The Annuals

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

 

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

 

 Wait, no, here's a better one:

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 Or buy the lot here.

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

HAPPY HOLLY(wood)DÉ(but)S!

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Some Nearly Wordless Pics of Languedoc Until the Keyboard's Fixed

  

 

 

 

 Click to embiggen. And spot the dog.

Is it a loud man getting things wrong?

 Here, ol' Unattendees, to celebrate my love for you all, is a tree giving a little house a hug. Sorry I haven't been posting more, but I am once again between keyboards (in case you were wondering, this post has been compiled entirely from copying and pasting parts OF ITSELF) but this hardware situation should be resolved when I get back from France, pictured above – where I have, as always, been spending Christmas with my folks – and below is the advert that will pay for it:

 

 

 I might even have enough left over after to take a show to Edinburgh, something I haven't dared do since 2001. Guess which show. "I don't know, Simon. How many shows have you made?" Well exactly, that one. Although, thinking on the previous post, I am growing obsessed (again*) with how abysmal a part of real world, far right economic discourse beloved, old sci-fi tropes such as space exploration and Ai have become, so maybe it will be two shows! Maybe it will be none! No, I've written it down now (or pains-takingly pieced it together from individual characters torn from THIS VERY POST) and 2025 is likely to frighten a lot of us anyway, so nits like me, who are sitting pretty pretty, should give courage a go too! Happy... changing things, then. Yeah. No. Franceuck it. Happy 2025, readers. Happy Change. 

 

Vancouver last August, where this ad was filmed – along with many futuristic sci-fi shows from the noughties, meaning I'd wanted to visit this city for decades. But when I finally get there, everywhere else had caught up, and the biggest thing distinguishing this Pacific shoreline now from, say, Leeds or Chelsea Wharf is just the number of people to a canoe.

 

* Did you get that that was what "Time Spanner" was about? I mean, it was about other stuff too.

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.)

Christmas Quiz!

 Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?

You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!

 

 

 (Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)

 

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.

Meeting Your Heroes

The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes. 

 Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.

 (I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)

Sometimes this blog will just be Japan's Bob McGrath.

 

 The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...

 

 

 

 There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...

 

 Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...

 

 Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.

"Rita, take a deep breath."

  That apparently was the instruction given to Rita Hayworth when Bob Landry took the above photograph for LIFE magazine in 1941. This photograph of Hayworth holding her breath would go on to sell over five million copies by the end of World War Two. It was this photograph Orson Welles saw while filming in Brazil which led him to famously declare the actress "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" Okay no, that's how he described RKO. What he actually said upon seeing Hayworth's picture was: "When I come back, that's what I'm going to do!" Which isn't far off. And reader, he did.

 

 I'll be playing Rita Hayworth's second husband in Almog Pail's new musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre in a month's time. It's a wonderful script – the whole cheating-on-the-wife-you're-sawing-in-half side of Welles is not one we often see – and I'm really looking forward to starting rehearsals next week. I'll also be playing Hayworth's boss, Harry Cohn, the monstrous, Weinstein-ian head of Columbia Pictures. And at least four other Americans, so I'm also really nervous. But I love being part of a labour of love, and Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a musical. Get yer tickets HERE!

 

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without Lembit Opik...

 

 O HOU, everyone! Happy First of Leo! Let's all celebrate One Humanity, One Unity – but not necessarily in that order – with Asgardia's plucky "Chair of Parliament" Lembit Opik, an uncredited Lena DeWinne, and their tiny "Head of Legal Affairs", none of whom outstay their welcome. If that wasn't enought to make this a Unity Day to remember, joining them is a computer-generated woman from 2005: "All Asgardians will be awarded celebrating in all corners!" Imagine that!

 

 

  Speaking of all corners, I see Dennis Shoemaker has found the perfect place for his map of the US. Okay, so it turns out that Unity Day was actually six months ago, but that's my fault, not theirs. I wasn't going to let the year go by without sharing the latest from Asgardia with you anyway, and every day's Unity Day here at Unattended Articles, so let's hear now from their Head of Information and Communications. Take it away, Dennis!

 

 

 

 Of course, Asgardia won't just be about law and information and recruiting women to give birth in outer space. There will also be a strong cultural element. But what will the Art of Earth's First Space Nation look like? It will look like Hell. O hou, Cheryl!

 Oh, who's this at the door now, but Asgardia's Minister for Trade and Commerce, Ben Dell, who maybe hasn't had that much to do this past year? I don't know. That's just a guess. Maybe sloppily photoshopping the Starship Enterprise onto pictures of himself sitting on a space swing was exactly how Ben was meant to be spending his time. It certainly wasn't wasted anyway. That's one tasty vision. Here's still to the future, guys. O HOU!

 

 

Deck the Stars!

 Season's Merries to all of you, ol' Unatendees! From the tasteful opulence of this Notting Hill window display, to the simple star atop the town down the tracks, below. I hope – however you spend this day, and whomever you spend it with – that incorporated into it at some point will be your idea of fun, and I hope you're all doing tremendously!