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.
As if! As if I'd ever "step into" a year. Years step into me, baby. Particularly last year, although I dimly remember resolving not to blog to see if anything else got written in its place, if that counts as a resolution. Results: I had a good day's writing in January, and then plans. Sitting on those plans I enjoyed a lot of days off. Too many. But I definitely enjoyed them, which I suspect is a skill. But now I'm poor. As anyone who follows me on instagram may know, I did finally land a job in the last two months of 2023, and I really enjoyed having that job, and then the job got busier, and I missed having days off, and I got iller and iller, and now I'm in France recuperating. That's a French boar.
I think she's a boar. My parents drove me up into the mountains to see a village sat in a crater – the Cirque de Navacelles – and she was knocking around a farm on the edge. We left the vineyards of Languedoc and wound up thick white canyons of pine – the temperature falling around us – until we reached a narrow-horizoned plateau of trees the size of bushes sheltering donkeys at the top, a sudden Mongolian steppe. Looking over the side of it was like looking at a map. Click to embiggen.
The sun was in our eyes all the way home.
It was a nice drive, and reminded me of a couple of things. One was just how much of the year I've spent playing "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion", searching crags and plains for a cure for my own vampirism, forgetting which horse is mine, running away from anything really well, and maturely coming to terms with my own white privilege by opting to play as an orc. (Everyone in it really does look like Simon Cowell as well; congratulations, Micky D.)
The second was THIS excellent adaptation of "Comet In Mooominland"starring our own John Finnemore which Radio 4 has just brought out for Yule, and which is definitely worth a share. I've missed sharing things on this blog. I used to stare at the cover of this for ages when I was ten.
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."
On Monday I joined friends to catch The Wind in the Willows Wiltonsat Wilton's Music Hall, chiefly to see Darrell Brockis as Toad; it's amazing what a really high-waisted pair of trousers can do to a man's shape. The weasels were sort of bankers now, as was the book's original author
Kenneth Grahame, who resigned as Secretary of the Bank of England in
1908 after either being nearly shot in the face during an anarchist
raid, or – depending on which motive you ascribe to the enforced retirement – accusing the Bank's future Governor of being "no gentleman", so I've no idea whose side he'd be on here.
(I have only my parents word for it that, many Christmases
ago, "Toad of Toad Hall" was the first show they ever took me to. It was the biggest room I'd ever been in. They tell me the sheer scale of the room made me whimper, then the lights lowered, and I didn't like that at all, and then old
man dressed as a mole stuck his head out of a trap door and shouted
"Hang white-washing!" and I howled and we left and that was it.)
Pleasingly concurrent with the fortunes of Toad Hall in this production were that of the baby otter puppet, Portly: It's always nice to see the inclusion of Pan, and "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" made a lot more sense as subplot here rather than just interlude. A lovely, lively, warm evening, and Wilton's Music Hall is an exciting space to explore during an interval. Do these photographs convey that?
I don't know. Badphone finally expired on Sunday, alas, but I appear to have found a
replacement with just as MySpace-era a camera, which was not my intention. I'll have to start hanging around more light.
On Tuesday I caught up for drinks with an old friend who told me that she can get married in Saint Paul's Cathedral, a thrilling possible future theatre project. I also found the following extraordinary performace on youtube while searching for video essays on "Brimstone and Treacle". I'd never made the connection before between Dennis Potter's fable of Satanic Home Invasion, and Mary Poppins (OR HAD I?)
I just wanted to write a good part for Olivia Colman.
And the TKA Smith Family Conservatory of the Art's family production of Poppins sheds little light on the banned seventies teleplay. But it does throw up a blisteringly confident turn from an uncredited singer in a role I don't remember as a rival nanny with a bun of grey hair fastened inexplicably to the top of her head, which the Conservatory has liked so much they've posted twice. In case you didn't manage to catch a Christmas show yourself this year I share both versions here, not for comparison, but to be played simultaneously to see if the resulting reason-shredding resonances open a portal to anywhere.
