Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

The Kneeling Wives Act

When I finally do another Sung Blog Sunday, I'm definitely going to add words to this.

 I had more sleep before recording Act Two, which is ironic – or at least relevant, given the number of characters who can't get to sleep in it. Don't the conspirators pretty much pull an allnighter? I'm not sure what the business with Casca pointing out which way's East with his sword is about. It feels like an in-joke. A heroic pose that loses all its glamour as soon as you turn the sound up. And I'd never noticed, until playing this scene, that Brutus completely reneges on his promise to tell Portia what's going on. He doesn't even not tell her. He just walks out.

"Cool. Which one are you?"

 Watching the edit back, going from Brutus and Portia's scene to Caesar and Calpurnia's I felt an unexpected and overwhelming relief. That might seem odd, given the stakes and Calpurnia's dream, but one of the possible advantages of playing every role is that there's very little chance you'll repeat a scene – it's too knackering, for one thing – and I'd run out of trauma by the time it came to play Calpurnia, but I really like, in retrospect, how recognisably "married" she and Ceasar appear as a result. It makes sense; Caesar's always been in danger, Calpurnia would be used to this. If they felt any emotional toll, she wouldn't be Ceasar's wife. As for my Caeasar, at least two cuddly old men in later plays make reference to either being or having played him, so I decided all three roles must have been written for the same actor, which is why I've given him a touch of the Wilfrid Hyde-Whites (although Gus Brown, who now I think of it played both those roles at University – Escalus in "Measure for Measure" and Polonius in "Hamlet" – would also be a great Ceasar.) This same imaginary company member has also so far turned up as an unnamed Roman in my Titus, and the Pedant in my Shrew. There are other imaginary members of this company, and I can only apologise to my Chiron voice for saddling him once again with a servant role.

Fun fact: Two supporting characters swap voices in this act.  It was bound to happen.

Share and Enjoy

LOOK HOW HAPPY HE IS!

Wow! I've really played a game of chicken plugging this. Okay: Time Spanner – the thing whose progress I've been charting on this blog for the past ten years – finally had a pilot episode recorded in June which was then broadcast on Radio 4 a month ago, which means you now have just one day left to listen to it, sorry.

And look who turned up to the recording! 

Ben Moor! Ned Mond! Julia, Joel, Jason, Katy Wix!

(Wedding photographer: Stephen Evans)

Has it really been ten years in the making? This interview from September 2007 suggests not. Back then, I appear to be contemplating a vehicle for myself about a homeless wedding planner, but what I realised soon afterwards was that if I wrote that, then I would have to research wedding-planning, and I wasn't very interested in researching wedding-planning so went instead for this sort of cosmic/science-fiction/fantasy... You know Doctor Who? That. 

Beautiful pic for the Radio Times by Thomas Flintham

Of course, it's not really Doctor Who. (Carrrie Quinlan's got that gig sewn up.) Hopefully, it rips off so many ideas from so many sources that I can't be fingered for any specific theft, but the real impetus is probably the comics I read in my teens, back when comics seemed to be doing something amazing – back when Alan Moore's Swamp Thing created a playground in which Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man could hang back on the benches, coolly composing existential thought experiments with painted covers by Brendan McCarthy, while the more popular kids like Gaiman's Sandman entered everything and won the gold – exactly the same impetus behind that strip I did about a slacker sent on a mission by an angel twenty years ago now that I think about it. Sorry. Obscure references. Bad. 

Also, I wanted to write the show to which "Peaches En Regalia" was the theme tune. 

 Team Spanner photo by Amanda Benson

l to r: Jeremy Limb, me, David Mitchell, John Finnemore, London Hughes, Belinda Stewart-Wilson

So, yes, I'm sorry I haven't given you blog-readers much notice of this culmination, and you'll probably want to listen to it three or four times. That's what all the cool dudes are doing. John suggests as much in this very nice piece, "John" as in John Finnemore who played Laika both in the finished thing and in that first read-through he let us perform in his flat six years ago (organising read-throughs was the only deadline I ever had for finishing a draft). Also present at that first draft was Gareth Edwards, who is now the producer of the show. I suspect Gareth experienced even more ups and downs trying to get this commissioned than I did; for me this was always a dream, and you're a fool to be disappointed if you don't get your dream, but Gareth managed it.

