Unposted Photographs of September 2022 in Chronological Order

 I found the Powell Estate in Kennington but didn't recognise it because the trees were new.

 

It seems I location hunted quite a bit in early September. Here's Taskmaster.

 

  So I still drift south. 

 

You can now get lost in what they've built around Paddington.

 

 Or be at one with the scum in the Kyoto Peace Garden.

 

 Here Tom and Shim prepare Waterloo Farm for their second wedding of the day.

 

 Once Tom's changed into an apron to clear up after our pizzas.

 I couldn't find whose this was. Barry Letts'?

 

 Finding new walks for Faren.

 

 Filth.

 

 The Duke and Duchess with Jimmy Chipperfield and an unidentified lion.

 

 Forming a dart with my arms did help. (Best family outing since Eurodisney.)

 

But did I?

 A big walk home from drinks with John, and nearly all of London now wards off the low-flying.

 

 Catching a matinée of See How They Run.

 

 Yet another big face. The eyes follow you round.

 

 

 So do the gronking pelicans.

The Ride and Room

 

 One old friend I was uncharacteristically proactive enough to actually arrange a reunion with before the wedding on Saturday was shunt's David Rosenberg, who instantly invited me to his latest shipping container work in King's Place which I had known nothing about – a mesmerising conveyor-belt-set dance piece called "Future Cargo" (see above) – and just as instantly offered me a job over drinks on the roof on the Standard Hotel. Yesterday saw me therefore, still bouyant as a blue plastic bag from the previous evening's hoo-ha, crawling across gravel and making sucking noises in a black curtained room on Darkfield's Greenwich premises before two more old friends – the writer Glen Neath, who was also at the wedding, and the head on a stick from "Coma" who was not. 

 I won't say any more about the job until it's all up and running, but I think it's something of a departure for Darkfield, maybe even more so than for me. It was a bit of a blur.

 

I remember noticing, on the journey in, how excited I still was to be riding the Docklands Light Railway, and wondering suddenly when I'm more content than when I'm on a ride.

 

(Source)

Best Man Break (or Cells And Atoms)

 

 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.

A Couple Of Things I Learnt From Ghosts

 One thing I learnt filming Ghosts back in January was how to tie a double-half-hitch, which is why there was that rope hanging from the ceiling of my trailer in case anyone peered in and was wondering. I was prepared for the double-half-hitch therefore, but less prepared for what I had to do just before: nothing but my hand would come into shot initially to grab the collapsing festoon, and then the rest of me would swing into shot revealing the identity of this hero. Not a detail in the script, just some proper film-making from director Tom Kingsley, which was a lesson in itself. And I sort of managed it, but the line "I got it" was actually recorded a few months later on a phone under a duvet in my flat, possibly to cover the faff of me not managing it more smoothly. It still really works though, doesn't it, don't get me wrong. Also, this is very much what I normally look like at weddings by the time the dancing's started. The costume department gave me lots of stuff to bulk out my pockets because I thought Keith's decision to turn up might have been a bit last minute, and he couldn't find a big coat.

 The other thing I learnt from Ghosts, just off the top of my head, was how to act in front of a camera. This I learnt very quickly from Tom Kingsley after two takes of the scene at the stump. It had been one of the scenes at the audition, an uplifting ten minutes in a room with Tom, Jim Howick, Ben Willbond and the producer Matt Mulot sharing stories of Ripper Walks - which it turns out Jim also did - and of course also being invited to act. So I'd definitely done okay, but performing the scene again a month later in front of a green screen outside West Horsely Place (oh! I didn't know until I got out of the car that the show was filmed in a real mansion - that was exciting!) I could tell the knockee wasn't really leaving the park. So: "Okay," said Tom after the second take. "This time, just try saying the lines to yourself."

 Up until then I had been saying them to camera. 

 And the camera was, well, this far away.

