Somewhat Degraded Emotions Walkthrough

 

 Before social media, if you wanted to let people know what made you cry, you'd have to write it down on a little bottle from The Body Shop, fill it from a fountain on the third storey of the Oxo Bargehouse, and leave it on a shelf, but try telling the kids that these days.

 

 Continuing to digitise then dump degraded capture of my twenties, I present here a walkthrough from the year two-thousand of the Museum of... Emotions, where for five pounds an hour, most of the founders of the immersive absurdist collective shunt and I would work the door, supervise the emotions node, or do a quick patrol to check nobody had forgotten to turn on the machine that says "I love you". It was a lovely door to work too, clicking the ticker and saying "yeah it's all free", and the ellipsis in the title is not there for suspense – Clare Patey and Pippa Bailey had curated a number of wonderful "Museum of..."s between 1998 and 2001, and this was "Emotions", but every iteration provided pencils and encouraged contributions, the first thing of its kind I had seen. 

 

  You glimpse me briefly in a mirror. The moustache was for a part. I kept most of it (below right) for the very first work I would do with shunt a few months later, The Tennis Show, staged two storeys further up the building, and so I've mixed a little footage of that, filmed by Susanne Dietz, into my walkaround of the then derelict top floor at the video's end. It was a magic show, and you can see more of it here.

 I'm not sure what's there now. 

Linesmen. That's Tom Lyall on the left.

A Burning Mirror

 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.

As a Trusted News Source...

"WORK FOR A KING NOT A CLOWN"

 

 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.

 Azadi.

 

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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.

Sometimes this blog will just be Three Weeks

A pull-quote. I have a pull-quote. 

 

"Jonah Non Grata" is getting another London outing! Next Saturday the nineteenth of July, at 9.30pm up the stairs of that old stalwart of the Edinburgh preview – but a duck-breaking first for me – the Hen and Chickens pub in Islingon. You can get tickets for just (over) a tenner HERE, and if you have any further questions... well, maybe I've answered them below. Maybe not. Maybe you have some questions about my answers. (And if any of them concern the penultimate anwer, I had a lovely meeting about the book on Monday: Apparently, translation rights are where a lot of the money is in childrens' writing. France doesn't like mermaids, because they're sleazy, and – possibly for the same reason – Germany does not like circuses, so take note.)

 

(Also here are some gorgeous, unpublished Hobbit illustrations from Eva Natus-Šalamounová and her husband Jiří, on display HERE, in Prague, which was yesterday. A good week.)

 

 I now have quite a few articles to to-do over the next few days plugging the show, so let's see how many more end up on here. Apologies in advance. Take it away, Caro Moses of THREE WEEKS...

As you know – because we are always talking about it – we like new stuff here at TW Towers. But you know what, we also like stuff that was first really good a few years ago and which is now getting another run. 

And all that relates to the show ‘Jonah Non Grata’, which was originally staged in London back in 2004 to much acclaim, and is going to Edinburgh this year. It’s the work of Simon Kane, an actor and writer who has worked on loads of stuff I love from various media, like ‘Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme’ and ‘Ghosts’. 

‘Jonah Non Grata’ is an absurdist solo show based on the events that befell the biblical Jonah and I wanted to find out more about it. I put some questions to Simon ahead of his upcoming edfringe run. 

Can you start by explaining the premise of ‘Jonah Non Grata’? Who is it about and what story does it tell?

 Inasmuch as it tells a story, it’s the Book Of Jonah, as in Jonah and the whale.

 A very short, possibly satirical shaggy dog story from the Old Testament about a prophet who refuses the call, tries to run away, is swallowed by a large fish sent by God, does what He wants, but is ultimately disappointed by the outcome. 

 The “premise” of the show, however, is that you don’t need to know any of this, but will nevertheless spend an hour not being bored.

 It’s a solo sequel to work I did with a beautiful immersive collective called Shunt, whose greatest review may have come from someone who’d missed the opening forty minutes of one show and so could just enjoy what they saw without worrying about being expected to get it.

 

What themes are explored through the play?

