Flash Quotes

  Sure, another reason I haven't blogged so much might simply be procrastination. I didn't write much about Edinburgh, but as this year began with me wondering whether to take a show there, let's finish 2025 by sweeping up the spoils. I got a trailer out it for a start...

 

 

 

 Pow. Huge thanks to DMLK for making it look like there were more than eight people in. Audiences averaged around ten in the end (for a room that sat around eighty) and one of the many lessons I learnt from taking JONAH NON GRATA to the Assembly Rooms was stars on posters don't necessarily mean bums on seats, so bums on posters next time? Maybe stars on bums? I'll stick links to the reviews that the trailer quotes from at the end of this post, but purely in tribute to the unimpeachable work done by this show's hype machine – ie Madelaine at Gingerbread – not for my sake. This isn't about me.

  But I mean, look at that. It's not easy to PR a twenty-year-old show either. You're not up for any awards. Still, Madelaine worked actually literally round the clock to get me press even if I had to write it myself. I shared some of those think pieces back in July, but not the lot, so let me slip into italics now, as I present an article I wrote for Gareth Vile's Analogue magazine about why JONAH NON GRATA's a clown show...

I remember an old interview with Dylan Moran where he stated an ambition to do absolutely nothing on stage, and have the audience get it.

In a time of such social upheaval no-one even noticed it, Woody Allen made three comedies – in a row – about the assassination of a political leader: “Bananas, “Sleeper”, and “Love and Death”. In each, the ethical and religious arguments against taking human life were inextricably tangled with the protagonist’s solipsistic, Bob-Hope-inspired cowardice and laziness.

It’s a cliché that every comedian wants to play Hamlet. The assumption, I think, is they hope to be taken more seriously. But Hamlet’s one of them already: more existentially comfortable splitting hairs and taking the piss than defeating Evil. The prophet Jonah also – at least in the most famous incident from the short book of the Bible bearing his name – is an inaction hero, comically human-sized. Initially, he refuses outright to call down the Wrath of God upon Nineveh, escaping on a boat. But then a storm comes, and there’s not much to do once you’re inside a whale.

When people ask me what “Jonah Non Grata” is about, I say it’s about that story – “sort of” – but it doesn’t matter if the audience don’t know it. When I’m asked what it is, I say it’s “a clown show”, because that’s what all my friends were making when I first devised it in my bedroom back in 2005. And if they ask me what a clown is, I‘m stuck.

The word means something. It has to. But read any casting breakdown of an advert calling for a “funny bones” or a “Zach Galifianakis/Martin Freeman/Jack Black type” (I only get the male ones, sorry) and you’ll see it’s hard to put into words. “Yes!” is one I remember from a clowning weekend sometime last century given by the great Angela De Castro – head of the “Why Not Institute” – and if you only have one word with which to teach someone how to be a clown, “Yes” might be the best. But doesn’t that then run entirely counter to my opening? Yes. And Why Not? Harpo and Chico try to steal a painting. Chico hears someone coming and hisses at Harpo to hide. Harpo stands on his head in the middle of the room. He’s still saying yes, just to something else. “If thy mind dislike anything,” Horatio tells Hamlet, “obey it.” Yes. Exactly. No.

I had a good pandemic. I hadn’t performed Shakespeare in a while, but with all the theatres shut, I decided to try performing the Complete Works on YouTube in my pyjamas, using a range of radio sketch show voices to differentiate characters, and some home-recorded foley, because why not? I hope the tone didn’t read as taking the piss. Or at least, no more than Rylance at the Globe – who never winked at the audience, but always let them in fully onto how weird everything going was. I like it when actors pretend to be the audience’s friend.