 Whereas the microphone was directly underneath my tie. So that's what I learnt. You don't actually have to act for the camera. The camera will pick it all up anyway. So will the microphone. And I hope it's okay to say that I adore this scene, partly because I know I'm just doing what I'm told in it, (even if I didn't manage to make my forehead go all veiny like a sad Don Draper). If it's the only acting I get to do on terrestrial television, it will still have been something useful in something great, and a performance that could never be given on radio or on stage, because it needs green screens and framing and a soundtrack and a microphone under my tie. So I got to do some proper telly. I also got to do something brilliant, kind and loved, made by - as I hinted back in January - a brilliant, kind and loved team. You can watch it here.

 

 (The filming of this, sourced from Tom Kingsley's twitter) 

 

   And to continue the Hallowe'en Countdown of the old Universal Farnakensteins, here's what I wrote about 1942's Ghost of Frankenstein.

Here's my actual favourite moment of 2017

The day before it first snowed...

my sister got married...

to my brother-in-law...

in front of friends and family in Mayfair...

Dad tried out his selfie-stick...

and when the ring went on, the groom's mother looked like she'd just been shown a dinosaur egg.

It was a short, great service...

 it said marriage was "about closeness and distance", I remember...

The speeches were also short, and great...

 

Zip forward to last week, my sister cooked her first Christmas Dinner, for the three of us in their new flat, and my brother-in-law made cocktails. We opened and played with presents, went to the pub, met friends, then dragged them back to watch "The Adventure Game" until two in the morning.

The night of the wedding however, the two stayed in a hotel overlooking Soho...

and woke, as I said, to snow.

DEATH RAY WEEK day 3: Actually this one turns you into shopping

The following short is a favourite at my Dad's film evenings in Puisallicon and features one of the dirtiest women ever to appear in cartoons (and the thirties were full of them). "Whopper" here I think means fib: 

 

 

In other news, the wedding of Hannah Lou to Trevor Moss in Wandsworth Town Hall yesterday was a paragon, a paean, a peach. We all sat in the Council Chamber playing with our flip out desks, enjoying the soft, Godless strains of Salt and Blue, and when Hannah walked she looking so young. They both looked so young. They are young. They fell in love young. Trevor's moustache (a lot of us had moustaches) only made him look younger, and his father was the best man and even he looked young. The best man speech at the Ivy House would later make me break my pledge.

And soon they'll be off to honeymoon in Finland (where the finals of the Mad Scientist's Laugh Competition are held). Bishop had begun to plan for his own wedding. Hiring a fake groom seemed like a good idea, then Bish could make a dramatic entrance through a window when the time came to ask if anyone knew of any lawful impediment. Heidi C. Mace said she actually knew someone who hires herself out daily as a shotgun-wielding, pregnant wedding-crasher. There is a market.

I found a payslip in my trouser pocket walking home that night through Peckham Rye. I'm finding payslips all over the place these days. That's the really insidious thing about a regular job, I realized: waiting for the payslip. You shouldn't be waiting for the end of the week. Time should not pass quickly. Good for Hannah and Trev.

 

(originally posted on myspace here)

DEATH RAY WEEK day 2: You will have been watching...

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

 

 Every show I work on with Shunt they always say they're going to make it rain, but this week someone finally has. I put 10p in the tin after work and helped myself to tea, a biscuit and a bunk. It looked great... But listen I should really go to bed as there's a wedding on tomorrow and I have to get up and wash and shave and generally get my head round that (I have slept already, but I should give it another go now I've taken my coat off) so here meanwhile is today's DEATH RAY which may well contain the finest opening credits to anything ever... I mean: Who ARE all these people? Do THEY even know? (Why can't I use italics on this blog? Block caps are so needy. You're supposed to use asterisks or something, aren't you, I know, but then it just looks - And this bit ideally should be written up the side, next to the address, under the stamp.)

"The reft is shouting" (and acting like a dick)

(originally posted on myspace here)

I woke at four. That was fine. I'd needed some sleep. The last two days I'd been trying to tackle the London Dungeons' new summer hours on the lowest reserves of rest, attention, patience, hope and vim that I'd seen since records began (ie this blog). Were there advantages to this physical state? Well, it wasn't all

no. The fact I'd been up at nights reading David Cairns' vividly illustrated missives from a week-long Hammer-Frankethon did lend my Ripper and Autopsy shows a new-found, straight-backed edge for example, as my faltering ability to discern Reality from Some Blog's Precis of Fantasy finally dissolved completely in the dry ice drifting off of Boghurst's bubbling jars. With an insomniac shudder of my shoulder blades, however, I also spent much of these days disproportionately haunted by Cairns' account of Peter Cushing's near-legendary grief, following his wife's less legendary death-bed confession that she had always thought he'd spent his life acting like a dick, in fact, and that he'd broken her heart and had made her life hell...