 

 Exactly the same themes as ‘Hamlet’? Yeah, I’m happy with that answer…

 Refusing the call to adventure. The comforts of inaction. Weighing one’s love for people against one’s anger at the world. The very nature of performance. Depression. Loneliness. Christianity. Extremism.

All that. But with songs and a bit where he thinks he’s gone to the moon.

 

How would you describe it in terms of style or genre?

 

 Pop absurdist clowning. A strange world on a tight budget. A church for a churchless faith.

 

What was the inspiration for this piece?

 A lot of friends were making solo shows that weren’t particularly text-based and, although I love writing, I wanted to join in making something more in the clown genre. 

 One of those friends’ shows was about the performer’s Jewishness, “although,” as he said, “I’m not Jewish, because I don’t believe in God”, so I realised that even though I’m an atheist, I’m also, similarly – or at least culturally – a Christian, and that engaging with this big mood might be a good starting point. 

 I’d also been thinking about the very first plays in English: Mysteries, which might read like spoofs but were the work of people who absolutely believed in the biblical reality of what they were performing, and so I thought about writing my own. You know, something “traditional”.

 Initially, I had considered the various accounts of what Jesus got up to after returning from the dead, but then, after reading a note about Jonah in Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, I opted for this Old Testament alt, as he seemed a good clown.

 I’ve always liked comedies about heroes who run away – I would later make a Radio 4 show called ‘Time Spanner’ about something similar – and a show that plays with thresholds is a good, cheap concept – every venue has doors. 

 As I mentioned, a third influence was the show I’d just been performing with Shunt, ‘Dance Bear Dance’, a clownish immersive piece about the Gunpowder Plot coincidentally devised during the opening months of the War On Terror.

 I wanted to play more both with the idea of making an audience complicit in a religiously motivated act of violence – but with laffs – and the idea of presenting a surreal church service as a basis for audience interaction – it’s nice if the audience has some clue as to what’s expected of them. 

 My work with Shunt in general also made me want to ensure every show was different and surprising, hence the levels of audience participation, as it used to be called. Basically, everything I do in the show is built upon things I’d already enjoyed doing, and had seen people enjoy me doing. 

 

It’s been quite a while since you first performed it – what motivated you to revive it now? 

 I missed it. And I’d landed an advert, so could afford to take it to Edinburgh. The show had never had a proper launch. It was just a thing I did, that people liked.

 But I’m finally now beginning to learn, not only how to make a show, but how to keep it alive, something I’d never known how to do on my own before. 

 Also, I’m seeing less and less stuff like it, and wanted to see if there was still an appetite for this kind of recklessly – if not irresponsibly – personal silliness. I think you can do anything onstage. I hope this show communicates that.

 

Has the show changed at all in the meantime? 

 Barely. I’ve written a few more jokes about the nature of audience interaction to help me get from A to B. And I might not use a real candle any more, but that’s actually funnier. One of the things that’s so exciting to me is how much it still chimes, but how differently.

 

You haven’t brought it to the Fringe before – why not before and why now? 

 See my previous answer! I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know how. And I can now and I know how. But also, I think my confidence in the show has grown.

 There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to make a show about right now, but it turns out Jonah is still that show.

 

Are there any post Fringe plans for the show? 

 Hopes, currently, rather than plans. This is why I’ve got a producer. I very much want to just get it in front of as many people as possible for as long as possible.

 It’s my clown show. But I’m also curious how it works as a play text. Theatrical criticism is still very ‘play’-based.

 

What do you like about the Fringe? What will you get up to in Edinburgh when not performing?

 It’s people making things. I’ll see things. Sometimes I’ll see five things in a day and they’ll form into one big thing in my mind. It’s magic.

So do you have a hit list of other shows you would like to see?

 I like finding out what’s interesting once I’m up there, but I will definitely be seeing ‘Simple Town’, and I will definitely be seeing Neil Frost’s ‘The Door’.

 

What drew you to performing as a career? Was it what you always wanted to do? 

 I could do it. I could hide in plain sight.

 My Dad’s an actor and a writer, but he mainly stayed at home on the typewriter when we were growing up, which was very nice for us.