Weirdly though, I don’t like it when stand-ups do it. Maybe because stand-ups are pretending to be themselves. Every solo performer – or at least every solo performer with decent enough PR – is wildly outnumbered by their audience, which I find inherently, situationally funny. But stand-ups can’t acknowledge this power imbalance, because they’re not playing a character, so it’s just awkward. But Jonah is a character. And the audience’s friend, because – although he never uses the word “God” (or indeed “Jonah”) – they are clearly his congregation. The audience however, playing themselves, are under no obligation to be on Jonah’s side in return. That’s the motor of not just this show, but a lot of the work I was lucky enough to make with Shunt that inspired it: “Dance Bear Dance”… “Money”… The audience outnumbers the performer, but the performer knows the territory. I’ve made it sound like we’re at war. We’re not. But it’s nice if we’re strangers.

I assume most people know the story of Jonah, even if they’re not, like me, culturally Christian – or Jewish – and even if they don’t know that’s the story I’m telling. Old stories are good, because you don’t have to worry about making anything up, you can just get on with depicting people, and you can’t be blamed for the horrible things they want to do. And I’ve always thought Theatre was a good place to stage demons. But those attending have to feel it’s their own demons they’re watching, not those other fuckers’. They didn’t seem nearly so prevalent, even back during “The War on Terror”. So, I’ve added one line since which I hope will help keep us safe: “Waiting is also way of joining in."

 

Production shot taken during the technical rehearsal by John Scott. 

(I think I was thinner by the time we shot the trailer.)

 

 Back to the italics, as I present next an interview (by which I mean they emailed me questions and I emailed them answers) with the British Comedy Guide from the 10th of August, illustrated with more of John's production shots, which is why it's important to get production shots (and of course a press release, otherwise what are they going to ask me about, which is another thing I learnt)...

You describe Jonah Non Grata as "Hamlet, only sillier - or Tommy Cooper, only slower." What's the most ridiculous thing that happens onstage?

I don't want to give too much away, but possibly my entrance. And I'm not saying it's all downhill from there - my final exit's pretty ridiculous as well - but when you're presenting a solo immersive piece without any scenery, inspired by a three-thousand-year-old story about a prophet who lives in a fish, with self-penned soft techno songs (one of which is purely a three-verse summary of the Scrap Brain Zone of Sonic the Hedgehog) it's... Do you know, I think it's when I try to mime getting the air nozzle working on a plane. It's not good.

Is it true you've performed the complete works of Shakespeare on YouTube in your pyjamas?

No. But it is five thirty-eighths true. I performed - forgive the abbreviations, but they're long titles and I'm a massive wanker - Two Gents, Shrew, Titus, Julius Caesar, and Richard the Second, that last one twice because I didn't like the first version. I absolutely nailed the others though.

It was lockdown. Everyone was making stuff online, and I'd always been YouTube-curious, so I started reading aloud Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. When I finished that, I looked around for something else to read, and realised if I did a Shakespeare a week, I'd be done by Christmas - performing one act a day, with summaries and regular content warnings - but that didn't happen in the end, because it turned out to be a lot harder than just reading a book, and things were beginning to open up, and Black Lives Mattered so distractions became less useful. But I'm incredibly proud of both the quality and quantity of that work. I remember everyone making so much during lockdown. We thought it was the internet keeping us from having hobbies. Turns out it was pubs. Oh, and they weren't my pyjamas.

What's harder - writing an existential clown show or delivering legal advice in EastEnders?

Both are phenomenally easy, it turns out. In the first case, you just take a really old story everyone knows, make a mix tape to accompany it, listen to it while pissing around in your bedroom, and write down anything you might want to do again in front of an audience. Then you wait twenty years until you land a nice advert and can take it to Edinburgh.

In the second case, you send in a self-tape playing one of a million faceless interfaces with authority soap characters have to face daily, then get a phone-call saying you've landed the role of "seedy lawyer". You turn up knowing your lines. Everyone is brilliant. Danny Dyer's brilliant. Kellie Bright's brilliant. The director's brilliant. You're brilliant. Three cameras record it, and it never happens again. It's brilliant.

What's the most absurd line you've had to say in character?

That "had to" is interesting. So is "in character". I actually got to play Hamlet once. When Horatio tells him the ghost of his dead father has been sighted in a suit of armour on the battlements of Elsinore, his response is "This is very strange" which always got a laugh.

