And here's what it looks like once you're sat down. This was taken an hour before we opened on Tuesday – a happy event, although I was unusually conscious of my spittle in the spotlight during my belter. Ellis and Claire, far right, have just spotted a cat.
Interrupting the blog silence to repost – almost belatedly (we open tonight) - the following message from Magnitsky the Musical's award-wining whimsyist Robbie Hudson (pictured above):
It’s the end of the world and it will be hilarious. The Official
Mighty Fin will have a 20th birthday next year. And so this year: Listen & Often, in association with TallTales, proudly presents:
ROBOTS!
by Robert Hudson and Susannah Pearse
It’s a rehearsed reading of a new comic musical for Radio 4. In other
news, Radio 3, which is focused on the classics, has commissioned a new
version of The Mighty Fin’s 2019 smash hit, Hall of Mirrors. Both these shows are recording in January, which means it’s impossible to do a fully-produced show now. But ROBOTS! will
be a joyful return to Waterloo’s delightful and incredibly convenient
Network Theatre (Surprising Tunnel! Jolly Bar! Bins!) and Charles
and the Technical Unit will do a special effect but they won’t tell us
what it is yet.
Seriously, though, we have really missed live theatre, this will be as
much fun as we can possibly make it, and it will be lovely to see you.
Book tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk/listenandoften. See you there.
Will we? Dare you?
L to R: Me (redhead), Robbie, (not), Alexa Lamont (redhead), Musical
Director Harry Sever (redhead), Ianthe Cox-Willmott (redhead), Harry
again.
The Network Theatre is underneath Waterloo Station, down a tunnel, beyond the smells, and very pleasant. You can come tonight, Thursday or Friday. The special effect might be a zipwire. The night promises to be smart and silly (we're wearing shirts and doing voices) and the apocalypse-spanning songs, by Susannah Pearse, are typically astonishing – I love singing Sue's stuff at Christmas. The source material is Karel Čapek's play "Rossum's Universal Robots" – the source of the word "robot" and I think I'm playing the guy on the left. Olé!
I found the little wall he had a sit down on after interviewing that doctor. It's even littler now:
I was inspired by No Two The Sameto stroll to Pimlico this evening, retrace the faltering steps of Ian Nairn, and check out the housing estates:
The Churchill Estate still seemed to be working nicely. The Mighty Fin used to rehearse musicals here, in the hall on the corner, but I'd never before ventured beyond these bollards:
There was a lot more green than estates are given credit for. Brutalism doesn't have to look shit when it rains. There are cobbles once you leave the road, and bricks, and bark, and all were gleaming tonight:
By the time I got to the Lillington Estate, it was darker:
It's on Vauxhall Bridge Road, where I used to go to school, so, again, an area I should have been familiar with, but I'd never ventured into:
It's more labyrinthine than the Churchill Estate, which is a hard quality to capture on camera, especially if the light's poor. I found a "sensory garden" but, again, my photo didn't really do it justice, so this isn't it:
And today I discovered that the term Brutalism comes from the French term for concrete: Bréton brut, so has absolutely nothing to do with brutality, which makes sense to me, but is unfortunate. This sign says "Caution, Bees":
These estates' biggest mistake is probably just believing the earth beneath them would stay still, which is why the cracks appear and the paving stones go wobbly. But it's naivety rather than neglect and, I think, the opposite of brutal.
And it was a nice day for it. But now I need a sit down.
Something about the light on Hackney Marshes reminds me of Seurat. I'd walked here from Camden, invited to a picnic, and for the first time in four months spoke with strangers. There were teachers and doctors and musicians, one of whom pointed out to me that I wasn't wearing walking shoes, which is something to consider. It was midnight by the time I got home.
Before I headed home though, I took a detour up the Lea, past the filter beds, to visit what I think must have been the marsh office described by Ken Campbell in The Furtive Nudist. Here he'd sit beneath a fishing umbrella, pockets stuffed with stationery, and await "a commission". The last time I came here was in 2016 just after the first recording of Time Spanner, possibly also awaiting a commission.
Happily this detour also took me past a friend, Mischa from shunt who was standing at the bend in the river. I wasn't expecting to bump into him, or anyone. It's nice out, I suppose is the moral, but I know nothing's changed. I wore a mask. But also I showed my face.
I notice that the brilliant crappytaxidermy.com hasn't been updated since 2015. But then I only dipped into it now because today's post features Anna Savory's taxidermy sitcom Stuff And Nonsense, which I got to be in thanks to a four-way Squadcast recording whose results turned out considerably better pieced together. Congrats to all respons.