 His brother, however, my wonderful Uncle Gordon, was a proper jobbing, touring actor, and we loved him, and everyone loved him, and acting professionally seemed a very nice, fun, feasible way to not grow up.

 In that sense, yes, it’s something I always wanted to do.

I have to say that you’ve been involved to a greater or lesser extent with some of my Very Favourite Things. What would you say have been the highlights of your career thus far? 

 

 That’s nice! I don’t really think I have a career, because it’s so often work with friends, but I suspect they’re definitely My Very Favourite Things too, and it’s a broad if not hefty mix.

I think the work with John Finnemore is unique in that it has fans who will be fans until I die. Cunningly, however, it’s all been highlights.

 Even the terrible work has been with brilliant people, and having brilliant people in your life is the very best thing. I’ve only one rule: never ever work with or for the bored.

 

What aims and ambitions do you have for the future? 

 I think I still want to do everything.

 

What’s coming up next for you after this?

 I’ve no idea. The next show? I’ve written a screenplay. I’m writing a book. I guess the next thing – now I seem to have worked out how making a show works – is to work out how all that other stuff works too. 

Simon Kane will perform ‘Jonah Non Grata’ at The Assembly Rooms from 31 Jul – 24 Aug, find the edfringe listing here. 

... But you guys knew that.

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 32: Where Pounds Won't Go!

"Pound as in the pounding of these zammoths' feet?"

"What zammoths? The ones to our right?"

"The ones I'm pointing at. Well, yeah, those ones, okay. God. So I wasn't exactly pointing at them. But yeah. God."

"No. Pounds as in insert-national-currency-here. The future has no regulated currency."

"Oh, and air?"

"No. And no zammoths. They're hallucinations. This planet's atmosphere is too thin. We're dying of radiation sickness."

"Speak for yourself. My body's packing in because it doesn't know how to function on a planet that has only a third of Earth's gravity. Hey, where are those guys going?" 

"I can't see what you're pointing at."

"Forget it... Where are we again?"

"Fucking everywhere, apparently."

 

 Illustration by nobody.

Spinach or Silence as Sources of Power

 "So, Art is something which is made when you use a material to change something... but it helps people to consider the Art which is in front of them if it is grouped with another set of Art, and it's very difficult to consider Art in isolation from other Art..."

 Born Yesterday has a great format: two twenty-four-hour-old clones of the hosts ask two guests to explain the world in terms of the only three things they've yet had time to learn about. Alexander Bennet and Andy Barr are its perfect hosts, digging down in just the right spots, and presenting perfectly packaged summaries, so no matter how a guest chooses to play it – as hilarious disruptor or dweebish stickler – it's almost impossible not to be entertaining. (Like Taskmaster.) As evidence, I'd like to submit this episode, in which I'm dropped in alongside Andrea Hubert (I'll let you decide which is which) to explain such topics as Cumbria and the concept of "The Ends Justifying the Means" with only Popeye, a Hog-roast, and Birmingham New Street Station as points of reference. Other topics also emerge during the episode, such as animal cruelty in early cinema, Insults, Joy, and whether or not – according to the mathematics of decapitation – Bradley Cooper's nose in Maestro makes him more alive. 

 I've been a fan of this podcast since it began, and obviously I'm always up for explaining the world to babies, so thanks to Andy and Alexander – an old Crystal Maze colleague – for inviting me, and thanks to Andrea for being such a great teammate/opponent and for showing me all her blades. (We appear nineteen minutes in. If you fancy a drinking game, down a shot every time you notice me avoiding saying her name because I get self-consciously stuck on whether "Andrea" has a long or short A, despite it being said numerous times during the record, and the way the name's always pronounced. I'll join you.)

 "So, in building our understanding of what a Mime is, we have been led to believe that, if a dog were to withhold from you its name, it would be able to pick you up..."

 

Wowee! An Official Film!

