Sex, Proust & Railway Modelling

Dancing on the Table

2010-08-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I had the dubious pleasure of putting on a musical in Moscow, in fact I have already written a rather jaunty account of what turned out to be something of a debacle. There was one particular experience that, at the time, I left out of that account for no other reason that it was slightly out of kilter with the day to day absurdities of that production.

The musical in question was being promoted locally by a rather desperate character and things were fairly chaotic but we were fortunate in having most of our dealings with an experienced Muscovite production manager, Yuri, who spoke good English. However these qualities were not enough to protect us from the appalling workmanship of the local scenery contractors, the taciturn idleness of the local crew and the open hostility of the venue management. In the best Brit tradition we plodded stoically on and I did my best not to lose my temper, as day after day, scenery would fail to be delivered and even when it did arrive was of questionable quality.

One particular set, consisting of a pair of large gates flanked on either side by a length of crumbling wall, the whole stretching across the full width of the stage, gave me particular pause. In pure construction terms what had been delivered bore some resemblance to the drawings that we had supplied but the paint finish, a sunny ochre stucco, ideal for a ‘Figaro’ or ‘Barber of Seville’, was not remotely appropriate for the 21st century post-modern parable that we were engaged on. Grey concrete mottled with lichen and spattered with pigeon shit was what we were after, so I called over Yuri and explained what had to done and needless to say he shrugged and said that there was no time for a repaint. I suggested an overnighter and he turned to the painters who were standing nearby. There were three of them, the boss, Sergei, was tall and gloomy, there was a spotty youth whose name I never learnt and there was Irina. Irina was extremely fat, extremely old and mostly drunk but I had noticed in passing that while her work rate was nothing special she, of the three, was the only one with any real skill as a scenic artist. Yuri asked if they fancied the overtime call and was refused, then he demanded that they take the call and finally he pleaded with them to do it. The men walked away but Irina gave me a sarcastic smile and said “How I know what to do?” Yes, Irina spoke a certain amount of English.
“I’ll be here” I said “I’ll tell you what to do”
“All night?” she asked.
“Yes”
“OK I do it.” She said and gave me a drunken leer. At this point I started to have doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise because when I say that Irina was mostly drunk in fact she was always drunk. She was forever shuffling off into the wings and taking a swig from a bottle in her vast handbag. She wore a thick paint splashed skirt, layers of ragged pullovers and heavy work boots. If you stood close to her the smell of unwashed woman pickled in vodka was not unlike that of standing next to a bucket of paint stripper. In short I had just decided to spend all night working on stage with a bag-lady.

Before the normal evening shift finished I made sure that the set we needed to paint was pushed onto the centre of the stage, that the electricians left us sufficient light to work in and that we had the theatre’s one rickety step ladder handy. Irina and I had already worked out a division of labour, I was to knock the whole set in dark grey and she would follow on behind me splattering and glazing to give the appropriately weathered look. As the rest of the crew left to do whatever Muscovite stage crews do after hours we made a start. I began to slosh grey paint around with great abandon and Irina huffed and puffed around mixing colour washes and glazes. We started to talk, Irina’s English was not great but we managed to get by with the occasional use of the tiny Russian Dictionary in my briefcase. In the cause of clarity I have tidied up her English in order to make this account of our night together readable.

I was curious to know her age but was too gallant to ask. She could have been a raddled fifty year old ravaged by years of hard drinking or a surprising seventy year old, surviving despite years of hard drinking but as she told me a little about her life it appeared that even my high estimate was probably on the low side. She had painted backcloths for the legendary designer Fedorovsky at the Bolshoi in the sixties and had worked at Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre in the eighties. In fact as she stumped around the stage she mentioned a couple of dozen other theatres or companies unknown to me and I started to suspect that in a country where jobs are often for life her speckled career path might have something to do with the amount that she drank. At about 2.00am she stopped talking about herself and asked.
“Hey. You want me to tell you something about this theatre?”
All I knew so far was that the theatre, the Estrada, had been built in the 1930s as part of an apartment complex that was designed to accommodate Party bigwigs from the Kremlin a mere Kalashnikov shot away.
“Stalin built this and all the apartments for his buddies” she waved a brush around her head liberally spattering the floor with yellow ochre. “They were the most luxurious apartments in Moscow at that time but I tell you something about these apartments. During the Terror not one of them escaped a visit from the NKVD or KGB.. They would come in the night. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the residents would end up in the Gulag, or they might just be killed in the corridors, their bodies left as a warning to others. The unlucky ones were taken to be tortured, to watch their family being tortured, to see their children hanging on meat hooks. I tell you Englishman you have no idea what went on here”. She had dropped her earlier bantering tone and was suddenly speaking with great intensity.
“I tell you something else about this theatre Englishman. The night they arrested the murderer Beria, you know who I mean, Beria, the monster who thought he would take over from Stalin?”
“Yes I know who Beria was.” I replied. He was almost beyond evil even by the high standards set by Stalin’s Russia.
“The night that Krushchev had Beria arrested he sent his men down here, they knew that a gang of Beria’s guys were in watching the show. They locked all the doors and dragged them out one by one and shot them in the Foyer, they say the blood was ankle deep”.
“Christ I didn’t know!” I said thinking of the chilly impersonal marble foyer that existed just beyond the doors at the back of the auditorium.
There was silence for a while then she said “I danced here then.”
“What here? On this stage?”
“Yes I was a dancer then. I was sixteen”
“Wow!”
“I was sixteen. My father played the fiddle. He sat over there and played, I danced. We were what you call a special. Is special the right word?”
“Maybe you mean novelty. You were a novelty act” I said
“Yeah maybe a novelty act.” She sniffed and then wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper. After a moment she went upstage behind the set that we were painting. I carried on with the grey, making the most of her absence to grab the stepladder and get to some top bits of the wall. I saw her come back out of the corner of my eye. She walked straight downstage to where the light was brightest. I turned to look and nearly fell off the ladder. Apart from her boots and socks she was completely naked and it wasn’t the sagging flesh, the puckered thighs or the vast breasts that she wanted to show me, it was every inch of her body from neck to ankle that was special because every inch was tattooed and what tattoos! These days tattoos are fashionable, the stuff of coffee table books and Sunday supplement articles and I would guess not many between the ages of twenty and thirty don’t have one, but not tattoos like these. Whoever had worked on Irina was a true artist, there were Tartar princes, scimitar wielding warriors, unicorns, wolves, waterfalls, icy mountains, forests, sailing ships, giants and dwarves.
I stood on the step ladder with a brush in one hand and a can of paint in the other with my mouth open, not sure what to say. “My what nice tattoos you have.” didn’t seem right for the situation. Instead I said “Turn round.”
She did and a medieval army was marshalled at the base of her spine, an eagle clutching a bleeding serpent in its talons on one shoulder, a crescent moon rising over a silvery lake on the other, a princess was entwined with a dragon on her right thigh. The level of detail was extraordinary and the composition spectacular.
“It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” I said
“Yeah yeah OK” she dropped back into her normal ironic manner and she went back upstage, returning fully clothed a few minutes later.
“Who did the tattoos?” I asked.
“My uncle. He was the finest tattooist in the Caucasus, maybe in all Russia. We were a circus family from Georgia, my mother was a trapeze artist, her sister had an act with horses and my father was a musician. I was a disappointment to them, I didn’t have the knack for the trapeze and I hated horses so the family decided that I should become a tattooed lady.”
“Did you mind?”
“How could I mind? In my family everybody had to earn their keep, I had to do something, so, no, I didn’t mind”.
She reclaimed the ladder from me and starting glazing the wall.
“In those days there was a sort of unofficial cabaret circuit in Russia. Most city or district Party committees ran some sort of late night event. Maybe once a month. My father and I travelled all over Russia, we did OK, we were looked after. One day we got a message to come to Moscow, to this theatre. This was a big step up for us. We normally played tractor factory canteens and so on, so we were very nervous. The act was simple, my father played a jolly country tune on his accordion, I took my clothes off and then posed for a bit to show off the tattoos. That was all, the tattoos did it. Oh and I was a very pretty girl then.” She laughed and the stepladder rattled and squeaked as she did.
“After our third night two men came into our dressing room. They didn’t knock, they just walked in and said “Come with us”. I was only wearing a dressing gown and my father protested but they just grabbed us and took us down the stairs, out of the stage door and into a car. We passed people on the corridor as we went and they looked away, they knew that we were going to be killed. In the car they put hoods over our heads and told us to be quiet, even so I could hear my father muttering prayers and I had never heard a single religious word come out of his mouth until then. I just thought this is not fair, we’ve done nothing and I started to cry. One of the men told me to shut up but then said “Don’t worry everything’s OK” and I thought maybe they’re not going to kill us after all. We drove for a long time, maybe two hours, Eventually we stopped and there were conversations that we couldn’t quite make out but we could hear gates opening and then we could hear that we were on gravel . When the car finally stopped they whipped the hoods off and we could see that we were outside the front doors of a big house and that there were lights on in the hall. A tall man in a black suit came down the steps and poked his head in the window and he said ‘Good you’re here, better late than never. Come with me”. We got out of the car and followed him into the house and I noticed that one of the men that had brought us had taken my father’s fiddle out of the trunk of the car, then I knew that we weren’t going to be killed we were going to perform.

In the hall the tall man, who was a butler or something, looked at me and then turned to the man carrying the violin and said “You didn’t bring her clothes?” and when the man shook his head the butler raised his eyes to heaven and took me by the hand, through a door and down some stairs into the kitchens. He told the two women working there to bring a hair brush, a mirror and some make-up. “You have ten minutes so do the best you can” he said to me and patted my shoulder. When I was ready we went back upstairs and my father and I were ushered into a small sitting room, .in the corner was an old man with a blanket over his knees. The butler indicated a chair to my father and then using another chair he helped me get up on to a table in the middle of the room. I thought ‘Who is this old man and why are we performing here’ then I recognised him and I nearly fainted. You have already guessed I’m sure, but it was Stalin himself, his skin was yellow, his hair white and his moustache, that famous moustache, was wispy and thin”
“So you danced for Stalin?” I said. I was staggered.
“Yes.I was shocked because of course we were fed propaganda images of the Great Leader from ten years earlier, we were never shown this old man on our weekly newsreels. Anyway, I looked at my father, who was petrified, he obviously knew who we were playing for, and I gave him the signal to start. I did the best I could with just my dressing gown and was down to just the tattoos pretty quickly but it was OK,I could see the old man start to smile and tap his foot in time to the music, he was a Georgian too you know. At the end of the routine he beckoned me to come to him and examined my tattoos very closely, he made the butler bring one of the table lamps closer so that he could see better. He was amazed, he shook his head in wonderment, he didn’t touch me, but he traced some of the images with his finger just a millimetre or two from my skin. Then he waved us away and slumped back in the chair and it was all over. The butler helped me into my dressing gown and in a moment my father and I were back in the hall where everyone was happy, they were relieved that we had done well because, perhaps, their lives depended on it. The guys who had driven us from Moscow slapped us on the back as they led us back to the car and they were really apologetic when they put the hoods back on. We were about to drive away when we heard the butler come back and talk for a couple of minutes to our escorts. We couldn’t make out what he said but the mood suddenly became more serious.
They took us back to the apartment where we were staying and once the hoods were off the one who wasn’t driving turned to us and said that he had been instructed to tell us that under no circumstances were we to continue performing our routine or to exhibit my tattoos in any way. We would receive instructions on what we were to do in the next few days.
This was a catastrophe for us and we couldn’t believe it after our success with the Great Leader but then two days later my father got a letter informing him that he was to take a senior musical position with a Georgian folk dance troupe in Tblisi. On the same day I also received a letter instructing me to report to the scene painting department of the Bolshoi Theatre here in Moscow where I was to be an apprentice, a much sought after position, though I didn’t know that the time”.
“So the reason that you are here with me tonight is because Stalin arranged it” I said
“Yes, because I danced naked on a table for Josef Stalin. I could have been dancing for my life you know, in a way that’s what everyone in Russia did in those days, they danced for their lives naked on Stalin’s table. I was lucky and here I am with you Englishman, you and this fucking wall”.

Dear Uncle Ted

2010-05-22T02:46:00.000-07:00

I have been in ‘show business’ for many years and have worked in most fields of this noble industry and I often receive correspondence from young people eager to make their way along the stardust trail that I have trod for more than forty years. I thought it might be a service to my younger readers to publish my advice to some of these supplicants.

Dear Uncle Ted

I have been trying to break into the theatre but as yet I have had very little success. My mother thinks it would be helpful if I were gay but I would find this life style change rather difficult as I already have a very active sex life with several girl friends, one of whom is carrying my unborn child. I am a very normal sort of chap, my hobbies are breeding pit bulls, cock fighting and I am a Millwall supporter. Do you think my mother is right?

Unsure of S. London.

Dear Unsure of S London

First let me reassure you that the theatre is refreshingly free from some of the prejudices that blight society as a whole, however your mother is right to a certain degree in that there are some specific areas of the industry where being gay may be an advantage. These areas are opera, ballet, drama, musicals, West End, provincial touring and rep, pantomime, summer seasons, direction, set, costume and lighting design, stage management, prop and costume making, stage door keeping and conjurers assistant. Theatre-in-Education is a field where a young man with your healthy out-doorsy interests can flourish. What can be more satisfying than driving a transit van load of props to a sink estate primary school in order to put on a two-handed version of Coriolanus to a room full of hostile ten year olds at nine-o-clock in the morning.

I wish you well in the future and good luck with your forthcoming happy event.

Dear Uncle Ted

I am a wardrobe mistress with several years experience in provincial theatre and have long yearned to get work on a West End musical. Recently I went to a party where I met a West End production manager. We both drank quite a lot and one thing led to another and we ended up in bed together. He has since made it clear to me that he would like to pursue this relationship and has implied that he could get me a job on a forthcoming production. He claims that this show, which is apparently based on a Haynes service manual, is a sure fire hit and that I could be in work for years. I have no morals whatsoever and I am keen to fast forward my career but frankly having sex with this man was so unpleasant that I may have to draw a line and head back up the M1. What shall I do?

Hesitant of Up North

Dear Hesitant of Up North

This kind of question comes up time after time and it’s never easy to get the balance right. Perhaps you should remember that the success of British theatre is based largely on the self-sacrifice of nice middle class girls like yourself and that you should just grin and bear it. That way you get the job and at least one of you has a good time in bed. I find that when I am engaged in an unpleasant sexual act concentrating on a beloved childhood pet sometimes helps.

PS: Be careful though, I know a bit about this ‘Haynes service manual’ musical and I am sure it is a solid gold turkey.

Dear Uncle Ted

Ever since I can remember I have wanted to be a sound designer on musicals. When I was little I used to arrange our family hi-fi in the living room and make my Mum and Nan listen to ‘Godspell’ time after time. I plastered the walls of my bedroom with pictures of West End sound designers and their favourite mixing consoles. At school I set up the sound for every conceivable function and now I am about to go to college to do a Dip Ac/Dc MBD in Environmental Sound Theory. Last week by a lucky chance I was invited by an acquaintance to meet some West End sound crew. You can imagine my excitement. I made up my mind to keep very quiet and to just soak up as much wisdom as I could from these audio titans. We met in a pub, which was rather rough, and at once the conversation started to flow. At first I revelled in the acronyms, the numbers, the jargon, all the money that I had spent subscribing to ‘Audio Fittings Monthly’ seemed well spent but as the evening wore on the atmosphere changed and the talk moved on to other topics. There was a lot of discussion about something called ‘per diems’ and ‘half-day travel’ which I didn’t understand and towards the end of the evening they started to complain about the hotels they had been made to stay at. By the time we parted I had the niggling suspicion that these audio titans were perhaps rather shallow bitter people. Have I made a bad career choice? Please advise me.

Disillusioned of Chingford

Dear Disillusioned of Chingford

Thank heavens that you have contacted me in time and thank heavens that your acquaintance had the good sense to show you a sound crew in the raw. You seem to me to be a sensitive caring young man and I think that perhaps the theatre in general and sound design in particular may not be for you. Are you religious? If not perhaps something in animal husbandry would suit you better. You can fill the theatrical void in your soul by collecting West End musical soundtracks on CD and at least these will have some resale value at car boot sales in the future.

Dear Uncle Ted

I am so confused and so worried, I do so hope that you can help me. I am a widow, my beloved Hubert having passed on some years ago. It appeared that he had left me in comfortable circumstances but what with the credit crunch, the recession and so on I now find that I am starting to eat into my life savings. Recently I attended a play at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford starring Felicity Kendall and Penelope Keith. At the interval I was feeling a bit woozy with the niceness of it all and a charming gentleman helped me to a chair. Despite the fact that he had a slight Merseyside accent I rather took to him and we didn’t go back in for the second half, we just drank gin and chatted in the bar. After a while, the gin having had its way with my tongue, I confided my financial woes to him. It turned out that this man is in fact a theatrical producer and he told me that these days the West End is the safest place in the world in which to invest and that he could “let me in on the ground floor” of a production that he is about to put on, a musical apparently based on a motorcar service manual. It sounds rather exciting and I am tempted to take the plunge and invest my life savings with this man. Is this wise?

Mrs W of Godalming.

Dear Mrs W

Personal finance can be a worry these days, what with oily Canary Wharf hedge-funders and Colombian money-launderers, it’s hard to know what to do for the best but in this case I can give you some solid advice. I think that I know the man that you refer to and I know for a fact that he is honest as the day is long and that his word is truly his bond. He is also correct in saying that the West End is a safe bet for your life savings and from what I have heard of the ‘service manual’ based musical it sounds like a sure fire smash to me, so be sure not to miss this opportunity to join the Lloyd-Webers and Cameron Mackintosh’s of this world. Now is your chance to become a high-roller!

Dear Anonymous of Old Compton St

Contact me immediately! You must not proceed with this project. What the director is proposing for Act 1 is definitely illegal in all EU countries and I can assure you that the inappropriate use of agricultural equipment in Act 2 can only end in tears.

This Blog

2010-05-14T22:28:00.000-07:00

As you already know the catchy heading of this blog is “Sex, Proust & Railway Modelling” and many of my readers have emailed me to say “Ted you have written absolutely nothing about Proust, very little about railway modelling and, please, let’s hear more about your opinions on sex in the 21^st century” I will try and repair the damage.

Let’s deal with railway modelling. The first thing that I am going to say is “My name is Ted Irwin and I am a railway modeller”. There I’ve said it and I feel better already. For the last couple of years I have managed to restrain the destructive impulse to spend hours in the shed trying to create a life-like scale version an early German branch line station. I have stoically moved on to military modelling and have spent my spare time painting model soldiers which is the equivalent of a methadone course for railway modellers, but now I am back mainlining again, or branch-lining in my case. For the record those of you who read my last piece about the election will be happy to know that I got my heart’s desire a hung Parliament and several yards of track laid and ballasted in the shed. I did pop into the house to see how Kirsty Wark was getting on only to discover that the BBC had decided to dump her into the rhododendrons in Nick Clegg’s front garden rather than have her hosting witty banter with the great and good. Watch out Kirsty, I think they have a career move in mind for you, before you know it you will be hosting Celebrity Window Cleaning.

On a more serious note I am often approached by young people who, knowing of my addiction, ask me this. “Ted I am thinking about becoming a railway modeller but I have heard that in order to do so I will have to give up sex completely. Is this true?.” This is a common misconception and has no foundation in fact. However, if you are going to take up this hobby, I would strenuously urge you to make sure that you have a sexual partner, ideally on a legal footing, before you do as you are unlikely to attract a member of the opposite (or same) sex once you do.

Now let’s deal with Proust. As far as I know Marcel Proust never wrote a single word about model railways. Had he wished to, the source material was all around him, he was fortunate in living at the height of the railway age and in 1891 the German firm Marklin introduced the first train set, though of course toy trains had been around as long as the real thing. Earlier literary titans like Shakespeare and Chaucer would have struggled with the concept of railway modelling. Perhaps Leonardo is the only man of sufficient vision from pre-railway times to come up with the idea of railway modelling and perhaps, just perhaps, he might have made the big leap and realised that if his models were magnified by about 87 times (assuming that he was working in HO scale which seems likely considering that he was an Italian) they could carry real people and thus revolutionise Renaissance transport. But even an intellectual giant of Leonardo’s stature would not have come up with that apogee of the railway modeller’s art, an exact scale recreation of a Great Western Railway branch line terminus complete with the stationmaster’s kitchen garden, bean poles, cabbages and all.

How different Proust’s masterwork might have been had his young hero not spent his afternoons fussing about in the gardens on the Champs-Elysees waiting for Gilberte to turn up but had parked himself at the end of one of the platforms at the Gare du Nord with a packet of fishpaste sandwiches (lovingly prepared by Francoise), a bottle of Tizer and a notebook in which to record those vital loco numbers. One afternoon a grimy but kindly engine driver might say the dreamed of words ‘Hop up sonny and have a look in my cab’.

Or maybe he and his Dad, a rather authoritarian but sometimes indulgent figure, could have worked together on ‘le train set’ in a shed at the bottom of his grandparents garden in Combray. I use the phrase ‘le train set’ with some trepidation as it could well provoke a storm of correspondence from irate railway modellers pointing out that while children have ‘train sets’ they have ‘layouts’. But for the family in Combray there would be no more worrying whether to take the Meseglise way or the Guermantes way on those shower threatened afternoon walks because there’s always plenty to be getting on with when you have a model railway. I can imagine father saying to his son ‘Get your nose out of that book Marcel we have track to ballast’ or ‘Come on old chap there’s just time for a shunting session before tea’.

One character from ‘Swann’s Way’ who would certainly have enjoyed a shunting session before tea is Uncle Adolphe. Uncle Adolphe is the narrator’s grandfather’s brother and he has a study in the house at Combray which is used by the narrator as a quiet spot in which to read. Unfortunately this arrangement comes apart when young Marcel pays a visit to Uncle Adolphe’s Paris apartments while the latter is entertaining a courtesan. The young man doesn’t realise what the lady is and goes to some pains to try to impress her with his maturity and sophistication, much to the embarrassment of Uncle Adolphe. He even goes as far as to kiss the ladies hand, which as far as I am concerned is fine, I was always brought up to be courteous to everyone whether they are prostitutes or not. In fact since I was once rescued from a stone throwing mob by a prostitute I rather go out of my way to be polite to them. However when Marcel returns home to his parents and, despite being cautioned by Uncle Adolphe not to mention the afternoon’s events, tells them what went on, they are outraged and Uncle Adolphe is banished forever from Combray and his study locked up. How much healthier if Uncle Adolphe had spent his twilight years escorting young Marcel on tours of narrow gauge lines in Brittany or rack railways in the Swiss Alps rather than dallying with this sort of woman.

Sadly as a ‘boy’ young Marcel is a bit of a disappointment. Quite apart from his unmanly lack of interest in railways it appears that his pockets are not stuffed with penknives, string and conkers. I doubt that his knees are permanently grazed and scabby or that he could recite all the names of the Combray Athletique first team. Worst of all he likes playing with girls.

Mention of girls brings us to our final topic ‘sex’. I am of course more than qualified to pontificate on this fascinating and mysterious subject but perhaps another time.

Election 2010 - The Thrill of It All

2010-05-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

“We should have an Election Night party” I announced at the supper table the other night.

“Why?”

“But we’ve got school the next day.”

“Who would we invite?”

“What’s an election?”

These were the rather dispiriting responses and I realised that a jolly evening with like-minded left of centre metropolitan folk, drinking beer and eating ‘Original Cool’ flavour tortilla chips while watching the results roll in from Billericay and beyond was not an option. “Who would we invite?” was the killer. In 1997 we still lived in London and had the Election night of a lifetime watching the Tory party crash and burn (and oh don’t we get moist when we remember Portillo going down), all courtesy of master strategist Peter Mandelson. Over the intervening years Mandy has had a truly appalling press and I dare say he is in many respects an appalling man but I for one would buy him a drink simply for putting the Conservatives out in the wilderness for 13 years. Basingstoke is different, apart from anything else it is a safe Conservative seat and there is the distinct possibility that anyone we invite might be a Conservative. Another problem is that I have a wife who is not English and she doesn’t ‘get’ the charm of the British electoral system. “why is it on a Thursday?” she asked the other night (every other western European state votes at the weekend) and I couldn’t come up with an answer. She also doesn’t think that it’s fun to sit up until dawn watching a lot of aldermen in full regalia reeling off the results in dingy civic halls in places that she’s never heard of. So what shall I do? Perhaps I will lock myself in my shed at the bottom of the garden and combine Radio 4’s Election Night Special with an all-night railway modelling session. I am currently embarking on a tinplate ‘O’ gauge layout which will be an outdoor affair with a terminus based on the veranda of the shed with branches running out into the garden. For those of you who are interested ‘O’ gauge is at a scale of 1:43.5. Why 1:43.5 I hear you ask. What a stupid question! It is exactly twice the size of OO which is 1:87.

You may think that I am being unduly frivolous about the fate of our great nation but if you think that for the last couple of years the default result for this election has been a Conservative win then anything less than total triumph for smarmy Etonian android Cameron will be worth celebrating. Should the Queen have to invite the Conservatives to form a government, perhaps this time in a whimsical moment, working on the basis that anyone who likes Charlie Parker can’t be all bad, she might invite Kenneth Clark to form a government rather than Cameron, in much the same way that she invited Alec Douglas-Home rather than R A Butler fifty years ago. Fat chance, but we can dream. A more realistic scenario is one in which the Conservatives don’t get an overall majority and that even after buying Sinn Fein lots of drinks they can’t form a government without the Lib-Dems, something that they will not do since the price would have to be the adoption of some system of proportional representation. Any system of proportional representation virtually guarantees that we would never have a Conservative majority in Parliament ever again and all the fringe groups who never get a look in now, Greens, BNP, Islamic, Sikh, Polish plumbers etc would get representation. “Oh my God! We could end up like Belgium or Italy” I hear you say. Well I’ve been to Belgium and to be honest it didn’t seem all that bad, their railways are a bit shabby but none of the Belgians that I met seemed particularly worn down by their endless elections. As for Italy! Well if this country could become like Italy who would complain. Not me. Great railways, a cabinet entirely made up of escort girls and great food.

The only downside of spending the night in the shed might be missing out on Kirsty Wark who will presumably be hosting some sort of TV Election night chatter. This woman bizarrely manages to combine being the worst dressed woman on television with being the sexiest and it’s a hard one to call, Kirsty or track laying? I suspect the iron road will win and if we end up with a ‘hung’ Parliament and I get a few metres of track laid and ballasted I will be a happy man.

The Retreat from Warsaw

2010-04-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

Opera has always been an international business, Mozart travelled all over Europe, Wagner was argumentative in Paris and just about everywhere else, Caruso was a global star and I have a fine postcard in my collection of Tetrazzini singing to a vast New Year’s Eve crowd in San Francisco in 1905. Twenty years ago opera companies toured around the world but these days they can barely afford to get to the sweetshop on the corner, instead we do co-productions. Several opera companies chip in to the initial budget, the originating house builds the set, props and costumes and ships them off to whoever’s turn it is to put on the production. So it was with David Alden’s excellent production of Katya Kabanova, which ENO has co-produced with the Polish National Opera in Warsaw and so it was that Justin Loader (the production’s show supervisor) and I flew to Poland 3 days after the catastrophic plane crash at Smolensk. Despite it being a week of national mourning and despite the Polish production team having done very little preparation all went surprisingly well and after two days on stage all was ready for the first stage and piano rehearsal on schedule.

Justin and I were due to fly back on Thursday night and therefore had the first part of that day to do a little light shopping in Warsaw. Our, or rather my, first target was a model railway shop a fair way from the theatre that I had researched on the internet. It was a lot further than a fair way from the theatre but it was a beautiful day and we were in an interesting city. I thought Justin was very understanding when we finally got there to discover that it had closed down. We headed for the west bank of the Vistula and were wandering back into town when my wife rang to tell me that due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland British airspace had been closed. Now I know that several million phone calls along the same lines were being made at around the same time but nevertheless it was still a remarkable phone call to receive. What to do? Our first stratagem was to drink beer and discuss how attractive Polish policewomen were. Our second was to go back to the theatre to discover that our flight had indeed been cancelled. What to do now? The train is the thing, so we rushed off to Warsaw’s grim central station to buy tickets on a sleeper to Berlin which puzzlingly went via Stettin on the Baltic coast. The ticket office couldn’t reserve us sleeping berths, we had to do that via the conductor on the train.

