Let's endure a mad old cartoon about skeletons for Hallowe'en proper, shall we?
Before the famous cat and mouse, before the male leads of The Good Life – but afterPierce Egan's 1821 box office hit that I've only just learnt about* – Tom and Jerry were apparently these two guys on the right, and after last week's dancing, and Saturday's march, I look upon their floating, supple forms now with envy.
I'm back rehearsing The Love Goddess this week, and the trick to dancing seems to be to get the top half of my body to hold up the bottom half, which after forty-eight years of having my bottom half hold up the top half is quite a revelation. There's a sexy dance in this too, although not on the same level as Tex Avery, or Jessica Rabbit, or Betty Boop, or actually any woman drawn outside of a toilet cubicle on a building site. I think the animators knew too that they weren't up to this task without any reference material, which is why they spent more time having their vamp just take incredibly deep breaths in a low cut top while standing still.
Has David Cairns written about this cartoon? Of course he has. Do the skeletons all start playing each other's ribs like xylophones at any point? Well actually, not quite. We're literally a second into the action when either Tom or Jerry turns his hat into a telescope, so let's not expect too many set-ups and pay-offs.
Apart from that though, Magic Mummy is just your standard, run-of-the-mill ,
proudly-gay-police-force-hunting-down-a-necrophiliac-Svengali cartoon
from the thirties. I don't think it was one of the ones Dad used
to show us on his Super 8 projector, but the scratchy soprano of its
wind machine still summons the dread of many he did. Skeletons were such a faff to draw, weren't they? Happy Hallowe'en, ol' unattendees!
"At last"?!
*UPDATE: I have also just learnt that "Tom and Jerry" was a drink! Okay. I reckon the drink was named after the play, and the cops were named after the drink, and the animals were named after the cops (Joseph Barbera worked on both cartoons) and the neighbours were named after the animals.
Yesterday I met Faren (not pictured) and her friends and colleagues in Trafalgar Square to join a human chain across Wesminster Bridge in support of the protests in Iran. October the 29th was also Cyrus the Great day, so I thought about researching him before writing this, then realised it probably wasn't that necessary, but I'll still research him after I've written this. I've got Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe open next to me right now.
Whitehall had been busy. The March of the Mums had made front pages earlier that day, and there was also a Ukrainian protest outside Downing Street, with which we ocassionally intermingled. "Down with tyrants." A lot of the chants were in English, but we were also taught "Azadi! Azadi! A-zad-i!" the Farsi word for freedom. And I finally learnt how to say Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, meaning Women, Life, Freedom – as taught to the people of Hastings by Omid Djalili here, and written across the Jason hockey masks of some protestors. Others hid their face behind David Lloyd's Guy Fawkes mask, now associated with Anonymous, possibly unaware of the seasonal appropriateness. Others still were dressed as zombie nuns, but I'm pretty sure they were just cutting through.
Our numbers grew as we walked down Whitehall, sometimes side by side and filling the road, sometimes holding hands in single file to form the human chain, (which I couldn't photograph without breaking of course). There hadn't seemed to be as many in Trafalgar Square as a month ago, but now we were on the move we were closing roads. This was my first march. Faren said she hadn't felt as safe as she'd have liked at the last one, because people had started shouting "Down with the BBC", believing the corporation hadn't been doing enough to support the protestors, or that reporting the deaths of students was bad for morale – meanwhile the very fact of Faren's employment by BBC Persian has seen her upgraded by the Iranian Government from spy to terrorist – but on this demonstration however, I only saw the one sign with the letters "BBC" dripping in blood, and Faren had her friends around her now. She seemed happy. She was loud. "I'm letting out a lot of anger." I realised I'd only been throwing my voice. Pretend shouting. Shy.
Posting some photographs of the protest on Instagram that evening, I wondered for the first time what my phone is actually up to when it says it's "finishing up" after the loading bar's filled, and I had flashbacks to Arthur Pewtey at the Marriage Guidance Counsellor. I don't really know how well I've fulfilled protestors' requests to "Be the Voice of Iran". But I know what I can do if it's okay with you, and that is to sign, and ask you to sign, THIS PETITION to whoever's Home Secretary when you read this: to drop an already twice rejected Public Order Bill that would make criminal offences of everything that happened yesterday – "interfering with key national infrastructure" for example – in other words, closing roads – and "locking on" – in other words, holding hands. If not for me, do it for Cyrus the Great.
Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?
Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind
over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own
ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head
under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to
learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we
had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy
Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.
Isn't this the best! And now you can add to the names Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen my own, for I have just completed the first week of rehearsals on The Love Goddess. And while I'm not saying I'm as good as these two yet, it does feel like I'm going to have to get close in order to pull off any of the routines that Jacqui Jameson's taught us. So I look forward that. I wonder how it will happen. That's Jacqui below, far right, if you don't count the reflections. This is a lovely room to be in. Look: Mirrors! Hats!
The absolute best thing about the theatre though is all the foreigners you get to work with: the world shrinks and your view improves and you just feel higher up. Almog Pail, the show's creator, is from Israel, and there's a heavy American contingent too, including songwriter Logan Medland, seen above on the keyboads, triple threat Joey Simon – also pictured – and producer Laura Lundy, who was telling us over a fish supper this evening at The Seashell about her ninety-year old gay mother who got thrown out of a convent and has written a book about it. Laura also asked me to look up her daughter on IMDB, and mate...
After supper we returned to The Cockpit to see Lanford Wilson Talley's Folly which closes tomorrow, a two-hander in a gazebo that I knew nothing about. "Lanford Wilson" is definitely an American name though. One often hears people who work in or for the theatre talk about the unique quality of the medium, a kind of "Here-we-are"-ness that I mainly don't feel at all when I go and see a play, beyond a nudge and a wink, but I felt it tonight.
"We could do this on a couple of folding chairs. But it's not bare. It's
not bombed out. It's run down. And that makes all the difference."
I'm not sure I'd call Talley's Folly a comedy, or even a romance, but it's definitely a thing with a heart, and a brain, and a careful thing, and I loved it. Watching American drama performed live by Amerian actors is a luxury, and also a bit of a relief. There were twenty-one other people in the audience tonight. If you're free I recommend filling the seats on its final day. The tickets are here.
Okay, I don't necesssarily expect you to know what my Dad looks like, so you're probably just thinking "Oh, that's a photograph of William Churchill's trusted adviser and possibly illegitimate son, former MP for Paddington, pioneering financial journalist, pretend Australian back in the days when pretending to be Australian was socially advantageous, and George Orwell's boss at the Ministry of Information, Brendan "BB" Bracken, born in County Tipperary 1901, etc..." without a double-take, and you'd be right. It's him. I think it definitely looks like my Dad too though. And so does this.
Happy Birthday, Daddy! It's Dad's birthday today... I screengrabbed this picture of Bracken leaving Downing Street with Churchill from the very informative but, if I'm honest, not necessarily reliable documentary below – and I'm not just saying that because one of the interviewees is Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad.
Bracken
had all his papers burnt after his death apparently, so everything
seems pretty apocryphal. Also the presenter bangs on lovingly about how big a liar Bracken was, so we're probably not on the same page politically. But it's interesting to see someone else have a go at making a history documentary, let's put it like that. The whole thing looks like it might have been shot on a phone, the music's fascinatingly awful, and there are some great, cheap choices of location to spice up the narrative, like a branch of Wimpy's when America gets involved. I'm not recommending it necessarily – again, William Rees-Mogg is in it – but I learnt a lot about BB from it, including the fact there's actually no evidence he was Churchill's son, and I feel I also learnt quite a bit about Conservative mythos too.
Speaking of which, what I really do recommend is The Gathering Storm, this 1974 BBC play I found yesterday on youtube, starring Richard Burton as Churchill, in which Dad pops up playing Bracken. Sorry yes, that was what got me looking him up in the first place and discovering the resemblance. Patrick Stewart also pops up as Clement Attlee. It's an extraordinary cast. Dad died his hair red for the role, which caused a lot of amusement when I was born, and they shot scenes at Chartwell itself, from which Dad "rescued" a photo of Churchill with Somerset Maugham and H. G Wells that he found in a cleaning cupboard. I love the absence of twinkliness in Burton's pre-Thatcher portrayal of Churchill here, not least because it makes the jokes play better, but also because, while he might have been a figure of fun, Churchill was not a clown: he was a walking, breathing ideology – terrifying, but I've also not seen portrayed more vividly someone you'd definitely want as the enemy of your enemy.
(Okay, I'm not saying Bracken definitely wasn't Churchill's son...)