A lot of the "refining" John writes about on his blog was the result of conversations I had with Gareth both in emails and in person, not to mention the final audio edit, where a tenth of what was recorded had to be cut to meet the running time. I only know it was a tenth though by checking the original script. It doesn't feel like a tenth, because Gareth clearly cut the right tenth. It was also Gareth who suggested I call this other dimension "Heaven" rather than – as it stood in the 2010 draft – "Uberspace", sending the show off into a far richer direction than the original psychedelic kid's show pastiche I had in mind (although it's worth remembering how many of those shows... Ulysses 31, Space Sentinels, and in particular Monkey... felt no qualms about involving the ineffable). "Uber" didn't mean then what it does now by the way. Similarly, the choice of an unhinged, dictatorial, reality-television-starring property developer as the story's heavy seemed a lot more light-heartedly surreal back in 2010. 

And here's a problem. Among the many exciting things comics were doing back in the eighties was refashioning Superman's arch-enemy Lex Luthor into a satire on Donald Trump. And it wasn't just Lex: by the release of Batman Returns, you couldn't budge for superheroes pitting themselves against wealthy philanthropists secretly trying to take over the world, all of whom provided the seed for Kraken.

So I still hope Time Spanner gets a series. Of course I do. But what's funny has changed and so, just between you and me, I might have to rethink where it goes. That's the problem when you grow up reading surrealist apocalypic dystopia. But it's also exciting. Far worse for the fate of the show would have been if everything was now fine. And I'm still glad I didn't go with that wedding-planner idea. Shall we cheer ourselves up further by looking at more of Amanda Benson's lovely rehearsal photographs?

Here's our Kraken. I had asked for Jon Hamm, but what are you going to do? It's worth mentioning that if it wasn't for David Mitchell I wouldn't be writing comedy at all (see that interview), and I certainly wouldn't have written this. In terms of getting the right people to pay attention, he effectively joined Gareth as midwife for the last two years of this thing's birth.

Returning for a second to Jon Hamm, I love the motto of Mad Men creator Matt Weiner's: "Subtext is Pleasure". I was keen the dialogue in Time Spanner should also sound pretty natural, organic even, leaving as many jokes unsaid as possible, if that make sense, jokes that would appear more in the performing than in the reading. The problem with this, of course, is that commissioners don't perform scripts, they read them. They read them once, if that, and even if by some miracle they do correctly interpret every nuance and scripted fluff, the actors who end up having to perform the thing only get to spend an afternoon with it. There's no learning time, let alone rehearsal time – it's not bloody Shakespeare – and so the writer has to make it absolutely clear why people are saying what they're saying on that first read. It was David who suggested the blindingly obvious solution: stage directions. Here's a tiny example:

       

All David's ideas were good. Here I think he's suggesting John be given a stool...

And here he is holding a script in front of his face because the character he is playing is on the other side of a door. John, as Laika, is urging my character on. I, as Martin, am literally miming holding a cup of tea because I'm new to this...

Oh yes. That name. "Martin". 

I wanted – as we all want – something basically normal but a little unfortunate. The words "Martin Gay" came up in conversation eight years ago and I thought: Oo, bingo! It wasn't until two years into drafting that I realised I'd plumped for exactly the same name John had already chosen for his own feckless sitcom hero in Cabin Pressure. This is why nobody in the episode ever actually addresses my character as "Martin".

London! Secret weapon. Gareth always said Gabbie was the key... 

(Here's another indicator of how long ago I started writing this: I was writing for Laurence and Gus when I first thought of Gabbie, and Isy Suttie was in the cast and I thought she might make be a great fit, but by total coincidence she then went and got cast as the disarming new love interest in Peepshow, "Dobbie". That long ago)... 

Auditioning actors for Gabbie might be the most grown-up thing I've ever done. Everyone we saw gave beautiful, intelligent readings, but London Hughes was unique in actually reminding me who Gabbie was. I don't mean she reminded me of Gabbie. I mean she literally reminded me who the character was meant to be, and why Gareth was so right. She was the key. There has to be a surplus energy to Gabbie that, again, you can't really put into words, beyond the stage direction "enthusiatically" – an energy without which very little Martin does in this episode really makes sense. So we were very lucky with London. If you want more of her and of course you do, try here.

Far right: B-Stew gets into the zone... 

