The safest way to watch the eclipse

Is probably just to watch the last one, so here it is. I was ushering at the BFI on August the 11th 1999, and watched the solar eclipse from Waterloo Bridge, but had given my camera to Jeremy and Fin to film it where they were. That's them, Fin with the glasses, Jeremy without. Fin's also made his own cooler cut here. I moved in with him the following year. Brixon, which is where we came in. Actually, I might revisit Electric Avenue for today's. It's crept up on me; I think the next one is in 2090. I won't look directly at it though because I don't have the special glasses. I haven't seen Jeremy in years. (The image above is sort of from here.)

By the Picking of my Thumbnail

Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.

 

 Apart from these fresh intros, the only new material, if you don't count the compilations, or the date stamps (and you are absolutely welcome to count date stamps as new material, by the way... it's been an unhelpful old year for me so far in terms of the old fight-or-flight) are the new thumbnails. Ideally, your typical YouTube thumbnail contains both the presenter's likeness and some text, and after a series of botched cut and pastes...

 

Bold. But rejected.

 

... I realised the easiest – and also quite pleasingly Dave McKean-iest  –way to achieve this was simply to pause the introductions as they fade into the titles, and take a screenshot.

 

 "Ta-daaa!"

 

 The compiled Julius Caesar went out this weekend, on both channels, meaning that for the second time Season One is now done. But another reason I bothered to give this project its own channel is that, this second time round, I hope to get further into Season Two and beyond on its return. I've time enough anyway, and a room. And I'm still very proud of the whole thing... The only reason I haven't plugged it until now is that, as I learnt in my previous post, apparently it helps the algorithm find you an audience if you don't. But that hasn't thus far worked the same magic it did on The Sitting, maybe because that video's only sixty seconds long. I don't know. It's a learning curve.

 As a fat, four course taster then, here are the compiled introductions. The Two Gentlemen of Verona's features a new attempt to explain what I'm doing, plus archival bonus material of me seeing if it will work if I sing the songs rather than just reading them out, which it didn't so I don't know why I've included it.

 

 

 The compilation of introductions to The Taming of the Shrew features no new introduction, but bonus material of me going off into the kitchen to throw some pans around for some sound effects, which I did use.

 

 

 

 More foley work is included in the collected introductions to The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, where I cry like a baby. Donald Trump was President back in 2020, remember. It was a different time. Ha ha ha.

 

 

 

 And finally – inspired by this bit in an excellent documentary about the old BBC2 cult film strand Moviedrome in which Alex Cox reckons he got the gig because, as the only film director not living in London, he couldn't just film everything in his living room and so his Film Club pieces to camera looked much more dynamic...

 

 

...  I head out of the flat for the final compilation of introductions to Julius Caesar, and attempt to explain what I'll do next beneath the green man of Parkland Walk. (Some thumbnails are better than others. Like I said, it's a curve.)

 

 

 

 Now play them all simultaneously! And if you fancy taking your own tour of the new channel, you can like, share, subscribe, scroll, swipe, dive, run, push, bomb, and pet heavy HERE. I hope you're all doing tremendously.

Floaters and Flashes

 That's last night. This is not a sponsored post but if you're wondering, the PIKOY Galaxy Projector Light is available on ebay for about thirty quid, and I definitely recommend it. You can change the colours, and it also does stars but they're immutably green. I assume white light's too messed up for a laser. This was today:

 

 I found a new park overlooking the Lea Valley, and it being Summer and me being someone attempting to live in the present, I lay down in the grass. Looking up at bare blue, my view was interrupted by more wavering forms: previously unnoticed cobwebbby gunk "floaters". The NHS website says they're only cause for concern if you've not seen them before. When I sat up and they didn't go away, I briefly made plans for going blind. Very briefly. I mean, something something talking books, that was the extent of it. Because then I wondered, what if they weren't new, what of they were one of the reasons I'd felt so much no this year, one of the bags over my head, in my way in my head? There's a blank wall in front of me now, I'll stare at that. 

