Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Themepunk Roundup: My Life as an Action Butler

Thanks to Gerard Giorgi-Coll.

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

Press my tummy to view.

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

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

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

Wednesday, 5 October 2022

The Silence

I only finished reading Marianne Levy's Don't Forget To Scream on Monday so it's too early to say if it's changed my life, but I've definitely learnt something (beyond confirmation of a bias that polite society tragically underestimates how much people need looking after – you know, that bias). Specifically I've learnt that it won't matter if a book has words like "SCREAM" and "UNSPOKEN" on the front; if it also carries the word "MOTHERHOOD" that third will work like an aneasthetic against any content warning. (To try and mitigate this I've photographed the book on my most unpleasant table.) Like shouting for help in a language with no word for help, the very words used to describe "being a mum" have made protest impossible:

"Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic but it felt like the Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to make wrongthink impossible."

Marianne writes this in a chapter called Bumbo. In a later chapter, Some Discomfort, having described what the British Medical Journal terms the "wide range of physical and psychological consequences" of her episiotomy, she concludes:

"I almost hit delete before this made it onto the page."

I remember these two chapters as a swift double punch in the gut, but leafing back I find they're nearly a hundred pages apart. Partly that suggests how readable she is, but also it suggests why her cry for help needs to be the size of a book; because what Marianne describes is a living nightmare, and she descibes it over and over again, because she has to, because we're – I can't find another word for it – programmed by mumthink not to listen... Or, if we do listen, to place what we hear on its own separate, cuddlier scale of oppression. Because "being a mum" is clearly the most laughably trivial subject there is.

"Our dining table was designed for four..."

Who are those Doctor Who monsters you forget as soon as you can't see them?

Ideally, this is what "red-pilling" should refer to... I'd even read Marianne's interview in The Guardian, from which the photograph below is taken, describing very specifically what the book would contain, but still my mind was going: "Being a mum. Yeah. Crayons on flock wallpaper. Meh." And I know Marianne, a little, which is why I'm calling her Marianne, but look at that photo, look how cosy it is! It was only the interview's closing words which made me realise I might have missed something: “I’m desperate for men to read it; I’m desperate for people without kids to read it.”

So I did, and I learnt something, and like any other sap who's had a veil lifted, I can't now think of anyone who shouldn't. Thanks therefore, Marianne, and congratulations.

Saturday, 17 September 2022

Ad Break (Hey It's June!)

Here's an Ocado ad I shot last November. That's right, this blog's a cough and a spit archive too now. Although I didn't even have to do that. It was my first interaction with an animated character: off camera is someone wafting a large piece of card to simulate a potentially self-aware articulated table. As with my first advert I play a dad (although you can't see our kid on the stairs). I'm sure my moustache was a factor in the casting, even though dads haven't really sported moustaches since the eighties. Nostalgia, as Don Draper says, is subtle but potent. The following day I flew to Bulgaria to push a child in a dinghy through a mock up of a flooded town for Deutsche Telekom, but I can't find that online.

The moustache was still around when I shot this ad in April, although who knows whether or not "John" is a dad? Maybe he's from Head Office in Frankfurt. Maybe he's a cannibal. It's a strong look, whatever he is. I love it. Some of these people had to sing "English Country Garden" for eight hours.

Miming the piano is June Hudson. This is very under-dressed for June. The director had used her a lot, and he wasn't alone. One advert she had done called for her to jump out of a aeroplane strapped to a parachutist. She's in her eighties. It was her first experience of skydiving.

Before doing adverts June taught Science Fiction Costume Design at the Univerty of Redlands in California. Before that she was Head Costume Designer on the original no-budget "Doctor Who". Anyone who has been to Angels' costume warehouse in Hendon will probably know her work...

Friday, 26 February 2021

Martian Or Ultra-Martian? Round

Things just naturally seemed to be heading towards a "Spot the Martian" round I feel, so below are twenty found images of aliens from film and television: you just have to identify the ten from Mars. For example, if I showed you the picture above, you would of course say "Yes, these are Martians! From the 1951 film Flight To Mars, set on Mars, which is why their helmets have holes at the front, because they live here so they can just breathe normally!"

Bonus points if you can name the show or film the image is from, and bonus bonus points if you just decide you deserve them, because why not? As many as you like! I'm WiIly Wonka! I'm the Childlike Empress! Infinite Wishes! Aswers will be posted as ever in the comments, where you can also tell me how many points you decided to award yourself.

Identify...

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Thursday, 25 February 2021

Sometimes this blog will just be Ziwzih Zwizih OO-OO-OO

"Most of the programs that I did were either in the far distant future,

the far distant past or in the mind. "

Electronic and Ambient pioneer Delia Derbyshire produced this pre-Kraftwerk, Die Antwoord-sampled marvel as a hymn for robots to sing at the end of a now lost episode of the BBC scifi anthology Out of the Unknown. According to this article on the nicely named "wikidelia", it recycles a track Derbyshire originally composed for a sex-education schools' film, rejected on the grounds that its wobbulator-induced ooh-ooh-oohs sounded "too lascivious" – and to be fair to Science and Health, now they've pointed that out, the deep chromium honeys do sound quite down to party.

This surviving still from the show got me very excited, because I immediately recognised the robots from their later reappearance, painted white, in a hastily rustled-up, unbudgeted fifth episode of the "Dr. Who" story The Mind Robber, recalling the impression made on me by the idea that the threshold between Imagination and Reality might be a white void inexplicably patrolled by machines.*

* As anyone who remembers the first episode of Time Spanner may have guessed.

Sunday, 19 January 2020

Giant Robot Scorpion Revisited

I'm cock-a-hoop that tonight the Doctor finally got to meet the inspiration for Professor Death. As one of the flesh-and-blood archetypes of the "Mad Professor" Tesla had always seemed to me an obvious subject for Doctor Who, and Nina Metivier's episode had it all: Wardenclyffe, the Current War, the signals from Mars, nothing from Tesla's mythos was left unused, Goran Višnjić was a beautiful Nikola, and while it's always been a bit too easy to paint the "inventor of inventing" as the baddie, Graham was just the right choice to finally tear a strip off Edison, but an additional thrill for me was the choice of ultimate villain: Armoured Scorpions of Death!

I mean it's an absolute coincidence I know, but I loved it. My own sketch complete with giant robot scorpion is underneath, and I've written more about it, and Tesla, and the runny logic of so much of the cult surrounding him (much of which would go on to inspire the mythology of "Time Spanner") here. It's back from when this blog was on myspace though so none of the links work now, sorry. Anyway, didn't they pull out all the stops on this one! I love it.

Wednesday, 5 February 2014

November 2013 - BULA WHO! *

"Cowabunga, dudes!"

Fear not, twenty-fourteenies, though I may be from the Future, I have more than three thousand years of epoch-relevant slang under my belt: "Wash yer 'andies!" See?

Dr. Who turned fifty in November of course, which made it a particularly good month to tear round London in a '66 Routemaster while pretending to be a Time-traveler for the kids. But the Time Tour's always fun. Once, a whole party of schoolchildren asked to be taken back to the year of their parents' birth. Each child. Individually. I don't know what was going on there. Normally it's the Great Fire of London, or just "Egypt", and then I have to explain fire and time, which obviously I enjoy.

And I got back into the Ghost Bus Tours as well for Hallowe'en. That's still fun. And counts. (Andy Field filed a great piece about ghost walks here).

I suppose I should let people know I'm doing them...

Back to Dr. Who though, here's my Dad telling the one about acting in Planet of the Spiders: