Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.
Apart from these fresh intros, the only new material, if you don't count the compilations, or the date stamps (and you are absolutely welcome to count date stamps as new material, by the way... it's been an unhelpful old year for me so far in terms of the old fight-or-flight) are the new thumbnails. Ideally, your typical YouTube thumbnail contains both the presenter's likeness and some text, and after a series of botched cut and pastes...
Bold. But rejected.
... I realised the easiest – and also quite pleasingly Dave McKean-iest –way to achieve this was simply to pause the introductions as they fade into the titles, and take a screenshot.
"Ta-daaa!"
The compiled Julius Caesar went out this weekend, on both channels, meaning that for the second time Season One is now done. But another reason I bothered to give this project its own channel is that, this second time round, I hope to get further into Season Two and beyond on its return. I've time enough anyway, and a room. And I'm still very proud of the whole thing... The only reason I haven't plugged it until now is that, as I learnt in my previous post, apparently it helps the algorithm find you an audience if you don't. But that hasn't thus far worked the same magic it did on The Sitting, maybe because that video's only sixty seconds long. I don't know. It's a learning curve.
As a fat, four course taster then, here are the compiled introductions. The Two Gentlemen of Verona's features a new attempt to explain what I'm doing, plus archival bonus material of me seeing if it will work if I sing the songs rather than just reading them out, which it didn't so I don't know why I've included it.
The compilation of introductions to The Taming of the Shrew features no new introduction, but bonus material of me going off into the kitchen to throw some pans around for some sound effects, which I did use.
More foley work is included in the collected introductions to The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, where I cry like a baby. Donald Trump was President back in 2020, remember. It was a different time. Ha ha ha.
And finally – inspired by this bit in an excellent documentary about the old BBC2 cult film strand Moviedrome in which Alex Cox reckons he got the gig because, as the only film director not living in London, he couldn't just film everything in his living room and so his Film Club pieces to camera looked much more dynamic...
... I head out of the flat for the final compilation of introductions to Julius Caesar, and attempt to explain what I'll do next beneath the green man of Parkland Walk. (Some thumbnails are better than others. Like I said, it's a curve.)
Now play them all simultaneously! And if you fancy taking your own tour of the new channel, you can like, share, subscribe, scroll, swipe, dive, run, push, bomb, and pet heavy HERE. I hope you're all doing tremendously.
When traditional paint-and-trace animation was explained to me as a child, in arts programmes of old, I was never able to understand how, when the painted cells were placed upon a lightbox to photograph, the brushstrokes showed up flat and brightly coloured as though lit from above, rather than as smeary, backlit shadows. When I was finally given the opportunity to make my own cartoon in Moving Image Class, as a seventeen-year-old foreign exchange student at Milton Academy Massachusetts, I was able to find out for myself.
Except I didn't, because I was right. The Sitting looks exactly what you might expect a light shone through a series of increasingly opaque painted body parts to look like. The white patch above, for example – intended to mask the coal miner's legs as he's coughed up by the Gibson Girl – does not match seamlessly with the wall behind, so I guess I'll never understand the properties of the lightbox. But I'm still incredibly pleased with it and proud of it. And, as you can see, I still have every hand-painted cell from it in a box under the bed, so I can always reshoot.
See if you think this next bit is interesting. I posted this barely discernible digital transfer of the VHS transfer of the American NotTheSameColour transfer of the original film shot in class to YouTube towards the end of last month, but didn't immediately get round to telling anyone. It turns out not telling anyone is actually what you're meant to do though, because it lets the algorithm get to work unmolested by acquaintances, and within a week I was surprised to see the video had received over six hundred views, which I know isn't much, but it's more than most videos I post. I guess it helps it's short. That number's plateaued however, so I reckon I can declare the accidental experiment over now and let you loyal, ugh, losers in on it without fear of nobbling the stats, therefore enjoy!
