Sometimes this blog will just be me guest reviewing on Collins and Maconie's Movie Club.

 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 was the nineties.

The Bed-Daughter and Some Messy Artists

 from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator

 Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal. 

 Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.

 Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest. 

 

 

UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?

Simon and Tom do Phonella's Shopping

from Notebookery 1

 

 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).

Sometimes this blog will just be something like "Have you seen Crosseyed and Painless?"

 I first saw this video on Talking Heads' VHS compilation Storytelling Giant and I'm pretty sure I stopped sitting out dances soon after. Voluntarily walking onto a dancefloor and moving on the spot had never been something I'd associated with myself before, it seemed too serious and difficult, like sport. I'm not really sure what these dancers were doing that felt so different, but I loved the undercover melodrama of it, the Tex Averish sneakiness, and although I couldn't copy the moves I could happily overact to an improvised internal monlogue in time with some music, which is what I began doing after seeing this, and have been doing ever since. It's choreographed by Toni Basil.

 And like Toni, I've still got it.

 P.S. Full Shakespeare is still happening, but other than a link in my profile and maybe a weekly round-up I'm going to start letting the blog, youtube and instagram accounts do their own thing a bit more from now on. I'll still plug stuff here, I just don't want to get tunnel vision, and I want to let my eyes dart. So today's video is still uploading, but Sunday's can be watched here (controversially The Taming of the Shrew starts a hole act earlier than Act One). I hope like Ms. Basil you're all using it and not losing it out there.

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.