Uncle Alec

 Dad asked Susy and me to go through the big box of photographs under the spare bed I'm sleeping in. Here's our first Christmas on the Isle of Wight.

 

 That's my other sister, Alice, on the right. I think for some reason there were Tarot cards in that box on top of the telly. To the left of Alice, in the yellow, is "Uncle" Alec. Not an actual blood relative, he was Dad's first agent in the sixties, but by the time this was taken I think he'd given that up, and was a chef somewhere on the island. "Cor-dong bloody blur, darling." Alec came every Christmas.

 

 He'd come over in the morning for the unwrapping of the presents and help Mum with the vegetables, long after we'd left the Isle of Wight. As his obituary in the Telegraph from 2001 put it "he never married." He was the only one allowed to smoke in the house. I don't think even Dad's real dad was allowed, but Grandad hardly ever came down. Alec Grahame is why Christmas always smelt of cigarettes.

 

 We still have that tree. Also from the Telegraph obituary: "in the 1970s show business became a much more serious industry. Much to Grahame's dismay, the liquid lunch was replaced by the working lunch and first night parties always seemed to end much too soon."

 

 Alec was gorgeous. Here's what must be his last Christmas with us. My hair was now black to audition for The Pianist.

 

 

 

 It's only researching him today I found out that Uncle Alec's original name had been James Alexander Patchett, that he'd been a lyricist in the early fifties, had turned an art gallery into a venue for evening cabarets called "Intimacy at 8" ten years before the satire boom, and had taken the first ever late night revue up to the Edinburgh Fringe, After the Show, arguably inventing the Comedy Festival.

 "Aww," Susy noted yesterday, "the tree's nearly stopped smelling of fags." 

 (But Susy still has Covid. I'll have a sniff.)

Christmas Quiz!

 Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?

You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!

 

 

 (Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)

 

Your Christmas Viewing or a better title to be decided later

 

 Let's catch up. 

 On Monday I joined friends to catch The Wind in the Willows Wiltons at Wilton's Music Hall, chiefly to see Darrell Brockis as Toad; it's amazing what a really high-waisted pair of trousers can do to a man's shape. The weasels were sort of bankers now, as was the book's original author Kenneth Grahame, who resigned as Secretary of the Bank of England in 1908 after either being nearly shot in the face during an anarchist raid, or – depending on which motive you ascribe to the enforced retirement – accusing the Bank's future Governor of being "no gentleman", so I've no idea whose side he'd be on here.

 

 (I have only my parents word for it that, many Christmases ago, "Toad of Toad Hall" was the first show they ever took me to. It was the biggest room I'd ever been in. They tell me the sheer scale of the room made me whimper, then the lights lowered, and I didn't like that at all, and then old man dressed as a mole stuck his head out of a trap door and shouted "Hang white-washing!" and I howled and we left and that was it.)

 

 Pleasingly concurrent with the fortunes of Toad Hall in this production were that of the baby otter puppet, Portly: It's always nice to see the inclusion of Pan, and "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" made a lot more sense as subplot here rather than just interlude. A lovely, lively, warm evening, and Wilton's Music Hall is an exciting space to explore during an interval. Do these photographs convey that? I don't know. Badphone finally expired on Sunday, alas, but I appear to have found a replacement with just as MySpace-era a camera, which was not my intention. I'll have to start hanging around more light.

 

 On Tuesday I caught up for drinks with an old friend who told me that she can get married in Saint Paul's Cathedral, a thrilling possible future theatre project. I also found the following extraordinary performace on youtube while searching for video essays on "Brimstone and Treacle". I'd never made the connection before between Dennis Potter's fable of Satanic Home Invasion, and Mary Poppins (OR HAD I?) 

 

 

 I just wanted to write a good part for Olivia Colman.

 

 And the TKA Smith Family Conservatory of the Art's family production of Poppins sheds little light on the banned seventies teleplay. But it does throw up a blisteringly confident turn from an uncredited singer in a role I don't remember as a rival nanny with a bun of grey hair fastened inexplicably to the top of her head, which the Conservatory has liked so much they've posted twice. In case you didn't manage to catch a Christmas show yourself this year I share both versions here, not for comparison, but to be played simultaneously to see if the resulting reason-shredding resonances open a portal to anywhere.

