The Dan In the High Castlewas repeated today on Radio 4 Extra, so here's a fun game you can play that's vaguely related. I enjoyed playing it anyway. Above is the Radio Times review from when the show made Pick of the Day, and I'm fine with David McGillivray's reservations; it was only the second episode of anything I'd ever written, and there aren't that many ways to interpret the commissioning of a second pilot two years after the first. I'm very grateful though to those who stood up for it, including the fair Finnemore:
But it was the following comment from David Cairns that set me on the path from which there could be no turning: "An indifferent review from the author of FRIGHTMARE. Praise from Caesar!" Now I hadn't heard of FRIGHTMARE but that wasn't too surprising; David C has a knowledge of film bordering on the Forbidden, having made it his mission to watch every single film illustrated in Denis Giffiord's Pictorial History of the Horror Movie. So here's the trailer...
That's a hell of a font. I went and looked up McGillivray's wikipedia entry (which I'd like to think he had a hand in writing himself) and was instantly enamoured to find a stalwart who'd worked at the coalface of British smut. Living, breathing history: "House of Whipcord", "Satan's Slave", "I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight", "The Hot Girls" (Not "Hot Girls", mind... "The Hot Girls".) These titles seemed almost specifically designed to wind up on a list. So I drew John's attention to the man's achievements, and John in turn drew my attention to this...
It was not Kofi Annan. And I was not disappointed. But it was a surprisingly uneasy thing to google. So that's the game. Happy hunting!
I'm still dithering about what to do with my Wednesdays, but even if I haven't yet committed to reviewing my W.C. Fields box set I've still been enjoying re-viewing it, so here's the"short" that first got me into him. It's not necessarily typical of Fields' comedy, he's spoofing virtue here rather than flaunting corruption, but all his best work was gooey with a juggler's disdain for melodrama, and I still find it delicious a century later, despite having no idea what was originally being parodied. What could be typical is the pacing, slow but restless, the kind of thing that might generate exponential waves of giggling in a live audience, but play quite differently to someone watching alone. Rewatching it I also now notice a strong influence from his dulcimer-playing upon my own musical output. (There's at least as much W. C. Fields in Mirrorboy as there is Buster Keaton.) Enjoyez.
Another track fresh today! Maybe a bit DJ Shadow-y? DJ Shoddy? Attempt enjoyment regardless, listeners, in this as in all things! (Cover art by Anne ten Dokelaar.)
By my count, at least (I'm not including the ears). Even outside of a world-wide pandemic Wilton's self-jeopardising stagecraft still seems gutsy ninety years on. I really enjoy the guy at the end too. I think he might also be the guy at the beginning being American - talkies were new I guess, Brits weren't that familiar with the accent yet. Actually I had my own lesson in doing an American accent yesterday, thanks to the internet and my friend Andrea...
My main takeaway, and don't blame Andrea for this, this is my shorthand, is that to sound American, you should stick as a many hard "G"s as you can into every single word - so instead of saying "Madison Avenue", for example, you say "Gmagdigsgon Gavgengoo" - try it - and now, and this is the clever bit, take them all out again... See?... It's funny, I don't associate character comedy with the nineteen-thirties, hang on I'll do some research - Holy Moly, the compere is Peepshow creator Sam Bain's grandfather! Aw. Well, there's more here if you want to see, say, this:
I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.
The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis
had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately.
"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana,
the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even
though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the
autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to
suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two
Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before
we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these
references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."
It was even more low-res in 2005.
Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.
Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is still available to listen to entirely legitimately for a month HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside the pilot here.)
There's not much sense performing a post mortem on a thing you've written, especially if you're as sloppy as writer as me - don't get me wrong, I like my stuff, but I seem to put the hours in only on the bits of writing that I find fun - the big splurges and then the problem-solving - rather than sorting out a structure beforehand and playing within that. It's quite an actor-y, hand-to-mouth, gig-economy approach: the unstructuredness feels freeing at the time, but in the long run probably provides less freedom than working with the resources available to someone with an actual plan (which is why I found it so rewarding to write for Shunt, whose shows already had a structure in place by the time I'd join the devising). Specifically, the fantastic exhileration felt when a last minute tweak helps me suddenly understand what I've written, is offset by the powerlessness felt re-encountering all the bits that go nowhere, written before that understanding dawned. But this isn't a post-mortem.