I call this piece "The Person Who Has To Explain The Art"

 No sorry, my point was that when I initially saw those road signs turned upside-down by French farmers over Christmas my first thought had been simply, oh I guess some stuff's upside-down now. I had clocked the symptoms a few weeks earlier while tearing through Norwich Castle on a twilight ticket and noticing that one of the paintings had definitely been hung the wrong way up. Screwed, in fact. Screwed to the wall – see above. In the next gallery I noticed another, by a different artist, again definitely upside-down (I don't mean to boast, an artist like me just has an eye for these things).

 

  Every room in fact had one painting inexplicably set upside down, and my first thought here was, oh I guess this is some kind of protest – exactly the feeling I didn't get when I saw the protests in Languedoc. (Mum tells me farmers are now blocking every road into every city with tractors, so that's less ambiguous.) I couldn't think what might be being protesting however. So I went up to the information desk and said "Hello" firstly, and then "Can I ask why some of the paintings are upside-down?" and the smiling woman at the desk handed me a leaflet sporting the name Mark Wilsher, explaining "Yes, it's an artist. Five works have been turned upside down. It's all about your reaction to it." And I'm trying to work out how best to explain the way she said it, because I think that's the point of this post.

 

A sidenote: I come from a generation who have been taught, upon reading the words "the smiling woman at the desk", to imagine immediately something counterfeit and sinister – the polite, public face of an industrial carnivore – but after the trip to the castle I went back to punch imaginary tickets on a train pretending to go to the North Pole, or pour and serve real hot chocolate, because most of the jobs I've taken have been pretty public facing – not just the out-of-work actor stuff, but the actor stuff too. Other credits on my CV include: Announcer; Host; Voice; Receptionist; Narrator; Waiter; Lift Operator; and Conductor, bus. But even the murderers on that list were narratively never threats to the public. I like the public, and I like being the public. 

 

 

 Anyway, I don't want you to picture me leaving that exchange with the smiling woman at the desk in any way huffy or aloof. And I don't want to give the impression she didn't seem very much on the side of the exercise. But she did say "It's all about your reaction to it" it in a way that made me wonder how previous enquiries might have gone. I said "Aw thanks" and took the leaflet to let her know she wasn't going to get any trouble from my end at least. I don't know. Perhaps I'm projecting. Perhaps she wasn't deescalating anything, just happy to help. Perhaps I was also projecting when I thought it might have been a protest, or when I thought those upside-down road-signs in France might not. Walking away, I thought: "Well, I guess my reaction to seeing some paintings turned upside-down is to find out why they've been turned upside down. Sorry if you were expecting more, Mark." 

 But now I think maybe the work was actually having her to explain the work to me because – as you might be able to tell – I've had a far more complicated reaction to that. 

 (Sorry I didn't post much here about The Polar Express, but there was Instagram. And that's me with the outstanding Miles Mlambo above. And below, that's me getting over two million likes on TikTok. Boasts of equal stature.)

@bethmae0 💫✨️Just be you✨️💫 #polarexpress #fy #fyp #fypシ #fypシ゚viral #fypviral #foryou #foryoupage #foryoupageofficiall #trend #trending #quoteoftheday #mumsoftiktok ♬ original sound - bethmae🤍

I-call-this-piece-"The-Person-Who-Has-To-Explain-The-Art" Placeholder...

 I can explain.

Your Christmas Viewing or a better title to be decided later

 

 Let's catch up. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 Here, one more time, is Orson Welles. 

 

 Big ball to stick your head in by Arthur Handy.

How To Read Minds By Not

Orson Welles by Derren Brown

 

 Another two-show day, so here's your Sunday shot of Orson Welles. 

 I first saw "cold reading" demonstrated in Derren Brown's Séance, which is also well worth a watch. (Of course, Derren Brown being Derren Brown, I may only think I saw it demonstrated.) As described by Welles to David Frost below, it is "a fraudulent technique used by mediums in the Victorian times" whereby you "warm up the sucker" with facts about themselves that could apply to anyone – I have a scar on my knee! – until they're so convinced by your psychic powers, they start unwittingly volunteering infomation about themselves.

