Uncle Alec

 Dad asked Susy and me to go through the big box of photographs under the spare bed I'm sleeping in. Here's our first Christmas on the Isle of Wight.

 

 That's my other sister, Alice, on the right. I think for some reason there were Tarot cards in that box on top of the telly. To the left of Alice, in the yellow, is "Uncle" Alec. Not an actual blood relative, he was Dad's first agent in the sixties, but by the time this was taken I think he'd given that up, and was a chef somewhere on the island. "Cor-dong bloody blur, darling." Alec came every Christmas.

 

 He'd come over in the morning for the unwrapping of the presents and help Mum with the vegetables, long after we'd left the Isle of Wight. As his obituary in the Telegraph from 2001 put it "he never married." He was the only one allowed to smoke in the house. I don't think even Dad's real dad was allowed, but Grandad hardly ever came down. Alec Grahame is why Christmas always smelt of cigarettes.

 

 We still have that tree. Also from the Telegraph obituary: "in the 1970s show business became a much more serious industry. Much to Grahame's dismay, the liquid lunch was replaced by the working lunch and first night parties always seemed to end much too soon."

 

 Alec was gorgeous. Here's what must be his last Christmas with us. My hair was now black to audition for The Pianist.

 

 

 

 It's only researching him today I found out that Uncle Alec's original name had been James Alexander Patchett, that he'd been a lyricist in the early fifties, had turned an art gallery into a venue for evening cabarets called "Intimacy at 8" ten years before the satire boom, and had taken the first ever late night revue up to the Edinburgh Fringe, After the Show, arguably inventing the Comedy Festival.

 "Aww," Susy noted yesterday, "the tree's nearly stopped smelling of fags." 

 (But Susy still has Covid. I'll have a sniff.)

I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before, in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to the film have been understandably strong but, beyond the fact that it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act, I can't find much information about what it is I'm actually seeing. Who was the act? How was it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like, for example? How many people would we find? Just the one costumed actor, moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? A little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...

 

 Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why, because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

Sometimes this blog will just be Robin Williams' guest appearance on "Mork and Mindy".

"Reality... What A Concept"

 

 Mork blogs well. At the end of every episode of "Mork and Mindy" he concisely reports back to Orson what he's learnt from the day's activities. I wish this blog was the same, but sometimes it's just going to be a link to some videos. Here's Alexei Sayle explaining how influential the show was to the British Alternative Comedy scene...

 

 

"It felt like being kicked down the stairs laughing." 

 

 When I heard the episode below – in which Mindy tries to interview successful comedian Robin Williams – mentioned on a podcast on my way to the Rosemary Branch theatre last night, I immediately looked it up on my phone, sat down on the closest bench and watched the whole thing. It opens strongly, with a surprise reference to Rula Lenska and almost exactly the same joke that opens Triangle Of Sadness (highly recommended), and closes with a scene of onscreen soul-spelunking to rival Peter Sellers on "The Muppet Show" telling Kermit he had his self surgically removed: Williams confesses to Mindy how difficult he finds it to say no. When Mork relays this predicament to Orson, the celestial overlord's having none of it.... "I thought all stars were rich, live in mansions, and drive big eggs..." Mork responds with a list of the dead, ending with John Lennon, to the low howling of wind and a slow fade to black.

 

"That's where I keep my bees."

The Prestooge!

Mac Ronay (source)

 

  I knew nothing about Mac Ronay until yesterday, when the video below popped up in my recommendations, and if my youtube algorithms are going to keep bringing me gold like this I couldn't be prouder of them. Like bubble magician Tom Noddy, Ronay seems to have fashioned one perfect, unique, ten-minute set that's lasted his whole career. Tommy Cooper is the most obvious comparison – which isn't bad – but the joke's not quite the same: Ronay doesn't perform tricks badly. He performs bad tricks. And he shambles where Cooper swivels. Enjoy.

