Sometimes this blog will just be Three Weeks

A pull-quote. I have a pull-quote. 

 

"Jonah Non Grata" is getting another London outing! Next Saturday the nineteenth of July, at 9.30pm up the stairs of that old stalwart of the Edinburgh preview – but a duck-breaking first for me – the Hen and Chickens pub in Islingon. You can get tickets for just (over) a tenner HERE, and if you have any further questions... well, maybe I've answered them below. Maybe not. Maybe you have some questions about my answers. (And if any of them concern the penultimate anwer, I had a lovely meeting about the book on Monday: Apparently, translation rights are where a lot of the money is in childrens' writing. France doesn't like mermaids, because they're sleazy, and – possibly for the same reason – Germany does not like circuses, so take note.)

 

(Also here are some gorgeous, unpublished Hobbit illustrations from Eva Natus-Šalamounová and her husband Jiří, on display HERE, in Prague, which was yesterday. A good week.)

 

 I now have quite a few articles to to-do over the next few days plugging the show, so let's see how many more end up on here. Apologies in advance. Take it away, Caro Moses of THREE WEEKS...

As you know – because we are always talking about it – we like new stuff here at TW Towers. But you know what, we also like stuff that was first really good a few years ago and which is now getting another run. 

And all that relates to the show ‘Jonah Non Grata’, which was originally staged in London back in 2004 to much acclaim, and is going to Edinburgh this year. It’s the work of Simon Kane, an actor and writer who has worked on loads of stuff I love from various media, like ‘Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme’ and ‘Ghosts’. 

‘Jonah Non Grata’ is an absurdist solo show based on the events that befell the biblical Jonah and I wanted to find out more about it. I put some questions to Simon ahead of his upcoming edfringe run. 

Can you start by explaining the premise of ‘Jonah Non Grata’? Who is it about and what story does it tell?

 Inasmuch as it tells a story, it’s the Book Of Jonah, as in Jonah and the whale.

 A very short, possibly satirical shaggy dog story from the Old Testament about a prophet who refuses the call, tries to run away, is swallowed by a large fish sent by God, does what He wants, but is ultimately disappointed by the outcome. 

 The “premise” of the show, however, is that you don’t need to know any of this, but will nevertheless spend an hour not being bored.

 It’s a solo sequel to work I did with a beautiful immersive collective called Shunt, whose greatest review may have come from someone who’d missed the opening forty minutes of one show and so could just enjoy what they saw without worrying about being expected to get it.

 

What themes are explored through the play?

 

 Exactly the same themes as ‘Hamlet’? Yeah, I’m happy with that answer…

 Refusing the call to adventure. The comforts of inaction. Weighing one’s love for people against one’s anger at the world. The very nature of performance. Depression. Loneliness. Christianity. Extremism.

All that. But with songs and a bit where he thinks he’s gone to the moon.

 

How would you describe it in terms of style or genre?

 

 Pop absurdist clowning. A strange world on a tight budget. A church for a churchless faith.

 

What was the inspiration for this piece?

 A lot of friends were making solo shows that weren’t particularly text-based and, although I love writing, I wanted to join in making something more in the clown genre. 

 One of those friends’ shows was about the performer’s Jewishness, “although,” as he said, “I’m not Jewish, because I don’t believe in God”, so I realised that even though I’m an atheist, I’m also, similarly – or at least culturally – a Christian, and that engaging with this big mood might be a good starting point. 

 I’d also been thinking about the very first plays in English: Mysteries, which might read like spoofs but were the work of people who absolutely believed in the biblical reality of what they were performing, and so I thought about writing my own. You know, something “traditional”.

 Initially, I had considered the various accounts of what Jesus got up to after returning from the dead, but then, after reading a note about Jonah in Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, I opted for this Old Testament alt, as he seemed a good clown.

 I’ve always liked comedies about heroes who run away – I would later make a Radio 4 show called ‘Time Spanner’ about something similar – and a show that plays with thresholds is a good, cheap concept – every venue has doors. 