I have had some experience of Polish sleepers and knew exactly what to expect but Justin, despite my attempts to disillusion him, clung to a fantasy based on the train scenes in From Russia with Love. He was expecting someone to come and ask which sitting for dinner we would like to take or perhaps he was thinking of putting his shoes out in the corridor so that by the time we reached Monte Carlo or St Petersburg they would be nicely shined. The truth was about as far from that as possible. First the two conductors we consulted about getting sleeping berths put on a fine display of Polish customer service and shook their heads dismissively. We pressed the point and getting no conclusive answer we just got on the train and stood next to the conductor’s cubby-hole until he eventually ushered us into a sleeping compartment in which three of the six berths were occupied. The train had started out from Lublin, far away in the south east of Poland, and the overheated compartment already had a foetid lived in smell. Justin’s face, as his illusions of glamorous trans-European travel crumbled to dust, was a picture. I offered him a choice of top or middle bunk, he took top. As I settled onto the middle bunk I heard a voice in the corridor saying to no one in particular “Do they know that I’ve got a very tight connection in Stettin?” Leaving vulgar medical humour aside this seemed to me to be a splendidly English thing to say. The owner of the voice filled the sixth berth in our compartment. As I expected the 7 hour run to Stettin was uncomfortable, sleepless and behind schedule. As we arrived we saw the Berlin express leave, Mr ‘Tight Connection in Stettin’s’ connection to Rotterdam via Hamburg had long gone. So on a chilly Baltic morning the three of us plus two jolly Dutchmen in suits stood on the footbridge over the tracks wondering what to do. We saw a tiny ticket office and ‘Tight Connection in Stettin’, who was looking a bit flustered, and I went in to see what we could find out. The girl behind the glass had obviously graduated from the Josef Stalin Customer Services School with honours. She expressed not a shred of sympathy or interest in our predicament and eventually pointed vaguely in the direction of the door. We then realised that this was a far flung outpost of Stettin Station and that the main building was much further down the platform and there we found that if we took a small local train to a place called Pasewalk we could change onto a stopping train to Berlin. This we did and had a pleasant journey on one of those double-decker trains that they have in Germany. Justin did well I think to express polite interest as I pointed out 19^th century Prussian water towers and other fascinating features of the railway landscape.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof is a brand new multi-tiered extravaganza of a railway station but we only got to see the ticket office queue which was long and almost stationary. Rumours flew around, “all the trains going west are full”, “the reservation system has been suspended and you can get on any train you like”, “Eurostar is booked solid for 2 weeks”, “only Portuguese speakers wearing red socks will be allowed to board the trains” and so on. Our plan at this point was to get to Ostend and cross as foot passengers to Ramsgate arriving at midnight. We had full back-up from the entire Coliseum administration, my wife and son in Basingstoke and our next door neighbour, all passing us data as we went along. Mr ‘Tight Connection in Stettin’ decided that his Warsaw to Rotterdam ticket was valid on any train so set off to try his luck. He was booked on a ferry from Rotterdam to Hull (12 hours) and then all he had to do was retrieve his car from the car park at Luton Airport and drive home to Northampton. I wonder if he got there, we shall never know. When we got to the front of the queue we were able to buy tickets for Ostend but were told that the only train between Cologne and Brussels was the Thalys (the Belgian version of the TGV) and that there were absolutely no seats available for at least four days. Justin and I decided to take our chances blagging our way onto the Thalys and set off in an ICE (Inter-City Express) for Cologne. What a great train!

Just short of Cologne my wife called to say that Ostend were not allowing foot-passengers. Then Terri-Jayne texted from the Coliseum to say that all the ferries were fully booked and there was no chance of getting on either the Paris or Brussels Eurostar. At Cologne Justin and I stood outside in the sunshine flanked on one side by the Gothic miracle that is the Cathedral and on the other by the (more impressive in my view) mighty three arched train shed of the station, without a clue as to what to do next. At this point Terri-Jayne texted “So what are you going to do now?” Not very helpful but then I had a good idea. I know Cologne well from the six weeks I spent putting ‘We Will Rock You’ into the Musical Dome and I often stayed at the Maritim Hotel and it’s one of my favourites. So with a little help from a local friend, who is an Alpaca breeder, I booked us in there for the night. We were just putting our bags into the back of a taxi when Terri-Jayne rang to say that they had two foot passenger tickets on the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry. All we had to do was get to Paris the next day in time to catch a train from the Gare St Lazaire at 13.50 to get to Dieppe. We checked into the hotel then returned to the station to join the ticket office queue. There was absolutely no way of getting to Paris by train we were told. The Thalys was full and so was the TGV between Brussels and Paris. What about local trains? None of them connect across the border and in any case wouldn’t get there in time. “Try the bus” the girl behind the desk suggested. The bus station is next door to the railway station and in a little shack we managed to buy tickets for 6.30 the next morning for Paris, arriving around 14.00 possibly in time for us to catch the 14.50 from St Lazaire which might just get us onto our ferry.

We took the night off from travelling and sat in a bar and watched the first half of FC Cologne v Bochum. The latter were rubbish and FC should have been 6-0 up at half time rather than just 1-0. Then we had a typical German protein-rush dinner at the hotel. At some point came the glorious news that Eleanor at ENO had come across some newly released Eurostar tickets and we were booked on the 20.43 from the Gare du Nord. The bus next morning left on the dot of 6.30 and all was well until we had just crossed into Belgium when there was a loud bang and the window next to me cracked into a thousand segments. Luckily coach windows are double glazed and only the outer layer was affected. Large chunks of window started to drop onto overtaking motorists and the driver pulled into a lay-by. Here I made the mistake of suggesting that perhaps an air rifle might be responsible partly because a similar thing had happened to me while travelling between Waterloo and Basingstoke. In that case it turned out that kids in a park near Surbiton were amusing themselves by taking pot shots at passing trains with an air rifle. In the lay-by the Polish driver called his boss in Gdansk who insisted that we wait for the police to turn up. Eventually two Belgian traffic cops arrived took details and witness statements by which time we had lost a precious hour. This hour was precious because Justin had never been to Paris and we were planning the ultimate speed-tour of the sights.

We were dumped by the bus on the eastern fringes of Paris at 15.40 and dived down the Metro to the Gare du Nord to check our tickets and to dump our bags in the lockers there. We fell at first hurdle when the ticket office told me that I had printed out the wrong part of the tickets and that what we had wasn’t valid and no they couldn’t print duplicates. Ten minutes later they printed the duplicates (for a fee), and we had only two more tasks to undertake: 1) take a picture of Justin in front of the Eiffel Tower. 2) Eat Steak and Frites in a Paris brasserie. We did both and crawled aboard the Eurostar. I got home 49 hours after boarding the Stettin sleeper in Warsaw.

Thanks to all who helped us home and particularly to Justin, who turned out to be an excellent travelling companion.

Interval Drinks

2010-01-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to see 'Waiting for Godot'....

Pre-show

A: (Breathless) Sorry I’m late
B: I don’t think you are.
A: Oh that’s OK then. Do we need to collect the tickets?
B: No I’ve got them. We can go straight in. Let’s go and have a drink in the circle bar. Are you alright? (They go into the foyer)
A: Just let me get my breath back I ran up the escalator at Piccadilly.
Usher: Tickets please. Thank you. The bar is on your right at the top of the stairs.
A: The bloke from Star Wars is in this right?
B: Star Trek.
A: Ah yes of course. I’m looking forward to seeing him. I don’t suppose he’ll be wearing a bri-nylon jumper in this.
B: No he plays a tramp.
A: And the bloke who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings is in it too right?
B: Gandalf.
A: Ah that explains it because Gollum was entirely computer generated wasn’t he and I couldn’t work out how he could be in this.
B: No this is Ian McKellen. He plays a tramp too. What do you want to drink?
A: Have they got a Merlot? If not any old red will do.
B: (To barmaid) A glass of dry white and a glass of red please and the same for the interval.
A: So they both play tramps eh. This play is famous isn’t it? I mean I know it’s all about waiting. Er for Godot obviously but there must be more to it than that. Have you seen it before?
B: A long time ago when I was at university. It made a big impression on me at the time.
A: So what’s it really about? Just generally. I don’t want you to spoil the ending or anything.
B: I think it’s about the futility of human existence but I couldn’t be sure.
A: Hmm. The futility of human existence?
B: Yes it’s a comedy.
A: Ah! There are jokes.
B: Oh yes plenty of jokes.
A: Thank God for that. I was worried that I might be in for a bit of a heavy evening.
B: (hands A his drink) Here. Cheers
A: Cheers
B: How’s work?
A: Oh a bit grim really. I’m hanging on by my finger tips. I missed the last round of redundancies by a hairsbreadth and I don’t know what we’ll do if I do get the push. The payout won’t be much, I haven’t been there long enough and Audrey doesn’t earn enough to keep us. How about you? Have you and Gavin been affected by the credit crunch.
B: We’ve lost a couple of clients but nothing drastic.
A: And living together is working out. Are you still in that basement in Hackney?
B: Yeah it’s great. We’re great.
A: You should get married. You can do that these days can’t you?
(Bar bells are rung)
B: Maybe. We should go in. We’re Row G 7 & 8.
(They enter the auditorium)
A: Oh that’s a shame. Why do they do that?
B: Why do they do what?
A: Show you the set when you come in. Why don’t they have the curtain in? It spoils it.
B: It’s this row. You go in first. What does it spoil?
A: Well I remember when Mum used to take Derek and me to the theatre when we were kids, we used to sit in the stalls and look at the curtain, which was always red and gold, and just before the show started they would play some music, like an overture. It was exciting. And then the houselights would go out and the curtain would go up to reveal the set and the audience would go “Ooh!” and if they really liked it they would clap. These days you walk into the theatre and there it is for all to see. I bet set designers these days are really pissed off, they never get a round of applause.
B: I don’t think set designers worry too much about a round of applause. Anyway it’s an impressive set. Full of opportunities don’t you think?
A: It’s OK. It looks a bit like the place where Harry and his mates go skateboarding.
B: How is Harry getting on?
A: Not bad. GCSEs this year so he is getting a bit stressed.
B: And Molly?
A: Fine too. Still mad on ballet but we’ve managed to keep her away from horses.(Pause) Apart from the tree of course.
B: What?
A: There’s no tree at the skateboard park. It would be dangerous to have a tree in the middle of a skateboard park.
B: Of course. Oh here we go. They’re starting.
(Fade out to silence)

Interval

(Fade up to hear the applause at the end of Act 1)
B: Quick go through the side door. We’ll get to the bar first. What do you think of it so far?
A: A longish first act I would say. Is it longer than your normal first act? There seem to be a lot of pauses. It would be quicker if there were less pauses.
B: They’re what are known as dramatic pauses I think.
A: Even so. I mean are these two, Ian McKellen and the Star Trek bloke, are they pause specialists? I mean George Clooney doesn’t do pauses, Brad Pitt doesn’t do pauses. If George Clooney and Brad Pitt were doing it that act would have been at least ten minutes shorter. Do some actors do pauses and some not?
B: Erm….
A: Take Pulp Fiction. There are no pauses in that. The actors are going hell for leather the whole time either talking or shooting. Do actors have to able to do both, pauses or no pauses? Do they have to be adaptable? Anyway apart from the pauses it was OK I suppose. The mute one who suddenly spoke gibberish for twenty minutes was ….impressive.
B: Lucky.
A: No impressive
B: No. Lucky is the name of the character.
A: Oh right. Whatever. I presume Godot turns up in the second act to resolve things. It must be a bit dull for the actor that plays Godot having to sit around doing nothing in act one.
B: You’ll have to wait and see.
A: Absolutely! Don’t spoil it for me. Actually to be honest this is more Audrey’s kind of thing than mine. She likes arty foreign films. Personally I can’t be bothered with the subtitles and there are a lot of pauses in foreign films you know. She belongs to the local film society and sometimes she drags me along. A couple of months ago I had to sit through an interminable Russian epic which started with a speck in the distance, a rider galloping towards the camera, and bloody hell, you know what? I could have popped across the road had a pint, gone to the loo, washed my hands three times, come back and that rider would still have been a bloody mile from the camera.
B: Andrei Rublev
A: Bless you! Ha the best jokes are the old ones!
B: Very funny. Andrei Rublev is a masterpiece and you’re a philistine. Shall we go back in?
(Fade to silence)

Post Show

(Fade up final curtain call)

B: Extraordinary! Don’t you think?
A: Absolutely.
B: No really. Wasn’t that just extraordinary.
A: Absolutely.(pause) A shame in some ways that Godot didn’t come. Things would have been clearer.
B: I think the whole point is that things aren’t clear.
A: Aren’t they?
B: (exasperated) Oh for Christ’s sake! No of course they’re not.
A: Not what?
B: Clear. Nothing is clear.
A: Right. Which way are you going? I’m walking up to Piccadilly.
B: (irritably) Er. I’ll get a bus from Trafalgar Square.
A: I mean I sort of understand what you are on about but I think one should always look for clarity. Don’t you agree?
B: Well yes but…
A: I did think a bit more about this pause business in the second half, because there were probably even more pauses in Act 2 than Act 1 and it made me think about Jenkins in the office. Now he’s a decent bloke a bit dull but decent enough and to be honest there’s not much to do in the office these days so in the afternoon we sometimes have a conversation.
B: A conversation?
A: Yes and because we have so much time on our hands we sort of stretch the conversation out and during Act 2 it occurred to me that some of the pauses that Jenkins and I have in the afternoon are even longer than the pauses in the play. We stretch the conversation out to fill the available time. I mean you could drive a Panzer Division through some of the pauses that Jenkins and I have in the afternoons. We’re much better at pauses than these guys. It’s a case of art holding up a mirror to life. Am I right? Is the play about filling the time available?
B: Possibly.
A: Right. Excellent! We must do this again. Love to Gavin.

The Low Point

2009-10-09T02:34:00.000-07:00

The other night in a break between the end of a rehearsal and the start of a lighting session of Turandot at the Coliseum I wandered across Covent Garden to a pub which is not normally full of young people enjoying themselves and which normally has football on telly. I bought a pint and sat down to watch Chelsea against some Cypriot (I think) no hopers in the Champions League. After a few minutes a memory of some events that occurred 40 years ago started to replay in my head, why a single pint of bitter, a bag of peanuts and an early Chelsea goal should have triggered this memory I have no idea. I have never forgotten these events but on the other hand I have not given them a moment’s thought for years, they have remained sandwiched somewhere between childhood holidays and first marriage on the shelves in the stockroom of my consciousness.

So this is a piece about depression and before you click the exit box I should reassure you that it has a happy ending, of sorts, and there are a couple of jokes on the way. If you have never suffered from depression you are lucky, a high percentage of the population will suffer from it at some point in their lives, if you have suffered from depression and come out the other side I salute you and if you are depressed now I don’t suppose that reading this will make the slightest difference and I am sorry for that.

I started to be depressed during my last year at school and continued to be affected with varying degrees of intensity for about two years. I have no idea what caused it, no that’s not quite true, but adolescent depression is common enough, hormonal imbalance may have been the cause and I will leave it at that for now. It is not just feeling gloomy, it is not just feeling ‘a bit blue’; at its worst depression is an almost physical anguish that can leave you literally doubled up on the floor. It can also be a secretive illness that will allow you to function normally, to be a jolly bloke in a pub, to go to lectures and tutorials and no one can tell, no one will notice and you won’t tell them partly because you don’t know what to tell them and partly because you are ashamed. Coupled with depression comes suicide and self harming, though forty years ago ‘self harming’ hadn’t been invented. I think that every would-be suicide has a favoured method of ending it all, my own was wrist slashing with a cut-throat razor, I never thought of suicide by any other means. The idea of waiting in the undergrowth on a railway embankment and stepping out in front of a train, as people do on a regular basis between Wimbledon and Waterloo, was unthinkable. The humiliation of a failed overdose with stomach pumps and so on would be unbearable and jumping off something high never appealed as I have no head for heights.

My lowest point came in my second term at university, in a decisively deranged moment I decided to run away from it all and head off to Istanbul then the first step on the way to the East, Katmandu and all that mystic hippy stuff, which I heartily despised, but I had enjoyed Turkey in my gap year (also not invented then, we just had a year in which to mess about). I cleared my bank account, packed virtually nothing apart from my trusty cut-throat razor and caught the train south to London and from Victoria I took the boat-train to Dover and Ostend. It was February, a stormy night and the night ferry then was even less appealing than it is now. I don’t remember much about the four hour crossing other than that it was very rough and that a lot of people were seasick. I have a hazy memory of something happening in the bar as we neared Ostend, that tipped me off my own personal cliff of despair and I went to the toilets, which were swimming in vomit, and locked myself in a cubicle. My obsession with wrist slashing had led me to some basic research and I knew that to succeed one needed to lie in a warm bath otherwise the blood clots and you don’t die but a medical student had told me that rather than go for the superficial veins the thing to do was to go for the artery below the tendons which operate one’s thumb and forefinger. Cut that artery and bingo! oblivion is almost guaranteed. So I set to work with my cut throat razor but while I quickly made a deep wound between the tendons which started to bleed profusely, I discovered that arteries are both slippery and tough customers and that the only way to get at this particular one would be by sawing my way through the obstructing tendons first, something that wasn’t in my plan. You may well say ‘Oh come on, what’s a tendon or two in the broad scheme of things when death is one’s destination’ but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Luckily I was saved from any further agonising by an announcement on the public address system telling all foot passengers to go to C deck for disembarkation. I hastily bound up the wound in my left wrist with a handkerchief, not easy to do with one hand and one’s teeth, and found my way to the queue for the gangway to the dockside. Luckily I was at the back of the queue, otherwise anyone behind me would have noticed that I was leaving a significant trail of blood. The customs man made his chalk mark on my bag but as I left the customs shed he noticed the blood dripping from my hand and shouted, not aggressively but in concern ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’. I ran out through the dock gates and into the streets of Ostend. I wandered about for a while not sure whether to go back to the dock and the railway station but was worried that the customs man might have told the police to watch out for me. I had to do something, I was wearing only a jacket and shirt and it was a bitter night, at 4.00am the streets were deserted and everything was shut, I was in danger of freezing to death. I walked along the front, where there is a row of rather elegant Edwardian hotels, all were closed up and dark except one where the lights in the foyer were on. I walked in to utter silence but after a moment a door under the stairs opened and a tiny man and a Jack Russell terrier emerged. The man was no more than 4’ 6” tall and wore a livery of some sort and I assumed he was the night porter. I couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say than ‘Petit dejeuner?’. I must have looked a sight, long haired, wild eyed, blood stained, but after a pause he pushed open a door, turned on some lights and ushered me into a vast dining room illuminated by three large crystal chandeliers. There were dozens of tables, all set for breakfast with battalions of immaculately folded napkins. He pulled out a chair at the table nearest to the door and indicated that I should sit, he vanished but the Jack Russell sat on the floor next to me, presumably ensuring that I didn’t steal the silver. The little man returned with a pot of coffee, fresh bread and croissants that had perhaps only just been delivered from a local bakery, he brought cheese, sausage, butter and jam. It’s hard to describe just how delicious that breakfast was but you must remember that forty years ago French bread and croissants had not made the trip across the Channel, Hovis was about as good as it got in England. He left me alone to eat, but all the while the dog sat at my feet so close that I could feel his warmth through my trouser leg. When I had finished I got up to pay but the little man briskly waved away my money and gently shooed me out of the front door. It would be nice to say that this act of kindness turned my life around but of course it didn’t, but it did enable me to pull myself together and get back on a ferry to England and from that moment my life has only got better. It took many months for me to sort myself out and find a life that I was prepared to live but that night was both the low point and the turning point in my life. As souvenirs of that February night I have a ragged scar on my left wrist and a tendency to approach most things in life with almost insane optimism.

Finally I will share with you a great line from the Psychiatrist’s Manual. At some point someone noticed that all was not well with me and I was packed off to the Tavistock Clinic, a fashionable outfit specialising in the treatment of disturbed adolescents. At the first three sessions I said nothing, literally nothing, I sat hunched in an armchair resentful, paranoid and traumatised. My psychiatrist probably looked forward to my weekly visit as an opportunity to catch up with some paperwork but on my fourth visit I started to talk and talk at some length. When I finished he came out with a line that, in retrospect, I know was probably one that he used on a regular basis and perhaps psychiatrists are taught this line in psychiatrist school, but he said “Bloody Hell! I’m not surprised that you’re depressed”. Thank you Dr Miller wherever you are, and 40 years on you are probably in that great Consulting-Room-in-the-Sky, it was one of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me.

A Mouse or a Moth

2009-09-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

A golem is a monstrous creature of Jewish legend created out of clay and animated by the use of magic. The best known story involves the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel who is reputed to have created a golem around 1580 in order to protect the Prague ghetto from an anti-semitic pogrom. This and other stories are the basis of three famous silent movies made between 1914 and 1920 by actor/director Paul Wegener, classics of German Expressionist cinema, which were to have an enormous influence on Hollywood horror films of the future. Of the three movies only the last The Golem – How He Came into the World exists in complete form, the second The Golem and the Dancing Girl has vanished entirely and there are only fragments of the first, which is simply entitled The Golem. Why am I telling you all this? I am sure that few of my readers have any particular interest in German silent movies. The reason is that these movies are at the core of the story that I am about to tell, but it is not my story it is the story of Mike Danfers.

I met Mike during my first, and as it happens my only year at university. He was in his second year and had the rooms across the landing from mine. I can’t remember what he was reading but he was a much more serious minded individual than I and we had little in common apart from an obsession with cinema. This he approached with great intellectual rigour writing impenetrable essays on obscure Balkan art movies for academic film magazines, attending seminars on ‘Symbolism in Early Argentine Gaucho Films’ and suchlike while I queued in the rain for late night ‘splatter’ movies. He had a pretty girlfriend called Liz, who was up at Newnham, and would gamely clamber over the walls of our college late at night in order to share his bed, but when she had an essay to write and stayed away Mike would pop across the landing to share a bedtime joint with me. We lost touch for a few years after my departure from the university but when I finally stumbled into a theatrical career we started to come across each other in the West End where he spent a lot of time in research at the British Film Institute which in those days was based in Soho. We would meet for coffee or an early evening beer, sometimes if I wasn’t busy he would invite me to join him in one of the BFI’s tiny preview theatres to watch whatever neglected classic it was that he was researching that week.

Some years ago, long enough ago that Old Compton Street was the street of a hundred porn shops rather than a hundred gay coffee shops, I had a call from him inviting me for a lunchtime drink. He sounded excited which was unusual as Mike normally kept his enthusiasms on a tight leash. He was already in our customary corner of the Coach & Horses when I arrived and I had barely taken a sip of my pint before he broke his big news.
“I think I might have a lead on a complete print of The Golem! You know! The first of the three”.
I did know and was delighted for Mike. This discovery could be a significant feather in his cap. Mike had received a call from Kaspar, an old friend at the Czech National Film School in Prague, saying that a basement full of film stock had been discovered in an obscure government building. What you may ask does a room full of film cans in Prague have to do with a German movie made hundreds of miles away in Berlin while Prague was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Apparently at some point in late 1941 when the RAF began bombing Berlin on a nightly basis Goebbels decided to move the German National Film Archive, mostly held at the UFA studios, out of harms way to Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) which was out range of Bomber Command. The archive consisted largely of sound films made after the Nazis came to power but there was a significant amount of earlier silent material. Initially the Nazis had set out to destroy any film with a Jewish connection but they quickly realised that if they did this they would have virtually no pre 1930 film archive at all, so they picked out a few of the most obviously ‘Jewish’ titles for public burning but left the rest to moulder in their cans. The archive was loaded onto a train which duly set out for Breslau but were caught up in the preparations for the German assault on Russia and were diverted via Prague. At this point the train was commandeered by the Wehrmacht and the archive was dumped in warehouses near the main railway station. Eventually it was reloaded and continued on its way to Breslau apart from a couple of wagon loads which never made it. How do we know this? We know this because Germans are sticklers for paperwork and in the 1960s keen students of German cinema followed the paper trail and it appears that these 2 wagons never left Prague and have never been traced. Furthermore it appeared from a sketchy inventory that a substantial part of early German movie history might be in the missing consignment quite possibly including the The Golem. With some financial and administrative help from the BFI Mike was able to leave almost immediately for Prague and in fact was going the very next morning. I was both happy for him, who I always thought led an unnecessarily dull life, and a little envious. Czechoslovakia at that time had only just ceased to be a Soviet satellite and Prague was not the coach party and stag night venue that it is today, there was still a whiff of Cold War sulphur in the air of Wenceslas Square. I wished him well and we parted early as he had packing to do and a visa to collect.

Neither Mike nor I were of an age when letter writing was a normal thing to do so I was surprised a few days later to receive an airmail letter postmarked Prague. In his first sentence Mike anticipated my surprise.

Dear Ted,
A letter from me eh! Who’d have thought it, but there is no one here at the Pension Brezina who I can talk to as I don’t know a word of Czech (other than pivo which means beer) and my German is not good enough to hold a decent conversation with the couple from Munich that I meet in the breakfast room. As you can probably tell I am just a bit excited but I had better start at the beginning. The flight, the taxi, the blah blah were all OK. This Pension is run by a Mrs Folgar who is rather fat, wears incredibly frilly pink things and always wants to talk which can be tiresome but she gives me a glass of schnapps when I come in at night which makes up for a lot. It’s all a bit “Mr Norris Changes Trains” if you know what I mean. Anyway my flight landed mid-afternoon and I came straight here, dumped my kit and got a cab to the address of the storehouse, archive or whatever it is, that Kaspar gave me. I couldn’t resist I couldn’t wait. It was a ten minute ride to a very dull looking 1930s office block. I presented myself to a shabby commissionaire who said nothing but picked up the phone and spoke for a few moments looking at me suspiciously as he did so. After a couple of minutes a tall stern looking woman appeared and said simply ‘Passport’. I handed it over, she studied it for a while and then beckoned me to follow her down some stairs into the basement. We passed through a long room shelved out floor to ceiling, every shelf groaning with buff folders and, every 10 rows of shelves there was a man sitting at a desk doing nothing, and I mean nothing, not a crossword in sight. In the furthest corner of the room was a steel door which the stern lady opened with a key from a bunch that she wore on her belt. She pulled the door open reached inside for a light switch and then ushered me in. I found myself at the top of a short iron staircase looking down into a large room piled high with boxes, crates and above all thousands of cans of film. I don’t know if you ever saw that 70s movie’ Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ but at that moment I felt like a kid on the banks of the Chocolate River. I looked back at Miss Stern for confirmation that it was OK to go down and she shrugged and gestured with both hands indicating that it was all mine as far as she was concerned but then she raised a warning finger and by a rather elaborate mime made it clear that the office closed at 5.00. This was only half an hour away but enough time for an initial survey of my kingdom. Narrow aisles had been left between the stacks of crates and cans and I threaded my way around the room. At first glance there was no obvious system to the way that things were laid out but that was not surprising if you consider that the whole lot had been loaded and unloaded several times by people who didn’t give a damn. Some were identified with swastika headed labels, the type written script faded to a pale violet, some carried rather neat art-deco style UFA labels, some had labels from lesser German studios and many had labels that were either illegible or non-existent. I opened an unmarked can at random and held the first few feet up to yellowish light above my head. I couldn’t make out the credit titles but the celluloid seemed to be in perfect condition which was encouraging. I made a mental note to ask Miss Stern if I could have some replacement light bulbs and to buy myself a good torch. The only downside was the smell, there was a distinct tang of drains in the air but I guessed that after a few minutes I would stop noticing it. Miss Stern opened the door the door at the top of the steps and I took my cue to leave thanking her profusely as I went.

That was yesterday. This morning I was up early to buy the torch, plenty of spare batteries, a cheap desk lamp, sticky labels, an extension lead, cleaning materials, a lunch box and thermos which I filled with the help of Mrs Folgar. I put all of this with the flight case that contained my mobile preview kit into a taxi and set off for the archive, though to be honest it doesn’t deserve such a grand title. On the doorstep when I got there was Kaspar and Miss Stern who he quickly introduced as Mrs Nemcova (but I like to think of her as Miss Stern). We did a bit of Eastern European hugging (Kaspar & I, not Miss Stern who just looked stern) which I found difficult, but when in Rome….Then Kaspar explained that the ministry had asked him to come round and make sure that I understood what the terms of my visit here were. The doors opened at 9.00am and closed at 5.00pm, I had to be out by 5.00 not five-past. I was expressly forbidden from removing anything whatsoever from the archive, I was to leave a copy of any notes or inventories that I might make with the ministry. Smoking was absolutely forbidden. Beyond that the people of Czechoslovakia welcomed me to Prague. Then Kaspar announced that he had to go to Bratislava for a fortnight to organise a Slovak Film School, we did a bit more hugging then he left.
Miss Stern smiled at me thinly and then to my utter amazement handed me a key to the basement.

So here I am, all set up. The money from the BFI will cover me for a month and I guess I can fund myself for a couple of weeks after that. I pulled together some crates which I dusted down to give myself a work surface close to the only electric socket that I could see. I set up the BFI’s mobile viewer (it’s like the things you see in edit suites) and made a start. My Holy Grail is of course The Golem but I have a duty to dig up as much as possible in the time available so my plan is to ignore anything clearly labelled with a swastika and concentrate on cans that are from commercial studios or are unlabelled.
I picked a corner of the room and made a start. Irritatingly a lot of the unlabelled cans seem to be uncut documentary Nazi footage of good looking blonde young Germans building autobahns, bridges, factories or harvesting in glorious summer sunshine. There were three cans full of footage of rural blacksmiths at work. I have come across a few thrillers and romances. These I label carefully with cast and production credits and stack in date order. So far very little silent footage and that not of any great interest, the biggest drawback is the drain smell which doesn’t get any better though every time I open a film can I get a waft of a rather pleasant chemical smell which obliterates the drains for a moment. I ate my packed lunch in the park across the road and had a quick beer from a kiosk there. At five-to-five Miss Stern put her head round the door and I switched off and packed up. She was waiting for me as I came up out of the basement, she smiled broadly at me, said nothing but took a mirror from her handbag which she held up to me and laughed. I looked like a chimney sweep.
I went back to the pension, cleaned up, had supper with Mrs Folgar, collated my notes and now I have written you this letter. Not a bad first day eh!
Regards
Mike D
PS I can’t seem to get World Service on my tranny here. How did Everton get on at the weekend?

I was staggered to get a letter this long from Mike and his excitement was infectious. I called Liz, who I had kept in touch with even though she and Mike had broken up a couple of years earlier, to read her extracts. She had received an equally buoyant postcard from Prague. A week later I received another letter.