 

 

 It's true the '61 set ends with a good trick – the egg gag made famous in Airplane – but apart from that, no magical skill is required, which is the joke, which requires skill. When Ronay plays The Bob Monkhouse Show twenty-five years later, to a glowing introduction from a man who really knows his onions (although I wouldn't personally describe the act as "heart-rending") the egg trick's gone, and the most baffling trick Ronay pulls off in its place – eight and a half minutes in – is immediately explained. It would be breaking the terms of the contract now to do anything so soullessly impressive as magic; the punchline is the prestige. Immediately I want to apologise to anyone with an actual skill for suggesting magic is "soulless". If I'd been at all aware of Mac Ronay before now, I would be copying him.

 

Robb Wilton Touches his Face Twenty- Eight Times.

  

 By my count, at least (I'm not including the ears). Even outside of a world-wide pandemic Wilton's self-jeopardising stagecraft still seems gutsy ninety years on. I really enjoy the guy at the end too. I think he might also be the guy at the beginning being American - talkies were new I guess, Brits weren't that familiar with the accent yet. Actually I had my own lesson in doing an American accent yesterday, thanks to the internet and my friend Andrea...

 My main takeaway, and don't blame Andrea for this, this is my shorthand, is that to sound American, you should stick as a many hard "G"s as you can into every single word - so instead of saying "Madison Avenue", for example, you say "Gmagdigsgon Gavgengoo" - try it - and now, and this is the clever bit, take them all out again... See?... It's funny, I don't associate character comedy with the nineteen-thirties, hang on I'll do some research - Holy Moly, the compere is Peepshow creator Sam Bain's grandfather! Aw. Well, there's more here if you want to see, say, this:

Noddy's Bubbles Celebrate Forty Years of Transience

 Finally, some good clean fun. 

 A hundred years ago – it's said – a performer could go their whole life touring just twenty minutes of material, until talkies and television came along, and all that changed. Not for Tom Noddy though. Here is the inventor of the bubble cube at a festival in 2018, performing almost exactly the same routine he performed for Johnny Carson back in 1983.

(Update: that video has since been taken down, but here's some from 2019)

 I say "almost exacly the same" because he now uses a tiny smoke machine instead of a cigarette, but the patter's identical, charming enough to have spanned four decades, and counting. 

 This wasn't a comeback either. Noddy just never stopped, never went out of fashion: Las Vegas, Letterman, The Paul Daniels' Magic show, Bubblefest, Experimentarium – forty years performing the perfect act, using nothing but soap, smoke, and straws. Here's his very first television appearance from 1980, in which host Charles Kuralt describes him as a "wandering minstrel... transient as his bubbles". Well, yes and no. I love Tom Noddy.

"I've never blown an ugly bubble."

The Pediscript

 

 Carl Herman Unthan completed "Notes From the Life of an Armless Man" when he was seventy-seven. He called it a "pediscript" because he'd typed it with his feet. During the First World War, according to this article, he served with the German Army "in a morale role" visiting new amputess, but he was chiefly a Vaudevillian, and in 1913 his typing skills, and more besides, were recorded for posterity when he was cast as Arthur Stoss in the Danish silent film "Atlantis", at the age of sixty-five. I'm not too sure about my choice of music to accompany this footage, but I do think Carl is cool.

"Although his abilities were impressive, critics of Atlantis felt his appearance in the film was simply extraneous and non-integral to the story." Wikipedia

Hey, hey, I'm the Monkees.

 Remember how I occasionally went on about that film I wanted to make of "The Secret Agent"? Well this isn't it, but it has a tang. Presenting: Mirrorboy –

 

 

Embiggen.

  Gerard suggested making a video for this song after he saw it performed at the fundraiser where my friend Katy broke her fist punching a fish which is why we have rehearsals. He also suggested the locations, mixed the track, and kept the camera rolling as I attempted to restage some happy accidents. So we had a hoot, met some Father Christmasses, and fourteen months later, here's the finished article. Enjoy responsibly.

 (And if you liked that, or even if you thought "seven bloody minutes???" there's more of Gerard's magic here, featuring a robot, Nick "Colonel Dalby" Lucas, and a proper song from possibly London's Last Londoner.)