 As I mentioned, a third influence was the show I’d just been performing with Shunt, ‘Dance Bear Dance’, a clownish immersive piece about the Gunpowder Plot coincidentally devised during the opening months of the War On Terror.

 I wanted to play more both with the idea of making an audience complicit in a religiously motivated act of violence – but with laffs – and the idea of presenting a surreal church service as a basis for audience interaction – it’s nice if the audience has some clue as to what’s expected of them. 

 My work with Shunt in general also made me want to ensure every show was different and surprising, hence the levels of audience participation, as it used to be called. Basically, everything I do in the show is built upon things I’d already enjoyed doing, and had seen people enjoy me doing. 

 

It’s been quite a while since you first performed it – what motivated you to revive it now? 

 I missed it. And I’d landed an advert, so could afford to take it to Edinburgh. The show had never had a proper launch. It was just a thing I did, that people liked.

 But I’m finally now beginning to learn, not only how to make a show, but how to keep it alive, something I’d never known how to do on my own before. 

 Also, I’m seeing less and less stuff like it, and wanted to see if there was still an appetite for this kind of recklessly – if not irresponsibly – personal silliness. I think you can do anything onstage. I hope this show communicates that.

 

Has the show changed at all in the meantime? 

 Barely. I’ve written a few more jokes about the nature of audience interaction to help me get from A to B. And I might not use a real candle any more, but that’s actually funnier. One of the things that’s so exciting to me is how much it still chimes, but how differently.

 

You haven’t brought it to the Fringe before – why not before and why now? 

 See my previous answer! I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know how. And I can now and I know how. But also, I think my confidence in the show has grown.

 There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to make a show about right now, but it turns out Jonah is still that show.

 

Are there any post Fringe plans for the show? 

 Hopes, currently, rather than plans. This is why I’ve got a producer. I very much want to just get it in front of as many people as possible for as long as possible.

 It’s my clown show. But I’m also curious how it works as a play text. Theatrical criticism is still very ‘play’-based.

 

What do you like about the Fringe? What will you get up to in Edinburgh when not performing?

 It’s people making things. I’ll see things. Sometimes I’ll see five things in a day and they’ll form into one big thing in my mind. It’s magic.

So do you have a hit list of other shows you would like to see?

 I like finding out what’s interesting once I’m up there, but I will definitely be seeing ‘Simple Town’, and I will definitely be seeing Neil Frost’s ‘The Door’.

 

What drew you to performing as a career? Was it what you always wanted to do? 

 I could do it. I could hide in plain sight.

 My Dad’s an actor and a writer, but he mainly stayed at home on the typewriter when we were growing up, which was very nice for us.

 His brother, however, my wonderful Uncle Gordon, was a proper jobbing, touring actor, and we loved him, and everyone loved him, and acting professionally seemed a very nice, fun, feasible way to not grow up.

 In that sense, yes, it’s something I always wanted to do.

I have to say that you’ve been involved to a greater or lesser extent with some of my Very Favourite Things. What would you say have been the highlights of your career thus far? 

 

 That’s nice! I don’t really think I have a career, because it’s so often work with friends, but I suspect they’re definitely My Very Favourite Things too, and it’s a broad if not hefty mix.

I think the work with John Finnemore is unique in that it has fans who will be fans until I die. Cunningly, however, it’s all been highlights.

 Even the terrible work has been with brilliant people, and having brilliant people in your life is the very best thing. I’ve only one rule: never ever work with or for the bored.

 

What aims and ambitions do you have for the future? 

 I think I still want to do everything.

 

What’s coming up next for you after this?

 I’ve no idea. The next show? I’ve written a screenplay. I’m writing a book. I guess the next thing – now I seem to have worked out how making a show works – is to work out how all that other stuff works too. 

Simon Kane will perform ‘Jonah Non Grata’ at The Assembly Rooms from 31 Jul – 24 Aug, find the edfringe listing here. 

... But you guys knew that.

Is it a loud man getting things wrong?