Rainbow over Vauxhall, February, 2020
Today was a day for applause and thanks, so let me here assert that writing The Dan In the High Castle was a far from lonely experience. Seven months before the recording in November 2018, a first draft was read out at John Finnemore's flat. This had Martin and Gabbie travel two years into the future to discover a dystopia they thought was the work of Kraken, just as in episode that aired, but it ended with them escaping into a mysteriously optimistic 2019, and also their relationship didn't develop beyond Martin finally getting to do something fun with his excellent new friend. This might have made good on the promises offered by the pilot, but what it didn't do, as my sister Susy pointed out, was provide any possible closure if this was to be not just a sequel, but the finale. It was London Hughes who suggested Gabbie should punch Martin in the face. So I put that in and went off to redraft. I'd had a new idea about octopuses, which didn't make it in, and anway months passed and, as with the pilot, it was producer Gareth Edwards who paid for coffee after coffee
while trying to convince me that as much fun as I was having penning
screwball wise-cracks, the threats should be real, and "Martin should
care". It was then ancient friend and collaborator Tom Lyall who pointed out over another coffee that Gabbie should be also be returned to 2016, as missing two years of one's life is obviously huge, and when I suggested Martin should nevertheless still stay in 2018, it was again Tom who said crucially, "Yes, and Gabbie should rescue him."
"Gabbie should rescue him?"
"Sure."
Over pints, David Mitchell just said he loved it which was highly encouraging, but otherwise useless, but really encouraging, but otherwise no use, but great.
Maida Vale studios, November, 2018.
These improvements made, I sent the possibly final draft to John Finnemore because he's always lovely with notes, and he replied as nicely as any intelligence could that actually he prefered the read-through. This is how his reply ended:
"I loved the last draft, and
the biggest problem with that one - Gabbie's
passivity - is now fixed. So it's in great shape. I just miss Martin as
my life-line of fundamentally understanding what the story is about,
because it's someone who wants something simple and human. More even
than
Arthur Dent wanting a cup of tea. More like The Dude wanting his rug
back. Maybe it's his shoes. It's almost his shoes now, but not quite,
because he doesn't really try. And anyway, it's not his shoes, it's Gabbie. It's got to be Gabbie.
Does that help? I cannot imagine it does."
Of course, it helped. So I threw out the pair travelling to 2018 in order to get Martin "future shoes" and instead made their motivation Martin's investigation of a future in which he gives up Gabbie and the Spanner. And I added Gabbie quitting. And finally, one week before the script was recorded at Maida Vale, I added Martin offering the Spanner to Gabbie at the end. And I remain very happy with that ending, and as I say, wish I'd thought of it a little earlier so I hadn't wasted all that time giving Bridget a load of exposition about "The Usual" that goes nowhere. But if there ever is an episode 3, I am of course now stuffed.
I spent a lot of those months playing "Half-Life 2".
The second episode of Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is now available to listen to for a month entirely legitimately HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside episode one here.) More bonus material will follow but I'd like to open with something I learnt in the year since the show was first broadcast, which is that "Bridget" is acually the name of an already existing Irish goddess...
Some lovely soothing Irish facts.
"Over the years, the goddess went by several names, including Brigid, Bridget, Bridge..." So, to be absolutely clear, I had no idea about Brigid when I chose the name that Gabbie would finally give to the Voice in Martin's head.
"Meaning 'firey power', she was often depicted with rays of light or
fire emitting from her hair and her head, showing us that she was the
embodiment of the element of fire..." The fact that I depicted the owner
of this Voice "wreathed in fire" (or as Bridget hereself put
it in the pilot: "not on fire, just terribly bright") is therefore a complete
coincidence.
"Through her ties with fire and the sun she was considered to be the
goddess of smithcraft..." Similarly, this was not why I made her the
creator of the Time Spanner, nor why I gave her a robot - "She was perceived to be the patron of relatively high dimensions...
and
concepts and activities that elevated oneself..." And again, having the
same figure interpreted by different cultures as both muse
and angel just made sense, so this was also a coincidence.
When original angel Belinda Stewart-Wilson was suddenly unavailable, we were star-wobblingly lucky to have Sally Phillips agree to join us, but this recasting had absolutely nothing to with Bridgid's "triple aspect" (from London Hughes' Instagram.)
