Kenny Everett interrogates John Lennon about Abstraction and Misery and I share it.

My mate Ollie Ford, who originally put this extraordinary 1971 artefact up on f*c*book, writes:

"This is a brilliant interview. Kenny Everett is so funny and John clearly likes him. He asks why his first solo album was so sad when he has so much and John starts to play the Laughing Policeman on his guitar and sarcastically asks if he’d prefer his next album to sound like that. There is also a heartbreaking bit when he tells Kenny how he’d like to die..."

 

I'm putting up a second post today, not because I'm ashamed of the previous one – it's clearly a beautiful tale, vividly told – but because I'm trying to make this the place where I share stuff now, and this is definitely worth sharing. The anarchic sweetheart, who would later go on to shout "Let's bomb Russia!" at Young Conservatives on the advice of Michael Winner, pulls surprisingly few punches questioning the choices of the troubled genius who would later go on to sing "Imagine no possessions" sat behind a white grand in Tittenhurst Park, and perhaps what's most extraordinary is just how cosy the interview remains, despite Cuddly Ken's unresolvable problems with not only John and Yoko's politics, but their art. It's all parsecs away from Lennon mucking around with Peter Cook a decade earlier, or Everett mucking around with Bowie and Freddie Mercury a decade on, but there's no bad faith here, and it's fun...

Liana Finck. Here's the linck.

... which hopefully leads me to why I'm sharing the interview here on this blog, rather than on, say, twitter. Because it's literally impossible these days to go more than thirty seconds on that site without encountering a fight. Neither that site nor f*c*book are really doing what we want them to any more – which is stay in touch – and they're both on our phones now, and our phones no longer fit our hands, and I'm increasingly concerned about what's in charge of who sees what. Joe Mande posted something beautiful about leaving twitter only today: "That's the problem with most things that are stupid as fuck: they're usually pretty fun" and Rick Webb's Internet Mea Culpa remains very sound, but of course there are many incentives to stay on, because one's work requires attention, so I'll keep linking to the blog on both sites. If you've any comments, however, I guess, please post below? Or just enjoy.

(If you're unfamiliar with the work and impact of Kenny Everett – whom I love – you're probably also unfamiliar with Joel Morris and Jason Hazely's "Rule Of Three" podcast – which I also love – so you might want to start with this one.)

And I'm still on instagram. Sure!

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 22 - The Sights

 "Well I don't know what we were expecting to see..." muttered Zorian.
 "You - You guys didn't think that was wild?! I thought you'd really dig - No, uh, no problem, there's other sights!" But Plok could see his fare slipping away...
 "SO SHOULD I SEE SOMEONE ABOUT THIS THEN OR > BWAAAP > WAIT, ARE NONE OF YOU DOCTORS?..."

Ilustration by Ed Valigursky.

Teaching Kids to Love Theatre by letting them Hate It

 Nigel Barrett is in a sensational kid's show at the Unicorn Theatre called "The Show in Which Hopefully Nothing Happens". Yesterday afternoon Tom and I went to sit at the back. Most of the rest of the audience were school parties of, I don't know, seven- to ten-year-olds, and witnessing them get to their feet and scream at the stage was, without a doubt, one of the best experiences I've had in a theatre. Here's some of what they screamed:

"DON'T COME ON!"

 "YOU ARE VERY BAD!"

"CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS?!"

 

 

"WE FORGIVE YOU!"

"JUST TELL US WHAT IT IS!"

 "STOP TRICKING US!"

 And from another afternoon's show, which Nigel passed onto us: "YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE! YOU STAND WHERE YOU STAND!"

Photos by Camilla Greenwell. Hopefully you can still get tickets here.

"At just a little under a dollar a word, becoming fluent in Na'vi is a very expensive investment."

Re: the implausibility of humankind ever actually visiting another inhabited plane... Avatar!

Commenting on the previous post, @tealin wonders if our hopes of encountering higher intelligences might be as much about a kind of "looking-glass colonialism" as they are about angelic conversations, and of course she's right. But the success of "Avatar" suggests a third and opposite fantasy – the desire to re-encounter the "Noble Savage". Were that ever to happen, the video below may be as accurate a prediction of that meeting as we'll get. Some of my happiest recent viewing has come from discovering, and then bingeing upon, the work of youtubers who share my fascination with theme parks. And if that sounds niche, let me inform you that Lindsay Ellis's piece on Hobbiton was just nominated for a Hugo, so keep up, old-timers! I'll share more of Ellis's stuff in another post, but what we're here to enjoy today is the work of Jenny Nicholson – specifically, her hilarious, fifty-nine-minute-long account of a visit to the newly opened Avatar theme park in Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Why not search for images of "Avatar theme park", and see if you can immediately distinguish the concept illustrations from photographs of the finished park?