S&N appeared on Friday as part of Robbie Hudson's deft and generous, online, weekdaily reimagining under lockdown of "Tall Tales", a previously every-other-monthly presentation above a pub in Kilburn, hosted by Robbie, of knowingly Radio 4-ish material before a friendly audience (and the first stop for most of John Finnemore's episode-ending "Since You Ask Me"'s). Like crappytaxidermy.com all episodes are worth a visit, but particularly those featuring Robbie's News From Kilburn stories, rich fiction perfectly realised as natter. I'm a Stuff and Nonsense virgin myself, but joining me for the recording were its "Tall Tale" stalwarts: Hugh, Tom, Shim and Anna the author. Tom and Shim you'll know if you came to An Execution: By Invitation Only, and Tom of course I know from - quickly doing the maths - the last thrity-two years of my life wait what?
How's
everyone doing? Here's polyamorous ornithologist, and sub-aquatic garden
enthusiast, Charles William Beebe* in his "bathysphere", seconds before
being joined in its four-foot span by its equally lanky designer Otis Barton, to embark together upon an unprecedented, two-mile dive off the coast of Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, and report back to fellow bathynaut Gloria Hollister, and illustrator Else Bostelmann, humanity's first ever sightings of in situ underwater bioluminescence:
Basically "bathynauts" were astronauts, but steampunk, and with open marriages and actual aliens. Here's silent footage of one of their later expeditions (with a bunch of annoying pop-ups over the fish images):
And here's an excellent image of an angler fish Beebe spotted off Port-au-Prince in 1927, I guess as a result of dredging, because he was only doing helmet dives back then (source here):
And most importantly, here is how I first heard of all this, the second episode of Royal Museum Greenwich's utterly fascinating live stream. To quote guest Jon Copley: "more than half the world is covered by water that's more than two miles deep... it's the reality of most of the surface of our planet." So the Earth is Ocean. And here's a more recent find from the hot springs in the deep Antarctic, BILLIONS OF CRABS:
In addition to the above sources, here's Beebe's wikipedia entry, containing a wonderfully comprehensive and quite personal biography of the man (*Robbie Hudson, if you're reading this, I assume you know about this guy, I mean he seems entirely up your street) and here's a contemporary newspaper splurge. And here's today's Defoe:
I am seriously considering a review of the two-hundred VHS tapes I keep in the cupboard to replace Frankenstein Wednesdays. I started on tape #1 last night, containing Flash Gordon, The Man With Two Brains and The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition (or as my Dad put it, the version where they put all the acting). It's interesting to note that Hobbiton, supposedly the most backward, unchanging community in Tolkein's world, appears to be centuries ahead in its influences of the Medieval-inspired civilisations surrounding it. Boom! Blog done. I'd also been considering blogging about Ming's daughter Princess Aura for a while: She seems to have been to Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond what Satan was to Milton: entirely and unintentionally heroic.
Boom! Another blog. Really though today's post is all about flagging up some of the beautiful ways others have been using their time. The magnificent Andy Stanton, for example, has been reading aloud all of a Mr. Gum book, so we can finally know for certain what everyone was supposed to sound like:
His fellow Nincompoop, and my own colleague and definite future Dr. Who, Carrie Quinlan, has initiated The Wild Freelancer Blog, and also this:
The writers of Mitchell and Webb's "Remain Indoors" sketches have remained indoors to bring us this episode of Rule Of Three (no way of embedding that, sorry) while Mighty Fin impresario Robbie Hudson has set up his own Emergency Broadcast System over on Spotify, on which I can occassionally be heard bellowing songs. Seasoned Science shut-in Helen Czerski (six weeks aboard a ship studying bubbles at the North Pole is nothing to her - she's like an astronaut if space had bears) joins the ranks of Science Shambles' Stay at Home Festival:
More fictionally, Monster Huntersco-creator Matthew Woodcock has created a surprisingly prescient submarine-based thriller for Definitely Human calledDown, its presience almost exactly matching that of Avenue 5, if anyone's seen that. No spoilers. Avenue 5's shuttle pilot John Finnemore meanwhile, perhaps most heroically of all, has gone and shaved his beard just to give us this wonderful thing:
And obviously I've been rebranding procrastination as "social isolation" from pretty much ever since this blog went daily last Christmas (April the first will be the hundredth straight post) but, Oo! My second pilot to Time Spanner, The Dan in the High Castle, is being repeated on Radio 4 tomorrow if anyone fancies a huddle. Huge thanks and love to all these makers and partakers. Be well, everyone.
I found this on my phone from 2018. I also note that I wrote next to nothing in 2019. And now in 2020 every
second post on F*c*book is a link to the Australian fundraiser: "Please help any way you can. This is terrifying", but this isn't F*c*book, so here are some happinesses. Firstly:
Watching Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" is like watching the Beatles.
