Big Spoon

artwork by Jon Stubbington

 

 Of course, I'm biased. But I think my mate Matthew Woodcock (Monster Hunters co-creator, "Roy Steel", and former Tweed Avenger of Mitre Square before the London Dungeons started giving us all scripts) has produced a genuine podcast Masterpiece in The Divide. Without giving too much away – and there is SO MUCH to give away – his new, twelve-part Cold War beast, is John Le Carré meets Philip K. Dick, with new episodes out every Friday, atmosphere you could cut with a piano wire, and me popping up all over the show as louche para-intelligence panjandrum Charles "A bastard for a boss can be quite the motivator" Spooner. Everyone involved has done incredible work on it so I won't mention any of them because I want you to stop reading this immediately and start catching up with it NOW: Here, look what a lovely length the episodes are...

 

 Power through the first four if you can for a NEXT LEVEL TWIST, and then bask in the even-nexter levelness of episode five...

  

 And then enjoy the wait. Cool some water, maybe, invite some friends round whatever you cooled that water with and talk and about it while you wait. Like! Subscribe! Sorry, I'm excited. I honestly reckon you'll be hooked though, I'm really proud to be involved, I've just shed a week-long fever, and you know how long it normally takes me to plug stuff. Here's another Grand Panjandrum...

 

 

 

 Fireworks and dogs. A different time. 

Themepunk Roundup: My Life as an Action Butler

 

Thanks to Gerard Giorgi-Coll. 

 

 This year, unlike last, I've been doing jobs. They've been jobs I've enjoyed, and sought out, but also what you might call out-of-work-actor jobs. There should be a better name for these though, not because I fancy arguing the toss about what counts as acting, but because, ever since I worked at the London Dungeon I have actively enjoyed performing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends in front of as broad a demographic as possible – Tourism jobs, if you like – and "out-of-work-actor job" doesn't really do that justice. A lot of performance work won't guarantee these things. Themepunk, as I'm going to try calling it for now, hopefully does, although you might get less time to rehearse. Here are Neil Frost and I finalising the route of The Classic Tour back in July:

  

  Press my tummy to view.

 

 I was definitely surprised when Big Ben – below with Neil, both fellow Dungeon alumni – got in touch to say the two of them had been asked by the Ghost Bus Tours to come up with a new, family-friendly, two-handed blockbuster alternative cabaret, complete with songs, costume changes, and a light dusting of Eat The Rich for its open top bus route, and to ask if I'd like to help develop the tour for actual money, and maybe perform it with Neil too, but it was a nice surprise. I figured doing a show on a bus with Neil would be an excellent way to spend a summer without having to go up to Edinburgh, and so it has proved. It's called "The Classic Tour" because that's what was written on the buses. Here's where they keep them:

 

All the other actors Neil brought on for this gig are beautiful too, although audiences have also been pretty Edinburgh-sized as well – appreciative twos and threes until tours were cut – but I'd spent long enough doing Time Tours not to be surprised by this, and I'd heard the Ghost Bus Tours was down to one actor a show as well now, hence my orginal surprise at Ben's call. But this is the bus tour I've always wanted to do, and I'm doing a few in November too, so if you fancy it, HERE.

 

 Yes! This was a plug all along! I'm also going to plug a beautifully written, handsomely received Big Finish Audio Drama I recorded last year: "Torchwood: Art Decadence", in which, as you can hear from the trailer below, I inadvertently play exactly the same character I do above. Don't tell Big Finish, They think I've got range. But I'm in, readers! I'm IN! ACTUAL ACTING JOBS! Available HERE.

Remember to keep everything natural.

   

 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...

*UPDATE: this one.

Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

Badphone in a Coma

 In its very last day at Canary Wharf, I finally got round to experiencing COMA, the Darkfield show in a shipping container I'd recorded back in 2019. Pre-plague. I had to remind myself of that when I heard my old voice expressing conern about being coughed at in the face.

 

 The pill in the little tray lay unswallowed at the back of my throat throughout the twenty minutes. That's the problem with lying down. But I managed to get the top bunk. Once the lights went out, all I could hear was me reading Glen's lines from an ipad; binaural radio's so much more prevalent than it was when we first made Contains Violence in 2008, or even Ring in 2013, and like that old film of the train pulling into the station, I don't know how much longer our brains will stay fooled. I guess I'm saying, it was more like what I was expecting than I was expecting.

 

 I'd actually booked for Saturday, but had dismebarked at the adjacent and preposterously similarly named "Canada Water" station by mistake, so missed my slot. The attendants were brilliant, but I didn't want to hang around on my own – Canary Wharf was making me miss things – so I decided to head back into town along Regent's Canal, as I hadn't walked that stretch for a while, but I got that wrong too, and turned off one rivulet too early.

