My strongest memory by far of the time Grange Hill went to Chessington Zoo is of Annette Firman negging a posh, ginger kid from between the plates of a fiberglass stegosaurus in the picnic area. Posh, ginger kids don't forget things like that. This is how I remembered that Series Five: Episode Twelve provides such a valuable record of what is now the "World of Adventures". But I had not remembered just how many other extraordinary moments the episode boasts. After finding it online, I posted the following single take to instagram, uncaptioned. Clickbait superlatives crowded my brain, but I didn't want to give any spoilers, and I still don't, so I must simply insist you watch it unprepared. This is from 1982:
Did Grange Hill – and specifically director Diamuid Lawrence – invent the steadicam chase? Apparently, newer technologies were gifted to the cheaper shows first to play around, so maybe. And what play... Jonah Jones's satchel lands in the sea lion enclosure, and within minutes we're watching young actor and not stuntman Lee Sparke falling bodily from actual rocks and swimming with actual forty-stone pinnipeds. Was anyone working at the zoo that day? I think this episode might also be the first time we hear Janet St. Clair say "I'm only trying to help you, Ro Land", an instant playground banger. I apologise to any demographic reading who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I also immediately rescind that apology because here is the episode in full, and irrefutable evidence that Grange Hill could be – I hesitate before typing this but, yeah, no – as good as anything that's ever been made.
"Pfff. I want to be an airdresser when I grow up. You know. With proper training."
"Yeah."
"What's the matter with that?"
"I want to do something exciting. Be a trapeze artist in the circus. Something like that."
Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.
Apart from these fresh intros, the only new material, if you don't count the compilations, or the date stamps (and you are absolutely welcome to count date stamps as new material, by the way... it's been an unhelpful old year for me so far in terms of the old fight-or-flight) are the new thumbnails. Ideally, your typical YouTube thumbnail contains both the presenter's likeness and some text, and after a series of botched cut and pastes...
Bold. But rejected.
... I realised the easiest – and also quite pleasingly Dave McKean-iest –way to achieve this was simply to pause the introductions as they fade into the titles, and take a screenshot.
"Ta-daaa!"
The compiled Julius Caesar went out this weekend, on both channels, meaning that for the second time Season One is now done. But another reason I bothered to give this project its own channel is that, this second time round, I hope to get further into Season Two and beyond on its return. I've time enough anyway, and a room. And I'm still very proud of the whole thing... The only reason I haven't plugged it until now is that, as I learnt in my previous post, apparently it helps the algorithm find you an audience if you don't. But that hasn't thus far worked the same magic it did on The Sitting, maybe because that video's only sixty seconds long. I don't know. It's a learning curve.
As a fat, four course taster then, here are the compiled introductions. The Two Gentlemen of Verona's features a new attempt to explain what I'm doing, plus archival bonus material of me seeing if it will work if I sing the songs rather than just reading them out, which it didn't so I don't know why I've included it.
The compilation of introductions to The Taming of the Shrew features no new introduction, but bonus material of me going off into the kitchen to throw some pans around for some sound effects, which I did use.
More foley work is included in the collected introductions to The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, where I cry like a baby. Donald Trump was President back in 2020, remember. It was a different time. Ha ha ha.
And finally – inspired by this bit in an excellent documentary about the old BBC2 cult film strand Moviedrome in which Alex Cox reckons he got the gig because, as the only film director not living in London, he couldn't just film everything in his living room and so his Film Club pieces to camera looked much more dynamic...
... I head out of the flat for the final compilation of introductions to Julius Caesar, and attempt to explain what I'll do next beneath the green man of Parkland Walk. (Some thumbnails are better than others. Like I said, it's a curve.)
Now play them all simultaneously! And if you fancy taking your own tour of the new channel, you can like, share, subscribe, scroll, swipe, dive, run, push, bomb, and pet heavy HERE. I hope you're all doing tremendously.
To know this show was to love it but if even you did neither, both Movie Club and "guest reviewer" are pretty self-explanatory, so enjoy as I continue to digitise my teetering VHS stacks. I think to be considered for the gig you had to leave a sample of your work on an answerphone, and I left a review of the Demi Moore version of Scarlet Letter where Robert Duvall dances round a bonfire with his head stuck up a stag – Christ, is there nothing about this I don't remember? Riverside Studios. 1998. Everyone was fun and pleasant. It wasn't paid. I didn't know what to wear so I wore what they wore. They asked if this was my first time on television and I told them I'd appeared in Z Cars when I was three months old. "Did you play a baby?" asked Andrew Collins. Rest in power, Brenda Fricker. Forgive me, Keifer. And that's my Dad and Mum at the end.