 Here, ol' Unattendees, to celebrate my love for you all, is a tree giving a little house a hug. Sorry I haven't been posting more, but I am once again between keyboards (in case you were wondering, this post has been compiled entirely from copying and pasting parts OF ITSELF) but this hardware situation should be resolved when I get back from France, pictured above – where I have, as always, been spending Christmas with my folks – and below is the advert that will pay for it:

 

 I might even have enough left over after to take a show to Edinburgh, something I haven't dared do since 2001. Guess which show. "I don't know, Simon. How many shows have you made?" Well exactly, that one. Although, thinking on the previous post, I am growing obsessed (again*) with how abysmal a part of real world, far right economic discourse beloved, old sci-fi tropes such as space exploration and Ai have become, so maybe it will be two shows! Maybe it will be none! No, I've written it down now (or pains-takingly pieced it together from individual characters torn from THIS VERY POST) and 2025 is likely to frighten a lot of us anyway, so nits like me, who are sitting pretty pretty, should give courage a go too! Happy... changing things, then. Yeah. No. Franceuck it. Happy 2025, readers. Happy Change. 

 

Vancouver last August, where this ad was filmed – along with many futuristic sci-fi shows from the noughties, meaning I'd wanted to visit this city for decades. But when I finally get there, everywhere else had caught up, and the biggest thing distinguishing this Pacific shoreline now from, say, Leeds or Chelsea Wharf is just the number of people to a canoe.

 

* Did you get that that was what "Time Spanner" was about? I mean, it was about other stuff too.

Sometimes this blog will just be Ziwzih Zwizih OO-OO-OO

 

"Most of the programs that I did were either in the far distant future, 

the far distant past or in the mind. "

 

 Electronic and Ambient pioneer Delia Derbyshire produced this pre-Kraftwerk, Die Antwoord-sampled marvel as a hymn for robots to sing at the end of a now lost episode of the BBC scifi anthology Out of the Unknown. According to this article on the nicely named "wikidelia", it recycles a track Derbyshire originally composed for a sex-education schools' film, rejected on the grounds that its wobbulator-induced ooh-ooh-oohs sounded "too lascivious" – and to be fair to Science and Health, now they've pointed that out, the deep chromium honeys do sound quite down to party.

 This surviving still from the show got me very excited, because I immediately recognised the robots from their later reappearance, painted white, in a hastily rustled-up, unbudgeted fifth episode of the "Dr. Who" story The Mind Robber, recalling the impression made on me by the idea that the threshold between Imagination and Reality might be a white void inexplicably patrolled by machines.*

 

 * As anyone who remembers the first episode of Time Spanner may have guessed. 

That Which Binds Us Through Time: The Chemic...

 

 I keep meaning to ask John Finnemore how intentionally his 2 Things To Do Before, Or After, You're 30 (above) echo the precepts of Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Theodore Ted Logan. "Be kind" and "have fun" are more actionable, but "be excellent to each other" and "party on, dudes" are the ones I've taken to heart, because I like a challenge. Actually I don't know if I do like a challenge, but I like the implication that being good might at times be challenging. How well does Ted's law equip him for growing old, for example? Two of the many joys of Bill & Ted Face The Music are seeing the duo's existence as a single unit both confirmed and dissolved. Many contrary ideas are entertained simultaneously in this film. Comedies, beautifully, can do this.

 

 

The familiar sound of trying to do everything.

 

 A few years ago, I tried to write my own story about a kind but procastinating slacker charged with saving the world, but I knew if Time Spanner ever got a series it would end with him not yet succeeding, so I never bothered to specify, or indeed work out, what the thing that might save the world would be. This is one of the reasons I was so excited to hear Bill and Ted were returning after thirty years: Maybe their writers had cracked it. Maybe they'd even come up with a third thing to do before, or after, you're thirty. I was not disappointed, and, given my hopes, that felt as miraculous as a thing could feel without becoming uncomfortable. What Bill & Ted Face The Music ends up proposing is simple and convincing, and while its final three words aren't exactly a precept, I'll probably still hold them as dear, and recommend them over even "and they lived happily ever after" as a thing to wish for.

