Frankenstein Placeholder Week, Day 3: Not Yet. Not There.

This lightbulb has been burning for a hundred and thirteen years.

  I've asked my friend Lauren to supply today's placeholder. A bunch of us just saw our friend Bex in "A Passage To India" at the Tower Theatre, which I loved, and which reminded me how much India and Pakistan used to figure in my cultural life when I was a teenager: film after film about the Raj, the works of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, there was Madhur Jaffrey, Sayeed Jaffrey, and Roshan Seth, and Peter Brook's "Mahabharata" – whose hypnotic utterances and daft action prancing I would watch on tape again and again – and Milligan and McCarthy's "Rogan Gosh"  – whose pages I scissored out of my old copies of "Revolver" and stitched together – and Camden, and ideas of God not as a lawgiver but as the thing things have in common. And I've missed it. Anyway, Lauren offered this as a placeholder: 

 Her Gran has just bought a lightbulb from Wilco that promises to live for fifteen years. Her Gran is eighty-six and determined to outlive it.

Frankenstein Placeholder, Valentine's Edition: Necronanigans!

 Apologies again for not posting my ground-breaking "Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman" blog, but I promise it will absolutely change the history of cinema and entiely salvage the reputation of Bela Lugosi, so hold tight. In the meanime, here's something appalling I learnt from my friend Michelle earlier this week. Above is a photo of the "vehicle" in which "Count" Carl Tanzler hoped to take Elena de Hoyos high into the stratosphere, restoring her corpse to life with cosmic rays. This is Tanzler building it.

 The flight never happened however, and what he did with Hoyos' body in the intervening nine NOPE years, including paying for a mausoleum NOPE to which only he had the key NOPE is as far as we can NOPE NOPE know recounted in appropriately rueful detail by mortician Caitlin Doughty below. "The public mood was generally sympathetic NOPE to Tanzler," wikipedia notes NOPES, "whom many viewed as an eccentric 'romantic'" NOPE NOPE NOPE although you'd hope a more modern NOPE public would NOPE at least NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Frankenstein Placeholder

Apologies for the delay to today's hotly anticipated "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" post, but apparently today marks the 42nd anniversary of the first ever broadcast of "The Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy" so I'm off out to the pub to attemptedly down four pints with Geoff "Ford Prefect" McGivern. Trust me though, tomorrow's Frankenpost'll be a doozy (check spelling), with possible traces of actual scholarship - I honestly think I might have found something new to say about Lugosi's Monster that could validate this whole endeavour! (Feel free to post your guesses below.)

Floella Benjamin and Anita Dobson Cut My Dad's Hair.

 There's a conscious nod to the Tazmanian Devil I seem to remember. Also, tough crowd! The full episode's here, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man tomorrow. Let's see if they get on. (I still don't know what a "scratch player" is.)

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 23 (with musical guest Howard Jones!)

 Each of them held a clicker. They could count down from nine thousand in perfect unison without looking, but they liked the noise the clickers made. "Fiiiive." Click. Entirely still, their green eyes fixed on the stripey horizon. Countdown nearly done. "Fooooour". Click. No horizons more stripey than the unmatched horizons of Zuu-cakeymoon. No plains more bare. "Threee." Louder now their high voices. Click. "TWOOOO!" No matter how much they puffed out their chests, their voices were just high. Click! "ONE!" Click! And as one, they turned clockwise: "COOOOOOMINNNNNG! READY OR N-...... Tt."

Illustration by Bruce Pennington.

A Fun Thing To Try With A Rat

 At a birthday party in a studio in Hackney in early January, talk got round to our current creative endeavours and I announced that nowadays I was "thinking about the nature of Fun". I said this not just because I was just trying to pass off new my job at the Crystal Maze as an area of serious study, nor because it was a fun party but I was mainly sitting down, but because I had realised that I had actually been thinking about the nature of Fun ever since a conversation in the Finnetour van last Autumn: "Of course comedy is all about fear," David Tyler had said, quoting studies made on the laughter of chimpanzees, the booze bag perched betwen us. But in the context of the show we were touring, this seemed to me worth questioning. There really wasn't much to fear in John Finnemore's Flying Visit, I thought, and yet it was still definitely a comedy. Maybe then, although this sounded glib, comedy was actually all about Fun, not Fear - It's just that there were far more scientific tests being done into the nature of the latter than the former. Fun still definitely existed though, and it didn't seem a stretch to suggest that like Fear it might exist as an evolutionary advantage - that somehow Fun fitted, and helped us to survive. But what did Fun help us to do? Cooperate? Communicate? Learn? Teach? When did it become part of our programming and why? Fast forward to last Friday then, and I'm catching up with my friend Sally, who's saying how her eighteen-month-old has started to walk, and learn to play games, before suddenly exclaiming "Oh!" as if to preface something incredibly exciting that she's noticed, which was this: "Hide and Seek isn't learnt!"

I saw a short show I think you'll like about British guns.

 I found this old photo of what used to be the Trocadero. There's a Crystal Maze at the top now, and occassionally I work there. Every Maze Master gets to choose their own costume and I chose pyjamas and a dressing gown. These make the wearer look simultaneously completely lost and completely at home, but I have subsequently remembered it's a costume I've chosen a few times before...

  And it's hard to run in slippers. The best of a number of good things about this job is that you get to share a green room with people who are making things. Our boss recently emailed us details of some of those things, currently being shown at the Vaults beneath Waterloo, and attached was a spreadsheet with thirty-three new works on it. I've only seen one of these so far, this evening, and this is a plug for it. Gang, I think you should go and see "Tuna"! It's on at six tomorrow (Sunday, so okay, today) and then that's it, I'm sorry. But Airlock have made a fabulous thing. Rosanna Suppa's teen narrator makes a divine comedy of the hell of not being listened to, populated by merciless physical caricatures drawn from a life growing up in a house full of guns, which burst out of her like something out of Tetsuo. It's a heck of a dance, but it's also just someone talking to you, knowing you're listening, and proudly asking nothing. Rosanna says here, "A recent audience member described it as ‘like the first time I took speed’, which sounds like a good thing, because the way he phrased it, he’s done speed since." She also says in that interview "There was a person's flesh worth of fish on there'' which is just a phrase I like. God, I laughed. Tickets are HERE. It's directed by Robbie Taylor Hunt, lit by Catja Hamilton, nobody seems to have put a foot wrong, and I hope it happens again.