"You wouldn't shit on a bun" from the Shunt show Money also gets quoted back to me sometimes, but I wrote that one. The line I'll be declaiming on pavements in my final days though, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, is Sir Maxwell House's intro to The Monster Hunters podcast: "Take two elements. Any two elements. Say, electricity and water. On their own, perfectly harmless. But mix them together, maybe in a bowl... Dynamite!"

Who's your dream audience member for this show - and who would be absolutely baffled?

Exactly. Yes. Them.

 

 The following day, August the 11th, I did an actual interview in person, with Peter Green who was lovely and posted a slightly expurgated (ie minus me gushing about my PR) recording HERE. It's a good reflection of where I was two weeks into the run, and includes a few other lessons I'd learnt, such as how to describe the show when handing out flyers: it had become clear from the look of those walking out halfway through having clearly expected a Play about a Man from the Bible, that a stronger contract with any future crowd might be forged by abandoning the initial pitch "it's based on the Book of Jonah" in favour of "it's a mad show about nothing." I also reflect in the interview on having totally missed the "Art Comedy" bus: whether or not to bill the show under Comedy, rather than Theare, had always been a quandary, and it turns out – due partly to the brilliant and queer work produced that year by BigHead Comedy – that 2025 might have been the year to make that switch. Anyway, I hope Art Comedy remains a thing long enough for me to try and take some credit for it. There's more.

 

musical accompaniment

 

 Back to the press. My final piece was for a music magazine, Fame, published along with a few more production shots on August the 14th...

 While I make not claims for it as a "process", I went about making my first solo show the same way I would advise anyone to: I chose a very old story everyone knew as my starting point – in this case the Book of Jonah (of "and the whale" fame) – then, instead of worrying about how to tell it, built up a playlist of music which might accompany that story, and at my own leisure in my own bedroom, worked out things to do to it which I wouldn't mind doing again in front of an audience.

This may be a generational thing. When I was a student in the nineties, beginning to associate with people who were making theatre from scratch, we didn’t just put movie posters on our walls, we listened to carefully curated playlists of movie soundtracks. Trainspotting. Pulp Fiction. Romeo plus Juliet. Everyone had these CDs, and pre-existing songs beloved by a director were an integral – structural – part of work we found exciting. 

When I graduated, we didn’t disperse, and I started working with a theatre collective in a railway arch in Bethnal Green, called Shunt. Under this arch, behind the Oxo Tower, and finally, in a sprawl of tunnels beneath London Bridge station, we created absurd spaces around which the audience could move, which might change beyond recognition the moment spectators’ backs were turned. Losing your audience is normally considered a bad thing, but having an audience let themselves get lost is different, and essential to these changes were not only the extraordinary designs of Lizzie Clachan, but the versatile and hugely enjoyable soundscapes of Ben and Max Ringham. How, as a performer, could we accompany such compositions, and bring these spaces to life? That was the process I took into making Jonah Non Grata. (And it’s also why I can literally say I have more experience dancing about architecture than I do writing about music.)

 

The show I’m taking to Edinburgh this year I made alongside that work. It is in many ways a personal sequel to it, but as a solo show, it’s also far more suited to rooms above pubs, and – not wishing to give too much away – the audience pretty much stay in their seats (unless there’s a hymn). I wanted it still to have that what-would-now-be-called “immersiveness” though, and music was crucial for this. Nothing I chose for my soundtrack could be too “on the nose” though. The Ringhams’ work for Shunt, while highly evocative, was never generic, and what exactly was being evoked was part of a show’s mystery, something to play with, or against. So there’s no whale song in Jonah, for example. Trying to work out what’s happened once you’ve been swallowed by a whale is, I think, a far more interesting state to play than knowing you’re in a whale, and I’m very happy for the audience to share that mystery. Nearly everything I do onstage, nearly everything we hear, is about existing in the story, rather than telling it. 

