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.
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.
It is true, I am in a Mark Wahlberg film! A Christmas movie called THE FAMILY PLAN 2. Although, noticing it had gone up on Apple TV and skipping straight to my bit, I initially thought oh I've been cut, but you can still see my back so I haven't. They just cut the shot of me humming on my headphones and ignoring the action behind me. You could even argue not seeing my face is cooler. It's certainly Christmassier (if you're into M. R. James). Anyway, I know that's me driving the bus. Here's a photograph of my legs as proof, or rather proof I'm not driving, as all the bus interiors were shot stationary in Shepperton Studios surrounded by a massive blue screen.
Not green screen, as I say in the video. I felt like Harrison Ford in that cab – first confronted with having to make heads or tails of the dashboard of the Millenium Falcon – and if you watch the clip closely you can just about catch me pretending to flip a switch above my head as we take off. What does it do? No idea. I cannot drive a bus. I did two days of filming for this, the first on location in Piccadilly, with a gold-trimmed, burgundy suite at the Sofitel on Regent Street as my trailer...
... during which I kept checking everyone knew I couldn't actually drive a bus. They knew that, right? Jermyn Street's quite narrow. I wasn't needed that day in the end. And if you want to watch the whole film, not just my back, and have a subscription to Apple I guess, it's here – enjoy! And if you still don't believe that's me, here's my bus driver's face back in Shepperton, behind which are Kit Harington and Mark Wahlberg having a tussle. I assume. I never looked round to check because I couldn't be sure in my driver's cab when they were or weren't shooting. Professional. I just kept Maggie Simpsoning at the wheel.
Of course I'm burying the lead, which is that at the beginning of the year I actually landed two Christmas movies, and you can actually see and hear me in the second, as a judge (well, magistrate) in the final button of the trailer no less, which is here. And Kiefer Sutherland came up to me and shook my hand and said You're great, You are great. It's called TINSEL TOWN and it comes out on Sky tomorrow!
Kicking off 2025 with this kind of work was odd and new to me and basically bliss, because I'd definitely decided by then to use all the money I'd received for "High Five" to take JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh. The night before my scene, I couldn't sleep, and stayed up re-reading Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN on my big hotel bed.
I'd brought it with me to Leeds because I wanted to check its influence on the solo show. Jimmy's nervous isolation on the phone. In an alien bedroom. And I remembered writing seventeen years earlier how I'd wanted JONAH to feel a little like a comic. And re-reading it I loved it again. I loved the book. Loved what I was doing. Loved that I was seeing the insides of hotels again. Loved that they'd put me up in a Marriott.
JONAH NON GRATA production shot by John Scott. See? The nervous hand to the mouth? I should definitely write more about Jonah.
And here's where I sat the following day. "There is no Nation so Powerful, as the One that Obeys its Law," it said on the wall in golden letters over a century old. The North gets it.
To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...
Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type.
In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...
The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...
I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...
There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...
I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...
At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend.
With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...
But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.
(Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.
Here, ol' Unattendees, to celebrate my love for you all, is a tree giving a little house a hug. Sorry I haven't been posting more, but I am once again between keyboards (in case you were wondering, this post has been compiled entirely from copying and pasting parts OF ITSELF) but this hardware situation should be resolved when I get back from France, pictured above – where I have, as always, been spending Christmas with my folks – and below is the advert that will pay for it:
I might even have enough left over after to take a show to Edinburgh, something I haven't dared do since 2001. Guess which show. "I don't know, Simon. How many shows have you made?" Well exactly, that one. Although, thinking on the previous post, I amgrowing obsessed(again*) with how abysmal a part of real world,far right economic discourse beloved, old sci-fi tropes such as space exploration and Ai have become, so maybe it will be two shows! Maybe it will be none! No, I've written it down now (or pains-takingly pieced it together from individual characters torn from THIS VERY POST)and 2025 islikely to frighten a lot ofus anyway, so nits like me, who are sitting pretty pretty, should give courage a go too! Happy... changing things, then. Yeah. No. Franceuck it. Happy 2025, readers. Happy Change.
Vancouver last August, where this ad was filmed – along with many futuristic sci-fi shows from the noughties, meaning I'd wanted to visit this city for decades. But when I finally get there, everywhere else had caught up, and the biggest thingdistinguishing this Pacific shoreline now from, say, Leeds or Chelsea Wharf is just the number of people to a canoe.
* Did you get that that was what "Time Spanner" was about? I mean, it was about other stuff too.
