I hope you agree this find was worth sharing. In its way, its almost as coruscating,
nourishing, and unstoppably funny, if only – as Americans say – on
accident. The central message of "Emptying Yourself for God" is a hell of a hook, and the total lack of rapport between unrehearsed host and puppet creates a tension I find it hard to grow tired of, however much the deranged animated inserts start to drag.
This Lucy and Friends is also the kind of reminder I always enjoyed getting, that before hitting its stride with wall to wall,
parasocial direct address and crafted video essays, YouTube was once a lot
more like the show Takeover TV, a kind of petting zoo for anonymous projects as its name suggests. Like Macbeth and the taste of fear, I had almost forgot.
* I'm trying to make formidable happen as a noun, a bit like spectacle even though that was never an adjective. Pronounce it as French as you like.
Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot
crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.
Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 going by my dye job (open auditions were being held for The Pianist) Tom Lyall and I staged one of the stories I'd written in the mountains of Bajardo at a cabaret at Chat's Palace, Hackney. I originally did these storytelling "acts" at Shunt's arch in Bethnal Green, and I might put one or two of those up as well now I'm finally digitising my VHS's. The scare quotes around "act" are just a reaction to my louche mumbling here. No level of video degradation can dim the splendour of Tom's work, even if the capture does little justice to his makeup choices as Phonella. Speaking of degradation, I thought I'd parcel this in a little Hi-8 footage of the region whose actual walk to the shops had inspired it, and I'm very grateful to Kane Parsons' Backrooms for cementing ageing VHS as a now legitimate liminal aesthetic. Enjoy (possibly with subtitles).
Sure, another reason I haven't blogged so much might simply be procrastination. I didn't write much about Edinburgh, but as this year began with me wondering whether to take a show there, let's finish 2025 by sweeping up the spoils. I got a trailer out it for a start...
Pow. Huge thanks to DMLK for making it look like there were more than eight people in. Audiences averaged around ten in the end (for a room that sat around eighty) and one of the many lessons I learnt from taking JONAH NON GRATA to the Assembly Rooms was stars on posters don't necessarily mean bums on seats, so bums on posters next time? Maybe stars on bums? I'll stick links to the reviews that the trailer quotes from at the end of this post, but purely in tribute to the unimpeachable work done by this show's hype machine – ie Madelaine at Gingerbread – not for my sake. This isn't about me.
But I mean, look at that. It's not easy to PR a twenty-year-old show either. You're not up for any awards. Still, Madelaine worked actually literally round the clock to get me press even if I had to write it myself. I shared some of those think pieces back in July, but not the lot, so let me slip into italics now, as I present an article I wrote for Gareth Vile's Analogue magazine about why JONAH NON GRATA's a clown show...
I
remember an old interview with Dylan Moran where he stated an ambition
to do absolutely nothing on stage, and have the audience get it.
In a time of such social upheaval no-one even noticed it, Woody Allen made three comedies – in a row –
about the assassination of a political leader: “Bananas, “Sleeper”, and
“Love and Death”. In each, the ethical and religious arguments against
taking human life were inextricably tangled with the protagonist’s
solipsistic, Bob-Hope-inspired cowardice and laziness.
When
people ask me what “Jonah Non Grata” is about, I say it’s about that
story – “sort of” – but it doesn’t matter if the audience don’t know it.
When I’m asked what it is, I say it’s “a clown show”, because that’s
what all my friends were making when I first devised it in my bedroom
back in 2005. And if they ask me what a clown is, I‘m stuck.
The
word means something. It has to. But read any casting breakdown of an
advert calling for a “funny bones” or a “Zach Galifianakis/Martin
Freeman/Jack Black type” (I only get the male ones, sorry) and you’ll
see it’s hard to put into words. “Yes!” is one I remember from a
clowning weekend sometime last century given by the great Angela De
Castro – head of the “Why Not Institute” – and if you only have one word
with which to teach someone how to be a clown, “Yes” might be the best.
But doesn’t that then run entirely counter to my opening? Yes. And Why
Not? Harpo and Chico try to steal a painting. Chico hears someone coming
and hisses at Harpo to hide. Harpo stands on his head in the middle of
the room. He’s still saying yes, just to something else. “If thy mind
dislike anything,” Horatio tells Hamlet, “obey it.” Yes. Exactly. No.