 

 Heading north, I didn't recognise any of the buildings, but I'm used to that. A lot's gone up. 

 It was round about the time I took the above picture that I decided I should finally get a new phone. Not for its own sake, but because I realised I wanted a better camera. That was an exciting moment. I hadn't wanted anything in ages. I used to want to make films. I tried taking some video with what I had, and was happy with the sounds I caught. There was a party going on in a flat, coots and car horns, sirens, a solitary firework.

 

 And soon it was too dark to photograph anything. See? 

 This is a whole palm tree I found discarded on its side in a weir. I definitely didn't remember there being a weir.

 I also misread a message sprayed onto the unlit footpath as "some peace. some time." until I realised one e was an l, and all the o's a's. You don't get that in Notting Hill. But I couldn't photograph that either, so here are some swans I saw on London Beach on Friday. I think that's new. I guess the new King doesn't want them.

 

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)

The Plague Year One Plague Year On

 

 April the Second marks one year since I decided to start reading aloud Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" on Youtube, and I don't know how I feel about this anniverary, which I suppose means I don't particularly feel anything. I remember thinking at the time that the idea of a "Plague Year" was a good thing to seed though: there seemed no way this would be over by Christmas, let alone the Summer. I probably didn't imagine so many would be vaccinated by now, however. I probably didn't think about it. Actually: yes, reading Defoe was my way of not thinking about it, immersing myself in the knowns of 1722 instead of worrying about the unknowns of 2020. 

 Here it all is again anyway, for anyone who missed it (in either sense of the word). In further Youtubing news, April the Second also saw my friend Barbara bequeath her old iPad mini to me today, in the hope that its editing software would prove less petulant than my old version of iMovie, so maybe I'll start Youtubing again. Let's see. I know many, many people have had a far worse plague year than me. I hope you're all doing tremendously. 

The "The Call to Adventure" Round

 

 

 In the end I decided this round could be a straight steal from Martin White and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra's typically brilliant, self-directed music video for The Call To Adventure. It's the big opening number to their album "The Hero's Journey" on which I briefly appear as Richard Nixon, reading the speech written for if the moon landing had gone wrong. Identify then the following films from the title screens below – we always give the years now in the quiz – or, more fun still, press play on the video above and shout out what you know. Answers as ever will be in the comments.

1. (1968)

 

 

2. (1985)

 

3. (1959)

 

4. (1988)

 

 

5. (1990)

 

6. (1987)

 

 

7. (1958)

 

8. (1993)

 

9. (1977)

 

10. (1984)

"The origins of chain saws in surgery is debated."

  It's probably for the best you can't make out the faces above as I've no idea what's announceable yet, but he were are again – or aren't –  embarking on a new thing from the brain of Bottom Left. Monday therefore has been exciting. I don't remember how the conversation got onto chainsaws; it was Top Right, I think, who said she had recently discovered they were invented originally as an aid to childbirth, which I looked up immediately, and... Happy International Women's Day, everyone!

 

Before the invention of gasoline motors, osteotomes such as this were powered by Charades.

 The pop shield I was sent didn't reach from the stand, so I tried holding it over my face like a French fan. Could something perhaps be installed to stop me popping permanently – enquired Bottom Right – like a nose bag? 

 We wracked our brains for something that could be worn over the mouth.

 – Whathever man invents the machine that can make Simon quieter– began Bottom Left.

 – Or woman, I interrupted, in celebration of the day.

 – Whatever man invents the machine... or woman... that can make Simon quieter– Bottom Left corrected himself.

 Whatever we finish making should be available in a couple of months, which is exciting, until which time, I think, I get to keep the whole recording caboodle, which is also exciting. Maybe I'll make some rap. I've been relistening to Rob Hubbard's old Commodore 64 sountracks recently: they're stirring, and would make an excellent bed. Don't copy me.

 

 

Bath Plug

 My friend Silvia Mercuriali has been incorporating headphone-heard instructions into her immersive theatre long before the invention of the smartphone: discmen, that's what we had to use back in those days, discmen strapped to actors and radios hanging from trees. To enjoy her latest audioteatro intimacy though all you have to do is head here and download the "National Ear Theatre" app, book a ticket here for any Saturday, Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday from now until October the 31st, and then simply get into your swimming kit and await further instructions. At some point in the show you will hear my voice, that's a promise this time, and the site says you'll also need goggles. Before the global pandemic hit, Swimming Home was actually going to be a work for public baths rather than private (or showers), and it's been joyful to see Silvia reimagining the project on her instagram account. 

