Margaret Cabourn-Smith reflects on her old sketch antics and why you shouldn't use real meat in your shows.
You can listen to the full conversation right here! shows.acast.com/out-of-chara...
#Comedy #Chat #Podcast #Sketch #Character #VictorianTimes #Liver #Magic #EdFringe
As "Jonah" turned from distant credit to looming "to do", I found these and other reminiscences about heading to the Edinburgh Fringe and making "magical worlds... trawling costumes around rooms above pubs" from fellow Finnemoreperson and rising star, Margaret Kaboom-Smith, both inspiring and grounding, and did not in the end use real fish.
Another reminiscence: Margaret, Carrie, Lawry and I independently tour our production of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "Мы" for ten seconds in 2019
Margaret is often inspiring and grounding, and I happen to have also recorded a (far more meandering) Out of Character with Alex Lynch back in 2022, but never got round to putting it up here, so why not listen to both episodes now, and compare our differing accounts of, say, making Series Nine? (I did not think it might be shit.)
Simultaneously. That's right. Listen to them simultaneously. It's like being in the room with us!
I remember enjoying myself a lot during the recording, and also the punishing heat – so today's actually perfect for a repost – I had just got back from "Bleak Expectations" in Newbury,
and had no idea at the time the show would go on to the
West End with an almost completely new cast, nor that Series Nine would indeed be the last series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme but that it would
continue as a series of annual specials, and I'd certainly no idea I would be writing for Mitchell and Webb again in 2025, which I should definitely write about, I know. But I think that's all the loose ends tied up. Our next Silly Voices Day is Friday.
Yet another reminiscence: Mayfly Season, Newbury, 2022. Intense.
Oh! The actor whose name I couldn't remember is James Callis, and Lillian Roth is the actress from "Animal Crackers". And I don't think that sound is me belching and rustling crisps, I think it's feedback. And it's a Newcastle accent Gilbert puts on as Len MacMonotony, not Birmingham, and Engelbert Humperdinck he mentions, not Sacha Distel. In fact, here is some "Gilbert's Fridge". They don't make kids' shows like etc.
The author, entirerly comfortable doing a first-time Northern accent in front of cameras.
I swear, I didn't just come back on this blog to plug stuff, but back in December, I was asked by Jamie Annett – the director of that episode of EastEnders I'd enjoyed being in so much - to take a day off from the Polar Express, to come and film a lovely little scene opposite "Bob Hope" (played by Tony Audenshaw) in Emmerdale. That scene went out tonight, and the internet has gone WIIIIILD...
Okay, that scene's not actually mine, mine is fourteen and a half minutes into episode nine-thousand-and-five, HERE. Personally speaking, I liked Bob. His child's just died, and when I ask him how the guitar playing's going, he finds sweet relief in pretending they're still alive. Another really lovely scene then, and Tony was beautiful, and I remembered to hold my clipboard the right way round, and no-one asked me to drive the van, and the rain held off, and, once the scene was done, we all had Christmas dinner at the top of the hill. Rock on.
Actually, there are a couple of self-tapes in here from August too now – I took down the original cut from youtube before I could blog about it, because I'd suddenly landed a second job and the clip I'd used from that was pretty much the entire role, and I'd signed a Non Disclosure Agreement, and I didn't want to lose the job, which films tomorrow (it's not this one:)
Otherwise, this has been a quiet year, which is why I decided to do something with all these old self-tapes that had been filling it. No complaints, although I do keep wondering about going back to the moustache, but my agents say no. Oh, I've got a voiceover agent now! That other – first – job which I landed from a self-tape, a clip of which opens this video, that was a voice over, but as you can see, I still decided to dig out – almost literally, as both the density and deriliction of my costume wardrobe have turned it quite earthy – my old London Dungeon shirt. So, yes, I got to be in "Good Omens" sort of. Those who can and who have not yet enjoyed John Finnemore's peerless take on the Book of Job in episode 2 are strongly recommended to do so ("Come back when you've made a whale." Outstanding stuff.) And for those who have not yet enjoyed this, and can, here you go...
Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I then decided to text Gemma Brockis, who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was originally, actually about?
Gemma answered that originally, actually the story had ended with Pinocchio getting hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of his initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy. Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced that education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy? Totally, Gemma answered. I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided when I got home to see if it was online. It was. Here's a taste.
Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes?
Here!
"What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?"
Well, I don''t know, look, sorry, but last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember"
– and I think that might be even worse. At least the old BBC adaptation is nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying
authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and
forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist
military academy by a dropped bomb, which maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.
I'd also suggest that if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care that Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. Well, that's a lie, obviously I care. If anything I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It actually made me want to watch the Zemeckis version to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised
by the excellent Ryan George below, that also seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch
the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, I don't know, you might love it. But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.
Here's a Saturday treat! No need to wait now for "The Dial of Destiny" to get your additional Indy content. Have eight minutes of the very first iteration of Old Indy, dashing through the snow in a wraparound for a "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles "spinoff movie I'd never heard of called – terribly – "The Mystery of the Blues!" I prefer my title, even if it is a bit of a spoiler for the ending.
Doesn't he look great with the beard? I guess it was for "The Fugitive", so this was actually filmed only a couple of years after "The Last Crusade" but it's a great Old Indy look regardless. I think he should have kept the beard. I also think he should also have kept that stuntman they used for the shot of Indy just getting out of the car, then he wouldn't have hit his head on the Millenium Falcon in "Force Awakens". Enjoy!
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.
"I was really the very first, I think, to sing naturally, to sing as you speak. And of course, it wasn't accepted by everybody. Certain clergy thought the songs I sang were evil, because of the love content and the way I sang them. And they really, really said, Rudy Vallée should not be allowed to sing on the air. Because – not of the content of the lyric particularly – but the hypnotic effect, the sexual quality, let us say. I was born, my friends sigh, with a tremendous amount, a great amount of sexual... emotion. Now, the song pluggers in 1940 in New York City called me 'The Guy With
the Cock in His Voice'. That was their expression: 'The Guy With the
Cock in His Voice'. That was evidently why, over a period of my
eighty-four years of life, I have known over a-hundred-and-forty-five
women and girls."
I have been doing a little research into the studio that made Citizen Kane. Also featured in Episode One of The RKO Story: Katharine Hepburn... King Kong... Murray Spivak's giant wind machines... a hundred dancing women strapped to aeroplanes... Ginger Rogers... and Fred Astaire, who also appears in Love Goddess - the Rudy Vallee Rita Hayworth Musical, tickets HERE!
Another two-show day, so here's your Sunday shot of Orson Welles.
I first saw "cold reading" demonstrated in Derren Brown's Séance, which is also well worth a watch. (Of course, Derren Brown being Derren Brown, I may only think I saw it demonstrated.) As described by Welles to David Frost below, it is "a fraudulent technique used by mediums in the Victorian times" whereby you "warm up the sucker" with facts about themselves that could apply to anyone – I have a scar on my knee! – until they're so convinced by your psychic powers, they start unwittingly volunteering infomation about themselves.
That's the theory. And Welles practised. According to various accounts – and a scene in Love Goddess (tickets available here) – he even practised on his future wife Rita Hayworth at their first meeting. It's never made explicit in our show that's what he's doing, but very little in our show is made explicit, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. And to Welles' credit – and unlike those who began it, or most famously practice it now – he only ever claimed to have "mind-reading capabilities", rather than the ability to speak to the dead. It was a more innocent time. There was a war on.