I
had a good pandemic. I hadn’t performed Shakespeare in a while, but
with all the theatres shut, I decided to try performing the Complete
Works on YouTube in my pyjamas, using a range of radio sketch show
voices to differentiate characters, and some home-recorded foley,
because why not? I hope the tone didn’t read as taking the piss. Or at
least, no more than Rylance at the Globe – who never winked at the
audience, but always let them in fully onto how weird everything going
was. I like it when actors pretend to be the audience’s friend.
Weirdly
though, I don’t like it when stand-ups do it. Maybe because stand-ups
are pretending to be themselves. Every solo performer – or at least
every solo performer with decent enough PR – is wildly outnumbered by
their audience, which I find inherently, situationally funny. But
stand-ups can’t acknowledge this power imbalance, because they’re not
playing a character, so it’s just awkward. But Jonah is a character. And
the audience’s friend, because – although he never uses the word “God”
(or indeed “Jonah”) – they are clearly his congregation. The audience
however, playing themselves, are under no obligation to be on Jonah’s
side in return. That’s the motor of not just this show, but a lot of the
work I was lucky enough to make with Shunt that inspired it: “Dance
Bear Dance”… “Money”… The audience outnumbers the performer, but the
performer knows the territory. I’ve made it sound like we’re at war.
We’re not. But it’s nice if we’re strangers.
I
assume most people know the story of Jonah, even if they’re not, like
me, culturally Christian – or Jewish – and even if they don’t know
that’s the story I’m telling. Old stories are good, because you don’t
have to worry about making anything up, you can just get on with
depicting people, and you can’t be blamed for the horrible things they
want to do. And I’ve always thought Theatre was a good place to stage
demons. But those attending have to feel it’s their own demons they’re
watching, not those other fuckers’. They didn’t seem nearly so
prevalent, even back during “The War on Terror”. So, I’ve added one line
since which I hope will help keep us safe: “Waiting is also way of
joining in."
Production shot taken during the technical rehearsal by John Scott.
(I think I was thinner by the time we shot the trailer.)
Back to the italics, as I present next an interview(by which I mean they emailed me questions and I emailed them answers) with the British Comedy Guidefrom the 10th of August, illustrated with more of John's production shots, which is why it's important to get production shots (and of course a press release, otherwise what are they going to ask me about, which is another thing I learnt)...
You describe Jonah Non Grata as "Hamlet, only sillier - or Tommy Cooper, only slower." What's the most ridiculous thing that happens onstage?
I don't want to give too much away, but possibly my entrance. And I'm
not saying it's all downhill from there - my final exit's pretty
ridiculous as well - but when you're presenting a solo immersive piece
without any scenery, inspired by a three-thousand-year-old story about a
prophet who lives in a fish, with self-penned soft techno songs (one of
which is purely a three-verse summary of the Scrap Brain Zone of Sonic the Hedgehog) it's... Do you know, I think it's when I try to mime getting the air nozzle working on a plane. It's not good.
Is it true you've performed the complete works of Shakespeare on YouTube in your pyjamas?
No. But it is five thirty-eighths true. I performed - forgive the
abbreviations, but they're long titles and I'm a massive wanker - Two Gents, Shrew, Titus, Julius Caesar, and Richard the Second, that last one twice because I didn't like the first version. I absolutely nailed the others though.
It was lockdown. Everyone was making stuff online, and I'd always
been YouTube-curious, so I started reading aloud Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.
When I finished that, I looked around for something else to read, and
realised if I did a Shakespeare a week, I'd be done by Christmas -
performing one act a day, with summaries and regular content warnings -
but that didn't happen in the end, because it turned out to be a lot
harder than just reading a book, and things were beginning to open up,
and Black Lives Mattered so distractions became less useful. But I'm
incredibly proud of both the quality and quantity of that work. I
remember everyone making so much during lockdown. We thought it was the
internet keeping us from having hobbies. Turns out it was pubs. Oh, and
they weren't my pyjamas.