To know this show was to love it but if even you did neither, both Movie Club and "guest reviewer" are pretty self-explanatory, so enjoy as I continue to digitise my teetering VHS stacks. I think to be considered for the gig you had to leave a sample of your work on an answerphone, and I left a review of the Demi Moore version of Scarlet Letter where Robert Duvall dances round a bonfire with his head stuck up a stag – Christ, is there nothing about this I don't remember? Riverside Studios. 1998. Everyone was fun and pleasant. It wasn't paid. I didn't know what to wear so I wore what they wore. They asked if this was my first time on television and I told them I'd appeared in Z Cars when I was three months old. "Did you play a baby?" asked Andrew Collins. Rest in power, Brenda Fricker. Forgive me, Keifer. And that's my Dad and Mum at the end.
I hope you agree this find was worth sharing. In its way, its almost as coruscating,
nourishing, and unstoppably funny, if only – as Americans say – on
accident. The central message of "Emptying Yourself for God" is a hell of a hook, and the total lack of rapport between unrehearsed host and puppet creates a tension I find it hard to grow tired of, however much the deranged animated inserts start to drag.
This Lucy and Friends is also the kind of reminder I always enjoyed getting, that before hitting its stride with wall to wall,
parasocial direct address and crafted video essays, YouTube was once a lot
more like the show Takeover TV, a kind of petting zoo for anonymous projects as its name suggests. Like Macbeth and the taste of fear, I had almost forgot.
* I'm trying to make formidable happen as a noun, a bit like spectacle even though that was never an adjective. Pronounce it as French as you like.
from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator
Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal.
Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.
Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest.
UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?
Sticking with politics, it's been a while since we checked in on the folks at Lembit Opik's zero gravity baby farm. The following is taken from the "Weekly Q and A with the Chairman of Asgardian Parliament" held on the eighth day of the month of Leo in the Asgardian year 0010 (full video posted below) with thanks to YouTube's transcription function...
12:31 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Yes, I believe we are live. Um and while we wait on the Chair, Peter,
would you like to give a summary of our um chair's meeting from an hour ago?
12:42 - Deputy Chair Peter Maughan (pictured):
Yes, Sarah. [clears throat] We're looking forward very much in the the meeting of the chairs [clears throat] looking forward to further discussions of our trip aa of the uh
Antarctic potential. We also are looking forward to whatever we're going to be able to do to
celebrate the uh anniversary of Asgardia and uh we had a lot of chairs there at the meeting tonight.
So it was very very good. Um we're waiting for some reports back from Lembit (Opik, Chairman of Asgardian Parliament)with regard to the uh discussions he's been having with Head of Nation
and with uh the Prime Minister. So we're hoping we might get some more news from him him at uh at this
meeting. But as it stands at the moment, we're really sort of waiting, absorbing,
looking forward to what we can do, and hoping that I can find a cure for the hiccups that I keep getting every two minutes, um, courtesy of the new drug that I'm taking and it gives me uh it gives
me hiccups. So, don't let anybody tell you that it's easy to lose weight with these
injections that you have because it is. But unfortunately, it also gives you ter terrible indigestion which I
have.
But no, we had a we had a very good meeting and we're now looking
forward to what Lembit will bring back to us. Lembit's in a in a conference in London at the moment (GB News' and Jordan Peterson's ARC). So, he's having to work around that. But, uh, we're hoping that he'll have some good news for us [clears
throat] in a few minutes when he manages to come to us. So, that's pretty much all we did. We didn't come to any huge conclusions
about anything, but we did uh we did have a good meeting and uh and that, and now we're waiting for Lembit.
15:12 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Thank you, Peter.
