Themepunk Roundup: The Scratchblood Comeback

 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.

 

January in Albertopolis

 I thought about going through my unposted photos from earlier in the year, when I wasn't blogging, and putting some up throughout December like I'd do at the end of every month, but looking through January's, it struck me that a more honest recap of the year might be, just to honour that lack of intention. Why catch up? 

 I had also forgotten how widescreen old photos from my good phone were, but here are four.

 I'd never noticed this collonade before. These are from January, and the earlier setting sun had now made it unignorable. I'd been living in Kensington for three months, and had finally decided to revisit the enormous museums along Exhibition Road as a resident, wanting to feel I was exploring my new environment, with an emphasis on the "my" rather than on the "new." I'd known this area all my life.

 

 During Boris Johnson's Mayorship – although he may have had no more to do with this than he had with the Boris Bikes – this road had become a "shared space" to "honour the area's cultural importance," meaning it stopped being a road for cars to drive down, and became instead a pavement for cars to drive down. This apparently resolved "the long stand-off between pedestrians and cars," until ten people got hit by a taxi in 2017. 

 This whole campus is called "Albertopolis" I found out today. It suits it. I keep discovering new ways in which, over a hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen Victoria's husband, the landscape of London still orbits his absence. 

 The railings here weren't always black.

 

Sometimes this blog will just be Japan's Bob McGrath.

 

 The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...

 

 

 

 There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...

 

 Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...

 

 Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.

"We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."

 

Illustrations by E. H. Shepard. That dragonfly is just perfect.

 Ernest Hemingway, who liked big, short statements, famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that." 

 I'm unlikely to change my mind that A. A. Milne's "Winnie-The-Pooh" holds a similar place in British Comedy, and since yesterday's post accidentally went out in the early hours of today, I'll linger a little longer on the story "In which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents". Here's an extact. I had forgotten Owl was in this story. I had also forgotten just how sketchy a character he is. (Does one lick pencils?)

     "It's a nice pot," said Owl, looking at it all round. "Couldn't I give it too? From both of us?"

     "No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan. Now I'll just wash it first, and then you can write on it."

     Well, he washed the pot out, and dried it, while Owl licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell "birthday."

    "Can you read, Pooh?" he asked a little anxiously. "There's a notice about knocking and ringing outside my door, which Christopher Robin wrote. Could you read it?"

     "Christopher Robin told me what it said, and then I could." 

     "Well, I'll tell you what this says, and then you'll be able to."

     So Owl wrote... and this is what he wrote:

HIPY PAPY BTHUTHTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDAY.

Pooh looked on admiringly.

 If the Hundred Acre Wood is Dunder Mifflin, Owl is its Creed. And like Dunder Mifflin, or Michael & Eagle Lettings, or the Muppets, the company of Pooh have little in common; they're a team, not a gang – and like Charlie Brown, every character is an absolute mood. 

 I had also forgotten that this story gave us one of Jim Henson's favourite songs, "Cottleston Pie". Here it is, performed by another bear.

 

Artists Honour the Supreme Purveyor of the New Baboonist-Chainsaw Tendency

 

chosen by Robin Smith

 

 Pictures from a burnt book taken with a broken phone, to honour an artist who, more than any other, helped me realise my place was among monsters. The book is the 1988 2000AD annual – published in 1987 – and the pictures are from a feature asking its creative team of "droids" to choose their favourite covers from previous year. Of the eighteen images chosen, six are by Kevin O'Neill. Hyperbole is the comic book's stock-in-trade, but "thrill power" was a real thing, and O'Neill drew covers you just really wanted to show people, like something inexplicable found under a hedge or a world opening up in your satchel. Sorry for these poor reproductions but maybe new-comers shouldn't see these too clearly...

 

 

 

chosen by Glenn Fabry

 

chosen by Brendan McCarthy

 

 

chosen by Pat Mills

 

 chosen by Cam Kennedy

 

chosen by Bryan Talbot

 

 And Kevin O'Neill operated on my brain. Thanks, Kevin, and I'm deeply sorry you left today.  

 2000AD honours him here.

Bigcoin

 "Wow!" indeed, thumbnail. Vic Stefanu takes us on a brief tour of the Micronesian Bankvaults of Yap, whose ancient limestone currency  – (is "ancient currency" an oxyoron?) –gets referenced in Extra Credits' history of paper money, which we've all watched in preparation for The City of London's Golden Key which takes place tomorrow, Saturday.

 

 

 Come along during the day if you can. Its all free, and I've finally found out which route we're at the end of: "Share Mile", details here. I'll be in kennels with the brilliant Julia "Legs" Masli and Sachi "Bums" Kimura, so I'll definitely be having fun and yes, apparently the counting rooms were called kennels. 

