King Prince Charles wishes everyone good luck probably.

 Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square On,e to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...

 

 I wonder if we could get him to revisit his bagpipe bit.

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.

 

"Universe, Is It? Harmony?"

 

 Rab C. Nesbitt was my Holden Caulfield. At least I'm assuming he was, I didn't get past page two of Catcher In The Rye. But "Scotch and Wry" – a compilation of Scottish sketches Dad had on VHS starring Rikki Fulton and Gregor Fisher who would go on to play Nesbitt – was something I'd watch religiously, meaning not necessarily understanding all of it, and when Fisher got his own sitcom in 1988, it had my full attention. All beautifully scripted by Ian Pattison, "Rab C. Nesbitt"'s fourth episode was a particular revelation: What a journey this speech goes on, digging and digging until we're out the other side. I remember thinking, watching it: "Oh wow, comedy can also do this?" I would have been thirteen.

 But what had I meant by "this"? Well, now I've spent a couple of days revisiting King Lear, I think I have a clearer idea. My first acquaintance with Lear and also Othello, two surprisingly entertaining and downright funny Great Works of Tragedy were around this time too, and I can see Rab's unaccommodated ranting at the Universe striking a similar chord. More compact than Shakespeare too. Comedy also equals tragedy minus time.

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." 

 

When Altman, Bogdanovich, Brooks and Capra Went On Cavett To Talk About Swine Like Harry Cohn

 

 

 It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you." 

Capra allowed to sit at Cohn's table (source)

 

 It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that. 

 

Cohn with Larry, Mo and Curly 

(the latter of whom Cohn forced to continue working after multiple strokes nyuk nyuk)

 Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!

Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

Not Safe For Work

  On Tuesday I held a place for the Webcamming Chronicles (a very different show from Spike) which Maud Madlyn and Andrès Montes Zuluaga will be performing again tonight at the Cockpit Theatre as part of Trojana – either the name of their company, or of the very specific sex-work-based project this show is a part of, I'm not quite sure which – and as this is a recommendation I'm going to try to get it written and posted while there's still time to get a ticket. There's a Q and A after tonight's show as well. I guarantee you will have questions, but I can't guarantee you'll necessarily want the answers. 

 To quote Trojana's f*c*b**k page:

"For this particular piece, performer Maud Madlyn took on her most demanding personal and professional challenge to date: work as an adult webcam model and trainer. She infiltrated the industry from a clandestine studio in Cali, Colombia, second world-leading power in this business. Why? To see what sexual desire looked and sounded like when decency and political correctness were stripped away."

 Along with many mutual friends from the London Dungeon I'd known Maude from when she ran the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms in Camden, and after she left the country – (side note: I love that she describes herself as "French-born" rather than French; I might start describing myself as British-born, it immediately seems a little freeing) – I knew from her instagram posts she was doing something involving not wearing clothes, but it wasn't until I saw this show on Tuesday that I realised her specific level of commitment, and that Trojana may have taken its name from the horse.

Image taken from this review of Webcamming Chronicles' Covid times, online premiere

 

 Not knowing much about the show beforehand however probably made it more unforgettable, and so I don't want to say too much more about Andrès' and Maude's investigations (I also want to get this posted pretty quickly, as I said) but – with the proviso that every audience will make every show different, and so what it felt like when I saw it might not be what it feels like any other night – I will say that the two things I probably loved most about the show were: 1) That I really wasn't prepared for it, and that it didn't seem to care – content warnings are incredilbly important but I hadn't realised until I watched this how much they also really make me feel like a consumer, like I'm in the shops – but I only loved this because 2) While a piece of staged journalism, it never stopped being art, by which I mean liminal, by which I'm trying to find a word that sounds less pretentious but still describes the necessary protective shared understanding that you don't have to immediately engage with the work as fact, that you can interrogate it without feeling you're interrogating the artist. That's what I mean. That thing that Nanette didn't have. Interrogating a work means you can create a conversation within yourself. And I don't know if I ever heard these specific words said, but the phrase "unsafely human" was something powerful I was left with,

 Of course, Trojana might also take its name from the first ever webcamming star: the coffee pot outside the Trojan Room of Cambridge University. If you're going tonight, maybe you could ask.