Look at that poor man. And look on this:

It's a design for Hamlet's conscience, Mr. Tommy Knockers. I scribbled it in the kitchen yesterday evening, while Bishop phoned round for puppets. It should be easy enough to fashion a conscience out of milk I would think, although it now looks more like we'll be going for something in a sock and some shades. The show's a week away (remember, we didn't do the publicity). But, good news: Stumbling back from work to my kitchen with a family Lasagne from Iceland and a heart of black ice I found that, once the boys had arrived and we actually stood up and started trying to perform what we'd written, I was having fun. I was having fun and I wasn't tired. And by half past eleven that evening we finally had something like a finished script to e-mail to our producer. Bishop was a little worried that he'd miss the last train back (to his fiancee, as of Friday! Tirree!) but of course, THE GREAT THING ABOUT WRITING HAMLET, as I learnt for myself and I'm sure you'll all learn for yourselves when you get round to writing Hamlet, is that if you do suddenly find you're five minutes away from the deadline with all your protagonists still standing, you can solve it with a simple stage direction - Hang on, I'll go and get the First Folio...

Omigod! Or, however you spell it. I've just made an immensely important literary find.

Right... The stage directions in the last scene of the Folio's Hamlet are certainly pretty brilliant (though not as good as in the Penguin version:
"In scuffling they change rapiers, and both are wounded with the poisoned weapon...
"The Queen falls...
"She dies...
"He wounds the King...
"He forces the King to drink...
"The King dies...
"He dies...
"He dies..."
And so Shakespeare finds out that, blimey, fighting is certainly a lot easier to write than speaking and in fact he was much nearer to the end than he had thought - There is a theory he spent over a decade working on "Hamlet", which given that he wrote thirty other plays in the space of twenty years is probably worth a mention, but anyway) no, the real find I've just made is Hamlet's ORIGINAL last words. Because, according to the First Folio, these are not, as has been handed down to us: "The rest is silence." They are in fact, as printed in the very first collection of Shakespeare's complete works back in 1623, (and thereafter one supposes consigned to the Naughty Step of Theatrical History):

"The rest is silence. O, o, o, o."

Well, at least it wasn't "The rest is silence. Oooo."

But actually, isn't that brilliant? Isn't it brilliant that Hamlet can't even get his own dying words right? He's a dick to the end... But a dick with dignity. He's OUR dick, and a plague and a pox and a dump upon those who'd try and paint him otherwise. Anyone can write a sympathetic villain, but try to write a sympathetic dick, that takes real heart - Ooh, bangs and barking outside. I wonder what that was. Let's see if there's sirens.

Well I didn't write what I'd intended to but I dare say that's fine. I'd found this teddibly interesting article on procrastination in the Observer in the Hop on Forest Hill. All the findings therein make perfect sense to me - See below: I am clearly a man of my time, this blog a vital social document - Speaking of which, here I am as Tony Blair in an earlier, serious version of Hamlet.

... Nope, no sirens. Clearly it was horseplay. Night then.

Bratwerk: A second horrible love story

 I got back from the Wambam Club about an hour ago and I'm having second thoughts now about not having a compere for "The Information". Not doubts. Just thoughts. But that's not why I'm blogging. I just phoned my imaginary girlfriend and I need to come here and hide. I need to post my two days 'orth. I need to buy myself some time before finally, definitely knuckling down to that sketch about Tesla- I've said too much... So yes, I got round to unpacking and boxing all the stuff my parents left for me and one of the last items to turn up was this, from the earliest comic of mine that I can find. The other strips were all Leo Baxendale knock-offs like the stuff I've already posted. I called them "Willy The Kid Books" because that's basically what they were, except for this one. Here, for once, the 5-year-old me decides to do away with the usual stumpy-heads-have-accidents-at-the-fun-fair-or-museum structure and go for something a bit more epic, Peer Gyntish even, involving a bride, a groom, a baby, a tramp and a harpy. The more I look at this story, the more I like it. And I don't think you're supposed to understand what the harpy's saying. We'll speak in a couple of days. Night night.