Belinda Stewart-Wilson took a porridge of archetypes and instantly made sense of it: Angel, yes, Muse, sure, but also Femme Fatale, Bell Dame Sans Merci, Cylon, Siri, White Witch... half of Tilda Swinton's CV actually... Philip K. Dick's VALIS, the Sorceress from He-Man, that female Buddha from Monkey, Bond's "M" and – if this is a rip-off Doctor Who – the Doctor. A character I was so nervous of pinning down she's referred to in the script throughout simply as "the Voice", Belinda took it all and simply made it sing.

And completing the team, second from left, the unweildily talented Jeremy Limb, from The Trap and music. You can hear his own science fiction comedy epic Event Horizon Crescent here. If Time Spanner is a baby, I always wanted Jeremy to be Godfather. In the Green Room before the recording, as final tweaks to my script were being made, it occurred to me how lucky I was to be in probably one of the best writers' rooms ever assembled, so thanks again to Gareth and to all the cast for keeping me company. And thanks to everyone who came to the read-throughs and played the roles and helped them exist a bit more. And thanks again to John Finnemore who always seemed to love this thing in all its forms. Which meant it was probably good. Which meant I stuck at it.

Have I missed anything? OH! THE LINK! Here. 
(And you can like it on here too.)
((And also broadcast that same belated epiphany was Now The Twelfth Night Show, which I loved appearing in, and which you also have a day left to listen to.))

 UPDATE: Someone has very usefully uploaded it to listen to whenever you like HERE.

posted from Nige's laptop

(originally posted on myspace here)

And look at the mess he's made. We're back rehearsing "Money" again after another break, this one three weeks long. (Here are some shots of us before then, brainstorming in the yard while the levels for the End of the World are unceasingly tweaked within. We are, as you can see hard, at it:)

So listen, while everybody's not looking I think I'll pop off to Paris for a couple of nights. I'm not bringing the laptop but I promise I'll catch up when I get back. No, the only reason I'm suddenly getting back in touch so hurriedly is that the That Mitchell and Webb Sound show airs tonight on Radio 4 and this is just the kind of place where I should be telling people about that (oh and all the stuff I wrote for the telly should now be up in a playlist on my profile.) Apparently I've written the opening and closing sketches of this first episode and they're both pieces I'm really pleased with. In fact the final sketch - if it's about tycoons - was directly inspired by the work done on "Money" so yes the spoof will now air before the show that inspired it. What this also means however is that you now have only about, well, none hours left to listen to some other stuff I'm quite proud of which aired on Laurence and Gus' final episode last Tuesday in a towering seven minute sandwich of sick whimsy towards the end. But look that's my fault entirely. Still, quick!

Ah Nige's back, looking very handsome. 

As is the Yard: 

As are we all. All so handsome. Hello Nige. Goodbye you. 

And it gonna be on wheels...

(originally posted on myspace here)

Just a quick breezing in while I'm sat at monitor 11 sending off last minute re-writes of a premiseless, twenty-two page sketch about the Elizabethan Conjuror John Dee to Laurence and Gus for tonight's final recording: We did some Shunt in front of people last night, and finally SOMETHING was there, audible, visible and playable. It feels very good. No trap-doors opening, no smoke, no penguin masks painted black, just door-knobs, tickets and a split audience to play with. "Finally we've got a wheel!" said Nigel, "All we need now are another three and we can stick them on a car." Yep, because all we had before was a drawing of a car we were waving in audience's faces while making brrrm noises. On the train home some teenagers threw bits of crutch at me, which I threw back to show I was down. About twenty onions lay crushed in the middle of the road outside my block. Might use that. Oh, just have.

Gemma on the machine's top deck, ages ago, with shambles.

...incommunicado...

 Broadband's down so I'm sending this from a cafe until I get back on line. It's a killer, a beaut', one of the absolute best things I saw while recuperating at my sister's – as a cartoon, more Chris Ware even than Chris Ware. Enjoy. Despair.

 Tomorrow, Monday, sees a couple of places where you might be able to watch some of my stuff in the evening (most of it hatched Thursday night... Basically, I thought, look I'm either a writer AND performer or a writer OR performer and AND's the only way I'm going to to eat, so I'd better just write. My eyes now feel like Trompe Le Monde): There's the first recording of the new That Mitchell and Webb Sound (a bit out of the blue, and I think it's all sold out) but there's also Lowdown at the Albany where Laurence and Gus might be trying out some gubbins before their final recording on Friday. I'm not going to be able to make Friday because of Shunt, so I'll probably do the Albany. Just so you know.
Right.
I have no Internet.
Bye then.

No, you hang up first.