"She was often seen as a motherly figure... Were some of you not aware
the she existed?" Well no! Not remotely! That's my point, video! Gabbie's line was originally "You look like a Janet", because that was just the first name that came into my head, and that's basically how I write, but then I found out "Janet" was already the name of a Heavenly interface in The Good Place, so went for "Bridget" because, you know, she bridges things. Not mentioned in the video however, is the weirdest coincidence of all by far, which is that Brigid has her own cross, and it is THIS...
An actual swastika. I am, as ever, indebted to the Time Spanner Tumblr for brilliantly bringing all of this to my attention, and to this Brigid blog blog for the images.
And according to this party I'm at, in the sixteenth century the English were considered very "kissy" by visitors from the continent.* Gemma, top left (her birthday today), suggests all that might have changed with the plagues. Other topics of conversation have included whether or not Saint Bernards were accompanied (we don't know)...
And when bananas were first introduced into the lyrics of the following...
Apologies for not posting more today. It's been a social whirl.
I am seriously considering a review of the two-hundred VHS tapes I keep in the cupboard to replace Frankenstein Wednesdays. I started on tape #1 last night, containing Flash Gordon, The Man With Two Brains and The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition (or as my Dad put it, the version where they put all the acting). It's interesting to note that Hobbiton, supposedly the most backward, unchanging community in Tolkein's world, appears to be centuries ahead in its influences of the Medieval-inspired civilisations surrounding it. Boom! Blog done. I'd also been considering blogging about Ming's daughter Princess Aura for a while: She seems to have been to Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond what Satan was to Milton: entirely and unintentionally heroic.
Boom! Another blog. Really though today's post is all about flagging up some of the beautiful ways others have been using their time. The magnificent Andy Stanton, for example, has been reading aloud all of a Mr. Gum book, so we can finally know for certain what everyone was supposed to sound like:
His fellow Nincompoop, and my own colleague and definite future Dr. Who, Carrie Quinlan, has initiated The Wild Freelancer Blog, and also this:
The writers of Mitchell and Webb's "Remain Indoors" sketches have remained indoors to bring us this episode of Rule Of Three (no way of embedding that, sorry) while Mighty Fin impresario Robbie Hudson has set up his own Emergency Broadcast System over on Spotify, on which I can occassionally be heard bellowing songs. Seasoned Science shut-in Helen Czerski (six weeks aboard a ship studying bubbles at the North Pole is nothing to her - she's like an astronaut if space had bears) joins the ranks of Science Shambles' Stay at Home Festival:
More fictionally, Monster Huntersco-creator Matthew Woodcock has created a surprisingly prescient submarine-based thriller for Definitely Human calledDown, its presience almost exactly matching that of Avenue 5, if anyone's seen that. No spoilers. Avenue 5's shuttle pilot John Finnemore meanwhile, perhaps most heroically of all, has gone and shaved his beard just to give us this wonderful thing:
And obviously I've been rebranding procrastination as "social isolation" from pretty much ever since this blog went daily last Christmas (April the first will be the hundredth straight post) but, Oo! My second pilot to Time Spanner, The Dan in the High Castle, is being repeated on Radio 4 tomorrow if anyone fancies a huddle. Huge thanks and love to all these makers and partakers. Be well, everyone.
Hi, Unattendees, here's another one from the vaults. This one went into my one-man-show Jonah Non Grata but originated independently as a cabaret piece about thriteen years ago. It's freshly recorded tonight, and with terrible production, really terrible, I mean barely listenable, but attempt enjoyment regardless! (Scrap Brain Zone theme by Masato Nakamura. Top image from the Charlie Chaplin Image Bank.)
This story is also told in Jim Henson's The Storyteller as "The Luck Child".
More dressing-gown fun. Only tyrants have favourites, but Grim Tales will always be one of the things for whose existence I'm most grateful. Rik Mayall hits so many notes I never got to see him take a shot at anywhere else; you can actually imagine him being your friend in this. I also love the music and the look of the show, although it was only ever made available on VHS, so apologies for the fuzz. Until now, I'd assumed every episode was assigned to a different animator, because each approaches its tiny budget so differently, but looking at the credits it turns out all to have been the work of this guy, Bob Baldwin. And while I loved The Storyteller, I looked forward to Baldwin's no-budget worlds at least as much, whether he was building cities out of paper for The Griffin, above...