 

(originally posted on myspace)

Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty (A New Year's Thinky Bin Clear-out)

 Hooh! Sorry about the absence. You want a piece of me? Okay here we go. Here's Herne Hill at five in the morning. I can't now remember why I went out. Yes I can. I'd slept in late after the last night of the pantomime and wanted some air. The fog was a bonus actually. I wasn't the only silhouette knocking around at that hour but, kid, I was monarch of all I surveyed:

And here's where I did my Christmas shopping the following morning:

 

And here's how I got there:

 

You couldn't see further than the length of a plane that day (a unit of measurement I was entertaining because I had to fly to France the next day). I walked blindly but with grace through the gates of Greenwich park, found an incline and made my way up to the observatory where I pottered cap in hand about the space exhibits freshly reminded of how little I really knew about the old place... I know less about space now than I would if I were five. For example there are officially NOT nine planets now: a five-year-old will know this but it's not what I was taught. And while I'm finally big enough to make my presence felt at the interactive exhibits I'm now too big to get my knees under the desk. So I just walk on, past all the education, and have a go on the meteorite instead. That is, I touch it. "This is the oldest object you will ever touch!" says the sign. So it's even older than the Earth. There is of course absolutely no way of being able to tell this by just touching it however, an obvious but still disappointing reality.

Happy New Year by the way. I hope anyone reading this is well and rested and has cleared up a bit rather than just burning a bit of incense like God's going to decide to come down and do the hoovering. All four of us in the house have beards now. A pit was dug in the garden for New Year's Eve, fifteen pits'orth of found firewood stacked beneath the fairy lights, didgeridoos and twelve-string guitars brought out, friends invited and, unlike the last time we tried this, nobody got branded. I'd popped up to my room quite early on, intent on putting this post to bed in time for my New Year's resolution (at least one post every two days, regardless of whether or not I have anything to say: the whole point of this blog was to wring some kind of thinking out of me) and accidentally went to bed. Well I'd had a busy day: By noon I had already stocked up on smoked salmon, run a bath, finished "The Drowned and the Saved" and impulse-bought four videos from Barnado's for 95p (an anachronistic indulgence that included Derek Jarman's back projections from a Pet Sop Boys' tour, and two episodes of this:

 

 

 

- the proto-Booshian, secret-identity-rockstar classic "Jem" whose opening song's manhole-facilitated hijacking by the Misfits kicks every ounce as much ass as I remember). I was woken in time for midnight though by Jamie banging on a steel drum with a cane (someone clearly knew that drum was going to come in handy when they dumped it in the corridor nine months ago) and even though we were going by the kitchen clock which is set four minutes early so that people don't miss their trains which I've never really understood, it was an exemplary social gathering. Glamour and glitter. Fashion and fame.

 

Hooh! continued: I actually started this post back in Languedoc, where I spent Christmas with the parents, where the birdseed is daily replenished, where the air is clear and the land quite flat, but not so flat you can't pop up a ridge to catch sight of the snow on the Pyrenees (so as my Dad pointed out we had snow for Christmas). And I gave my Dad a book of morally fortifying Magic Lantern slides. Here's one:

 

Here, rather shockingly, is the next (it was a simpler time):
 