New Big Spaces

I'm well, thank you for asking.

 

 

In fact, I think I'm all well. I would go for walks on Hampstead Heath and check on my hand to see how my body was doing, like I used to in hospital, then see that it was glowing and have to find a bench, but that was back in February...

 

And, well, now, how to get from there to here? Am I just going to write everything? Maybe I should start by making my excuses: 

1. The lease ran out on my photoshop, which is half the fun of these posts for me (so these images are bigger and duller than I'd like).

2. I *was* of course going to write about my steroid-induced psychotic episode next (so very Christian Bale, so very topical back in February), but thought better of that until I'd found somewhere to live... which, now I set it down in print, strikes me as incredibly paranoid. Or is it? I don't know. Ah. No, but if I were vetting potential flat-mates I'd probably google them to see if they'd, say, started any fights in hospital with a club-footed Maori. Then again, to paraphrase Lenny Bruce, I'd google mud. 

 

 

Hmm. These paragraphs are more widely spaced than I remember, Yup, big spaces... Anyway, I moved out of Susy's at the end of March, into a long, uncarpeted, white-washed room in a large, airy, joss-sticky flat in Gipsy Hill, and I lasted there a month. The land-lady didn't like my hours, and who can blame her? The floor-boards creaked, her room was right outside the bathroom, she slept with her door open so actually yes I for one can blame her, but a home's a home, and that was hers, and I'm not even sure I want one right now.

 

Time passes, shut up! as Dylan Thomas once wrote, and I've found a room now, with a carpet and a coffee table, three storeys up a tower-block in Clapham Junction, with gardens, pool, sauna, jacuzzi, and loudly wuthering heights. I'm holed up across from the busiest station in Europe, I've found a "Complete Works of Shakespeare" for a pound, and Dr. Thompson's incomparable "Great Shark Hunt" for three, I'm pretending I'm on tour, or a scatty writer assigned to LA, while my stuff – the charred and the saved – stays in storage until I can face it, and the big money's been coming in fine from Shunt whose new show's more physical aspects can be seen here under construction.

 

In fact, they're still under construction. And with nowhere to work, and the director up in Scotland, we have this week off. It's okay though, it's all fine, I'm just in it for the company and the money, that's what I've got to keep telling myself. I mean, it's great! I'm better! I can do winch-work and wrestling, and I've got a pool and a sofa! And I've got work, biggish commissions for both LaurenceandGus' and MitchellandWebb's new radio shows, and it's work I can actually do (new stuff got laughed at)! AND the insults  Charlotte Hesketh and I have been throwing back and forth across f*c*b**k for the past month now number a hundred, so I can finally leave that! And here we are rehearsing: Hey Spacey, copy THIS!

 

 

 

 

Whatsamadda, Kevin Spacey, you chicken?! Oh yeh, you all: "I'm going to get a railway arch and put art in and shit" and we all: "Let's drop this flowerpot on the director's head a number of times before he leaves" and you all: "Good luck with that then" and we all "Ow, uh...." Yes well lots to catch up on then. Hello again, thanks for sticking around. A post every other day as promised, once. Join me tomorrow for those hundred insults then. I'm better. This is easy. 

 

(Oh yeah, 3:10 AM. I remember. Hmm... still big spaces.)

BANG! URGH! TOOT! (NONBOND NIGHT 2: something something KILL)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Youtube has this down as a trailer for the film "Licensed To Love and Kill". The trailer itself however says "Shoot To Kill", and elsewhere on youtube it's called "No1 of the secret service Lindsay Shonteff". Regardless, I came across this trailer after last night's post and it immediately leapt to the "No1" Non-Bond spot in MY heart, I'll say. So here it is, enjoy:

 

 

So okay the film itself (Let's call it "Gareth's Good at Flicking Fags and Poo") looks wretched, but this trailer's clearly the work of a comedy genius. Really, hats off to the dry, lone anarch who pieced this beauty together: the Quixotic irony of the final voice-over that accompanies No1's clearly doomed test-drive of the world's shittest flying car... the subliminal suggestion of a turd flicked into cleavage... the non-sequiteurial toot of the stripper crawling out of the wall... and the sound, just the cutting of the soundtrack is hilarious and oddly exhilirating, it's like Spike Jones (as opposed to Jonze).

Oh and should you feel like a bath after watching this, may I belatedly suggest my friend John's Cabin Pressure...