Princesses made of sweet-wrappers de-louse-ing a dragon for The Gnome...
"So shall we go back into our home?"
"Then we can take our helmets off."
"I mean, sure."
"Mars though!"
From "Boring Space Aventures"
Again, a post that was hanging around on the reserve benches for months, and never meant to be remotely relevant. I bet those bubbles smell horrible.
Welcome to my Space Disco! I've been looking for an excuse to post the video to Supernature up here for ages, so a world-wide pandemic that sounds a bit like the name of the artist seems as good an excuse as any. Every cloud... Cerrone is actually the name of the drummer, which you'll glean when you watch this video.
But why stop with just the one video? Jean-Marc Cerrone has a whole youtube channel! Here then is another floor-filler, featuring a more traditional promo that shows us the real Cerrone. Look at him go!
In Call Me Tonight we see the orginal daft punk get out from behind his drums and invent a brand new dance using just his knees. Jean-Marc really uses the space here. Very "Jamiroquai".
Then there's Je Suis Music, (of course there is), its lyrics a terrifying litany from a civilisation in freefall, but whose video takes a quite different approach to the subject than the similarly apocalyptic Supernature, although both feature limousines:
And finally, from the eighties, Cerrone's still on his apocalyptic kick, but has lost the moustache and is now just throwing every idea he can into the mix. See how many you can spot! Also, bums.
As a final Frankenstein Wednesdays postlude, here is one of Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Junior's last appearances together (and Lugosi's frist appearance with Vampira, five years before Plan 9 For Outer Space) a shabby sketch show starring a shabby comedian sponsored by something called Geritol. I've only stuck it here to dispel the myth that Lugosi's one foray into live television was a total disaster, and that Red Skelton's improvisations caused him to jeopardise the show because as you can see, that's not what happens at all. Bela forgets a line, but that's it. It's fine. It's even charming. Live theatre was Bela's livelihood, and I know he looks shockingly ill, even standing next to Chaney who looks like Bill the Cat, but it still makes me happy to see him doing work this good with material this bad (including his own mortal tissue). It's nothing like the scene in Ed Wood, is what I am saying. The curtain's not brought down.
I love this movie. But.
Moving on though: What am I going to do for Wednesdays now? I know I didn't aways make the deadlines, and that last Abbott and Costello post went on for eight days, so maybe I should give myself a break and not dedicate Wednesdays to anything for a while. But if I were to, here are some candidates...
Clockwise, from top left:
A box set of the first six Star Trek films: in which the original crew of the Enterprise grow old and realise they've nothing but each other. In trying to wring adventure out of Reason rather than Romance Trek's impact on popular science fiction, and by extension the popular subconscious, might be as deep as Frankenstein's. But do I really want to chunter on in that vein for six weeks? Conventional wisdom says the odd-numbered films are bad and the even-numbered ones are good, so at least I'd be kept on my toes. Or if I wanted to stay in the thirties...
A box set of seventeen W. C Fields Features: I adore W.C. Fields, am always happy to recommend his work, and know there are at least five films in here I'd want to say something about. Also this would let me delve deeper into the thirties, nor do I remember any of them being stinkers. Still five out of seventeen's not a great ratio, and maybe I should be careful how much of the thirties I dabble in. There's always earlier...
A box set of Early Hitchcock. Nine films, all British, some silent. There's a lot here I haven't seen, so that would be one reason to go for this. And I love Hitchcock's early British stuff. But maybe too niche. Maybe I could review some telly instead...
A box set of the Bardathon. Clive James' name for the BBC's televising of every single play known to have been penned by Shakespeare at the time of broadcast, the early eighties. Thirty-nine plays, each about three hours long. So a hell of a project, but I have already watched them all, and enjoyed most of them. Then again, I'm an English graduate. Also I've no idea what these posts would look like. A bit curious to find out. Also piquing my curiosity...
Twenty-two Ingmar Bergman films I inherited from my godfather. Again, a very heavy exercise. I've seen very little Bergman though, so like the Hitchcock this would be an excuse to finally watch something, rather than an opportunity for closer study. And Bergman definitely deserves closer study. And maybe now's not the time. Or maybe he's completely up my alley. I've no idea, this is the biggest blind spot on the current list. Unlike...
The complete Ulysses 31. Space. Robots. God. Bad acting. Good design. Great music. Twenty-six episodes. Last-minute thought. I still haven't read the Odyssey. Back to the thirties...