Dear Ted
End of Week 1
Firstly no sign of The Golem, but apart from that a really amazing week. Alright two thirds of what I have been viewing has been Nazi kitsch with occasional anti-semitic propaganda thrown in, but the other third! I think I have found at least half a dozen silents previously believed to be lost and several very early talkies that I have no record of and may be discoveries. The basement is a bit like a time machine, every morning I step on board and plunge straight into the 1920s and 30s, this really is an extraordinary experience.
On my second day Miss Stern greeted me at the front desk and presented me with a pair of green overalls which certainly make life easier. She sometimes pops her head round the door presumably to check if I am still alive but she never comes in. One day I was running one of my favourite finds, a series of silent clips of Berlin cabaret stars. I was watching a pair of excellent knockabout clowns called Klik and Klak when she opened the door, I waved for her to come down and take a look but she wrinkled her nose and retreated. On that same cabaret reel was some footage of a ventriloquist at work which must some of the worst use of silent film ever!
Some of the Nazi stuff is absolutely disgusting and after a while it gets to you and I don’t sleep too well. I have dreams where I am in a cornfield or a village street standing behind a pretty young girl with long blonde pigtails, I tap her on the shoulder and when she turns to look at me she has the face of a haggard old woman. The shock wakes me every time and I find I am drenched in sweat. I have another dream which is always identical, I see a Nazi official in uniform, wearing a cap the same shape as the one General de Gaulle used to wear but with a swastika on the front, he is standing on a street corner outside a butcher’s shop. He is fat and rather jolly but he seems to be inspecting the passers-by closely. Every so often a small boy runs up to him and points someone out in the crowd. He thanks the boy and pats him on the head. I have had this dream several times and while there is nothing particularly shocking in it I find it unsettling and the image of this man returns to me during the day. I think my problem may be the smell in the basement which is perhaps affecting me at night. It seems to be getting stronger. One morning I bought a bunch of flowers on my way in (I walk in every morning now, Prague is a splendid city awash with beautiful women) and I’m afraid that Miss Stern may have thought they were for her, she looked a bit miffed when I vanished into the basement with them. I put the flowers next to me on my workbench but after less than an hour their smell was overwhelmed by the drain smell. In fact the smell has changed a bit and is more like the smell of dossers sleeping rough. Do you remember the old bloke that used to sleep in that alley next to the Eagle? Remember the stench in that alley? It’s a bit like that but stronger. It got so bad that I tried moving my workbench to the other side of the room but that made no difference
Tomorrow is Sunday, my first day off. I will do touristy things, drink beer and leer at blondes.

Yours
Mike D

Another great letter and I was particularly cheered that he might be leering at blondes. The break up with Liz had been at her instigation, while they got on perfectly well, she felt that they weren’t going anywhere and that Mike’s lack of commitment was infuriating. Mike for his part was broken hearted but to be fair to Liz he was entirely bound up in his research and hadn’t been paying attention. Anyway Golem or not it looked as if the Prague trip might give his career a welcome leg up and if he got laid into the bargain all the better.

Or so I thought until 3 days later when I was having a quiet morning in my office with some budgets when Mike burst in. Our PA Agnes stood behind him waving her hands despairingly.
“Sorry Ted! He just ran in”
“No problem. Come in Mike. Make yourself at home” I said but then saw the look of panic on his face. “What is it?”
Mike grabbed my arm “Tell me I’m not mad. I think I’m going insane”.
“Calm down man. What’s happened?”
He was almost gibbering. I steered him to a chair.
“Sit down. Deep breaths and tell me what’s happened. I had a letter from you a couple of days ago”. I made a quick mental calculation, that letter would have been written a week ago. ”Everything was great then. What happened?”
Eventually he did sit down and started to talk more or less coherently. In the interests of clarity I have edited what he said.
“Everything was OK except for the smell. I became a bit obsessed about it, I became convinced that there was someone else in the room hence the dosser smell. I searched the room several times, I crawled around with my torch searching for the source of the smell and in the end I found that it was strongest where I was working. I moved my workbench a couple of times but the smell just followed me and seemed to get stronger. I tried to ignore it and I managed to plough on through mile after mile of Nazi Ministry of Works or whoever’s image of the new Germany, interspersed with the occasional romantic comedy or thriller. I did get better at spotting and avoiding the dull stuff which was good but I was barely making any inroads on the room as a whole and worst of all I was finding very little silent footage. Then two days ago I was spooling my way through a 20s costume drama and the smell was as bad as it ever had been….no hang on smell is the wrong word, stench is better, the stench was as bad as it had been, when I saw something move between the film cans on my workbench, a tiny movement, just out of the corner of my eye. I am methodical, you know me. Every morning I would stack what I was going to view at the left hand end of the bench and as I viewed, logged and sorted them I moved them across and they ended up at the right hand end of the desk so for most of the day I was faced by a wall of film cans and it was in a gap between two stacks that I glimpsed something pale move. A mouse or a moth? I hadn’t seen a trace of any living thing in the basement, no droppings, no cobwebs. I wasn’t sure what I had seen. I stood up and looked over and behind the cans. Nothing. It was the moment in a horror movie when one character says to another ‘Did you see that?’ and the other says ‘Oh it was nothing. A trick of the light.’ But I was alone so I said it to myself and carried on working. I still felt uneasy and for the first time I knocked off early and spent the evening wandering round Prague trying out different bars, chatting to anyone who could understand me, desperate to flush out what seemed to be a mental as well as a physical stink. That night my dreams were as vivid as ever, but in the one with the Nazi outside the butcher’s shop I had a different viewpoint. I was looking from behind him, over his shoulder, and I could see the passing crowds moving relentlessly down a long hill. At the bottom was a large building of some sort, a railway station or a factory.
The next morning I went back in and I felt OK. I worked well into the afternoon but then the same thing happened, the merest flicker of movement in the furthest periphery of my vision and the stench became overpowering. I got up and went to the top of the little iron staircase and gazed out across the basement. Nothing moved, there was not a sound, there was a smell, the stench, and nothing more, but I was frightened. I wanted to run out of the room and not come back. I sat down on the top step and did what I’m doing now, I tried to be rational. To be honest if it hadn’t been for my natural stubbornness and the thought that The Golem might be in that room I think I would have left there and then. Now I wish I had. Oh I really wish I had left right then.”
At this point Mike stopped and looked warily round the room checking for what I wasn’t sure. Then he went on.
“I mentally rolled up my sleeves, I went back and sat down at my bench and it was then that I saw what I had been sharing the basement with for the past fortnight. About two feet away from me, standing on the worktop was a tiny man, the size of my thumb, perhaps a little bigger, 4 inches tall, no more. He was completely naked, a fat man with a sagging belly, thinning black hair but above all he was filthy, he seemed to have soiled himself and he stank. I sat frozen, my mouth probably open, but I could make no sound. He smiled gently at me but I knew that he was evil, nothing but evil. There was a ruler on the bench and for a moment I thought I might grab it and chop him down, then I had the absurd thought that I could grab him, imprison him in my briefcase and exhibit him forever after in a freak show. I did neither because I knew that he was much more powerful than I was. He knew me, he understood me. His eyes said ‘I know all about you. I know what you really want.’“
Mike paused and asked if I had some water. He stood and looked out of the window while I went next door to fetch some. When I came back I was about to say something as he turned back from the window but I saw that he was crying.
“Ted it was pure evil and I was held by it. I couldn’t move. ” I gave him the water and sat him down again.
“Look” I said “ we both know that 4 inch high humans don’t exist. We both know…”
“Wait I haven’t finished.” he cut in “In the end I shouted at him, I don’t know what I shouted, but in fury or fear I shouted at him and then I ran up the staircase and out of the building into the fresh air. I was never going back into that basement again. I said to myself what you were about to say to me; that 4 inch high men don’t exist and therefore this must have been a hallucination but you and I had our fair share of hallucinations in our hippy days and this was nothing like those. He was as real as you are now and his smell was real too. I got on the first tram that passed and went back to the Pension Brezina where I called the airport and changed my flight for the first one this morning. I told Mrs Folgar that I had family problems back home and she could see that I was distressed and so made no difficulties about my leaving a month earlier than expected. She booked me a cab for this morning and promised to wash my overalls and return them to Miss Stern. In fact she rather took me in hand last night and put me in an armchair in her parlour, found some football on TV and brought me supper on a tray. We drank schnapps and more schnapps and I crawled up to my room to pack and hide from whoever or whatever the tiny man was. It was OK and I felt safe and eventually, helped by the schnapps, I went to sleep. Later something woke me, I turned on the bedside light and sat up, there was the sound of Mrs Folgar’s central heating and perhaps distant traffic but nothing else. Nothing in the room had changed but I was suddenly wide awake. Then it hit me the smell, the stench, was in the room. I was out of bed and dressed in seconds, I didn’t wait to see if I had a tiny visitor, I grabbed my bag, ran downstairs and out into the street. I walked until I found a taxi and went straight to the airport. I sat in biggest, most open space that I could find until the check-in desks opened and when I got through to the Departure Lounge I went straight to the bar and ordered a large Scotch and a salami roll. I sat on a stool….Jesus! Ted this was only four hours ago….and I buried my nose in the glass of scotch. I’m not a big Scotch drinker but what a great smell! I thought I was safe but next to me was a tray of condiments, vinegar, dressing and so on and I reached for the mustard and there was the tiny man, filthy, naked and leering at me. I jumped back and shouted at the girl behind the bar ‘Can you see him? Look he’s there!’ I looked again and he was gone. I fled before she could call security and went to wait at the departure gate. I came here straight from the airport. I didn’t want to be alone. I had to talk to someone”
“Ok. Let’s get you sorted.” I said, not feeling as calm as I sounded. “You have obviously been inhaling some sort of toxin in that basement and the first thing we need to do is get to the bottom of that. Who’s your GP?”
In his frantic state it took Mike a few moments to remember who his doctor was but when he did I made the call and Dr Bowmaker agreed to see him as soon as I could get him there. I got Agnes to cancel the rest of my day and Mike and I set off in a cab for West Hampstead where Mike still lived in the tiny flat that he and Liz had once shared. The doctor’s practice was a couple of streets away and I sat in the waiting room thumbing through six month old Hello Magazines and Gardener’s World while Mike went into the consulting room. After about twenty minutes Dr Bowmaker came out and beckoned me over to a quiet corner and asked me a few basic questions, essentially checking Mike’s story. When I had confirmed everything that Mike had presumably told him he said “I’m pretty sure that you got it about right when you said to Mike that he had been poisoned in that basement. There are a range of fairly obscure chemicals that can cause the delusionary effects that he seems to have been experiencing. To be on the safe side I’ve got him a bed tonight in a psychiatric unit, St Ursula’s, it’s just off the Finchley Rd. Do you know it?” I shook my head. He gave me directions.
“These toxins normally get flushed out of the system pretty quickly and leave no lasting effects. I would think that Mike will be right as rain in 48 hours. But what a chump to keep on going down there! Anyway I have given him a couple of hefty tranquillisers to keep him on an even keel until you get him to St Ursula’s. I hope that’s OK with you.”
I followed him back to the consulting room where Mike looked much better already.
“I am actually mad then it seems” he said cheerfully
“Yep. Stark raving bonkers. Come on St Ursula’s here we come” I replied.

St Ursula’s was exactly what an NHS hospital should be and not what the Daily Mail would have you believe they are. Modern, quietly efficient and above all reassuring, Mike was admitted with a minimum of fuss. He kept what he needed overnight and I took the remainder of his stuff to his flat. I called Liz who said she would look in on him the next morning. When I left him he looked, if not cheerful, at least relieved that matters had been taken out of his hands. In fact he spent two nights in St Ursula’s but was absolutely back to normal when, on the following Saturday, I went up to his place armed with a six pack to watch football on telly. We didn’t talk much about events in Prague and he seemed a little shamefaced to have caused such a fuss and so I glossed over it and we had a jolly evening.
A couple of days later I travelled to Edinburgh on business and I got a message to call Liz when I checked in to my hotel. She was in tears when she answered. Mike had hung himself the previous night. His body had been discovered by Mrs Jackson, his Jamaican cleaning lady who came in twice a week to tidy up and lecture him on his lack of a wife. Apparently he had hung himself off a hot water pipe in his tiny kitchen, in his death throes he had kicked a packet of cereal off the worktop and the floor was covered in corn flakes. He had left a note which said simply ‘Sorry. I can’t stand the smell’.

There was an inquest. Mrs Jackson and I gave evidence and a finding of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed was inevitable. The coroner muttered something about possible chemical imbalance but none of the tests carried out at St Ursula’s nor the post mortem showed any sign of toxins in Mike’s system. His mother Edie had travelled up from Paignton and Liz and I did our best to comfort her. We had both met her when Mike had been up at the university and she was devastated. She was long widowed and Mike was her only child, she kept scrapbooks containing all his articles, his few appearances on late night TV arts programmes were the stuff of legend in the crescent where she lived. The funeral, at Kensal Rise Crematorium was a sparsely attended and grim affair. There were a handful of relatives, some of Mike’s fellow denizens of the BFI library and a couple of old college mates. We had a drink in the pub across the road and no one found much to say. Before she left to catch her train back to Devon, Edie came to Liz and I and asked if we would mind organising the clearance of Mike’s flat. She had removed any personal items or mementoes and she said we should dispose of the rest as we saw fit. Of course we agreed and Liz and I decided to meet at the flat the next day to start sorting things out.

Liz was waiting for me on the doorstep of Mike’s block the following morning. I said “Are you OK for this? I can do it if you can’t.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s the least we can do for Edie”. She tried to look plucky but I could see that she clutched a tissue in one hand. We went up to the second floor and I opened Mike’s front door.
“Pooh” said Liz “something’s gone off in here”. She tossed her handbag onto the sofa and stomped off in the direction of the kitchen. The smell was overwhelming but not of rotting food. Surely it was the ‘stench’ as described by Mike. I felt terror, sheer terror, I looked around the room, I scanned the shelves of books, the piles of CDs, and finally the mantelpiece. Did something move? Something pale? What was Mike’s phrase? Was it a mouse or a moth?
“Liz!” I shouted “We’ve got to go! Now! Right now!.” I snatched up her bag and it was probably the fact that I was clutching her handbag rather than my expression that convinced her that, for whatever reason, we had to go. I seized her arm and dragged her away down the stairs and into the street. I made her run until we reached the corner. Over coffee in the kebab house next to the tube station I told Liz exactly what Mike had told me that day in my office, she had only heard the coroner’s version which vaguely mentioned delusions. We came to a guilty decision. I borrowed a copy of the Yellow Pages from behind the counter and arranged with a local company who advertised under the banner ‘House Clearances Undertaken’ for them to empty the flat and then we walked away.

.

Room 613

2009-09-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

I loathe Las Vegas. I don’t fear it, I loathe it. Everything that is crapulent about the human condition is glorified, sanctified and beatified there. So, on the odd occasions when I have to go there on business, and I tell friends or colleagues where I am off to, they say things like “Oh you lucky dog” or “Nice work if you can get it” and I snarl politely. For me it is a long flight ending in a series of jet lagged meetings, punctuated by sleepless Nevada nights sitting up in bed watching reruns of Friends. The casinos are obscene, row after row of black-jack and crap tables, armies of robotic croupiers and acre upon acre of slots. The shows are bland beyond belief, even the Cirque du Soleil shows while being incredibly inventive and visually dazzling have all the emotional heart of a parking meter. The answer to survival in Vegas is to bring a lot of good books and a complete set of Mozart Piano Concertos on CD and lock yourself in your hotel room and pretend that you are in Berlin, though I have found that ordering room service in German doesn’t work. None of the above however has anything to do with the story that I am about to tell.

Some years ago a Las Vegas production of a musical that I was involved with was mooted. It was a heavy mechanical show and the Vegas version would require substantial building works and hydraulic plant installation. I was sent out by the London producers to referee a series of meetings between our creative team, the casino owners, who were promoting the show, and the local building contractors. My flight, in business, was pleasant enough, and. I was booked into the hotel attached to the casino, which for legal reasons I shall refer to as the ‘Miracle’. The hotel was one of the oldest in Vegas dating as far back as the 1970s but regular refurbishment had kept it near the top of the pile and the foyer was a triumph of excess over taste. I checked into room 614 and was escorted there by a smart young bell-hop who I duly over-tipped after he had shown me how to open the minibar and how to operate the TV. Unlike New York where hotel rooms come in two sizes, matchbox and shoe box, Vegas rooms tend to be more expansive and this one was no exception, with room to swing several cats. There was a vast double bed, a black marbled bathroom, a walk in wardrobe and the whole was furnished in surprisingly good taste. Next to the wardrobe was a door that was locked which presumably led to the adjoining room and could be unlocked in order to create a suite. The early morning sun streamed through the window and if I craned my neck I could just glimpse ‘The Strip’ though the gap between the Miracle and the Bellagio.

In the interests of ‘hitting the tarmac running’ I had taken a flight that got me into Vegas early in the morning and I had just enough time for a bath and breakfast before heading out to my first meeting. All present lived up to their stereotypes, the casino management looked like hit-men for the mob, the local contractors were all called Chuck and were enormously overweight and the UK creative team were all as camp as camp can be. Musical affairs occupied me all day and in the evening I had dinner with the Miracle’s General Manager, Mike Fiorelli. Mike was a relative newcomer to Vegas having moved there only five years before but had developed an almost obsessive interest in the history of the city. Somewhat tentatively, bearing in mind his surname, I asked him about the relationship between the Mafia and Vegas in general and The Miracle in particular. He chuckled. “Ted, that’s all in the past. These days Vegas is cleaner than Disneyland, everything’s corporate now, Warner, Time Life, Sony, and to keep us all on the straight and narrow the FBI and IRS have dozens if not hundreds of undercover agents in all the casinos. Frankly Ted we can’t blow our noses here without someone in Washington knowing.” Then he gave a wry smile “But it wasn’t always like this” and he told me a little about the origins of the Miracle. The original owner was a local man, Mortimer Woodford, whose family had been in the area long before Vegas as a gambling haven was even a twinkle in a mobster’s eye. They had made a lot of money selling plots of land to the casino developers and during the explosive expansion of the city during the 1970s Woodford decided that rather than selling land to others he would build his own casino, the Miracle. He was determined to outspend the competition and flew in architects and designers from Europe, Dior designed the staff liveries, the theatre was to be the largest in town but as construction started Woodford’s arrogance fuelled resentments from the other casinos, nearly all of whom were controlled by East Coast Mafia families. He began to be beset by difficulties, niggling at first, construction problems, union disputes and vandalism but as he soldiered on planning and licensing issues reared their head and he became bogged down in a string of long drawn out and expensive legal disputes.
‘Eventually’ said Mike ‘he ran out of time and money. Despite a lot of public statements that he was going to complete the Miracle ‘Come Hell or high water’ he had to sell out to Danny de Santos, a big player among the East coast families.” Apparently there was a meeting on site, Woodford had only built up to the sixth of thirty floors by that point, where de Santos forced him to sign over all rights to the Miracle. A bitter Woodford left Vegas never to be seen again. At that point Mike said we both had an early start and he went home and I headed back to my room.

I must have made the mistake of sitting down on the bed for a moment, because I woke fully dressed with cramp in my left leg and a mouth like sandpaper. I looked at the clock, it was a little after midnight which meant that I had only slept for about an hour. I felt exhausted but my body clock was nagging me to wake up and I went to a run a bath. As I came out of the bathroom I noticed that the room, without daylight, seemed much smaller than it had in the morning. I went to the window and tried to look down at the Strip, always a good view at night, but try as I might I couldn’t lean far enough to see past the adjoining building, which was strange because I had been able to in the morning. I gave up and turned on the TV, and there was the Friends episode about Phoebe’s aunt’s funeral so I took a drink from the mini-bar and settled down for a long night. After a while I became aware of thuds and bangs from the room next door, it sounded as though whoever was in there was moving furniture about. Occasionally I heard voices raised in argument, two men, maybe three perhaps. Out of pure nosiness I went to the communicating door and listened but the voices were too muffled for me to make anything out. If I had thought that I was going to get any sleep I might have rung down to Reception to complain but as it was I turned up the volume on the TV and eventually did doze off.

As I left my room to go down to breakfast in the morning the door of 612 (there was no 613) opened and a short blonde woman emerged, she wore a badge that said ‘ Realtors of the USA (South-West) – Tammy Verbanek’. She was wearing a pink tracksuit made from a material that might well have been a spin off from the Space Programme.
“You were busy last night” I said cheerfully, “were you changing the whole room round?”
Her eyes narrowed.
“I was busy trying to get some sleep while you and your drunken buddies were throwing stuff about!”
“I was in bed. Watching Friends.”
“Who was making all that ruckus then?”
I don’t know. It must have been from above or below I guess.” She eyed me suspiciously. “Going to breakfast?” I continued breezily.
“Sure” she said and as we walked along to the elevators she told me that she was from Tucson, Arizona, and that she was her company’s top earning realtor (which means estate agent for those of us brought up in the home counties) and that that had won her the right to attend this annual wing-ding in Vegas.
The restaurant, themed in Hollywood classical Greek style, was nearly deserted and Tammy, obviously a gregarious type, suggested that we sit down together. Over breakfast she told me about her life in Tucson, about her husband Duane, who had just been laid off from the tyre company where he had been a supervisor for twenty years, about her two kids, one at college and the other in the 6th grade and about her church, Americans have the ability to talk about their religion in a way that would make a C of E vicar cringe. I rather took to Tammy, like most Americans she remained cheerfully positive whatever the problems were that confronted her. Towards the end of our breakfast together she lowered her voice and asked “Did you hear screaming last night? I’m sure I heard screaming and it was a man screaming not a woman”.
“No” I replied “but I fell asleep at some point. Are sure it wasn’t on TV?”
“It didn’t sound like it. It came from your room. It didn’t sound as if someone was acting. You can tell you know”.
I assured Tammy that I hadn’t been torturing anyone in the night and we went our separate ways, she to her gung-ho realtors convention and I to a series of visits to contractors’ workshops. I finished off the day having a delicious Mexican dinner with the owner of a local prop shop and he joined me for a couple of nightcaps in the hotel bar. So it was very late when I got out of the elevator on the 6th floor and started the long trek along the deserted corridor towards my room. At the far end a door, on the same side of the corridor as my room, opened and for a moment the wall opposite was lit by brilliant light coming from the room, a man emerged and closed the door behind him. He turned and headed towards me, he was tall, dark and more formally dressed than is the norm in Vegas these days in a dark suit with a rather dated hat, the sort of hat that Spencer Tracy wore in Bad Day at Black Rock. He strode determinedly on, looking straight ahead. Had the corridors at the Miracle not possessed generous Vegas proportions he would have walked right over me, as it was I was able to move out of his way. He looked neither right nor left and appeared not to notice me as he pressed on towards the elevators. The door at the end of the corridor opened again and again there was a blast of light as a man very similar to the one that had just passed me came out and shut the door behind him. He had the same determined stride as his predecessor, in fact as the distance between us closed it became clear to me that he was absolutely identical to the first man. At this point I must confess to the reader that on the night in question I was decidedly drunk. We had been drinking Margeritas all evening and it doesn’t take many of them to addle my brains so I assumed in a good naturedly drunk way that I had just seen a pair of identical twins leaving a room near mine and at that moment that didn’t seem surprising, this was Las Vegas after all. There was something unnerving however about the way that that neither of them had acknowledged my presence with so much as the flicker of an eye.
By this time I was near the end of the corridor and I glanced up at the door numbers to see how near. I was at 612, which was Tammy’s room, and my room 614 would be next and at that moment the door to 614 was flung open and for an instant I was caught in the blast of light that I had seen before and a man brushed past me closing the door. He set off down the corridor and I could see that he was dressed in exactly the same way as the other two and walked in the same distinctive way. I was about to shout after him “Hey that’s my room, what were you doing in there” when I was distracted by what I had just glimpsed through the open door. Firstly there had been the light, incredibly bright, not artificial, not theatrical but exterior noonday desert sun. secondly I had seen a man in shirt sleeves sitting on a straight backed wooden chair, there was a bucket and a hammer on the floor next to him. I had seen him only fleetingly and only in silhouette but I was sure that he was terrified. I stood undecided, stunned actually, something extraordinary was going on in my room, but then the number on the door caught my eye. It was 613 not 614, the man in the chair was next door and not in my room. After a couple of abortive attempts I managed to get my keycard into the lock of 614 and fell through the door and onto my bed. I lay there for a few seconds but then realised that if I didn’t get up immediately I would pass out so I managed to get undressed and went and sat under the shower. I turned the water to cold and stayed there until I could bear it no longer, I turned the water off and as I did so I could clearly hear screaming. As Tammy had said it was a man screaming and it was coming from next door. I pulled on the hotel issue bathrobe and went out into the corridor, the screams sounded even louder there. I scuttled past 613 and knocked on 614.
“Tammy! Are you OK ?”
The door opened instantly and she dragged me inside.
“Now you can hear it huh!” she said.
“Yes let’s call the front desk or security or something”.
She went to the phone.
“Hello we have a problem up here. Something terrible is happening in 613. We can hear screaming”
I hit the speakerphone button and added “someone is being killed next door. We need the police or security now!”
“OK. Is this Mrs Verbanek that I’m talking to? I can see that you are calling from 612 and you say the problem is in 613?” The man on the switchboard sounded reassuringly calm.
“Yes “I said “and I’m Mr Irwin from 614. The screams are definitely coming from 613, the room between us”
“OK folks security are on their way and will be there momentarily but I have a problem here in that there is no room 613, there are no ‘13s’ on any of the floors of this hotel or any other in Vegas. Gamblers are superstitious.”
“Go check again” whispered Tammy to me. I felt a rush of cowardice but could think of no plausible excuse for not going, so while Tammy held the door open, I quickly popped out into the corridor, dreading meeting another fedora hatted man, but no one emerged and I was able to confirm that the number on the door was indeed 613. As I turned back into Tammy’s room I saw two heavily built men hurrying along the corridor, the first to arrive introduced himself as Bill Stover, Deputy Head of Security at the Miracle. They joined us in 614 and we explained what we had heard and when.
“And the noises definitely came from 614 through there?” asked Bill gesturing at the inter-connecting door.
“No!” said Tammy “from 613 next door, Mr Irwin is in 614!”
“Pardon me Ma’am but there is no 613”
“Go check it out” said Tammy
We all trooped out into the corridor and Bill gazed at the number plate next door which clearly read 613. He started to talk into his radio “Hi I’m outside 613 ………….Yeah Yeah. I know but I’m standing outside 613. It’s kinda weird somebody must’ve been monkeying with the number plates.” He went on to explain what was going on and that he was going to enter 613. He asked us to withdraw up the corridor then standing slightly to the side of the door he knocked firmly. His sidekick, who I had noticed from his badge was named Isidore, stood on the other side with his hand on his gun. There was no reply to Steve’s first knock and he tried again saying loudly as his did “Hello this is hotel security please open the door”. He took out what I assumed was a master key card from his pocket and was then confounded to find that there was no key lock on the door nor indeed any sort of lock, just a door handle. He tried the handle, it didn’t budge, he gestured to Isidore, a fat free 18 stone, to kick the door in. Tammy and I stood 20 yards up the corridor and at that point I noticed that she was wearing a truly remarkable mauve quilted dressing gown and she noticed that I was drunk. “Are you drunk?” she asked.
“Yes. Does it show?”
“It certainly does” she replied with a frown of disapproval.
“Sorry” I said
“It’s OK” and she edged closer to me as Isidore launched himself at the door. He bounced back and fell to the floor, rubbing his ankle and gasping with pain. The door had not even vibrated under the impact of 18 stone Isidore.
“I’m calling a Code 3” said Steve into his radio.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh just that we get a duty manager and maintenance up here and we stand-by local law enforcement” He shushed Isidore who was using language that was making Tammy flinch. We all went back into her room and were joined a few minutes later by Mike Fiorelli and two men in orange overalls called Estevan and Julio who carried hefty tool boxes.
Mike nodded to me and then turned to Steve.
“What’s going on?”
“We have a 613 where we shouldn’t have a 613” said Steve and led Mike out into the corridor. I followed a few moments later and took Mike to one side and explained what I had seen.
“Are you drunk?” he asked when I had finished.
“Yes. Does it show?”
“Yes, but never mind. This is really weird.” He asked me to describe in detail the man or men that I had seen in the corridor and the man in the chair.
We went back into 612 and Mike pointed to the door that in theory connected with my room but must now connect with 613, “Do we have a key for this?” he asked Steve who examined the traditional keyhole and then shook his head. The men in orange went to work and in a few moments they had prised the door open. They revealed another door which they also forced revealing my room, embarrassingly strewn with dirty clothing, but there was no sign of 613, just an 18” concrete filled gap between the two rooms. The men in orange were then sent out into the corridor to force the door labelled 613 but came straight back looking confused.
“There’s no 613 sir” Estevan said. “Next door is 614.” Mike shook his head impatiently and shoved them out of his way as he went to look for himself. We all followed. Estevan was right, there was no 613. Mike looked at me. I said “You saw it didn’t you?”
He nodded, I looked at Steve and Isidore and they nodded. There was silence, there was no explanation that we could share. An elevator ‘dinged’ in the distance and a group of late night gamblers appeared at the end of the corridor. Mike shooed us all back into Tammy’s room. Was it my imagination but did her room seem bigger than it had a few moments before, I pulled back the curtain to see The Strip and beyond that the sun rising over the desert.
“Steve call down and let’s get these folks relocated to a couple of suites on the top floor.” Steve started to talk into his radio. Mike turned to Tammy and I. “Look I’m truly sorry that all this has happened though I’m not sure what exactly has happened here. I’ll get some people to help you move your stuff” Tammy had moved into the opening between the two rooms while he said this.
“Why is the gap between the rooms so big” she asked.
Good point, I thought, hotel walls can normally be measured in microns rather than inches.
“Are there services, air con or something running up there” I suggested.
“No” said Mike “all the services run up a central core”.
“What’s this? Come here Ted” Tammy was peering at the knobbly surface of the concrete that filled the gap between the two rooms
I moved next to her and looked where she was pointing.
“These are fingers aren’t they?”
There were four lumps that seemed to be finger shaped or at least the top joints of four fingers but I was about to dismiss them as lumps created in the rough concrete by chance when I noticed the unmistakeable shapes of fingernails. I reached forward and picked at one of them and a concrete encrusted nail broke away and fell to the floor revealing a yellowish larva of some sort in a dark brown cavity. Tammy shrieked and recoiled in disgust as the maggot wriggled its way free and dropped onto her slipper. A trickle of foul smelling black liquid followed and then I could see the top of a finger bone, a distal phalange to be exact, though I didn’t know that at the time, I just wanted to be sick. Suddenly we were surrounded by concerned hotel staff who more or less carried us bodily away from the horror in the concrete and whisked us upstairs to separate suites of absurd luxury. Mike arrived about twenty minutes later with a couple of Xeroxed photos in his hand.
“Is this the guy in 613, the guy in the chair?” he asked showing me a picture of a well built white haired man of about 60.
“I don’t know” I said “Could be but I only saw him in silhouette. Who is he?”
“Mortimer Woodford. Is this the guy in the corridor?” he said handing me the other picture.
“Yes! Absolutely! Unmistakable. That’s him. Who’s he?”
“Danny de Santos” replied Mike who was looking very tired.
“Shit! He was here tonight”.
“I don’t think so. Danny de Santos was shot dead in a bar in Hoboken New Jersey in 1984”.
We sat for a while not saying anything.
“Look Ted I don’t know what you think about all this…”
“I think Danny de Santos tortured Mortimer Woodford until he signed over the Miracle to him and then incorporated him in the building and somehow tonight we’ve or rather I’ve been shown that.”
“Yeah well whatever”. Mike looked uncomfortable “This doesn’t look great for the Casino Ted and I would be grateful if what happened tonight went no further”.
I considered for a moment. With a show about to open in the Miracle’s theatre it wasn’t in my interests to rock the boat and whatever I said or did wouldn’t help poor Mortimer Woodford entombed between rooms 612 and 614.
“OK Mike. No problem.” He looked immensely relieved as he left me to enjoy the remains of my stay in the Sammy Davis Suite.
On my return to the UK I kept an occasional watch on Las Vegas local news websites but nothing about Woodford or De Santos ever came up but I was surprised and delighted the following Christmas, and every Christmas since, to receive a vast Fortnum & Mason’s hamper with a card from ‘the Management & Staff of the Miracle Casino – Las Vegas’.
What of Tammy? I never saw her again after that moment when the maggot landed on her slipper but I did manage to trace her to her office in Tucson and I called her. She was polite but didn’t seem very pleased to hear from me and I think she didn’t care to be reminded of the events in Room 613, however she did hint in a roundabout way that the Casino had eased her financial worries both long and short term. So as the song goes “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas”.