 

And there are a lot of songs. An abstract space invites abstract text, something sparer than a monologue. Rather than lectures, I learnt working with Shunt that the audience might be better addressed by awkward questions, slogans, ritual, found text or invented catchphrases, language as part of the alien landscape. Or of course, lyrics. There’s an economy to lyrics. People receive words differently when they’re sung, and a performer delivers them differently too. Songs are time stretchers, time savers, and, as well as releasing words from their obligation to convey specific information, music releases an audience from its obligation to follow what’s going on. This can be essential when a public might worry they’re not “getting it”. All attention should be rewarded, but rather than demanding intellectual engagement, I think there should always be space for an audience to drift off, without fear of getting lost, especially if – as may happen at the Edinburgh Fringe – they’ll be seeing four or five other shows that day. 

I hope this helps.

  Hmm. Two "though"s. Not good. 

 Anyway, that's what I wrote. Just before I move onto the reviews: I lost or maybe I should just say spent ten thousand on the whole thing in the end, which is what I expected to lose, but I wonder if I'd have still lost it if I hadn't exxpected to. it was the most nerve-wracking show I have ever done which is probably a good thing, Edinburgh New Town's not what it was ten years ago in terms of passing trade, I was surprised how long it took me to be in the mood to see anything else, at least two weeks, if I return with a solo show I'll try to make sure it's still part of a larger group of people, every night saw somebody not like Jonah and somebody absolutely love it and with single-figure crowds there's only so much you can sway that, I felt like an artist, if not a working artist, and I finally want to make a next show, and if you came, thank you, and whether or not you did, let's shake off these italics, and happy new year!

 

 Here in France, it's just turned 2026, and a warm hello to everyone sticking around for the plaudits. So. PR's plan to do a second London preview at the Hen and Chickens in order to potentially have something to stick to the posters as soon as we were up, bore beautiful, juicy fruit, although I balked at turning Ben Moor's whales into stars...

 

 Still, long term readers of the blog will know how much those whales will have meant to me. As for the rest, here are the links along with any quotes that ended up electric-stapled to the flyer. That's how I'm celebrating. (I also have port.)

 

So, I already mentioned Rich Cline's review from June 22nd at the time but here it is again: "There's a reason why this show has such a following: it's a near-perfect display of surrealist comedy, brain-bending and utterly hilarious... a skilful performance that brings out hauntingly deep, dark ideas about humanity in unimaginably amusing style."

 

July 20th, The Reviews Hub     (This was a hell of a review. ) "A divinely commanded clown... absurd and profound... Kane's performance is extraordinary... He welcomes both laughter and awe... so thematically dense that you could discuss it for days on end, but it is also an absolutely joyous, in-the-moment experience." This was a hell of a review.

 

July 21st, Sarah Birch Hackney Citizen  (quality) "A virtually indescribable cacophony of humour and found language...  be sure not to miss this captivating five-star-quality production."

July 22nd, Malcolm Beckett Theatre Vibe DON'T DO STARS bless, and then we went to Edinburgh, to receive...

 

 

 But also – on August the 6th – from Bruce the Moose Bruce on the Fringe .5 and then...

 

August 9th, Erin Ross Edinburgh Guide  "The show is, yes, funny; it’s absolutely mad; but it has a startling poignancy. Perhaps it’s the sheer conviction of this writer and performer... The audience left dizzy, happy and connected having experienced something very strange together, something to think on and share when someone inevitably asks, “What did you see at the festival?” Don’t miss the chance to see something devout immersive and interactive theatre lovers have lauded for many years; it’s the fringiest thing at the Fringe."
 

August 11th, Kay Marquis The Wee Review  "Kane manages to be both alarmingly unpredictable and reassuringly genial... it may dwell on angst and be full of sinister shocks and disorientating requests, but it’s very funny... for anyone looking for something different, this is perfect."

 

And then my first actual print review on August 12th, from Hamish Gibson in
Fest 

 

Never mind, let's check on those audience reviews (thanks, Morgan!) 