Oh and on the subject, I'd also like to plug Ned's awesome Knocker. (Just grit your teeth for the preceding "poetry pod"). There's quite a bit of baroque surrealism doing the rounds in comedy at the moment, only not very well and slightly embarrassed, but Ned nails it. And he always plays people called Ian, which is nice... I would also have liked to plug the repeat of Laurence Howarth's brilliant Safety Catch, but that's just finished, so I can't make the words go blue and underliney. Well, that should do for now.

MITTENS IN MEMORIAM

No time as yet just now to post the Post Mortem on the run of Jonah. No time either to document my very confused emotional reaction to the airing of the Primo Levi sketch in "Laurence and Gus: Hearts and Minds". I don't know if I still find it funny. The performances are brilliant. The sound effects are brilliant. But they've cut bits. Quite a few. And does the absence of a frictionless vibrating stepladder, gravity-defying nylon scarf and gas-powered aromatherapy helmet make the sketch more merciful, or simply more glib? I don't know. Always forget a sketch is going to be edited. Am I evil?) No time either just now to comment on the sad passing of Jeremy Beadle (owner of the largest private library in Europe according to Ken Campbell - according to Ned - "Next time you meet 'im, get 'im to take you into his cellar and show you his shelves on hen-faced women!"... now bedad and alas I never shall) nor the death of mitten-spurning Maila Nurmi, aka "Vampira"... "Plan 9" cameo, obviously, James Dean's S & M stub-buddy, and seemingly sole keeper of the flame of geek-lust lighting the end of the fifties' tunnel. Howammamma!

No, the death of strangers is an easy topic. My own life more fiddly. Suffice it to say that a huge, uncomplicated, marvelous fact is currently taking precedence, and I'm going to let it - I asked for it - and return to you with the more traditional arty humhahs once everything's settled down. So, Jonah thoughts next for everyone reading this. And thanks to all who came to the show. Particularly those who hated it. You know who you are. And I love you...

and I shall do better...  

What NONO What

 

Blimey is that the time?

Three in the morning. Um - Ah. Look. I found these:

 

I can't stay. Sorry. I shouldn't even be here. 

Look! I did those when I was four! How cool!

If I had more time I might argue that the unloading of all this stuff actually relates to a conversation I had in Cambridge today about ideas, the instant of an idea, the storing of that idea, the writing down of it, the changing of it, the losing of it, and cleaning. I've been asked to participate in something called "I shall never be clean". I'll explain. Just not now. "You can't clean anything without making something else dirty," Jeremy pointed out, and I think this project of his is going to be a bit of a clearout after ten years of not making. And those are often very good.

 

Actually as I'm here I might as well clear some things up:

My phone is now working again after a couple of sessions on the radiator, but its session in the coffee has made the joystick stick a little. Joylessly.

The documentary I was voice-overing yesterday for the SciFi channel turned out to be about "Heroes", and not Mary Shelley or string theory, which I'd sort of guessed really. And it turned out I'd been hired by Steve Hore who made that show-reel where I get born. Surprise. Lovely.

It's pronounced "George Ta-KAY" apparently. Not Takeye.

Laurence and Gus had their final table-read today, which I couldn't make (Cambridge, see above) and having totally failed to make good on a promise (at least to myself) of an epic sketch concerning Elizabethan conjuror (read "map-reader") Dr. John Dee and his earless, klepto stooge Ned Kelly, I submitted instead some last-minute stuff that was old and weak and listlessly tinkered with at five in the morning WHICH IT IS NOW AS WELL!!!...

NO!!!

HOW CAN IT BE FIVE?!?!? Hhhhh...

Anyway - thereby ends with a snivel and a whimper an assignment that up until that dawning has been all grins and zeal.

Anyway.

And Shunt are giving me everything I ask for and more regarding "Jonah". Which is incredibly exciting but does mean I have to get some work done now. Or maybe fume with hubris and balls this up as well. I see Chris Goode (see past strands and tangents) has kindly posted the following plug on his blog, which has made me laugh and will have to make do in lieu of a press release. Now GOOD NIGHT. NIGHT. GOOD NIGHT.

"This revival might be garbage, who knows, but the several times I saw it at CPT, it frightened and baffled and upset me and made me laugh, all in ways that I normally associate only with getting out of the bath in a heavily mirrored room. It is ruthlessly inventive, acutely painful and, oh, stuff. It is also very titillatingly close to this new invention of mine called theatre."