 

Bojangles Break

 

 Unfamiliar with the name, I wikipedia'd Bill Robinson – as namechecked in the often brilliant Fred Astaire muscial The Band Wagon – and my belated dance education continued (it beat working on my abs):

"According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, 'Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging,' adding a 'hitherto-unknown lightness and presence.'... He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances."

 So when I wrote that the trick to dancing seemed to be to get my top half to hold up my bottom half, apparently he invented that. And more. Watching the battered, echoing remnant of his work above I realised – later than I would like – that I'd grown up loving Bill Robinson's dancing without ever seeing the man himself do it:

"His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent."

And who can blame him? 

Heigh ho. 

That's entertainment.

LOVE DUMP!

 Some bouche-amusing, minute-long promotional videos rich with rehearsal footage have just dropped for The Love Goddess. Here's the show's superb star and co-creator Almog Pail first up, with a little bit of me thrown in to illustrate the concept of man-sharks...

 And here's the show's wonderful producer Laura Lundy introducing Almog introducing the rest of us. I'm mostly out of shot but you can trust me, I'm dancing just as proficiently as everyone else. I've absolutely got this...

 

 

 

 And here is our brilliant and patient choreographer "JJ" – the very first British dancer to have a shoe named after her apparently – giving credit where it's due to George "Shorty" Snowden...

 

 And here's some George "Shorty" Snowden! He's genuinely short! We open on the eighteenth, come!

Now I Lay Me Down...

"I was eternally grateful to Harry Cohn for what he did for me, because I had a musical, Around The World In Eighty Days, and I had to open in Boston, I had a lot of costumes waiting in the railway station, which couldn't go from the railway station to the theatre about eight blocks away unless someone paid Brookes Costume Company forty-seven thousand dollars..." 

 Hm. Transcribing even this almost definitely exaggerated anecdote from Orson Welles, it strikes me how meandering and ultimately inconsequential the story behind the making of The Lady From Shanghai is, especially given it was Welles' one onscreen collaboration with both his wife Rita Hayworth, and her longtime harasser, producer Harry Cohn. 

 

 But that's fine, I guess. It's called Show Business, not Show Interesting. Let's finish...

 "I found myself in the box office trying to think of who could send me this money, and I thought: Harry Cohn. I hardly knew him. And I called him up on the long distance phone. I said 'Harry Cohn, this is Orson Welles. I've just read a book –' and I turned a paperback around which the girl had in front of her who was selling tickets and I said 'It's called...' something or other, it wasn't called Lady From Shanghai then – I said: 'Buy it, and I will make it for you if you send me forty-seven thousand dollars in two hours.' And he did." 

 So I guess Around The World In Eighty Days did happen. Actually this is the internet, isn't it, I can check... Okay that's interesting, there's a contemporary recording on youtube (brought to you by "splendind, splendid Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer even in this time of grain restriction") that sounds like Americans doing The Goon Show, which I don't think I like. The video description suggests the show inspired the pretentious flop in Fred Astaire's musical The Band Wagon. Astaire worked a lot with Hayworth... 

 

"Unidentified young starlet" left. Harry Cohn right.

 

 Anyway, ultimately Welles blamed composer Cole Porter for the failure of Around The World In Eighty Days, and film historians blamed Cohn for the failure of the The Lady From Shanghai, as they blame nearly every one of Welles' producers for the messy, unfinished nature of nearly every one of Welles' films. I don't know who they blame for the messy, unfinished nature of Welles' marriage to Hayworth or his political career, but don't get me wrong, I love Welles probably as much as he'd want me to: I love Citizen Kane unreservedly, I love The Trial unreservedly, and I love F for Fake unreservedly, and that's it, but that's more than enough. Joe Dante below also blames Cohn, and he'll know more than I do. He also mentions in his retelling the surprising involvement of William "The Tingler" Castle. But be warned: Rita Hayworth gets slapped in the face in the trailer's closing seconds. And be reminded: I'm playing both Welles and Cohn in the musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit in a few weeks. Tickets HERE!

Lebanon, Missouri

 

Gwen Verdon in Fame!