Those of you who know anything about ghost stories will have realised by now that the above is a retelling of M R James classic story ‘Number 13’ set in a rural Danish inn and originally published in 1904. James’s ghost stories are absolutely the best and published in a collection called ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’ which is still in print.

How to Put on a Musical – Part 15 – Sound, Lights and Video Tape

2009-08-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

In an ideal world a musical creative team would have met on a regular basis from ‘Day 1’, they would have bonded and in a very 21st century caring sharing way collaborated together under the chairmanship of a director, who, while having a clear vision of the general conception of the production, is grateful for the input of his colleagues and endeavours to ensure that each discipline gets a fair slice of the cake. The world we live in however is not ideal and what really happens is that the director and set designer work up a concept over a period of months and then invite the techno teams in and are horrified to find that their pristine vision will have to be cluttered with unsightly speakers and lamps. Even worse they find themselves involved in conversations about ‘projector throw’, ‘surround sound’, ‘LED resolution’ and suchlike.

We production managers find ourselves in the middle of what often turns into open warfare. The set designer will storm up saying “Tell him he can’t hang those lamps there! Go on tell him!” or “Fucking hell those speakers are the size of a garage! They can’t go there!” but sadly yes they can and they usually do. We do our best to limit the damage, on Porgy & Bess we draped the speakers in tasteful khaki gauze, on We Will Rock You at the Dominion the PA is painted to match the proscenium wall which in turn is painted to look as though there has been a major plumbing disaster upstairs. I often think how nice it must have been to be the production manager on the original West Side Story. Hang a few painted cloths, bring in some wooden scenery so light that a hamster with a slipped disc could carry it, change the colours in the lighting battens, and the sound, what about the sound? It was simple, the cast on stage sang, the orchestra in the pit played and everyone enjoyed it. Not a microphone, amplifier or speaker in sight. A golden age I say.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Lighting designer Geoff Osram is sitting in a deck chair in his Wandsworth back garden, around him his family are enjoying the summer. Geoff is enjoying himself too, he is reading the latest catalogue from the Ghibbichung Lighting Corporation of Sacramento, California. Geoff loves catalogues and there is something positively erotic about the Ghibbichung Corporation’s latest glossy offering, in particular their new range of Vimto Stratoscan moving lights takes Geoff’s fancy. These beauties are undoubtedly the future of moving lights, they can point in every conceivable direction, carry an infinite number of computer generated gobos and carry a colour range that would make a Pantone book blush. These instruments (never called lights or lanterns these days, possibly because they cost about the same as a Stradivarius) have appealing little extras, they have an LCD screen on the back which shows the lighting plan and that particular instrument’s position on it, the screen can also tell you which city you are in (useful for disorientated touring electricians) and give simple directions to the nearest Starbucks. In short they are the lighting designer’s ultimate weapon, ’infinite possibility’ is the copywriter’s strap line, indeed they are so flexible that a salesman at Plasa tells Osram “Geoff these are so flexible they can do a fucking endoscopy for you”. Despite this unappealing image Osram realises that if he moves fast he could get the Vimtos into the rig of Maintenance! and be the first lighting designer in Europe to use them.

Coincidentally, at the same time as Geoff dreams in his deck chair, sound designer Ian Geek is being lunched by Simon Hurstmonceaux of Blue Sky Audio Environments. This Orkney based company makes bespoke sound systems and Hurstmonceaux, an enormously tall ex-public school boy, is trying to sell his latest creation, the Ziggy Soundscape System. “…..and I can assure you Ian that we only use Zambian copper in these speakers, none of that Bolivian shit and the cabinets! Well you can forget plywood, these are made entirely from Jacaranda wood so you can say goodbye to that brittle mustardy sound that we have all been going on about since the Ark”. Ian Geek salivates and not because of the dish in front of him, which consists of a large plain white plate carrying 2 cubic inches of meat crowned with a pyramid of tiny and unfamiliar tropical fruits, surrounded by a perfect circle of bright red sauce, but because he can hear in his head and heart the opening chords of Maintenance! exploding out of the Ziggy system.

By an almost dizzying coincidence at the same time as Osram and Geek are experiencing their epiphanies video designer Harry Redeye is in a southeast London pub drinking with Steve Twaddle of Used Video Systems (2004) Ltd.
“You could do me a big favour Harry.” says Twaddle “I’ve got 200 LED screen panels coming off the ‘Sputum Test’ tour. I don’t want them lying around in the warehouse not earning”.
“What are they”
“Vegemite 2000s, they’re 2 years old and they’ve seen the world in that time but in the West End no one is going to know any better”.
Harry Redeye considers for a moment, he owes Twaddle far too many favours to lightly dismiss the proposal and after all why shouldn’t Maintenance! have a video wall, albeit a rather travel stained one.
“I’ll do what I can” he eventually replies.

In due course production manager Stewart Cowless receives the bid lists from the three designers and is appalled to find that two of them have specified the most expensive kit available and the third has specified a 12m by 6m video wall weighing nearly 4 tons. He gets on the phone to each in turn and tells them not to be so silly. They promptly ring director Kevin McHarrowing who rings producer Alvin Toxteth to complain about his insensitive and cavalier treatment. Toxteth calls Cowless.
“Stewie we need to get on board with these guys. Geoff tells me that the Vimtos give out a unique quality of light and that they are so user friendly that we will effectively be saving on two crew and Ian is right we need to get into this sort of technology. I really hate that brittle mustardy sound that we get all the time, don’t you? We should be moving on. And Harry, well he’s a bit of an old hack but he tells me he can get a really good deal on this video wall which will make a great backing for the pet shop scene. I know it’s heavy but can’t you just put some steelwork up in the grid? That’s what you normally do isn’t it?”. He hangs up and Cowless punts the three kit lists out to London’s rental suppliers and vents his frustrations on them when they ring back with their quotes by shouting “Just do it for fucking less can’t you!” at them down the phone. He also calls the Armageddon Rigging Company to get the “the putting some steelwork up in the grid” thing under way.

How to Put on a Musical –Part 14 – The Set

2009-07-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

A good set will not save a bad musical and a bad set can sink a good musical, though irritatingly there are several instances in the West End at the moment of a bad musical on a bad set making a fortune for its producers. In general what is particularly scary for musical producers is that the set concept has, by the very nature of production schedules, to be in place before casting is done, before rehearsals begin. The decision that may condemn the entire project to failure will have been made long before a single tap shoe hits the rehearsal room floor.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Ulla Hoos, the set designer of Maintenance!, was born in 1969 in Riga at a time when Latvia was part of the Soviet Empire. In her teens she joined the Young Socialist Drama League and spent her summer holidays hiking from village to village putting on shows like The Tractor Driver’s Lament in which the hero Ivan bewails the facts that both his wife Sonya is unfaithful to him and that the collective farm where he works fails to make its beet quotas.
In 1988 she went to East Berlin to study stage design at the celebrated Bumpundgrind Kunstschule. It was there that she became assistant to Karl Bleistiftspitzer and collaborated with him on the notorious all-woman S&M version of Ivor Novello’s Lilac Time which provoked a riot at its premiere as much due to its ghastly music as to its scenes of unbridled lesbian passion.
After German reunification she was invited to London by English National Opera to design The Marriage of Figaro, a production (set in a Belfast bookie’s shop at the height of the troubles) which put her in the forefront of a school of operatic design which habitually has the chorus tramping across dizzyingly raked stages while wearing shabby raincoats and carrying battered suitcases.
After her success with this Figaro ( at least with the critics, the production was much loathed by the public), she made London her base and set up a studio in Hackney.

In the fifteen years that Ulla has been in the UK she has worked on a wide range of projects, opera, dance, plays, performance art but sadly not musicals. Ulla has never ‘got’ musicals. Their colour, jollity, and their happy endings are entirely alien to her, as they are to Maintenance! director Kevin McHarrowing. They first met at the bar of an Edinburgh Fringe show, where they were the only people who appeared to be enjoying a gruelling Marxist re-interpretation of a Chilean folk tale. They were kindred spirits, soul mates and while their respective sexual proclivities prevented them forming a deeper relationship they became professional collaborators.

The industrial possibilities of Maintenance! and the intriguing fact that the show is set in Kettering led McHarrowing not only to invite Ulla to design but led to their first ‘joke’. “Do you like Kettering?” he asked her one day. “Oh I don’t know, I don’t think I have ever kettered” she replied sweetly (This joke brought to you courtesy of the Prestatyn Museum of Old Jokes).

The producers initial response to Ulla’s first sketch model is one of ill concealed horror and bewilderment. All the components are there. The futuristic ‘Front Room’ for the Prologue, the awesome Skoda production line opening scene, the Kettering street scene, the Pet Shop, the Garage, the Canal, the Skoda Fandango Finale, all are there but rendered in Ulla’s customary palette of black and grey and the overall surround looks like the underside of Spaghetti Junction. Both she and McHarrowing have been here before, most of their model presentations degenerate into artistic trench warfare and this one has all the makings of a Passchendaele. On the one hand he launches an intellectually watertight defence of their concept, she, on the other, promises to brighten things up, though privately she knows that this will only involve the addition of a little khaki or drab ochre. Eventually the producers convince themselves that they have wrung vital concessions from their dour creative team and turn to Stewart Cowless for the production manager’s take on the model. He patiently and good naturedly points out that the set as designed is unlikely to fit any West End theatre that the production might go into (at this point the deal with the Piccadilly is far in the future) and that at first sight it also looks to be unaffordable. Everyone in the room nods sagely at these uncomfortable truths but Alvin Toxteth hastily forestalls any further debate with a breezy “OK Stewart we hear what you say but let’s get some costings before we go any further”.

Cowless and Ulla start to tout the model around some of London’s scenery shops. They begin with Harry Rabone, the doyen of set builders, who like many of the old school started out on the bench at Ted Babbage’s. Harry is old fashioned in more ways than one and his attitude to women is that of a working class south London male and while his years in the business have taught him to try not to appear patronising to the feisty lady designers who come his way, he doesn’t always get it right. On this occasion he is on his best behaviour and doesn’t call Ulla ‘dear’ or ‘my love’ but Cowless does notice a steely gleam in her eye when she spots the calendar on the wall behind Harry’s desk. Miss September wearing nothing more than a baseball cap inscribed with the word ‘Gas’ can be seen doing something interesting with a petrol pump nozzle. They work their way through one grey set after another and after a while Harry asks “This is a musical isn’t it?”
“Yes of course” says Ulla “now what about these cobbles?”
“No problem darling” says Harry “we can get them on 8’ x 4 ‘ sheets these days in a range of sizes. These look like the Accrington or Clovelly range to me.”
“ No! No! Can’t you see? Every cobble is individual. The texture and profile vary across the stage. We need a sculptor to work with me on this.”
Cowless intervenes. “Ulla the difference in cost…..”
“No Stewart I can’t compromise on this. Cut what you like but the cobbles are a deal breaker for me”.
“Do they have cobbles in Kettering?” mutters Harry as they leave.

Their next stop is Accademia Scenery in Battersea, a relative newcomer on the London theatrical scene, Accademia is run by partners Giles Tennon and Alastair Mortis who both got into theatre at university, messing about backstage with the Dramatic Society. In fact both of them missed vital exams during their finals desperately trying to complete a set for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern thus precluding them from getting a degree and thus condemning them to a lifetime building scenery. (Oh woe! Mrs Worthington make sure your children pass their exams and get a proper job.)
After some preliminaries discussing the current Glyndebourne season Giles and Alastair get to grips with Ulla’s Maintenance! model. “Oh these subtle grey tones and the concrete finish are just fantastic!” and “This is so much more interesting than the normal run of the mill musicals that we get to cost” they enthuse. Finally the cobbles. “….and the cobbles! Let’s get Ivan in here. They are right up his alley.” Ivan, Accademia’s sculptor/propmaker, is summoned from the far corner of the workshop, he runs his fingers delicately over Ulla’s model and pronounces “Yes these are good! We can do these. My team can handcraft every cobble individually and then finish each with a series of washes and glazes that will give every stone a history”. Ulla purrs, Alastair & Giles beam, Stewart Cowless sighs.

The Black BMW

2009-06-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

The journey from central London to Peckham is tedious and holds no scenic splendours other than the rather bizarre sculpture outside Tesco on the Old Kent Road. On the day that Trudy Mason died I had taken the tube to the Elephant and Castle and then a bus towards Peckham. The meeting I was going to was at the studio of a young opera designer somewhere off Trafalgar Rd. I got off the bus three streets away and as I zigzagged my way past tower blocks and derelict playgrounds my thoughts turned to dinner. We had friends coming and I was cooking. If I did a risotto starter did we have any Arborio rice? Was asparagus good at moment? Did I have time to go to Borough market to pick up some decent cheese? Distracted by culinary fantasy I stepped off the kerb to cross a quiet residential street, as I did so a car came round the corner at high speed, it clipped my right leg and sent me spinning onto the pavement. I was not badly hurt, very shocked certainly and my leg was completely numb but I was much luckier than Trudy who had been crossing the road from her Mum’s house to her Nan’s on the other side a few doors down. The car caught her full on and threw her into the air. She landed head first on the curb, I saw her skull shatter and I knew immediately that she would not even be ‘dead on arrival’ but ‘dead at the scene’. A woman passing started screaming, I must have passed out because the next thing I remember I was lying in an ambulance with an oxygen mask over my mouth, my leg was no longer numb but hurt like hell, the woman was still screaming.

In A&E I slowly came out of shock and reran in my mind what had happened. A nurse seeing me sitting up came over.
“The little girl died” I said. It was a statement and not a question. After a moment’s pause she nodded.
“How do you feel?” she asked
“OK I guess. Is my leg going to be alright?”
“Just badly bruised. No breaks. There is a policeman who wants to talk to you. Are you up to it?”
“Yes why not?”
A young constable came over.
“Thank you Mr Irwin for talking to us so soon after the accident”
“What about the driver?” I asked “He didn’t stop did he?”
“No he didn’t. Can you tell me anything about the car?”
I told him three things that I knew about the car. It was a black BMW, all the windows were blacked out and that it had the letters ‘EMD’ in its number plate.

A couple of weeks later my statement was read out at the inquest. I wasn’t asked to attend, I’m not sure why, but I went anyway. From a conversation with a local journalist on the steps of the Coroner’s court I learned that Trudy’s Mum was a single parent, that Trudy, who had been eight years and fifty three days old on the day she died, was the youngest of three, that she had a twelve year old brother Kelvin and a fifteen year old sister Sophie who played the clarinet.

Two weeks after that an arrest was made. I knew this because my ‘Witness Liaison Officer’ Penny rang me to tell me. I went out and bought a copy of the Peckham Advertiser and read that Alvarez Camargo had been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and remanded in custody. His application for bail had been refused. The story hinted that Camargo had drug dealing connections and was probably not a nice person. There was a murky photograph of an overweight black man with a moustache. Penny told me that the case would come up in a couple of month’s time and that until then I shouldn’t discuss the case with anyone. Needless to say I spent the next couple of months discussing the case with everyone and when I wasn’t doing that I mentally rehearsed my evidence (described as crucial by Penny) and pictured the defence’s cross examining barrister, who in my mind’s eye ranged from Charles Dance to Rumpole. At one point in my conversations with Penny I brought up the question of witness intimidation.
“Oh Mr Irwin you’ve been watching too much television. I don’t think you need worry about that” she said cheerfully.

Eventually she rang to say that the court date was finally set and I received notification from Southwark Crown Court to attend in a fortnight’s time. One evening about a week before the appointed date I was walking home along one of the quiet streets that lead from the Old Vic to the Borough when a car pulled up along side me, two men in balaclavas jumped out and threw me onto the floor in the back. My head was forced down until my nose was jammed into the laces of a shiny black shoe, I could smell the leather. I had no doubt what was happening, as Penny had rightly suggested, I had seen this sort of thing on television. After only two or three minutes the car pulled up and I was rolled out into an alleyway between two shops. The two men started to kick me, I squirmed about trying to protect myself. At first they said nothing but then they started to shout “Do you know why we are here? Do you? Do you?” After only the third kick I came to a very rational but highly immoral decision. I wasn’t going to give evidence against Alvarez Camargo. I would have told my attackers this had I not been so severely winded that I couldn’t speak. As they continued their work in a very professional way (they avoided kicking my head), they started to recite the name of my son’s school, the address of the office where my wife worked and the name of the ward of the care-home where my mother lived. At last I managed to gasp out “I won’t give evidence, I promise, I promise” I begged for mercy and they stopped. One of them bent down and whispered in my ear “If we have to come again we will cut out your tongue”. They walked back to their car.
“Wait! Wait!” I said. They both turned to hear what the man grovelling on the tarmac had to say. “I have a message for him. Get him to call me. They have phone cards and so on in remand centres don’t they? I’ll give you my mobile number”
“We know your mobile number” one of them said and they got back into the car and drove away.

I recovered enough to call my wife who drove the few hundred yards to pick me up. She tried to take me to hospital but I refused, at home she had to help me up the stairs to our second floor flat. She, like me, understood exactly what had just happened. As she helped me take off my ruined clothes she said nothing until the full extent of the bruising was revealed then simply “Oh Jesus”.
We sat on the bed together.
“I can’t give evidence against him” I said
“No you can’t” she agreed.

This was easier said than done. The police and Penny in particular were unlikely to let me off the hook. They had my original statement and I could probably be forced to appear whether I liked it or not and I could easily face a charge of perjury. I hadn’t come up with the answer to this problem when, two days before the trial, I received a call on my mobile from a number that I didn’t recognise.
A deep voice said “You have a message for me”
I hadn’t really expected this call but nevertheless I had thought about what I would say if it did come.
“Oh. It’s you. Er I just wanted to say that…I just wanted to say…” I petered out unnerved by the total silence from the other end. “Listen I know that you are a bad man, probably a very bad man, but I don’t believe that you meant to kill Trudy Mason that day. I also know that there is nothing you or I can do to bring her back but you must promise me to do something for her mother and family. I don’t mean money, this is nothing to do with money, this is not Africa where you run over a child and give the parents the price of a goat or a cow. At some point in the future her mother needs to believe that good things can still happen. Do you understand? I er …I want your word of honour on this”. Asking a man like Camargo for his word of honour was patently ludicrous and the silence continued, I thought for a moment that he had rung off but then he said “OK.” Then he broke the connection.

I felt I had no option but to appear at the trial but I had planned carefully what I would do. I was the worst witness for the prosecution ever. Camargo’s barrister couldn’t believe his luck. In minutes he had convinced the jury that I had a poor memory, poor eyesight, that I wasn’t wearing my glasses at the time of the accident, that I couldn’t tell the difference between a BMW and a Fiat Panda, that I was in shock when I gave my original statement to the police, that the letters ‘EMD’ were the first letters that came into my head and finally that I had rabid racist tendencies. Camargo, who had watched me stonily throughout, walked free, Trudy’s Nan spat at me as I left court.

Two years later I received a press cutting through the post. It was a small item from the Peckham Advertiser. Under the headline ‘Scholarship for local girl’ it said that talented local clarinettist Sophie Mason had been awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. For a moment I thought of the visit that must have been made by two men in balaclavas to a tweed jacketed examining professor of music and I smiled.

How to Put on a Musical –Part 13 - Production Meetings

2009-05-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

The late eighties and early nineties were the Golden Age of the one-off kamikaze musical. A steady stream of would be producers arrived at Heathrow, each with a suitcase full of money and each announced to the world at large and Theatreland in particular “I have a great idea for a musical”. Many of these poor deluded souls found their way to our offices in Bedford St. Among many others we churned out Carrie, Metropolis, Sherlock Holmes – The Musical, Which Witch, Children of Eden, Winnie, and these are the shows are that actually made it onto the stage, many mercifully did not. In every case there was a preliminary production meeting where the man with the suitcase full of money set out his stall, where possibilities were assessed and flights of fancy shot down. The worst moment at these early encounters was when the budding Ziegfield would pull a cassette from his pocket and play us some of the music. Normally the experience that followed ranged from embarrassing to excruciating but worst of all was the time that we were summoned to a very camp Chelsea apartment to discuss ‘Always’ , the Edward & Wallis-Simpson musical. The producer, who I think was also the author, seated us in comfy armchairs and then proceeded, with the aid of a cassette player and a few deftly arranged props, to perform the entire musical for us at point blank range. Another example of man’s inhumanity to man. Unsurprisingly, since our efforts not to giggle failed, we didn’t get that job.

The next phase in production meetings is much more businesslike, schedules, budgets, staffing etc are discussed but still in a relatively small forum. At this point realistic production and running budgets are set up, which in theory bear some relation to the show’s earning capacity and should predict a recoupment of the courageous investors’ money at some point in the next hundred years. As the production progresses layer upon layer of detail is added and the numbers of attendees at the meetings increase as the number of days before Previews dwindles. By the time rehearsals start the turn out at a production meeting will easily outnumber a matinee house in Scarborough. They come armed with fresh notepads and sharp pencils ready to fight for a few square feet of wing space or a couple of hours of stage time, they come to have the importance of their role in the Grand Plan recognised. Fat chance.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Production Manager Stewart Cowless’s first introduction to Maintenance! comes about as a result of a call from producer Alvin Toxteth. “Stewart I have a project I’d like you to look at. I think you’ll agree that it’s quite remarkable. Can you come and see us?” After checking Toxteth’s provisional production schedule against his commitments Cowless finds that he is only booked on two other shows at the time in question and cheerfully agrees to a meet. As he walks into the offices of Jolly Good Musicals Ltd he is greeted by Kevin Whimper, the General Manager. “Stewie I hope you’ve got your prescription pad with you. They’re all in need of medication in there” he says, gesturing at Toxteth’s inner sanctum.
With a wry smile Cowless goes into Toxteth’s office where he is introduced to an enormous pony-tailed man wearing black jeans and a black leather waistcoat over a white shirt, there is a fair amount of metalwork hanging round his neck. This is composer Gunther Eisenkopf who greets him with a bone crushing handshake before waving over the book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty. O’Dainty looks tiny beside Eisenkopf, he is a dapper charming figure familiar from TV panel games and pet food commercials.
“Ah, so you are the man who is going to make it all work” says O’Dainty
“Something like that”
Alvin Toxteth ushers them into chairs around his desk and starts to describe the project .to Cowless, who has had some warning from Kevin Whimper about the wackier aspects of the production and is ready to play a straight bat to whatever may come at him. However the limits of his self control are tested when Eisenkopf hits the button on a CD player and plays some of the songs, explaining as he does the effect that his East German upbringing and the neglect of his Stasi officer father has had on him. At one point he appears to wipe away a tear and Cowless, who judges the music to be dreadful, the up-tempo numbers a cross between Status Quo and the Ramones but less interesting, the ballads sounding like the dirges that Portugal enters for the Eurovision Song Contest, realises that an anodyne “Oh that’s fantastic! I particularly like the one with the tuba intro”. Isn’t going to cut it, but he is an old campaigner and knows how to handle this sort of stuff. He looks Eisenkopf dead in the eye and says earnestly, “It’s like an orange isn’t it. You know what I mean when I say it’s like an orange? I mean that your music has an outer skin that initially is hard to peel and gets under your fingernails but when you have peeled it you have the exhilaration of the juice”. Eisenkopf’s English is not quite good enough to take in what Cowless has said but he senses a compliment and beams happily. O’Dainty nods his head slowly and Alvin Toxteth eyes his production manager suspiciously. The meeting moves on to more practical matters and an hour and a half later Cowless is back on the street convinced that this particular project will die the death sooner rather than later.

Much to his surprise Maintenance! does continue to flourish, a creative team is put in place, budgets finalised, staff employed and Cowless himself signs a contract to steer the show into the Piccadilly Theatre.

During the first week of rehearsals the first full on production meeting is called with all the newly appointed HODs, stage management, and creative team invited. Cowless, who normally chairs these events, is a believer in the theory that you should never call a meeting unless you can be sure of its outcome. During the days preceding the meeting he methodically works his way round the various departments and creatives making sure that there will be no ambushes and that everything should go smoothly. The meeting convenes after rehearsals in the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance, the stage management arrange chairs in a large circle, the attendance will be good, even the marketing team are coming.

Eventually everyone takes a seat, opens their notebooks, and Cowless starts the production meeting.
“Thanks for coming everybody. This shouldn’t take too long if we all crack through it, as some of you will know I am Chairman of the Society for the Prevention of Long Meetings “ There are a couple of polite chuckles at this feeble attempt at humour.
“OK so I suggest that we take a quick look at the schedule then go round the room to pick up on any individual concerns or niggles.”
“Well if it’s the schedule that we are talking about I’m going to jump in first” says director Kevin McHarrowing. “This schedule is totally unworkable. I thought I made it clear at the outset that this is not a crappy formulaic juke box musical that you can just throw on the stage. These rehearsals need to have an emotional core, the cast will need to find their moral space on the stage. These are artists not squaddies who need to be drilled into submission”
Cowless, who has always thought of musical ensembles in exactly the latter terms, is about to reply when choreographer Bobby Brasso breaks in.
“Listen guys I’m the last person to deny anyone their moral space but I need placing time and I just don’t see it in this schedule.”
The floodgates open.
“Stewie dear we can’t do a costume parade in two hours. And we need to do it under the proper lights” chips in Buzz Phelps.
“No chance! We will barely have the rig in the air by the time that’s scheduled. When am I supposed to focus? In the middle of the bloody night I suppose! I need a decent blackout and no chippies banging about.”
As soon as Geoff Osram has finished sound designer Ian Geek plunges in.
“Stewart I don’t know what’s going on here but I can’t EQ the system, set the defaults on the digbys and defib the AJBs in two sessions and I certainly can’t do it until all the masking is in place and we certainly need to have the company in wigs from the Day 1 of the Tech”.
Wig mistress Natalie Tongs is aghast “Sorry but we weren’t expecting to have wigs until the second week of the tech at the earliest”.
Harry Redeye the video designer: “Look old chap we need line-up time and obviously we can’t do it while Geoff’s focussing but I’m sure you can find us a slot.”
Stage Manager Rowena Pettifer diffidently puts her toe into the increasingly stormy waters, “Look I don’t want to be difficult or anything but I don’t think we can start the tech on the Tuesday there will be too many Health & Safety issues to resolve before we can have the company on stage.”
“Bugger Health & Safety” says Alvin Toxteth succinctly. There is a short pause while everyone considers his point, a point that all can agree with.
“Er the photocall doesn’t seem to have made it onto the schedule. We need all the principals for 4 hours on the morning before the first Dress Rehearsal and when are we doing the EPK?” This identifies the smart young man that no one has recognised as one of the PR team.
Set designer Ulla Hoos, “Vhere is the paint call? Zhere is no paint call! The cobble stones vill certainly need touching up.” Her Latvian accent comes across more strongly as she becomes more stressed.
“Cobble stones! What fucking cobble stones?” Bobby Brasso’s camp nasal Bronx cuts across the room like a buzz saw. “How many times do I have to say this people? We can’t fucking dance on cobble stones.”
McHarrowing explodes “Listen they have cobble stones in Bohemia and they never stop fucking dancing! Bohemians are famous for their fucking dancing!”
“OK! OK! Perhaps the cobbles should be the subject of a separate meeting”. Cowless manages to get a word in, then Toxteth stands up, looks around the room before stating firmly “It’s obvious that the schedule needs to be finessed but no one in this room should be in any doubt that we will do our first Preview on the 27th come hell or high water. I hope that’s clear.”
Stewart Cowless sighs and thinks firstly that it is going to be a long evening and secondly that a career as a beachcomber somewhere warm with a relaxed attitude to drugs and prostitution is looking increasingly attractive.