15:13 - Deputy Chair:
But now, now we're live. I should say that uh that my name is Peter Maughan
and I'm de deputy chair of the parliament of Asgardia which is the first space
parliament and also the first fully digital democracy and that if anybody's
watching this who is not a resident of Asgardia this is a good time to join. It's €100 or the equivalent in your currency per year and that gives you access to
all of the facilities of Asgardia. So if you're not [clears throat] already a member, get joined. Uh we
love it. We come together once every week as chairman of the committees of
Asgardian Parliament, but we also we also enjoy ourselves. We're all friends. It's all quite nice. Those of us who've been involved in politics for a long
time, as I have, know that politics is a dirty, filthy business. But this is not politics. This is politics with a small P in the sense that we are looking to
guide the the destiny of mankind in space and looking to safeguard the residents of Asgardia, but not to fight with
one another. It's very easy to fall out with me. I mean, I'm in lo local politics in
the northeast of England and everybody falls out with me. Although I try to avoid that, but we're just all friends. If I'm in
trouble with regard to anything, I can reach out to all of my colleagues in the Parliament of Asgardia and they're always
here to lend a helping hand. So, it's worth it to join to have that constant on constant friendship
just at the end of a phone and it's lovely and I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, I
don't know who's here. You can't ask Lem any questions because he's not. But if anybody wants to ask any questions of any anyone, I'll try.
17:48 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Peter, you are you're muted, Peter. And I think Lembit has joined us...
I'm glad they've kept the intro, but why change perfection?
That was back in November of 2022. Actually it's 'irreplaceable' isn't it?
And apologies, this will be a quite long, largely unillustrated, and not very happy post madly stuffed with microlinks, but if you click on only one of those links this last day of Pride, please let it be THIS. Thank you. I always liked you.
Okay. Probably the biggest, if not the only, historical development I've derived any genuine
joy and hope from this century is the shedding of my own
trans-skepticism as friend after friend of mine found the answer to who
they were and came out as trans and non-binary. In the growing light of their revelation the world seemed to me, in this one sense at least, to become better, and richer,
and more user-friendly and less exploitative. Then the party I voted
into office turned that light out because they thought it's the
Government who should decide what human beings are and not human beings. I've heard no one this year
wish each other a Happy Pride. So no, I can't say I've grown any fonder of Sir Keir Starmer since I posted the picture above.
But now Labour is finally finding a replacement, and perhaps the knots in my brain will loosen. However, as the man himself said:
"while this is an important moment it is not one for celebration. It is
one for reflection. On how a party that has always prided
itself on its anti-racism, its commitment to equality, its belief in a
better, fairer Britain could have fallen so far as to betray its own
principles, as well as the principles of the country. This is also a
moment to apologise once again. To all those who were hurt, to all those
who were let down, to all those driven out of our party, who no longer
felt it was their home, who suffered the most appalling abuse. Today, on
behalf of the entire Labour Party, I say: sorry."
... and, at the very opening of this Pride Month, Wes Streeting's replacement as Health Secretary going on the Today programme to pronounce that a trans woman is a man in a dress, an interview I have literally woken up thinking about most days since. (His exact words were in fact "I wouldn't say trans women are women", but what are they then, fucking UFOs?)
Sorry, wrong picture
And obviously – actually I'll take that "obviously" back, because so many seem to miss it – Starmer-mandated cruelty wasn't just reserved for the trans. Look at Woolwich Crown Court: With plans still in place to speed up "access to justice" by ending a person's right to trial by jury, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson recently set a couple of unorthodox precedents, firstly by intitiating a prosecution for contempt of court against defense lawyer (and veteran of inquiries into Grenfell, Hillsborough, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence) Rajiv Menon for daring to remind a jury that they were allowed to vote with their conscience, and secondly, by sentencing the four Palestine Action activists left to defend themselves to a total of twenty-five years in prison for a crime they'd neither been charged with, tried for, nor found guilty of. What all four had been charged with was "criminal damage", specifically: taking a sledgehammer to Elbit Sytems UK "products" intended to be tested on Palestinians before being marketed globally as "battle-proven". (Who knows what "products"? Helmets probably.) What they were jailed for however was terrorism, with the backing of a Court of Appeal who had, in deference to the Government, reversed the High Court's overturning of Palestine Action's proscription.
But no, they're all tangents, because the only thing compelling me to write any of this at all was there was meant to be a mass lobby of MPs to reject the EHRC's "bathroom ban" last Friday, but it had to be cancelled because of the heat and so I was hoping we could all write to our MP instead (particularly if any of you live in Makerfield) and here's that link again please. I also hope whoever takes over as Prime Minister has a plan for the heat, and the hatred,
and the battle-proving, and I hope it's more than just letting it play itself out or whatever.