On Wednesday evening we performed the ante-penultimate Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre. The weather was milder now. The snow had gone. I didn't walk home directly. Badphone's replacement took what it could.
On Thursday, well, I wrote last Sunday's post, but I also learnt that that ante-penultimate show had actually been our penultimate as one of the cast had fallen ill, although testing negative for Covid. We'd planned our cast drinks for that evening however as some people had to rush off on Friday, including myself, who would have to be up early to catch a flight from Gatwick on a day of border control and train strikes. Our producer Laura had booked a table at a pub called the Pereseverance, and I hadn't left the flat all day.
As with the long walk home on Wednesday I found a refreshing solitude in that place. The barman gave me a Guiness in a weird glass, free nuts and sample of an unnamed Christmas cocktail he'd worked on. A lot was ending. Enjoying the uniterrupted ambience, it occured to me I could just try and go straight
to Gatwick after the final show though and not worry about sleeping Friday night.
I woke at midday, feeling finally Christmassy. The last night went ahead and everything felt new, which may not be unusual for a last night. As I said from the start, everyone's lovely, and while I may not have tried so much towards the end not to be too weird, it's only because that's what happens when you get to know people.
Then that stops, and there's no getting used to it. The show's over. Almog's on another continent now, and I took the Thameslink to Gatwick however many hours ago it was and found a nice, small copy of "Pinocchio" at the airport bookshop. Its tone is very Vic and Bob. In fact Bob Mortimer would make a brilliant Pinocchio. I woke on the plane surprised to see the land up at the top.
Mum met me at Montpellier just as I received the message that the cast member had now tested positive for covid after all, but that was okay because Susy's tested positive for Covid too. We made it down. That's the main thing. Dad showed us "Creature Comforts" in the cinema (because it's important to be reminded just how perfect Aardman can be...)
Tom put on the "Bottom" Christmas special. I'm about to put the presents out. I was meant to be cacting up on sleep but appear to haev written this instead. I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, ole unatendees.
Love Goddess - The Rita Hayworth Musical has another two weeks at the Cockpit, and I'm enjoying it more and more. Here's another lovely shot from Roswitha Chesher Also making me look good of course is the show's star and co-creator Almog Pail, who gave this fascinating interview in The Jewish Chronicle recently about one of the chief inspirations behind the show – as well as "one of Israel's founding fathers" – her own grandfather Meir Pa'il. During the second act I watch Almog sing the "Gilda"-inspired "I Don't Belong To You" from the theatre's gantry, in character as producer Harry Cohn. Just standing there, hoping to exude a kind of stony, middle-aged command, I realise is a quite familiar feeling to me: I've been playing these kind of characters since my late teens, and now I'm now genuinely middle-aged, yet can't be sure that I'm approaching this moment of onstage stillness any differently to how I might if I were still seveteen. I wonder if Orson Welles felt the same when he suddenly found himself the same age as characters he'd been playing for decades. They're not any easier to play now, but then they never seemed hard. They also never seemed nice. That's what's been going through my head when the lights are on me in the gantry. And when they're off I count the audience.
Top row, left to right: My brother-in-law Tom, Dan Tetsell, my sister Susy, my sister Alice, and my nephew Jake. A beautiful turnout.
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...
When I first returned to this blog* after Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory I thought I'd just remain on twitter to post links and provide a little daily – but potentially always topical – keening over our exit from the EU inspired by Megan Anram's daily "Today was the day Donald trump finally became president" posts. Initially, I thought spending less time on everyone's favourite hellsite was simply for my own good, but when I watched Lindsay Ellis' video about her own cancelling last April I realised maybe the problem wasn't just me, but twitter's own business model, which now required the active promotion of upsetting content in order to keep our attention. Capitalism depended on growth, and twitter had grown as big as it was going to get. So I pinned this to my profile:
Yes, stay cool. Because Fascism Thrives On Division.
Then, just over a week ago, Elon Musk finally bought the site or app or whatever it is for forty-four billion dollars.