Finally saw this.
And it worked. https://t.co/KDTD6WKo0e

— Simon Kane (@slepkane) February 7, 2021

 Oh, guys. You're welcome. That was a great journey. One of the best. Thirty years. "And it worked." Happy Love Day.

London on Late Night

 Tottenham Court Road's east side is now completely unblocked. They've finished the outside of whatever that is. This was last Friday.

 My straight line's walk continued through Trafalgar Square, and past Parliament. There weren't many people around; there were possibly more police, but dotted around in twos and threes.

 What the outside's currently meant to look like feels unsettled. In a ground floor window in Pimlico, I noticed a naked couple enjoying their heating, I suppose, just pottering. Not these windows. Older windows. 

 

 I realised at this point I hadn't seen Vauxhall in over a year, so turned back and crossed the bridge. Vauxhall was looking a lot more finished now than it had in 2018, when I had the heroes of Time Spanner brought here at gunpoint.

 

 Of course it was. However, 2020's emptier streets, and clashes between police and the bone-stupid private militia of a reality TV star, might have made now an even better setting.

 

 Or whatever year this is. It's impossible to photograph the moon with a phone, isn't it? 

 

 I didn't take many pictures of the waterfront. The finished flats were almost entirely glass, and while it didn't seem impermissable to photograph their interiors, and nobody inside was naked, it still felt a bit like a mistake. Maybe I just wanted to photograph stillness.

 This flag was a nightmare. How has anyone ever photographed a flag?

 

 I'd known they were going to build an American Embassy in Vauxhall ever since David Byrne posted something about it in 2006 or so, on a blog that's now impossible to find. He'd expressed pertinent concern at the growing demand for castles, and queried its need for a moat.

 

 It's a post that's stayed with me, but this was actually my first visit. The embassy had quite a bubbly, Barbarella-ish approachability up close, for a fortress. In Los Angeles, it was now coming up to one o'clock in the afternoon. I was aware of this because one of my favourite people in the world would be preparing her first ever appearance on "The Tonight Show".

 

 I sent her wind-chapped salutations from the base of a building we'd pretended to escape three years ago – oh yeah, we still totally text – and returned home via the south bank. As two girls overtook me on roller blades, keeping warm somehow, and bearing music too mellow to blare, I thought how alright all this was, and how much it resembled a 2021 I might have looked forward to long ago. I wouldn't be wearing a parka though. I'd be in a long woolen coat or something. Maybe I should buy a long woolen coat. 

 Here's London Hughes in Los Angeles on Late Night.

I Saw "Soul" and Realised Where You Can Find Straight Lines in Nature.

  Sort of spoilers ahead for Soul.

 "I-stroke-we have been given many names..." Twitter's just reminded me, it was four years ago today that the first of Time Spanner's two episodes were broadcast (still hearable here, shush). I've already written a little about the fug I got into trying to decide exactly what to call Belinda Stewart-Wilson's pan-dimensional inhabitant of the Fons et Origo, or "Heaven". Producer Gareth decided upon "Angel", which made a lot of sense, but did risk ruling out the possibility she might be God. I was tickled therefore, and probably a little jealous, when I came to watch Soul, and saw that its own dimensionally difficult inhabitants of an Afterlife-cum-Source-of-all-Inspiration had managed to cut through all this theological faff by just calling each other "Jerry". I also liked that the Jerrys were composed of a single line. If you're going to try to visualise a non-religious Heaven, mathematics seems a pleasing place to start, and I spent quite a bit of the film trying to work out why (beyond the cuteness of bureaucracy).

 

In 1887, B. W. Betts tried to model the evolution of human psychology through pure geometry, although he maybe didn't try that hard. (More here).