Now, I appreciate this might not sound like everyone's cup of tea – an hour-long monologue about a theme park based on a nine-year-old movie – but the sustained simplicity of the presentation is part of Nicholson's genius. My favourite detail is the Jordan Peele-y ambience of dread she notices pervading the park, as a result of its invented backstory: the world's indigenous Na'vi have welcomed this second human invasion, we're told. There's statues and framed photographs everywhere, celebrating human and Na'vi cooperation. But no Na'vi. Nicholson can also just describe rides, and I like just descriptions of rides, but they too add to a portrait of an idea that has over-reached itself just enough to be ceaselessly entertaining. Enjoy...

What I REALLY think about Space

Happy Saint Earth's Day!

(Africa's actually much bigger in real life. How many more mistakes can you spot?)

Below is a terribly on-brand TED talk (painful intro, but good meat) delivering a potted literary history of some of the lunar fantasies that might have inspired space flight. Namechecked are Cyrano De Bergerac, and the Baltimore Gun Club, both of whom can be seen above toasting a cosmonaut alongside Baron Munchausen in one of my favourite films of all time. I'm a sucker for this kind of cataloguing. I love finding out where ideas come from – especially if the results involve illustrations of Jacobeans borne over a pointy island by a rig of geese – and, as long term readers of this blog will know, the historical symbiosis of stark pottiness and scientific innovation was a big influence on me finally rolling up my sleeves and writing a whole two episodes of "Time Spanner".

 But...

 There must have been a reason I made the narrator of that show a dead dog, and located its traditional alien planet tropes not in outer space, but "Heaven" – a dimension of things that don't exist – and with Extinction Rebellion taking so well to the streets, I've been growing more honest with myself about exactly what I expect humanity to be able to pull off, reconsidering just how very big space is, and I reckon Alex McDonald's talk misses something very big, which is that Carl Sagan, who was right about so much, might not have been right about this. Guys... I don't think we're going into Space. 

 Sorry, but even if we survive for another million years I just don't think there's anything out there worth the intergalactic faff. I mean, it's really far away, and those tales we told ourselves of other worlds were hangovers from sea-faring days, the hopes of encountering higher intelligences a hangover from angels. So the idea that these exciting space adventures might have inspired billions upon billions' worth of scientific research seems more hilarious to me now than wonderful. Wasn't "flight" once synonymous with fleeing – hence "fight or flight"?* But we're never leaving home, not really. Earth is that home, and what's out there isn't Heaven. It's, at best, a well. And however deep we lower into it, if there is such a thing as human destiny, I'm pretty convinced now it will be played out on this pale blue dot. We need something else to explore, then. Which is good news, I think. I don't know what NASA should be doing in the meantime though – apart from splashing out on a few more lady space suits. Drugs?

 You're welcome.

Actual size of Africa (from back when BBC1 was the whole world.)

* I also found out recently that "cope" comes from the French "coup", so it's not a synonym for bearing at all, in fact, but for fighting. Like I say, I love finding out where ideas come from.

help (noun)

I thought this was ten years ago. Actually the fire happened on the 8th. Huh. It was painted by Morgan, the next door neighbour who heard Dan's cries for help while I was unconscious from smoke inhalation on the ground floor. That's Dan in the window. Residents of South London, from Brixton to Waterloo to London Bridge to One Tree Hill, might recognise from this some of Morgan's other great works, on shop fronts, shutters, electricity boxes, bins, murals, the Imperial War Museum, and the totem pole on Peckham Rye. And friends and blog readers with excellent memory will know that I moved into his house and found a lot to be very happy about. I started writing "Time Spanner" there, and imagined Martin and Graham living somewhere similar. It's the only home Morgan's ever known, and then last November, on my birthday in fact - the anniversary of Laika's first and only flight into space - I learnt that Lambeth Council were evicting him from it after forty years. It was his mother's council house, and his mother didn't live there any more. That's why I mention it. There was a fund to help him, a legal fund, and the legal fight may now be lost, but Morgan might be homeless this Winter is my point, and he helped save my life what I thought but now realise having checked wasn't ten years ago, and he took in everyone, and I love him, and money might still be useful. If you'd like to donate, go here.

In other words, this call to donate to an "artist's resistance fund" was posted too late. But there's a lot of bad news going round and I couldn't bring myself to add to anyone's fat upload of online grief at the time. So, sorry if that's all this news has done. But Morgan makes me happy, and an introduction to his work is always, I hope, a little like a chink of light. Heavens know we all deserve better, but Morgan most. Here.

And, you know, everywhere. That's a bin.

TIMESPANNER INITIAL MATERIAL

... in other words: whatever the opposite of bonus material is... in other words: the shows! This is a post to provide links to both episodes of Time Spanner now that they're off the Radio 4 site, with sneaky thanks to whoever put them up - long may they hang around - and extrovert, obvious and unending thanks to producer Gareth Edwards, narrator John Finnemore, baddie David Mitchell, goodie London Hughes, angels Belinda Stewart-Wilson and Sally Phillips, and cast of thousands Jeremy Limb. Share and, as ever, enjoy.

Part 1 - "Welcome to Heaven, Mr. Sorry" (broadcast January 7th, 2017) - can be heard HERE.
Part 2 - "The Dan in the High Castle" (broadcast December 21st, 2018) - is HERE.