Margaret's Fringe. Gilbert's Fridge.

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

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— Out Of Character (@oocharacterpod.bsky.social) 26 May 2025 at 10:54

 

 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.

 

The Delia Derbyshire of the Electronic Stomach

 

 

 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.

Placeholder Proper

 

 This isn't me saying I'm leaving something as a placeholder and then going on to write a whole post about it accidentally, this will be a placeholder pure and simple, represented by a photograph I took of a bare, beutifully clean, uselessly lit premise that I walked past heading home from seeing Margaret Cabourn-Smith be one of the brilliant things in Spike at the Richmond Theatre. I've more than one actually. I don't even have time to choose the best.

 

 I'm finding more and more of these on my phone – photos of uselessly lit, bare premises passed while walking home after rmidnight. I find them when I get home. I don't always remember taking them. 

 

"Perfectly Buoyant" - further chronicling of the tosh

willoughbies.jpeg by John Finnemore

 We had tried all manner of things with "The Willoughbies" in previous series of JFSP, both at sketch try-outs and live recordings: We'd tried it with John as the Dad, with me as the Dad, as a "runner" – catching buses, or winning points for spotting spelling mistakes in a menu – and as a standalone sketch, but they never made it in. And I didn't really get them. I am – as should be clear by now from these posts – a lot slower on the uptake than most listeners, and cold as a stone. Possibly the point was to show a generically happy, Ned-Flanders-type family in a less annoying light, and to let an audience – specifically John's audience – love something more commonly mocked. Posssibly it was less pointed than that; sometimes John just enjoys painting portraits. Anyway, I was surprised how doggedly he kept trying to do something with them.

 

 So when he first mooted over Zoom his plans for Series Nine, and for the family formerly known as Willoughby, I immediately anticipated how out of my depth I might be. This wouldn't be the normal rough trade John gets me to do. I'd need a buoyancy aid. That buoyancy aid turned out to be a fond memory of Jim Broadbent at his most "heigh-ho" augmented with a weak "r", and I clung onto that aid for dear life when recording Jerry's first scene – the restaurant scene from Episode Two. As I said on twitter during the tweetalong: 

 "I reckon it might have been this scene that made me consider giving Jerry that voice. I was worried my own voice might sound a little too punching down. Among other things"

 You know. Bullying. I'm making it sound like it was hard, aren't I. It wasn't hard, of course. I had John's writing to play, John and the rest of the cast to play off, Sue's tunes to sing, and Ed to tell me how much Jerry reminded him of his dad. But this was unlike anything I'd done on the radio before*, Jerry wasn't a character in a sketch, he had a whole series, a series in which I'd also be playing quite a few other roles which we'd have distinguish from him, so whatever voice I used in that first recording of that first scene would have to stick. Fortunately, Jim Broadbent is a very versatile actor. 

 Oh, here's something about that restaurant sketch I didn't know:

 

 And this might be my favourite revelation of the week. I've loved Willie Rushton ever since I received a copy of his comic "The Gernaium of Flüt" as a child, and I wish I could find it now. His son in that is called Toby, I think. His dog might be called Toby as well. I sang his praises here, back in 2008. And here he is playing Watson opposite John Cleese's Holmes.

 

 

 

 But he wasn't just the dry, avuncular fantasist of my childhood. Ruhston was there at the beginning of Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was, a stalwart of the sixties' Satire Boom that Jerry fails the audition for in Episode Six. In real life there are people who remind you of people, and I love that Jerry had that, whether I knew it or not. What I remind myself most of in fact, listening to Jerry now, is my childhood friend Tom. He was big fan of Willie Rushton too.

 Here's something great that William Shaw wrote about the series' approach to failure. And here, before I go – because, despite what it says at the top of this post, it's actually New Year's Eve tonight – is another thing John told me about the inspiration for Jerry when we first Zoomed:

 

  It goes up to 63, by the way. 

 Series Nine is still being repeated at 11pm on Radio 4, the final episode is tonight, if you have any questions you can post them below, and you can still hear the whole thing any time you like here. (I recognises that, despite all this talk about buoyancy aids, I haven't once mentined the lilo.) Happy New Year, Unattendees!

*(I know I've played Sir Maxwell House over a few series of "The Monster Hunters" {who also taught crows to do tricks}, but Sir Maxwell is a character from a sketch, which might be why the show outgrew him.)

Christmas Album 2020 (The Cut Off)

 

 The past never becomes the past more suddenly than on Christmas day.

 I always find, and forget I'll find, that stuff I considered posting before Christmas Eve looks immediately out of place on Boxing Day.

 

 It's a proper petit mort.

 The deadline for all the things I did to get me in the mood.

 Including the things I didn't know I was doing to get me in the mood. 

 My friend Sarah Morgan Margaret Cabourn-Smith called this space between Christmas and New Year's "the Merrineum".

HYMN HYMN HYMN HYMN HYMN HYMN HYMN 

 Margaret's just corrected me. Sarah however has in no way confirmed this correction. I wonder if baby Jesus got to keep that lamb.

They Cut My Love Scene But Apart From That

 No lie! I think it was Margaret Cabourn-Smith who recommended me to the creator of Trying, so thanks Margaret, here's a picture of the fun I had on it. It debuts this month on Apple TV, which is like normal TV except better funded and a website. According to the Hollywood Reporter "the show is disarmingly original in concept, its eight-episode first season committed to the grueling true-to-life intricacies of these proceedings, from applications and home evaluations to training classes and interview panels." As you can see. I'm in episode 5.

Nearly there.

Nearly, nearly there. What were your favourite bits of this wonderful year?

Actually that's from this.

Odd to see something as old as Norden's "Alright On The Night" overlap a genre as not-as-old as a talking-heads time-filler. Was this the first of its kind? Who cares? And was this a wonderful year? In many ways of course it was as grim as a peeled cat in a pram, but let's not dwell, it's still December the 27th, John Finnemore wrote a sketch about that and it's in his Holiday Special from Series Six which was repeated on the radio today, and I'm in it too, and so of course are all those turkeys who voted for Christmas. I never blogged about that series I now realise, not even about the musical. Oh well. The producer did, including a number of photographs of us in Santa Hats, standing at a poignant distance. Series Seven starts on January the 4th. YES! PLUGGED SOMETHING BEFORE IT HAPPENED! Enjoy, my lovelies.

not this wonderful year

Update: I have just learnt from twitter that Margaret Cabourn-Smith calls this period, between Christmas and New Year's, the "Merry-neum". What did you learn from twitter today?