 

 Paradise is another word for Garden... I'd also just been rewatching The Crown*, and remembered how Prince Charles, nosing around his new estate in Highgrove, had said "there are no straight lines in Nature." But if that's the case, I suddenly thought, how do you know where something will land when you drop it?  Thanks to gravity, if we could perceive the world in four dimensions, we'd see that Nature is actually full of straight lines. And ellipses, and perfect geometric figures, and maybe that's what's so pleasing about these images: not their simplicity, but their powers of prophecy. And maybe, then, that's the kind of thing we'd hope to see in Heaven, especially if we weren't waiting to see God. 

 

 

* (Olivia Colman speaks quickly. Elizabeth II speaks slowly. It's taken me two series to realise my one problem with it.)

HUGHESDAY, 22ND DECEMBER 2020

 

 I used to love the idea we only ever use ten per cent of our brain or whatever it was. Like Odd John, or the pill that makes Bradley Cooper get his shit together in Limitless, it threw up superb fantasies of human potential, suggesting if we could only get that percentage higher, maybe we could read all of "War and Peace" in a single minute by just flicking through it without blinking, or blinking very quickly, or we could move objects with our mind, or walk through walls, or turn invisible...

 

 

 But then I learnt it wasn't really true. It was like saying "you only ever use ten per cent of your home." We just never use a hundred per cent at once, and human potential is actually, sadly, a lot more knowable and mapped than I'd hoped. We aren't all secretly Captain Marvel (D.C.'s or Marvel's, take your pick) sitting on untapped panoplies of super powers. 

  But then... 

 

 Oh, then I saw London Hughes perform "To Catch A D*ck" at the Soho Theatre and, reader, I saw a human operating at a hunded per cent. That show has since been turned into a Netflix Special, which dropped today in something like a hundred and ninety countries worldwide, as one of the many fruits of London's move to Los Angeles back in February, and I watched it this morning, keen but also wary, because it couldn't possibly have been as good as I remember, but no it was, and that's the thing about London: she promises everything, and then makes good on it. She gives it all, and not a quantum of it is wasted, because her aim, like everything else about London Dionne Mischa Stacey Stephanie Estina Knibbs-Hughes, is true... 

 

 Respect to Hannah Gadsby, but not all comedy relies on self-deprecation. And respect, too, to W. B Yeats, but the best don't all lack all conviction. How is it possible for a comedian to have the energy levels of the oustanding and beautiful Robin Williams without projecting a quantum of that man's desperation? I've no idea, but London manages it. Also, her material's better. And she didn't nick it. Banging on about her positivity risks missing how funny she is, from which I'm guessing all the rest of it springs, but she is one of the bravest people I know, because none of it is fake, and her courage is contagious, and the fact I met her while casting a character who's energy has to fling the protagonist of Time Spanner through Heaven in a circuit round the Universe remains one of the nicest things I know about being me.

 

(London in LA)

 

Frankly, world, this was long overdue. Hey, welcome to London!

Don Quixote Reads Himself, Silly

 Sourced here, but the artist is uncredted, sorry.
 

 One of the more interesting discoveries I made studying "English" was how self-aware the first English fiction was: Medieval writers couldn't just launch into a story they knew to be untrue, they had to first tell you about the person they met who'd told it to them, or about how they'd fallen asleep and dreamt it. I loved being carried over the threshold like this. It probably inspired the creation of Laika as a narrator for Time Spanner, and it definitely endeared me to the shunt ethos that a show begins as soon as a venue is entered. However, subsequent traditions decided this quarantine between the real world and the world of the work was a waste of time, and self-awareness became considered self-indulgent and "meta-textual". But it absolutely used to be the norm. 

 The post-medieval, sixteenth-century-penned Don Quixote – one of the first novels – purports to be the story of a real man, which means a lot of its second half is spent with Quixote dealing with the fallout from the publication of its first half (UPDATE: like Borat) and I'm sure this wouldn't have seemed self-indulgent in 1605. The point of the book is that Don Quixote exists, against his will, in the real world, a world which also, therefore, contains this book. 