What's harder - writing an existential clown show or delivering legal advice in EastEnders?
Both are phenomenally easy, it turns out. In the first case, you just
take a really old story everyone knows, make a mix tape to accompany
it, listen to it while pissing around in your bedroom, and write down
anything you might want to do again in front of an audience. Then you
wait twenty years until you land a nice advert and can take it to
Edinburgh.
In the second case, you send in a self-tape playing one of a million
faceless interfaces with authority soap characters have to face daily,
then get a phone-call saying you've landed the role of "seedy lawyer".
You turn up knowing your lines. Everyone is brilliant. Danny Dyer's brilliant. Kellie Bright's brilliant. The director's brilliant. You're brilliant. Three cameras record it, and it never happens again. It's brilliant.
What's the most absurd line you've had to say in character?
That "had to" is interesting. So is "in character". I actually got to
play Hamlet once. When Horatio tells him the ghost of his dead father
has been sighted in a suit of armour on the battlements of Elsinore, his
response is "This is very strange" which always got a laugh.
"You wouldn't shit on a bun" from the Shunt show Money also
gets quoted back to me sometimes, but I wrote that one. The line I'll be
declaiming on pavements in my final days though, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, is Sir Maxwell House's intro to The Monster Hunters
podcast: "Take two elements. Any two elements. Say, electricity and
water. On their own, perfectly harmless. But mix them together, maybe in
a bowl... Dynamite!"
Who's your dream audience member for this show - and who would be absolutely baffled?
Exactly. Yes. Them.
The following day, August the 11th, I did an actual interview in person, with Peter Green who was lovely and posted a slightly expurgated (ie minus me gushing about my PR) recording HERE. It's a good reflection of where I was two weeks into the run, and includes a few other lessons I'd learnt, such as how to describe the show when handing out flyers: it had become clear from the look of those walking out halfway through having clearly expected a Play about a Man from the Bible, that a stronger contract with any future crowd might be forged by abandoning the initial pitch "it's based on the Book of Jonah" in favour of "it's a mad show about nothing." I also reflect in the interview on having totally missed the "Art Comedy" bus: whether or not to bill the show under Comedy, rather than Theare, had always been a quandary, and it turns out – due partly to the brilliant and queer work produced that year by BigHead Comedy – that 2025 might have been the year to make that switch. Anyway, I hope Art Comedy remains a thing long enough for me to try and take some credit for it. There's more.
musical accompaniment
Back to the press. My final piece was for a music magazine, Fame, published along with a few more production shots on August the 14th...
While I make not claims for it as a "process", I went about making my first solo show the same way I would advise anyone to: I chose a very old story everyone knew as my starting point – in this case the Book of Jonah (of "and the whale" fame) – then, instead of worrying about how to tell it, built up a playlist of music which might accompany that story, and at my own leisure in my own bedroom, worked out things to do to it which I wouldn't mind doing again in front of an audience.
This
may be a generational thing. When I was a student in the nineties,
beginning to associate with people who were making theatre from scratch,
we didn’t just put movie posters on our walls, we listened to carefully
curated playlists of movie soundtracks. Trainspotting. Pulp Fiction.
Romeo plus Juliet. Everyone had these CDs, and pre-existing songs
beloved by a director were an integral – structural – part of work we
found exciting.
When I graduated, we didn’t disperse, and I
started working with a theatre collective in a railway arch in Bethnal
Green, called Shunt. Under this arch, behind the Oxo Tower, and finally,
in a sprawl of tunnels beneath London Bridge station, we created absurd
spaces around which the audience could move, which might change beyond
recognition the moment spectators’ backs were turned. Losing your
audience is normally considered a bad thing, but having an audience let
themselves get lost is different, and essential to these changes were
not only the extraordinary designs of Lizzie Clachan, but the versatile
and hugely enjoyable soundscapes of Ben and Max Ringham. How, as a
performer, could we accompany such compositions, and bring these spaces
to life? That was the process I took into making Jonah Non Grata. (And
it’s also why I can literally say I have more experience dancing about
architecture than I do writing about music.)