I love this photo. This is the curtain call of the opening night of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the English Theatre Frankfurt in 2017. The assistant stage managers for that show, Mel and Meli – who helped with quick changes, and hid behind the fireplace to rip off Shaun's trousers, and mopped up my spit take in the interval – now flatshare in London. On Sunday they whatsapped to ask if I was in the film on Netflix that they were watching. I hadn't done a film for Netflix. They sent me a clip. I saw what they meant.
I honestly cannot overstate how accurately this resembles my self image. Only when a little research revealed that this was actually Peter Serafinowicz could I begin to reframe "Yuba the Gnome" as anything other than the ground zero of an exploded subconscious. Fortunately, that Bucharest job has just turned out another advert so I can check what I actually look like.
Well it calls itself a market, but I'd call "Alfies Antiques" an Emporium if anything, without even looking up what an Emporium is (although I suspect the definition is a building selling wares at least three storeys tall, composed entirely of mezzanines resulting in an uncountable number of floors, and with as many different types of staircase as possible stuck just wherever there's a space – the Barbican does not sell wares so doesn't count). I have no idea why a painting of David Mitchell takes pride of place above this particular shop, but who needs a reason?
Flanked by gigantic prints of Klimt, Alfies Emporium stands immediately opposite the Cockpit Theatre, where this week we have started rehearsing Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth musical. Tomorrow is the table read, when we're all less nervous. Today we learnt songs and dancing, and I am very new to the latter. Having just the two feet makes it easier though. I'm learning they tend to take turns, and there's only so many places you can put them, and I must now have calves a centaur. We're also doing hat stuff – our choreographer worked with Gwen Verdon I hear – and while it does distract from the feet, I also learnt today what having a top hat land on my balls feels like. It's no trilby. Still, everyone's lovely and I'm trying not to be weird. Come!
It was in those small hours, the sleepless hours, tending the Sentient Wurtlizter Node long beyond her command, that Zimogen Fingertickler could feel her late husband by her side, or possibly just the ghost of someone dressed as her late husband, he was annoying whoever he was.
The pill in the little tray lay unswallowed at the back of my throat throughout the twenty minutes. That's the problem with lying down. But I managed to get the top bunk. Once the lights went out however, all I could hear was me reading Glen's lines from an ipad. Binaural radio's so much more prevalent than it was when we first made Contains Violence in 2008, or even Ring in 2013. Like the old film of that train pulling into the station, I don't know how much longer our brains will stay fooled.
I guess I'm saying it was more like what I was epecting than I was expecting.
I'd actually booked for Saturday, but had dismebarked at the adjacent and preposterously similarly named "Canada Water" station by mistake, so missed my slot. The attendants were brilliant, but I didn't want to hang around on my own – Canary Wharf was making me miss things – so I decided to head back into town along Regent's Canal as I hadn't walked that stretch for a while, but I got that wrong too, and turned off one rivulet too early.
Heading north I didn't recognise any of the buildings, but I'm used to that. A lot's gone up.
It was round about the time I took the above picture that I decided I should finally get a new phone. Not for its own sake, but because I realised I wanted a better camera. That was an exciting moment. I hadn't wanted anything in ages. I used to want to make films. I tried taking some video with what I had and was happy with the sounds I caught. There was a party going on in a flat, coots and car horns, sirens, a solitary firework.
And soon it was too dark to photograph anything. See? This is a whole palm tree I found discarded on its side in a weir. I definitely didn't remember there being a weir.
I also misread the words "some peace. some time." sprayed onto the unlit footpath until I realised one e was an l, and all the o's a's. You don't get that in Notting Hill. But I couldn't photograph it either, so here are some swans I saw on London Beach on Friday. I think that's new. I guess the new King doesn't want them.
Now with added EastEnders, which means that even though I used a clip from EastEnders' youtube channel the video is still "partially blocked", so that only certain countries can see it. I don't know which countries. Has it been blocked inside Britain? Outside Britain? Are you in one of those countries? That's a shame. Let me know.*
In the lead-up to Love Goddess, which starts rehearsals next week, I've been doing a little research into some of the Orson Welles stuff I know less about, and found this photo of his first ever professional job as director. Before I get into that however, I have a question: In 1948 he made a film of Macbeth*, and "to save time" he decided to record audio of all his actors speaking their lines first, then film them lip-syncing to it like a music video, and I have no idea why. I know about recording dialogue and image separately, and obviously Welles did too – half his output is him re-recording other actors' lines – but why this way round? Did other directors do this?