2009-05-08T01:11:00.000-07:00

On a late August day in 2004 I checked into the Radisson Hotel in Moscow. The receptionist chirpily said “Ah Mr Irwin you are staying with us for 49 nights”. My heart sank, from previous recce visits I knew that this was not a good idea. What follows are the despatches that I sent home as we progressed. Some of my readers will have read them before but there is a whole new generation of We Will Rock You crew who might enjoy them so I make no apologies.

Moscow Diary 1

Well here we are on the 7th day of the load –in and we progress slowly but steadily. We have some lighting hung, we have 80% of the showdeck down, we have ripped out the substage ready for lift installation. Sadly the sound rig has not yet arrived but is promised for today. So our Production Sound Engineer, Chris Vass, and Autograph’s representative, PJ, have had plenty of time to be tourists, unfortunately for them they were both laid low by food poisoning on the second night, proof positive that there is a God.
We are still trying to sort out the generator problem and we are not nailed down on a video playback system. A laser contractor was here today and seemed to know what he was talking about.

The relationship with the theatre is very tiresome. Simple tasks like getting doors unlocked require a great deal of negotiation. Putting the dimmer racks on the fly floor created a fair old rumpus locals being convinced that the fly floor would collapse. No one seemed reassured when I pointed out that we had removed 2 tons of counterweights from the fly floor before we put the racks up there. Almost everything we do is greeted with howls of outrage and much shaking of heads by leathery old gentlemen who probably remember the good old days when Stalin sat in the stalls and a good time was had by all. Security is provided by unsmiling young men in dark suits who prowl the corridors and foyers. We had one particularly joyous moment when one of these thugs refused to let Ian Moulds, our production electrician, open one of his flight cases unless he had written authority from Sergei Baranov.

Sergei also prowls the building dispensing humour and charm in equal measure!

The Radisson Hotel is about 20 mins from the theatre depending on the traffic and is a typical international hotel, biggish rooms, proper bath, excellent breakfast and some of the best looking prostitutes I have seen for a long time hanging round the bar.

Travelling by car in Moscow can be exhilarating, one should recall the old Russian proverb “ In the land of the Russian driver the panel beater is king.” The Metro is highly recommended (Chechen suicide bombers permitting!) each station superbly and individually decorated. I’ve never had to wait more than 30 sec for a train.

Food comes in different shapes and sizes. There are the restaurants in the hotel mall which have menus quaintly priced in ‘conventional units’, a coy way of describing dollars at a ruinous exchange rate. Then there are top of the range Moscow restaurants like the one with a ‘Ukrainian’ village in the middle of it complete with live goats, hens and pretty peasant girls. At the rear of the theatre is Buffet No7 which serves decent Russian food and to the right of FOH is a café which is not only OK but cheap as chips. There is also a small canteen in the basement of the theatre where you could probably live for a hundred years and not spend a week’s per diems.

To sum up we are undoubtedly behind schedule and it’s bloody hard work! Lost in translation! Phooee! We don’t just lose things in translation here, we kidnap them, torture them to death, boil them in oil, chop them up and serve them on toast!

Moscow Diary 2

We have completed the second week of the load-in. The sound rig turned up 8 days late (a little local difficulty in Lithuania) but our sound and light teams have made good progress. They plough on dragging their local crews kicking and screaming along with them. They show great forbearance and tempers have not been lost. Sadly I don’t do quite so well in this respect. I tend to be irritable by 10.00am, angry by midday, homicidal by 5.00pm and completely out of control and in need of restraint by 8.00pm.

The Estrada itself is a major source of frustration, it is locked in a bizarre Stalinist time-warp. The whole building is severely overmanned with elderly people who do nothing. As you enter the stage door there is normally a cheery lady to greet you though sometimes it is a malevolent looking chap who looks disconcertingly like the vampire in Nosferatu. Sat a few feet from the stage door person is another man whose sole responsibility seems to be to sign out dressing room keys. Sat next to him is another man who idly watches a CCTV view of the stage door. Once you have run this gauntlet you may encounter on stage a man wearing a red arm band. I assumed that perhaps he was taking part in Communist Pride Week but no, apparently this armband denotes that he is in overall charge of the stage. A surprise to me as I have never seen him do or say anything.

Unlocking doors! Aargh! Every morning requires a struggle to unlock the doors to the foyers, where we store our equipment, and to the circle where the control room is. I now know how the Russians won the battle of Stalingrad. They simply withdrew very slowly locking all the doors behind them as they went until the Germans went insane.

The hole in the forestage, the muddy hole in the forestage (which is surprising considering the stage is on the 3rd floor) where our lift will go remains the centre of much speculation. Every day a new team of men arrive to stand in the hole for a few minutes, shake their heads then depart. We are promised that the lift will be installed on the 18th!

The scenery is notable for it’s absence. But we do now have a band platform which has been well made and major developments are imminent.

The now notorious 7.00pm meetings have taken on the quality of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. We have them at a long table in a basement room in the theatre. I fully expect people to cry ‘No room! No room!’ as I approach the table. Sergei (known affectionately as Caligula by his staff) takes the chair and explains how the meeting will be run. He will ask all the questions (and he asks me specifically never to interrupt him) and then at the end we can remind him of any questions that he might have forgotten to ask. He then proceeds to browbeat his staff and scenery contractors into making promises that they cannot possibly keep. The other night at the end of the meeting he turned to me and said ‘Everything is OK, all the scenery will be delivered on the 18th’.
I glanced across the table at Oleg, the main scenery contractor, who was sitting with his head in his hands, and I thought ‘I have just been told the biggest lie since Hitler said he had no more territorial demands in Europe’.
All I can say is that my staff (who shamefully tend to giggle at these meetings) and I await the 18th with bated breath.

Away from the theatre news from the costume dept is reassuring and I have seen some good wigs. I haven’t seen any rehearsals, which are taking place on the other side of Moscow.

We have been talking to staff and Sergei has taken on 2 showcallers neither of whom have any experience. At our meeting I explained the task ahead of them, the lovely Julia gazed at me uncomprehending but beautiful while Ashod furiously wrote down every single word that I said. An analogy leaps to mind, picture a packed 747 (crippled child, singing nun etc), the pilot and co-pilot collapse after eating the prawn cocktail, these 2 kids have to land the 747! Tracey we need you!

At present there is no stage manager worthy of the name.

Our best signing is probably Seva, video operator, who came for an interview, watched the Perth video, turned his nose up at the video scheme proposed by a local contractor, went away and designed a system himself which he then sourced and demonstrated in the theatre 2 days later (on our cheap and cheerful Russian screens). He managed to demonstrate every effect required in the show within 15 minutes with the exception of time code synchronisation. He may look as if he’s only twelve years old but the boy’s a genius. Willie Williams and Smasher are providing a non-synch version of Radio Ga Ga and One Vision.

Possibly the biggest triumph of the week is the completion of the re-translation of the script from Russian back into English so that we have a script that lines up word for word, so that we Brits can work out where the hell we are in the Cyrillic script during the Tech. This task was accomplished by Tania, our excellent and vivacious translator, and I. Interesting to note that in Russia Gazza Fizza becomes Goolya Figga and Meat and Britney become Phil & Alla, the Russian Pearl Carr and Teddie Johnson of their generation (younger readers may need to refer to the Encyclopaedia Britannica at this point).

Time for tourism has been limited but I have made it to the Bolshoi twice to see Mussorgski’s mighty operas Khovanschina and Boris Godunov. The glorious 7 tiered auditorium and 160 odd Russian chorus belting out my favourite operas makes the whole trip worthwhile. It may be heretical to say this but who needs Rock & Roll.

Moscow Diary 3

Exactly 3 weeks in and progress is slow and steady. Sadly all the scenery was not delivered on the day directed by our esteemed producer but it has been coming in fits and starts. Some of it is excellent, some of it is OK and some of it is gobsmackinzitpickingfuckinshite. Best is the Heartbreak/Wasteland Truck which, after 2 days attention from some decent painters looks the business. The Wasteland side has looks nothing like the Australian version but has an energy all of it’s own. The Bar and the Ga Ga Statues are also excellent. The booby prizes go to the small van, which looks as though my 5 year old daughter and her class mates have pooled their stocks of Play-Doh and sculpted a psychedelic dodgem car, and the Wasteland Hanging which could be a Forest Glade in Les Sylphides. Both are for the tip!

But does the lift work? Do the Ga Ga Treads and the Killer Queen Throne slip gracefully up and down stage? In your dreams!

Sound and Video are in reasonable shape. Lighting would also be in good shape were it not for the Generator. Don’t mention the war! Don’t mention the generator! This was the instruction given to Ian, our Production Electrician, by Mr Baranov in a rare moment of exasperation. However the generator crisis dribbles on from day to day. We have known for 6 months that we need a generator and here we are days behind schedule and still we can’t turn the rig on. Eventually a generator has been found in Moscow, but not the cable to connect it to the theatre. When the cable did turn up there was a problem with the connection which resulted in a bizarre moment at last night’s 7 o clock meeting when Rubin, the local chief electrician, asked Ian if he had lots of black PVC tape with him. Ian asked why. Rubin said that they were going to make a temporary connection in the Mains room which they were proposing to insulate with PVC tape. A 300 amp connection! Bloody Norah!

There are many mysteries here at the Estrada which remain to be unravelled.
Who cleans the stage is one of them. The crew don’t do it, but there is a lady in a green pinny who pops on stage now and then, surveys the carnage for a few moments, nervously sweeps a few square feet in the US corner and then scuttles away. We have christened this lady Beryl. But even the Beryls of this world have their day in the sun. A few days ago Mr Baranov arrived at the theatre and decreed that, in honour of Jim, Brian and Roger’s visit, we should all stop what we were doing and clear the stage completely so that Beryl could vacuum & mop. There was more than an air of triumphalism in the swing of Beryl’s mop.

Another mystery is the identity and role of three men who arrive fairly early (by Russian standards), build themselves a little lean-to shelter out of old scraps of ply in the scene dock, and then play backgammon until 3.00pm when they leave. None of our contractors or the theatre lay claim to them.

The problem of who our stage manager is to be was confirmed in a curious way the other day. Mr Baranov has nominated a chap called Sergei who has 25 years experience in the theatre. What he spent these 25 years doing remains unclear. I have expressed my doubts about this appointment. I personally wouldn’t book this guy to manage a troupe of performing goldfish. Anyway I was in the SL scene dock discussing the responsibilities of a stage manager with this Sergei via our talented and charming interpreter Tania, (keeping our voices down so as not to disturb the backgammon players) when we were approached by the eldest member of the theatre staff, the one with the red arm band who does bugger all. He told us a curious tale from long ago of a local stage manager of Mongolian descent named Kur-Li, who, on his deathbed, decreed that his clipboard should be concealed within the very fabric of the building until someone sufficiently worthy to carry it should come along. At that very moment I felt the floor beneath my feet begin to vibrate, the fluorescent tubes overhead began to flicker, cracks appeared in the wall in front of us, chunks of masonry fell away to bounce unconvincingly on the floor. And there within the wall, bathed in a golden light was a clipboard, the clipboard of Kur-Li. Sergei stepped forward unhesitatingly and took it in both hands.He is the ‘Chosen One’.He turned to me, his eyes glowing with an inner fire, he looked down at the clipboard and said “What is it? What do I do with it?” I sighed and went back onstage to watch paint dry.

Our tiny theatrical expat community has doubled in size with the arrival of Bruce Ramus, Richard Sharratt, Ben Milton & Smasher. We are all looking forward to the tech rehearsal period with some anticipation. Rarely in the history of musical theatre have so many factors been stacked on the side of chaos and mayhem. We have our stage manager, ‘The Chosen One’, we have our 2 show callers (2??) Ashod, the speed writer, and Julia, beautiful but uncomprehending. We have an entirely green crew, who I gather will not be consistent, anyone may turn up. We will be working with 3 translators, one on the stage ring, one on the lighting ring and one with sound. We have a Russian director and choreographer, neither of whom have done a musical before. And possibly best of all we have a producer who may jump on stage at any moment and organise the scene changes personally. So the stage is set for a humdinger.

The schedule is shot to pieces but no one seems very interested in previews so I guess they get the push.

Traffic habits in Moscow continue to fascinate and terrify. Interestingly there are absolutely no cyclists. We assume that they have all been killed. Moscow is running it’s own experiment in Natural Selection. They are breeding a race of aggressive pot bellied men with big cars and small dicks (sorry, a bit of big car envy crept in there). All the eco friendly caring sharing cycling Nigel Planer look-a-likes have been brutally expunged from the gene pool.

Russian history hangs like grey pall over everything here. The complex of up-market flats of which the Estrada theatre is a part was built in the early 30’s to house high-up Communist party apparatchiks. Locals tell us that not one of the apartments here missed having its inhabitants butchered or exiled at some point in the Terror of the 1930’s and 40’s. Presumably those who survived retired to bungalows on the Black Sea coast with names like ‘Dunmassmurderin’ and ‘Dungulagin’. Mind you after working here for 3 weeks mass murder comes top of my list for things to do on a rainy afternoon.

Moscow Diary 4

We have been here exactly a month and Russia is as exasperating now as the day we got off the plane. We all feel that our responses to normal life have been coarsened by our experiences. This is in part due to the everyday rudeness of your average Russian, they insult each other with regularity and gusto. Waitresses and shop assistants are treated with finger snapping contempt which they are quite capable of returning with interest. Even the most uncontroversial discussions on stage can turn into a shouting match. The worst insult you can hurl is apparently ‘pederast!’ which Mr Baranov frequently uses in his discussions with Yuri Antizersky (Clement Freud look-a-like) on the subject of the late arrival of the scenery. Even Tracey Ransom, who has only been here 3 days coaching our show caller Julia, has started swearing like a trooper.

“……and on the seventh day Sergei Baranov said let there be light!” And on the twelfth day there was light. Gordon Bennett! What a performance getting the generator running. Cables not long enough, wrong size, planning permits etc etc. We’ve known about this for 6 months. The abject failure of Russian technology and planning so far on this project has led us to speculate on how these people managed to put a man in space. We pass a splendid statue of Yuri Gagarin on our way to the theatre and have come to the conclusion that he must either have had a profound death wish or been forced into the space capsule at gunpoint.

But with power to the lighting rig and a couple of days rough programming from Bruce we decided to go straight into a tech with the actors. Finding a crew hasn’t been straightforward. Our stage manager, Sergei, the ‘Chosen One’ was de-selected by Mr Baranov almost immediately and replaced, to our dismay, at one of our knock-about 7.00pm meetings, by Vladimir who is the technical manager for the building. This arrangement lasted for several minutes until after the meeting when Vladimir came to me and said ‘I’ve not agreed this with Baranov. I won’t do it!.’ So we remain consistent, at no point on this production have we had so much as the toenail clippings of a stage management team. What we need is a team of nice, middle class, work ethic driven folks ready to die for the sake of fly Q 22. Sadly we have no one, we have no paperwork from rehearsal, no moves written down, no script revisions, no idea at any given moment who should be playing whom from the innumerable permutations of cast. The crewing has also been a bit bumpy. Four follow spot operators duly presented themselves for a day’s training, three of them took one look at their truss positions and promptly left. They were replaced the next day by more cannon fodder who were bullied into position. The stage crew, who are in part made up of the backgammon players, have also been very flexible in their approach to the job. One of my biggest problems with the running crew has been to convince any of them that being in the building is a necessary part of the rehearsal process. They drift off at any time without so much as a by your leave. Seva, our Golden Boy video operator, has been the worst offender in this respect. Local crew morale has picked up with the arrival of the cast in the theatre, specifically the lady members of the company. The expat WWRY crew here are definitely of the opinion that, from a heterosexual male point of view, this is undoubtedly the best looking Rock You company world-wide. But perhaps we have all been away from her indoorski for too long. As a sage old Master Carpenter once said to me, ‘Ted, once you’ve done a couple of all-nighters they all look like Marilyn Monroe’.

The show is entirely in Russian apart from the last three numbers and it’s fair to say differs in emphasis markedly from the UK version. Sexual politics are somewhere in the Stone Age here so Scaramouche doesn’t get all the good lines and in one of the van scenes sobs uncontrollably and is comforted in manly fashion by Galileo (our no1 Galileo is blessed with what are apparently Georgian good looks, black hair, hook nose and eyebrows that need strimming). All the dialogue scenes seem much longer than normal and are played to the hilt, no gentle ironies or self mockery here, dramatic points are hammered down with all the subtlety of Canadian seal hunters armed with baseball bats. The Van Scene! Our director Dimitri Astrakhan, has boldly taken on the ‘Curse of the Van’ (general readers may want to skip this bit). All of us who have been associated with the production for a while know that the two Van scenes in Act 2 present a scenic challenge in that getting the damn thing on and off stage can be a problem. This difficulty has been solved in Australia & Vegas by having the Van come up on a lift. This was our plan here, but a combination of architectural problems and the bloody minded intransigence of the Estrada management has forced the lift right to the front edge of the stage. Dimitri declared that the scene was unplayable in this position and so we are pushing our Play-Doh dodgem on from DSR. He also worried about the lack of scenic background in Van II and when I said that it was a short scene covering the transition into the Killer Queen Boudoir he replied “No! No! It’s a very complex dramatic scene”. A few minutes later he was at the back of the stalls quoting Brecht at me in broken English, at which point I felt it was probably time for a lie-down.

But for all the problems at last we are under way with a cast on stage, a music dept that is currently missing 50% of it’s cues, the lovely Julia is calling the show in harness with Miss Ransom who doubles as Musical Supervisor on occasion and above all we have a lot of shouting. Russians love to shout and it’s bloody exhausting listening to them all day.

As we progress through the grinding hell of the Tech time for excursions has been limited but a chance conversation with a business Brit in the hotel bar tempted me out after rehearsal one day. He said that he travelled regularly from Kursk Station and that the area around there was distinctly dodgy. Well the opportunity to combine a bit of train spotting with some low life research was catnip to me, so off I went. Sadly the low life bit was about as racy as Dorking though the area is significantly poorer than the affluent area of Moscow where we spend most of our time. There are far fewer vagrants visible here than in London and very little litter and no graffiti. The trains are good though. Russian sleeping cars have a smartly dressed lady attendant standing in every door ready to greet the passengers and there is a smell of coal fires from the stove in each carriage on which a samovar is kept going all day.

Moscow Fashion Note: For those of you planning to make the trip for the Press Night and who want to cut a dash in Moscow Society you should be aware that Mr Baranov is not the only one who wears silly pointy shoes. They all do. One is in serious danger of multiple ankle high stab wounds at any moment this city.

Apart from there being no cyclists here, there are also no sandwiches and no whistling. The notion of beetroot and potato on rye has not caught on, not one of the local kiosks or our beloved local supermarket (apparently the most expensive in Moscow) carry a sandwich of any kind. Whistling is traditionally banned in theatres worldwide, but Smasher was sternly told by a policeman to stop whistling while walking across a bridge near our hotel. Overt displays of happiness are frowned on as being improbable.

And finally I must relate a sorry tale which encapsulates all that has made this project the trial it has been. A few nights ago I spotted Mr Baranov and Yuri Antizersky talking at the back of the stalls. They were arguing over a sheet of paper and as I approached they looked more shifty than usual. I could see that they were holding a Russian copy of the prop list. I asked if there was a problem and they said “No! no!” and wandered off. Later I interrogated Yuri and, yes folks, you guessed it, a sizeable chunk of the prop list (including the Yuppie Canes) had just been ordered, 3 days into the tech.

I get a day off from all this jollity when I fly to Munich in a couple of days to check out the Cologne set which is being built there. Onlookers at Munich airport may be surprised to see an Englishman on his hands and knees kissing the tarmac.

Moscow Diary 5

Phew! Made it!

Yes on the 17th Oct 2004 Lazarus walked, water turned to wine and we had a premier that wasn’t half bad. The final preview was described by Bruce Ramus as the “worst Rock You ever”, so the transformation was miraculous. Everything worked, even the Killer Queen Throne lift and rotate which was still being teched an hour before the show. The company gave their all which is a lot and sometimes you may not want it all but you get it anyway. The Russian version is longer and wordier than the UK model but the audience seem to be engaged by the dialogue scenes. Now and then a ripple of applause runs round the house as if to say ‘Good point, well made!’. The opening captions don’t get a laugh even though I am reliably informed by our lovely and talented translator, Tania, that 2045 reads “Ben Elton burnt at stake by religious zealots in Turkmenistan”.

The previews, indeed all the rehearsals, were a shambles with endless permutations of band and cast driving the sound boys demented. And the shouting! Endless, endless shouting.

What does the future hold? Well with no technical or stage management it’s hard to believe that all will go smoothly. Yuri Antizerski explained the Russian approach, which goes along the lines of letting things get into such an appalling state that you have to do something and in the end you just get through. That’s certainly the case with this production.

The Party was held in a huge low ceiling ballroom within the precincts of the Kremlin. It had less atmosphere than the baggage-claim area at Dusseldorf airport (where I am a regular visitor) but there was plenty to drink and eat, and of course Brian, Roger and the company rocking on stage. Excellent.

And the next day we made our escape back to the free world. Never is a rash word to use but until they sell Cornettos in Hell I will steer well clear of Moscow. On the plus side are the Metro, the Bolshoi and hordes of beautiful women in pointy shoes. On the minus side just about everything else.

The Old Rex

2009-04-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

This is not a story about a beloved but ageing GoldenLabrador nor about a raffish clubbable chap going to seed, this is a story about the Rex Cinema in a prosperous town halfway between London and the South Coast.

Charlie Hepple sheltered from the rain under the only section of the cinema’s canopy that remained intact and watched the neatly dressed woman with a red umbrella approach.
“Carol Timperley from Biggin-Newbold.” She proffered the hand not holding the umbrella. “You must be Mr Hepple. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“No. Just a couple of minutes” said Charlie.
“Shall we go in?” Ms Timperley burrowed in her handbag and produced a bunch of keys and after peering at the dog eared labels selected the largest and thrust it into the lock of the foyer doors. The Rex had been built in the 1930s and for a long time had been an outpost of the Gaumont chain, third in the cinematic pecking order behind the Odeons and ABCs. At some point in the 1970s the Rex had descended from showing exotically titled Horror double-bills to soft porn and finally closed as a cinema only to reopen briefly as a Punk Rock venue. At about this time the Rex was bought by a local businessman who tried more porn (insufficient dirty old men), Indian movies (the local restaurateurs and their families preferred to go up to London for their Bollywood dreams) and Bingo (the Rex’s Jackpots were no match for the Top Rank Suite’s at the bottom of the town). It was this businessman, now in his 80s, who was selling the Rex, freehold and all.
Charlie Hepple and Carol Timperley stood side by side in the gloom of the foyer.
“I haven’t been in here myself before” said Miss Timperley. “Mr Baildon at the office said there was a light switch on the right. Ah! There it is.” She flicked the switch and a fluorescent tube sputtered into life. The foyer was small, the ticket window boarded up and the sweet stall ceiled had collapsed, the walls were painted a nasty blue. There was a framed photo of a chubby bespectacled man in a dinner jacket that was captioned “Ron Pickles – Our Manager at Your Service”.
Ms Timperley gazed around at the dismal scene. “It’s been closed a very long time you know” she said rather failing in her estate agent’s duty to accentuate the positive.
“Yes” said Charlie “shall we go inside?” On the left of the foyer was a staircase that led to the circle and to the right three steps that led up to the stalls. He led the way to the right and Ms Timperley , who had brought a torch out of her handbag, followed. The double doors at the top of the steps opened into utter darkness and the light from the torch seemed to peter out after a few feet. Ms Timperley turned to her right and shone the torch along the back wall of the stalls until she located the switch that she was looking for. A single bulb dangling from the front of the circle gave out baleful yellow light. They heard rustling from around the room.and Ms Timperley stepped a little closer to Charlie. “I’m OK with mice” she said “but I’m not very good with rats. I can smell something. Do you think there are rats?” she asked.
“Probably” said Charlie cheerfully. But Charlie Hepple wasn’t smelling rats he was smelling profit and Charlie had come out of the womb smelling profit. At school he never paid much attention in class but on the playground he was the king of the free market and profitably wheeled and dealed his way through dozens of schoolboy crazes. He wangled a place on a business course at his local Poly (now the University of North Surrey) and found his niche as Student Union Entertainment Secretary. This meant that he got to book the bands, he got to meet the bands, he got to load the bands’ vans and he got to sleep with the girls who failed to sleep with the band. His wife Sandy had failed to get off with the bass player of a band called Sputum Test and their relationship had started in a moment of post-gig triste in the Union building car park. Twenty years on they were still together, Sandy is Finance Director of Charlie’s business. After college Charlie became the booker for a circuit of pub venues in the south-east and when a distant relative left him a lump of money he bought a bankrupt restaurant just outside Guildford which he converted (despite strenuous protests from local residents) into his first Rock venue. The Rex, should he go ahead and buy it, would be his fifth venue. The other four were all doing well with a mixture of cheap eats, expensive drinks and good music.

Charlie walked down to the front of the auditorium. By modern Multiplex standards it was big, 500 seats in the stalls with another couple of hundred in the circle. The walls had once been red but were now pockmarked with crumbling patches of crumbling plaster, there was some nasty 1950s fretwork around the proscenium framing some once gold drapes that in turn framed the screen which had a three foot gash near its bottom edge. The seats had been partially covered with dust sheets, Charlie peeled back the nearest to reveal moth eaten red plush.
Ms Timperley followed him down to the front. “Mr Baildon said that there was a mains switchboard or something backstage. I could go and try and switch some more lights on if you like”. She looked as enthusiastic about this expedition as she would if presented with a free holiday in Somalia.
“Great” said Charlie. Ms Timperley pluckily headed for a small door to the right of the screen and vanished through it.
Left to himself Charlie’s thoughts returned to profits. The Rex was certainly big enough, the auditorium could be levelled, he could put a bar at the back of the stalls and another up in the circle. As always where to put the kitchen was a problem. Perhaps Ms Timperley would reveal something, but at that moment the light went out leaving Charlie in complete darkness.
“Shit!” he said, she had the only torch, he could only wait in the dark for her return. He heard a faint clattering noise and beam of light from the projection room window flicked on. Ms Timperley had obviously found the switch room. Scratchy images of countdown numbers appeared on the screen accompanied by a hissing crackling soundtrack, a barely legible title came up I’m Here. Then the film seemed to break, the rattling projector momentarily sounded louder, the screen showed pure white for a couple of seconds before everything went dark and silent once more. The single bulb hanging from the circle came back on and Carol Timperley emerged through the little door at some speed looking somewhat less elegant than when they had first met under the canopy.
“You found the switchroom then” said Charlie
“No I didn’t. Sorry it’s all locked up back there. What a bugger! There must be more keys somewhere”.
“But this light went out and the projector came on”
“Really?” said Ms Timperley, “well not from anything I did. To tell the truth I didn’t look too hard for the switchroom, there are a lot of scuttling things back there. “She looked into the gloom above the circle, “I don’t think that there are any projectors up there. Are you sure?”
“Yes” said Charlie, but as he said it he felt less confident. “Perhaps we could look upstairs”
“Certainly” They both went back through the foyer and up the stairs. The circle was in worse condition than the stalls, most of the seats were broken and the wreckage piled up against the rear wall.
“How do we get up to the projection box?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know” said Ms Timperley. There appeared to be no access from the circle until Charlie pushed open the fire doors at the far end of the upper foyer and found a fire escape that led up onto the roof and to the projection box. The door was firmly locked.
“Sorry” said Biggin-Newbold’s finest. “I’ll have a rummage around for the other keys when I get back to the office.”
Charlie took pity on her. “I tell you what, leave me the Foyer key and the torch. I’ll have a look around for a while and I can drop them off at your office later.”

After Ms Timperley had left he spent a few more moments in the circle and then went slowly back down the stairs inspecting two foul smelling toilets on the way. Back in the stalls he took out his digital camera and took a dozen shots of the auditorium before going backstage where Ms Timperley had feared to tread. With only the fading beam of the torch to guide him he stumbled on to the tiny stage behind the screen, which housed the remains of a bingo-caller’s rostrum and a few chairs. On the side of the stage was a staircase leading below where he discovered the locked boiler and switch rooms. There was an exit door down there which Charlie presumed opened onto the small car park at the back.

A few minutes later he was standing on the other side of the street studying the Rex’s battered façade. One half of his brain was thinking that there were possibilities here. The location was perfect, the top end of the town had been going steadily upmarket over the past few years, the surrounding streets buzzed with life in the evenings. He could probably buy the Rex for a song and he didn’t expect any licensing problems from the local authority. The other half of his brain reran those few frames of scratchy film that he had seen or thought he had seen. The projection room had been securely locked, he and Ms Timperley would have met anyone coming down the stairs. It made no sense and Charlie Hepple didn’t go in for magic. He walked own the hill to Biggins-Newbold, returned the torch and keys, and told them he would come back the following week with his surveyor and builder.