The
show I’m taking to Edinburgh this year I made alongside that work. It
is in many ways a personal sequel to it, but as a solo show, it’s also
far more suited to rooms above pubs, and – not wishing to give too much
away – the audience pretty much stay in their seats (unless there’s a
hymn). I wanted it still to have that what-would-now-be-called
“immersiveness” though, and music was crucial for this. Nothing I chose
for my soundtrack could be too “on the nose” though. The Ringhams’ work
for Shunt, while highly evocative, was never generic, and what exactly
was being evoked was part of a show’s mystery, something to play with,
or against. So there’s no whale song in Jonah, for example. Trying to
work out what’s happened once you’ve been swallowed by a whale is, I
think, a far more interesting state to play than knowing you’re in a
whale, and I’m very happy for the audience to share that mystery. Nearly
everything I do onstage, nearly everything we hear, is about existing
in the story, rather than telling it.
And
there are a lot of songs. An abstract space invites abstract text,
something sparer than a monologue. Rather than lectures, I learnt
working with Shunt that the audience might be better addressed by
awkward questions, slogans, ritual, found text or invented catchphrases,
language as part of the alien landscape. Or of course, lyrics. There’s
an economy to lyrics. People receive words differently when they’re
sung, and a performer delivers them differently too. Songs are time
stretchers, time savers, and, as well as releasing words from their
obligation to convey specific information, music releases an audience
from its obligation to follow what’s going on. This can be essential
when a public might worry they’re not “getting it”. All attention should
be rewarded, but rather than demanding intellectual engagement, I think
there should always be space for an audience to drift off, without fear
of getting lost, especially if – as may happen at the Edinburgh Fringe – they’ll be seeing four or five other shows that day.
I hope this helps.
Hmm. Two "though"s. Not good.
Anyway, that's what I wrote. Just before I move onto the reviews: I lost or maybe I should just say spent ten thousand on the whole thing in the end, which is what I expected to lose, but I wonder if I'd have still lost it if I hadn't exxpected to. it was the most nerve-wracking show I have ever done which is probably a good thing, Edinburgh New Town's not what it was ten years ago in terms of passing trade, I was surprised how long it took me to be in the mood to see anything else, at least two weeks, if I return with a solo show I'll try to make sure it's still part of a larger group of people, every night saw somebody not like Jonah and somebody absolutely love it and with single-figure crowds there's only so much you can sway that, I felt like an artist, if not a working artist, and I finally want to make a next show, and if you came, thank you, and whether or not you did, let's shake off these italics, and happy new year!
Here in France, it's just turned 2026, and a warm hello to everyone sticking around for the plaudits. So. PR's plan to do a second London preview at the Hen and Chickens in order to potentially have something to stick to the posters as soon as we were up, bore beautiful, juicy fruit, although I balked at turning Ben Moor's whales into stars...
Still, long term readers of the blog will know how much those whales will have meant to me. As for the rest, here are the links along with any quotes that ended up electric-stapled to the flyer. That's how I'm celebrating. (I also have port.)
So, I already mentioned Rich Cline's review from June 22ndat the timebut here it is again: "There's a reason why this show has such a following: it's a
near-perfect display of surrealist comedy, brain-bending and utterly
hilarious... a skilful performance that brings out hauntingly deep, dark
ideas about humanity in unimaginably amusing style."
July 20th, The Reviews Hub (This was a hell of a review. ) "A divinely commanded clown... absurd and profound... Kane's
performance is extraordinary... He welcomes both laughter and awe... so
thematically dense that you could discuss it for days on end, but it is
also an absolutely joyous, in-the-moment experience." This was a hell of a review.
July 21st, Sarah Birch Hackney Citizen
(quality) "A virtually indescribable cacophony of humour and found
language... be sure not to miss this captivating five-star-quality
production."
July 22nd, Malcolm Beckett Theatre VibeDON'T DO STARSbless, and then we went to Edinburgh, to receive...
August 9th, Erin Ross Edinburgh Guide
"The show is, yes, funny; it’s absolutely mad; but it has a startling
poignancy. Perhaps it’s the sheer conviction of this writer and
performer... The audience left dizzy, happy and connected having
experienced something very strange together, something to think on and
share when someone inevitably asks, “What did you see at the festival?”