 I probably wasn't the only child who wondered as what characters in Eastenders watched on BBC1 at 7:30pm.

"Bits"

 I found another notebook!

 Probably from 2006, because that's when I was in Japan. I'll post more from it, obviously, but just thought it worth noting how far our understanding of masks has come on since then, eg... 

Great. This is exactly why I set up the Time Spanner account. I'm an idiot. 

 I also found this:

Showing My Face

 Something about the light on Hackney Marshes reminds me of Seurat. I'd walked here from Camden, invited to a picnic, and for the first time in four months spoke with strangers. There were teachers and doctors and musicians, one of whom pointed out to me that I wasn't wearing walking shoes, which is something to consider. It was midnight by the time I got home.

  Before I headed home though, I took a detour up the Lea, past the filter beds, to visit what I think must have been the marsh office described by Ken Campbell in The Furtive Nudist. Here he'd sit beneath a fishing umbrella, pockets stuffed with stationery, and await "a commission".  The last time I came here was in 2016 just after the first recording of Time Spanner, possibly also awaiting a commission.

 Happily this detour also took me past a friend, Mischa from shunt who was standing at the bend in the river. I wasn't expecting to bump into him, or anyone. It's nice out, I suppose is the moral, but I know nothing's changed. I wore a mask. But also I showed my face.

Today I'd Like to Remoan About Hostile Environments

 Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?

 NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read, a couple of months ago, that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-whoah-now about what the site promotes. So, when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag, and indeed most tweets accompanying it were also wondering why it was trending, as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour, and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" – not marches so much, as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun, or a fight, or a fun fight – and I would stand there, hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that these racists – I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists – would see how alone they were. 

 But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped, in my little lawyer's wig, a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four-years-plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and I hoped – again, hoped – that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:

 

 "Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack.  

  As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement". I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers, but while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM – and definitely POTUS – would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower), I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything relating to the killing of George Floyd until people marched. 

 Also, I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election, I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given, I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more of it. Also, I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge – President Guff Goofy – declared a zombie apocalypse, saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that. But that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So, I remain a remoaner. 

 I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out – care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became associated with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And, while I have Santa's knee, I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation, rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. 

 And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: Trouser Bar Rabbit Hole

 The Dan In the High Castle was repeated today on Radio 4 Extra, so here's a fun game you can play that's vaguely related. I enjoyed playing it anyway. Above is the Radio Times review from when the show made Pick of the Day, and I'm fine with David McGillivray's reservations; it was only the second episode of anything I'd ever written, and there aren't that many ways to interpret the commissioning of a second pilot two years after the first. I'm very grateful though to those who stood up for it, including the fair Finnemore:

 But it was the following comment from David Cairns that set me on the path from which there could be no turning: "An indifferent review from the author of FRIGHTMARE. Praise from Caesar!" Now I hadn't heard of FRIGHTMARE but that wasn't too surprising; David C has a knowledge of film bordering on the Forbidden, having made it his mission to watch every single film illustrated in Denis Giffiord's Pictorial History of the Horror Movie. So here's the trailer...

 That's a hell of a font. I went and looked up McGillivray's wikipedia entry (which I'd like to think he had a hand in writing himself) and was instantly enamoured to find a stalwart who'd worked at the coalface of British smut. Living, breathing history: "House of Whipcord", "Satan's Slave", "I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight", "The Hot Girls" (Not "Hot Girls", mind... "The Hot Girls".) These titles seemed almost specifically designed to wind up on a list. So I drew John's attention to the man's achievements, and John in turn drew my attention to this...

 It was not Kofi Annan. And I was not disappointed. But it was a surprisingly uneasy thing to google. So that's the game. Happy hunting!

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: 2020 Hindsight

  Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is still available to listen to entirely legitimately for a month HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside the pilot here.)

 I love this by robotqueenvictoria.

