whale" fame) – then, instead of worrying about how to tell it, built up a playlist of music which might accompany that story, and at my own leisure in my own bedroom, worked out things to do to it which I wouldn't mind doing again in front of an audience.
This
may be a generational thing. When I was a student in the nineties,
beginning to associate with people who were making theatre from scratch,
we didn’t just put movie posters on our walls, we listened to carefully
curated playlists of movie soundtracks. Trainspotting. Pulp Fiction.
Romeo plus Juliet. Everyone had these CDs, and pre-existing songs
beloved by a director were an integral – structural – part of work we
found exciting.
When I graduated, we didn’t disperse, and I
started working with a theatre collective in a railway arch in Bethnal
Green, called Shunt. Under this arch, behind the Oxo Tower, and finally,
in a sprawl of tunnels beneath London Bridge station, we created absurd
spaces around which the audience could move, which might change beyond
recognition the moment spectators’ backs were turned. Losing your
audience is normally considered a bad thing, but having an audience let
themselves get lost is different, and essential to these changes were
not only the extraordinary designs of Lizzie Clachan, but the versatile
and hugely enjoyable soundscapes of Ben and Max Ringham. How, as a
performer, could we accompany such compositions, and bring these spaces
to life? That was the process I took into making Jonah Non Grata. (And
it’s also why I can literally say I have more experience dancing about
architecture than I do writing about music.)
The
show I’m taking to Edinburgh this year I made alongside that work. It
is in many ways a personal sequel to it, but as a solo show, it’s also
far more suited to rooms above pubs, and – not wishing to give too much
away – the audience pretty much stay in their seats (unless there’s a
hymn). I wanted it still to have that what-would-now-be-called
“immersiveness” though, and music was crucial for this. Nothing I chose
for my soundtrack could be too “on the nose” though. The Ringhams’ work
for Shunt, while highly evocative, was never generic, and what exactly
was being evoked was part of a show’s mystery, something to play with,
or against. So there’s no whale song in Jonah, for example. Trying to
work out what’s happened once you’ve been swallowed by a whale is, I
think, a far more interesting state to play than knowing you’re in a
whale, and I’m very happy for the audience to share that mystery. Nearly
everything I do onstage, nearly everything we hear, is about existing
in the story, rather than telling it.
And
there are a lot of songs. An abstract space invites abstract text,
something sparer than a monologue. Rather than lectures, I learnt
working with Shunt that the audience might be better addressed by
awkward questions, slogans, ritual, found text or invented catchphrases,
language as part of the alien landscape. Or of course, lyrics. There’s
an economy to lyrics. People receive words differently when they’re
sung, and a performer delivers them differently too. Songs are time
stretchers, time savers, and, as well as releasing words from their
obligation to convey specific information, music releases an audience
from its obligation to follow what’s going on. This can be essential
when a public might worry they’re not “getting it”. All attention should
be rewarded, but rather than demanding intellectual engagement, I think
there should always be space for an audience to drift off, without fear
of getting lost, especially if – as may happen at the Edinburgh Fringe – they’ll be seeing four or five other shows that day.
I hope this helps.
Hmm. Two "though"s. Not good.
Anyway, that's what I wrote. Just before I move onto the reviews: I lost or maybe I should just say spent ten thousand on the whole thing in the end, which is what I expected to lose, but I wonder if I'd have still lost it if I hadn't exxpected to. it was the most nerve-wracking show I have ever done which is probably a good thing, Edinburgh New Town's not what it was ten years ago in terms of passing trade, I was surprised how long it took me to be in the mood to see anything else, at least two weeks, if I return with a solo show I'll try to make sure it's still part of a larger group of people, every night saw somebody not like Jonah and somebody absolutely love it and with single-figure crowds there's only so much you can sway that, I felt like an artist, if not a working artist, and I finally want to make a next show, and if you came, thank you, and whether or not you did, let's shake off these italics, and happy new year!
Here in France, it's just turned 2026, and a warm hello to everyone sticking around for the plaudits. So. PR's plan to do a second London preview at the Hen and Chickens in order to potentially have something to stick to the posters as soon as we were up, bore beautiful, juicy fruit, although I balked at turning Ben Moor's whales into stars...
Still, long term readers of the blog will know how much those whales will have meant to me. As for the rest, here are the links along with any quotes that ended up electric-stapled to the flyer. That's how I'm celebrating. (I also have port.)
So, I already mentioned Rich Cline's review from June 22ndat the timebut here it is again: "There's a reason why this show has such a following: it's a
near-perfect display of surrealist comedy, brain-bending and utterly
hilarious... a skilful performance that brings out hauntingly deep, dark
ideas about humanity in unimaginably amusing style."
July 20th, The Reviews Hub (This was a hell of a review. ) "A divinely commanded clown... absurd and profound... Kane's
performance is extraordinary... He welcomes both laughter and awe... so
thematically dense that you could discuss it for days on end, but it is
also an absolutely joyous, in-the-moment experience." This was a hell of a review.
July 21st, Sarah Birch Hackney Citizen
(quality) "A virtually indescribable cacophony of humour and found
language... be sure not to miss this captivating five-star-quality
production."
July 22nd, Malcolm Beckett Theatre VibeDON'T DO STARSbless, and then we went to Edinburgh, to receive...
August 9th, Erin Ross Edinburgh Guide
"The show is, yes, funny; it’s absolutely mad; but it has a startling
poignancy. Perhaps it’s the sheer conviction of this writer and
performer... The audience left dizzy, happy and connected having
experienced something very strange together, something to think on and
share when someone inevitably asks, “What did you see at the festival?”
Don’t miss the chance to see something devout immersive and interactive
theatre lovers have lauded for many years; it’s the fringiest thing at
the Fringe."
August 11th, Kay Marquis The Wee Review "Kane
manages to be both alarmingly unpredictable and reassuringly genial...
it may dwell on angst and be full of sinister shocks and disorientating
requests, but it’s very funny... for anyone looking for something different, this is perfect."
And then my first actual print review on August 12th, from Hamish Gibson in Fest
Never mind, let's check on those audience reviews (thanks, Morgan!)
So the show was, if not finding its audience, at least losing its non-audience, and trouble was being shot...
August 13th, Sean Greenhorn The List, a big one which we didn't use any quotes from, but I still enjoyed the writing: "It’s always tough to review a show like Jonah Non Grata; a show
that consistently wrongfoots the audience, revelling in awkward moments
where things don’t seem to be working. It’s tough because, to some, the
lack of laughter is the point, and can perversely lead to the biggest
laughs of all. Simon Kane’s surreal anti-comedy piece is loosely about
dilemmas and decisions. Or a vengeful man who wants to stay at the
Marriott. Or simply the slow unravelling of an entertainer. It’s
honestly hard to tell."
The show was definitely better when people laughed though, I knew that by now. You can't let the audience know you're in on the joke however without breaking character, but I was getting better at it...
August 19th, Oli Fuller Binge Fringe
"An hour of theatre that will have you on the edge of your seat and will
keep you thinking about it for the rest of your life... It is artistic
and beautiful and indescribably enticing... an absurdist masterpiece. Go
see this show, do not put it on a list, do not see it if you have time,
book it now."
Oli stayed around afterwards. I loved Oli.
August 22nd, My Goddess Complex
"equal parts absurdist theatre, stand-up
comedy, and performance art."
And finally...
August 25th, Ben Kulvichit Exeunt (who also don't to stars) "I like liquorice." And it should have turned 2026 in Britain too now so HAPPY THAT! No rush.
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