You find me still chasing my own tail, short on time, short on sanity, and short on patience with PC World. Very little new there then…
SID IS AN IDIOT
Now, summer wouldn’t be summer without a lovely outdoor Shakespeare (that’s half my readers lost), and Sid and I headed over to Worthing in plenty of time to catch The Merry Wives of Windsor performed by Rainbow Shakespeare, a company of local actors who’ve been doing this sort of thing for ages (which is journalist code for: I have no idea how long but I’m pretty sure it’s a long time).
Our first problem was getting there. I shoved the postcode of Highdown Gardens into the SatNav, the one thing I’d choose as a luxury if I was on Desert Island Discs as, honestly, even if the island was half a mile by half a mile I’d still manage to get lost every time I ventured away from my mud hut.
The problem was that I didn’t have the house number – because it wasn’t a house. This drives me nuts, as my SatNav is always demanding a number in its sweetest tones – I can hear a feminine voice a lot easier than a male’s over the sound of the old thrumming engine – but half the time you’re trying to get to a shop on a retail estate, or a park, or a scout camping place, or a church, none of which seem to ever have a specific postcode, just one that also covers the half a mile of scrubland that surrounds it.
But the Littlehampton Road really took the biscuit. It’s four miles long and our postcode took us to the very start of it. We asked one woman who said “Oh no dear, you’ve got to turn round. It’s back up that way.”
Luckily I’ve learnt not to trust anyone who calls you ‘dear’
so we stopped and asked someone else who just happened to be a bus driver and pointed us in the exact opposite direction to what Dearie had told us.
Fifteen minutes later and we’d found the Asda, we’d found the roundabout, and we’d at last found the rotten gardens. A loooong drive up a looooong drive later, and we were in a car park. Ten minutes til curtain up. We’d be fine.
“Oh, it’s a long walk down that way,” said an old lady when asked where the actual gardens were. “But there aren’t any loos, what with it being a garden, so you’d better go up there if you need to go,” she said, pointing in the other direction. I was losing the will to live.
Sid chucked the chairs, the bags, the picnic, out of the car while I scrabbled off to the loo (you need so much STUFF for these outdoors affairs). We made it with two minutes to go.
I sat down, exhausted. Sid pushed his recliner back to look at the sky and drifted off, never having been much of a fan of the Bard. Very soon I wanted to join him. Let’s face it, when Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives he was having a bit of an off day. He’d created the character of Falstaff, a fat, dissolute, cowardly knight, and he’d gone down an absolute bomb in the two Hal the Fourth plays.
“Well, I’m not letting go of HIM,” he said, quill in hand. “He’s bloody comedy gold!”
He wasn’t infallible, that Stratford bloke. But Rainbow made a good fist of a not so good play, although I was really quite glad when Falstaff was thrown into the Thames in a basket, the only pity being that he managed to get out again.
During the interval, Sid went off to the car to get blankets as mid-summer in southern Britain was proving to be a bit nippy.
The second half was pretty uneventful apart from Sid managing to fall backwards off his recliner which then folded itself up with him inside, a bit like a metal Venus Fly Trap.
Luckily he was quiet about it.
Bows over with, we folded the chairs up, shoved half eaten packets of cheese back in to a Tescos bag, and struggled back to the car.
“Come on, hurry up,” Sid moaned, as I trudged up the path, crutch in one hand, chair in the other. I think it must have temporarily slipped his mind that he’s technically my bloody carer. Arsehole.
A hiatus: we both stand looking at each other
A realisation: neither of us have the car keys
A kerfuffle: where the buggery are they?
A run: I stand helpless, fuming
A sigh: They’d fallen out of the pocket of his stupid H&M sand coloured trousers that every other male teen in the word is also wearing when he fell off his chair
As I said: arsehole
RINGO STARR WAS NEARLY MY DAD
So says Mitch Benn‘s. Sort of. We were at one of my favourite little venues, the Ritz in Worthing, watching The Now Show stalwart perfecting his new show before he took it up to be dissected in Edinburgh. The Ringo Starr line was one of the titles he’d toyed with, along with Pete Best Found My Snake.
Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle is a lovely little show, having a dig at how many people have been given the soubriquet ‘the fifth Beatle’. On a whiteboard (for Mitch is nothing if not an anal geek) he charts the people he thinks deserve the title of fifth, sixth, seventh etc, until he finds himself the 37th. Tenuously, he readily admits. Oh so very tenuously. Tenuously enough to give his Edinburgh show a bloody good title though and that’s all that really matters.
I loved it. I adored it. I soaked his words up like he was a Beatles god. I, of course, had the advantage of knowing a bit about Beatles history. Sid, on the other hand, has listened to Sergeant Pepper’s in the car and had had the misfortune to sit through Let It Be at The Savoy while I reviewed it. He therefore knows shit all about The Beatles. By the time I was his age I’d read Hunter Davies biography of the Fab Four which tells you how much kids have changed. He’d now rather sit through Let It Be a dozen times than read the thousand odd pages of Davies‘ (at the time) definitive tome.
“You’ve met Paul McCartney,” I reminded him in the interval. “Oh, have I?” he said, bored. “I don’t remember.”
This is when my ‘He’ll thank you when he’s older’ switch gets tripped. It’s a frustrating one to activate, but I’ve got so used to it now that it hardly causes me the smallest whimper.
Three more things to say about Mitch:
- He really knows how to play the iPhone. Yes, play it, as in ‘creates music with’. His iPhone Beatles parody was by no means perfect but it was bloody impressive. “It’s never been easier to do creative stuff,” he said. “And it’s never been harder to get paid for it.”
- His bouncy druid song still makes me laugh
- His weight seems to fluctuate even more than mine. I thought I was going to see the new slimline Benn who reminds me so much of my ex, but instead I saw a portly Benn who, though not quite as expansive as he once was, still seems to be growing in the old stomach department. Some of you may remember me wittering on about Charlie Higson and his ball of string-defying waist last time and may be saying “Hang on a minute there my dear. Aren’t you a touch obsessed by men’s waistlines?” to which I say to you, don’t call me ‘dear’, and I’m only obsessed because we so rarely see expanding waistlines on the telly. But that’s best left for another day…..Suffice to say, I love a belly. So much better than a twig. On which note….
I CARRIED A WATERMELON
No, I’m not preggers. One’s enough. No, I dragged Sid along to the press night of Dirty Dancing.
Actually, he did want to come to this one.
I could tell by the lack of screams.
Sid loves a musical. It’s still a shock to me that he’s straight. I so so SO wanted a gay son and all I got was this lousy heterosexual. Ug. See, I should have had a couple more just so’s statistically I would have hit a gay streak. Oh well, too old now.
Now, if you go to press nights a lot, there are certain people you see over and over, and Bruno fucking Tonioli is one of them. Another is Paul Gambaccini. Another is that other one off of Strictly. The dark guy with the sneer. Craig Blahblahblah.
This time I actually had to get up for Bruno as he was in our row.
Oh the glamour of having a Tonioli arse in the face (no sniggering at the back).
We were actually sat next to that Canadian woman off of Mock the Week who is actually quite funny but has a boyf who thinks it’s OK to eat sweeties in the theatre but they were very nice and polite and I still think she’s OK and funny on Mock the Week even though her boyf doesn’t have ANY THEATRE SWEETIE MANNERS! Philistine. And she’s now tarred by her boyf’s brush.
People who have seen Dirty Dancing have made me feel yay small when I’ve told them that I haven’t. Invariably these people were born in the eighties. I was (very nearly) a grown woman in the eighties and I can assure you it wasn’t all Patrick Swayze, Choose Life and Kajagoogoo.
It was horrible. Margaret Thatcher. Jimmy Savile. The Krankies. Oh god, pass the knife.