 On Wednesday evening we performed the ante-penultimate Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre. The weather was milder now. The snow had gone. I didn't walk home directly. Badphone's replacement took what it could.

 

On Thursday, well, I wrote last Sunday's post, but I also learnt that that ante-penultimate show had actually been our penultimate as one of the cast had fallen ill, although testing negative for Covid. We'd planned our cast drinks for that evening however as some people had to rush off on Friday, including myself, who would have to be up early to catch a flight from Gatwick on a day of border control and train strikes. Our producer Laura had booked a table at a pub called the Pereseverance, and I hadn't left the flat all day.

 As with the long walk home on Wednesday I found a refreshing solitude in that place. The barman gave me a Guiness in a weird glass, free nuts and sample of an unnamed Christmas cocktail he'd worked on. A lot was ending. Enjoying the uniterrupted ambience, it occured to me I could just try and go straight to Gatwick after the final show though and not worry about sleeping Friday night.

 

 

 I woke at midday, feeling finally Christmassy. The last night went ahead and everything felt new, which may not be unusual for a last night. As I said from the start, everyone's lovely, and while I may not have tried so much towards the end not to be too weird, it's only because that's what happens when you get to know people.

 

 Then that stops, and there's no getting used to it. The show's over. Almog's on another continent now, and I took the Thameslink to Gatwick however many hours ago it was and found a nice, small copy of "Pinocchio" at the airport bookshop. Its tone is very Vic and Bob. In fact Bob Mortimer would make a brilliant Pinocchio. I woke on the plane surprised to see the land up at the top. 

 

 Mum met me at Montpellier just as I received the message that the cast member had now tested positive for covid after all, but that was okay because Susy's tested positive for Covid too. We made it down. That's the main thing. Dad showed us "Creature Comforts" in the cinema (because it's important to be reminded just how perfect Aardman can be...)

 

 

 Tom put on the "Bottom" Christmas special. I'm about to put the presents out. I was meant to be cacting up on sleep but appear to haev written this instead. I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, ole unatendees. 

 Here, one more time, is Orson Welles. 

 

 Big ball to stick your head in by Arthur Handy.

March doesn't get back to Normal

 Let the record show this post is actually going up on Thursday the 22nd, the day after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the US Senate. I've been meaning to post something about March for a while, to catch up on the run-down of the year, and Zelensky's address has proved a good incentive, so here are more old photos.

 

 Again, a lot of scenery, including a reminder that a giant mound had been dismantled outside Marble Arch, serving as the reminder it had ever gone up. It looked better stripped of turf.

 March appears to have seen no real change to my routine. I'd use my time walking, and photograph where I walked. Local parks. Local galleries.

 

 I put off buying stuff for the room. We still wore masks at the Crystal Maze. The weather was changing though, behaving itself to begin with, showing no signs for example that in April this would all be snow...

 

 And in August this would be dust...

 Then, just as it seemed it had been decided the pandemic was over now, and "things" should be getting back to "normal", we suddenly remembered the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

 Down the hill from me, outside Holland Park, flowers and signs of support started appearing at the feet of the statue of the Ukrainian Saint Volodymyr. Russia had invaded the Ukraine on February the 24th. I looked it up.

 

 Just up the hill from me, outside Kensington Gardens, fences were erected to protect the walls erected to protect the Russian Embassy from graffiti, and across the road from them, more fences, often peopled by protestors, but I'm normally too shy to take photos of people. 

 

 The fences are still there today.

 

 And the signs.

 

A search for "Zelensky" conducted at the beginning of this invasion reminded me he'd been a popular television comedian before coming to office, and the extraordinary speech he gave in Russian on the day of the invasion reminded me how powerfully a comedian can communicate.