 

Brittle Sticky Liquid Issues

No photos for a while I'm afraid, as I dropped my phone into some coffee this morning heading out onto the floor of the Dungeons and all I can get it to do now is either vibrate or electrocute me, I'm not quite sure which it is. I was at a party the night before in Hammersmith. It was very good indeed but left me lolloping quite a bit. Laurence and Gus were there and it turned out that the Abraham and Isaac sketch I'd written for them had been recorded after all, nothing was censored, so hooray. That'll teach me. Apparently it's fine with Radio 4 listeners to pick holes in the OLD Testament as long as you're not making fun of Jesus. "And," as Laurence points out "the appearance of God automatically makes everything cartoony".

Morgan meanwhile, Morgan from next door, he has been censored. His hoardings-based portrait of Da Vinci with the lobster claws, and the slogan "THE WORLD NEEDS A PAINTBRUSH AND A HUG" have now been - a little ironically - painted over by the builders. In their place can now be seen a number of large colourless slabs that make the Tate's Rothko room look like the Wide Awake Club. Or they did until Morgan joined them up to form a large, grey smiley face.

And speaking of large, grey smiley faces I've started searching for "latex masks" on ebay. I do recommend it. There's a cornucopia of cheap, weird heads out there. I was sourcing materials for Jonah Non Grata because the "Constipation" mask I used to wear to play a cherub is now pretty much unusable. I used to fill it with Greek Yoghurt so my head would be good and gooey for the scene inside the whale, but now it's gone brittle and cracks. And electrocutes you. Okay it doesn't but I don't really understand latex and they don't make that mask any more, so I'll probably have to find a new face for the cherub. And here's a very small sample of the current ebay front-runners. See?

Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty (A New Year's Thinky Bin Clear-out)

 Hooh! Sorry about the absence. You want a piece of me? Okay here we go. Here's Herne Hill at five in the morning. I can't now remember why I went out. Yes I can. I'd slept in late after the last night of the pantomime and wanted some air. The fog was a bonus actually. I wasn't the only silhouette knocking around at that hour but, kid, I was monarch of all I surveyed:

And here's where I did my Christmas shopping the following morning:

 

And here's how I got there:

 

You couldn't see further than the length of a plane that day (a unit of measurement I was entertaining because I had to fly to France the next day). I walked blindly but with grace through the gates of Greenwich park, found an incline and made my way up to the observatory where I pottered cap in hand about the space exhibits freshly reminded of how little I really knew about the old place... I know less about space now than I would if I were five. For example there are officially NOT nine planets now: a five-year-old will know this but it's not what I was taught. And while I'm finally big enough to make my presence felt at the interactive exhibits I'm now too big to get my knees under the desk. So I just walk on, past all the education, and have a go on the meteorite instead. That is, I touch it. "This is the oldest object you will ever touch!" says the sign. So it's even older than the Earth. There is of course absolutely no way of being able to tell this by just touching it however, an obvious but still disappointing reality.

Happy New Year by the way. I hope anyone reading this is well and rested and has cleared up a bit rather than just burning a bit of incense like God's going to decide to come down and do the hoovering. All four of us in the house have beards now. A pit was dug in the garden for New Year's Eve, fifteen pits'orth of found firewood stacked beneath the fairy lights, didgeridoos and twelve-string guitars brought out, friends invited and, unlike the last time we tried this, nobody got branded. I'd popped up to my room quite early on, intent on putting this post to bed in time for my New Year's resolution (at least one post every two days, regardless of whether or not I have anything to say: the whole point of this blog was to wring some kind of thinking out of me) and accidentally went to bed. Well I'd had a busy day: By noon I had already stocked up on smoked salmon, run a bath, finished "The Drowned and the Saved" and impulse-bought four videos from Barnado's for 95p (an anachronistic indulgence that included Derek Jarman's back projections from a Pet Sop Boys' tour, and two episodes of this:

 

 

 

- the proto-Booshian, secret-identity-rockstar classic "Jem" whose opening song's manhole-facilitated hijacking by the Misfits kicks every ounce as much ass as I remember). I was woken in time for midnight though by Jamie banging on a steel drum with a cane (someone clearly knew that drum was going to come in handy when they dumped it in the corridor nine months ago) and even though we were going by the kitchen clock which is set four minutes early so that people don't miss their trains which I've never really understood, it was an exemplary social gathering. Glamour and glitter. Fashion and fame.