 So the show was, if not finding its audience, at least losing its non-audience, and trouble was being shot...

 

August 13th, Sean Greenhorn The List , a big one which we didn't use any quotes from, but I still enjoyed the writing: "It’s always tough to review a show like Jonah Non Grata; a show that consistently wrongfoots the audience, revelling in awkward moments where things don’t seem to be working. It’s tough because, to some, the lack of laughter is the point, and can perversely lead to the biggest laughs of all. Simon Kane’s surreal anti-comedy piece is loosely about dilemmas and decisions. Or a vengeful man who wants to stay at the Marriott. Or simply the slow unravelling of an entertainer. It’s honestly hard to tell." 

 

 The show was definitely better when people laughed though, I knew that by now. You can't let the audience know you're in on the joke however without breaking character, but I was getting better at it...

August 17th, Elise Mc Leod Ruby TV (who don't do stars)

August 19th, Oli Fuller Binge Fringe  "An hour of theatre that will have you on the edge of your seat and will keep you thinking about it for the rest of your life... It is artistic and beautiful and indescribably enticing... an absurdist masterpiece. Go see this show, do not put it on a list, do not see it if you have time, book it now." 

 

Oli stayed around afterwards. I loved Oli.

 

August 22nd, My Goddess Complex  "equal parts absurdist theatre, stand-up comedy, and performance art."

 

And finally...

August 25th, Ben Kulvichit Exeunt (who also don't to stars) "I like liquorice." And it should have turned 2026 in Britain too now so HAPPY THAT! No rush.

 

 

5th of March 2017

Helpings

 It occured to me yesterday, happily and suddenly, that my lack of engagement with the blog might not, in fact, be incontertible evidence of a waning enthusiam for things I see and do as I fall into my fifties, but simply the inevitable consequence of Non Disclosure Agreements. Most of the things from which the rest of my life now hangs are projects a digital signature on a PDF proscribe me from mentioning until the results go out, and by then it feels too late to send a postcard. 

 

 I suppose I could have mentioned I'd spent five beautiful afternoons towards the end of 2024 in a writers' room for Mitchell & Webb's new sketch show when the press release for it first went out back in February, but then I was probably nursing too much guilt for not having been able to mention I'd worked on the pilot script in 2023 (Mitchell and Webb Need Help it was called then. Can I even say that?) Maybe "beautiful" isn't exactly the right adjective, but I definitely want one of the good ones, because being invited aboard the writing team of a sketch show in 2023 felt like receiving a phonecall to say you'd won an Oscar when you didn't even know you'd made a film. 

 

 Here's me in the room, "established" according to Big Talk's press release.

 

 There are many other reasons I'd want the good adjectives: I really enjoy pissing around with millenials for a start. I also don't think I've seen Robert Webb so happy. Watching him and David improvise material across a table in a way I had never witnessed before – perhaps having been away from each other so long – made sitting there, laughing, peeling tangerines, and asking if anyone wanted the window closed feel like contribution enough from me. I did contribute more though, in the end. I contributed The Goomb – a sketch first mentioned on this blog in 2022, and originally submitted to That Mitchell and Webb Look in Two-Thousand-and-Ten. Other sketches were bought, but none filmed. Still, fifteen years on, HERE'S HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS!...

 

 

 

TV Shows? Is it not clear HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS! is a movie?

 

 Perhaps because the intervening years had been so full of Finnemore (the first series of Souvenir Programme went out in Two-Thousand-and-Eleven) the gap between shows never seemed that big to me, but then I realised fifteen years is also the interval between Sylvester McCoy's Doctor Who and Christopher Eccelston's, which is of course the longest amount of time betweeen two things there can be. It was gratifying to see how well the sketch went down with the new guys. I suppose dying inside while someone watches something you made on a laptop is what brought them here. I am proud. I'm so happy. I am such a fan of everyone involved. You see, this is the problem with not writing about something until it's out. What can you say? I miss them? 