"It is wonderful, isn't, yes. Proper prestige telly! Yes. Glenda Jackson! And really, thank you all again for coming over, it's so – Bit nervous, yes. Ha. Now, I'm not entirely sure when I'll be showing up, but – Oh, she's the... She's Mary Queen of Scots, isn't she? Or her mother– Oh wait, THIS IS ME THIS IS ME!"
"... And that's it! Anyway, on with the story... No, I think that's it for me... Mm?... Yes! One take!... Well no actually, second take, but for the first one my idea had been that I'd just, sort of, be going around hitting everyone, with the stick, yes, and the drum, just hitting them very, very hard with the – there were two sticks originally – but we didn't use that in the end, and everyone, me included, thought 'tone it down, Ian, well not me included, but anyway I think there were nerves and so that was all, yes, 'on the hoof' do they say? Not much research, no."
It's okay to post old auditions from 2023, right? And it's okay if you want a quick clip for your new showreel to just film the television with your phone, it's fine, yeah? Great. Here it is then.
The title of this post comes from director Katrin Gebbe's excellent advice to me on the set of A Thousand Blows
as horses, carriages and stallholders reset for the seventh or eighth
take of me finally getting to run out of a pretend hotel for real –
obviously, you don't forget something like that. Look out too for some
lovely fortuitous swipes, my favourite having to be Kellie Bright
condemned to skeletoning at 2:10.
For some reason, colours always seem happiest working with David Hockney. Here's a small, room-sized fusion of Renaissance Florence, Bruges and
Ghent he built for a BBC Omnibus in 2003 because television was also his thing. I'm surprised to find I've not written
about him before on here, because I think about Hockney a lot. And probably what I think about most often is his discovery – I don't think that's too
strong a word – chronicled – I don't think that's too strong a word
either – in this programme. Art as Science as Art, it's a typically beautiful piece of thinking, and a brilliant watch.
Studying the accuracy with which Renaissance painters represented
the play of light on a suit of armour or a chandelier, despite the fact
no naked
eye could stay still enough to capture the same gleam twice – and inspired by the perceived similarity of Ingre's line when turning out small
portraits of English tourists in 1812 to Warhol's tracing of old
photographs over a century later, despite the former predating the actual invention of photography – Hockney meticulously deduces that the reason why "from about 1500 to 1860 you never see a badly done basket" is not, as had been assumed previously, that everyone just suddenly got better at drawing, but rather that artists had been using camera obscura and – before the perfection of those lenses – convex or "burning" mirrors to transform the three-dimensional image in front of them into a two-dimensional, reversed projection that can be accurately traced. I think too about the scorn with which Art Critics greeted this theory, and I think about Hockney's calm counter-argument: then why are all the people in these paintings left-handed?
For this and many other reasons, he was my favourite living artist. Until today. I really loved you, David Hockney. Thanks for getting me back on the blog.
"This is the record of our second expedition to the site of Britain. It was a grim undertaking. But we had to go, otherwise all the members of the first expedition would have died for nothing..." We never find out what killed that first party in the end. Maybe they swooned themselves to death at the site of a porcelain cockapoo.
Because, despite its intriguing opening, what must be one of television's first ever post-apocalyptic visions settles almost immediately into a sneering fantasy upon the ruination of ghastly ghastliness. Ken Russell is directing, however, so nothing's done by halves, everything's shot with a warring mixture of love and hate rather than just disdain. Maybe the voiceover was scripted afterwards because Monitor thought it looked too beautiful. I have no idea why it was made, but that might be what's most enjoyable about it. Anyway this is your occasional reminder to check in on the BBC Archive's youtube channel, and I hope you're all recovering this new year's day, and continue to recover.
It occured to me yesterday, happily and suddenly, that my lack of engagement with the blog might not, in fact, be incontertible evidence of a waning enthusiam for things I see and do as I fall into my fifties, but simply the inevitable consequence of Non Disclosure Agreements. Most of the things from which the rest of my life now hangs are projects a digital signature on a PDF proscribe me from mentioning until the results go out, and by then it feels too late to send a postcard.