So anyway, I came to Dirty Dancing with fresh eyes and absolutely hated it. Here’s my damning review: and believe me, I was being kind click
PUNCHDRUNK IN A TIMBER HOTHOUSE
Which is me trying to say in one headline that I went to see Punchdrunch, Timber!, and The Hothouse. I know, I know…..so sue me…
The Drowned Man by Punchdrunk was in an old Post Office sorting office in Paddington and was pretty odd. I’ve never been to a big bit of immersive theatre before so it all came as a big surprise. I was extremely glad that, being a crip, I was assigned someone to help me out round the big, dark building, and I was very glad that I got Angel Ashley. You can read about my experience of it here click
Funnily enough, I was sitting in the bar at the National this week when Angel Ashley ran over to me to say hello. Small world, the world of London theatre.
“Did you like the piece I wrote?” I asked her.
She looked shifty and avoided eye contact. Oh god, I thought, she hated it and has come over to give me a piece of her mind.
“Oh yes, very good,” she said and then rapidly changed the subject.
Oh fuck, she DID hate it. It was, of course, only after we’d finished our conversation that the other scenario dawned on me: that she hadn’t read the piece at all and was lying to save my feelings. Well, that’s the one I much prefer anyway. I wonder if I’ll bump into her again, because then I can grill her and get to the bottom of it.
I was at the national with pal James (Mr Autograph Guy) who’d just started a blog up himself that very week about another of his passions, athletics, and we’d just been telling each other with certainty that no one reads what we write so why do we do it. And then along came Angel Ashley as if to confirm it. Oh well, you, dear reader, may be my one and only fan. Pat yourself on the back now and, if I ever meet you in person, I shall pat you on the back myself. Lucky you.
It was with James that I went to Timber! at the Southbank Centre, a sort of family circus based on the logging culture of backwater Canada. I know. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it.
For some reason I’d got it in to my head that there was going to be chainsaw juggling.
I have no idea where this came from but I had mixed feelings: on the one hand, boy, that sounded exciting; on the other, I have a real fear of chainsaws and blanch at even the sight of one.
There was a story in The Anus not long ago which told of a Saltdean man who’d been doing something or other in his garden with a chainsaw when he’d managed to saw through his own arm. Did Mr Chainsaw then collapse on the floor spurting blood like the Black Knight in Python and the Holy Grail? Oh no. The quick-thinking hard man calmly picked his arm up and walked to his neighbour’s house to ask them to call an ambulance and if they had an arm-shaped space in their freezer.
The moral of the story? Never go to Saltdean.
James had never in his 21 years been to a circus and was expecting huge things. After the cheers, applause and bows, we turned to each other and saw the same bewildered look mirrored in each other’s faces. “Was that it?” said our faces. “Where were the bloody chainsaws?!”
You can read my review here if you’re in the remotest bit interested click
The Hothouse at the Trafalgar Studios, on the other hand, was rather marvellous. But with Simon Russell Beale and John Simm you’d have to be a spectacularly bad director to cock it up, and Jamie Lloyd is a rather good one all told.
CUSH IN SHEPHERD’S BUSH
I’d never been to Shepherd’s Bush before. Oh, tell a lie. It’s got BBC TV Centre in it, hasn’t it – or did have before the Beeb sold the old dear and all our childhood memories down the river.
I’d been there before to see Harry Hill’s TV Burp being filmed on the day that they were filming Question Time with the BNP’s Nick Griffiths as one of the guests.
That was a funny day, dragging a young Sid through a near full-size riot in order to see a man discourse with puppets and unleash a strange and unsettling creature called Wagbo.
I found the Bush Theatre and noticed that right next door was Shepherd’s Bush Market which I’m pretty sure Del Boy used to go to now and then. I mean, it’s right next door to Peckham isn’t it?
It was a boiling hot day so I bought a fan in said market, and a bowl of fruit. This is an unusual concept to those outside of London. A quid a bowl. The first time I bought this I was most miffed that I didn’t actually get the bowl.
Handy things, bowls.
I’d already positioned it in my kitchen when the guy slipped my fruit into a bag and quickly stashed the bowl back onto his bowl tower behind the counter. Cheat.