Props can help. (Source)

 

 That's the theory. And Welles practised. According to various accounts – and a scene in Love Goddess (tickets available here) – he even practised on his future wife Rita Hayworth at their first meeting. It's never made explicit in our show that's what he's doing, but very little in our show is made explicit, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. And to Welles' credit – and unlike those who began it, or most famously practice it now – he only ever claimed to have "mind-reading capabilities", rather than the ability to speak to the dead. It was a more innocent time. There was a war on.

 

"We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."

 

Illustrations by E. H. Shepard. That dragonfly is just perfect.

 Ernest Hemingway, who liked big, short statements, famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that." 

 I'm unlikely to change my mind that A. A. Milne's "Winnie-The-Pooh" holds a similar place in British Comedy, and since yesterday's post accidentally went out in the early hours of today, I'll linger a little longer on the story "In which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents". Here's an extact. I had forgotten Owl was in this story. I had also forgotten just how sketchy a character he is. (Does one lick pencils?)

     "It's a nice pot," said Owl, looking at it all round. "Couldn't I give it too? From both of us?"

     "No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan. Now I'll just wash it first, and then you can write on it."

     Well, he washed the pot out, and dried it, while Owl licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell "birthday."

    "Can you read, Pooh?" he asked a little anxiously. "There's a notice about knocking and ringing outside my door, which Christopher Robin wrote. Could you read it?"

     "Christopher Robin told me what it said, and then I could." 

     "Well, I'll tell you what this says, and then you'll be able to."

     So Owl wrote... and this is what he wrote:

HIPY PAPY BTHUTHTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDAY.

Pooh looked on admiringly.

 If the Hundred Acre Wood is Dunder Mifflin, Owl is its Creed. And like Dunder Mifflin, or Michael & Eagle Lettings, or the Muppets, the company of Pooh have little in common; they're a team, not a gang – and like Charlie Brown, every character is an absolute mood. 

 I had also forgotten that this story gave us one of Jim Henson's favourite songs, "Cottleston Pie". Here it is, performed by another bear.

 

Charlie Brown Is A Mood

 "Recently my secretary came to work one morning, and she said that her little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch, and had said - Mom, I feel like Charlie Brown... And all of a sudden it occurred to me, after all these years: this is the purpose of Charlie Brown."

 

 Back to the dawing board: here's more treasure from the BBC Archive, to honour what would have been Charles Monroe Schulz's hundredth birthday today. Buying old Peanuts paperbacks as a child, I felt let into an unusally adult kind of comedy, at least as funny as, but more emotionally astute than the anarchic, boggle-eyed output of British kid's comics, and the fact that this comedy's protagonists were people my age was, in hindsight, incredibly important. It meant you didn't have to be adult to be human. Your feelings were valid regardless, and not just something to be marked right or wrong.

 

  I actually miss the tone of these pre-junket-era interviews: "I think the one overwhelming reason why your work is so popular here in England, where very largely we think of ourselves as being a Post-Christian Society, is that here's a man who really knows how terrible life is. Are you happy to be looked at in that way?" asks Peter France of the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy. 

 To which the answer turns out to be: "Yes." 

 

A Sketchy Account of The Martian Broadcast

 The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles. 

 

 Welles by Welles

 In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums. 

 

 

 Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do. 

 And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."

 

Unfinished in '88: "THAT FOOT! WHOSE IT IT?"

 The Art Department called these "Visual Notebooks" when they gave them out, as if a thirteen-year-old me was going to fill it with sketches of passers-by or bark rather than a page and a half of an unfinished Watchmen spoof. But here is all that remains of all that was started of something I seem to remember I called "The X-Ceptions". Also an obvious influence on these few frames is The Dark Knight Returns, and possibly The Killing Joke, which is why I'm dating this 1988 (and I appear to have thought that giving the Joker an upturned nose instead of a pointy one counts as pastiche). Having lovingly referenced these three core works however – note the wobbly lines around Pscychoe's speech bubble* – I seem to have immediately run out of ideas, so who knows what role in this dark epic "The Lilac Librarian", "Incy-Wincy-Splat" or whatever that Swamp-Thing-looking thing on the left were meant to have played? ("Doc God" I like.)

 

 

* Sure, I noticed that. But not the fact John Higgin's colours weren't totally boring. I think this must be why I got a B.