 

Remarkable speech. Addressed to the Russian people, it should also be heard everywhere. pic.twitter.com/RkrDGSYUYq

— Piotr Zalewski (@p_zalewski) February 25, 2022

 

 On one walk, I then bumped into the friend who'd invited me to that concert where the orchestra were all masked. She'd grown up in Yugoslavia, and outlived it, still holidaying as a teenager in what was becoming Croatia while living the rest of the time in what was becoming Serbia (Is that right? Have I got that right? I should look it up.) Anyway, she lived in a war. 

 "Vladimir Putin is an absolute fucking genocidal dictator," she explained over a pint in the Windsor Castle. "But –"

 "America doesn't give a fuck about Europe either. The Cold War's been over for thirty years, why is there still NATO? Putin didn't do this without reason. I cannot believe this propaganda. News should be History. Nothing is being explained. We're not enemies. These are people! They're going to have to discuss! It's exactly like Yugoslavia... I'm sorry." 

 And now I'm thinking of that "Stalin Attacks Churchill" headline from 1946, in the copy of the Daily Mail we use as a prop in Love Goddess. It's a good prop. You can see the beginnings of the Cold War in the story beneath, as "Generalissimo Stalin" warns of an English-Speaking assumption of World Domination. The power of that narrative's still there today too.

 

Meeting Your Heroes

The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes. 

 Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.

 (I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)

Placeholding Shreds of Tom Driberg

 Fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to explain further why, but for now here's a picture of Tom Driberg. I don't expect you to know who he is. I didn't until just now. Initially a member of the Communist Party, and openly gay when it was incredibly illegal, Driberg became Chairman of the Labour Party in 1958, but there's a lot more to know about him than even that. Here's a brief extract from the wikipedia entry where I found his picture:

One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the occultist Aleister Crowley.

 But that's not why I was resarching Tom Driberg either. I was researching him because his was the name which turned up when I searched "MP Driberg 1946," which I did after reading this point of order recorded in Hansard on the thirteenth of March 1946...

FASCIST ACTIVITIES (ALBERT HALL MEETING)

HC Deb 13 March 1946 vol 420 cc1113-4 1113

The following Question stood upon the Order Paper in the name of Mr. Driberg:

137. To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he is aware that a public demonstration is to be held at the Albert Hall, on Wednesday, 13th March, by a body known as the Britons' Vigilantes Action League; and if, in view of the fact that much of the propaganda of this League is identical with that of our enemies in the late war and of the consequent likelihood that a breach of the peace will be provoked, he will prevent this demonstration from taking place. 

 

Mrs. Braddock

On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the urgency and the possible far-reaching effect of any reply which may be given, can we have an oral answer to Question No. 137?

 

Mr. Speaker 

No, I can see no need and this is not a matter for me to decide.

 

Mr. Driberg 

Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Should I be in Order in raising on the Miscellaneous Financial Provisions Bill this afternoon the question of this Fascist demonstration?

Mr. Speaker  

That is a matter for the Chairman of the Committee. It has nothing to do with me.

Mr. Driberg  

May I, in view of the urgency of this matter, ask your leave, Mr. Speaker, to move the Adjournment of the House on a definite matter of urgent public importance—that is, the revival of Fascism in this country and the public demonstration by Fascists which is due to take place at the Albert Hall tonight?

Mr. Speaker  

That is hypothetical, and I cannot accept it.

Back to Women's Garments (Down pointing)

 ... And that's what turned up when I searched "the Briton's Vigilantes Action League," which I did because they're mentioned on the front page of the Daily Mail from the sixteenth of March 1946, in a story entitled "Police crushed by Communist demonstrators," and I know about that because it's currently a prop in Love Goddess.

 

 I never really think about 1946. As I say, hopefully more to follow. Click to enlarge.