Moon Alert!

(originally posted on myspace here)

Yes, moon alert: Tonight's full mooon will loom larger in the sky than it has since 1993, although peering through the blinds tonight all I see is cloud. Actually I should put some curtains up. Venetian blinds are all very well for a two-fisted man of letters keeping faith with Ridley Scott's vision of 21st century living, but it's getting quite cold now, and the bonsai tree by my brass bed's beginning to smell ill. Seriously it took me ages to locate the garlic odour.

On the subject of the moon, here's a short animation made by Paul Barritt accompanying a story by Suzanne Andrade; she stands in front of it, looking eerily like Jean Charles Deburau but with sexier hair, in their show "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" which I saw last night at the BAC:

They don't do cabaret any more. That's a shame because an hour of this on its own can look a bit phoney, whereas a fifteen-minute invasion of the stage of the Battersea Barge, say, is awesome… That's a terribly ungracious judgment for me to make however because I was sitting right at the front on my own, with a bad neck, and hadn't even paid and paying always gets you in the mood. But this was a Big Christmas Treat from the Battersea Arts Centre, you see, who'd invited me along to a "Brainstorming Session". I felt like a real player. After the show there were probably about two-hundred of us sat around tables with crackers and lasagne, two-hundred who had all, we were told, been "put on a list". Lewis was there (of "Alf and…" fame) and personal favourite Julian Fox. Crackers were pulled and tiny pairs of nail-clippers sent flying across the hall. And then the time came to "round table" some subjects, and I joined the round table that read:

ONE ON ONES

… firstly because of The Books of Soap and Interview Room H, but also because I found the name very pleasing to the eye and couldn't quite work out why. At this table the BAC's joint artistic director tabled the notion of a "one-on-one theatre festival" which sounded great. Then he suggested this festival might answer a demand from a public finding themselves in a "post-capitalist, post-Blairite, post-spin" era, hungry for honesty and "energized by Obama" etc. and I thought "Who? What? Oh no..." But it prompted Lewis to make what I thought was the most interesting and important point of the evening, namely that this demand for "one on one" theatre wasn't in fact coming from the public at all, but from us artists. It's us who want "the house-lights turned up" as he put it, far more than our paying or non-paying house. I love Lewis. And it seems to me a very important distinction for an artistic venue to make when deciding on its focus, and indeed for commentators in general. Art doesn't change direction because the public want it to but because the artists do; but artists are also of course the public - they're seeing stuff as well as making it, and chances are they're making the stuff they want to see. In other words, you don't necessarily need all these feedback forms. And the idea that the Battersea Arts Centre is somehow a barometer of national public interest is, when you think about it for a second, bonkers; what the BAC can I think genuinely take pride in is the interest they generate from the large number of artists wanting to produce work there. Dedum.

So anyway I walked home well-fed, clearly knowing everything there ever was to know about my chosen medium, found a DVD of "Planet Terror" in the living room, bunged it on and was immediately reminded how much I clearly wanted to DO THIS! THIS! MOVIES NOT THEATRE! THIS!!! Gah:

Bratwerk: A second horrible love story

 I got back from the Wambam Club about an hour ago and I'm having second thoughts now about not having a compere for "The Information". Not doubts. Just thoughts. But that's not why I'm blogging. I just phoned my imaginary girlfriend and I need to come here and hide. I need to post my two days 'orth. I need to buy myself some time before finally, definitely knuckling down to that sketch about Tesla- I've said too much... So yes, I got round to unpacking and boxing all the stuff my parents left for me and one of the last items to turn up was this, from the earliest comic of mine that I can find. The other strips were all Leo Baxendale knock-offs like the stuff I've already posted. I called them "Willy The Kid Books" because that's basically what they were, except for this one. Here, for once, the 5-year-old me decides to do away with the usual stumpy-heads-have-accidents-at-the-fun-fair-or-museum structure and go for something a bit more epic, Peer Gyntish even, involving a bride, a groom, a baby, a tramp and a harpy. The more I look at this story, the more I like it. And I don't think you're supposed to understand what the harpy's saying. We'll speak in a couple of days. Night night.