Rab C. Nesbitt was my Holden Caulfield. At least I'm assuming he was, I didn't get past page two of Catcher In The Rye. But "Scotch and Wry" – a compilation of Scottish sketches Dad had on VHS starring Rikki Fulton and Gregor Fisher who would go on to play Nesbitt – was something I'd watch religiously, meaning not necessarily understanding all of it, and when Fisher got his own sitcom in 1988, it had my full attention. All beautifully scripted by Ian Pattison, "Rab C. Nesbitt"'s fourth episode was a particular revelation: What a journey this speech goes on, digging and digging until we're out the other side. I remember thinking, watching it: "Oh wow, comedy can also do this?" I would have been thirteen.
But what had I meant by "this"? Well, now I've spent a couple of days revisiting King Lear, I think I have a clearer idea. My first acquaintance with Lear and also Othello, two surprisingly entertaining and downright funny Great Works of Tragedy were around this time too, and I can see Rab's unaccommodated ranting at the Universe striking a similar chord. More compact than Shakespeare too. Comedy also equals tragedy minus time.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you."
It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that.
Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!
Mork blogs well. At the end of every episode of "Mork and Mindy" he concisely reports back to Orson what he's learnt from the day's activities. I wish this blog was the same, but sometimes it's just going to be a link to some videos. Here's Alexei Sayle explaining how influential the show was to the British Alternative Comedy scene...
"It felt like being kicked down the stairs laughing."
When I heard the episode below – in which Mindy tries to interview successful comedian Robin Williams – mentioned on a podcast on my way to the Rosemary Branch theatre last night, I immediately looked it up on my phone, sat down on the closest bench and watched the whole thing. It opens strongly, with a surprise reference to Rula Lenska and almost exactly the same joke that opens Triangle Of Sadness(highly recommended), and closes with a scene of onscreen soul-spelunking to rival Peter Sellers on "The Muppet Show" telling Kermit he had his self surgically removed: Williams confesses to Mindy how difficult he finds it to say no. When Mork relays this predicament to Orson, the celestial overlord's having none of it.... "I thought all stars were rich, live in mansions, and drive big eggs..." Mork responds with a list of the dead, ending with John Lennon, to the low howling of wind and a slow fade to black.
"The
freighter that picks me up from the Ice flow is manned by tall silver
men with long waterproofs, square heads but aquiline profiles, smooth
black dishes for ears and receding chrome spirals on the head. Maybe the
cube swivels to accomodate the face. Anyway a nice kind image. THE
GOOMB-MEN"
I don't know where I got the name "Goomb" from, but they stayed with me. I tried to put them in a Mitchell And Webb sketch later that year (it was never filmed, maybe I submitted it too late), and I was still contemplating casting them as saviours in some children's book or other until today, when I was knocked sideways to see this image pop up on pinterest:
This is a two-headed Martian from the Twilight Zone story "Mr. Dingle the Strong", an episode I have no recollection of ever seeing. Their heads aren't exactly cubes, and their ears aren't exactly dishes, and
their antennae aren't exactly spirals, but that's the Goomb alright, right down to their
cheekbones. The clincher for me is that, while I describe them as "silver" in the notebook, I actually dreamt them in black and white.
Emailing that sketch to Gareth Edwards back in December 2009, I wrote:
"Hopefully you might find some joy – far too late as it is – in
this sketch about aliens I mentioned ages ago, and then didn't write
because it seemed you had loads about aliens, and now have written
simply because it might turn out to be the very-odd-but-actually-useable
sketch I have so far failed to produce."
And now UPDATE (April 27th 2023) It looks like it might actually be used now! All hail the Goomb...
First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...
John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to
blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...
But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...
Another canal. Maybe you can imagine how much Angus McKie's artwork for Rondò Veniziano's 1983 album "Venice In Peril" blew the mind of a young boy rifling
through records in WHSmith, although I didn't know it was called that back then, and having my mind blown by
album art was literally the only reason I rifled through records in
WHSmith in the eighties. Click to enlage if you like, but don't blame me if you never come back, and here's another.