I suppose I could have mentioned I'd spent five beautiful afternoons towards the end of 2024 in a writers' room for Mitchell & Webb's new sketch show when the press release for it first went out back in February, but then I was probably nursing too much guilt for not having been able to mention I'd worked on the pilot script in 2023 (Mitchell and Webb Need Help it was called then. Can I even say that?) Maybe "beautiful" isn't exactly the right adjective, but I definitely want one of the good ones, because being invited aboard the writing team of a sketch show in 2023 felt like receiving a phonecall to say you'd won an Oscar when you didn't even know you'd made a film.
Here's me in the room, "established" according to Big Talk's press release.
There are many other reasons I'd want the good adjectives: I really enjoy pissing around with millenials for a start. I also don't think I've seen Robert Webb so happy. Watching him and David improvise material across a table in a way I had never witnessed before – perhaps having been away from each other so long – made sitting there, laughing, peeling tangerines, and asking if anyone wanted the window closed feel like contribution enough from me. I did contribute more though, in the end. I contributed The Goomb – a sketch first mentioned on this blog in 2022, and originally submitted to That Mitchell and Webb Look in Two-Thousand-and-Ten. Other sketches were bought, but none filmed. Still, fifteen years on, HERE'S HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS!...
TV Shows? Is it not clear HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS! is a movie?
Perhaps because the intervening years had been so full of Finnemore (the first series of Souvenir Programme went out in Two-Thousand-and-Eleven) the gap between shows never seemed that big to me, but then I realised fifteen years is also the interval between Sylvester McCoy's Doctor Who and Christopher Eccelston's, which is of course the longest amount of time betweeen two things there can be. It was gratifying to see how well the sketch went down with the new guys. I suppose dying inside while someone watches something you made on a laptop is what brought them here. I am proud. I'm so happy. I am such a fan of everyone involved. You see, this is the problem with not writing about something until it's out. What can you say? I miss them?
I'm still in France by the way.
Languedoc
Not all the sketches are viewable here. I don't know why. I think what links them is having a "Writers' Room" bit. And I want to share one of those, I just don't know if I'm posting the right one as I can't see it, but if this is the sketch I'm thinking of, Lara Ricote did indeed originally propose it as a car commercial...
Let me know if I'm right. (UPDATE: Back in the UK now. Yeah.)
That's not the actual writers' room of course. Ours was a lot fuller: essentially a sandwich of walls, old fashioned shash windows and the sound of drilling, sideboards covered with awards, a big table on the inside spotted with varying systems of discarded tangerine peel, and a meaty, seated talent filling in between the two. I was there the morning Trump was reelected. I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world. Stevie Martin wrote a great post about writers' rooms here, by the way, on her substack. And while I'm plugging stuff I have nothing to do with, Lara's comedy special "GRL/LATNX/DEF" is on youtube here, and diamond sharp.
One of my favourite things about seeing Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping finally go out in August was seeing all the accompanying Sketch Show Opining. Honestly. Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian defined the form's importance pretty succintly, I think, as "an important mechanism for digesting the world", but she also descibed them as "hit and miss" whereas the truth is – as the Radio Times wrote in its preview – that they're "tapas": different people like different bits. Pete Paphides' observation in his interview with David and Rob in the same magazine, that "sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other" was another lovely summing up. I do think if there were more sketch shows on the telly, people might be better at getting stuff off their chest and differences might not be so likely to become divisions, and I enjoyed self-identifying youtuber video essayist
Stubagful's savvy theory below, as to why telly stopped making them: not economics, as is normally suggested, but snobbery: "The sketch show died because the TV
industry wants to think it's better than the internet... Nobody wants
to be just another content creator." All of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping should be available to enjoy on Channel 4 HERE, and I think it's glorious.
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 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 actually originally about?
Gemma answered that originally, actually, the story had ended with Pinocchio hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of the 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 education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy, I asked? Totally, Gemma answered.
I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided to see if it was online when I got home. 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 it might be worse. At least the old BBC adaptation was 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. This 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 Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. That's a lie, obviously I care. If anything, I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It almost 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 it 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, or 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...
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 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!
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!
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