 

(originally posted on myspace)

3 solid nights of mixing sounds with sister Susy later I am

but 'appy

and I hope she's happy too.

Thank you, mighty sibling. You did it all.

cirque de mel (BIGGER THAN MY GREAT GREAT GRANDMOTHER)

... except I can't work out how to open this post with the word "The." Well it's been a while. I'm rusty (Hello). I ran my bath upstairs. The downstairs bath no longer has any hot. I got in and found there was a wasp hovering around. I got out and tried to hover in a manner that might influence his own hovering towards the door. I didn't flap I just waved my arms, switched the light-saving bulb on and off... He knocked about the bulb and the lintel, inscrutably. Both of us looked stupid. Neither of us were equipped for this. Neither were a credit to our separate species. "Basta! We are the paragon of dumb animals" I thought after the bath and set about building a circus from youtube:

 

  A lot of silent acts had to be cut I'm afraid, but they can be easily found. "The Miller and The Sweep" who just whack each other with sacks until they're both grey... "Princess Rajah" who can belly-dance with a chair between her teeth... The legendary Annie Oakley from 1894 displaying a marksmanship that has to be taken a little bit on trust given the state of film stock from 1894... The stripper on the flying trapeze and "the Gordon Sisters" endlessly boxing for Thomas A. Edison...

Edison's own electrocution of Topsy the elephant however (to illustrate the dangers of Tesla's Alternating Current) I left out after much deliberation. It did smack of epoch, but this wasn't going to be that kind of circus.
And I would have loved to have had the extraordinary "Julian's Troupe Acrobats" on the bill, but they refused to be embedded.

 

 Darrell Bluett stays. He has to. I can't stop watching him. I don't know why. I even thought of reproducing his act myself verbatim, then found someone else on youtube had already done that. I am glad.
 

 And in the world: I compered. My first time properly: the Wambam Club at the Battersea Barge. Our burlesque act Lady Chocolat never arrived but I'd written two songs that day to cover. One was called "Scrap Brain Zone". It was accompanied by the music of Sonic the Hedgehog from my phone and was supposed to sound a bit like Julian Fox ("I'm a blue hedgehog. And I'm running around a factory that's very, very dangerous. Collecting Gold Rings..." etc.) The other was "O Suck It In", an attempt to phonetically reproduce Asha Bhosle's "O Saathi Re" (from the 1978 film "Muqaddar Ka Sikandar") into a language that let me join in... an old idea, but a great opener. Coincidentally there happened to be a large and mainly Asian birthday party in that night to see the burlesque act, so witnessing me singalong to a Bollywood legend probably sweetened the pill of her absence considerably. Definitely. It wasn't racist. They could tell I just wanted to sing along:

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Oh lower your belly on me.
Suck in and put your belly on me.
Oh lower your belly on me.
Suck in and put your belly on me.
Remind me of Butch my cleaner.
Then let me knock at your knee-knaw.

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Johnny Hayseed,
I need you knee-deep.
On yon façade we'll eat brassy monkeys.
Up with the southern butchers!...
Who aren't bad people.
Bjorn says when he's king
He'll pardon them mostly.
And build the office on me-ee-ee.
Build the office on me.
Make love and stooge on me.
Only joking for real.
And let me knock at your knee-knaw.

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Hurry, hurry, Carnaby.
Just take it easy.
Sandstone may easily be the pushier moon, heh?
It's the third year BC.
Who saw the burly detective?
My old nun said to me it's too easy to hate.
Bjorn ain't too thin now-w-w.
Bjorn ain't too thin now.
Who said the rude thing now?
Someone joking for real.
They let me market your demons.


P.S. That's Asha Bhosle singing on my homepage now. (I may switch back to the Eno though at some point because his music is actually supposed to be used as wallpaper. Just makes it more ethical.) Anyway we'll catch up properly tomorrow maybe.