Christopherly

"If I must sit I do so in the bath."

From wikipedia:
'After the war, Lee, who can speak fluent French and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals. Of his time with the organisation, Lee has said: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority ... We saw these concentration camps. Some had been cleaned up. Some had not."'

"We, that are so you young..." etc. Gentlemen of Horror opens tonight at the Woolwich Grand if you fancy it (which means I've three more hours to learn how to sit up straight) followed by a screening of Dracula AD 1972, featuring this shot of Stephanie Beacham:

The venue is amazing by the way. And I got my hair cut especially (which is stupid because look how long Christopher Lee's hair is).

Also - kerching! - "That Mitchell and Webb Sound" is back on the radio, complete with James Bachman, Olivia Colman, and the ghost of Acker Bilk. Here. More anon. Nothing of mine in this episode, but it's all gold. You might want to hazard a whoop.

*Christopherly: - A bit like a Christopher.

Lee and Cushing's Fist of Fun

A quick plug for something I'll be in next week, featuring a number of subjects dear to me, among them the opportunity to hang out with Matthew Woodcock.

"Matthew and Simon are very enthusiastic, and old friends who've worked together a lot... They're still working on what they'll do. One caveat, though - if you're coming along, please don't expect two people who look and sound identical to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee."

Wise words indeed from playwright James Goss. (Here's the interview.) And - ah! Brilliant! - here are rehearsal shots of Bishop as Cushing and myself as Lee, taken by our superb director Kate Webster yesterday. I know. Uncanny. It looks like it's being billed as a comedy, which is maybe just as well. I can do Lee's voice in my head, but we all sound a bit like Christopher Lee in our head. It's beautifully written though. Utterly believable. And we're great. Also I ditched the beard today and, Christ, my teeth are feeling the cold as a result. So come. Watch us be actors at the Woolwich Grand. It will be sweet. Here.

Take Two Elements!

Any two elements... say, Electricity and Water.
On their own, perfectly harmless.
But mix them together
maybe in a bowl
DYNAMITE!

Roy Steel!
Second Best Big Game Hunter in the world!
Fighter! Lover! A man of action, with all the actions of a man!
The ancient Mayan word for "fist"!
His passport says "Beast Slapper"!

 

And Lorrimer Chesterfield.

Leading Professor of Occult Studies at London's London University!

A brain in the shape of a man!

Demon handler and Myth wrangler!

He reads books! He writes books! Sometimes he reads the books he writes!

His brain can fell an ox! 

 

My name is Sir Maxwell House. 

I took those two elements, and like some kind of scientific blacksmith I forged them, forged them into a team that would look Danger in the eye and bring it down with the Knowledge of a Man, and the Fist of a Man! They are... The Monster Hunters!

 

 And, oh, how I love them. Over the past two years the writing team of Peter Davis, Matthew Woodcock, and J. P. Chenet has produced – in addition to the above – two stage shows, two series of webcast adventures, and three specials, all available to listen to at the link above NOW, and I'm lucky enough to have been invited along for the lot. I like being in a series. I've never played a recurring character before, someone whose story I didn't know the end of, and the generous attention paid to Sir Maxwell with each new episode has made for a very happy inbox. 

 Happier still, my sister joined us for the last series, whose twisted arc the chaps played scrupulously close to their retro-fitted chests, in the happiest tradition of this mattering.  

 And it's surprisingly well researched. It turns out the Post Office Tower really was an official secret. And there really was an MI16. (There have actually been eighteen sections of military Intelligence in all, numbered 1 through to 19 – there was never an MI13.  In fact, I found out only very recently my uncle used to work for one: After an Oxford performance of Ring he casually mentioned over drinks above the Samuel Beckett Memorial Car Park, how much the experience of sitting in complete darkness wearing headphones had reminded him of his "anti-interrogation training in the foreign service". I suppose the thirty years are up then. Mum always suspected he had spent too much time in Egypt for a playwright. The Egyptians at the time must have agreed – "I stepped into a taxi, turned out it wasn't a taxi. I said, 'I have my daughters with me.' They said, 'Do they eat eggs?' I said, 'Yes.' So they boiled up some eggs and took me away. Of course, what saved me was that I didn't have a gun on me. Everyone always says carry a gun. But I was supposed to be out there teaching, if they'd found a gun on me that would be it. So they let me go."  

