(I am indebted to Miss Natalie Haynes
for a number of Medea's lines here, and for yesterday's "She was sexy,
she was sticky, she was sex on a stick", and also for the re-naming of
the Corn Exchange in tomorrow's post, while the thing at the bar
is obviously a nod to David Cronenberg. My dad's just given me a hat
like that... I used to get these strips in about an hour before the
paper was put to bed. Editorial interference was therefore pretty
minimal.)
... That last strip spent some time in Limbo. I was having problems
with my mum's computer. Anyway I'm still in France but have this to
hand, so here's where the story really starts. It appeared in the
University paper back in 1996: I only had the one character, and he was
always going to be called Jaundis - I'd decided that back when I was
thirteen, imagining him as some kind of futuristic bounty-hunter - but I
never got round to that strip ("Urban Vulture"). Then at eighteen I did
get round to "My Quiff", but none of the independent titles rife at the
time were willing to print anything so irredeemably wet. And then,
then, I was finally approached to create a strip for Varsity at the age
of twenty-one and had one more crack, which is this, and which, as I
head home tomorrow, should hopefully take us up to the new year:
From
1993. That is tiny. Or maybe just far away. It's only up here because
the narrator appeared three years later a little mellowed, in the
strip I was hoping to upload before coming out to France for Christmas
and haven't. Sorry. It was going to be great; the whole thing would be
serialized and silly and festive and take us up to the new year but I
met up with some people for drinks instead. Anyway how's your Christmas
been, dear bunch? Get anything nice? I got a Harold Pinter! Worked fine
for the first couple of hours but then...
It's
Monday the 22nd of December and the weather outside is thirty-seven
minutes late, so whatever you're doing this morning be sure to leave
plenty of time.
Apparently the Dungeons received a memo from "top
office" to "tone down" SATAN'S GROTTO this year, and replace the line
"I've killed Santa" with "I've kidnapped Santa", which we've done. And
the displays team have set him just to the left of Satan's throne. Only
he's a bit rotty. And nailed to a cross.
Still could be worse...
I honestly don't think the sight of Santa's gnawed, eyeless, crucified
carcass is going to be as traumatic as any actual Santa. I really do.
"What's he doing in Bentalls?" I seem to remember asking myself as a
six-year-old. Surely part of the mythos is you never actually get to see
him, like 'Er Indoors or Doctor Claw or Humphrey Lyttelton.
That's a medley of money shots from Benjamin
Christensen's enlightening 1922 expose "Haxan", re-released in the
sixties as "Witchcraft Through the Ages" with narration by William
Burroughs (the Haxan blooper reel's
also up on youtube, featuring at 1 minute and 40 seconds in four takes
of a nun "trying out a variety of ungodly titters"). And that's the
director himself playing the devil, top off and tongue out, which must
have made for an interesting set. (Warning: contains bumbums.) Anyway
coming up next, as requested by Mr. James McQuillan, a short yuletide
run of an old cartoon strip of mine "Persona Non Grata" as soon as I
work out how to scan A3. Meantime here's more Santa.
... and looking over this opening again I think I can
see why. It was the smile. I thought it was evil. And she looked like a
ghost. Also I was a terrible racist until I was about five - all Asians
looked to me like evil wizards - and I thought Emily looked Asian.
Regional accents disturbed me as well so "Ivor the Engine" never really
got a look in either, particularly those dragons (and nor did "Why Don't
You?"). And they didn't show The Clangers when I was a toddler, which I
think I would have loved
(even though it wouldn't have made me laugh, like "Chorlton and the
Wheelies") let alone Noggin the Nog - I must have missed those both by a
few years - so what I'm saying is that Oliver Postgate's influence only
really began to work on me when I became a teenager.
And I'm saying this because of course Oliver Postgate is now dead.
And
that I should only love Smallfilms' output now - REALLY love them -
makes perfect sense to me. Look at Bagpuss or Ivor, there's an inbuilt
nostalgia. And I trust nostalgia. Perhaps that is the wrong word. I
trust stuff that is old, and handmade. Such stuff has earned my trust,
and the worlds built by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin in their
magically non-magic shed are timeless, and chiefly responsible. So I
should mark his passing somehow, definitely, and I'll do it by posting
this link
to Chris Goode's own excellent tribute here. It includes a recording of
perhaps the last story Postgate ever told, the introduction to "Hippo
World Guestbook", and praise for Postgate's own blog which is also well worth a look if you're interested (it's political, in a good way... ie it has a moral). Enjoy, all interested parties.
