The Annuals

 Yes, MERRY CMRIJNNAJ! By the way, I used to be crazy about Rodney Matthews, bringing my copy of "In Search Of Forever" into Art GSCE and asking when we were going to stop drawing things in bowls and start airbrushing curly, curly made-up space landscapes where everything looks inexplicably cuddly yet thorny.

 

 Happy December the Twenty-Seventh, Unattendees! I hope you've all been with friends, and that your celebrations have been surmountable. Here's to greater attendance in the New Year from me at least, to this blog, or to any equivalent technology that can remind me as effectively both to engage in things, and – for all the gaps in the record – that I did actually sometimes engage. For example, I've said little here about John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme's continued existence over the last three years (and counting) as standalone, 45-minute, annual reunions, but allow me to provide you now – finally – with some exclusive and evocative behind-the-scenes reportage:

 

 Wait, no, here's a better one:

 

 Here we all are, broiling in Bush Hall on the fourteenth of July 2025, for this year's special which incidentally was repeated this Christmas Day immediately after the King (a big name, but I wish he wouldn't do so much stuff about the war). If you've yet to hear it, BBC Sounds don't do foreign any more, but it was comedy of the week when it first went out, so you can hear it in podcast form HERE.

 

 

 This even better photograph of Sally Stares, Sue Pearse, either Ed Morrish or Lawry Lewin, and almost definitely the rest of us, was taken on the seventeenth of April 2023, just before we recorded the very first special – "The Twat of the Night" – which I wrote a little about here, and which, re-reading, I see was also very warm. 

 We didn't just meet up for the recordings though. There were also try-outs. But no longer in Kensington Library, as they had been when I lived in Camden, they now took place – in conjunction with my having to relocate to Notting Hill Gate – in a great big hall in Cecil Sharp House, Camden. In this photograph, John is facing the back wall and the audience are standing up because, I guess, we're all still finding our feet after lockdown:

 

 We sorted it out in the end though, and I think wherever you are in the world you can hear the 2023 special HERE. 

 Or buy the lot here.

 The following year, John – the divinities exalt him – decided to do something different, and that first try-out of 2024 where we all just ended up sat at the back watching him invent the desire-path-abundant village of Allwyn (pronounced "Alan") was such a thrill for me, I never for a second worried well hang on what am I going to do then. But if I'm honest, that's never a worry. Ed once told us how much he enjoyed producing a show with no egoes, and Margaret and I immediately corrected him: we probably have enormous egoes, but what ego isn't going to enjoy working on something this good? 

 

Yes. Yes, I think I remember now why I never got round to posting these.

 Wherever you are in the world, I think you can hear the 2024 special HERE, the only show to my knowledge John has performed sat at his laptop rather than standing with a script, because there simply wasn't time to print one. ("The following show was written in front of a live studio audience," to quote Ed crediting John-Luke Roberts). It was recorded on the twenty-second of April 2024, and I've put these in quite a weird order, haven't I:

 

 

MARGARET CABOURN-SMITH CAN CURRENTLY BE SEEN IN "SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS" AT THE BIRMINGHAM REP.

King Prince Charles wishes everyone good luck probably.

 Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square One to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...

 

 I wonder if we could get him to revisit his bagpipe bit.

Come On Pilgrim

(source)   

 

 "It's basically a pilgrimage," said Gemma, "There were a couple behind me from York. They asked me what else I was going to see while in London." They'd been down for Diana as well apparently. Gemma Brockis of course lives in London, like me. Having decided it would be crazy to miss probably the biggest act of local political theatre since the beheading of Charles the First, she had joined the queue on Saturday at 4am and was out of Westminster Hall fourteen hours later to come over and help me with a self tape, buzzing. It was great to hear her.

  Because in spite of my decades working in tourist attractions, I tend to forget when I talk about London's "community" or public spaces how much of destination this city is, how much of a venue it is. And the night I walked from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner a week earlier seeing nothing but an occupying army of fences and police, I had known nothing about The Queue to come. It hadn't occured to me that my back yard might have to present itself as the centre of the world for a spell, again.

 

  I also forgot – or it never occured to me – watching and rewatching King Prince Charles lose his temper over a pen in Nothern Ireland, that not only had his mother just died, he was there to reaffirm the legitimacy of – and shake hands once again with – the killers of his favourite uncle. If the biggest story from that visit was a leaky pen I guess he was doing his job, poor sod. It's easy to associate the idea of kings and queens with fantasy, and conclude that their inclusion in a political system is a sign of immaturity, but a far more crucial ingredient of fantasy is heroism and, like Yoda in the good films, the Queen was never heroic. It wasn't her job to make history, just to exist in it, and her speeches weren't meant to rouse. "It is at times such as these..." was her catchphrase.

 

 "She was a little old lady," Gemma said. "Immortal crown. Mortal wearer. The Queen is dead. Long live the King. That's the power of it." 

 That it might be safer for a nation – particularly a nation as historically in love with the idea of empire as ours – to concentrate its hero worship upon someone whose job is simply to receive that worship without seeking it, was an idea that the Queen exemplified for seventy years. "Seventy years. She met Eisenhower. In the fifties. A female head of state!" And this was something else Gemma said that really chimed, particularly in a week which has seen Lindsey Graham attempt a nationwide abortion ban in the US and the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police in Iran. Without – perhaps uniquely – ever having to be sexualised, masculinised or martyred – from the moment she was on the throne – "here," said Gemma, "was a woman people listened to."

 

"Tantum Fortunam Meam!"

 

 September 10th

 

 

 September 12th or 13th

 

 I know, Charles, I know. It's awful and stupid. Nothing fits now, I know. Still, grumpy kings are a fairy tale staple too, aren't they? But should we pack all this in anyway? Otherwise, you're staring down the barrel of it until you die. You're meant to love us too now. But why should you love us? We still have those tapes of that private conversation where you joked about being reincarnated as the new Queen's tampon. "Just my luck!" the transcript reads. I know what you mean. I wouldn't love us. Commiserations.

 

Happier days (source – there's one of him in a bin there as well.)

 

 Hey, I just did a search for "Prince Charles" to find out how old you were!