Was he just not sure he'd be able to get the actors back?
The result is probably the stage-iest film of Shakespeare I've seen, including those actually set on a stage. Here's a watermarked still from it. See if you recognise the set...
It's the same arch and staircase configuration as the picture at the top. That was from Welles' first Macbeth – indeed his first anything – a Depression jobs programme from the Federal Theatre Project employing a hundred-and-thirty-seven black actors and stagehands, and one wild-eyed white, pipe-smoking twenty-year-old who decided to set the whole thing in Haiti.
The way Welles talks about the "Voodoo Macbeth", even making his first film Citizen Kane a few years later feels like a come-down, and one can see why when you watch the four minutes preserved of it in the newsreel below. To go from nothing to this... (I think they may have added a line not in the original Shakespeare by the way. See if you can spot it.)
Unlike the arch and stair combo, the brilliant line "Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! My Name's Macbeth!" did not alas make it in to the 1948 film, which consequently has very little to match this production's energy. It's just occured to me it might not originally have appeared in this production either, but simply been added for the newsreel to give viewers unfamiliar with the play some clue as to what's going on. The later filmdid, however, also end
with the witches' return and the line: "Peace, the charm's wound
up!" although I think "wound up" here means ready to go, like a clock, rather
than finished like a story, so I'm not sure why it's at the end of
either. Pessimistic circularity? Did Welles innovate that? The actor absolutely killing it with that line, as Hecate the god of witches, is Eric Burroughs, whose son recently wrote a graphic novel all about the production here, which I think they might be turning into a movie here. Further fantastic reminiscences follow. Enjoy:
*UPDATE: I've just found the whole film – each helmet siller than the last – up on youtube HERE.
No wonder that podium's always doing a double take.
I reached the end of yesterday wondering how I'd managed to get so little done given how little I currently have to do, and only realised with Liz Truss' resignation today how much time I've spent simply checking who's in charge.
To be fair to the Daily Mail, she lasted longer than an hour. She also lasted longer than Andrew Neil when he tried to launch a similarly naked culture war over on that GB News then left after two weeks. And how long will the Tories last? Sorry, I mean the Conservatives! I'm trying to stop using the T word, as I have a theory the way they've managed to stay in office for so long is by having two names: the "Tories", who soak up the bad news and the hate, and the "Conservatives" who actually appear on the ballot paper, name unsullied. We'll see if this works again. I've no idea when. Anyway hats off to the Daily Star's "Will Liz Truss last longer than this lettuce" live feed, a properly salient piece of journalism – Yes I know we all know about it, but this is an archive too. To whoever's reading this in years to come: Shush, I know political chaos is never a prelude to good news, but let me enjoy this. Right, the rain's just stopped, laptop closing, I'm off for a walk.
That apparently was the instruction given to Rita Hayworth when Bob Landry took the above photograph for LIFE magazine in 1941. This photograph of Hayworth holding her breath would go on to sell over five million copies by the end of World War Two. It was this photograph Orson Welles saw while filming in Brazil which led him to famously declare the actress "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" Okay no, that's how he described RKO. What he actually said upon seeing Hayworth's picture was: "When I come back, that's what I'm going to do!" Which isn't far off. And reader, he did.
I'll be playing Rita Hayworth's second husband in Almog Pail's new musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre in a month's time. It's a wonderful script – the whole cheating-on-the-wife-you're-sawing-in-half side of Welles is not one we often see – and I'm really looking forward to starting rehearsals next week. I'll also be playing Hayworth's boss, Harry Cohn, the monstrous, Weinstein-ian head of Columbia Pictures. And at least four other Americans, so I'm also really nervous. But I love being part of a labour of love, and Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a musical. Get yer tickets HERE!
Here are Thuso Mbedu and Viola Davis playing a scene we've watched many times before, in Disney cartoons, in Tom Cruise vehicles, in Young Adult fantasies – I mean, it was dumb of me to even begin this list because it's absolutely endless. When I saw it in The Woman King yesterday however, it felt fresh. Watching Viola Davis act always feels like the best way of spending one's time, but Thuso Mbedu...
I don't think I've ever seen played as well as I have here the story of a strong-willed young outlier trying to find both the respect of their elders and their place in history, which isn't bad considering it's pretty much half of all stories told (and not my favourite usually; I like stories about monsters and slackers). Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King might be the best Historical Romance I've seen since... I don't know... Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? No it has so much over that film, even that film, but I wanted to give a hint of how – in the best way – basic an entertainment it is too. Basic, not dumb.