 I'm still in France by the way.

 

Languedoc

 

 Not all the sketches are viewable here. I don't know why. I think what links them is having a "Writers' Room" bit. And I want to share one of those, I just don't know if I'm posting the right one as I can't see it, but if this is the sketch I'm thinking of, Lara Ricote did indeed originally propose it as a car commercial...

Let me know if I'm right.

 

 That's not the actual writers' room of course. Ours was a lot fuller: essentially a sandwich of walls, old fashioned shash windows and the sound of drilling, sideboards covered with awards, a big table on the inside spotted with varying systems of discarded tangerine peel, and a meaty, seated talent filling in between the two. I was there the morning Trump was reelected. I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world. Stevie Martin wrote a great post about writers' rooms here, by the way, on her substack. And while I'm plugging stuff I have nothing to do with, Lara's comedy special "GRL/LATNX/DEF" is on youtube here, and diamond sharp.

 

And Krystal Evans' instagram is here.

 One of my favourite things about seeing Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping finally go out in August was seeing all the accompanying Sketch Show Opining. Honestly. Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian defined the form's importance pretty succintly, I think, as "an important mechanism for digesting the world", but she also descibed them as "hit and miss" whereas the truth is – as the Radio Times wrote in its preview – that they're "tapas": different people like different bits. Pete Paphides' observation in his interview with David and Rob in the same magazine, that "sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other" was another lovely summing up. I do think if there were more sketch shows on the telly, people might be better at getting stuff off their chest and differences might not be so likely to become divisions, and I enjoyed self-identifying youtuber video essayist Stubagful's savvy theory below, as to why telly stopped making them: not economics, as is normally suggested, but snobbery: "The sketch show died because the TV industry wants to think it's better than the internet... Nobody wants to be just another content creator." All of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping should be available to enjoy on Channel 4 HERE, and I think it's glorious.

The Annuals

 Yes, MERRY CMRIJNNAJ! By the way, I used to be crazy about Rodney Matthews, bringing my copy of "In Search Of Forever" into Art GSCE and asking when we were going to stop drawing things in bowls and start airbrushing curly, curly made-up space landscapes where everything looks inexplicably cuddly yet thorny.

 

 Happy December the Twenty-Seventh, Unattendees! I hope you've all been with friends, and that your celebrations have been surmountable. Here's to greater attendance in the New Year from me at least, to this blog, or to any equivalent technology that can remind me as effectively both to engage in things, and – for all the gaps in the record – that I did actually sometimes engage. For example, I've said little here about John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme's continued existence over the last three years (and counting) as standalone, 45-minute, annual reunions, but allow me to provide you now – finally – with some exclusive and evocative behind-the-scenes reportage:

 

 Wait, no, here's a better one:

 

 Here we all are, broiling in Bush Hall on the fourteenth of July 2025, for this year's special which incidentally was repeated this Christmas Day immediately after the King (a big name, but I wish he wouldn't do so much stuff about the war). If you've yet to hear it, BBC Sounds don't do foreign any more, but it was comedy of the week when it first went out, so you can hear it in podcast form HERE.

 

 

 This even better photograph of Sally Stares, Sue Pearse, either Ed Morrish or Lawry Lewin, and almost definitely the rest of us, was taken on the seventeenth of April 2023, just before we recorded the very first special – "The Twat of the Night" – which I wrote a little about here, and which, re-reading, I see was also very warm. 

 We didn't just meet up for the recordings though. There were also try-outs. But no longer in Kensington Library, as they had been when I lived in Camden, they now took place – in conjunction with my having to relocate to Notting Hill Gate – in a great big hall in Cecil Sharp House, Camden. In this photograph, John is facing the back wall and the audience are standing up because, I guess, we're all still finding our feet after lockdown:

 

 We sorted it out in the end though, and I think wherever you are in the world you can hear the 2023 special HERE. 

 Or buy the lot here.