The Complete Thin Man Collection. William Powell and Myrna Loy get pissed and solve crimes in the thirties. Six films. I love the first two - maybe too much to have anything interesting to say about them - and I haven't seen the last four. Speaking of Powells...
Two box sets of films by Powell and Pressburger. Some absoute wonders here, but I haven't seen them all, so again I'd be using this as an opportunity to cath up. A lot has already been written about the films I have seen though, and I'm not sure I'll be bringing much to this party. And finally...
The complete Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes. Fourteen films, which I love, which is a reason for choosing them. Also I'm not sure I've seen them all, which is another reason for. Also there'll be some continuity of talent with Universal's Frankensteins, another reason for. But I might love every film for the same reason, and there's fourteen of them, so I might not have that much new to say about each. Then again, maybe "not that much" is eactly the right length for a blog.
Okay, just searching for those screengrabs has made me keen to do definitely something. Feel free to make suggestions below.
Turning on BBC2 one midnight in the early nineties I came across Norman Beaton, who I only knew from the sitcom Desmond's, monologuing in shades and a fez and a beaten-up set like something out of The Young Ones. I'd never heard a voice do what Beaton's was doing here, and was transfixed. The fact I had no idea what this show was helped the spell. When Stephen Rea lurched in I was suddenly reminded of an illustration of Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran that we had hanging up in the toilet, and realised this must be Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and then Charlie Drake popped out of a dustbin, and that settled matters. But I'd been enjoying the hang of unsettled matter. To this day I've never seen the play onstage, but then... I... don't... really... enjoy going to see Samuel Beckett there I said it. I've never been asked to act in anything by him either, although I've acted in a lot that he must have inspired, which I think I prefer. Because God bless him, he couldn't have made restaging his work more off-putting if he'd tried, but now he's part of The Canon and so actors still have to climb into bins or pots or stand stock still for half an hour with only their mouths illuminated, or get pulled along with ropes round their neck burdened with suitcases having memorised three pages of intense abstraction, long after the astonishing originality of any of this blipped its last blip. In Conor McPherson's 2000 film of Endame, the dustbins aren't even in shot until
they're unveiled, making a nonsense of their intial veiling. It's just
an action performed because it's in the script. In that same film Michael Gambon plays "Hamm", the monster I first saw Norman Beaton play, and he plays him monstrously, which I don't think is as good. But I don't know how you could be as good as Norman Beaton is in this. I wanted to see everything he was in after that night, and when he was cast as King Lear I blutacked the flyer of him in star-rimmed spectacles onto my bunk bed and couldn't wait to watch him live. But then he fell ill, and it never happened, which you can read about here. He died that year, and I've been wanting to see this particular Endgame again ever since, literally for decades. Last month someone finally put it upon youtube. So that's the build-up. Here's a taste:
Charlie Drake's great too. And here's the whole thing if you're as smitten as me. Happy Saint Patrick's Day, gang. Stay wonderful.
I've never played Minecraft, but enjoy hearing people talk about video games, maybe more than I enjoy playing them. It takes less time for one thing, but also, the definition of what a game actually is, or should be doing, is still so unsettled that if interest is keen enough, conversations can go anywhere. Here's Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon, going full "Pickle Rick"on a podcast that I enjoy a lot, How Did This Get Played, accompanied by footage of some project called Titan City which seems populated by nothing but pigs and chickens. Maybe too apt now, but it was either this or another post I had in reserve about Endgame, and this seemed the happier Monday. Whether I'm talking about Samuel Beckett's Endgame or Marvel's you'll find out tomorrow. In the meantime, stay safe, me ol' unattendees, and if you're still looking for something to do here is a link to a VR reconstruction of Rick's Toilet of Solitude...
Look, nothing's going to beat "Je Suis Mermaid", I peaked too early. But ploughing on, here for the Ides of March is something older, sadder, and I've only just realised, also quite mermaidy. I came up with this dirge a few years ago while helping to devise shunt's The Boy Who Climbed Out Of His Face, a promenade through shipping containers inspired simultaneously by both Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and
Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (whose cover I notice strongly
resembles what audiences saw of Tom Lyall above)...
