It's okay to post old auditions from 2023, right? And it's okay if you want a quick clip for your new showreel to just film the television with your phone, it's fine, yeah? Great. Here it is then.
The title of this post comes from director Katrin Gebbe's excellent advice to me on the set of A Thousand Blows
as horses, carriages and stallholders reset for the seventh or eighth
take of me finally getting to run out of a pretend hotel for real –
obviously, you don't forget something like that. Look out too for some
lovely fortuitous swipes, my favourite having to be Kellie Bright
condemned to skeletoning at 2:10.
Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:
And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow:
I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...
To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:
I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:
Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of
grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had
suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons
Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.
Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can.
What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back.
Here's more research:
* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.
Now with added EastEnders, which means that even though I used a clip from EastEnders' youtube channel the video is still "partially blocked", so that only certain countries can see it. I don't know which countries. Has it been blocked inside Britain? Outside Britain? Are you in one of those countries? That's a shame. Let me know.*
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.
Oh well, the episode of the popular soap I may have been in might not have aired yesterday as planned, but my Bucharest job went up online. Look, there I am, far right.
Notice the careful cactus placement? I heard there were a few takes of that. Another interesting story from the set– OOH HANG ON IT'S UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And Alicia's in it?! You lucky people! Well, this is the best day ever.
Words by Alan Moore (again) who hates this now. Art by Brian Bolland, who doesn't.
Appropriately, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's thirteenth episode is Titus Andronicus' Act Three, featuring heaps of wailing and gnashing of teeth lightened only by a quick appearance from the most committedly evil character in English literature. There's no way it wasn't going to be knackering but still, I'm sorry my reading's not a bit more lucid, screaming iambic pentameter isn't much fun to watch. "Going mad" is such a staple of literature, and especially horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking it actually happened.* Trauma can make a person feel more removed from reality but that's not the same as "going mad", and to his credit "madness" in Shakespeare was, or at last became, a quite specific idea, a liminal place whose inhabitants – those suddenly hit by trauma or depression – would react as if they've suddenly realised they're characters in a play, physically present in a work of fiction, unrecoverable by reality. So Shakespeare found the stage a useful machine for exploring grief, and even the famous tea-towel-adorning "All the World's A Stage" is spoken by a character called "the melancholy Jacques". In Elizabethan medicine, "melancholy" means "manic". It's no more a celebration than "Born In the USA".
Trigger Warnings: More mutilation, a lot of crying, and the death of a fly.
*UPDATE 19th July 2026: Shows how much I know! I have since learnt – watching Denise Fox's breakdown on EastEnderswith my then flatmate who knew someone who suffered similarly – that trauma-triggered psychosis absolutely happens.
