"Sad c****" is actually "sad clown", but I thought the asterisks were more on brand.*

 Well, there is absolutely, positively no way I'm going to let myself stage Jonah Non Grata again for the first time in nearly ten years, without getting round to plugging it on here with at least twelve hours' notice, so here is that plug, and HERE are the tickets. It's on for one night only this Midsummer's Saturday, at the Soho Theatre on Dean Street – a venue I've always hoped to infiltrate – as part of the London Clown Festival, a scene I've always similarly nursed a pang to crash.

 

 Me crashing clowns. Hi Dan. Hi Neil. Hi Ben. Hi Dan again.

 

 After that one night only, the old bag of tricks, fish, and creamed rice – older even than this blog – will head up to Edinburgh for loads more nights in August, as threatened, and I do plan to bang on about that a lot more on here in future, so don't worry, but for now I'll just say that the Assembly Rooms tickets are HERE, and that I have a lot of people to thank for this happening but mainly one person. That person's precise attitude towards being so much as even mentioned on this blog, however, is currently unknown to me at half past one this morning, so I'll just – for anyone who doesn't know what PR is – post this helpful and unrelated video from 2012:

 

 

  I didn't know what PR was either, but looking at the Metro, it... seems... to be... working... Does the writer below even know me? I don't think so. No reason they should, either: no explicit promise is actually made about the quality of whatever funny bones I may have, just that they'll be mine. 'An exciting biblical adventure'. Great. That's the "Why now?" taken care of too, I guess. So there I am, in today's paper. Being picked in the Must-Sees. Easy as that. Type discount code "FLIGHTRISK" for a fat fifth off tonight's tickets! 

 

 * on brand for Lucy, I mean. Keeping it ****

Themepunk Roundup: My Life as an Action Butler

 

Thanks to Gerard Giorgi-Coll. 

 

 This year, unlike last, I've been doing jobs. They've been jobs I've enjoyed, and sought out, but also what you might call out-of-work-actor jobs. There should be a better name for these though, not because I fancy arguing the toss about what counts as acting, but because, ever since I worked at the London Dungeon I have actively enjoyed performing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends in front of as broad a demographic as possible – Tourism jobs, if you like – and "out-of-work-actor job" doesn't really do that justice. A lot of performance work won't guarantee these things. Themepunk, as I'm going to try calling it for now, hopefully does, although you might get less time to rehearse. Here are Neil Frost and I finalising the route of The Classic Tour back in July:

  

  Press my tummy to view.

 

 I was definitely surprised when Big Ben – below with Neil, both fellow Dungeon alumni – got in touch to say the two of them had been asked by the Ghost Bus Tours to come up with a new, family-friendly, two-handed blockbuster alternative cabaret, complete with songs, costume changes, and a light dusting of Eat The Rich for its open top bus route, and to ask if I'd like to help develop the tour for actual money, and maybe perform it with Neil too, but it was a nice surprise. I figured doing a show on a bus with Neil would be an excellent way to spend a summer without having to go up to Edinburgh, and so it has proved. It's called "The Classic Tour" because that's what was written on the buses. Here's where they keep them:

 

All the other actors Neil brought on for this gig are beautiful too, although audiences have also been pretty Edinburgh-sized as well – appreciative twos and threes until tours were cut – but I'd spent long enough doing Time Tours not to be surprised by this, and I'd heard the Ghost Bus Tours was down to one actor a show as well now, hence my orginal surprise at Ben's call. But this is the bus tour I've always wanted to do, and I'm doing a few in November too, so if you fancy it, HERE.

 

 Yes! This was a plug all along! I'm also going to plug a beautifully written, handsomely received Big Finish Audio Drama I recorded last year: "Torchwood: Art Decadence", in which, as you can hear from the trailer below, I inadvertently play exactly the same character I do above. Don't tell Big Finish, They think I've got range. But I'm in, readers! I'm IN! ACTUAL ACTING JOBS! Available HERE.

The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Unposted Photographs of October 2022 in Chronological Order

 On the first, I left Trafalgar Sqaure in bloom, happy with the city I lived in, and crossed the river to get a better view of it:

 

 In the basement of the Royal Festival Hall, three dancers had found a space outside the toilets:

 

 I've lived in Notting Hill a year now. I finally found the quickest route to the park, but it still feels like I'm finding routes, rather than walks:

 

 Trellick Tower, its green heart still commemorating Grenfell. It always appears in view suddenly, and to the right of where I expect:

 This was the first time I'd revisited the Victoria and Albert Museum since moving up the road:

 

 I suddenly remembered seeing Jennifer Tilly here, and hearing her, and tried to recall the plot of Slipstream:

 Neil and I went to see Big Ben break his News Revue cherry. Their six week run outlasted two Prime Minsters, and Fred Strangebone in a blonde wig turned out to be a very serviceable Keir Starmer. He was the only one to do a silly bio:

 In Tate Britain, I stayed in the box with the racist language for the whole video (I can't find who's this was or what. It was wonderful. Does anyone know?) Others entered the box, and left very possibly because I was in there, but I don't know how better to screen it:

 

 Over the escalators in the tube, adverts are now screened an angle, tampering with my balance over the duration:

 Here, outside the vault of the Ned, it occured to me that on Saturday we should all wear robes:

 

 Then we moved on to Greenwich peninsula, to rehearse the counting of rice:

 Our rice in situ:

 Suddenly, October was beginning to end. I mean, to finish. I caught Ilona's exhibition just as it was being taken down:

 This Flying Tiger model could have got more into the spirit of the season, I felt. I bought nothing:

 On this stage, I saw David dance and speak lines from King Lear. A good block:

 Outside on Regents Street, they were beginning to put up angels:

By this point, my phone had crashed. Everything was harder to record on Badphone, particularly Maxfield Parrish light. Why was it still Summer?