 The following year, John – the divinities exalt him – decided to do something different, and that first try-out of 2024 where we all just ended up sat at the back watching him invent the desire-path-abundant village of Allwyn (pronounced "Alan") was such a thrill for me, I never for a second worried well hang on what am I going to do then. But if I'm honest, that's never a worry. Ed once told us how much he enjoyed producing a show with no egoes, and Margaret and I immediately corrected him: we probably have enormous egoes, but what ego isn't going to enjoy working on something this good? 

 

Yes. Yes, I think I remember now why I never got round to posting these.

 Wherever you are in the world, I think you can hear the 2024 special HERE, the only show to my knowledge John has performed sat at his laptop rather than standing with a script, because there simply wasn't time to print one. ("The following show was written in front of a live studio audience," to quote Ed crediting John-Luke Roberts). It was recorded on the twenty-second of April 2024, and I've put these in quite a weird order, haven't I:

 

 

MARGARET CABOURN-SMITH CAN CURRENTLY BE SEEN IN "SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS" AT THE BIRMINGHAM REP.

HAPPY HOLLY(wood)DÉ(but)S!

 

 

 It is true, I am in a Mark Wahlberg film! A Christmas movie called THE FAMILY PLAN 2. Although, noticing it had gone up on Apple TV and skipping straight to my bit, I initially thought oh I've been cut, but you can still see my back so I haven't. They just cut the shot of me humming on my headphones and ignoring the action behind me. You could even argue not seeing my face is cooler. It's certainly Christmassier (if you're into M. R. James). Anyway, I know that's me driving the bus. Here's a photograph of my legs as proof, or rather proof I'm not driving, as all the bus interiors were shot stationary in Shepperton Studios surrounded by a massive blue screen.

 Not green screen, as I say in the video. I felt like Harrison Ford in that cab – first confronted with having to make heads or tails of the dashboard of the Millenium Falcon – and if you watch the clip closely you can just about catch me pretending to flip a switch above my head as we take off. What does it do? No idea. I cannot drive a bus. I did two days of filming for this, the first on location in Piccadilly, with a gold-trimmed, burgundy suite at the Sofitel on Regent Street as my trailer...

 

 ... during which I kept checking everyone knew I couldn't actually drive a bus. They knew that, right? Jermyn Street's quite narrow. I wasn't needed that day in the end. And if you want to watch the whole film, not just my back, and have a subscription to Apple I guess, it's here – enjoy! And if you still don't believe that's me, here's my bus driver's face back in Shepperton, behind which are Kit Harington and Mark Wahlberg having a tussle. I assume. I never looked round to check because I couldn't be sure in my driver's cab when they were or weren't shooting. Professional. I just kept Maggie Simpsoning at the wheel.

 

 

 Of course I'm burying the lead, which is that at the beginning of the year I actually landed two Christmas movies, and you can actually see and hear me in the second, as a judge (well, magistrate) in the final button of the trailer no less, which is here. And Kiefer Sutherland came up to me and shook my hand and said You're great, You are great. It's called TINSEL TOWN and it comes out on Sky tomorrow! 

 Kicking off 2025 with this kind of work was odd and new to me and basically bliss, because I'd definitely decided by then to use all the money I'd received for "High Five" to take JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh. The night before my scene, I couldn't sleep, and stayed up re-reading Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN on my big hotel bed.

 

  I'd brought it with me to Leeds because I wanted to check its influence on the solo show. Jimmy's nervous isolation on the phone. In an alien bedroom. And I remembered writing seventeen years earlier how I'd wanted JONAH to feel a little like a comic. And re-reading it I loved it again. I loved the book. Loved what I was doing. Loved that I was seeing the insides of hotels again. Loved that they'd put me up in a Marriott. 

 

 JONAH NON GRATA production shot by John Scott. See? The nervous hand to the mouth? I should definitely write more about Jonah.  

 

 And here's where I sat the following day. "There is no Nation so Powerful, as the One that Obeys its Law," it said on the wall in golden letters over a century old. The North gets it.