And Santa gave me "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, which I'm tucking into now and finding as problematic as expected (see Jun 19: "Heaven's full of Machines" passim, won't you). It really is a very long-winded and patronizing piece of writing. And I can't agree that the question "Does God exist?" is scientifically important (see Sep 21: "Qui Makey Ipsum Makeyman?" or whatever it was called, passeeeem). I don't believe in God, mine is a vast and Godless Universe and that's fine, but (or maybe "therefore") I can't conceive how his existence might change what scientists should investigate, how they should investigate it, or how any of us should behave towards each other? Also… as nasty, wretched and wrong as atheism's enemies are I can't agree with Dawkins that religion is my "enemy" either, any more than I can agree that sculpture is my "enemy", or football. Religion is a form of assembly. It's a subject for art, it's a medium. Where does the imagination fit into all this? Somewhere surely, and at the risk of sounding quisling, the question "GIVEN that God clearly doesn't exist, WHY do people believe in him?" is probably a lot more interesting than Dawkins' answer "Because they haven't grown out of it" suggests, although I can agree that people should be given every opportunity to quit (which is what this book purports to give, so good on it I suppose). The numerous examples he cites of institutional oppression meted out to the opponents of hokum are unbelievably depressing – and I'm only a hundred pages in - but what do they prove? Clive James once wrote that a ban on televised beauty contests would do nothing to stop thick ladies wanting to turn up on the telly in their bikinis. He was spot on, and I rather feel the same way about religion and tribal violence... Anyway the real problem I have with the book is its tone, and it's not a superficial problem. As I mentioned earlier I'd just been lent "The Drowned and the Saved" by Primo Levi and – I wasn't actually lent it by Primo Levi, sorry... – and baffling as religious belief is, Levi's writing rings out with insight into a subject no less baffling as the direct result it seems to me of the tone he feels obliged to adopt. At no point do you feel he's writing to give anyone an erection. His tone is angry but not insulting, impartial but not agnostic, respectful but unwavering, and it's this tone that's missing from Dawkins. That's all I'm asking for really, insight. Sound like a scientist. Surprise me. As I said though I'm only a hundred pages in. 

 

And I should probably declare a couple of interests as well, in the spirit of looking back:

I once fell in love with a woman who told me she spoke to God. And I don't believe in God but I didn't believe she was lying and I didn't believe she was wrong. No, I quite happily entertained two completely incompatible cosmic attitudes, and that decision seemed at the time the closest I've ever come to Being In Love: She had her cosmos, I had mine, an attitude that would probably strike Dawkins as detestable intellectual cowardice, but Love is an act of faith as I've written before (I can't agree with the idea that falling in love and monogamy are Darwinian chemical imperatives... if they were everyone would live happily ever after and the Earth would shine like the sun). Love is unprovable. That's why weddings normally happen in churches, and are normally frightening. And why this woman's religion made it so much easier for me to go "Right, I love her", although my atheism made it so impossible for her (let's say... let's just say that was the reason). It's also why I began to find going to weddings so hard.

Then there was that sketch I wrote for Laurence and Gus in a lunch break a couple of weeks back (I've never written a sketch so quickly... I'm sure that's a good sign) the sketch about Abraham and Isaac that opened with "And on the seventh day God rested. And on the eighth day, God rested. And on the ninth day, God rested, and so he basically rested, and then drowned everyone and invented the rainbow. And then rested," a sketch that was pretty clearly not going to be recorded, although it went down very well at the read-through. Actually I should check up on that. I couldn't make the last recording as I was doing the pantomime (It was based on Pride and Prejudice, I was the baddie, the second time in two months I've been asked to wear green tights). I should also state that it's only the commission to write for Laurence and Gus that got me turning this stuff out in the first place, but if it hasn't been recorded then hooray, I can proudly count myself among the Censored Satirists. I mean it was a funny sketch. I mean she did love me. It's just… you know, religion.

Michael's wedding was lovely though. That's what I said I'd write about in this post, didn't I. The reception was a month ago now and took place in a huge brick hall in Wapping that had once been responsible, so I was told, for powering every hydraulic theatre curtain in the West end. Its floor was covered with leaves and bare trees had been installed in a downstairs chamber where flamenco dancers served mulled wine. What can I say about it? It was a month ago. It was not frightening. I was sat with friends. We danced. It was hilarious.

And I'll leave you, in the spirit of looking forward, with a New Year's message from the celebrated, short-sleeved turkeyperson Arthur C. Clarke. I found this pinned to a board in the Carnegie Library. Enjoy the sunshine, wherever you are...

"Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life – a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. It will be a history illuminated by the reds and infra-reds of dully glowing stars, visible only to whatever strange beings have adapted to their light. Before them will lie not the billions of years in which we measure eras of our geology, but years to be counted literally in trillions...



"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

Yes. Happy New Year