 Okay, it seems they've gone.

Emu's World

 

 

 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.

 

Remember to keep everything natural.

   

 Actually, there are a couple of self-tapes in here from August too now – I took down the original cut from youtube before I could blog about it, because I'd suddenly landed a second job and the clip I'd used from that was pretty much the entire role*, and I'd signed a Non Disclosure Agreement, and I didn't want to lose the job, which films tomorrow (it's not this one:)

Otherwise, this has been a quiet year, which is why I decided to do something with all these old self-tapes that had been filling it. No complaints, although I do keep wondering about going back to the moustache, but my agents say no. Oh, I've got a voiceover agent now! That other – first – job which I landed from a self-tape, a clip of which opens this video, that was a voice over, but as you can see, I still decided to dig out – almost literally, as both the density and deriliction of my costume wardrobe have turned it quite earthy – my old London Dungeon shirt. So, yes, I got to be in "Good Omens" sort of. Those who can and who have not yet enjoyed John Finnemore's peerless take on the Book of Job in episode 2 are strongly recommended to do so ("Come back when you've made a whale." Outstanding stuff.) And for those who have not yet enjoyed this, and can, here you go...

*UPDATE: this one.

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.)

Logging The Local Iconoclasm

 Simple. Effective. And I notice this last picture suggests there were never any faces to deface in the first place. So everyone's happy, gold star.

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.

 

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.

David Warner's Juliet, and other dirt

 

 

A trip to Marx's grave

 

 I used to watch "Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment" all the time when I was at school. Of all the fictional, whimsical pests the sixties had thrown up, David Warner's Morgan was the only one I wanted to share a cup of tea with. He didn't seem to have that rockstar ego. He seemed like a listener. It made sense that my parents said he was the Hamlet of his generation. A lot of people said that. It was only when Warner died in July that I found out my old neighbout turned housemate Morgan had been named after him, also that I was now living on exactly the same slopes of Notting Hill where the film had been set – have I said I've moved to Notting Hill? 

 I can't find any way of seeing his Hamlet now, but here are some photos taken by Lord Snowdon which, according to the captions, show the actor in character. Researching the original production I can't find any confirmation, but I hope the captions are right. Look at him enjoying himself...

 

 Once I'd left school I actually got to share a cup of tea with David Warner. I was in Hollywood for my gap year, and he knew my Dad because they'd been in the Royal Shakespeare Company together back in the sixties. He was a gentle giant. Later, when he would come to London, he and Dad would reminisce about the night he tried to jump out of a window because he thought he'd be caught by a cloud. It was the first time I'd ever heard the word "bi-polar", encunciated by David with arms oustretched in a shrug as wide as I was tall. Over tea in Los Angeles, I asked him why he'd stopped working with the RSC and he explained that they'd wanted to cast him as Romeo, and he said he'd only do it if he could choose his Juliet, so they fired him. 

 He'd asked for Frances de la Tour. 

 David and Dad worked together again years later, on a television production of "Love's Labours Lost" that I rewatched the night he died. I posted a few clips on instagram, because I think they're just gorgeous together. Here's one...

 

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A post shared by Simon Kane (@slepkane)

 

 So, yes, now the death of Her Majesty has brought me back to the blog, I thought I'd catch up on my old In Memoriams. And having moved, I'm also sorting through my boxes once again. I found this: the fax David Warner sent me when I came to play Hamlet myself at University. Director Simon Godwin's face was a picture. David said he had no advice, but I took it anyway.