 

 Fellow shunt associate Susanne Dietz has also been producing videos here to accompany some of the text compiled from what I'm asssuming are interviews Silvia conducted, but Blogger no longer lets me embed vimeo content into my post for some reason, so instead I'll just quote one of them verbatim. This is from Maia Rossi: "I am allowed to be here. Among people. Nearly naked. And I am in my own bubble. There is a crowd of people around you. You are in the same element. You are sharing the fluids. But you really are alone. On your own, not alone. On your own."

 

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/462802313" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

^ See? What's this? Any ideas?

Gods, Men and Monsters. And Snakes... Oh, and Women!

   For centuries, it seems, the defining characteristic of a gorgon was actually her tusks. This two-and-a-half-thousand year old antefix from the island of Thasos for example doesn't even bother with snakes in the hair. I hadn't realised not having snakes in the hair was an option. I wish I'd known that when I was nine.

 I just assumed you really had to commit to the snakes. I also thought you had to give a gorgon breasts, which as a nine-year-old I would definitely have found harder to draw than snakes; but the Medusa in Clash of the Titans had breasts, and the Medusa on the front cover of my school's copy of Gods, Men and Monsters clearly had breasts, so in the best traditions of Classical Sculpture, room was made. And speaking of grotesque misrepresentations of women from Greek Mythology: my friend and teacher Natalie Haynes has a new book out to set the record straight called Pandora's Jar, which she talks about on a very fun Book Shambles HERE! 

 Here's another misrepresentation: the Pythia at Delphi, showing a lot less skin than Medusa, and surrounded by big, scary Dangermouse eyes in tunnels. I've clearly misunderstood "Pythia" to mean "half-lady-half-python" which it didn't at all. It just meant "priestess". Still it gave me a chance to draw more snakes. And here are more: the giant cobra that apparently guards the Golden Fleece, facing Jason in his Speedos over on the right...

 And one of the heads of the magic deity Hecate up in the centre, whom I have also given hairy legs, knee windows and a nighty. On the bottom left is Medea, single-handedly taking on the bronze giant Talos. Not Jason at all. I'd forgotten this, but Natalie mentions it in the Shambles so I'm happy to see this was also the version I was taught. And fuck it, here's a slime monster.

 Now a plug: On Friday I'll be one of seventy-two actors reading The Odyssey aloud in its entirety on the Jermyn Street Theatre's live stream here. I'll be on around 4pm, I think (after Mark Corrigan's mum!) telling of Odysseus' conversations with ghosts in Hades, including the ghost of Agamemnon who sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia and was in turn murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. "She has poured down shame on her own head," Agamemnon moans, "and on all other women, even good ones." The italics are mine, but I'll be the one reading it so they're staying. Natalie also talks about Agamemnon. She says her next book will be a novel about Medusa. I can't wait.

Same Day

 

Not a ship.

  This week's Ship, Sea and the Stars doesn't seem to have gone up yet, but that's okay, because I still haven't posted last week's, so here it is. The subject is "Stranded Seafarers". You can hear me reading accounts of friendlessness from Frankenstein at 4:48, and faithlessness from an old Charles Dibdin ballad at 30:43, but the episode's main focus is a lot more contemporary. At least four fifths of the world's trade is still transported by sea, which is obvious if I think about it, but I don't normally think about it, and Covid has seen pretty much all the contracts of those working these ships extended, or even doubled, meaning they will be at sea now for anything from six months to over a year, their shore leave perpetually threatened with cancellation in order to meet "Same Day Delivery" commitments. One of Helen's guests is a chaplain, and that's not because the workers are doing okay. Another illuminating engagement with something ignored but essential, I really recommend it, even though it ultimately has very little to do with Frankenstein.

A Nice Quick Job And Or But Others

 I left the flat comparatively early today to record a series for Definitely Human. All twelve episodes. Imagine that. Three hours in front of a microphone, having fun playing an absolute nightmare, while everyone else does the work. It was hot in there though; I caught myself in a mirror at the end of the recording, and I looked like I'd been pulled out of a cow. It's cooler now at 5:59am. I did sit down to write this at a reasonable hour, but you know how writers like to get comfortable and, well, I ended up trying to reupholster the chair. I couldn't get all the screws out in the end. Or entirely back in again. (I'm surprised to see neither "giving up" nor "quitting" are tags on here yet.) Now it creaks beneath me, still mainly a nice chair, rescued from the Shunt Lounge ten years ago. Oh, if anyone remembers sticking chewing gum on the underside for later, come and get it, guys.

Icebergs, Sirens and A Thing that looks like The Biggest Thing

 HMS Captain, which sank on its first night out with the fleet 

because it was too heavy and weird-looking (image source).