These lines are but a fraction of my contribution to "Phantom Peak" as Pius, High Priest of the Church of the Cosmic Platypus, mini-penned at an easel in the corner of Old Town, where I would sit to receive tourists as part of a step on their trail. (Everyone who visits Phantom Peak is a "tourist", including those who know the place far better than me, and have made even greater contributions.) My character's dependence upon psychedelic fungus after an orchestrated blimp crash is one of the few details of the world's deep lore I was sure completely of. When a message like the following would pop up from a Head of Department on our work WhatsApp –
– uncaptioned, I might be thrown, but I'd figure if I needed to know what it meant, I'd know, and that generally proved correct. Another contribution, perhaps my proudest, was the innovation on day one of asking tourists, once our scripted interaction had been logged: "Would you like to take a moment?" It was fascinating how well this offer nearly always went down. People seemed genuinely delighted to be just standing still for six seconds or so, stopping, and insufferably, I began to feel like an actual church. Any post introducing Peak though, should really be about the extraordinary company I worked with, but I'm making this all about me because taking a moment is how I've been spending my fiftieth birthday. Today's been lovely. Thanks to all who've said and sent nice things. According to this mural in Strangers' Hall, Norwich, I am now finally half-way through my life! I'm now trying to remember one of Pius' sign-offs.
Ah, yeah: Nine out of ten.
Photo credit: I've become lax, sorry. If anyone knows who took that picture of me, let me know.
Happy Hallow, as I guess today is! Above is not a picture of Hallowe'en. I have not been working here over Hallowe'en. God knows what's happened to the poor, brave souls who are. The work WhatsApp currently reads like the transcription of a black box. Lois has lost a finger, and I'm writing this on the train to York. I only hope they forgive my abandoning them.
“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”
When my job as a conductor on the Mid-Norfolk Polar Express ended in December, I knew I wanted the New Year to be, above all else, one in which I continued to play people who carry a hurricane lamp. No, I wanted to continue doing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends as I wrote last post, and the London Bridge Experience was my first themepunk gig of 2024. (I am committed to trying to make "themepunk" a thing. Sorry, it's my blog.)
London Bridge! History!
It was a return to Tooley Street, and to reading on the floor between shows, and writing your own script if you wanted to just as the London Dungeon had let you do when it was the rival across the road. It was also a return to painting myself a better jawline and cheekbones.
Look at this dashing rake! Who needs appetite supressants? Compare the portrait above taken when I started work at the LBE this February, to one below of me posing next to a stuffed tapir in Bedlam at the Dungeons in 2007, and you’ll see full rejuvenation was achieved. The dead don't age (although my phones seem to have got worse).
The LBE used some of the pumped odours too – and you know what that does to a pysche – and even some of the tunes: ducking out of Fleshmongers, past the giant spiders and through the labyrinth of killer clowns to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room, I’d hear the same plainsong which used to play on the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…
There were differences too, of course: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter, which made me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a fake Viking longboat, chainsaws, Romans, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact this place is genuinely underground (I turned my flash on one day, and you don’t get gastropodinous limestone arteries like this in County Hall...)
Everyone there works their arse off as well, like they grew up through Covid or something. Physically, verbally, chemically, no two actors share a superpower. I think it’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice – bloody Vikings – which is another reason I've been taking it a bit easier. so, okay, the dead do age. But, readers... work with people who work their arse off. I don't mean losing a finger. I mean, say: okay, between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, for example, Sam's at his laptop in the green room, putting together something like this beautifully simple, one-shot unnerver below. Enjoy! There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes too. God, I hope they're okay.
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.
The author, entirerly comfortable doing a first-time Northern accent in front of cameras.
I swear, I didn't just come back on this blog to plug stuff, but back in December, I was asked by Jamie Annett – the director of that episode of EastEnders I'd enjoyed being in so much - to take a day off from the Polar Express, to come and film a lovely little scene opposite "Bob Hope" (played by Tony Audenshaw) in Emmerdale. That scene went out tonight, and the internet has gone WIIIIILD...
Okay, that scene's not actually mine, mine is fourteen and a half minutes into episode nine-thousand-and-five, HERE. Personally speaking, I liked Bob. His child's just died, and when I ask him how the guitar playing's going, he finds sweet relief in pretending they're still alive. Another really lovely scene then, and Tony was beautiful, and I remembered to hold my clipboard the right way round, and no-one asked me to drive the van, and the rain held off, and, once the scene was done, we all had Christmas dinner at the top of the hill. Rock on.