Procession of the wealth of King Ghezo, painted in 1851 by Forbes (source)
Yesterday was fun and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange, and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key and to Gemma for having me and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.
Counting the grains of rice:
This is a new idea.
Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly
important promise. Still probably more promises than it’s fair to
expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.
Originally a promise was much bigger and most people would be
unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of
something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of
the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of
the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still
count that as a promise kept. Which they did.
Maybe that’s why we’re underground.
Eating a grain:
This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.
Taking another grain:
And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?
Proving that I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.
The Golden Key is on today! Here are some clues as to where we'll be, and by clues I mean very late research I decided to do on our location while leaving the bath running. That's the Parliament building of New Delhi. I was in New Delhi in 1991 when for some reason our house master pulled strings for us to perform there Václav Havel's absurdist critique of Communism Redevelopment, in which I played a middle-aged architect having a nervous beakdown with talcum powder in his hair because I was sixteen. I think I have a photo...
... That's me far right. I secretly based my performance on Bette Davis in All About Eve. Ronnie Potel's the idealistic young buck in the middle, secetly in love with my wife. I remember the audience muttering when she gave me a shoulder rub, and I bought my first ever Talking Heads album over there, and my first beer, and saw distant women doing laundry in the Ganges as the sun set behind the Taj Mahal in Agra. None of that's a clue, sorry, just memory's cute stampede. We'll be at the end of Share Mile in the "Maze of Adventures". Come and find us, and once it's all done I'll post where we were in the comments (I might also post the school magazine's review of my Zdenek Bergman!) Here's the clue. Take it away, Nibbling Nuts...
"Wow!" indeed, thumbnail. Vic Stefanu takes us on a brief tour of the Micronesian Bankvaults of Yap, whose ancient limestone currency – (is "ancient currency" an oxyoron?) –gets referenced in Extra Credits' history of paper money, which we've all watched in preparation for The City of London's Golden Keywhich takes place tomorrow, Saturday.
Come along during the day if you can. Its all free, and I've finally found out which route we're at the end of: "Share Mile", details here. I'll be in kennels with the brilliant Julia "Legs" Masli and Sachi "Bums" Kimura, so I'll definitely be having fun and yes, apparently the counting rooms were called kennels.
Speaking of fun...
I don't know, I didn't want to let his passing go unremarked on here, but can any clip truly contain Robbie Coltrane? I barely had a moment to enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng getting fired before I heard the news. Every time I see him closing that plane door as an unpseaking extra in Flash Gordon I think, and then you go on to do everything. A giant Yappian coin of the acting world. Bye bye, big man.
I'd not noticed the Medusa outside Tate Britain before. Henry C. Fehr's The Rescue of Andromeda isn't the only depiction I've seen in which Perseus and the woman's head he brandishes look identical – I don't know the reason for that (and I haven't bought Natalie Haynes' new book yet, so it might get explained there) – but it's the only depiction I've seen in which Medusa's hair is bound. I suppose that's a sensible precaution, although it's possible Fehr just couldn't be bothered with all the snakes. It's odd that Perseus is also holding a sword though: he's about to turn a sea monster into stone, what was the plan?
Similarly bound and held at arm's length, I realised, is the head in the centre of Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Not "the Crucifixion" I now note. According to Bacon they're Furies: raging demons from Greek Tragedy broken into the Christian Iconography of a triptych. The artist decided in 1944 that pity was no longer enough I guess. Every time I walk into that room of the Tate I'm fifteen again, seeing those girning horrors in that orange boom for the very first time, and recognising the one in the middle from Swamp Thing's first trip to Hell. "Flutch" Alan Moore called him in that. Pencils by Stephen R. Bisette. Inks by John Totleben. Outside of comics I suppose it's odd for a drawing to have two artists, but I looked at those drawings a lot.
Another triptych was playing in the dark round the corner: John Akomfrah's gorgeous The Unfinished Conversation, a study of the immigrant intellectual life of the Stuart Hall who didn't present It's A Knockout. And thread through the whole building, Hew Locke's mighty Procession. Two new highlights. I can't remember when I last spent as long there – I went Monday; it might be where I picked up the bug – I really recommend going.
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