After supper that evening he downloaded the photos that he had taken on to his laptop and showed them to Sandy. She clicked through them casually but then asked “Who’s that bloke?”
“What bloke?” said Charlie
“Him. In the doorway” she said pointing to the screen. Sure enough, standing in the doorway that led from the auditorium to the foyer was a man rather formally dressed in a dark suit with a raincoat over his arm. Charlie zoomed in as far as he could before the image became impossibly pixilated. The man appeared to be in his thirties with short hair, he looked unfashionably dapper, he had an almost black and white movie look about him.
“He must have turned the projector on” said Charlie.
“What do you mean?” asked Sandy. Charlie explained his ‘hallucination’.
“It’s still a bit weird isn’t it? Why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t know” said Charlie uneasily “he must be some sort of caretaker I suppose”.
Charlie shut the computer down and went to watch football on television.

A week later Charlie was in the Biggins-Newbold office, Carol Timperley cheerfully brandished a bunch of keys that she had produced from desk drawer. “Here you go Mr Hepple. I’ve found the right bunch this time with the boiler room, switch room and everything”. Charlie took the keys and paused at her desk. “You didn’t see a man in the Rex last week did you?” he asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Well when I got back and downloaded the photos that I took, in one of them there was a man standing in the auditorium doorway”
Ms Timperley frowned. “Really? Do you know what. I don’t think I locked the street door when we went in. He probably just walked in off the street. Just a curious passer-by.”
Charlie mentally kicked himself for not thinking of the obvious solution and set off for the Rex to meet his surveyor Keith Wallace and his builder Harry Dunphy.
“Welcome to the Rex gents” said Charlie as he ushered them into the foyer “soon to be Rock Dreams V “
“Good site Charlie” said Keith. He took out a laser measurer and started to map out the dimensions of the foyer. Charlie led Harry into the auditorium where he turned on the baleful yellow light.
“The boiler room and the switch room are through there Harry” said Charlie gesturing to the door to the side of the proscenium “do you want to check them out?” The builder nodded, took the keys and disappeared backstage. Immediately the single bulb clicked off and immediately a projector beam stabbed through the darkness.
“Oh shit!” said Charlie but this “Oh shit!” was not said just out of fear but also from expectation. Somehow Charlie had known that this would happen and indeed, by sending Harry off, leaving him on his own, had engineered it. This was the “Oh shit!” that you might say as you strap yourself into a white-knuckle ride. Just like the week before the scratchy image of the countdown numbers appeared on the screen and then the title ‘I’m Here’, but this time Charlie had a powerful torch with him. He swept the room with it focussing particularly on the auditorium door but there was no sign of the man with the raincoat. He looked back to the screen, he could hear a crackling hissing soundtrack. Had there been sound the week before? He couldn’t remember. The title faded into a snowstorm of scratches before the figure of a woman appeared. She was walking along a street towards the camera, she was smiling, a pretty woman with tight blonde curls, wearing a jacket over a full skirt. Charlie had no claims to be a student of the history of fashion but even he could tell that this was definitely pre-miniskirt. 1950s perhaps. He shouted out “Keith! Keith could you come in here please. Harry!” There was no reply, no sound except the relentless hiss and crackle as the woman neared the camera, her face nearly filling the screen. Charlie studied the smiling eyes, while the woman was pretty she was no film star and the quality of the film was that of a home movie. Why was he being shown this? He shone the torch up at the projection room windows but as he did so the film cut out and the single bulb hanging from the circle came back on. He strode out to the foyer where Keith was poking about in the box office.
“Didn’t you here me calling?” said Charlie.
“No” said the surveyor. “You OK Charlie?” He could see that his client was agitated.
“Yeah. Yeah I’m fine. Let’s check out the roof”. Keith sighed, stopped what he was doing and followed Charlie up the stairs, through the circle foyer and out onto the fire escape, Harry followed a few moments later.
“Let’s check in here” said Charlie as he unlocked the projection room. Keith and Harry exchanged glances, of all the aspects of the Rex the projection room was easily the least relevant to the job in hand.
“Shit!” said Charlie as he stepped inside. The room was empty apart from some rickety Dexion shelving in one corner.
“What were you expecting Charlie?” asked Keith
“Er nothing… I suppose” muttered Charlie. The curved steel runners embedded in the concrete floor on which the original projectors would have been rolled back for maintenance were the only trace of the room’s former use. There was a thick steel plate door at one end of the room. Charlie tried all the keys on the bunch but none fitted.
“That would have been the film store originally” said Keith “when this place was built film stock was still incredibly flammable and they had to keep it in fireproof rooms”.
Charlie shrugged, went out and leaned on the rail of the fire escape gazing distractedly across the rooftops of the town, gazing as it happens at the rooftop of Biggins-Newbold where Carol Timperley was keeping her fingers and her legs crossed in the hope that Charlie Hepple would make an offer for the Rex. It would be a feather in her cap to shift a property that had been on the books for so long.

At lunchtime the three men met in the pub across the road and compared notes. The builder and surveyor were relieved to see that their client had recovered his composure and was ready to do business. All the news was good news, the fabric of the Rex was sound and, for a building that had been unoccupied for most of the three previous decades, was in surprisingly good nick. Even the boilers which probably should be replaced eventually were good for another couple of years.
Charlie was decisive. “Ok guys I want to go for this. Let’s do some preliminary costings and let’s meet in Keith’s office next Monday morning. I want to make an offer next week. OK?”
As they left the pub Charlie said “Bollocks! I’ve left my torch in the Rex. I’ll have to go back for it. I’ll see you on Monday” As Keith and Harry wandered off to the NCP Charlie went back into the cinema and sat in the stalls. “Come on then. Show me the rest” he said out loud. There was silence. He sat there for nearly half an hour. At one point he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. A mouse trotted boldly along the floor by the skirting board and glanced casually at him as it vanished under a dust sheet. Charlie got up to leave and as he did so there was a familiar clattering noise and the single bulb went out. He sat down in the dark watched the screen intently. There were no clues in the in the initial numbers or title and the street background to the approaching woman sequence was so blurred that it could have been anywhere. The film cut to another close-up of the same woman. This time the camera was pulling away revealing more of the woman as it did so. She was smiling but not in the same open cheerful way as in the street, there was something sly in this smile. The scene was an interior, she cast a clear shadow on the white brick wall behind her, her bare arms were raised above her head. The camera drew back further, her wrists were manacled together and chained to a ring in the wall, she was wearing black bra and pants. “Bloody hell” thought Charlie “I’m watching a 1950s home-made S&M porn movie which is being projected by magic. What the fuck is going on here”. By now the screen was filled with a full length image of the woman chained to the end wall of a narrow room, from behind the camera a man emerged. He was stripped to the waist, showing a fair amount of paunch and he wore a black hood. He looked absurd, a Pythonesque member of the Surbiton Sadomasochists Society but then Charlie saw the whip in his hand and he said “No!” to the empty auditorium. The man started to lash the woman and through the incessant crackle of the soundtrack Charlie could hear her gasps of pain which soon turned into screams. In his career on the fringes of Rock & Roll Charlie had been to some wild parties and seen some weird stuff, but this was different, there was nothing mechanical about the scene on the screen, there was an emotional intensity about it which made it hard to watch. He wanted it to end. The whipping did eventually stop and the camera moved in to a close-up of the woman’s face, her eyes were full of tears but her expression was exultant. The film snapped off and the light came back on. Charlie sat stunned for a moment or two then something made him look back over his shoulder to the doors to the foyer. The man with the raincoat over his arm stood there watching him.
“What did that mean?” asked Charlie gesturing at the screen. “Who are they?” The man didn’t reply but stared steadily back at Charlie, who got up and started to move up the aisle towards him. The man stepped back into the foyer and the doors swung to behind him. By the time Charlie burst through those doors the man had vanished. Charlie had locked the street door and so knew that the man was no passer-by and that the only way he could have gone was up. He raced up the stairs to the circle and then through the circle foyer and onto the fire escape. There was no trace of the man but Charlie had not really expected any, he realised that something very strange was going on. He stood on the roof in the early summer sun for a few minutes before unlocking the projection room door. He went in and stared down at the auditorium through the projection windows for a long time, then he relocked the room and went downstairs and out onto the street. Across the road a traffic warden was enjoying writing tickets in the early summer sun, Charlie went over and asked for directions to the Public Library.

Mrs Pardew had been a librarian for many years, in fact she had officially retired some time ago but she still came in to man the Information desk. When she saw the flashily dressed young man stride into the library that afternoon she recognised a fish out of water. Charlie for his part was no scholar, no reader, he could just about manage a John Grisham on holiday. In his entire life up to that point he had probably not been inside a library of any description for more than a total of 7 ½ minutes.
“Can I help you young man?” asked Mrs Pardew who on closer inspection had decided that flashily dressed or not this was a rather good looking young man.
“Yes. Maybe. Do you keep copies of old newspapers here?” asked Charlie
“We do. On micro-fiche”
“Microfish?”
“Yes. I’ll show you. We only keep the local paper here, for the nationals you’ll have to go to London. What year?”
“Erm 1950s I think” said Charlie haltingly. Suddenly he had no idea what to look for.
“We probably need to be more specific” said Mrs Pardew kindly “what exactly are you trying to find out?”
“I’m interested in the Rex. The old cinema. Do you know it?”
“The old Rex. Yes I certainly do” she chuckled,” my second husband and I did some of our courting in the back row there. But it’s been closed for some time now hasn’t it?”
Charlie had his elderly helper down as an archetypal spinster and was surprised to discover that there had been at least two Mr Pardews.
“I’m looking for an event in the 1950s, something out of the ordinary. I’m not sure what.”
“Well apart from the Etherington murder there’s nothing that comes to mind”.
“The Etherington murder?”
“Yes. Mary Etherington was a usherette at the Rex. Her husband killed her but it didn’t have anything to do with the Rex as far as I can remember.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure but I think I can find out”. She went away and returned a few moments later thumbing through the appendices of Capital Punishment in the UK by J M Sturges. “This is a list of all the executions that took place in the UK. There were only a dozen or so per year in the 50s so we should be able to find it”
“The husband was executed?”
“Oh yes” said Mrs Pardew “They hung him. They did in those days. Ah here we are. Stanley Etherington executed at Wandsworth Prison on the 26th June 1954. it’s notable as one of the few cases where a murderer was executed when the victim’s body has not been found.”
“Is there a picture of him in there?” asked Charlie
“No” said Mrs Pardew “it’s not that sort of book, but I’ll get you the Evening Argus micro-fiche scrolls for 1953 and 54. there will be plenty of pictures, this was a big story locally.” She fetched the scrolls and showed Charlie how to use the viewing machine. Left alone he went immediately to the 25th June 1954 and below a banner headline reading Etherington to Hang Tomorrow – Final Appeal Fails was a picture of the man that Charlie had seen only an hour before. It is one thing to have the feeling that something strange is going on but it is altogether different when you are confronted with incontrovertible proof that you have been talking to a man that was hung for murder more than 50 years before. He felt a chill dread steal over him. What was he supposed to do now? Numbly he scrolled back through reports of the appeals and the original trial. Apparently the alarm was raised by Mary Etherington’s mother when her daughter had not turned up for a planned weekend visit. When she confronted Stanley Etherington he claimed that Mary had run off with another man and that he didn’t know where she was and didn’t care. For a while the affair was seen only as a ‘missing persons’ case by the local police but eventually at Mary’s mother’s insistence they started to dig deeper. A veritable army of family members, neighbours and local publicans presented themselves to the police to testify that Stanley Etherington, a local printer, was an evil tempered bastard and that they had heard him threaten his wife on many occasions. Eventually the police discovered traces of Mary’s blood in the boot of Etherington’s car (which he claimed were the result of an accident with a broken beer bottle on a picnic outing) and more traces of the same blood on a spade in his shed. The evidence was all circumstantial but overwhelming, the prosecution case being that he had done away with Mary in a fit of jealous rage by means unknown and then buried her body somewhere up on the Downs. Charlie scrolled further back past the reports of Etherington’s arrest back to the time of the alleged crime. There was no mention of the Rex but finally he noticed a tiny item in the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the June 2nd 1953 edition. ‘Local Projectionist Dies’. The report continued ‘Mr Percy Howland, projectionist at the Rex Cinema tragically died yesterday. Mr Howland was crossing the High St when he suffered a heart attack. First Aid was administered at the scene by a passing midwife but he was found to be dead on arrival at St James Hospital. Mr Howland was a respected and popular local character, he lived alone and leaves no family’.

Charlie sat quietly for a few minutes then pulled out his mobile phone and punched in Harry Dunphy’s number. Mrs Pardew scuttled across and said “Give me that. You can’t use it in here!”
Charlie ignored her.
“Harry I’m sorry and I know it’s late in the day but could you come back to the Rex and bring Sean or one of your other boys with a gas axe?”
“What?” said Harry
“You know. Oxy-acetylene cutter”.
“Yes I know what it is but what’s it for?” demanded Harry
“Humour me “. said Charlie and cut the connection. He turned to the outraged Mrs Pardew, “Sorry and thanks but I’ve got to go now”

45 minutes later Harry Dunphy pulled up outside the Rex in a Toyota pick-up with his son Sean.
“We need to get the gear up to the projection room” said Charlie.
Harry started to swear but Charlie raised a hand and Sean started to lug his equipment up the stairs. A few moments later Keith Wallace arrived having been alerted by Harry that something was up.

“Cut round the lock” said Charlie.
The three men and Sean were looking at the plate steel door of the store in the projection room.
“At the very least it’s criminal damage Charlie” said Keith.
“Someone’s going to notice eventually” said Harry
“Just do it “ said Charlie “it’s important”.
“Don’t I need a Hot Works Permit?” asked Sean nervously.
Harry caught Charlie’s grim expression. “Not today son. Just do it”.
As the room filled with smoke and the smell of scorched metal, the three men went out onto the roof while Sean worked. Nothing was said.

After a few minutes there was a clang as the lock fell out of the door, Charlie was about to shove Sean aside and open the door when Harry grabbed him.
“Wait Charlie! It’s red hot, let it cool”
Charlie looked round the room, picked up a piece of wood and levered the door open.
As the smoke cleared a different smell, a smell of dead things caught at the back of Charlie’s throat and he gagged. Mary Etherington sat on a mattress staring sightlessly past him. Mary’s neck was still ringed by a steel collar attached to a bolt in the wall, her underwear hung loosely over her mummified flesh, a few scraps of blonde hair clung to her withered skull. The room was the room that Charlie had been shown on the screen the only difference being that Mary had written, in her own blood, the words ‘I love you’ on the wall beside her.
Mary had run off with another man, run to Percy Howland’s S&M dungeon on the roof of the Rex. Percy must have left her chained there while he popped out for some cigarettes and dropped dead in the High Street with the only key to the store in his trouser pocket. Poor Mary must have died of thirst. Stanley Etherington had been hung for being an evil tempered bastard and nothing more.
“Christ! What a balls up” said Charlie. He pushed the door shut with his foot and took out his mobile to call the police.

How to Put on a Musical – Part 12 – The Design

2009-04-11T03:43:00.000-07:00

No one can deny that set design is important. Would Les Mis have been the success it is without its barricades and its cast endlessly tramping around the revolve? Would Phantom still be running without its chandelier, drapes and subterranean candles? Would We Will Rock You prosper without the theatrical coup that is the Guitar Reveal? I firmly believe that the original Martin Guerre would have been a hit if only they had had a set more interesting than those dreary radio controlled trucks that trundled aimlessly around the stage (mind you at the preview I saw the finale consisted of the ensemble miming hoeing in semi darkness so perhaps the direction missed the mark as well). On the other hand a great set can’t buy you success as audiences who dozed through Lord of the Rings will testify.

Producers hate designers almost as much as they hate production managers. The reason is simple, as a basic principle producers hate anything or anyone that costs them money and designers are responsible for spending a substantial portion of the budget. Producers often get the designer foisted on them by the director and feel they have no control and definitely no understanding of these maverick creatures, who can be difficult, spendthrift, drunk, unavailable, irritatingly camp, abroad, vegetarian, Trotskyite, foreign, sleeping with the director, unfathomably intellectual, computer illiterate, patronising, impractical, late, and over budget (delete as applicable). Producers find themselves sitting with their head in their hands listening to a designer earnestly explaining why the floor texture has to be made from individually carved tiles as opposed to a simple paint job (a floor incidentally that no one in the stalls can see) or why the finale costumes have to be made from a handmade silk dyed in Milan rather than being bought in Southall. We production managers (and I must be careful not to grind too many axes here) are often caught in the middle, the producer will gush enthusiastically at the design presentation but the moment the designer is out of earshot will turn to me and say “Tell him the floor’s got to be a paint job and tell him he can shove the handmade silk up his arse”.

Project Model – Maintenance!

It’s late in the afternoon at the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance when director Kevin McHarrowing completes his introductory remarks and turns to designer Ulla Hoos to present her model of the set design to the assembled company. Ulla is an intelligent, determined woman who has never lacked ‘front’ but today’s presentation is bigger than anything she has done before and she is aware that there are some aspects of her model that may not find favour with other members of the creative team, who due to the lateness of the design have not had a chance of a preview.
So it is with some trepidation that unveils her model and starts to speak. “When Kevin and I first started to talk about this musical we both agreed that it was vital to set it in its correct 20th century context. You will notice I say 20th century not 21st and we feel that both the Skoda and Barry’s maintenance predicaments are very much products of their time and place in late 1990s Kettering.. We have drawn on cultural references from all over Europe and I’m sure that some of you will notice the influence of the Viennese Secessionist Movement in general and of the Absurdist poet-gardener Janos Handspring in particular. The original chief of design at Skoda was…” She drones on and has cleverly lost everyone in the room in no more than 30 seconds, she can ramble on without fear of interruption. As she pulls the white sheet off the model box there are polite ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ particularly from the acting company though production manager Stewart Cowless does hear someone mutter “Why is it all grey?” and as he dose so he sees the other members of the creative team making a beeline for him.

The model that Ulla has revealed consists of a cobbled stage with a criss-cross of tramlines surrounded by solid walls, which extend out into the auditorium, painted with a grim industrial wasteland and shadowy figures that might just suggest haggard children. There is a solid ‘faux’ concrete ceiling and the front edge of the stage appears to be decorated with broken glass. Ulla demonstrates how the various trucks and lifts work and how the ‘Pet Shop’ ingeniously transforms into Morag the Mechanic’s narrow boat..

Bobby Brasso is the first to arrive at Stewart’s side and whispers urgently in his ear “What’s with the fucking cobbles? Nobody said a damn thing about cobbles. We can’t fucking dance on cobbles.” Stewart makes reassuring noises as the choreographer rants on but then the normally mild mannered lighting designer Jeff Osram arrives at his other ear.

“Solid walls! Solid ceiling! Pros booms covered! How the fuck am I supposed to light this thing with no overheads or side light. This is supposed to be a bloody musical”.

Stewart manages to extricate himself only to be confronted by Ian Geek, Maintenance! s sound designer. “She’s covered the pros wall and the advance bar position! Where am I supposed to hang the PA?”, company manager Anthony Fawning is next “won’t the broken glass be a health and safety issue?” and finally costume designer Buzz Phelps sidles up to him “Stewie darling what about my shoes? Ooh those awful cobbles. Promise me you’ll get rid of the cobbles”.

Ulla is getting close to the end of her presentation “ …and finally the cobbles which are absolutely central to our design concept in that they make the link between Bohemia and Kettering abundantly clear.”
“I don’t think they ever had cobbles in Kettering” says Jeff Osram quietly at the back
“How do you know?” says Cowless “Have you ever been to Kettering?”
“Well no but…”
“They certainly never had trams in Kettering” says Geek.
“Why is the show set in Kettering? Does anyone know?” asks Osram
“Oh for Christ’s sake you two! Maybe it’s to do with ley lines or maybe Dermot O’Dainty lost his virginity there.”
“Really? “
“Gordon Bennett!” Cowless stalks off to listen to Buzz Phelps’s presentation of her costume drawings.
Buzz is the ultimate pro and has never delivered a design late in her life, there are those who might unkindly suggest that this is because all her designs are essentially the same and that she can knock them out in her sleep. She smoothly displays beautiful sketches complete with fabric samples neatly pinned to them. If she can’t sell these original designs to members of the cast she will sell them at ‘Showbizz Showbizz’ in the Fulham Rd after the show opens. The ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from the cast are unforced and heartfelt and the producers beam at this welcome antidote to Ulla’s dour and unsettling set presentation. In a rare moment of competence they have insisted that Ulla should not do both set and costumes on the grounds of workload and the only discontented faces in the room at this moment are Ulla’s and McHarrowing’s who both feel that the costumes will only trivialise the vital story that they have to tell, a story of ordinary working people facing the challenge of life in post-industrial Kettering. They are unwarrantedly colourful, they are sexy in a way that undermines the themes of sexual exploitation that they want to bring forward and both resent the complete lack of agonising that has gone into their design. On a personal level Ulla feels a twinge of envy as she studies the design for Morag the Mechanic’s overalls which are a triumph of subtle eroticism over utilitarianism. She has never had the flair for this kind of thing and her costumes often appear no more user friendly than her sets. Company Manager Anthony Fawning brings Maintenance!s first day of rehearsal to a close announcing as he does that there will be a production meeting after rehearsal the following day. As the company, the management, and the creative team drift away, the stage management hastily stack chairs and clear the hall in preparation for the evening’s Tai-Kwon-Do session. Dermot O’Dainty pauses on the steps of the Parish Hall for a moment and smiles to himself as he remembers the far off day when he lost his virginity in Kettering.

How to Put on a Musical – Part 11 – Rehearsals 2

2009-03-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

Rehearsals. What do they do all day? Well the actors don’t normally learn their lines in the rehearsal room, they do that offsite while in the bath or walking the dog. In musical rehearsals there are normally 2 rooms one for the director and one for the choreographer. The latter lays out the big routines and the former does the motivation and the ‘don’t bump into the furniture bit’. It sounds simple doesn’t it, six weeks later a fully formed musical steps into the spotlight. However as always with Musical Theatre there is plenty to go wrong.

From my personal point of view, a production manager’s point of view, the first day of rehearsal can be both dreary beyond belief and fraught with peril. On the one hand one has to sit through endless introductory speeches and meet dozens of people whose names melt away quicker than snow in the desert and on the other one is likely to be confronted by aggrieved staff members who have discovered that their contracts are not exactly what they expected and one can also be ambushed by the creative team who may have added something to the design concept not previously discussed or costed. So we production managers have to either be on our mettle or find some reasonable excuse for not being there at all.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Kevin McHarrowing slowly rises to his feet, he gazes round at the assembled company, he almost seems to be counting them to check that all were present, that no one would miss his First Day of Rehearsal Director’s Speech.
“Welcome. All of us in this room have something in common, we have all shared at least one experience and that is the feeling of pure bewilderment when we heard that these two guys” here he indicated the show’s producers sitting either side of him, “were going to put on a musical based on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit.. It’s crazy, it’s off the wall, it’s almost surreal” Glaswegian McHarrowing lovingly rolls the ‘r’s in surreal, “which incidentally is a word we will be coming back to later. But now let’s think about the 1989 Skoda Favorit. It was the last crap car that Skoda made, after this Favorit model Volkswagen bought the company and starting making ‘good’ German cars. All well and good but did we not lose something at that moment. Leave your bourgeois ‘What Car Magazine’ prejudices at the door. The Skoda was the people’s car, the Czech people’s car built at a plant deep in the Bohemian forests. Ah Bohemian there’s another word that we will be coming back to in these rehearsals. These are the forests where the Brothers Grimm roamed in search of their fairy tales, where Hitler went on camping trips from school, they are soaked in romance, blood and history and in order to put the Skoda in its true 20th century context we will be doing the opening ‘Production Line’ routine entirely in Czech. At this point I would like to introduce Katarina Masaryk who is our Czech language coach.” All turn to look at the pretty blonde girl at the back of the room.
“And then we have the ‘’Book’”, McHarrowing raises a copy of the Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit above his head. It is a mauve A4 size hardback with an artist’s impression of a Skoda Favorit and a photo of something that might be a gear box on the cover. It has been out of print for sometime and is hard to come by. “All down the ages from the Gospels themselves, through A Pilgrim’s Progress , Das Kapital, down to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets there have been books that show us the way, that show us our place in the universe. This book in its humble way does the same. It guides our hero Barry on his perilous journey from adolescence to manhood on what Sigmund Freud described as ‘Das autobahn von der leben’. We can take this book as a paradigm for……”

At the mention of the word paradigm, the meaning of which is known to only four people in the room, the company’s attention starts to wander. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust starts to feel distinctly uneasy, partly because he doesn’t know what paradigm means and partly because he thought that he was putting on a simple ‘Boy Buys Car to Get Girl – Boy gets Girl – Car Breaks Down – Boy Loses Girl – Boy Fixes Car – Boy gets girl Back’ sort of a musical and from what McHarrowing is saying, (he is now deep into the relationship between contemporary socio-political mores and motor maintenance), he is not going to get it.

Stage manager Rowena Pettifer takes a moment to open the box next to her chair which should contain scripts of Maintenance! but to her dismay, due to a cock-up at the printers, contains copies of a 50 page pamphlet produced by the London Borough of Newham entitled Performing Arts for the Elderly – A Users Guide. An ASM is despatched to the printers in a cab.

Choreographer Bobby Brasso sighs inwardly as he listens to McHarrowing. He has sat through many such speeches but this one has the makings of an all time low. Why was it that Brits took the direction thing so seriously, on Broadway there was a lot more pzazz than paradigm. Brasso, who despite his age (58) has been voted ‘Boy with the Pertest Bottom on Broadway’ for the last three years running, comforts himself with the thought that only he can turn things round, only he, using a lifetime’s experience on ‘the Great White Way’ can turn this dreary tuneless English suburban piece of hackwork into a dazzling choreographic extravaganza with routines remembered long after the Skoda Favorit has been forgotten.

Designer Ulla Hoos, clad in her normal khaki dungarees and beret, listens to McHarrowing attentively. She is probably the only person in the room who shares his world view and as his loyal and long term collaborator she desperately hopes that Maintenance! could be their passport out of a cultural ghetto of their own making onto a sunlit upland plain of mainstream work that might pay the rent and buy some new dungarees.

Composer Gunther Eisenkopf sits entranced. All this is new to him, in all his years with the East German heavy metal band Kursk Salient his music (and most critics didn’t describe it as such) was universally reviled by all but a devoted and drug crazed band of fans. His English isn’t good enough to quite follow what McHarrowing is saying but phrases like ‘musically a definitive statement of intent’ and ‘beats the shit out of Rodgers & Hammerstein’ sit well with him.

Book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty does know what paradigm means but also realises that McHarrowing is talking absolute bollocks. However he is savvy enough to know that to have any credibility a director has to talk absolute bollocks some or all of the time. He lets his imagination roam to a world where he and Katarina Masaryk make sweet sweet music together.

Production Manager Stewart Cowless sits in his chair trying not to writhe with anxiety. His mobile phone vibrates silently but relentlessly in his pocket as desperate scenery contractors try to contact him to nail down orders for a set that Cowless knows is already over budget and highly impractical. Eventually he can stand it no longer and making apologetic gestures to McHarrowing in particular and to the room in general he heads for the corridor to get on with business.

‘……and that’s enough quotes from dead Germans for one day’ says McHarrowing mercifully concluding his opening remarks. ‘Now I’d like to introduce our design team Ulla Hoos who has come up with a sensational set and Buzz Phelps our costume designer……’

To be continued

Here is a brief reminder of who's who on Maintenance!

Producers: Alvin Toxteth & Samuel J Bloodlust
General Manager: Kevin Whimper
Producers PA: Charlotte Gore Wincanton

Music: Gunther Eisenkopf
Book: Dermot O’Dainty
Choreographer: Bobby Brasso
Director Kevin: McHarrowing
Designer: Ulla Hoos
Costume Designer: Buzz Phelps
Lighting Designer: Geoff Osram
Sound Designer: Ian Geek

Production Manager: Stewart Cowless
Company Manager: Anthony Fawning
Stage Manager: Rowena Pettifer
Deputy stage Manager: Sazz Muldoon
ASM Book Cover: Maggie Truelove
ASM: Justin Philpotts
Wardrobe Mistress: Angie Overlocker
Wig Mistress: Natalie Tongs

And here is a reminder of the location of past episodes in the archive

No 1 Feb 1 2008
No 2 Mar 3 2008
No 3 Mar 31 2008
No 4 Apr 21 2008
No 5 Apr 31 2008
No 6 May 25 2008
No 7 June 1 2008
No 8 June 29 2008
No 9 Oct 9 2008
No 10 Nov 17 2008

How to Put on a Musical – Part 10 - Rehearsals

2008-11-17T01:01:00.000-08:00

The first thing you need for rehearsals is a rehearsal room and for a musical the ideal rehearsal space should fill the following criteria:
Be within 400 yards of Leicester Square tube station
Comprise: 1 large space for the main production calls
1 smaller space for dance calls etc
1 room with mirror & piano for costume fittings and music calls
1 room with phone/internet as a company office
3. Be available 9.00am – 10.00pm
4. Have a sprung timber floor
5. Be well heated so that dancers don’t injure themselves
6. Be in a nice middle-class area with access to cappuccinos, ciabatta sandwiches, noodle bar, and a pub for the stage management to brood in at the end of the day.
How many rehearsal rooms fit these criteria? None. Most rehearsal rooms are in socially challenged areas where the local kids can strip the wheels off a BMW and leave it on bricks in less than 3 minutes. Most are inconveniently placed in quadrants of London not served by the underground and most are draughty and dank, too small to mark up the set plan on the floor, have limited access and provide a wide variety of cultural and sporting activities for the local community in the evenings requiring a complete clear up of the space at the end of rehearsals every day. The latter drawback is often viewed as a plus by some wily producers who realise that a full programme of table tennis, Brownies and Tae-Kwon-Do in the evenings will prevent the director from rehearsing after 6.00pm and thus save thousands of pounds of stage management overtime.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Due to the short notice of the deal with the Piccadilly Theatre the Maintenance! management have had to book rehearsal space at the last minute and have ended up with the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance in East Ham. This is a sub-standard space by any reckoning. It is not big enough, it is badly lit and heated, it is a nightmare to access from central London and worst of all, the local priest is a musical theatre enthusiast who likes to pop in and discuss how things are going with the director.