 

Hooh! continued: I actually started this post back in Languedoc, where I spent Christmas with the parents, where the birdseed is daily replenished, where the air is clear and the land quite flat, but not so flat you can't pop up a ridge to catch sight of the snow on the Pyrenees (so as my Dad pointed out we had snow for Christmas). And I gave my Dad a book of morally fortifying Magic Lantern slides. Here's one:

 

Here, rather shockingly, is the next (it was a simpler time):
 

And Santa gave me "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, which I'm tucking into now and finding as problematic as expected (see Jun 19: "Heaven's full of Machines" passim, won't you). It really is a very long-winded and patronizing piece of writing. And I can't agree that the question "Does God exist?" is scientifically important (see Sep 21: "Qui Makey Ipsum Makeyman?" or whatever it was called, passeeeem). I don't believe in God, mine is a vast and Godless Universe and that's fine, but (or maybe "therefore") I can't conceive how his existence might change what scientists should investigate, how they should investigate it, or how any of us should behave towards each other? Also… as nasty, wretched and wrong as atheism's enemies are I can't agree with Dawkins that religion is my "enemy" either, any more than I can agree that sculpture is my "enemy", or football. Religion is a form of assembly. It's a subject for art, it's a medium. Where does the imagination fit into all this? Somewhere surely, and at the risk of sounding quisling, the question "GIVEN that God clearly doesn't exist, WHY do people believe in him?" is probably a lot more interesting than Dawkins' answer "Because they haven't grown out of it" suggests, although I can agree that people should be given every opportunity to quit (which is what this book purports to give, so good on it I suppose). The numerous examples he cites of institutional oppression meted out to the opponents of hokum are unbelievably depressing – and I'm only a hundred pages in - but what do they prove? Clive James once wrote that a ban on televised beauty contests would do nothing to stop thick ladies wanting to turn up on the telly in their bikinis. He was spot on, and I rather feel the same way about religion and tribal violence... Anyway the real problem I have with the book is its tone, and it's not a superficial problem. As I mentioned earlier I'd just been lent "The Drowned and the Saved" by Primo Levi and – I wasn't actually lent it by Primo Levi, sorry... – and baffling as religious belief is, Levi's writing rings out with insight into a subject no less baffling as the direct result it seems to me of the tone he feels obliged to adopt. At no point do you feel he's writing to give anyone an erection. His tone is angry but not insulting, impartial but not agnostic, respectful but unwavering, and it's this tone that's missing from Dawkins. That's all I'm asking for really, insight. Sound like a scientist. Surprise me. As I said though I'm only a hundred pages in. 

 

And I should probably declare a couple of interests as well, in the spirit of looking back:

I once fell in love with a woman who told me she spoke to God. And I don't believe in God but I didn't believe she was lying and I didn't believe she was wrong. No, I quite happily entertained two completely incompatible cosmic attitudes, and that decision seemed at the time the closest I've ever come to Being In Love: She had her cosmos, I had mine, an attitude that would probably strike Dawkins as detestable intellectual cowardice, but Love is an act of faith as I've written before (I can't agree with the idea that falling in love and monogamy are Darwinian chemical imperatives... if they were everyone would live happily ever after and the Earth would shine like the sun). Love is unprovable. That's why weddings normally happen in churches, and are normally frightening. And why this woman's religion made it so much easier for me to go "Right, I love her", although my atheism made it so impossible for her (let's say... let's just say that was the reason). It's also why I began to find going to weddings so hard.

Then there was that sketch I wrote for Laurence and Gus in a lunch break a couple of weeks back (I've never written a sketch so quickly... I'm sure that's a good sign) the sketch about Abraham and Isaac that opened with "And on the seventh day God rested. And on the eighth day, God rested. And on the ninth day, God rested, and so he basically rested, and then drowned everyone and invented the rainbow. And then rested," a sketch that was pretty clearly not going to be recorded, although it went down very well at the read-through. Actually I should check up on that. I couldn't make the last recording as I was doing the pantomime (It was based on Pride and Prejudice, I was the baddie, the second time in two months I've been asked to wear green tights). I should also state that it's only the commission to write for Laurence and Gus that got me turning this stuff out in the first place, but if it hasn't been recorded then hooray, I can proudly count myself among the Censored Satirists. I mean it was a funny sketch. I mean she did love me. It's just… you know, religion.