Anyone wanting to spend two hours in a room full of kindness should find
a screening. Secondly:
Robbie Hudson wrote the first show in which I appeared with John
Finnemore "Frankenstein and the Sharks of Doom", a Mighty Fin Musical
with songs by Susannah Pearse. The first time I performed John's
writing was another Mighty Fin Musical with songs by Susannah
Pearse "Diary
of a Nobody", which was also the first time I worked with Carrie Quinlan.
Mighty Fin Musicals are excellent amateur dramatics is what I'm trying
to prove here, and "Farm" was the Mighty Fin's first, and it's being staged
again this week with all proceeds going to charity as is the point of
Mighty Fin. Tickets are on sale here and other Mighty Fin merch is here. Robbie also characteristically co-wrote with Johnny Flynn a folk musical about the Magnitsky act which aired last night, and can be heard here. Thirdly:
I was hoping to be in "Farm" myself, but another happiness occured and I was asked to play an excellent role in an excellent TV show this Friday instead, and I've just received the call sheet and my mate Ned Mond's in the episode too, so this Friday should be amazing. But that's the end of the happiness, and Friday will not be amazing because on Friday my friend Morgan is finally being evicted from Seaview, his home of forty years, and mine for three.
I can only say again what I said in February. He helped save my life and took me in when I needed a place, and there was no one he didn't take in. His work is as generous as he is and I hate this. If I'd ever learnt a second language I'd probably run screaming from the English-speaking world right now, but I never even did that, and I've just landed a telly, speaking of which the photograph of John Logie Baird came from here. Apart from that I have no idea what to say that is both true and happy about this thing I desperately want to say something about. Morgan made a book that's very happy though, and you can buy it here.
Oh, one thing I can say: Morgan shared this video on F*c*book as well, and it reminded me that I don't look at nearly enough cartoons on youtube. I love monsters and it made me very happy - it's very him - and Morgan, if you're reading this I love youse too. Everyone else, have a happy and maybe helpful week. Here's a million monsters:
Holy moly, this is late! As I'm guessing pretty much everyone who reads this blog already knows, series five of "John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme" has gone out now and is (nearly) all up on Her Britannic Majesty's extant iplayer for further study. (Alright, a couple of episodes have dropped out of earshot, but at least I plugged it in advance so I'm not a total idiot). Among other things, this series must have marked the most perilously concentrated period of writing I've seen the great man yet subject himself to, written as it was in Goodies-style trandem with both "Double Acts" and the live show. The fact that everything turned out totally fine is a little worrying: He's not going to try and do all that again this year, is he? (On the Finnemore scale, "fine" of course means "won an award". Yes! "Double Acts" won best sitcom. Elsewhere, Cabin Pressure was nominated for best drama. John's producing so much that his work has literally spilt over into the wrong genres.)
The other thing this series marked was our first recordings post "Souvenir Cabin". A bit off book, with a nod to costume and another nod to banter, it was the first live sketch show I'd ever done, and I loved doing it. By the third of my three nights I felt pretty justified loving doing it too, but I'm not sure what I picked up helped me in Series 5. I'm talking about the grunting. I'm talking about the weird unscripted grunting before you even realise my character's in the scene. I don't know. No point worrying about your craft now, sunshine. Plough on...
What else? Our gallant Producer Ed did some behind-the-scene production notes. I'll do that then. Here then are my own solipsistic titbits.
Tidbits?
Episode 1. Okay you can't hear the episode now, but... I'd say by the time Episode 1 aired there was still about a third of
the series as finally broadcast yet to be written. Exciting. Unrelatedly, when I first saw John perform the final story, about crossing the Atlantic on a
horse that thought it was a cat, it didn't have that ending – the
ending where the day is saved by the horse landing on its feet – you know, the
punchline you might have thought was the whole point of including a horse that thought it was a cat. No, he'd simply decided to include a horse that thought it was a
cat and see where it went. Come on, that's fascinating! Another tiddlebiscuit: I think "School Slogan" marks the only time
Margaret and I have turned up to a sketch accidentally wearing the same
accent. Incidentally, Jason Hazely turned up to play the piano for this one, having just learnt that six out of the top ten non-fiction books for that week were the Ladybirds he'd co-authored with Joel Morris. By Christmas it would be eight. He looked terrified. I remember bumping into Joel on the day of a tube strike back in Summer, when the two of them were just getting started: They do a Christmas book every year, and this year decided to have a proper think about which publisher they'd really like to write for. Joel was so happy showing me the caption for the dog rack. The secret of comedy is love. Timing's just a symptom. I've changed the subject. Anyway, I love Jason and was very happy to do stuff in front of and with him.