I've just started watching Dennis Potter's Casanova: its scenes of an imprisoned writer suffering pornographic flashbacks and raging against his cellmates are very reminiscent of The Singing Detective, but its sumptious and creepy Venetian exteriors are giving me welcome flashbacks of my own, specifically to how powerful a role some idea of this city played in my childhood imagination. The mad cover art on a Rondò Veniziano record is probably what started it.
A decade after "Venice In Peril" was released I would have my first ever pizza (I was scared of cheese) and, as I've written before, I chose a Veniziana because for every one ordered Pizza Express would pay "a discretionary 25p" to the "Venice In Peril fund" and I still hadn't been. In the end Venice did not disappoint, but that discretionary 25p would never change in value over the next three decades of my ordering Venizianas. Then, last weekend, I went to the Pizza Express in Paddington basin and found out it was no longer on the menu. I asked why. Apparently Pizza Express no longer has the necesary sultanas. I blame Brexit. How are we going to pay for that spaceship now?
High Camp! We made it! This working week ended with a run-through ofThe Love Goddessthat seemed to leave everyone happy, including our composer Logan Medland who now has to return to New York, and certainly me. I also learnt a new word: WandelProbe, pronounced "Vondelprobe", which means... well, what we just did. As I said when we started: everyone is lovely, and I'm trying not to be too weird. I don't think I'm always succeeding. However, I've decided to blame two decades of making work at the last minute with whatever was
to hand for any sudden attacks of lip-chewing anxiety I've experienced when, say, asked suddenly to enter holding a phone that we don't
have yet (because I mean how much of this phone will end up existing?
Just the receiver? Or maybe it should be just the receiver? Or will
there be a wire coming out of it? Why? Or why not? And how long will
that wire be? Where does this world end?) or to dance in time with the music.
(But wait no, because this bit isn't a dance, it's just a scene in which the characters happen to be dancing. And maybe my character isn't a good dancer. Or maybe he is. Maybe I haven't decided. Where does this world end?) "Trust the process," says our choreographer Jacqui Jameson who, let me
remind you, has a dancing shoe named after her. I don't always understand
the process though, I think. But then she says, "You're impatient." And
she's right. And I knew this.
Also though, it has always for as long as I can remember made me
uncomfortable in warm-ups when I have to bend over and stick my head
through my legs, because now I can't see what everyone else is
doing, and what if they suddenly do something else? How am I supposed to learn
then? All bent over with my head through my legs? I don't know if that's necessarily impatience. Anyway, as I say: we made it this far. I feel very lucky to be working
with these people, and look forward to playing with them. We open on Friday.
Here is fictional actor Nicholas Craig's take on the rehearsal process, care of Nigel Planer pictured at the top, and illustrated with some mercilessly harvested contributions from the non-fictional. The Naked Actor first went out in 1990 when I was still doing school plays, and was an instant hit in whatever crypt we happened to set our satchel down in. "Rehearsal! Aye! Ha-ha! Rehearsal!" we'd all quote. Or: "Janet my love?" Or: "A bit Freddy Frautington." Does that sound like the kind of gang you want to be in? Then enjoy. The opening credits are honestly the funniest I've seen, and distil perfectly a very specific moment in British culture when a happily subsidised mainstream could regularly present to the masses something a bit like something a bit like something thrilling and experimental which the director had popped in on.
I finally managed to catch my friend Maude's show The Webcamming Chronicles tonight at the Cockpit – tickets for the second showing on the 13th here! – and thoroughly recommend it, but haven't time if I want to get any sleep now to explain why. So here as a placeholder is Carl Sagan's first attempt, as far as I know, to send a drawing of a naked man to aliens. I drop us straight into the explanation below, but the whole video, being a video of Carl Sagan talking, is typically superb.
Isn't this the best! And now you can add to the names Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen my own, for I have just completed the first week of rehearsals on The Love Goddess. And while I'm not saying I'm as good as these two yet, it does feel like I'm going to have to get close in order to pull off any of the routines that Jacqui Jameson's taught us. So I look forward that. I wonder how it will happen. That's Jacqui below, far right, if you don't count the reflections. This is a lovely room to be in. Look: Mirrors! Hats!
