Ad Break (Hey It's June!)

 

 

 Here's an Ocado ad I shot last November. That's right, this blog's a cough and a spit archive too now. Although I didn't even have to do that. It was my first interaction with an animated character: off camera is someone wafting a large piece of card to simulate a potentially self-aware articulated table. As with my first advert I play a dad (although you can't see our kid on the stairs). I'm sure my moustache was a factor in the casting, even though dads haven't really sported moustaches since the eighties. Nostalgia, as Don Draper says, is subtle but potent. The following day I flew to Bulgaria to push a child in a dinghy through a mock up of a flooded town for Deutsche Telekom, but I can't find that online. 

 

 The moustache was still around when I shot this ad in April, although who knows whether or not "John" is a dad? Maybe he's from Head Office in Frankfurt. Maybe he's a cannibal. It's a strong look, whatever he is. I love it. Some of these people had to sing "English Country Garden" for eight hours.

 

 Miming the piano is June Hudson. This is very under-dressed for June. The director had used her a lot, and he wasn't alone. One advert she had done called for her to jump out of a aeroplane strapped to a parachutist. She's in her eighties. It was her first experience of skydiving. 

 Before doing adverts June taught Science Fiction Costume Design at the Univerty of Redlands in California. Before that she was Head Costume Designer on the original no-budget "Doctor Who". Anyone who has been to Angels' costume warehouse in Hendon will probably know her work...

 

Horniman, Presepe, Gorgon and Queue

 Today I returned to Sydenham Hill. 

 Here's a video. See if you can find the white triangle to press to make it play...

 

 

 Bella (real name unknown – originator of the "Woodlouse or Moth?" round) had invited me the Horniman Museum, to be among butterflies.

 I am an idiot for never having been in a butterfly house before.

 The pyschedelic antiquarian decadence of these animals' final act upstages any flame, and made me want to redecorate. 

 I also loved the remains of a "gorgon's-head brittlestar" in the Horniman proper, and took a picture to celebrate Natalie Haynes' new book.

 

 Elsewhere, in the newly re-de-othered World Gallery, an Italian nativity scene – or presepe – showcased foot-high likenesses of the late Queen flanked by Michael Jackson and Silvio Berlusconi...

 

 It was getting quite cold by the time we took the train to Blackfriars to see The Queue. After all, it was there.

 I'd been told it moved fast, but I was still surprised how fast, and genuinely envied those in line. I would have loved to know what it was like to be in a queue that fast. Maybe not for the full twenty hours, but I couldn't say when the excitement would wear off.

 However nothing about it struck me as "uniquely British", apart from the accents. Isn't lying in state quite an international thing? Don't they all have queues? Does this not happen at Mecca? I wonder if what's actually uniquely British is mistaking community spirit for patriotism. Probably not even that. Parliament Square was closed to traffic. As people had reported, a lot of "just being there together" was happening, which is what I like to think should happen in a public space. I love a good pedestrianisation.

 

"Tantum Fortunam Meam!"

 

 September 10th

 

 

 September 12th or 13th

 

 I know, Charles, I know. It's awful and stupid. Nothing fits now, I know. Still, grumpy kings are a fairy tale staple too, aren't they? But should we pack all this in anyway? Otherwise, you're staring down the barrel of it until you die. You're meant to love us too now. But why should you love us? We still have those tapes of that private conversation where you joked about being reincarnated as the new Queen's tampon. "Just my luck!" the transcript reads. I know what you mean. I wouldn't love us. Commiserations.

 

Happier days (source – there's one of him in a bin there as well.)

 

 Hey, I just did a search for "Prince Charles" to find out how old you were!

Badphone Does Bucharest

 Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.

 

  As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?

 

  It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.

 

I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.

 

 Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?

 

Not A Good Look

 Another big scary face. Gemma Brockis sent me this: it's Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party headquarters in 1934. There's a lot going on, isn't there – the face may be saying "No", but the walls... It's got my name written all over it! Anyway, it's a lot more ghost-trainy an aesthetic than I normally associate with fascism. When I think of fascist architecture, I think of Albert Speer's slave-built "cathedrals of light" at the Nuremberg Ralleys, and those huge, bare rectangles and domes reminiscent of and maybe even inspired by John Martin's extraordinary designs for the Hellish city of Pandaemonium in his illustrations for "Paradise Lost" made a hundred years earlier...

 

All of which I guess means there never really was a "fascist aesthetic", beyond Big and Dumb. It's just a numbers game. Changing the subject completely, walking home last night I noticed – it was hard not to – more police on the route from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner than there were non-police. I asked one of them what was going on, and she explained that the Qeeen had died – thanks – and that they were here for the funeral. "Isn't that a week away?" I asked. "It's just, this is quite intimidating." "Don't worry," her partner replied, "We're here to keep people safe." I didn't ask from what. 

 Hey, remember when that Russian guy got arrested for holding up a blank piece of paper? Can you imagine if that happened here LOLZ!

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)

Peter Brook's Soft Pink Pincers

 Another white box: Sally Jacobs' hugely influential set for Peter Brook's magic-redefining production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in which my Dad played Puck. That's him stage right, in the yellow Chinese Circus bloomers and blue skullcap, entering on stilts. He also rode a trapeze and spun plates. Mum was a dresser on the show, having worked for a while at an actual circus, and that's how they met. All this was before my time of course, but as a child I still found something strangely magical about squash courts. Here's some footage.

 

 

 The Dream stayed with Dad, who always described Peter Brook as a ghost on his shoulder. Brook never shared Dad's love of Gilbert and Sullivan, for example. "Tacky." When he was just twenty-six, Dad wrote a beautiful essay about working with him which Alan Cox dug out and to sent to me the day Brook died, in July, the same month as David Warner. This is another belated In Memoriam then (and there may be a third, in which case this will be a two-parter, but also there may not). You'll notice the actor's account of the rehearsal room here differs a bit from the director's:

  "Unseen by us, Peter carefully prepared the ground for these 'revelations'... Peter could drive us to distraction by his demands for an incease in our self-awareness. He would sit down with us and shake his head in disbelief that we could have gone so far forward in one direction while taking so many steps back in another..."

 And then Dad goes on to explain how he escaped, and where he got the idea for the stilts. Click to enlarge.