It wasn't for me, but a suggestion of something Tom might sing from his island at the end. The guitar loop's based on a passage from Rosinni's "William Tell
Overture" most familiar for accompanying sunrises in old cartoons. And Tom made his own brilliant work from it, a hypnotic piece lasting half an hour during which he would slowly undress (to look even more like the cover) six times an evening. Maybe all that background's best forgotten though. Like the song says, no questions. This was recorded tonight, with renewed apologies for still using a laptop mic. Still, attempt enjoyment, listeners! Cover art by Lynn Hatzius.
Finally, some good clean fun. A hundred years ago, it's said, a performer could go their whole life touring
just twenty minutes of material, but then talkies and
television came along, and that all changed. Not for Tom
Noddy though. Here's the inventor of the bubble cube at a festival in 2018, performing almost exactly
the same routine he performed on Johnny Carson back in 1983.
(Update: that video has since been taken down, but here's some from 2019)
I say "almost" because he now uses a tiny smoke machine instead of
a cigarette, but the patter's identical, charming enough to have spanned
four decades and counting. This wasn't a comeback either. Noddy's just never stopped, never gone out of fashion: Las Vegas, Letterman, The Paul Daniels' Magic show, Bubblefest, Experimentarium, forty years performing the perfect act, using nothing but soap, smoke and straws. Here's his very first television appearance from 1980, in which host Charles Kuralt
describes him as a "wandering minstrel", as "transient as his bubbles". Well, yes and no. I love Tom Noddy.
There is no Wikipedia page for Finger Frights! I can find no history of them online, no record of who invented them or how long the've been around, nothing. Not anywhere. Any leads would be gratefully recieved if you have them. This is not for a thing.
Presenting Percy Press' last stand, and some early hell from the Brothers Quay.
Now this is a find! Punch and Judy: Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy. It's only as the credits rolled I learnt it contains the last ever performance given by Percy Press Senior "the uncrowned King of Punch & Judy Men". He died when I was six, so there's a chance I saw him perform live as well, out in Covent Garden; the scene twenty-six minutes in where Joey has fun with the corpses of Punch's victims certainly rings a bell, and seems too virtuosic a piece of handiwork to be easily imitated. It also makes me giggle, which surprised me. Previously, like I assume most people, I had considered Punch and Judy entertaining only in the way bad taxidermy or collections of gas masks were entertaining, but Press' act here isn't just macabre. The timing with which he wields his puppets, punctuating their manic outbursts with sudden moments of tense stillness, recalls the cartoons of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. And now I think of it, pretending you're too stupid to put your head into a noose so you can ask the hangman to demonstrate is exactly the kind of stunt Bugs Bunny would pull, except Bugs wouldn't batter his wife and child to death first.
I saw these in a Punch and Judy exhibition at the Aberdeen Maritime Musuem last year. In addition to the tradional policeman, beadle, ghost, doctor, "Joey", and devil, some modern shows add a health-and-safety officer. This is true.
As well as a record of Press' act you can also see him performing excerpts from an interview with an early "Punchman" from 1850, in addition to some pretty queasy narration from Punch himself performed by Joe Melia - I didn't like that at all, and nor will you, be warned - a full account from 1827 of the first Punch and Judy show ever documented, complete with cracking, boss-eyed illustrations by George Cruickshank...
... and, perhaps most excitingly of all, early but readily identifiable animation from surrealism's foremost haunted doll wranglers, the Brothers Quay, including their accompaniment to the opera Punch and Judy by Harrison
Birtwhistle. It's altogether a beautifully packed little history.
I was resarching Punch and Judy because, having finally put Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to bed, I still had clowns versus monsters on the brain. "Joey" Grimaldi himself of course was chased offstage by a giant mutant vegetable here. Bugs Bunny bested monsters and witches and martians. And Punch faced off against a giant crocodile most famously, but also ghosts, the devil, and reviled seventeenth century celebrity executioner Jack Ketch. Like a cartoon his woodenness made him indestrucable, but again, now I think about it, maybe the most pertinent parallel to draw is not with cartoons but with SPOILERS FOR ONCE UPON A TIME IN LOS ANGELES: Bradd Pitt's wife-murderer taking down the Manson familyEND OF SPOILERS.Quentin Tarantino has gone on record to say how influential he found Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but actually it's his work we go to these days for our Punch and Judy shows. The code there's the same: violent people are monsters, but violence is fun.
Florence hasn't quite got her thwack down yet, and the audience reacts accordingly. You can't go wrong with a crocodile though.