The BBC you might have heard is incredibly nervous at the moment about putting another foot wrong: you can hear Adam and Joe
checking with their producer to see if they're allowed to say "Smack My
Bitch Up" just like the old days when you weren't allowed to hear "I Want Your Sex",
all shows are now undergoing a three-day vetting period to ensure
nothing which might possibly offend anyone reaches the internet etc,
everyone's clearly under a lot of pressure to play it as safe as is
humanly possible with no more "slip-ups"... in the light of which I
found this image from The Mxxl On Sxndxy illustrating what's accidentally been programmed for Christmas Day SO HILARIOUS I CRIED.
(It
was lying in a cafe. I did not buy it. And it's not the outrage I'm
promoting, just the delicious Oops of it... Sorry, have you already seen
this? I'm a little out of the loop.)
Yes, moon alert: Tonight's full mooon
will loom larger in the sky than it has since 1993, although peering
through the blinds tonight all I see is cloud. Actually I should put
some curtains up. Venetian blinds are all very well for a two-fisted man
of letters keeping faith with Ridley Scott's vision of 21st century
living, but it's getting quite cold now, and the bonsai tree by my brass
bed's beginning to smell ill. Seriously it took me ages to locate the
garlic odour.
On the subject of the moon, here's a short animation made by Paul Barritt accompanying a story by Suzanne Andrade; she stands in front of it, looking eerily like Jean Charles Deburau but with sexier hair, in their show "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" which I saw last night at the BAC:
They don't do cabaret any more. That's a shame because
an hour of this on its own can look a bit phoney, whereas a
fifteen-minute invasion of the stage of the Battersea Barge, say, is
awesome… That's a terribly ungracious judgment for me to make however
because I was sitting right at the front on my own, with a bad neck, and
hadn't even paid and paying always gets you in the mood. But this was a
Big Christmas Treat from the Battersea Arts Centre, you see, who'd
invited me along to a "Brainstorming Session". I felt like a real
player. After the show there were probably about two-hundred of us sat
around tables with crackers and lasagne, two-hundred who had all, we
were told, been "put on a list". Lewis was there (of "Alf and…" fame) and personal favourite Julian Fox.
Crackers were pulled and tiny pairs of nail-clippers sent flying across
the hall. And then the time came to "round table" some subjects, and I
joined the round table that read:
ONE ON ONES
… firstly because of The Books of Soap
and Interview Room H, but also because I found the name very pleasing
to the eye and couldn't quite work out why. At this table the BAC's
joint artistic director tabled the notion of a "one-on-one theatre
festival" which sounded great. Then he suggested this festival might
answer a demand from a public finding themselves in a "post-capitalist,
post-Blairite, post-spin" era, hungry for honesty and "energized by
Obama" etc. and I thought "Who? What? Oh no..." But it prompted Lewis to
make what I thought was the most interesting and important point of the
evening, namely that this demand for "one on one" theatre wasn't in
fact coming from the public at all, but from us artists. It's us who
want "the house-lights turned up" as he put it, far more than our
paying or non-paying house. I love Lewis. And it seems to me a very
important distinction for an artistic venue to make when deciding on its
focus, and indeed for commentators in general. Art doesn't change
direction because the public want it to but because the artists do; but
artists are also of course the public - they're seeing stuff as well as
making it, and chances are they're making the stuff they want to
see. In other words, you don't necessarily need all these feedback
forms. And the idea that the Battersea Arts Centre is somehow a
barometer of national public interest is, when you think about it for a
second, bonkers; what the BAC can I think genuinely take pride in is the
interest they generate from the large number of artists wanting to
produce work there. Dedum.
So anyway I walked home well-fed,
clearly knowing everything there ever was to know about my chosen
medium, found a DVD of "Planet Terror" in the living room, bunged it on
and was immediately reminded how much I clearly wanted to DO THIS! THIS!
MOVIES NOT THEATRE! THIS!!! Gah:
I have written no screenplay-he-dee-dee-doe. I have written no screenplay-he-dee. Done nothin all the livelong day but written this song And then whittled a fiddle out of whicker from a skip And stuck it up me bum-dee-doe.
Dear
Hollywood, I'm afraid I did not get round to writing "Fat Adolf" in the
end but here is a song I just done instead, can you make a film of
that? Yes? Excellent, phew that's a load off.