I was there to see Josephine and I by Cush Jumbo (which was probably why I was thinking of Del Boy to start with).
Cush intertwines a narrative about an aspiring black actress – which Cush just happens to be herself – with the life of Josephine Baker, the music hall artiste who took America and the world by storm back in the days. It’s a tour de force and one of the best things I’ve seen all year. Believe me, Cush is going to be a big, big star.
Here’s my review click
COUNT ARTHUR STRONG IS MARMITE
My dad used to hate Count Arthur Strong. He just didn’t get him at all. So while me, Sid and my mum would happily trot off to the Komedia to see the radio show being recorded, he’d sit alone at home, wondering what all the fuss was about.
I can’t quite work out why the Count is marmite though. I’ll leave that to better brains than mine I reckon. Dissect comedy too much and it falls apart under your scalpel.
I do know that I’ve got a rather large crush on Rory Kinnear (who plays Martin – MICHAEL!) which is immensely disconcerting as
sometimes, when he smiles, all I can see is Roy Kinnear, his dad, and comedy stalwart of my childhood. And I don’t fancy him at all *shudder*
The National had a talk a couple of weeks ago with Rory and fellow Othello actor Lyndsey Marshal. I, of course, went for insights into playing such a villain as Iago and what Lyndsey thought of Emilia‘s handkerchief moment. All right. No I didn’t. I went to perv at Rory and his knees for behold! it was a hot day and the man was in shorts!
There, I sat next to one of those fans whose dedication seems ludicrous to us mere normal fans. I couldn’t quite work out if her dedication was to the National Theatre itself or to the male stars therein, but it seemed likely to be targeted at anyone who’d ever been in Sherlock, The Lord of the Rings or Doctor Who. Just a guess, but you get the picture.
She lived in Bristol and took the coach to London to see her idols in the flesh. I’d love to have learnt more of her wanderings but Rory, Lyndsey, and the old guy who’s done the NT interviews for decades appeared and I lost the chance to quiz her more, and i love to hear stories from fans like her because they’re all so, well, fruitcakey, and make me look positively normal.
I’d been to see the TV pilot of Count Arthur, driving miles to some TV studio in Surrey, only for it to be shelved. If I hadn’t loved the Count so much I’d have been well pissed off, but I was happy as it just wasn’t right. They’d tried to fit him in to a silly game show format and I just couldn’t fathom why when they had such a classic sitcom character. We’re talking Hancock, Dad’s Army, Only Fools here. Yes, Steve Delaney (the Count himself) is
destined to be that big and anyone who says he isn’t can go shovel poo in a Tory duckhouse.
My cousin was in a car driving down the motorway once when Count Arthur came on the radio. Eventually she had to find an exit as she says she was laughing so much she feared she was going to crash.
The Count may well be an acquired taste for some: I don’t know as I loved him from the very start. I used to hate olives but I ate one a day for two weeks and by the end, I adored them.
Quite why I persevered so doggedly now escapes me
and you may say, well, why would you sit through a comedy show that you don’t appear to like on the off chance that it may one day make you titter a bit. Good point, but I think that in a very small space of time (6 episodes, so three hours), Graham Linehan and Steve Delaney have created a show with characters that we care about as well as laugh at – and with.
A character death at the end of the first series is a very brave thing to do, as is one of the staples of the sitcom, the locked room scenario (think how many times Mainwaring and co got stuck somewhere together), and to include a fourth wall-breaking Shakespeare speech on top of that – well, it’s daring, you’ve got to admit.
I saw someone who looked just like Katya, the Count‘s friend, at London Bridge Station last week. She was more hunched over, but must have been in her 80’s, if not 90’s, and had a very fetching purple feathered hat on and was trailing a shopping trolley.
Her t-shirt read LOOKING FOR RICH GUYS.
As the Count so succinctly says: “You couldn’t make it up.”
Next week (month, year, whatever)…PC World is not a very nice world to live on, we go to an airshow and see some planes, and our little three day holiday goes horribly wrong……
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