Michael's wedding was lovely though. That's what I said I'd write about in this post, didn't I. The reception was a month ago now and took place in a huge brick hall in Wapping that had once been responsible, so I was told, for powering every hydraulic theatre curtain in the West end. Its floor was covered with leaves and bare trees had been installed in a downstairs chamber where flamenco dancers served mulled wine. What can I say about it? It was a month ago. It was not frightening. I was sat with friends. We danced. It was hilarious.

And I'll leave you, in the spirit of looking forward, with a New Year's message from the celebrated, short-sleeved turkeyperson Arthur C. Clarke. I found this pinned to a board in the Carnegie Library. Enjoy the sunshine, wherever you are...

"Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life – a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. It will be a history illuminated by the reds and infra-reds of dully glowing stars, visible only to whatever strange beings have adapted to their light. Before them will lie not the billions of years in which we measure eras of our geology, but years to be counted literally in trillions...



"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

Yes. Happy New Year

The single most simple invention 2: TE-DEE

 

 

"The single most simple invention" actually refers to that lengthy, and often mardy, tangent I was involved in over at Chris Goode's blog, the one I threatened at some point to try and summarize, the one I printed out yesterday that ran to more than fifty pages of A4, the one where Chris writes about "trying to reinvent" theatre, and I get shirty and counter with "but it's the single most simple invention known to man" thinking I'm quoting "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", only it turns out I'm not, because the passage I was actually thinking of goes like this:

""What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford? "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
"Alright, Mr Wiseguy, you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

... and finally, after two weeks of fractious debate over the nature and definition of fiction, testimony, irony, God, and cats, the tangent ends, as I said, quite cheerily, with me going "this is what comedians do, and it's certainly not candour" and then Chris going "Stand-up comics, yes, YES", and then Chris going "the perfect mix of prepared material, technical facility, responsiveness, interaction, topicality, entertainment, liveness", and finally "All we have to do then is: replace the single figure with a group, preferably; lose the microphone; lose the raised stage; lose the necessity of 'being funny'. But heighten and intensify the sense of entertainment... I can see why you would want a drink in your hand."
So, sort of like I said, simple. 

 

And now I'm putting the tangent down, and I'm walking away from the tangent. I just thought I'd bung a record of it up here on the blog, because it's all stuff I've been thinking about in relation to the now-upcoming Jonah show I'll be doing in January... a show which I've often considered trying to pass off as stand-up, but with longeurs, and hymns. I had a very odd dream about it last night in fact (or rather this morning), where my request to move the audience about and have the run of Shunt's lobby and lift were sniffily rejected on, of all things, ARTISTIC grounds. And then I thought, oh this'll make an interesting post. And then I woke up. They were rejected in my dream by a man called Mischa Twitchin, who I've never known be anything other than totally supportive of anything I've ever done... except maybe the Primo Levi sketch – Maybe that's what the dream was actually about, now I come to think of it. That wee fear. Mischa makes a lot of pieces about literature relating to the Holocaust, and I've just written a sketch where Primo Levi goes "Te-dee!" a lot, and has his sleeping-pill-powered, imploding gin bagpipes confiscated by the landlady. That's real. I'm back to talking about real life now.

 

But clearly I've left the writing of these posts long enough for them to start acting like dreams, in other words, too long, because: A) They do seem quite confused and boring in hindsight, for which I apologize, but also B) You think you've been concentrating on one thing and then you start writing and it turns out something completely different floats to the surface, like a dead polar bear in a film star's pool where you were expecting William Holden. "Oh Primo!" was finally recorded on Monday night, after I called Nigel to say yes. Apparently, the producer recorded himself in the bath for one of the sound effects. Isn't that lovely. It's one of three sketches I have so far got round to writing for Laurence and Gus, and I'm very very pleased with how they've been going. And that's all I'll say for now... I'm not going to complain again about how corridory Broadcasting House is. Although it IS awful. It's awful. Like a check-in desk. You can't take plastic cups in, you've got to pour the BEER BACK INTO THE BOTTLE! And there are only two urinals! That's not liminal! Unless a huge queue of men hanging round the door of the gents – the GENTS! – at half time can be considered liminal because it means "threshold"... So I'll leave it. A friend of mine got married at the weekend. It was lovely. That's what I'll write about next...

 

 P.S. Anyone whose interest was piqued by yesterday's garbled post about David Rosenberg might find a visit to his website http://www.iwake.co.uk/ both useful and illuminating (heh-heh-heh).