Writing isn't hard
you know. Graham Linehan said in an episode of Screenwipe I have left
it now too late to link to, it was like "doing a poo". Perhaps I should
get off the pot then. Certainly I'm not going to get anything written at
the British Library; people are distracting, and I've never written
anything in a library I now realize. When I write I tell myself a story
and take it down, and that means being on my own, maybe in bed, with
warm low lighting. Sounds nice enough but I'm still not doing it, I'm
simply filing these reports. Some excellent writers were interviewed for
that Screenwipe and the only thing, disappointingly, they had in common
was that they all dreaded writing. And willies. They all had willies in
common I mean, they didn't all dread willies. Russell T. Davies' one
piece of Advice To Writers was "Finish it", which is sterling.
Wednesday's
the half-point, yes? The half-point of the week? So I'm at the
half-point of my paid holiday now and that's five livelong days of
procrastination (ten day week, yup... You weren't told? You're in for a
big shock come Stansday)... five days in which I have written nothing,
and done very little else either because I know I'm meant to be writing.
Everything has been put off, even sleep. I mean I've been for walks.
And into second-hand bookshops, as should now be obvious (NICE FACT TO
STAVE OFF PANIC NECESSARY TO GET MY ARSE IN GEAR: Shunt have asked me to
be in their next show, which is based on "L'Argent" by Zola. I've been
looking for a copy). And I've been eating out a bit (SECOND
PROCRASTINATION-FRIENDLY FACT: The money came through from those
Mitchlook and Webbell sketches, the ones with this
in,
on the back of which I have now been invited to write for BBC 3's "The
Wrong Door" following a very friendly meeting with – I think – the
producer and receipt of a brief in which "Edgeyness" was misspelt.) I've
been swimming. I've been running baths. I've found an old sitcom of my Dad's
in its entirety on youtube, and been reminded yet again just how kind a
writer he is, and how glamorous ITV used to be back in the eighties:
that handover from Thames to LWT, those floodlit office blocks along the
South Bank promising such good times for the weekend (recalled to
perfect life in the opening credits of "Man To Man with Dean Lerner"),
and Richard O' Sullivan in a pastel blue track-suit toppling suavely
into Regent's Canal... I mean, yes, the BBC had the world for its logo,
but ITV had the South Bank! And the West End! AT NIGHT!
And
what am I going to see of that glamour, eh, in this day and age? Where
will I find all the magic bits in a W1 I now know like the back of my
tiny hand?... Anyway sitting in front of the laptop this morning looking
at – I don't know – this maybe –
- I received a text out of the blue from Dr. Meikle of
Foix: "Lazy bottom..shift and do something other than pretend you know
what its like ouside!scoot!i think you should go to....maida vale
today!why not." So I got up and headed out. I went to Maida Vale. I'd never been. It
was sunny. I had ciabatta on a barge. I picked up a leaflet called
"Little Venice Circular Walk". I hit Regent's Canal and attempted a run,
like Richard O' Sullivan. I felt queasy and slowed down. Ibis to the
left of me, dingoes to my right and up ahead moored to the Cumberland
Basin, the top-heavy Feng Shang Floating Restaurant just waiting to be
hijacked. I continued my way to the top of Primrose Hill and, similarly
buoyed, awaited further instructions.
From
"Adam and Eve" by the late Willie Rushton and the Primitive painters of
the Portal Gallery, a beautiful little book picked up in Oxfam in
Kentish Town on a Sunday evening set aside to be spent as though the
doctor with a talent for tenderness was in town and knocking about
beside me (the "she" mentioned below is Mrs. Bradley, Rushton's own
imaginary companion, like my doctor or that American who lives inside
Jack Dee's head in 'Lead Baloon' - or maybe he's a ghost, or a cylon, I
don't know. And the painting is "First Love" by Martin Leman):
"Now she's tut-tutting very loudly. " 'Mr Leman,' I say, 'is well-known for his cats.' I don't know why I think this will help. 'World famous.' " 'Tut-tut-tut.' " 'He loves chess.' "There is no way I am going to persuade her that these are two cats playing chess."
That made me laugh a lot. I loved this book:
"Tuesday:
God brings every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air to Adam
'to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living
creature, that was the name thereof.' Here we were very lucky as he was
100% right."
And here's one of a number of bizarrely oblique
jokes I recently unearthed that I had sent off to Private Eye back in
the nineties. Eh?