Finally, since I hope never to write about Starmer again, I'll use this post to share his very last interview before resigning, given at the G7 summit. Chris Spargo is a fairly new YouTuber to the scene, whose other videos include "Why is this bin everywhere in the UK?", "Do you really need to preheat the oven?", and "I just want to show you some weird stones". I love Chris Spargo. And Callum, Emma, Sib, Griffyn, Harry, Amanda, Ashley, Billie, Sarah, Alastair, Maya, Pippa, Jack, Jas, Jordan, Jay, Es, Ozzy, Miranda, Mamoru, Oli, I love you too. Happy Pride x
That's last night. This is not a sponsored post but if you're wondering, the PIKOY Galaxy Projector Light is available on ebay for about thirty quid, and I definitely recommend it. You can change the colours, and it also does stars but they're immutably green. I assume white light's too messed up for a laser. This was today:
I found a new park overlooking the Lea Valley, and it being Summer and me being someone attempting to live in the present, I lay down in the grass. Looking up at bare blue, my view was interrupted by more wavering forms: previously unnoticed cobwebbby gunk "floaters". The NHS website says they're only cause for concern if you've not seen them before. When I sat up and they didn't go away, I briefly made plans for going blind. Very briefly. I mean, something something talking books, that was the extent of it. Because then I wondered, what if they weren't new, what of they were one of the reasons I'd felt so much no this year, one of the bags over my head, in my way in my head? There's a blank wall in front of me now, I'll stare at that.
I'm afraid you will have to read the link in full to understand this. I should get photoshop again.
Okay. Good.
The hopeless, teeth-grinding paralysis logged in my last
post has lifted a little today.
And with genuine love and respect for
all who, by contrast, find themselves disquieted by Keir Starmer's
resignation, I do intend to pay my proper goodbyes to that feeble, purge-sanctioning pepperpot soon. But for now I just want to share this Unattended Article from nineteen years ago! I'd thought it prudent to start backing up the blog because who knows what's going to happen to the internet now it's literally being run by Nazis – sorry, "hard power" enthusiasts – and in doing so... well firstly, bloody hell if I say so myself, but this was a great read in its early days before I started just sharing stuff... and secondly, and more pertinently, having grown to believe my anxieties about the normalisation of the Far Right had only begun in 2008, with the shamelessly guff-spraying double whammy of Sarah Palin as Republican candidate for Vice President and an openly Islamophobic Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, I was genuinely taken aback to find in August 2007, when this blog had just begun and Gordon Brown just become Prime Minister:
I've noticed a number of angry
twenty-year-olds at work, angry and hopeless, robbed of any ideology.
And it occurred to me of course, any fellow thirty-somethings, that
these people have lived HALF THEIR LIVES under the present government…
so no wonder they're so scared and racist. It was alright for us because
we knew the Tories were baddies when they talked about "Preserving the
British Way of Life"… We grew up with images of gorgons smeared in blood
and cash and war… But "kids today", they've heard that same poppycock
from the good guys. Thatcher's not the baddie anymore, it's something
called the New World Order, and expect to hear immigration mentioned a
lot...
Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot
crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.
Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 going by my dye job (open auditions were being held for The Pianist) Tom Lyall and I staged one of the stories I'd written in the mountains of Bajardo at a cabaret at Chat's Palace, Hackney. I originally did these storytelling "acts" at Shunt's arch in Bethnal Green, and I might put one or two of those up as well now I'm finally digitising my VHS's. The scare quotes around "act" are just a reaction to my louche mumbling here. No level of video degradation can dim the splendour of Tom's work, even if the capture does little justice to his makeup choices as Phonella. Speaking of degradation, I thought I'd parcel this in a little Hi-8 footage of the region whose actual walk to the shops had inspired it, and I'm very grateful to Kane Parsons' Backrooms for cementing ageing VHS as a now legitimate liminal aesthetic. Enjoy (possibly with subtitles).