 

 Isn't this the best! And now you can add to the names Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen my own, for I have just completed the first week of rehearsals on The Love Goddess. And while I'm not saying I'm as good as these two yet, it does feel like I'm going to have to get close in order to pull off any of the routines that Jacqui Jameson's taught us. So I look forward that. I wonder how it will happen. That's Jacqui below, far right, if you don't count the reflections. This is a lovely room to be in. Look: Mirrors! Hats!

 

 The absolute best thing about the theatre though is all the foreigners you get to work with: the world shrinks and your view improves and you just feel higher up. Almog Pail, the show's creator, is from Israel, and there's a heavy American contingent too, including songwriter Logan Medland, seen above on the keyboads, triple threat Joey Simon – also pictured – and producer Laura Lundy, who was telling us over a fish supper this evening at The Seashell about her ninety-year old gay mother who got thrown out of a convent and has written a book about it. Laura also asked me to look up her daughter on IMDB, and mate...

 

 After supper we returned to The Cockpit to see Lanford Wilson Talley's Folly which closes tomorrow, a two-hander in a gazebo that I knew nothing about. "Lanford Wilson" is definitely an American name though. One often hears people who work in or for the theatre talk about the unique quality of the medium, a kind of "Here-we-are"-ness that I mainly don't feel at all when I go and see a play, beyond a nudge and a wink, but I felt it tonight.

"We could do this on a couple of folding chairs. But it's not bare. It's not bombed out. It's run down. And that makes all the difference."

 I'm not sure I'd call Talley's Folly a comedy, or even a romance, but it's definitely a thing with a heart, and a brain, and a careful thing, and I loved it. Watching American drama performed live by Amerian actors is a luxury, and also a bit of a relief. There were twenty-one other people in the audience tonight. If you're free I recommend filling the seats on its final day. The tickets are here.

 

A Third Startling Themblance, or When Dad Was Big Brother...

 

 

 Okay, I don't necesssarily expect you to know what my Dad looks like, so you're probably just thinking "Oh, that's a photograph of William Churchill's trusted adviser and possibly illegitimate son, former MP for Paddington, pioneering financial journalist, pretend Australian back in the days when pretending to be Australian was socially advantageous, and George Orwell's boss at the Ministry of Information, Brendan "BB" Bracken, born in County Tipperary 1901, etc..." without a double-take, and you'd be right. It's him. I think it definitely looks like my Dad too though. And so does this.

 

 Happy Birthday, Daddy! It's Dad's birthday today... I screengrabbed this picture of Bracken leaving Downing Street with Churchill from the very informative but, if I'm honest, not necessarily reliable documentary below – and I'm not just saying that because one of the interviewees is Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad.

 

 

 

 Bracken had all his papers burnt after his death apparently, so everything seems pretty apocryphal. Also the presenter bangs on lovingly about how big a liar Bracken was, so we're probably not on the same page politically. But it's interesting to see someone else have a go at making a history documentary, let's put it like that. The whole thing looks like it might have been shot on a phone, the music's fascinatingly awful, and there are some great, cheap choices of location to spice up the narrative, like a branch of Wimpy's when America gets involved. I'm not recommending it necessarily – again, William Rees-Mogg is in it – but I learnt a lot about BB from it, including the fact there's actually no evidence he was Churchill's son, and I feel I also learnt quite a bit about Conservative mythos too.

 

 

 Speaking of which, what I really do recommend is The Gathering Storm, this 1974 BBC play I found yesterday on youtube, starring Richard Burton as Churchill, in which Dad pops up playing Bracken. Sorry yes, that was what got me looking him up in the first place and discovering the resemblance. Patrick Stewart also pops up as Clement Attlee. It's an extraordinary cast. Dad died his hair red for the role, which caused a lot of amusement when I was born, and they shot scenes at Chartwell itself, from which Dad "rescued" a photo of Churchill with Somerset Maugham and H. G Wells that he found in a cleaning cupboard. I love the absence of twinkliness in Burton's pre-Thatcher portrayal of Churchill here, not least because it makes the jokes play better, but also because, while he might have been a figure of fun, Churchill was not a clown: he was a walking, breathing ideology – terrifying, but I've also not seen portrayed more vividly someone you'd definitely want as the enemy of your enemy.