 Here if you're interested is a lecture he gave recently, about his childhood in Epsom growing up beneath the Battle of Britain. This is all true. But I digress.

 

The Beast Must Dies' notorious werewolf break

 Back to the silly voices, the final episode of Finnemore should still be available to listen to for a day or so, including four minutes of drunken American rambling (shaved down from eight) that I never thought would be John's kind of thing, and which I am very glad he decided was. 

 While writing this series, he actually scheduled a meeting in the "Douglas Adams Room" of the Beeb's new Grafton House digs, specifically to try out silly voices. Its decals, famously misquoting classic BBC comedy, did not disappoint. You may have thought it impossible to misquote "42".

  They managed it. 

  Ah, as I write this, Peter has just sent me this year's Monster Hunters Hallowe'en special. Dynamite.

1. Be nice. 2. Have fun.

  

Quick! You have only about an hour left to listen to the first of the new series of "John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme" - featuring the Funnimore himself (not pictured), Lawry "Legs" Lewin, Carrie "Feet" Quinlan, Margaret "Cabourn" Smith and my weird, slurpy voice - before they go and put out another ("they" being Radio 4 at half past six this evening) and, really, whose fault is that? Having gone to the trouble of setting up this blog, picking out the wallpaper etc, you might hope I'd be a bit more on the ball when it comes to plugging stuff like this, the perishables, off-the-air in a week, but there you go. Apologies. Plugging the show means writing about John, and that's quite a trick to manage without sounding utterly sycophantic. And I have to take a step back, and then - it turns out - another, and then another, because it's simply impossible not to still feel close to him. I can't imagine what it's like for his fans. He's good as gold. Let's leave it at that. "Says you!" says you. Fair enough. Bit rude, but here's some proof, as he makes a bad ting good at the Chortle Awards:

There's pleasanter proof of his brilliance online than this, obviously - the anarcho-syndicalist idyll of Cabin Pressure most obviously, his stirring Now Show spots, his piece on badgers, his blog, anything he's done for Mitchell and Webb of course, fuckyeahjohnfinnemore. Or this. Or indeed the show itself, quick! I guess the point of posting this particular clip was simply to show how, yeah, we won an award he's always that good.

Ta, boredtimelord.

Not nearly enough of someone reading "Three Men In A Boat"

Taking the long way back back from the shops this afternoon through Nunhead Cemetery, a rolled-up copy of 2000AD rubbing its stupid ad for some paperback off on my hand in the usual manner, it suddenly occurred to me that that thing about always keeping to the left only really works in mazes. I have had a stomach bug so my mind's not the sharpest right now. This, nonetheless, I duly tweeted, receiving a reply from somebody, "Apart from when it failed miserably in Three Men In A Boat". Well I've read the book, but I don't really remember it, and certainly not this bit. So, heading onto youtube in search if an enlightening clip, I hit upon this. And it was not what I expected. And it made me laugh more than anything I can remember. And I will not rest until everyone has seen it. (And I do not yet care if that makes me a bit racist). Thank you, Paul!

Let It Spread

  Being on the internet is – just a little bit – inherently depressing. It's a beautiful day outside, or else you should be asleep, and either way you know an hour or two's undistracted boredom might provoke a little creativity, yet here you sit/lie/steam spinach, before update after update of things that are going to make you angry, no more genuinely interacting with others than if you were passing notes in class, or perhaps more accurately – since the internet isn't a public space, but rather a shared private space, a public toilet, not a town hall – writing something under a message left on the cubicle wall. Even when the good stuff is shared online, chances are it's old, or new and brave and tragic. Or if it's new and not the News, if it's something brilliant that someone has made, that too is a little depressing because what's it doing on the internet? Why is nobody being paid to broadcast this work, in a medium with proper start and stopping times, independent of the likes of us having to pass it around amongst ourselves, like a pamphlet? Who's in charge? And what's happened to Alan Partridge's Mid-Morning Matters!