 There's not much sense performing a post mortem on a thing you yourself have written, especially if you're as sloppy as writer as me. Don't get me wrong, I like my writing, but I only seem to put the hours in on the bits I find fun – the big splurges and resultant problem-solving – rather than sorting out the structure beforehand, and playing within that. It's quite an actor-y, hand-to-mouth, gig-economy approach, and while this unstructuredness feels freeing at the time, in the long run it probably provides less actual freedom than working with all the resources available to someone with an actual plan (this is why I found it so rewarding to write for Shunt, whose shows already had a structure in place by the time I'd join the devising). Specifically, the fantastic exhileration felt when a last minute tweak helps me suddenly understand what I've written, is offset by the powerlessness felt re-encountering all the other bits that go nowhere written before this understanding dawned. But this isn't a post-mortem.

Rainbow over Vauxhall, February, 2020

 Today was a day for applause and thanks, so let me here assert that writing The Dan In the High Castle was a far from lonely experience. Seven months before the recording, a first draft was read out at John Finnemore's flat. This had Martin and Gabbie travel two years into the future to discover a dystopia they thought was the work of Kraken, just as in the episode that aired, but ended with them escaping into a mysteriously optimistic 2019, and also their relationship didn't develop beyond Martin finally getting to do something fun with his excellent new friend, all of which might have made good on the promises offered by the pilot. But what it didn't do, as my sister Susy pointed out, was provide any possible closure if this was to be not just a sequel, but the finale. It was London Hughes who suggested Gabbie should punch Martin in the face, so I put that in, and went off to redraft. I'd also had a new idea about octopuses, which didn't make it in, but anyway months passed and, as with the pilot, it was producer Gareth Edwards who paid for coffee after coffee while trying to convince me that, as much fun as I was having penning screwball wise-cracks, the threats should be real, and "Martin should care". It was then ancient friend and collaborator Tom Lyall who pointed out, over another coffee, that Gabbie should be also be returned to 2016, as missing two years of one's life is obviously huge, and when I suggested Martin should nevertheless still stay in 2018, it was again Tom who said, crucially, "Yes, and Gabbie should rescue him."
  Eschewing coffee for pints, David Mitchell simply said he loved it, which was highly encouraging, but otherwise useless, but really encouraging, but otherwise no use, but great. 

Maida Vale studios, November, 2018.

 These improvements made, I sent the possibly final draft to John Finnemore, because he's always lovely with notes, and he replied – as nicely as any intelligence could – that, actually, he prefered the version at the read-through. This is how his reply ended:

 "I loved the last draft, and the biggest problem with that one – Gabbie's passivity – is now fixed. So it's in great shape. I just miss Martin as my life-line of fundamentally understanding what the story is about, because it's someone who wants something simple and human. More even than Arthur Dent wanting a cup of tea. More like The Dude wanting his rug back. Maybe it's his shoes. It's almost his shoes now, but not quite, because he doesn't really try. And anyway, it's not his shoes, it's Gabbie. It's got to be Gabbie.

Does that help? I cannot imagine it does."

 Of course, it helped. So I threw out the pair travelling to 2018 in order to get Martin "future shoes", and instead made their motivation Martin's investigation of the future in which he gives up Gabbie and the Spanner. And I added Gabbie quitting. And, finally, one week before the script was recorded at Maida Vale in November 2018, I added Martin offering Gabbie the Spanner at the end. And I remain very happy with that ending, and as I say, wish I'd thought of it a little earlier, so I wouldn't have wasted all that time giving Bridget a load of exposition about "The Usual" which goes nowhere. 

 But if there ever is an episode three I am, of course, now stuffed.

I spent a lot of those months playing "Half-Life 2".

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: "I have been given many names...."

 The second episode of Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is now available to listen to for a month entirely legitimately HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside episode one here.) More bonus material will follow but I'd like to open with something I learnt in the year since the show was first broadcast, which is that "Bridget" is acually the name of an already existing Irish goddess...

Some lovely soothing Irish facts.

 "Over the years, the goddess went by several names, including Brigid, Bridget, Bridge..." So, to be absolutely clear, I had no idea about Brigid when I chose the name that Gabbie would finally give to the Voice in Martin's head.