 (Okay, I'm not saying Bracken definitely wasn't Churchill's son...)

A Second Startling Semblance, or That's Not Me In That Film

 I love this photo. This is the curtain call of the opening night of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the English Theatre Frankfurt, in 2017. The assistant stage managers for that show, Mel and Meli – who helped with quick changes, and hid behind the fireplace to rip off Shaun's trousers, and mopped up my spit take in the interval  – now flatshare in London. On Sunday, they whatsapped to ask if I was in the film on Netflix that they were watching. I hadn't done a film for Netflix. They sent me a clip. I saw what they meant.

 I honestly cannot overstate how accurately this resembles my self image. Only when a little research revealed that this was actually Peter Serafinowicz could I begin to reframe "Yuba the Gnome" as anything other than the ground zero of an exploded subconscious. Fortunately, that Bucharest job has just turned out another advert, so I can check what I actually look like.

The Thane of Harlem – Welles' Macbeths

 In the lead-up to Love Goddess, which starts rehearsals next week, I've been doing a little research into some of the Orson Welles stuff I know less about, and found this photo of his first ever professional job as director. Before I get into that however, I have a question: In 1948 he made a film of Macbeth*, and "to save time" he decided to record audio of all his actors speaking their lines first, then film them lip-syncing to it like a music video, and I have no idea why. I know about recording dialogue and image separately, and obviously Welles did too – half his output is him re-recording other actors' lines – but why this way round? Did other directors do this? 

 Was he just not sure he'd be able to get the actors back? 

 The result is probably the stage-iest film of Shakespeare I've seen, including those actually set on a stage. Here's a watermarked still from it. See if you recognise the set...

 

 It's the same arch and staircase configuration as the picture at the top. That was from Welles' first Macbeth – indeed his first anything – a Depression jobs programme from the Federal Theatre Project employing a hundred-and-thirty-seven black actors and stagehands, and one wild-eyed white, pipe-smoking twenty-year-old who decided to set the whole thing in Haiti.

 

 The way Welles talks about the "Voodoo Macbeth", even making his first film Citizen Kane a few years later feels like a come-down, and one can see why when you watch the four minutes preserved of it in the newsreel below. To go from nothing to this... (I think they may have added a line not in the original Shakespeare by the way. See if you can spot it.)

 

 

 Unlike the arch and stair combo, the brilliant line "Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! My Name's Macbeth!" did not alas make it in to the 1948 film, which consequently has very little to match this production's energy. It's just occured to me it might not originally have appeared in this production either, but simply been added for the newsreel to give viewers unfamiliar with the play some clue as to what's going on. The later film did, however, also end with the witches' return and the line: "Peace, the charm's wound up!" although I think "wound up" here means ready to go, like a clock, rather than finished like a story, so I'm not sure why it's at the end of either. Pessimistic circularity? Did Welles innovate that? The actor absolutely killing it with that line, as Hecate the god of witches, is Eric Burroughs, whose son recently wrote a graphic novel all about the production here, which I think they might be turning into a movie here. Further fantastic reminiscences follow. Enjoy:

 

 

 

 *UPDATE: I've just found the whole film – each helmet siller than the last – up on youtube HERE.

Bigcoin

 "Wow!" indeed, thumbnail. Vic Stefanu takes us on a brief tour of the Micronesian Bankvaults of Yap, whose ancient limestone currency  – (is "ancient currency" an oxyoron?) –gets referenced in Extra Credits' history of paper money, which we've all watched in preparation for The City of London's Golden Key which takes place tomorrow, Saturday.

 

 

 Come along during the day if you can. Its all free, and I've finally found out which route we're at the end of: "Share Mile", details here. I'll be in kennels with the brilliant Julia "Legs" Masli and Sachi "Bums" Kimura, so I'll definitely be having fun and yes, apparently the counting rooms were called kennels. 

 Speaking of fun...

 

 

 I don't know, I didn't want to let his passing go unremarked on here, but can any clip truly contain Robbie Coltrane? I barely had a moment to enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng getting fired before I heard the news. Every time I see him closing that plane door as an unpseaking extra in Flash Gordon I think, and then you go on to do everything. A giant Yappian coin of the acting world. Bye bye, big man.