Don’t miss the chance to see something devout immersive and interactive
theatre lovers have lauded for many years; it’s the fringiest thing at
the Fringe."
August 11th, Kay Marquis The Wee Review "Kane
manages to be both alarmingly unpredictable and reassuringly genial...
it may dwell on angst and be full of sinister shocks and disorientating
requests, but it’s very funny... for anyone looking for something different, this is perfect."
And then my first actual print review on August 12th, from Hamish Gibson in Fest
Never mind, let's check on those audience reviews (thanks, Morgan!)
So the show was, if not finding its audience, at least losing its non-audience, and trouble was being shot...
August 13th, Sean Greenhorn The List, a big one which we didn't use any quotes from, but I still enjoyed the writing: "It’s always tough to review a show like Jonah Non Grata; a show
that consistently wrongfoots the audience, revelling in awkward moments
where things don’t seem to be working. It’s tough because, to some, the
lack of laughter is the point, and can perversely lead to the biggest
laughs of all. Simon Kane’s surreal anti-comedy piece is loosely about
dilemmas and decisions. Or a vengeful man who wants to stay at the
Marriott. Or simply the slow unravelling of an entertainer. It’s
honestly hard to tell."
The show was definitely better when people laughed though, I knew that by now. You can't let the audience know you're in on the joke however without breaking character, but I was getting better at it...
August 19th, Oli Fuller Binge Fringe
"An hour of theatre that will have you on the edge of your seat and will
keep you thinking about it for the rest of your life... It is artistic
and beautiful and indescribably enticing... an absurdist masterpiece. Go
see this show, do not put it on a list, do not see it if you have time,
book it now."
Oli stayed around afterwards. I loved Oli.
August 22nd, My Goddess Complex
"equal parts absurdist theatre, stand-up
comedy, and performance art."
And finally...
August 25th, Ben Kulvichit Exeunt (who also don't to stars) "I like liquorice." And it should have turned 2026 in Britain too now so HAPPY THAT! No rush.
It occured to me yesterday, happily and suddenly, that my lack of engagement with the blog might not, in fact, be incontertible evidence of a waning enthusiam for things I see and do as I fall into my fifties, but simply the inevitable consequence of Non Disclosure Agreements. Most of the things from which the rest of my life now hangs are projects a digital signature on a PDF proscribe me from mentioning until the results go out, and by then it feels too late to send a postcard.
I suppose I could have mentioned I'd spent five beautiful afternoons towards the end of 2024 in a writers' room for Mitchell & Webb's new sketch show when the press release for it first went out back in February, but then I was probably nursing too much guilt for not having been able to mention I'd worked on the pilot script in 2023 (Mitchell and Webb Need Help it was called then. Can I even say that?) Maybe "beautiful" isn't exactly the right adjective, but I definitely want one of the good ones, because being invited aboard the writing team of a sketch show in 2023 felt like receiving a phonecall to say you'd won an Oscar when you didn't even know you'd made a film.
Here's me in the room, "established" according to Big Talk's press release.
There are many other reasons I'd want the good adjectives: I really enjoy pissing around with millenials for a start. I also don't think I've seen Robert Webb so happy. Watching him and David improvise material across a table in a way I had never witnessed before – perhaps having been away from each other so long – made sitting there, laughing, peeling tangerines, and asking if anyone wanted the window closed feel like contribution enough from me. I did contribute more though, in the end. I contributed The Goomb – a sketch first mentioned on this blog in 2022, and originally submitted to That Mitchell and Webb Look in Two-Thousand-and-Ten. Other sketches were bought, but none filmed. Still, fifteen years on, HERE'S HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS!...
TV Shows? Is it not clear HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS! is a movie?
Perhaps because the intervening years had been so full of Finnemore (the first series of Souvenir Programme went out in Two-Thousand-and-Eleven) the gap between shows never seemed that big to me, but then I realised fifteen years is also the interval between Sylvester McCoy's Doctor Who and Christopher Eccelston's, which is of course the longest amount of time betweeen two things there can be. It was gratifying to see how well the sketch went down with the new guys. I suppose dying inside while someone watches something you made on a laptop is what brought them here. I am proud. I'm so happy. I am such a fan of everyone involved. You see, this is the problem with not writing about something until it's out. What can you say? I miss them?