"It is wonderful, isn't, yes. Proper prestige telly! Yes. Glenda Jackson! And really, thank you all again for coming over, it's so – Bit nervous, yes. Ha. Now, I'm not entirely sure when I'll be showing up, but – Oh, she's the... She's Mary Queen of Scots, isn't she? Or her mother– Oh wait, THIS IS ME THIS IS ME!"
"... And that's it! Anyway, on with the story... No, I think that's it for me... Mm?... Yes! One take!... Well no actually, second take, but for the first one my idea had been that I'd just, sort of, be going around hitting everyone, with the stick, yes, and the drum, just hitting them very, very hard with the – there were two sticks originally – but we didn't use that in the end, and everyone, me included, thought 'tone it down, Ian, well not me included, but anyway I think there were nerves and so that was all, yes, 'on the hoof' do they say? Not much research, no."
It's okay to post old auditions from 2023, right? And it's okay if you want a quick clip for your new showreel to just film the television with your phone, it's fine, yeah? Great. Here it is then.
The title of this post comes from director Katrin Gebbe's excellent advice to me on the set of A Thousand Blows
as horses, carriages and stallholders reset for the seventh or eighth
take of me finally getting to run out of a pretend hotel for real –
obviously, you don't forget something like that. Look out too for some
lovely fortuitous swipes, my favourite having to be Kellie Bright
condemned to skeletoning at 2:10.
I never mentioned Hockney on here before yesterday, but I've mentioned Fred Spencer, with good reason. He used the internet as I feel it should be used, broadcasting hope, sharing his sadnesses, and living without embarassment. I'm glad he got back together with Sharon, as evinced in the video above, even if she's not interested in taking trips, and he definitely is. Of course he is. He's a pioneer. One of the first wave of YouTube celebrities.
Long after the video that made them both famous, Fred kept proving content creation wasn't just a job for him, but a calling. For over a decade he used this new platform to make whatever he wanted, whether it was Music Videos...
Satire...
Or whatever this is...
And the initial attraction of his output for me, obviously, was that so much of it was bafflingly bad. Or baffling and bad. Or bad and baffling and charming. And raw. Laziness was no impediment to his creativity, clearly. Fred would just throw the doors open and wait for poetry to happen – or to risk happening but then get derailed by him thinking about sex, then stopping thinking about sex but then thinking about volcanoes, as in the video below, which generates an emotion I have no name for.
Once relegated to life aboard the mobile home "Starship Betty" however, after his initial split from Sharon, he started to document a real life and, as I've written here before, I became genuinely engaged by and grateful for the candour of those unsponsored video diaires. I was sad to hear when things with Sheryl Ann hadn't worked out...
And when I shared my condolences in the comments, Fred was generous enough to reply. Then, a decade later, once things seemed happily patched up with Sharon, my comment received a second reply...
And that's how I learnt Fred Spencer had pasta way.
I couldn't find any confirmation of his death online, but that only made me realise how small a digital footprint he left outside of his own channel.
I've put off writing this for over a year – possibly because I've had, you know, as I'm sure a lot of us have, actual people I deeply love pass on in that year – but I knew I wanted some part of the internet to commemorate the passing of this particular Fred Spencer. And so here it is. He always kept things personal, and kind, and weird, and I hope his work stays up forever, because I honestly think it epitomises a kind of Internet before the fall, a pole star of the lived experience shared fearlessly, and a paradise we can return to whenever we like. In spite of all the algorithms trying to turn us into Hamlet, this invention is still ours, to do with whatever we like, for as long as we can pay attention to each other. Thank you. Where you've gone, I don't know, hope it's warm and sunny. Here's David Lynch.
For some reason, colours always seem happiest working with David Hockney. Here's a small, room-sized fusion of Renaissance Florence, Bruges and
Ghent he built for a BBC Omnibus in 2003 because television was also his thing. I'm surprised to find I've not written
about him before on here, because I think about Hockney a lot. And probably what I think about most often is his discovery – I don't think that's too
strong a word – chronicled – I don't think that's too strong a word
either – in this programme. Art as Science as Art, it's a typically beautiful piece of thinking, and a brilliant watch.