 

Gracious

 Who says a circle has no end? Phil Davis' twitter account put it well: "She did what she was supposed to do." I always thought it would be David Attenborough who went first, but no, Churchill's boss has finally left us. Not all the bus shelters in Notting Hill bear the news yet. "Postpone" is probably the wrong word to use here in retrospect, and "rest":

 

 And maybe noboby was looking at their phone more than normal as I walked home through Soho, maybe I was just noticing it more. I learnt of the news myself from the definitive "1926 - 2022" instagram post on my phone at about seven in the evening just outside Forbidden Planet, but people had been spending all day reminiscing about her already online, so I felt more of an "Oh, right." than an "Oh no!" And the drinks I walked past felt like drinks-after-a-show kind of drinks. Friday kind of drinks. Life definitely goes on. Today's proven that, at least.

 I didn't hear anyone say "God Save the King" outside the Crown. The mood outside all the pubs, and in the pub above which I write this – have I mentioned, I live above a pub now? – seems more one of "Fair play, who can blame her?" But it's been raining a lot, of course, after the drought, of course, and she'd just appointed a new Worst Prime Minister, of course, so maybe everyone's had their fill of the unthinkable and just wants to kick a ball around. Or maybe that's just me.

 Susy and I went to visit our Aunty June yesterday, in her new care home in Henley. Susy visits her a lot. I love Susy. June's dealing with her sudden dementia incredibly well I think, without distress, finding her way around it like a new phone that doesn't do what the old one did. There's nothing doddery about her condition. Some very specific information simply doesn't take. Every ten minutes or so I just had to reintroduce myself, and explain I wasn't married to my sister. Not "remind" June. That information had gone. Meet her, I suppose. And I like meeting people. "And what do you do?" She can get through a book perfectly well too, she told me, whoever I was. June's not bored. 

 So there's that. The giant illuminated strawberries on the Coronet fly at half mast. And Mum and Dad arrive from France tonight, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary back here in the United Kingdom. I hope they're okay. "Kingdom". I've never had a king before. I wonder if that will take. I wonder what money will look like. Oh! I was going to send her a link to my youtube Shakespeares, I think she might have enjoyed them. The Queen, I mean. What made me think of that? I wonder what she listened to. I wonder if she ever heard me. 

 

A brilliantly unfortunate front page from the Mirror.

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!

Going Back to the "WELL..."

  Speaking of wars and uncles and secrets and years, I can't imagine that anyone reading this blog hasn't by now listened at least once through to the ninth series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. But if you haven't, I would love it if you did, and then you can learn why producer Ed Morrish bought us all these lovely glasses. In fact, you'll learn the reason for that in Episode One, but you'll have to wait until Episode Four to learn the reason for the reason, which is as good a guide for how to listen to Finnemore's Ninth as I can probably give. Here's the link. And here's John's own advice for how to listen to it. 

 When I heard the episodes go out this Summer, week after week, it felt like what finding treasure must feel like, and when John first suggested to me over Zoom what he was planning for the series – given the difficulty of performing sketches in front of a live audience at the beginning of 2021 – I was thrilled giddy by the idea that he might finally, finally, be making something that just wouldn't work AT ALL (like the fairy tale about a giant condemned to carry people across a river until finally he drops one in the water, and everyone stops asking him, and so he's free) but in the end we never got to witness that. John didn't drop a thing. That's my only disappointment regarding this otherwise perfect answer to the question "How do you follow the Heist Episode from series 7?" And I will definitely at some point write more about it from the beach in my mind I'm spending the rest of my life on because I got to be in it.

 

 

*This* is why I wouldn't call it a sketch show though.

Luxury apartmen

 That's Reuben's and my digs on the right, just eight minutes walks from the Bolton Octagon. The apartment came with a profusive rainforest shower, towels to lay on the floor, and carpeting so thick when I put my laptop on the bedside table, it sank. One of those fancy lamps that's just a big Menlo Park lightbulb came down with it, shattering immediately, all within an hour of my moving in. Here's the room after I moved my bed ninety degrees to the wall so I that could fully open the draws.