Adulting

 

 Love Goddess - The Rita Hayworth Musical has another two weeks at the Cockpit, and I'm enjoying it more and more. Here's another lovely shot from Roswitha Chesher Also making me look good of course is the show's star and co-creator Almog Pail, who gave this fascinating interview in The Jewish Chronicle recently about one of the chief inspirations behind the show – as well as "one of Israel's founding fathers" – her own grandfather Meir Pa'il. During the second act I watch Almog sing the "Gilda"-inspired "I Don't Belong To You" from the theatre's gantry, in character as producer Harry Cohn. Just standing there, hoping to exude a kind of stony, middle-aged command, I realise is a quite familiar feeling to me: I've been playing these kind of characters since my late teens, and now I'm now genuinely middle-aged, yet can't be sure that I'm approaching this moment of onstage stillness any differently to how I might if I were still seveteen. I wonder if Orson Welles felt the same when he suddenly found himself the same age as characters he'd been playing for decades. They're not any easier to play now, but then they never seemed hard. They also never seemed nice. That's what's been going through my head when the lights are on me in the gantry. And when they're off I count the audience.

 

 Top row, left to right: My brother-in-law Tom, Dan Tetsell, my sister Susy, my sister Alice, and my nephew Jake. A beautiful turnout.

Guess who won the election for Asgardia's New Head of Space Nation!

  No, not Lembit Öpik. He's just here to introduce the real winner – and, for all I know, only candidate – Dr. Igor Ashurbeyli. Dr. Igor keeps his victory address short and informative, and since I haven't been keeping up with the Asgardian Parliament, I was grateful to be brought up to date...

 While Ashurbeyli admits the "so-called panemic" has stalled Asgardia's financial development somewhat, I was excited to learn that the Space Nation now has its own currency – the "Solar" – and that the exchange of fiat currencies into Solars has been "enabled", even if "the third part of the cycle" – namely the exchange of Solars back into actual money – "has yet to be addressed." A project for the next five years then.

 The launch of a new sattelite called "Asgardia 2" is also on the agenda it seems, although what it will do, how it will do it, and how it will be launched is yet to be determined. 

 Ashurbeyli is keen too, he says, to create a new language for Asgardia, and website. 

 

An imagining, I'm guessing.

 

 But "the constitutional anchoring of Asgardia's primary mission" remains "the birth of the first human child in Space." The Head of Nation still seems really keen on this, and "on our path to achieving the goal," Ahsurbeyli announces, "we have come close to the first stage – an isolation experiment on the ground, simulating a year-long space flight involving several married couples of volunteers to conceive and give birth in conditions as close to those in orbit as possible. However," Ashurbeyli admits, "the cost of such an experiment is very high and funding has to be secured." Close then, but no cigar. Also I'm pretty sure the closest conditions to being in orbit achievable "on the ground" are forty second burts of zero gravity in a plummeting fuselage, so encouraging couples to volunteer for a whole year of that might really eat into the budget. Still, at least someone voted for him.

 I've dropped you into this video just as the Head of Parliament Lembit Öpik – himself introduced by Asgardia's "Head of Administration" and one-hundred-and-third human in space – appears to be pretending to know sign language. Oh Lembit.

 

 

"I hug all of you and every one of you."

PinonononoNO!

 Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I then decided to text Gemma Brockis, who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was originally, actually about?

 Gemma answered that originally, actually the story had ended with Pinocchio getting hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of his initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy. Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced that education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy? Totally, Gemma answered. I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided when I got home to see if it was online. It was. Here's a taste.

 

 Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes? 

 Here!

 

  "What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?" 

 Well, I don''t know, look, sorry, but last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember" –  and I think that might be even worse. At least the old BBC adaptation is nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist military academy by a dropped bomb, which maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.

 

 I'd also suggest that if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care that Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. Well, that's a lie, obviously I care. If anything I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It actually made me want to watch the Zemeckis version to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised by the excellent Ryan George below, that also seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, I don't know, you might love it. But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.

 

I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to this film have been understandably strong, but I can't find anything about what it is I'm actually seeing, beyond the fact it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act. Who was this act? How is it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like? How many people would we find? Is there just one costumed actor moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? Is there a little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was this act? Because if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, stat!" Or maybe he did! Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good! Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean up this clip, less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever AI Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips my algorithm has suggested to me use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 It's my old workplace, the Trocadero. The next time I was there I took a photograph to compare the two...

 

 Because when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have check why, because documentaries aren't new and film has been around for long enough now for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 I've decided it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

Everything But Snow. And Snow.

 "Have a fight," said the guy with the camera to the man and child in the small plastic dome with fake snow on the floor, just before I started filming. It wasn't the kind of fake snow you could make balls with, if such a kind exists, but it didn't look like there was much else to do in there. The same seemed true of the reindeer paddock.

 

 There were caribou on Church Street today, as well as the steel band, all right outside the Cockpit, and all gone just as it actually started to snow, between shows. (They went well by the way, the shows, by which I mean I think I've finally stopped rushing. The trouble is I never know I'm rushing until I stop.)

 

 And none of us can work out what this refers to. 

 

 The snow this evening is thick now – as you'll know if you're reading this in London – George-Bailey-come-back-to-life thick, refusing to fall from the tops of spiked fence or the branches of plane trees along Notting Hill Gate, piling up on crumpled inflatable snowmen outside people's big front doors, still falling now outside my window with the terminal velocity of confetti. Flakes got into Badphone on the walk home however, fritzing with its unlocking, so I wasn't able to take any photos. But imagine it. It looked like that. 

 Here instead is some freezing mist I photographed on the walk into work today on the big bridge that curves over Little Venice with the scanty streetlights and the single file pavements where I tend to finally check the time and find I'm running late.

ACTUAL MORE INDIANA JONES: "THE SECRET OF THE BROWN NOTE". STARRING HARRISON FORD!!!

   

  

 Also starring JEFFREY WRIGHT as Sidney Bechet!!!

 Here's a Saturday treat! No need to wait now for "The Dial of Destiny" to get your additional Indy content. Have eight minutes of the very first iteration of Old Indy, dashing through the snow in a wraparound for a "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles "spinoff movie I'd never heard of called – terribly – "The Mystery of the Blues!" I prefer my title, even if it is a bit of a spoiler for the ending. 

 

  Doesn't he look great with the beard? I guess it was for "The Fugitive", so this was actually filmed only a couple of years after "The Last Crusade" but it's a great Old Indy look regardless. I think he should have kept the beard. I also think he should also have kept that stuntman they used for the shot of Indy just getting out of the car, then he wouldn't have hit his head on the Millenium Falcon in "Force Awakens". Enjoy!

 

February in the Black

 For the past couple of years, every time I've finished a book I've taken a photograph of it, maybe hoping that this will make me read more. I took six photographs of books in January I see, and one in February. And none in March. Here's Holland Park. I'd get wheeled around here when I was one, so I've been told. I don't remember. Now it's just up the road.

 

 Photographing Kensington was one thing I managed to keep up in February. Was I doing it hoping to feel more like a resident, or like a tourist? Did I want to feel more at home or the opposite? I still stayed sociable, although I stopped going to the BFI as much, another fad of January. But I still had spending money from my first two commercials shot at the end of 2021. I still met friends, and if I was twenty years younger maybe there'd be photogaphs of that too. Here's a concert I was invited to in February. I couldn't remember why I'd photographed it, until I looked closer and saw everyone's masks. Click to enlarge.

 

 I met Gemma Brockis a lot. I could afford to go out for coffee. We'd knock ideas about, her teaching and seeking meetings, me working a couple of days a week at the Crystal Maze and meandering. She told me how as an immersive theatre veteran she'd also occasionally get approached by Virtual Reality Engines to participate in Research and Development. Intimacy was what they were after now. "Virtual Intimacy" was VR's philopospher's stone.

 

 What does "intimacy" actually literally mean though, I asked? We talked about that a bit – Chris Goode used to ask it back when he still did the blog, and was alive – then I decided to just look it up on my phone. We all have an idea. What do you think it means? As far as I could work out, "intimacy" just means the opposite of loneliness. That doesn't seem to have much to do with Virtual Reality. I didn't think they were going to find it, and I made a note of that on my phone. That phone broke, but I remembered.