Studying the accuracy with which Renaissance painters represented
the play of light on a suit of armour or a chandelier, despite the fact
no naked
eye could stay still enough to capture the same gleam twice – and inspired by the perceived similarity of Ingre's line when turning out small
portraits of English tourists in 1812 to Warhol's tracing of old
photographs over a century later, despite the former predating the actual invention of photography – Hockney meticulously deduces that the reason why "from about 1500 to 1860 you never see a badly done basket" is not, as had been assumed previously, that everyone just suddenly got better at drawing, but rather that artists had been using camera obscura and – before the perfection of those lenses – convex or "burning" mirrors to transform the three-dimensional image in front of them into a two-dimensional, reversed projection that can be accurately traced. I think too about the scorn with which Art Critics greeted this theory, and I think about Hockney's calm counter-argument: then why are all the people in these paintings left-handed?
For this and many other reasons, he was my favourite living artist. Until today. I really loved you, David Hockney. Thanks for getting me back on the blog.
Iranian artist Soheila Sohjkanvari's "Leave to Remain" features a number of old passports stamped with incongruous advertising slogans. The one above is from Burger King (which now I think about it, I should have been able to guess). I saw it today at Tate Britain while catching up with my friend Viv with whom I enjoyed rooms one through eight. I was a little late meeting her though, because I'd stopped to take some video...
Halfway through Hyde Park I'd heard cheers and car horns to the south, and realised something potentially cheerful might be up outside The Iranian Embassy, so I made a small detour and arrived just in time to see someone climb out onto the balcony (I'm pretty sure it was out, not up, is that possible? UPDATE: No) take down the flag of the Iranian Republic, and fly in its place the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun. (At this point my camerawork gets a bit shaky because I had to take my gloves off to zoom in.)
The police sirens were clearly for somewhere else, and I guess the van driving up and down was
showing Fox Newson its flank, but cropped, so your only clue is Sean
Hannity – does Hannity still work at Fox? Of course, a lot of rotten kings and clowns with no history of supporting #women, #life or #freedom will want to take responsibility for this if it ends happily, but let's not let them. Picking up speed as I headed on to Pimlico, I sent what I'd shot to a friend at BBC Persian whom I hadn't seen since 2022, with love and hope that her family in Iran was safe. But how would she know? And walking home I learnt a little of it had been published online, which is how I can identify the flags.
Stop editing things, Simon! Sorry, me. But sometimes there's an itch you have to scratch, and sometimes that itch is wanting to see Lucky from "Waiting for Godot" perform Yvan's speech from Yasmina Reza's "Art" and you've had these two clips lying around on your desktop for over a year, and if it hadn't been snowing out you'd probably have gone for that long walk then come back to write those thousand words instead, but it was, and your neck gets cold now at night anyway, so you've spent the day all knotted, which a long walk would probably also have sorted out and now it looks like you might be trying to write a pastiche of the long speech above but that's honestly only just occurred to you and back to that itch, you can edit it all on your phone now which means you can't see the results very well, sure, but it doesn't really matter whether you scratch it very well at all, that's not the point. The point is it's scratched.
(Here I appear to have cropped out most of the snow in this photo of it snowing)
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
"This is the record of our second expedition to the site of Britain. It was a grim undertaking. But we had to go, otherwise all the members of the first expedition would have died for nothing..." We never find out what killed that first party in the end. Maybe they swooned themselves to death at the site of a porcelain cockapoo.
Because, despite its intriguing opening, what must be one of television's first ever post-apocalyptic visions settles almost immediately into a sneering fantasy upon the ruination of ghastly ghastliness. Ken Russell is directing, however, so nothing's done by halves, everything's shot with a warring mixture of love and hate rather than just disdain. Maybe the voiceover was scripted afterwards because Monitor thought it looked too beautiful. I have no idea why it was made, but that might be what's most enjoyable about it. Anyway this is your occasional reminder to check in on the BBC Archive's youtube channel, and I hope you're all recovering this new year's day, and continue to recover.
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.
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 Guidefrom 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 22ndat the timebut 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 VibeDON'T DO STARSbless, and then we went to Edinburgh, to receive...
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 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.
Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.
.png)