I'm still in France by the way.
Languedoc
Not all the sketches are viewable here. I don't know why. I think what links them is having a "Writers' Room" bit. And I want to share one of those, I just don't know if I'm posting the right one as I can't see it, but if this is the sketch I'm thinking of, Lara Ricote did indeed originally propose it as a car commercial...
Let me know if I'm right. (UPDATE: Back in the UK now. Yeah.)
That's not the actual writers' room of course. Ours was a lot fuller: essentially a sandwich of walls, old fashioned shash windows and the sound of drilling, sideboards covered with awards, a big table on the inside spotted with varying systems of discarded tangerine peel, and a meaty, seated talent filling in between the two. I was there the morning Trump was reelected. I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world. Stevie Martin wrote a great post about writers' rooms here, by the way, on her substack. And while I'm plugging stuff I have nothing to do with, Lara's comedy special "GRL/LATNX/DEF" is on youtube here, and diamond sharp.
One of my favourite things about seeing Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping finally go out in August was seeing all the accompanying Sketch Show Opining. Honestly. Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian defined the form's importance pretty succintly, I think, as "an important mechanism for digesting the world", but she also descibed them as "hit and miss" whereas the truth is – as the Radio Times wrote in its preview – that they're "tapas": different people like different bits. Pete Paphides' observation in his interview with David and Rob in the same magazine, that "sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other" was another lovely summing up. I do think if there were more sketch shows on the telly, people might be better at getting stuff off their chest and differences might not be so likely to become divisions, and I enjoyed self-identifying youtuber video essayist
Stubagful's savvy theory below, as to why telly stopped making them: not economics, as is normally suggested, but snobbery: "The sketch show died because the TV
industry wants to think it's better than the internet... Nobody wants
to be just another content creator." All of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping should be available to enjoy on Channel 4 HERE, and I think it's glorious.
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 One 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.
Margaret Cabourn-Smith reflects on her old sketch antics and why you shouldn't use real meat in your shows.
You can listen to the full conversation right here! shows.acast.com/out-of-chara...
#Comedy #Chat #Podcast #Sketch #Character #VictorianTimes #Liver #Magic #EdFringe
As "Jonah" turned from distant credit to looming "to do", I found these and other reminiscences about heading to the Edinburgh Fringe and making "magical worlds... trawling costumes around rooms above pubs" from fellow Finnemoreperson and rising star, Margaret Kaboom-Smith, both inspiring and grounding, and did not in the end use real fish.
Another reminiscence: Margaret, Carrie, Lawry and I independently tour our production of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "Мы" for ten seconds in 2019
Margaret is often inspiring and grounding, and I happen to have also recorded a (far more meandering) Out of Character with Alex Lynch back in 2022, but never got round to putting it up here, so why not listen to both episodes now, and compare our differing accounts of, say, making Series Nine? (I did not think it might be shit.)
Simultaneously. That's right. Listen to them simultaneously. It's like being in the room with us!
I remember enjoying myself a lot during the recording, and also the punishing heat – so today's actually perfect for a repost – I had just got back from "Bleak Expectations" in Newbury,
and had no idea at the time the show would go on to the
West End with an almost completely new cast, nor that Series Nine would indeed be the last series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme but that it would
continue as a series of annual specials, and I'd certainly no idea I would be writing for Mitchell and Webb again in 2025, which I should definitely write about, I know. But I think that's all the loose ends tied up. Our next Silly Voices Day is Friday.
Yet another reminiscence: Mayfly Season, Newbury, 2022. Intense.
Oh! The actor whose name I couldn't remember is James Callis, and Lillian Roth is the actress from "Animal Crackers". And I don't think that sound is me belching and rustling crisps, I think it's feedback. And it's a Newcastle accent Gilbert puts on as Len MacMonotony, not Birmingham, and Engelbert Humperdinck he mentions, not Sacha Distel. In fact, here is some "Gilbert's Fridge". They don't make kids' shows like etc.
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!
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.
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