 At the 3:26 mark of the latest Ships, Sea and the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich I read Lawrence Beesley's astonishing eye-witness account of the sinking of the Titanic. The subject of the show is marine archeology and the guests are Andrew Choong, who loves boats, and Helen Farr, who loves time, which is handy. Helen Czerski's the host, and I feel she would have described the Titanic sinking in a very similar manner to Beesley; both share an attention to not just detail but exactly the right detail, and a clarity of insight into just what it is about that detail which makes the processing of it so unforgettable. Catching up with a Science Shambles from a couple of weeks ago, in addition to some excellent talk about astronomy for the blind, what the big bang looked like, and why candles don't work in zero gravity, eleven minutes in I heard Helen offer this great vignette: "I remember the biggest thing I've ever seen - and it wasn't the biggest thing I'd ever seen, but my brain thought it was - and it was a tornado. And the thing about a tornado is that clouds are normally there, but you don't normally see them connected to the ground. The cloud base was probably three kilometeres. So I was looking at something three kilometers big."
 I've no idea what the actual biggest thing Helen's seen is.

Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Ships, Sea and the Snark

  
A whatsapp map created for refugees,
presented by Professor Marie Gillespie,

in which distances are measured in money.

 This week's episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich might be the the ships-sea-and-the-starriest one yet, because it deals with navigation. Not just the treasures of cartography, but the Pacific star maps being recommitted to memory by modern Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson - an account of which you can hear me reading at 5:25 - and the Global Positioning System, or GPS, originally reserved for the American military until it was unscrambled for general use in January 2000. Other systems are now available of course, just not the EU's, because we're leaving it. On a completely unrelated-to-Brexit note, I also get to rattle through some Hunting of the Snark at 34:30. 

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"  (Source.)

 Marie Gillespie also brings a bag refashioned by a refugee solidarity network on Lesbos from one of a million lifejackets now left on the beaches of Greece, and if you fancy further clicks Extra Credits just produced a nice series on Austronesian navigation which you can watch here, and you can give to the Refugee Council here.

Titus Bemoan (York's from Wales now. And Lancaster's from York.)

 

I looked up what a "gorget" is (source).

 Pah, just missed midnight, and I'm still a post behind if I want to average one a day (there was no post on Wednesday the 29th) but anyway, Act Two of the definitiver Richard II is now uploading, and will be posted below once done. There were ninety minutes of recording to cut down this time, but I'm glad I'm having another run, now I'm clearer what's going on: Richard having no idea actually how hard he's pushing people's buttons is a lot more interesting to play longterm, Bolingbroke feels like someone people might now be genuinely happy to meet, and – upping the Celtic quotient – York's more fun to play now he's not so stiff-jawed and uptight and sounds like Titus Andronicus, another ill-starred old soldier whose loyalty to the state turns him against his own son – that's all in the future though; right now, it's just a more enjoyable voice to complain in. York should bark. Its partly his overestimation of the power of that bark that loses him so many allies. And it's nice to recast a voice. If you're following these videos, I think that's Mark Antony's voice as Mowbray, and possibly Cassius' as Harry Percy, but his part's going to be built up.

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Be Pinto Colvig, If It's Even That.

 I feel I should have known who Pinto Colvig was before this week. He had arguably one of the most influential voices in comedy. Like Mel Blanc, he is probably best known for the cartoon characters he voiced, but while Blanc was a well respected character comedian with a regular showcase on The Jack Benny Show (basically the Seinfeld of its day, only more so because it came first) Colvig had to slum it as unrecognisable nightmare fuel in terrible circus-based shorts for Capitol Records.

 In creating the role of the Wendigo-mouthed "Bozo", Colvig certainly proved influential enough in the world of horror (a Wendigo by the way is a flesh-eating, First Nations xenomorph notable for chewing its own lips off with hunger), but that's not why I feel he should be better known. He was also the voice of Grumpy the dwarf, and Sleepy, and Bluto from Popeye, and Pluto from Mickey Mouse, but most importantly, surely, he was the original voice of Goofy. That's a voice with big ripples. You can hear it in Dan Castellaneta's Homer Simpson, Spike Milligan by his own admission straight up stole the voice for Eccles, it is the dopey voice (although of course Dopey didn't have a voice), and his nervous "gollum" debuted years before the publication of The Hobbit (it's surely a nervous swallow that gives Smeagol his nickname, rather than Andy Serkis' odd cough). So I'd love to tell you more about Colvig. Unfortunately I can't get beyond the first ten seconds of this video (so you should feel under no obligation to, either):

The Armpits of the Thames

View from the Trafalgar Tavern

 "The river was a place for children... but it wasn't a nice place for children." Mudlarker Lara Maiklam, maritime historian S.I. Martin and senior curator of the Royal Observatory Louise Devoy join Helen Czerski for a look under the hood in this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars, while I can be heard reading a nineteenth-century engraver's gush. It is, as ever, the good stuff.