 

 

one more clip

But Who's Counting

 

 Further facelessness. 

 In the temple-like vault of a former bank stand six-hundred-and-fifty defaced and numbered photographs of the artist Sarah Maple and her child, one defacing for every breastfeed given over a three month period. A lot more than I expected. It's called "Labour Of Love". I don't know if it will still be up on Saturday.

 

 I was down there today to scout the marble counting house I'll be in this weekend as part of Gemma Brockis' contribution to The Golden Key, a massive City of London commission from Coney and Friends, which will see the normally dead-at-weekends Square Mile come alive with activity and riff raff like me, and perhaps you! 

 

   

 

 Specifically, we'll be part of The Maze of Adventures: "Choose wisely, friend," insists the blurb  – a voice from a simpler time perhaps, before the pound found itself battling gravity like Indiana Jones – "as you will not able to see them all..." That isn't much help, sorry, but we'll be there somewhere. I'm not sure if I can give away the vault's exact location, but when I used to do the Ghost Bus Tours we'd get stuck in traffic outside of it for anything up to half an hour and have to vamp about plague pits – Oh, I hadn't thought about them! The City's full of subterranean material, but I think we'll be sticking to counting.

 

Villains From a Simpler Time: Martin Shkreli

 

 

 "Yeah, I'll be evil, I'll be the Bond villain." I had totally forgotten about Martin Shkreli! Do you remember Martin Shkreli? Something like... he bought the rights to an AIDS drug and immediately made it five hundred times more expensive? I know next to nothing about American Healthcare, but Allie Conti's interview with him for Vice back in January 2016 is a beautiful character study regardless of topic.

 

 The useless hover board, the mismatched wine glasses, the "Sicilian Defense", the globe on the floor. That Wu Tang Clan album. This is what performative villainy looked like before Putin invaded the Ukraine. Before Covid. Before Brexit. Before Trump. Almost before Elon Musk.

 

 I was only reminded of it when watching RedLetterMedia discuss Ben & Arthur as part of their "Best of the Worst" series: an awkward cri de coeur shot in a cheaply furnished flat. Something about that film's combination of bareness and clutter suddenly reminded me of Shkreli, so I looked him up, and it turns out he'd just got out of prison.

 

 I've no idea if the rob-the-rich-to-give-to-Research-and-Development defense he gives in this interview holds any water at all. I just know he's pawned his "prison watch" and is now threatening on instagram to go and bed all our "thot mums". I miss wondering what someone like him will do next, rather than fearing it. I hope he never catches up.

 Here's some Ben & Arthur.

 

A survey of television production during the first six months of operation. For manufacturers and viewing rooms only.

 Arts, Science, Light Ents, the lot! Don't make me choose a screenshot!

 I've said it before and I'll say it again, the BBC Archive is really worth following. 

 (And here's Lord Reith being "sut"-shamed by Malcolm Muggeridge.)

 

 

"Opera and Revue have been attempted."

Of Course, the Very First British TV Drama Was Filmed in Total Darkness.

 Almost as surprisingly, it was filmed in portrait mode. 

 A single camera/projector shot a pinwheel of light at the subject, and changes of angle were achieved by raising a chequered card behind which actors had to feel their way around with the lights off, using only the panel below for guidance.

 

 "These used to light up as required."

 

 Accompanying music and sound effects were, as far as I can work out, provided by a mixture of pre-recorded 77's and, if you count a second's worth of chimes played out on the guts of a musical top by producer Lance Sieveking, live performance.

 

"This is my signature tune."

 

 And here's Lance with the rest of the original team extant behind that 1930 drama, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth – an adaptation of a short play by Pirandello about oral herpes – recreating their original publicity shot for a recreation broadcast forty years later.

 

 That's "special effects man" George Inns on the far left with his checquered card, and on the far right Mary Eversley the prompter, holding a script, so I guess there must have been some light to see by after all, although probably not as much as in the 1970 reconstruction below from which these images are all taken.

 

 

 I did not know neon was pink.