The first day of rehearsals gets off to an inauspicious start when stage manager Rowena Pettifer and her team turn up at 9.30 to set up for the morning’s ‘Meet ‘n Greet’ session only to find the hall securely locked. After half an hours detective work they find caretaker Sid Stickler a few doors away. Sid, who, unlike his parish priest, believes that all musicals, with the possible exception of Bernadette, are the work of the devil and that the unhappy group of stage management on his doorstep are only one step removed from being Satanists, is not helpful. He declares that there was only a pencil booking, that nothing has been confirmed and that no advance payment has been made, furthermore he has no intention of opening the hall until he has a call from Doris Quill the parish secretary telling him that a cheque has been received. With that he departs for his allotment. Rowena hastily calls Kevin Whimper, who is already half way to East Ham and now has to turn round and return to the office to pick up a cheque for Mrs Quill. It is a miserable, drizzling February morning in East London and slowly the group of disgruntled actors, management and creative team huddled together by the locked doors of the hall grows larger. The Church of our Lady of Cheerful Countenance is marooned in an ocean of derelict industrial sites interspersed with the occasional decaying tower block or vandalised playground, there is not a Starbucks for miles and the only catering nearby is a petrol station where the pork pies have sell-by dates from the previous year. Director Kevin McHarrowing eventually cancels the morning call and tells everyone to return at 2.00pm. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust curses everyone within earshot including the Lady of Cheerful Countenance and sets off in his chauffeur driven BMW with his leading man and leading lady to buy doughnuts for everybody.

By lunchtime the cheque has finally reached Mrs Quill and the stage management retrieve Mr Stickler from his allotment (he is discovered in his shed reading a periodical entitled ‘Zips ‘n Buckles’). He grudgingly opens the hall and even more grudgingly turns on the heating. At 2.00 the company are finally assembled, seated in a semicircle in front of a table where the producers, Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth sit with director McHarrowing. Bloodlust gets up to speak.
“Welcome everyone. I am Samuel J Bloodlust and I and my partner Alvin, are the producers of Maintenance! Today is a proud day both for us and for the creative team on this project, today is not the beginning but is a vital staging post on a journey that began one night two years ago in the departure lounge of Berlin’s Tegel Airport. On that night these two guys”, he pauses to indicate composer Gunther Eisenkopf and book writer Dermot O’Dainty, “met at the bar and in an evening of creative inspiration wrote the basis of the show that we are about to put on”.
Eisenkopf and O’Dainty nod sagely knowing full well that they were both so drunk on that fateful evening that they had no idea that they had written a musical until the following morning when the airport police released them and with the personal possessions returned to them was a bundle of paper napkins on which they had laid down the basis of Maintenance!
“Dermot brought the project to us soon afterwards and I’m happy to say that we are now fully funded”, at this point his partner Alvin Toxteth looks distinctly shifty, “and as you all know we are scheduled to start previewing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 7 weeks time. We are very excited to have secured the Piccadilly with its superb location and long history of successful runs”. This last laughable assertion sets some of the company sniggering. “However I’m not going to take up any more time, I’m going to pass you over to Anthony your company manager who has some business stuff to get out of the way and then to Kevin who will lead us on the journey that is Maintenance!"
Anthony Fawning gets up. “OK everyone. Welcome and many apologies for this morning’s problems. Now if you haven’t been seen by our wardrobe department and been measured then you need to have done so before you leave the building. You also need to have handed me your starter forms before you leave. And finally I know some of you had trouble finding your way here today and I know that two of you ended up at Stanstead Airport, so can I recommend that you go to Stratford East by overland then get the 429 bus heading towards Barking and get off at Asda and get a 365 heading towards Woolwich which will drop you off at the top of the road. Any questions? No? OK it’s over to you Kevin”.
Director Kevin McHarrowing gets slowly to his feet and surveys the clay from which he hopes to mould a hit musical. He has never staged a West End musical before but he has absolute not to say psychotic confidence in his own abilities and has no doubt that given sufficient intellectual rigour he can transform the sentimental pap that is the current book into a socialist parable for our times, a parable that will bring hope and meaning to ordinary working people and not just the contemptible pleasure seekers who come to the theatre solely to have ‘a good night out’.
“Good afternoon everyone. Before I tell you something about Maintenance! I think we should all introduce ourselves and tell the room what we do. So Gavin would you like to start”.
“Gavin Shoestrap playing Barry”.
“Erica Fortinbras playing Sharon”
One by one the cast and staff announce their names and the part that they are playing or the job that they will be doing.
“Miranda Williams ensemble”
“Harry Hopkins playing Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”
“Diane Wilkins ensemble & dance captain”
“Peter De Vriess ensemble.”
“David Casper, Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”.
“Ah” says McHarrowing staring at David Casper who he fails to recognise. Alvin Toxteth quickly intercedes, realising that somewhere in his office something has gone horribly wrong and that somehow they have contracted two actors to play the same parts.
“David you and I need to get together on this”
“Do you mean I’m not playing the Foreman, Pet Shop owner and Registrar?” says the aggrieved actor.
“No, no, no. We just need to have a chat”. says a flustered Toxteth and gestures for the next actor to introduce themself. Finally all are done and the company look around with mixed feelings. The Company manager and stage management study the sea of faces trying to work out who will be the company nutter, the rest look around and compile a mental list of whom they would most like to sleep with and David Casper leaves the room to ring his agent.
McHarrowing starts his introductory address.

To be continued

How to Put on a Musical part 9 – The Staff

2008-10-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

Stage Management

“Ted please tell why I need stage manager?” was the question asked on an almost daily basis by the Moscow promoter of We Will Rock You, Sergei Baranov. I would look across the table, take a deep breath and have another go at persuading him that the show needed someone to organise scene changes, to structure the rehearsals, to set props, to produce a prompt copy and above all write it all down so that we could do approximately the same show on the second night that we did on the first. After my explanation he would shake his head dismissively and leave the room. Eventually he was persuaded to employ a show caller so that at least we would have some coordination between departments. The lucky candidate was Julia, a recent graduate from an Arts/Business course, whose backstage experience was nil but she was very keen, had a few words of English and was very beautiful. In desperation we flew Tracy, stage manager from WWRY London to give emergency guidance, which she did with great charm and skill. Julia did come up trumps a couple of days into the tech rehearsals in responding to some criticism from our rather upmarket director (his day job was directing Chekhov) with a volley of abuse that translated roughly as “Don’t, you fucking well tell me what to do you fat bastard. I’m the bloody stage manager here I’ll have you know!”
As we started the Tech Rehearsal I realised that there was no one backstage who had a clue what was supposed to be happening and so, with a heavy heart, I put on a headset and got up on stage to get things going. After 10 minutes of shouting (Russians love shouting) I got someone to turn off the working lights and the stage went totally dark, completely and utterly dark, and at that point I realised that I hadn’t checked that ‘Act 1 Beginners’ were standing by onstage. I thought about getting the working lights back on but couldn’t face any more shouting so I decided to check by feel alone. Luckily the actors playing ‘Pop’ (long wig) and the 2 policemen (helmets) were easy to identify by touch but as I tugged at Pop’s wig I had one of those moments of clarity that we all have now and then and I thought “What the fuck am I doing here”. At the same time I decided that not having any stage management can put you in a very dark place both literally and metaphorically.

So you definitely need stage management even if they can be a bit anal and a bit irritating at times. For a musical you need at least four and probably more, you need a stage manager in charge, a Deputy who calls the show from the prompt corner and will probably have developed a large bottom from sitting on a prompt stool night after night. You also need assistants to run either side of the stage, props etc.

It is sometimes said that whether you were born in the stairwell of a Peckham tower block or in a four-poster in a stately home when you work in the theatre you immediately become an honorary member of the middle class. This is never truer than with stage management, they are the stuff of which the Empire was built. In days gone by your average stage manager would not have been unlocking a rehearsal room at 9.00am but would have been administering an area of Africa bigger than Surrey. Stage Management are willing to give their lives to ensure the show goes on and the nation needs more people like them.

Wardrobe
The wardrobe mistress is a key figure in backstage life, apart from organising her department and washing lots of smelly clothes she is a clearing house for all company gossip, using the dressers to garner information with all the skill of a KGB spymaster. Should the Company Manager need to know anything about a member of the company, drug habits, drinking habits, sexual tastes, he goes straight to the wardrobe mistress. Traditionally they are large, motherly, drink gin and sleep with the master carpenter. If you happen to employ a wardrobe master they tend to be slim, excessively tidy, drink gin and sleep with the master carpenter.

Wigs
If you have children who show no obvious talent for anything in particular then you might consider pushing them in the direction of wigs. As a production manager I find that putting together a wig department is extremely tiresome. There aren’t enough wig staff about, competent or otherwise, so Mrs Worthington put your daughter into wigs and she will never be out of work again.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Production Manager Stewart Cowless, Company Manager Anthony Fawning and Producer’s Assistant Kevin Whimper interviewed more than twenty would-be stage management for Maintenance and finally settled on Rowena Pettifer as stage manager, a well organised determined girl who is probably not tough enough for the job in hand but is the best of a bad bunch. As DSM they have hired the ballsy Sazz (Sarah) Muldoon an Irish girl with a backside the size of Gloucestershire, as ASM book cover Maggie Truelove a West End veteran and finally as ASM Justin Philpotts a charming young man from Brighton who was hired by Fawning and Whimper while Cowless was out of the room making a phone call. He enchanted them by declaring that his mother, herself an actress of sorts, had had a dream in which she saw him emerging from the stage door of the Palladium to be greeted by his adoring fans. He declared that he had come to fulfil his destiny. Thus begins the career of Justin Philpotts who by the year 2050 will be known by all and sundry as a ‘National Treasure’ and his Sunday night chat show Philpot’s Pals will attract vast audiences. Cowless was enraged to find that someone so utterly inexperienced had been employed without his say-so and accused Fawning and Whimper of going for the prettiest bum.

Angie Overlocker has been employed as wardrobe mistress and she lives up to the stereotype handsomely. She is large, jolly, motherly, but can be tigerish when negotiating quick change space in the wings or defending her position in the queue at the bar.

The Wig Mistress will be Natalie Tongs, who is delightful in every way other than that she has only ever been an assistant and has never run a department before. The main thing going for her is that she has spent nine months on The Rolf Harris Story at the Queens, dressing wigs for Maintenance!’s future leading lady Erica Fortinbras who is known to be difficult.

Casting Update

After the debacle in Andover (see blog of 25th May 2008) plans for the TV audition show Baby You Can Drive My Car are revised down to a more controlled, not to say ‘fixed’, enterprise in order to give the producers the cast they want. Unfortunately it turns out that Hampshire Gold TV, who were to produce the series, were sponsored by the city of Reykyavik (strap line “Where the fish come to party”) and their funds were cut overnight resulting in a total collapse. For a brief moment the producers toyed with the idea of a radio version but then went back to more traditional methods of casting. To play the leading role of Barry, Kevin McHarrowing has picked Gavin Shoestrap, a 3rd placed X Factor contestant, who has made a decent living over the past couple of years with soap opera parts and the occasional chart entry. He has promised to lose weight in rehearsal. The part of Barry’s girl friend Tracy has been given to Erica Fortinbras whose lack of anger management has landed her in court twice, once after an incident on the Jonathan Ross Show and once when she assaulted a dresser with a stiletto heeled shoe after chasing her out of the fire exit and across the roof of the Shaftesbury Theatre during rehearsals for Petra & I the Blue Peter musical. The voice of the Haynes Manual will be delivered from an offstage vocal booth by veteran soul singer Charlie ‘Duke’ Magee. The vital role of Morag the Mechanic is as yet uncast.

Mr Poulter’s Last Match – Part 2

2008-09-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

By the time Mr Poulter and Hugh Fennimore had set up the stumps the rest of the team had arrived at the wicket and Jack was placing his field. Doug Billings was going to open the bowling from the By-Pass end and Sam Fletcher would bowl the second over from the Railway end. Neither team had non-playing umpires so the job was done by members of the batting side already out or yet to bat. Scoring was done by whoever was competent and had a pencil. The scoreboard was a warped sheet of plywood, which leaned against one of the beeches, with hooks which carried metal plates on which were numbers too small to be read from the middle. The Allied Breweries (Western Division) 3rd XI openers strode purposefully to the wicket, were greeted with polite applause from the Paragons, one of them prepared to face Doug, and the umpire, a tall dark haired man with grey sideboards who none of the Paragons had seen before, said ”Play”.

Dorothy looked up from the Tom Stoppard piece she had been reading (“Me and my Window Boxes”) and adjusted her position on the rug to be able to watch more comfortably. She genuinely loved cricket, she came from a cricket mad family and had the LBW laws by heart before she read her first Enid Blyton. She had a grandmother who kept a signed photo of Don Bradman on her mantelpiece, her father was a long time member at Surrey, and she had three cricket mad older brothers, two of whom still played club cricket. She had spent a substantial part of her girlhood retrieving ‘lost balls’ from under the rhododendrons. So these Sundays watching John and the Paragons were no chore though the Paragons’ fragile batting often made the afternoons shorter than planned.
She watched her man take his place in the slips, she loved this man. She had noticed him in the office lift on the same morning that he had noticed her and she had asked around as to who and what he was. She was told he was a departmental deputy who had been in the bank longer than anyone could remember and that he was dull, punctual, stuck in a rut, older than the rest of his department by a good 10 years. Did he have wandering hands? No he didn’t. Did he chase account clerks at the Christmas party? No he didn’t. Was he gay? No he wasn’t. Was he married? Yes he was. Dorothy had been married once, in her early twenties, to a man she had originally met at a business college in Kingston. It had not gone well and her husband took to ‘working late’ so often that she knew he was having an affair. What depressed her most was not that he was having an affair but the fact that she didn’t care. She moved out of their tiny rented flat into a tinier
bedsit. Two years later a decree arrived in the post telling her that she was single once more, something that she had known all along. She had been 32 by the time she joined USBB and that fateful eye contact in the lift occurred only a few weeks after she had started there. John Poulter was definitely good looking in a grey sort of way, Dorothy often thought that he could make a good living in TV commercials as an ‘honest’ man selling insurance or pension schemes. There was something reassuring about him and when he stuck his head round her door and proposed the trip to Arundel she hadn’t hesitated for a second. Their affair was now 12 years old, for 12 years she had been ‘the other woman’ and she really didn’t mind. She had watched TV documentaries about being a ‘mistress’ with interviews with bitter women who resented every moment that their lovers spent with their wives and families but she valued her independence and when their affair had started all three of John’s children had still been at school and leaving Nancy wasn’t an option. Dorothy had been made redundant by USBB two years after she first met Mr Poulter and after a string of short term jobs in the city she had finally set herself up selling vintage knitwear on ebay. This meant that she didn’t see Mr Poulter at work but her ‘sole trader’ existence meant that she could easily be free to accompany him to dreary European banking conferences to which he was despatched by the USBB as ‘a safe pair of hands’, He developed a technique of giving his business card to, and shaking hands with, every warm blooded creature in the conference centre before discreetly leaving by a fire exit and spending the rest of the time with Dorothy who found his hands very safe indeed. One weekend in Berlin, where there was no cricket to be had, they hadn’t left their swanky hotel room once and lived off room service with Dorothy never wearing more than a slinky1920’s black silk knit cardigan that she had bought in an antique market the week before. Once when Nancy went to stay with her brother in Canada for a couple of weeks they had managed to do ‘Cricket Week’ at Scarborough and occasionally they made it to Old Trafford or Headingley.

Doug Billings was a class act, he was quick, accurate and consistent, he took wickets year in year out and this afternoon was no exception and with his fifth ball he clipped the off stump of one of the AB openers. Their No 3 was their captain who in the past had played some dogged innings against the Paragons and he straight batted Doug while the other opener accumulated runs off Sam Fletcher. All went well for the AB’s until the tenth over when Jack took Sam Fletcher off and replaced him with Maltese Joe who tempted the opener into a wild drive which he mishit tamely to mid-off. The following over Doug had the AB skipper caught at slip and in the over after that Maltese Joe took a second wicket when the AB No 4 unluckily kicked the ball onto his stumps. At 40-4 things were looking up for the Paragons when the tall stranger with grey sideburns headed for the wicket.
“Oh look! Oh I hate that” said Jack.
“What?” said Mr Poulter
“He’s wearing some poncey school tie as a belt. Don’t you hate that?”
“Oh! Yes I do” said Mr Poulter grimacing “tell Doug to hurt him”.
“I will” said Jack and walked off to give his fast bowler the necessary instruction.
The stranger arrived at the crease and took guard with casual ease. Mr Poulter at mid-on noted the expensive cream flannels, the immaculate shirt, the man only needed a silk scarf round his neck to be a 1930s House-Party toff. He played the last ball of Maltese Joe’s over past Mr Poulter’s left hand for a single and prepared to face the first ball of Doug’s next over. Doug, following his captain’s instructions to the letter, bowled a lively bouncer, which the Toff planted effortlessly over the mid-wicket boundary. He then proceeded to score off every ball of the rest of the over. It was apparent to the Paragons that this man was in a different class to normal run of Sunday afternoon cricketers, Jack mouthed the word ‘ringer’ to Mr Poulter who nodded grimly. The Paragons only strategy was to get the rest of the ABs out before the Toff scored too many, but this was easier said than done as the Toff farmed the strike mercilessly and scored 80 odd in what seemed like no time at all. Jack rotated his bowlers desperately, even offering Mr Poulter, who had never claimed to be even an occasional bowler, a chance, but the flow of runs from the Toff continued while only two wickets fell at the other end. With the score at 170-6 Mr Poulter saw Jack in discussion with Jacek and after a few moments Jack tossed Jacek the ball. The young Pole then started walking towards the boundary at the bowler’s end and for a moment Mr Poulter thought that Jack had not asked him to bowl but had sent him on some errand to the pavilion but eventually the Pole stopped, scratched a mark in the turf and started to run in off what was the longest run-up that Mr Poulter had seen since the golden age of West Indian fast bowling. His first ball, which was as quick as any that Mr Poulter had seen that season, pitched on a good length but lifted enough to hit the Toff in the chest. He staggered back, surprised, and eyed the new bowler with suspicion. Jacek’s second ball was even faster and yorked the Toff, who played far too late, his batting partner at the other end mouthed the word ‘ringer’ and the Toff nodded grimly as he marched off.
The Krakow Dynamo, as Jacek was immediately christened, mopped up the last wickets in his next two overs and the ABs were all out for 176.

At tea the Paragons put a brave face on things despite the fact that the tea itself had been provided by Hugh Fennimore, who was an evangelical vegetarian, so not only did both teams have to suffer dull sandwiches but also endure a string of homilies on the perils of animal fats and bad Kharma. Several of the team smuggled in pork pies and Scotch eggs along with other decadences like ‘char-grilled steak’ flavoured crisps and Coca-Cola, some of the ABs vanished to return with Kentucky Fried Chicken from the retail park along the by-pass.
Catering aside the Paragons knew that on their crumbling end of season wicket and with a lunar surface of an outfield 176 was an enormous total particularly when they had no one with the talent of the Toff in their team. Jack interrogated Jacek, hoping that he might have batting skills equal to his bowling prowess but the Tatra Tornado shook his head and earnestly told his captain “No. I yem crep betsman, I go eleven pliss”.

Dorothy tended to avoid the rituals of the tea interval and brought along her own picnic which Mr Poulter came to share after tasting one of Hugh’s bean curd tartlets. Jack joined them to ask “Where do you want to bat today? Last time and all that, you can open if you like”. Mr Poulter refused this offer and Jack put him down at No 6 as normal and wandered off, filling in the batting line-up in the score book as he went. He found his two openers Harry Shah and Fat Barry padding up and gave them a pep talk not found in Mike Brearley’s ‘The Art of Captaincy’.
“Look realistically we’ve got no bloody chance of winning this but remember it’s not limited overs, it’s 20 overs from 6.30 and we could just hang on for the draw so dig in and waste as much time as you can. OK”. His openers nodded obligingly but neither had any intention of ‘digging in’, they were going out to play their natural game come what may. Fat Barry had a good eye and could hit the ball extremely hard and had every intention of doing so. Harry Shah, who ran a sporting goods shop in South Norwood and had once played for the Rawalpindi Colts, was the Paragons’ best batsman and he felt that his natural game was not unlike that of Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s, and he had every intention of living his dream.
The Paragons’ innings got off to a good if hectic start with both openers blazing away as if they were in a 20/20 game that had been cut by rain to 10/10. They took 22 off the first three overs before disaster struck, Harry Shah skied a short ball off a top edge to give an easy catch to the wicket keeper, almost immediately Fat Barry holed out in the deep and the Paragons were 24-2 with Jack Lascelles and Ron Haslam newly arrived at the crease.
“Come on Ron let’s give them a run for their money. Dig in” said Jack
“OK skip” said Ron who promptly hit his first ball for a straight six but was clean bowled by the next. 30-3
Jack was joined by Mark Philpotts, who had been to a decent public school, and could be relied on to follow instructions and bat sensibly but Jack at the non-strikers end called for a suicidal single to a ball that the wicket keeper fumbled and both batsmen ended up at the striker’s end with the ball back in the bowler’s hand. Mark did the decent thing and stepped out of the crease leaving Jack, who hadn’t been to a decent public school, cursing but still in. So at 30-4 Mr Poulter came in to play his final innings. Jack stopped swearing for long enough to give him more or less the same spiel that he had given to the openers but then relented and said “Oh just enjoy it John”.
Mr Poulter did just that, he felt both relaxed and confident, he started slowly but soon began to score freely and Jack was content to play second fiddle and once the first two AB quickies were rested the bowling held no terrors. Eventually the Toff was given a bowl and Mr Poulter’s heart sank, if he was only half as good a bowler as he was a batsman they were doomed but he turned out to be a ‘nothing special’ medium pacer and the Paragons revival continued until the score reached 83-4 at around the time that 20 overs were called at 6.30. Twenty overs to get 94 thought Mr Poulter, twenty overs to survive thought Jack. They met in the middle. “We could do this” said Mr Poulter.
“Bollocks!” said Jack “How often have we got more than 150?”
“True” said Mr Poulter.
Jack saw that his friend was looking across at Dorothy and said “You don’t think that Nancy will turn up do you? It being your last game”
“No” said Mr Poulter “I didn’t mention it to her”.
“Ah. Well I might have mentioned it in passing if you know what I mean” said Jack
“What! What do you mean ‘mentioned it in passing’”? said Mr Poulter incredulous.
“Oh. I think I may have said something when she answered the phone last week”
The umpire cleared his throat extravagantly and the two returned to their respective ends, Mr Poulter to face the ABs spinner. He was so distracted by Jack’s revelation that he failed to play a shot at the first ball and was lucky to escape an LBW decision.

Dorothy, enjoying the sun in halter top and shorts, was unaware of Mr Poulter’s emotional turmoil though she did notice the LBW incident and wondered what on earth he was thinking of, but otherwise there wasn’t a cloud on the horizon. But, and in life there are always ‘buts’, even in the clear blue sky of Dorothy’s existence, there were times when she wished that he was there in the morning when she woke up, that he was there on her birthday, that they were together at Christmas. When she wished these things, she remembered the bitter ‘mistresses’ in the TV documentaries and retracted her wishes hastily. In the meantime John was looking good for a fifty and she kept her fingers crossed on his behalf.

“She won’t come. She never comes. She doesn’t know where the ground is.” But the latter sentence wasn’t true, Nancy occasionally dropped him off here. Mr Poulter mentally calculated the odds for and against his wife turning up at the game. After a minute or two’s thought he came to the reassuring conclusion that not only would Nancy almost certainly not come but even if she did she wouldn’t recognise Dorothy, it was several years since they had last met. He had these thoughts while watching Jack ‘digging in’ at the other end and as he came to his final reassuring conclusion Jack dollied up a simple catch to short leg and the Paragons were 97-5 and Mr Poulter had scored 42. Hugh Fennimore came in and Mr Poulter went to meet him.
“Mark’s a bit upset about that run-out” said Hugh “he’s sulking in his car”.
“He’ll get over it” said Mr Poulter” it’s not the first time that Jack’s run him out. Now listen we need to dig in”.
“Absolutely” agreed Hugh and the words ‘dig in’ were music to his ears because while his batting was as dull as his bean curd tartlets, ‘digging in’ was what Hugh did best. Mr Poulter thought “I’m going to get 50” and that was a very pleasant thought. He had scored fifties for the Paragons in the past but not often and not recently and he got to 50 with two ‘4’s in the next over. He and Hugh attempted a high-five but failed to make contact.

At this point the ABs realised that the Paragons were not going to roll over and die so brought their opening bowlers back on, but Mr Poulter was both seeing and striking the ball well. Hugh Fennimore was not as alert to a quick single as he might have been and Mr Poulter found it hard to farm the strike but with 6 overs to play they had progressed to 147-5. “We should win this” thought Mr Poulter. Hugh Fennimore came over and said “Look we could win this. I’m going to stop ‘digging in’.”
“Oh right. If you think so” said Mr Poulter dubiously. And then the wheels came off. Hugh attempted an uncharacteristic sweep and was caught at square leg. Sam Fletcher came in and was given out LBW off his first ball by Fat Barry, who was umpiring, though as Sam said later “I was so far down the pitch I could smell the umpire’s halitosis”. Maltese Joe managed a few defensive prods before being caught behind and Doug Billings took a wild swing at a ball that both pitched on and removed his middle stump. From a match winning 147-5 the Paragons were at a terminal 151-9 with Mr Poulter on 79. Four overs left to get 26 runs with just the ‘Polish Pietersen’ to come. Mr Poulter intercepted Jacek on his way to the wicket and was about to give him some pointers but was momentarily distracted by the virulence of the young man’s acne. In that hiatus Jacek said determinedly “I stay, you hit. We win game. OK”
“OK” said Mr Poulter and went back to face the first ball of the next over. As he prepared to take guard the AB wicket keeper said “Is that blonde woman over there waving at you?”
Mr Poulter looked round and there was Nancy in beige slacks and turquoise top waving gaily. He waved back half-heartedly and was relieved to see Jack moving swiftly to intercept her. Fortunately Dorothy was further along the boundary than the rest of the team so there was a good chance that Jack could keep them apart. Dorothy didn’t seem to have noticed the presence of Nancy.
He managed 6 off that over but failed to get a single to get Jacek to the non-strikers end for the next. Nancy appeared to be in relaxed conversation with Jack and Mr Poulter stood back to see what the young Pole could do with the bat. An elaborate forward defensive was what he could do, and he did it again with his second ball. The AB bowler pitched the next one shorter to discourage him but the ball clipped the very top corner of the bat and flew over the keeper’s head for 4. Jacek kept out the next three balls and with the score at 161-9 Mr Poulter took guard with 16 required to win off two overs and it was at this moment that he realised that mathematically it was possible that he could get a century. He had never hit a century. Like anyone who has ever picked up a cricket bat he had fantasies, not just fantasies that involve women in interesting underwear, but fantasies that involve the crowd rising as you hold your bat aloft at Lords having scored a chanceless hundred against the Australians. Nancy in the meantime was progressing slowly along the boundary talking to other members of the team despite Jack’s efforts to distract her with the score book.
The first ball of the penultimate over was wide of his off stump and he failed to make contact, the second he played to deep mid-on and they were able to run 2 to a misfield, the third was dead straight and he could only defend, the fourth he smashed through midwicket for 4, the fifth came off an edge and they scrambled a single to third man. Jacek’s forward defensive proved equal to the last ball of the over. 9 required off six balls to win the match, 8 required for his century and his marriage quite possibly in ruins because Nancy, arms folded, was now talking to Dorothy. Jack was hopping anxiously from foot to foot trying to get Nancy to watch the game.
Mr Poulter couldn’t score off the first ball but managed 2 off a mishit slog to square leg. At this point raised voices could be heard from the boundary. As the bowler went back to his mark the AB wicket keeper came round from behind the stumps.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight” he said “The blonde lady over there is your wife?”
“Yes” said Mr Poulter
“..and the dark haired lady is not your wife?”
“Yes that’s right”
“Hmm. I reckon you might have a problem there” said the wicket keeper.
The next ball was a yorker which Mr Poulter managed to dig out but failed to score off. 7 required off 3 balls. Mr Poulter tried to ignore the increasingly animated scene on the boundary, he must concentrate, he needed a boundary but the next ball was short, wide and should have been hammered for 4 but he missed it completely. 7 required off 2 balls.
The AB skipper despatched his fielders, including the wicket keeper to the boundary. Mr Poulter looked around and decided that his best chance of a 4 was back past the bowler. His plan would have worked perfectly if he had not hit the ball straight into the bowler’s hands who luckily was so surprised that he dropped the catch. 7 required off one ball, it was impossible.
“Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!” he said
“Hard luck mate” said the wicket keeper
“Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!” said Mr Poulter. All he could do was block the last ball to get the draw. The AB skipper brought the field up into a tight ring around the bat and went over to talk to his bowler. On the boundary Nancy was pointing an accusing finger at Dorothy, Jack tried step between the two women but Nancy slapped him hard across the face.
“Come on chaps let’s focus” shouted the AB captain. The bowler ran in and bowled a wide down the leg side, there was nothing marginal about this wide, it was very wide and in the circumstances it was unforgivable but in the bowler’s defence it must be said that he may have been distracted by the word ‘Slut!’ which carried clearly from the fracas on the boundary just as he reached his delivery stride. Another ball in which to hit a 6 to win the match and get his century. Mr Poulter took a deep breath and paused to survey the state of his marriage. Nancy was storming off towards the car park, Dorothy made to follow but was prevented by Jack. She slapped him hard across the face.
The AB captain caught the wild look in Mr Poulter’s eye and thought “This man is not going to play for a draw” and the fielders retreated to the boundary once more. Mr Poulter took guard and watched the bowler run in. If he was bowling he would be going for a Yorker and in that case he, Mr Poulter, should be going down the pitch, and yes, he guessed right, he middled the ball which flew high in the direction of long leg. The Toff loped elegantly round the boundary to take the catch above his head but as he did so he overbalanced carrying the ball with him over the line for 6.
“Lucky bugger!” said the wicket keeper.
The Paragons had won, he had scored his first century and he was seriously considering making a run for it over the Portsmouth-Waterloo mainline but Jacek in a fit of Slavonic emotion gave him a hug and led him in triumph towards his celebrating team mates.
“She said I could bloody well have you” shouted Dorothy at him as he and Jacek came in to the faltering applause of the other Paragons. She looked flushed and very angry.
“Well?” she demanded
“Well what?”
“Can I bloody well have you?”
“Yes you can”
“Will you marry me?” she demanded
“Yes I will”
“Well that’s alright then.” She paused. “Come on we should go to the pub. You have to buy lots of drinks for everybody.”
“Why did you hit Jack?” he asked
“He was being a pratt”
“Fair enough” he said and they went to the pub.