 "Meaning 'firey power', she was often depicted with rays of light or fire emitting from her hair and her head, showing us that she was the embodiment of the element of fire..." The fact that I depicted the owner of this Voice "wreathed in fire" (or as Bridget hereself put it in the pilot: "not on fire, just terribly bright") is therefore a complete coincidence.

 "Through her ties with fire and the sun she was considered to be the goddess of smithcraft..." Similarly, this was not why I made her the creator of the Time Spanner, nor why I gave her a robot - "She was perceived to be the patron of relatively high dimensions... and concepts and activities that elevated oneself..." And again, having the same figure interpreted by different cultures as both muse and angel just made sense, so this was also a coincidence.

When original angel Belinda Stewart-Wilson was suddenly unavailable, we were star-wobblingly lucky to have Sally Phillips agree to join us, but this recasting had absolutely nothing to with Bridgid's "triple aspect" (from London Hughes' Instagram.)

 "She was often seen as a motherly figure... Were some of you not aware the she existed?" Well no! Not remotely! That's my point, video! Gabbie's line was originally "You look like a Janet", because that was just the first name that came into my head, and that's basically how I write, but then I found out "Janet" was already the name of a Heavenly interface in The Good Place, so went for "Bridget" because, you know, she bridges things. Not mentioned in the video however, is the weirdest coincidence of all by far, which is that Brigid has her own cross, and it is THIS...

 An actual swastika. I am, as ever, indebted to the Time Spanner Tumblr for brilliantly bringing all of this to my attention, and to this Brigid blog blog for the images.

O Sweet, O Sweet Content!

 

All set!

 I am seriously considering a review of the two-hundred VHS tapes I keep in the cupboard to replace Frankenstein Wednesdays. I started on tape #1 last night, containing Flash Gordon, The Man With Two Brains and The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition (or as my Dad put it, the version where they put all the acting). It's interesting to note that Hobbiton, supposedly the most backward, unchanging community in Tolkein's world, appears to be centuries ahead in its influences of the Medieval-inspired civilisations surrounding it. Boom! Blog done. I'd also been considering blogging about Ming's daughter Princess Aura for a while: She seems to have been to Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond what Satan was to Milton: entirely and unintentionally heroic.

 Boom! Another blog. Really though today's post is all about flagging up some of the beautiful ways others have been using their time. The magnificent Andy Stanton, for example, has been reading aloud all of a Mr. Gum book, so we can finally know for certain what everyone was supposed to sound like:

 His fellow Nincompoop, and my own colleague and definite future Dr. Who, Carrie Quinlan, has initiated The Wild Freelancer Blog, and also this: 

 The writers of Mitchell and Webb's "Remain Indoors" sketches have remained indoors to bring us this episode of Rule Of Three (no way of embedding that, sorry) while Mighty Fin impresario Robbie Hudson has set up his own Emergency Broadcast System over on Spotify, on which I can occassionally be heard bellowing songs. Seasoned Science shut-in Helen Czerski (six weeks aboard a ship studying bubbles at the North Pole is nothing to her - she's like an astronaut if space had bears) joins the ranks of Science Shambles' Stay at Home Festival:

 More fictionally, Monster Hunters co-creator Matthew Woodcock has created a surprisingly prescient submarine-based thriller for Definitely Human called Down, its presience almost exactly matching that of Avenue 5, if anyone's seen that. No spoilers. Avenue 5's shuttle pilot John Finnemore meanwhile, perhaps most heroically of all, has gone and shaved his beard just to give us this wonderful thing:

 And obviously I've been rebranding procrastination as "social isolation" from pretty much ever since this blog went daily last Christmas (April the first will be the hundredth straight post) but, Oo! My second pilot to Time Spanner, The Dan in the High Castle, is being repeated on Radio 4 tomorrow if anyone fancies a huddle. Huge thanks and love to all these makers and partakers. Be well, everyone.

For when I run out of VHSes.