 I really recommend subscribing to that BBC Archive channnel. I couldn't find a recording of the 1930 original, but given that the means of both recording and broadcasting it were entirely analogue that's not surprising. I did however find another very convincing, fuller restaging made by Granada Television in 1968 made by Radio Rentals for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1967, so here's that too. It's horrible. What were they thinking?

 

EastEnders Omnibus

Form.

 

 I didn't know when I self-taped that I was auditioning for a "bumbling lawyer". I just thought Russell would be one of those bad-news-delivering authority interfaces necessary to a continuing drama who might not even get a medium shot because it was all about the reactions. I didn't know to whom he'd be giving this bad news either as the names were changed in the audition script to keep storylines confidential, and I definitely didn't know there'd be a second scene in which Russell would be stripped to his shivering essence in the purifying fire of a face-off with Danny Dyer!

 But behold a bit:

 

 So no, I knew little about the brief if you'll pardon the pun, but I normally send in two takes on a self-tape: one high-status, one low-status (or if the character's status is unambiguous, one slow, one fast, or if the status and pace are both unambiguous... I don't know... one subtle and one stupid) and the low status take turned out to be exactly what EastEnders director Jamie Annett was in the mood for. I've also started to get castings for "William H. Macy" types.

 

 The costume department phoned ahead to ask me if I had a rumpled pinstripe suit to bring to set, but everything I showed them was too shipwrecky, even for Russell. What the director had liked about my tape he said, is that it had suggested a man who nearly gets away with being shit. Which actor hasn't dreamt of hearing that? Jamie also liked that I lived above a pub.

 

 "Russell's not a shit lawyer," he clarified on the hoof as the morning we were given to film both scenes powered along, "He's just shit in court," which is was why he was being so spineless, and why suddenly having to consider the innocence of his client paralysed him. "Yeah, I can see him being a recurring character definitely, the bumbling lawyer" said my new friend Danny Dyer.

 

 Maybe there'd be a spin-off. Hustle Like Russell. "You'd find him in the pub at two in the afternoon," Jamie also ventured, not a direction necessarily, just riffing now on what he was witnessing. I can't imagine being more supported on a set. And look at all this lovely business I was given...

 

  Hankie. Paperwork. Big old briefcase. To say nothing of the bag of crisps Jamie instructed me to take out to get to the paperwork – Walford's own brand, by the way, "Wells Crisps", imaginary packaging – I didn't take the placebo painkillers in the end because I thought Russell might at least have had the nouse to take his pills before showing up, but they were there in the bag if I changed my mind. Am I adequately conveying how much of a dream this job was?

 

To be on that stage in Elstree with people turning out four episodes a week, and to see the three of them working together among all the other work going on – Jamie, Danny, and Kellie Bright – without a quantum of ego between them. Just courtesy, art, and a trouble-shooting focus. For example: "Now, this line.."

 

 "I mean-! I'll just say... Do ya though?" Harold Pinter's favourite actor was right. My line says what his line said. Subtext is pleasure, to quote Matt Weiner. The scene was better.

 Another example: Despite having prepped like hell, I didn't know what would be going on in other episodes, and so hadn't clocked quite a big change to our first scene since the audition. Originally I delivered some good news (the police have dropped the charges) then some bad news (this doesn't mean Linda automatically gets her daughter back), but in the rewrite Mick and Linda already knew the good news and so as Kellie who plays Linda pointed out, the bad news wasn't news any more, and the scene as I had been playing it no longer made sense. It needed a new shape. I stopped playing my lines as someone painstakingly explaining something therefore, and started playing them as someone making excuses, desperate to leave, and suddenly it felt right, and we played what I think are two really great scenes, and there were three cameras recording it, and it went out on national television, and I'm still new enough to this medium to find all of that amazing.

 

 Have I mentioned I'm in EastEnders then? I appear about halfway into episode six-thousand-five-hundred-and-fifty-eight, immediately after the appearance of Alicia McKenzie from the production of Bleak Expectations I was in over Summer, which was a great surprise, playing Debs – I love how we all get names – and pulling the only face anyone should pull when dealing with Janine.

 

  Oh yes, I'm a fan now. Watch the whole thing HERE.