Before social media, if you wanted to let people know what made you cry, you'd have to write it down on a little bottle from The Body Shop, fill it from a fountain on the third storey of the Oxo Bargehouse, and leave it on a shelf, but try telling the kids that these days.
Continuing to digitise then dump degraded capture of my twenties, I present here a walkthrough from the year two-thousand of the Museum of... Emotions, where for five pounds an hour, most of the founders of the immersive absurdist collective shunt and I would work the door, supervise the emotions node, or do a quick patrol to check nobody had forgotten to turn on the machine that says "I love you". It was a lovely door to work too, clicking the ticker and saying "yeah it's all free", and the ellipsis in the title is not there for suspense – Clare Patey and Pippa Bailey had curated a number of wonderful "Museum of..."s between 1998 and 2001, and this was "Emotions", but every iteration provided pencils and encouraged contributions, the first thing of its kind I had seen.
You glimpse me briefly in a mirror. The moustache was for a part. I kept most of it (below right) for the very first work I would do with shunt a few months later, The Tennis Show, staged two storeys further up the building, and so I've mixed a little footage of that, filmed by Susanne Dietz, into my walkaround of the then derelict top floor at the video's end. It was a magic show, and you can see more of it here.
Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 going by my dye job (open auditions were being held for The Pianist) Tom Lyall and I staged one of the stories I'd written in the mountains of Bajardo at a cabaret at Chat's Palace, Hackney. I originally did these storytelling "acts" at Shunt's arch in Bethnal Green, and I might put one or two of those up as well now I'm finally digitising my VHS's. The scare quotes around "act" are just a reaction to my louche mumbling here. No level of video degradation can dim the splendour of Tom's work, even if the capture does little justice to his makeup choices as Phonella. Speaking of degradation, I thought I'd parcel this in a little Hi-8 footage of the region whose actual walk to the shops had inspired it, and I'm very grateful to Kane Parsons' Backrooms for cementing ageing VHS as a now legitimate liminal aesthetic. Enjoy (possibly with subtitles).
Yesterday was fun, and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key, and to Gemma for having me, and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels, I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome, and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it, once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.
Counting the grains of rice:
This is a new idea.
Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly
important promise. Still, probably more promises than it’s fair to
expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.
Originally, a promise was much bigger, and most people would be
unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of
something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night, there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of
the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of
the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still
count that as a promise kept. Which they did.
Maybe that’s why we’re underground.
Eating a grain:
This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.
Taking another grain:
And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?
Proving I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.
I was being a Best Man today, so please accept the thirst traps above in lieu of a bigger post. They show me and Greg McLaren in 2018's production of "An Execution (By Invitation Only)" – the production on which our Bride and Groom first met – and were taken by Floro Azqueta who was also at the wedding. I'd not seen these pictures until today. I love them. There are more on Floro's website here. Lucky you. He didn't take the one below however, he told me, so that must be the work of press photographer Tristram Kenton (I found it illustrating a nice review here). Four years later this waltz would be Tom and Shim's First Dance.
You're surrounded by reunions at a wedding. And it struck me that although a Lifespan is enormous, it might be also be atomic: there's no splitting it into smaller units. So they met in 2018, but these two have known each other forever.
We had tried all manner of things with "The Willoughbies" in previous series of JFSPat both sketch try-outs and live recordings. We'd tried it with John as the Dad, with me as the Dad, as a "runner" – catching buses, or winning points for spotting spelling mistakes in a menu – and as a standalone, but the clan never made it in. Also, I didn't really get them. I am, as should be clear from these posts by now, a lot slower on the uptake than most listeners, and as cold as any stone. Possibly the point was to show a generically happy, Ned-Flanders-typefamily in a less annoying light, and to let an audience – specifically John's audience – love something more commonly mocked. Or posssibly it was less pointed than that. Sometimes John just enjoys painting portraits. Anyway, I was surprised how doggedly he kept trying to do something with them.
So when he first mooted over Zoom his plans for Series Nine, and for the family formerly known as Willoughby to take centre stage, I immediately considered how out of my depth I might be. This wouldn't be the normal rough trade John gets me to do, I'd need a buoyancy aid. That buoyancy aid turned out to be a fond memory of Jim Broadbent at his most "heigh-ho", augmented with Terry Jones' weak "R", and I clung to that aid for dear life when recording Jerry's first scene, the restaurant scene from Episode Two. As I said on twitter during the tweetalong:
"I
reckon it might have been this scene that made me consider giving Jerry
that voice. I was worried my own voice might sound a little too
punching down. Among other things"
You know. Bullying.
I'm making it sound like it was hard, aren't I. It wasn't hard, of course. I had John's writing to play, John and the rest of the cast to play off, Sue's tunes to sing, and Ed to tell me how much Jerry reminded him of his dad. But this was still unlike anything I'd done on the radio before.* Jerry wasn't a character in a sketch. He'd last a whole series, a series in which I'd also be playing quite a few other roles which we'd have distinguish him from. So whatever voice I used in that first recording of that first scene would have to stick. Fortunately, Jim Broadbent is a very versatile actor.
Oh, here's something about that restaurant sketch I didn't know:
And this might be my favourite revelation of the week.
I've loved Willie Rushton ever since I received a copy of his comic The Gernaium of Flüt as a child, and I wish I could find it now. His son in that is called Toby, I think. His dog might be called Toby as well. I sang his praises here back in 2008. And here he is playing Watson opposite John Cleese's Holmes.
But he wasn't just the dry, avuncular fantasist of my childhood. Ruhston was there at the beginning of Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was, a stalwart of the sixties' Satire Boom that Jerry fails the audition for in Episode Six. In real life there are people who remind you of people, and I love that Jerry had that too, whether I knew it or not. But what I remind myself most of, listening to Jerry again now, is my childhood friend, Tom of our number. He was big fan of Willie Rushton too.
HERE is something great that William Shaw wrote about the series' approach to failure. And here, before I go – because, despite what it says at the top of this post, it's actually New Year's Eve tonight – is another thing John told me about the inspiration for Jerry when we first Zoomed:
It goes up to 63, by the way.
Series Nine is still being repeated at 11pm on Radio 4, the final episode is tonight, if you have any questions you can post them
below, and you can still hear the whole thing any time you like here (I recognise that, despite all this talk about buoyancy aids, I haven't once mentined the lilo scene). Happy New Year, Unattendees!
*(I know I've played Sir Maxwell House over a few series of The Monster Hunters {who also taught crows to do tricks} but Sir Maxwell is a character from a sketch, which might be why the show outgrew him.)
My friend Tom of our number gave me this cursed book back in 1994 – not the specific copy above, mine's more fire-damaged – but I never got round to making anything in it because I never seemed to have the requisite cigarette packets, golf tees or fringed tweed. Look at the fun I missed out on though.
During this blog's hiatus, however, I did manage to fashion this picture round from it for the Dungeon Zoomers who continued to quiz online, and now – to round off a week that started with robots – I thought YOU coud play along TOO, maybe, if you open this page in a few different tabs? I don't really know how this will work. Anyway, all you have to do is match the following names and raw materials...
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
... with the corresponding, delightful toys pictured below. I'll post the correct answers in the comments although this one's actually pretty easy so maybe I won't. CHWAT!