 

Big Spoon

artwork by Jon Stubbington

 

 Of course, I'm biased. But I think my mate Matthew Woodcock (Monster Hunters co-creator, "Roy Steel", and former Tweed Avenger of Mitre Square before the London Dungeons started giving us all scripts) has produced a genuine podcast Masterpiece in The Divide. Without giving too much away – and there is SO MUCH to give away – his new, twelve-part Cold War beast, is John Le Carré meets Philip K. Dick, with new episodes out every Friday, atmosphere you could cut with a piano wire, and me popping up all over the show as louche para-intelligence panjandrum Charles "A bastard for a boss can be quite the motivator" Spooner. Everyone involved has done incredible work on it so I won't mention any of them because I want you to stop reading this immediately and start catching up with it NOW: Here, look what a lovely length the episodes are...

 

 Power through the first four if you can for a NEXT LEVEL TWIST, and then bask in the even-nexter levelness of episode five...

  

 And then enjoy the wait. Cool some water, maybe, invite some friends round whatever you cooled that water with and talk and about it while you wait. Like! Subscribe! Sorry, I'm excited. I honestly reckon you'll be hooked though, I'm really proud to be involved, I've just shed a week-long fever, and you know how long it normally takes me to plug stuff. Here's another Grand Panjandrum...

 

 

 

 Fireworks and dogs. A different time. 

"There's a big question about what to do with all the rubble..."

 "... there have been preliminary talks and various plans about a Gaza seaport..."

 So that's what I needed to get back on the blog, it turns out. Hope.  

 I mean, sure, instagram stories are great and everything (and don't worry, I'll post soundbites below) but this interview is, if anything, even more useful than a bond-dissolving Niagra Falls of screaming trauma: a gripping, followable, and humanely optimistic account of – for want of a better phrase – what the fuck is going on and, more pertinently, what the fuck just happened. I mean, Trump?! Peace?! HIM??? It could easily be played in History classrooms for years to come, unless of course it turns out Israeli peace negotiator and self-confessed peacenik Gershon Baskin is just making it all up, but I don't know... he's been doing this for forty-seven years. He definitely knows things. I know. Someone who actually KNOWS things.

"I brought an agreement from Hamas, to do what we're doing today, back in September 2024. And I got it from Hamas in writing, in Arabic and in English, and in voice message. And no one on the Israeli side would listen. In fact, the head of the negotiations in Israel told me: 'It's a great deal. But the Prime Minister refuses to end the war.' I went to Qatar and presented it to them, it was with the Egyptians, it got to the desk of President Biden. But it got no traction."

 But Biden, unlike Trump, didn't have property interests in Qatar which might get upset by Netanyahu's later attack on Doha. Nor, it seems, did Biden have real estate mogul Steve Witkoff as a United States envoy:

"Since the Arab Spring, the main base of operation is Istanbul... (Turkish Intelligence Chief) İbrahim Kalın, who's a good friend of (Turkish President) Erdogan, who's a good friend of Donald Trump, and of Steve Witkoff, they got him on the phone and said: 'Ibrahim, we need you to lock Hamas into this deal.' and the Turks – together with the Egyptians and the Qataris – strong-armed Hamas. And Sharm El Sheikh happened." 

 Just as that ***** of **** posted on "Truth Social" it had, before Hamas had even agreed – a crucial tactic acording to Baskin (and useful too, of course, if you're planning on getting Jeremy Corbyn to form a political party with you). So... wow... man... Do watch it. 

 And, on Trump's horrific homefront, if you haven't yet checked out Portlanders in inflatable animal costumes standing up to ICE, I of course recommend you do so, but what I really haven't been able to get out of my head immediately previous to this Peace is Josh Johnson on The Daily Show brilliantly noting how much Trump's started talking about not getting into Heaven. Where is it now... Oh yeah! Ghislaine Maxwell! Still, as distractions go, I mean, Peace is definitely an improvement.

 

"I want to try and get into Heaven, if possible. I hear I'm not doing so well." Actual quote.