 Speaking of fun...

 

 

 I don't know, I didn't want to let his passing go unremarked on here, but can any clip truly contain Robbie Coltrane? I barely had a moment to enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng getting fired before I heard the news. Every time I see him closing that plane door as an unpseaking extra in Flash Gordon I think, and then you go on to do everything. A giant Yappian coin of the acting world. Bye bye, big man.

 

 

one more clip

"This episode takes place on Monday 19th September 2022."

(Photo by Azqueta Arts)

 

 ANNOUNCEMENT: Guys, I can't say too much, but you MIGHT want to tune into BBC1 tonight at 7:30 to watch– Hang on, let me check... 

 Oh, of course. Yep. 

 Okay. 

 Well, enjoy "Paddington 2", nation. It's what she would have... 

 (So when will it be–? Uhhhh...)

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."

 

Horniman, Presepe, Gorgon and Queue

 Today I returned to Sydenham Hill. 

 Here's a video. See if you can find the white triangle to press to make it play...

 

 

 Bella (real name unknown – originator of the "Woodlouse or Moth?" round) had invited me the Horniman Museum, to be among butterflies.

 I am an idiot for never having been in a butterfly house before.

 The pyschedelic antiquarian decadence of these animals' final act upstages any flame, and made me want to redecorate. 

 I also loved the remains of a "gorgon's-head brittlestar" in the Horniman proper, and took a picture to celebrate Natalie Haynes' new book.

 

 Elsewhere, in the newly re-de-othered World Gallery, an Italian nativity scene – or presepe – showcased foot-high likenesses of the late Queen flanked by Michael Jackson and Silvio Berlusconi...

 

 It was getting quite cold by the time we took the train to Blackfriars to see The Queue. After all, it was there.

 I'd been told it moved fast, but I was still surprised how fast, and genuinely envied those in line. I would have loved to know what it was like to be in a queue that fast. Maybe not for the full twenty hours, but I couldn't say when the excitement would wear off.

 However nothing about it struck me as "uniquely British", apart from the accents. Isn't lying in state quite an international thing? Don't they all have queues? Does this not happen at Mecca? I wonder if what's actually uniquely British is mistaking community spirit for patriotism. Probably not even that. Parliament Square was closed to traffic. As people had reported, a lot of "just being there together" was happening, which is what I like to think should happen in a public space. I love a good pedestrianisation.

 

"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!

Peter Brook's Soft Pink Pincers

 Another white box: Sally Jacobs' hugely influential set for Peter Brook's magic-redefining production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in which my Dad played Puck. That's him stage right, in the yellow Chinese Circus bloomers and blue skullcap, entering on stilts. He also rode a trapeze and spun plates. Mum was a dresser on the show, having worked for a while at an actual circus, and that's how they met. All this was before my time of course, but as a child I still found something strangely magical about squash courts. Here's some footage.

 

 

 The Dream stayed with Dad, who always described Peter Brook as a ghost on his shoulder. Brook never shared Dad's love of Gilbert and Sullivan, for example. "Tacky." When he was just twenty-six, Dad wrote a beautiful essay about working with him which Alan Cox dug out and to sent to me the day Brook died, in July, the same month as David Warner. This is another belated In Memoriam then (and there may be a third, in which case this will be a two-parter, but also there may not). You'll notice the actor's account of the rehearsal room here differs a bit from the director's:

  "Unseen by us, Peter carefully prepared the ground for these 'revelations'... Peter could drive us to distraction by his demands for an incease in our self-awareness. He would sit down with us and shake his head in disbelief that we could have gone so far forward in one direction while taking so many steps back in another..."

 And then Dad goes on to explain how he escaped, and where he got the idea for the stilts. Click to enlarge.

David Warner's Juliet, and other dirt

 

 

A trip to Marx's grave

 

 I used to watch "Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment" all the time when I was at school. Of all the fictional, whimsical pests the sixties had thrown up, David Warner's Morgan was the only one I wanted to share a cup of tea with. He didn't seem to have that rockstar ego. He seemed like a listener. It made sense that my parents said he was the Hamlet of his generation. A lot of people said that. It was only when Warner died in July that I found out my old neighbout turned housemate Morgan had been named after him, also that I was now living on exactly the same slopes of Notting Hill where the film had been set – have I said I've moved to Notting Hill? 

 I can't find any way of seeing his Hamlet now, but here are some photos taken by Lord Snowdon which, according to the captions, show the actor in character. Researching the original production I can't find any confirmation, but I hope the captions are right. Look at him enjoying himself...