Here him in the actual Ladybird archive
Episode 2. For some reason, when playing the voice in John's head I found it very hard not to think "How would Rob Webb play this?" I'm not saying I could guess the answer, or that I would think it ethical to act upon it if I could. I'm just saying... I'm just saying. Similarly, I first encountered the Wrong Friend sketch rehearsing "Souvenir Cabin" with John and his comedy partner of yore mumKevin Baker. Kevin was unmatchably hilarious in this role. I tried to match him regardless, which is why I am shouting here more than acting.
Episode 3. Oh, Ed hasn't done any notes for this. I remember we went to see "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" on John's birthday – the
one where Mark Strong hits a burning owl mid-flight with a cane (back
when the circus really was a circus). The spy story here, set in a zoo which is actually not a spy story at all, was first performed in "Souvenir Cabin". It was here that I learnt to keep schtum through a laugh and hold out for a second wave, like some BMX skillz. Obviously though, stillness doesn't show up on radio. It's like the grunting. Plough on. What else? I don't think Jurassic Park 3 is a worse movie than Jurassic Park 2.
Episode 4. We do a thing called Silly Voices Day: a closed-plan, blue-sky, coffee-and-biscuits ideas ramble that helps give John something to write for, which is where "Kirates" came from. The first time we tried out "Word To The Wise" at the Canal Cafe I could barely get through the sketch with what the Americans call "breaking". In retrospect I think it helped. By the time of the recording, I could rattle right through them, and I wish I hadn't. "Kirates", of course, is all about not getting through it – the building pressure that corpsing (no pun intended) can provide is written in. (To see what the real thing can add to a sketch, watch the wave after wave Rachel Dratch catches with the line "I can't have children" below.)
Episode 5. Silly Voices Day probably paid for itself with just this episode, which I adore. "Schmoogle" came from that, as well as pretty much everything Lawry suggests here. That extra recording in January really paid for itself too: John had had a month off (on the Finnemore scale of course, "a month off" means "a month spent writing just the one thing") and returned carrying gold, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, a phrase I realise is a lot easier to imagine applied to John than most other humans.
Episode 6. I'm not saying you can't act and shout at the same time. What I find oddest about the self-proclaimed "Most Self-Indulgent Sketch In The World" is just how much I enjoyed playing someone not enjoying playing someone playing themself. It's all a bit...
The story about putting Queen Victoria's brain in a robot was apparently inspired by this film, and the robot hedgehog itself was inspired by a remote-controlled hedgehog from the charity Christmas cabaret in which this story had its first performance. (Go, Mighty Fin!)
(Before I deliver my final tildaswintonbids: if anyone is wondering
if Lawry Lewin, Carrie Quinlan, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Sue Pearse and
Ed Morrish are not just brilliant at their jobs but also fun and kind, they
are.)
Final tin lid: When I sang "For he's a jolly good fellow" to John as the train manager, we had to retake the whole thing because the audience joined in.
Well, "Exciting Space Adventures" are all well and good, but what have you been up to?
What do you mean? Who are you?
You did another series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, didn't you?
Oh! Yes! Yeah, but I assumed anyone who read this blog would already know about –
Can that still be heard?
Yes. Absolutely. It's up on, erm – Oh, some episodes have gone now – but there's still some left on iplayer. Yeah, it's great. So good. Listening back, I feel I could have maybe toned it down for some of the sketches, but –
You're not happy with your work on it?
No no no! It's – Not at all. It was really – Oh, and the Quasimodo sketch is up now on something called Radio 4 in Four.
What? Um... Yeah. It was really fun. I think the original shot of John drawing a beard on his own reflection is maybe more original, and better suited for press, but it –
You'd rather not appear in the publicity?
No! No, it's great! A huge compliment. And if you buy the CD you can see some of our feet. No. I just –
The Boy Who Climbed Out Of His Face – The Build by Floro Azqueta
Okay. You've written a lot about shunt on this blog. Want to talk about it?
Um. Wouldn't you rather hear another Exciting Space Adventure?
Do you not want to talk about theatre any more?
No! No no! Actually there's a few interesting things from the rehearsal I'd like to put up. And I did Ring. Again. And I've done – er, actually I've done a couple of shows, as a part of the London Horror festival. Just one-offs.
Where can we see them?
Um. They're – They've – They happened. Back in October. Yeah! But no, I had great fun doing –
Okay. Where can we see you next?
What? Oh! I'm in a panto. Well, it's more of a musical. A company called the Mighty Fin do one nearly every year or so, and Susannah Pearse writes the songs, and John Finnemore's in it as well, which is actually how we met, and it will be brilliant. Yes. You can get tickets... Oh wait, you can't. It's sold out.
Oh, AND, I've popped my panel show cherry! Yes, I was invited to take part in the excellent transatlantic comedy podcast "International Waters". It went online on Monday, and you can hear me laughing my "dad laugh" on it, and plugging stuff even more poorly than I've just done here. Thank you, and MERRYCHRISTMAS!