No sorry, my point was that when I initially saw those road signs turned upside-down by French farmers over Christmas my first thought had been simply, oh I guess some stuff's upside-down now. I had clocked the symptoms a few weeks earlier while tearing through Norwich Castle on a twilight ticket and noticing that one of the paintings had definitely been hung the wrong way up. Screwed, in fact. Screwed to the wall – see above. In the next gallery I noticed another, by a different artist, again definitely upside-down (I don't mean to boast, an artist like me just has an eye for these things).
Every room in fact had one painting inexplicably set upside down, and my first thought here was, oh I guess this is some kind of protest – exactly the feeling I didn't get when I saw the protests in Languedoc. (Mum tells me farmers are now blocking every road into every city with tractors, so that's less ambiguous.) I couldn't think what might be being protesting however. So I went up to the information desk and said "Hello" firstly, and then "Can I ask why some of the paintings are upside-down?" and the smiling woman at the desk handed me a leaflet sporting the name Mark Wilsher, explaining "Yes, it's an artist. Five works have been turned upside down. It's all about your reaction to it." And I'm trying to work out how best to explain the way she said it, because I think that's the point of this post.
A sidenote: I come from a generation who have been taught, upon reading the words "the smiling woman at the desk", to imagine immediately something counterfeit and sinister – the polite, public face of an industrial carnivore – but after the trip to the castle I went back to punch imaginary tickets on a train pretending to go to the North Pole, or pour and serve real hot chocolate, because most of the jobs I've taken have been pretty public facing – not just the out-of-work actor stuff, but the actor stuff too. Other credits on my CV include: Announcer; Host; Voice; Receptionist; Narrator; Waiter; Lift Operator; and Conductor, bus. But even the murderers on that list were narratively never threats to the public. I like the public, and I like being the public.
Anyway, I don't want you to picture me leaving that exchange with the smiling woman at the desk in any way huffy or aloof. And I don't want to give the impression she didn't seem very much on the side of the exercise. But she did say "It's all about your reaction to it" it in a way that made me wonder how previous enquiries might have gone. I said "Aw thanks" and took the leaflet to let her know she wasn't going to get any trouble from my end at least. I don't know. Perhaps I'm projecting. Perhaps she wasn't deescalating anything, just happy to help. Perhaps I was also projecting when I thought it might have been a protest, or when I thought those upside-down road-signs in France might not. Walking away, I thought: "Well, I guess my reaction to seeing some paintings turned upside-down is to find out why they've been turned upside down. Sorry if you were expecting more, Mark."
But now I think maybe the work was actually having her to explain the work to me because – as you might be able to tell – I've had a far more complicated reaction to that.
(Sorry I didn't post much here about The Polar Express, but there was Instagram. And that's me with the outstanding Miles Mlambo above. And below, that's me getting over two million likes on TikTok. Boasts of equal stature.)
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.
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...
"NO! THIS IS ENOUGH! I DON'T WANT ANY MORE OF THIS, NO! NO! STOP!"
Good. I look less surprising at the age of forty-eight than Little Nemo here, but that's still no excuse for not getting on with things – not that I haven't been entirely okay with not getting on with things this past year, and not that I'm not entirely supportive of the absence of resolutions for the coming year. But while 2022 saw me comfortably protected from most of the year's crises by jobs and a nice big bedroom, I've no guarantee 2023 will do the same, so some kind of "project" might be an idea, as fortune at least favours a moving target.
The Med, from which I'm now back.
That project probably won't be this blog though. It's
not just the holiday that's caused my contributions to thin. I thought
about doing a big New Year's Dump of my favourite unposted
photographs from 2022, but could never get beyond trying to caption the photo from January below, simply because I couldn't think of anything to say about it.
It's only now that I realise that's probably exactly what I had to say about it: that this photo represented a cycle of me going outside,
into Kensington, and coming back with absolutely nothing to say, and realisations like that are what this blog is great for – coming up with ideas as I'm writing. But putting the time into a post which an idea might deserve is ungaugeable when you've decided to turn out one a day. And it's the not coming up with ideas that takes up so much, well, everything.
Also, I've finally worked out how to download Word onto this old laptop. So if I like something now I'll just share it on twitter (as long as that's around,) and if I have some pictures I have nothing to add to I'll share them on instagram (oh, if my new, even worse phone's memory lets me, I've just remembered.) Otherwise I'll take notes a bit more privately in 2023, and try to find some other blank pages to stare at. And maybe this is just the January talking. But it's January's turn. Let's hear it out.
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