 

 Once I'd left school I actually got to share a cup of tea with David Warner. I was in Hollywood for my gap year, and he knew my Dad because they'd been in the Royal Shakespeare Company together back in the sixties. He was a gentle giant. Later, when he would come to London, he and Dad would reminisce about the night he tried to jump out of a window because he thought he'd be caught by a cloud. It was the first time I'd ever heard the word "bi-polar", encunciated by David with arms oustretched in a shrug as wide as I was tall. Over tea in Los Angeles, I asked him why he'd stopped working with the RSC and he explained that they'd wanted to cast him as Romeo, and he said he'd only do it if he could choose his Juliet, so they fired him. 

 He'd asked for Frances de la Tour. 

 David and Dad worked together again years later, on a television production of "Love's Labours Lost" that I rewatched the night he died. I posted a few clips on instagram, because I think they're just gorgeous together. Here's one...

 

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A post shared by Simon Kane (@slepkane)

 

 So, yes, now the death of Her Majesty has brought me back to the blog, I thought I'd catch up on my old In Memoriams. And having moved, I'm also sorting through my boxes once again. I found this: the fax David Warner sent me when I came to play Hamlet myself at University. Director Simon Godwin's face was a picture. David said he had no advice, but I took it anyway.

 

Gracious

 Who says a circle has no end? Phil Davis' twitter account put it well: "She did what she was supposed to do." I always thought it would be David Attenborough who went first, but no, Churchill's boss has finally left us. Not all the bus shelters in Notting Hill bear the news yet. "Postpone" is probably the wrong word to use here in retrospect, and "rest":

 

 And maybe noboby was looking at their phone more than normal as I walked home through Soho, maybe I was just noticing it more. I learnt of the news myself from the definitive "1926 - 2022" instagram post on my phone at about seven in the evening just outside Forbidden Planet, but people had been spending all day reminiscing about her already online, so I felt more of an "Oh, right." than an "Oh no!" And the drinks I walked past felt like drinks-after-a-show kind of drinks. Friday kind of drinks. Life definitely goes on. Today's proven that, at least.

 I didn't hear anyone say "God Save the King" outside the Crown. The mood outside all the pubs, and in the pub above which I write this – have I mentioned, I live above a pub now? – seems more one of "Fair play, who can blame her?" But it's been raining a lot, of course, after the drought, of course, and she'd just appointed a new Worst Prime Minister, of course, so maybe everyone's had their fill of the unthinkable and just wants to kick a ball around. Or maybe that's just me.

 Susy and I went to visit our Aunty June yesterday, in her new care home in Henley. Susy visits her a lot. I love Susy. June's dealing with her sudden dementia incredibly well I think, without distress, finding her way around it like a new phone that doesn't do what the old one did. There's nothing doddery about her condition. Some very specific information simply doesn't take. Every ten minutes or so I just had to reintroduce myself, and explain I wasn't married to my sister. Not "remind" June. That information had gone. Meet her, I suppose. And I like meeting people. "And what do you do?" She can get through a book perfectly well too, she told me, whoever I was. June's not bored. 

 So there's that. The giant illuminated strawberries on the Coronet fly at half mast. And Mum and Dad arrive from France tonight, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary back here in the United Kingdom. I hope they're okay. "Kingdom". I've never had a king before. I wonder if that will take. I wonder what money will look like. Oh! I was going to send her a link to my youtube Shakespeares, I think she might have enjoyed them. The Queen, I mean. What made me think of that? I wonder what she listened to. I wonder if she ever heard me. 

 

A brilliantly unfortunate front page from the Mirror.

Lighting Candles in the Cloud

 Monday was shrouded in mist, or cloud (I don't know how high up we are, here in Languedoc). Sat around Mum's computer on three chairs, we attended her brother Francis' funeral online, then drove carefully to the abbey in the next village, to light a candle for him. 

 

  The abbey's been here less time than Mum and Dad, only completed in 2018. I don't know who designs sanctuaries these days, but they understood the assignment. The small chapel we were taken to by the monk, where the candles were lit, was bright with stained glass, even in this weather, but the palette of the surrounding cloisters is far calmer, almost prehistoric, the colour of water and bone. And the windows of the main church aren't stained, but grooved like the sand in a karesansui garden, which my camera doesn't pick up.

 

 The earliest Christmas I remember, I was six or seven: I received a robot that broadcast a panorama of Saturn across its chest and fired missiles from its forehead (this one, in fact), and a beautifully illiminated boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I still own. I remember Mum conveying the excitement with which she and her brothers and sister would look forward to the next story coming out, but I'm only now realising the more personal connection: that its author had actually taught one of them. Apparently, C.S. Lewis considered Francis "the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met." I loved that box, but it would be decades before I got beyond The Horse and His Boy, although I still remember, vividly, its description of how surpisingly damp and grey it is to be inside a cloud. 

 Francis' service, if you wish, can be viewed here.