The absolute best thing about the theatre though is all the foreigners you get to work with: the world shrinks and your view improves and you just feel higher up. Almog Pail, the show's creator, is from Israel, and there's a heavy American contingent too, including songwriter Logan Medland, seen above on the keyboads, triple threat Joey Simon – also pictured – and producer Laura Lundy, who was telling us over a fish supper this evening at The Seashell about her ninety-year old gay mother who got thrown out of a convent and has written a book about it. Laura also asked me to look up her daughter on IMDB, and mate...
After supper we returned to The Cockpit to see Lanford Wilson Talley's Folly which closes tomorrow, a two-hander in a gazebo that I knew nothing about. "Lanford Wilson" is definitely an American name though. One often hears people who work in or for the theatre talk about the unique quality of the medium, a kind of "Here-we-are"-ness that I mainly don't feel at all when I go and see a play, beyond a nudge and a wink, but I felt it tonight.
"We could do this on a couple of folding chairs. But it's not bare. It's
not bombed out. It's run down. And that makes all the difference."
I'm not sure I'd call Talley's Folly a comedy, or even a romance, but it's definitely a thing with a heart, and a brain, and a careful thing, and I loved it. Watching American drama performed live by Amerian actors is a luxury, and also a bit of a relief. There were twenty-one other people in the audience tonight. If you're free I recommend filling the seats on its final day. The tickets are here.
Okay, I don't necesssarily expect you to know what my Dad looks like, so you're probably just thinking "Oh, that's a photograph of William Churchill's trusted adviser and possibly illegitimate son, former MP for Paddington, pioneering financial journalist, pretend Australian back in the days when pretending to be Australian was socially advantageous, and George Orwell's boss at the Ministry of Information, Brendan "BB" Bracken, born in County Tipperary 1901, etc..." without a double-take, and you'd be right. It's him. I think it definitely looks like my Dad too though. And so does this.
Happy Birthday, Daddy! It's Dad's birthday today... I screengrabbed this picture of Bracken leaving Downing Street with Churchill from the very informative but, if I'm honest, not necessarily reliable documentary below – and I'm not just saying that because one of the interviewees is Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad.
Bracken
had all his papers burnt after his death apparently, so everything
seems pretty apocryphal. Also the presenter bangs on lovingly about how big a liar Bracken was, so we're probably not on the same page politically. But it's interesting to see someone else have a go at making a history documentary, let's put it like that. The whole thing looks like it might have been shot on a phone, the music's fascinatingly awful, and there are some great, cheap choices of location to spice up the narrative, like a branch of Wimpy's when America gets involved. I'm not recommending it necessarily – again, William Rees-Mogg is in it – but I learnt a lot about BB from it, including the fact there's actually no evidence he was Churchill's son, and I feel I also learnt quite a bit about Conservative mythos too.
Speaking of which, what I really do recommend is The Gathering Storm, this 1974 BBC play I found yesterday on youtube, starring Richard Burton as Churchill, in which Dad pops up playing Bracken. Sorry yes, that was what got me looking him up in the first place and discovering the resemblance. Patrick Stewart also pops up as Clement Attlee. It's an extraordinary cast. Dad died his hair red for the role, which caused a lot of amusement when I was born, and they shot scenes at Chartwell itself, from which Dad "rescued" a photo of Churchill with Somerset Maugham and H. G Wells that he found in a cleaning cupboard. I love the absence of twinkliness in Burton's pre-Thatcher portrayal of Churchill here, not least because it makes the jokes play better, but also because, while he might have been a figure of fun, Churchill was not a clown: he was a walking, breathing ideology – terrifying, but I've also not seen portrayed more vividly someone you'd definitely want as the enemy of your enemy.
(Okay, I'm not saying Bracken definitely wasn't Churchill's son...)
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