 

 I'd emailed Reuben beforehand to ask if he wanted the dandelion print or the Mercator projection, noticing that the latter room seemed to have no window, but it turned out Reuben was taking the hit, as my windowlessness made it a lot easier to get to sleep Friday and Saturday nights (see location of window above – London's not a twenty-four hour city, but Bolton is). Around a week into rehearsals, I received a parcel at the theatre from my parents. Having already broken the lamp I didn't want to damage the room further, so I never got round to pinning it up, but I really appreciated the view...

The Warm Glow

 An early start to a happily busy Wednesday, on little sleep because I stayed up late, because I'm staying up late. Later and later this week, it seems, like I'm waiting for time to stop – or at least do something interesting, which it normally does around two or three. As I've written before, that's when time leaves you alone. Maybe it's the size of the television screen that keeps me from going to bed. Maybe my body's not yet used to a screen this big. Occasionally, I entertain the idea of curling up on the carpet and falling alseep in front of it, rather than being parted by going upstairs. A change of scene maybe, like camping, which I never voluntarily did. Or sleeping on a friend's sofa, which I do. Maybe my body's grown too used to the screen. I still don't know what to eat in front of it though. Maybe I just want a harder mattress.

 Normally I don't remember dreams if I haven't slept that long, but on Tuesday night I dreamt John Finnemore had set up a series of gentle booby traps in a darkened classroom, talking me through them, one by one. Later on, I found myself in that classroom again, initially disturbed at being jabbed in the ribs and having something fall on my head in the dark, but then recalling "Oh yes, that's that damp towel John showed me." My dreams aren't normally that well-structured. Maybe it was a darkened meeting room.

So Many Questions about Badgerwood Park

 "Nestled in woodland, in the heart of Berkshire, is the exclusive Badgerwood Park development–"

      

 I was letting youtube run, and this ad came up. I can't remember before what, I wasn't paying attention. Not at first anyway, I had my back to it. But something made me turn and start staring, and by "Welcome to a new way of life" I had so many questions, I knew I had to watch it again. 

 Rewatching answered nothing however, except possibly why I was being targeted...

 

 "Seventy residential park homes, for the over-45's. Picturesque scenery. Quiet and peaceful..."  

 Hey, I'm over 45! So it's not a retirement village. Or is it? What are over-45's? Why? What?

 

 "Badgerwoord Park is perfectly located, and has great transport links, nearby..."  

 

  What's this map?

 

"Each home is unique. Made to your requirements..."  

 

 But who am I?

 

 "And don't be fooled by the quiet pace of life, as there are lots of things to see and do around Badgerwood Park."  

 Refreshments? Count me in! Look at all these... different types of lawn. Paddling pool? Children's play area. But the children aren't over 45, are they? Are these first time properties then? But there's no... Where are the... These are chalets. How can anyone...

 

 Okay! Sorry! Sorry, what exactly is supposed to happen here? 

 Are we meant to believe that people will pull these chairs back from this table, sit on those chairs, pull them back in again, and then sit next to each other, dining at this dining table? In this dining room? All I saw at first was how little elbow room there was, I hadn't even noticed the walls.

 So what is this? Who's it made for? Who made it? I mean, no-one yet; I get some of this is CGI. But is this new? Or is this actually normal – like Jersey – and it only seems weird to me because I live in a city, and there are actually hundreds of people over 45 watching this advert and going "Brilliant, that's exactly where I want to move to and park my 4x4. I hope it has kids"?

 

 

 I'm going to try to follow the progress of this development more, in a manner not dissimilar to how I've been trying to follow Lembit Öpik's space nation of Asgardia. Badgerwood Park might take Asgardia's place in my non-affections, in fact, as the latter just brought out its calender for the year 0005, which has thirteen months, all four weeks long, and inwardly I scoffed: How's that going to work! before doing the maths, and realising that twenty-eight times thirteen is three-hundred and sixty-four, so month thirteen just needs one extra day. 

 It's actually a very good system.