 But I'm glad I was on the internet for this clip. It's American, like a lot of what I seem to watch online (particularly now The Daily Show is being hosted by John Oliver* – I've aways loved it, but now I'm rooting for it.) And while there's a lot to be said for keeping up with The American News (if for example the words "Carlos Danger" mean nothing to you, you might well be missing out on one of the greatest and most hilarious and simultaneously enervating mysteries ever thrown up, and I mean literally thrown up, by a political career – yes, that is what "literally" means, I've checked...) still I'm unused to hitting upon something as cheering as this Stephen Colbert clip. It's a heck of a curveball. It's big. It's good. It's a fear-killer. Shoot-to-kill laws, Piers Morgan, Putin and the trolls turn to steam while it's playing. You should watch it.

 

"It's spreading."

* By the way, discussing Egypt with Andy Zaltzman in their Bugle podcast, John came up with one of my favourite ever political observations:

"Under a dictatorship, you get used to a dictator kicking you in the balls. Under a democracy, you have to get used to 50% of your own population kicking you in the balls."

Power Socket 7: "Aw, sneck!"

This issue must have taken me ages. I was heavily into 2000AD by now, and who can blame me? My imagination had been pretty traumatised by a sudden move to public school at the age of nine, starved suddenly of mythology, baffled by "catalytic cracking" and "the ablative" and the absence of girls, sectioned by separate desks for every boy and separate teachers for every subject, sustained only by the scraps afforded by Mad Magazine and Oink. But then, in 1985, for just 24 pence a week, it found its salvation.

The late Massimo Belardinelli, just doin' his thing.

In fact it was struggling now to keep up. My hatred of that school had become so bad that I persuaded my parents to send me to a therapist, and of the one session I finally received the only detail I can remember now is me confessing my frustration that my imagination seemed so tiny compared to these guys'. How did they do it? Where - as Alan Moore was often asked, and possible went on to suffer a nervous breakdown trying to find out - do you get your ideas from? And it wasn't just the Alan Moore's stuff. There were the richly researched and nightmarishly illuminated worlds of Pat Mills, the surrealist panache of Peter Milligan's teen-friendly metaphysics, the aspirational shopping-mall dystopia of John Wagner's Mega-City One which teemed with poor, beaming, fad-chasing bastards seeking their fix of fun even in the cannon's mouth, and all of this served with wit - with jokes even - and monsters! So many monsters.

 

"Get off my back, Father!" Some Kevin O'Neill

There were no supermen, or at least none I was interested in. There were wanderers, terrorists, deserters, smugglers and surfers, very few of whom looked recognisably human. Everything 2000AD was teaching me was stuff I wanted to learn, and to this day I'm still playing catch-up as a writer. (The scifi pilot I've been hawking around, subtitled "Prog 1", has perhaps as a consequence been deemed "too dense" for Radio 4. Which it is, but that's another post.) Yet for some reason Issue 7 of Power Socket was to be the last I completed. I'm not sure if I gave up, or decided to wait until I was better at it, or maybe I just started enjoying school a bit more. I suspect the truth is - and my "visual notebooksW back this up - that there was just so much out there now to copy, why bother sticking with a super-hero serial? In the Autumn of 1986 Dad suggested we take Power Socket Issue 7 along to show to my new heroes at a signing. I did. "What do you think?" he asked. Alan Moore said "Um, I'm more of a writer," and was lovely. Kev O'Neil (responsible for the image above) said "Do you lay it out first? You should try laying it out." And Pat Mills, to my surprise, turned out not be a woman. I can't remember what he said. Or John Wagner. But I've got the signatures. And all have remained my heroes.
And one day I hope I'll get to show them what I've made since.