 On this stage, I saw Natasha dance and speak lines from King Lear. I was not expecting that in a production of Henry the Eighth:

 My balance tampered with, I was still happy to have to caught the last matinee, and celebrated with a walk on the beach:

 

 On this stage, I saw my former rice wife Julia cast her own legs as her parents, and her hand as her dog. I'd missed her rumbling, threatening giggle. It got messy:

 

 Rehearsals started for the Love Goddess in Marylebone. Working in daylight suddenly:

 Opposite Alfies Antiques. Everything a walk away:

 And last Saturday, like the first, saw Trafalgar Square in bloom again.

Going South at 2am

 This is a photograph of Southwark, but we haven't got there yet. The walk from my flat to Waterloo Bridge is pretty much a straight line. Last night I found this:

 

  I don't know what the sign was for, or if this person's meant to look like they're drowning, but it works on a lot of layers, so I left it alone for others to appreciate. Something else I found on my walk last night:

 

 If you deviate from the straight line, there are tiny entrances to casino car parks, crammed frantically with statues and palm trees, a small garden centre's worth. I left these alone too. Continuing south, I recorded evidence of Theatreland's devastation:

 This play had gone so wrong that literally every word of its title was now back to front. Just south of this, someone had tied the traffic lights together.

 

 I crossed the Thames, into the sanity of Southwark. Nearly every job I'd had in my twenties was here, somewhere along the South Bank. 

 

  After graduation, I got a job at the British Film Institute, working as an usher, or behind the reception desk, or in a little booth in the Museum of the Moving Image where visitors could buy videos of themselves being asked pre-recorded questions by Eamonn Homes or Zig and Zag.

 

 Later, when I moved out of my parents' flat, I worked in another museum behind the Oxo Tower. The theme varied. It was free. Everyone from Shunt happened to work there as well. We froze, and read books.

 

 The Museum Of... had great, rattly animatronics from Tim Hunkin, and a room at the top with a fountain, and shelves stacked with thousands of small Body Shop bottles filled with water from the fountain, bearing labels on which visitors had written decriptions of what made them cry. No one was using these rooms for anything else.

 

 I then worked at the London Dungeons beneath London Bridge station. Shunt coincidentally moved next door the following year. Both venues would occasionally, accidentally, and independently, shut the station down with their smoke machines.  

 

 A lot of the buildings I passed last night must have gone up since then.

 

 Once the Shard was built and the station renovated, my most regular visits to this area were as part of the Ghost Bus Tours, which was started by Big Ben from the Dungeons.

 

  If the tours had time, we'd pull up outside Redcross Way, make everyone get off, and take them into a tunnel whose walls were decorated with a kind of Dalek pelt which, the last time I visited here, I noticed had been stipped of it its nodules. But last night the nodules were back, newly tinted.  

 

 That other tunnel between the eyes is painted with swans, and takes you to the site of a pauper's grave, Crossbones – now a car park – and the memorial garden just beyond. That's is where we'd take the groups.

 

 The garden is fenced with the old car park gates, to which locals tie gifts honouring the "outcast dead" or more recent, personal bereavements. None of this looked any different last night.

 Normally I'd take the riverside walk, but I'd heard hollering from the bank, and while I know that's also what fun can sound like, I favoured the privacy of the main roads.

 

 So, that's how I saw all this shiny new stuff, and it's possible that at two in the morning, at the height of a global pandemic, is the best time to see it. I remember when City Hall was just hoops.

 

 I hope I don't find it too difficult whan I finally have to stop being alone. I turned back when I got to the giant ants.

 

Fancy Party and 4 Oz. of Furlough

 Sorry this is only going up now, but I was catching up with my fellow Ripper Walkers last night, in the actual flesh in an actual pub, and it turned into a tiny, tiny stag do. Yes, we all got married! Not really. Neil noted it felt a bit like being in a pub on the telly; busy enough to fill the seats, but no busier, and we all looked like background artists.

 I remember most of what happened. I think of Ben - author of our Walks, and founder of the Ghost Bus Tours - very much as one of the keepers of London. He always knows what to point out on a ramble, like the Duke of Wellington's replica noses poking out of the concrete on Great Windmill Street. Oh god I've just remembered the toilets. They were magical, they lit up, where were they?

  Here's something else I remembered, and it contains spoilers: I've been using the last week to start reading again, watching less television as a result, binge-watching less, switching more between shows. I put on an episode of Parks and Recreation, series three, episode nine, this one:

 And here's the spoiler, it turns out that the party April and Andy are throwing is actually a surprise wedding, and they get married. I then put on an episode of Orange Is The New Black, series two, episode nine, it was this one, literally the very next thing I watched on television:

  In which Piper gets furlough from prison to attend her grandmother's funeral and, here's the spoiler, at the service her brother throws a surprise wedding, and he and his girlfriend get marrried. I have nothing to say about this coincidence, except that I wish I'd been able to share it. I don't mean share it on the blog, because as you can see I have nothing to say about it. It wasn't even interesting enough a coincidence to share with Neil and Ben. I just noticed it would have been nice to share the oddness as it happened.

Goodye, Diana Rigg. You kicked arse.