And immediately sacked its content moderators – one week before the American midterm elections, and exactly one day before a terrorist attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover followed by our reappointed Home Secetary's warning of an "invasion" of the south coast by refugees – and I was initially nonplussed by commentators passing the popcorn and using phrases like "it's going to be a wild ride." I mean, I get it. I write, and sentences must be finished, and lot of this blog is just me sharing stuff I find ineresting and then realising I should probably provide some kind of commentary, and "it's going to be a wild ride" is a handy sign off. But it still seemed a weird way to describe the rise of Fascism.
But maybe that wasn't what was being described. Maybe those commentators anticipating twitter's downfall were looking forward to the fall of the rise of Fascism, certainly something I'd like to live long enough to see... That's maybe not entirely true. What I mean is, given that I have to keep on living, I would very much like the fall of the rise of Fascism to happen at some point during that.
Has the word Fascism gone a bit weird on me now? Maybe.
Anyway, here's some chat.
And I was talking to my uncle Gordie last week, and learning how well his children's generation have been rallying around each other, and how much help is now provided – ar at least seen to be needed – which wasn't when I was their age, and I have to remember that I'm living to see other, far better things also on the rise.
* Here's how this post originally began:
When I first started
Okay
actually, before I continue I'm going to let you a little into how
tediously I go about writing these posts: I've just started writing this,
about four minutes ago, three of which have been spent arriving at the
word "tediously" which I might still change, and it would
normally now be about an hour before I looked back over all this and finally noticed
how... again, I'm going to spend a while now trying to find a synonym
for "bad"... let's just stick with "bad" then... how bad those opening
four words are, only as it happens this time I noticed almost
immediately. "When I first started"? Surely that's a... I'll look this up...
tautology? Doesn't starting mean doing something for the first time
anyway? And yet it sounds okay to my ear when I say it out loud. Maybe I
just like the sound of my voice too much. "When I first started..."
Okay.
When I first started returning to this blog to post daily
Oh bloody hell....
"First
started returning"? That sounds terrible. What can that mean? But no,
back in December of 2019 I returned to the blog after a bit of an
absence and I started posting daily, which I hadn't done before, and
then there was a break in early 2021, and now I'm blogging daily again.
Hence "first", hence "returning"... Yeah that"started" is redundant.
When I first returned to this blog to post daily... I've honestly forgotten now what I was going to say.
Let's endure a mad old cartoon about skeletons for Hallowe'en proper, shall we?
Before the famous cat and mouse, before the male leads of The Good Life – but afterPierce Egan's 1821 box office hit that I've only just learnt about* – Tom and Jerry were apparently these two guys on the right, and after last week's dancing, and Saturday's march, I look upon their floating, supple forms now with envy.
I'm back rehearsing The Love Goddess this week, and the trick to dancing seems to be to get the top half of my body to hold up the bottom half, which after forty-eight years of having my bottom half hold up the top half is quite a revelation. There's a sexy dance in this too, although not on the same level as Tex Avery, or Jessica Rabbit, or Betty Boop, or actually any woman drawn outside of a toilet cubicle on a building site. I think the animators knew too that they weren't up to this task without any reference material, which is why they spent more time having their vamp just take incredibly deep breaths in a low cut top while standing still.
Has David Cairns written about this cartoon? Of course he has. Do the skeletons all start playing each other's ribs like xylophones at any point? Well actually, not quite. We're literally a second into the action when either Tom or Jerry turns his hat into a telescope, so let's not expect too many set-ups and pay-offs.
Apart from that though, Magic Mummy is just your standard, run-of-the-mill ,
proudly-gay-police-force-hunting-down-a-necrophiliac-Svengali cartoon
from the thirties. I don't think it was one of the ones Dad used
to show us on his Super 8 projector, but the scratchy soprano of its
wind machine still summons the dread of many he did. Skeletons were such a faff to draw, weren't they? Happy Hallowe'en, ol' unattendees!
"At last"?!
*UPDATE: I have also just learnt that "Tom and Jerry" was a drink! Okay. I reckon the drink was named after the play, and the cops were named after the drink, and the animals were named after the cops (Joseph Barbera worked on both cartoons) and the neighbours were named after the animals.
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...)
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