Mr Poulter’s Last Match – Part 1

2008-09-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

Mr Poulter’s cricket bag was made of blue canvas and had leather handles. Written on it in flaking white paint were the words “St Ursula’s Convent”, he had bought it at a car boot sale some years before. In it were his bat, his batting gloves, his box, his boots (which were the traditional leather type with proper studs, not the glorified trainers that the younger members of the team wore), one stump, two bails, his sweater, an old pair of socks, one of those key thingummies used for screwing in studs, and last week’s Sunday Times Review and Sports sections (unread). He removed the Sunday supplements and replaced them with the ones that had come with the paper that he had bought from the newsagents that morning, he put in a clean shirt, flannels and pair of socks. As he did so his wife, on her way from the kitchen to the living room asked “Will you be late?”
He sighed as he zipped up the bag, Nancy asked this question every Sunday before he went out to play cricket.
“No I don’t think so” he replied, “I’ll only have one drink”.
“Oh OK but don’t worry about me, I went to the library yesterday and I have plenty of books to keep me company”.
Nancy didn’t like cricket. Early in their marriage he had taken her to the Saturday of a Lords Test against the Australians and she had been restless all day. She complained about her seat, the sun in her eyes, the rowdy drunks around her, the smelly toilets and the fact that she couldn’t sit in the pavilion.
Mr Poulter picked up his cricket bag, went out of the front door and put it in the boot of the Peugeot, he came back in and said “I’m off now”.
Nancy gave him a quick peck on the cheek “Have a good time. Love you!”
“Love you too” he replied automatically.
For a few moments he sat in the car and didn’t put the key in the ignition. He suddenly realised that he hadn’t mentioned to Nancy that not only was this was the last match of the season but it was also his last match for the New Malden Paragons. He was 52 and after running a couple of sharp singles needed a lie down, in the field he realised that the skipper expended a great deal of ingenuity in not exposing him to long chases to the boundary but most of all his knees hurt, his knees hurt most of the time. As a founder member of the team he knew that he could probably play until he needed a wheelchair and that no one would say a word, but he felt the time had come to hang up his boots. Why hadn’t he told Nancy? Was he worried that she would be irritatingly solicitous, that she would miss her quiet summer Sunday, that she would encourage him to take up bowls, or most likely, that she wouldn’t care.

He started the engine and drove off, the prospect of the day’s game against Allied Breweries (Western Division) 3rd XI banishing any such anxieties. This was a regular fixture for the Paragons and was usually a closely fought encounter. The link between the AB(WD) 3rds and the brewing giant had become increasingly tenuous over the years and now the team mostly consisted of blokes who drank in a pub called the Roebuck in Putney. The Paragons had been founded by Mr Poulter and his best friend Jack Lascelles nearly twenty years before at a time when they both worked for USBB (the United Singapore & Bankok Bank which Mr Poulter thought of as Usurers Shits & Bastards Bank in his darker moments). Jack had moved on and had done pretty well, Mr Poulter was still with the USBB which had changed hands several times and was currently called Winnipeg & North Klondike Securities. He was No 2 in the Foreign Offsets & Denials Department and he was a good No 2, serving at least a dozen bosses over the years with neutral efficiency. He had adroitly seen off attempts by several uppity 26 year olds to oust him, he was living proof that age and guile will always defeat youthful talent.

The West Nutley Recreation Ground was only 15 minutes drive from Mr Poulter’s home and as the car bumped along the pot-holed lane to the car park he gazed across the four pitches that surrounded the pavilion. It was a perfect day for cricket and despite being flanked on two sides by semi derelict industrial sites, and by the main Waterloo-Portsmouth mainline and the Kingston By-pass on the others Nutley Rec was a beautiful place. Mr Poulter was well aware that to any cricketer a cricket ground was a beautiful place but even so the arrangement of the pitches separated by rows of tall beeches and the rampart of brambles on the railway embankment gave the Rec a charming rural feel. By contrast the pavilion was now so vandalised and so graffitied that it could have been lifted bodily and dumped into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern without an eyebrow being raised. In the car park he saw the familiar Fiat Uno of his mistress Dorothy who had the back open and was lifting out rugs & a picnic. He parked and walked over and she kissed him warmly on the lips.
“It’s a great day for the match John” she said
“Absolutely” he said and they kissed again and as they did so a bright yellow Audi Quattro parked alongside them.
“Steady you two, you’ll frighten the horses”. This was Jack Lascelles, who got out, gave Dorothy a hug, punched Mr Poulter on the shoulder, picked up his bag and set off for the Pavilion. Mr Poulter and Dorothy dumped the picnic under one of the beeches and started to stroll arm in arm around the boundary.

Dorothy had been working at USBB when they had first met twelve years before, not in his department but in the neighbouring Domestic Breakovers & Futilities. He first noticed her one morning in the lift and, having discovered where her office was, contrived most days to walk down her corridor and gaze through the glass partition into her office. He discovered that she had an interest in cricket when he came across her studying the Daily Mail cricket page in the canteen, they started to chat occasionally at the coffee machine or on the homeward walk to the Tube station. Mr Poulter had never been unfaithful to Nancy, he had never been tempted by any of the endless stream of underclad banking vamps who passed through his department but now he was disturbed by Dorothy. She loomed large in his thoughts, whatever he did he found himself wondering what Dorothy would think about it, what Dorothy would do if she was there. He was in his professional life a decisive man, he was never afraid to make a decision and stand by its consequences whether right or wrong, but in his personal life he had always taken the line of least resistance. Nancy had been a pretty and vivacious 24 year old when they got married and there had rarely been a cross word between them, except of course for that unsatisfactory trip to Lords when Mr Poulter had got rather testy on the train journey home. Their married life together had gone as smoothly as a Mediterranean cruise, temperate in climate and mood with the occasional dramatic landfall. But now he realised he was on the brink of danger, possibly disaster, but he would not pull back and so one day he tapped on the glass door of Dorothy’s office, poked his head in and said without any preamble “Er look I’m going to Arundel this weekend. For the cricket. Would you like to come?”
There was a moment of silence. Neither of them had any illusions about what this invitation meant or its consequences. Dorothy knew he was married indeed she had met Nancy at the bank’s Christmas do.
She smiled “Yes I’d like that very much”
“Oh right! Good! We should start fairly early. Can I pick you up at 9.00?”
“Make it 8.30, the traffic might be bad”. She was still smiling.
“Right. Excellent, 8.30 it is”. He turned to go back to his office but she followed him out into the corridor.
“Wait!” He turned and she put a scrap of paper into his hand with her address written on it.

Mr Poulter was very nervous the following Saturday morning, he had put Nancy on to a train to Manchester the previous evening, she was going to her mother’s for the weekend, and he had been pacing around the house ever since. He had set off far too early to pick up Dorothy and had been driving in circles round the Tooting area for three quarters of an hour before he pulled up outside the address she had given him. He was in an agony of doubt and guilt, it was only good manners that stopped him driving away, but when she appeared at the front door in a summer dress with her dark hair falling over her bare shoulders he was sure it was going to be alright. He took the small red suitcase and hamper that she was carrying and put them in the boot. They set off for Arundel on a glorious morning and it’s hard to say whether they fell in love before they crossed the M25, but they had certainly fallen in love by the time that the Duke of Norfolk’s XI declared at tea at 280-6 and put the Indians in. Mr Poulter had booked a room at an ivy clad hotel a few miles from the town, in fact he had booked two rooms just in case things hadn’t gone well, something that Dorothy guessed and as she sat up in bed the next morning, her breasts silhouetted against the early morning sunshine, she said “I bet you bloody well booked two rooms. You did, didn’t you?” Mr Poulter confessed and Dorothy hooted with laughter.

Hugh Fennimore the Paragons wicket keeper appeared in his whites wearing a blue rubber glove on one hand and carrying a plastic bag in the other. He started his habitual and obsessive search for dog turds on the square and outfield. When teased by his team mates, who incidentally were delighted that someone cleared up any hazards to diving stops in the deep, he would launch into an earnest lecture on the wide variety of parasites, bacteria and other toxins contained in dog shit. Mr Poulter realised that he was late and that he should go and change, he and Dorothy curtailed their walk and she went to read the papers under a tree. In the pavilion he changed in his customary place under the words ‘Blue Moon Girls’ written in broad silver marker above the changing room coat hooks. He had once asked the girls in his office whether the ‘The Blue Moon Girls’ were a pop group but they had denied all knowledge. He looked around to see who was playing that week, Jack, next to him was captain, he could see the two openers Fat Barry and Harry Shah. Maltese Joe, their lone spinner, Doug Billings, who normally opened the bowling with Sam Fletcher, were down by the washbasins. Ron Haslam and Mark Philpotts arrived together arguing about whether Samuel Beckett was dead or not. At the far end of the room sat a tall skinny young man with a mop of blonde hair and terrible acne.
“Who’s the kid at the end?” Mr Poulter asked his skipper.
“ Ah”, said Jack “he’s a new signing. His name is Yacek and he’s from Krakow”.
“Has he played before?”
“Oh yes I think so” said Jack airily.
“Where did you find him?” asked Mr Poulter.
“He came with the bloke who services my pool. He noticed my bat in the hall and said he liked cricket”.
“Does he bat or bowl?”
“Er not sure.” said Jack “Oh come on John you know how hard it is to get eleven to turn out at this time of the season, anyway he looks pretty fit”.
“What’s his surname?”
“Unpronounceable” said Jack. “Come on we should get out there”.
Mr Poulter sat while the rest of the team filed out. He had never thought about it before but he was fond of this room that smelled of socks and drains, he liked the clatter and scrape of studs, he liked the racket from the Surbiton Tamils in the room next door (whose games against the Surbiton Lankans were evidence that cricket can be genocide by other means) and the Paragons’ other neighbours the Weejans, who were all Jamaican, and normally played with a ghetto blaster at square leg.
He picked up his bag and joined the rest of the team on the boundary . Jack returned from the middle to announce that he had lost the toss and that the AB(WD) 3rds were going to bat.
“OK let’s get out there and throw some catches around” said Jack keenly. As always he was ignored by his team who mooched about under the beeches gossiping and discussing all the other and better ways that there are of spending a Sunday afternoon. Yacek stood by himself staring out across the field. Mr Poulter and Hugh Fennimore picked up stumps and bails and set off toward the wicket.

To be Continued

With Bob Dylan in the Passenger Seat

2008-08-25T02:44:00.000-07:00

Firstly apologies for recent lack of product. A combination of holidays and increasing involvement on ENO's forthcoming Cav & Pag have cut down available time.

Bob Dylan’s first album, imaginatively titled Bob Dylan, came out in 1962. I was 13 then and for 9 months of the year was confined in a boarding school on the edge of the North Downs, a school where, in today’s social climate, many of the staff would be serving long sentences for a variety of offences ranging from child abuse, assault, criminal neglect, racism and not teaching anything relevant to modern life.
“Please sir, what’s a National Insurance Number”?
“Quiet Irwin Minor! See me later!”While I was struggling with Caesar’s Gallic Wars and algebra (the former has turned out to be much more useful than the latter in adult life) Robert Zimmerman was pottering along to the Supreme Court Building in New York to change his name to Robert Dylan. I don’t think that Bob’s first album registered much in the UK but I certainly remember his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan of 1963. There was a House record player which we were allowed to listen to for a few minutes a day and fierce battles were fought for musical control but in that particular period an aggressive group of Lower Sixth formers usually held sway and we were treated to some surprisingly progressive stuff, Bo Diddley, Alexis Korner etc, this at a time when the Hit Parade was full of trash like Frank Ifield’s I Remember You and Pat Boone’s Speedy Gonzalez. So Dylan’s nasal delivery and acoustic guitar accompanied songs with incomprehensible lyrics about murdered black people were a revelation. The album sleeve was fascinating too, it showed a skinny young Dylan, hunched against the cold, walking along the middle of a street with a strange alien creature hanging on his left arm. This alien being was what was known as a ‘girl’ and it took me a long time to get the hang of them, in fact there are those who would argue that I still haven’t got the hang of them. At the time I nursed a passion for Dusty Springfield who wasn’t a girl but was a goddess, but a goddess who soon came crashing down out of the heavens. I expect all of you reading this can remember where you were and what you were doing when you were told that Dusty was gay, I certainly do, a boy called Harry Flack dropped this emotional hand grenade in my lap one evening during First Prep. I was consoled by the arrival of the Rolling Stones and Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin (1964), the cover photo of which makes Dylan appear about 45 and to have had an accident with a sand-blasting machine. By 1965 I was in the Lower Biology Sixth busy dissecting things and Dylan went electric. What a hoo-hah! Remember the bloke at the back of the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, who shouted “Judas” as Dylan started his electric set. Dylan reputedly turned to his backing group a few moments later and said irritably “Play it fucking loud”. What were those bearded, chunky sweatered, shit-for-brains folk fans on about? All closet Morris dancers I would say. His lyrics got better around this time, try singing along to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll as you blast down the autobahn of life, then try Subterranean Homesick Blues. No comparison. But what did all those lyrics mean? There were those who dedicated their lives to analysing them. One such was one of my best friends, who for now I will call Judas, Judas was an absolute terrier with those lyrics, endlessly obsessing about what Bob was trying to tell us. At about the time that Blonde on Blonde came out Judas put our relationship under some strain when he grassed me up when I returned drunk from the Natural History Society annual outing. After I had thanked the Headmaster for giving me 8 of the best (yes we really did have to say “Thank you sir” after a beating) he gravely told me he would be writing to my parents and my future Cambridge tutor to tell them of my wickedness. The tutor thought it was hilarious, my parents less so.

And so to what these days is called a Gap Year and in these enlightened times young people go and work on birth control schemes in Eritrea, then it was a time to mess about, travel a bit, try some drugs, and if at all possible lose one’s virginity. Dylan meanwhile amused himself by having a motorcycle accident and then disappearing from view leaving the Judas’s of this world high and dry. How did my ‘Messing about Year’ go? Not bad, work in a psychiatric hospital, the Orient Express to Istanbul, trapped in the middle of the 1967 Six Day War, nearly killed by a stone throwing mob, arrested, deported, hitched to Sweden, and yes, I did lose my virginity. Phew. Dylan resurfaced with John Wesley Harding at about the time that I went off to Cambridge to drink sherry before dinner with some of the finest minds in Europe. The fact that the words of All Along the Watchtower came from the book of Isaiah were a worry for us all but it didn’t stop Jimi Hendrix making one of the best covers of all time. Unfortunately all I did do at Cambridge was drink sherry and a great deal more and it didn’t take the University authorities long to decide that I wasn’t making full use of the educational facilities that they had provided and I was politely asked to leave. I won’t dwell on the trauma that this caused, suffice it to say things at home were tense for a while.

Then I got lucky, incredibly lucky. Through a patient of my father’s, who was a an Assistant Film Director, I got a job on a movie, not a documentary, not an army training film, a real Hollywood movie with stars like George Peppard and Judy Geeson. Bob went ‘Country’ at this time and produced Nashville Skyline which included the single Lay Lady Lay. If ever a song was responsible for a lot of fucked up relationships this is the one. It’s potent ‘brass bed’ imagery and "..stay with your man awhile” lyrics must have led a lot of young men and women around then into romantic arrangements that they later regretted and while I won’t blame Bob Dylan for my first marriage I reckon he must have got a hefty back-hander from ‘The Brass Bed Manufacturers of America’. I learnt a lot from my first marriage, particularly from my wife’s mother who taught me two valuable things, how to make a Lobster Thermidor and that it does no harm to be silly sometimes. My family were not silly at all, buying a toothbrush was never a spur of the moment thing, it required a careful study of Which Magazine whereas my in-laws were silly on a grand and often catastrophic scale.

On the movie I met an actor called George Baker who offered me a job as an ASM in his touring company based at Bury St Edmunds and that’s how I started in the theatre where it has to be said we spend a fair amount of time being silly. I lost interest in Dylan, Blood on the Tracks was the last album of his that I bought. Over the next decades I may have bought the odd Dylan compilation album to keep myself awake on long drives but these were soon lost in hotel rooms and rental car sound systems and then one day last year when I was bored stiff in Toronto (a natural state of being in Toronto) I came across Modern Times which I had read somewhere was a late return to form by Dylan. I bought it and I like it, I play it in the car and the kids like it too.

The Bourne Misunderstanding

2008-07-31T23:17:00.000-07:00

The kids and I are great fans of the Bourne movies and the most recent. ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ is worth seeing if only for the sensational chase sequence on Waterloo Station.

Scene: The beating heart of Basingstoke, the Railway Station, Traveller’s Fare snack bar.
“The train now arriving at Platform 2 is the 09.35 for Exeter St David’s, calling at….”
Katya Grodzsinski leant on the cappuccino machine and studied the man on the stool by the window. He had been there for more than an hour, nursing the same cup of tea. He barely moved, gazing north towards the Reading branch, occasionally he spoke into his phone.
“Overton, Whitley, Andover, ,….”
Katya moved over to the magazine rack to get closer to him. She made a pretence of tidying the ‘Now’s, ‘Hello’s, ‘OK’s, and ‘Big Breasts Monthly‘s’. Two days worth of stubble did nothing to mar his good looks.
“Vould you like anuzzer cup of tea?” she said. He turned slowly to look at her, he said nothing and his eyes told her less. The Exeter train pulled in, his eyes flicked back to the window, a momentary flash of interest.
…passengers for Micheldever, Old Todger and Long Trousers should travel in the first five coaches of this 10 coach train due to short platforms at those stations”.

Scene: CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA. Covert Operations Room, an acre of flickering screens and earnest young Americans fighting for freedom the best way they know how.
“Chief! We gotta hit on ‘Fishpaste’. A cell phone in Europe”. The atmosphere suddenly crackled, screens jumped into life, coffee cups were pushed to one side as the room swung from an average CIA day at the office propping up murderous dictatorships to battle stations.
“Ok! Where is it? Location, location, location!”
“Basingstoke, England sir. The railroad station”.
Whose phone is it? C’mon people we’re losing time”.
“The phone is registered to a J. Bourne of 42 Elm Tree Rd, Solihull, Birmingham, England”.
The Chief exploded. “Jesus H Christ! Bourne’s alive! Bourne’s alive and he knows about the ‘Fishpaste’ programme”.
Younger operatives around the room glanced at one another in alarm, older hands mentally buckled up their seat belts and prepared for a bumpy ride.
“Listen up people, we are going to condition ‘Tangerine’, Jason Bourne is the most potent threat to National Security that we could possibly face. This is a code 5 Priority. Where is our nearest asset”?
“Er. Twenty minutes away Chief”
“OK. Activate the asset. Give him a no recall, green for go, shoot to kill directive”.

Scene: Wisteria Cottage, the Clampings, Hook, Hampshire, UK.
A middle aged couple are enjoying a late breakfast. The woman scanned the Daily Mail (headline “All Foreigners are Satanists Claim”) while eating her second piece of toast. Opposite her the man pondered the Telegraph crossword. The mobile phone on the table suddenly chirruped, the man read the text on the screen, put the crossword down and said “I have to go out for a while”
His wife looked at him for a long moment. “Oh, I see” she said.
He got up, went out to the hall and opened the cupboard under the stairs. He pushed aside the golf clubs, Christmas decorations and wellingtons, he took out a leather holdall labelled Hartley Witney Bowls Club. He headed for the front door, the elderly Labrador dozing in a basket in the corner lurched to his feet in hope of an unexpected walk but quickly sensed that what his master had to do he had to do alone and slumped back down again.

Scene: Basingstoke Station.
“Southwest Trains regret to announce that due to engineering works in the Basingstoke area this weekend and for the following 52 weekends…
The man got up from his stool and came to the counter. His eyes held Katya’s for a moment before he said, “Can I have a Scotch Egg please?”
Katya couldn’t place his accent. Was he English?
“Sure” she said, “anuzzer tea?”
“OK”
He looked weary for a moment as if the acceptance of a cup of tea was a surrender to a human weakness he would rather not admit.
….there will be no train services to or from this station. Alternative bus services will be provided but frankly they are not much use and you would do better to stay at home, there is plenty to do in Basingstoke”

Scene: CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA.
The Chief paced the room angrily. “Where’s the fucking CCTV from Basingstoke? We can’t afford to lose this guy”.
“Online now Chief!”
The senior men clustered round a screen to watch a fuzzy grey image of Basingstoke Station, Platform 3. The camera panned slowly along the platform.
“Where is he? Where is he?” fumed the Chief.
Finally the camera panned across the window of the Traveller’s Fare snack bar. A shadowy figure sat on a stool by the magazine rack.
“OK hold it there. Increase the resolution.”
The shadowy figure came slowly into focus, the image fractured by reflections on the window.
“That’s him! That’s Bourne!” said the Chief
“You sure Chief”? said his deputy, who at that moment thought the image could be anyone from Joseph Stalin to Minnie Mouse.
“Jesus I’ve been hunting this guy for ten years. I know it’s him. Where’s the goddamn asset?

Scene: The A30 between Hook and Basingstoke.
The man from Wisteria Cottage drove the Rover with calm assurance, his mobile chirruped again on the seat beside him. An image of a young man appeared on the screen, he studied it for a few moments then snapped the phone shut and put it away.

Scene: Basingstoke Station.
“Customers are asked not to leave any unattended baggage….
The young man watched two men in dark blue anoraks come onto the platform from the subway, they didn’t look in his direction and strode purposefully to the north end of the platform where the sat down on a bench. He put the Scotch egg in his rucksack, left his tea, and followed them.
“Zank you. Come back soon” said Katya but she was talking to a closing door.
“…and if they do see anything unusual please point it out to a member of staff as they do have a very dull time here.”

Scene: CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA.
“He’s on the move people. Let’s not lose him. Shit! Who are those other two guys on the bench? Where’s the asset?”
“Asset in position now sir”.

Scene: Sainsbury’s Pay & Display Car Park, Basingstoke
The man from Wisteria Cottage parked the Rover on the deserted roof of the Sainsbury’s Multi-Storey Pay & Display. He paid for half an hour and carefully stuck the ticket to the inside of his windscreen. Then he carried the Hartley Witney Bowls Club holdall to the north parapet and assembled the Ptacynski P45 snipers rifle that it contained. He then clipped on the Hytner diometric telescopic day-sight, together they made the weapon of choice of assassins the world over. He slipped a single round into the chamber and started to hunt his prey. From his vantage point he had an excellent view of the full length of Platform 3.

Scene: Basingstoke Station.
The man came up to the two men on the bench and greeted them familiarly.
“Hi fellers. Anyone fancy a fishpaste sandwich?”
At that moment the man from Wisteria Cottage shot Jason Bourne of 42 Elm Tree Rd, Solihull, rail enthusiast and train spotter, better known to his mates as ‘Gobbler’, through his right eye.
Oops!

My Appearance on the Parkinson Show

2008-07-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will know that I once had a career in stand-up comedy (see Blogs of the 11th & 18th May) and that I spent some months playing clubs up north billed as ‘Ted Irwin – The Irritating Git from Down South". It was during a week when I was third on the bill at the Accrington Odd Fellows & Job Seekers Club when I got a call from a researcher on the Michael Parkinson Show. Apparently Jimmy Tarbuck had pulled out at very short notice and she was desperate for someone to fill the gap that very night. Now I hear you saying to yourself “Surely the Parkinson Show could find someone more impressive than a comic who was third on the bill at the Accrington Odd Fellows & Job Seekers Club”. Apparently not and though I say it myself I had gained some local notoriety as a comedian whose sole purpose in life was to insult anyone born north of Watford whilst being pelted with rubbish by a hostile and drunk audience and I had attracted a lot of media interest in Manchester where the Parkinson show was recorded in those days. Needless to say I jumped at chance and as the show was recorded early evening it didn’t interfere with my club engagement.

The researcher Fiona met me at the studio mid-afternoon and we went through background details until Parky himself became available and he and I mapped out how things would go. It was agreed that since I was a relative unknown I would do a snippet of the act in my full rig of ankle length quilted riveters coat and orange cycle helmet, before sitting down for the chat bit.

Being the new boy in town I was on first (Meryl Streep and Noel Edmonds were my fellow guests) and then as now the entrance onto the Parkinson set was at the top of a curving staircase. I was on the point of vomiting from nerves and was by no means reassured by seeing Audrey, my mistress, Harry her husband and my boss with the rest of my cabaret co-workers in the audience, when I got a “3-2-1 Go” and a gentle shove from a floor manager and I tottered down the stairs.

Now before I go any further I will answer the question that has popped up in all your minds. “What is behind the entrance at the top of the Parkinson staircase?” Presumably you, like me, have always thought that there would be a lavishly appointed hospitality suite with agents, promoters, hustlers, high class hookers, recreational drugs and young men with metal briefcases full of money. Every so often one of these young men would open his case and say “Look what a lot of money I have in my briefcase” only to be put down by another young buck opening his case to reveal even more money. But no, the backstage area resembles nothing so much as a ‘Goods Inwards’ in a typical Slough industrial unit. The hospitality suite and dressing rooms are contained in two rather squalid portacabins and the only catering on site is a Turkish burger van on the far side of the car park. Parky spends most of his time, when not on set, playing cards with his chauffeur in the back of his car. Even more intriguing is the fact that the staircase just goes up to a temporary platform accessed by a rather steep ladder from offstage. Lounging around at the bottom of this ladder are two shaven headed Serbs dressed in combat trousers and rather soiled vests whose sole purpose in life is to assist any guests that might have trouble getting up the ladder. Apparently they really earned their money when Whoopi Goldberg was on the show.

I was on and I launched into my standard patter and as I did so the studio audience dutifully started rather feebly to chuck the odds and ends that the studio staff had provided, nothing more lethal than screwed up paper or soft fruit. Luckily my party had managed to smuggle in some bottles, glass ashtrays and a decent sized bag of King Edwards. In no time at all shards of glass were flying round the studio like shrapnel and Parky was ducking and diving down behind his chair. My routine ground to a standstill in very pleasing uproar and there was a lengthy pause while the studio staff swept up the debris and Parky picked all the shreds of potato out of his hair (Kevin Keegan style in those days). Then we sat down and I explained to the world at large how after a long, expensive and privileged education I had ended up standing on stage in a long coat and cycling helmet while the punters threw lethal objects at me. It was dull and predictable but would have done my career no harm at all had it not been terminated soon after. Then it was Noel followed by Meryl, afterwards we adjourned to the portacabins for a bottle of light ale and kebabs, which Meryl gamely fetched from the burger van. I thought Noel was a bit sniffy about the whole thing and sulked in the corner muttering that they always had Chicken in the Basket on Multi-Coloured Swapshop. Meryl and I got on famously, so famously that a few months later we had an incognito ‘weekend’ together in a B&B in Solihull. It wasn’t bad at all, en suite but with hard loo paper, nylon sheets and loud parrot in the hall. To be honest I thought that Meryl was a bit noisy too and I’m sure the landlady wonders to this day why her parrot was squawking “Aahfrika! Aahfrika!” on the morning that we left.

Basingstoke in Bloom

2008-07-13T22:59:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will be aware that Basingstoke (civic motto “We’re walkin’ on sunshine”) won the coveted prize of “Hampshire’s Cultural Glory 2008” last year and this is my report from our front line in the war on barbarism.

First the bad news, our headline production of Berloz’s epic opera The Trojans was stillborn after an unfortunate accident during a rehearsal of the torchlit entrance of the Wooden Horse. Basingstoke Chief Executive, Paul Poltroon, said, when interviewed in front of the smouldering remains of the Brimshott Rd Scout Hut, “I don’t think Hector Berlioz would have done it differently and besides this is why we have insurance”.

As expected the ‘A Hundred years of the Sooty Show’ exhibition has attracted world wide interest with visitors coming from as far afield as Chile, Taiwan and a jumbo jet load from the ‘Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Bizzy Society’ of San Diego. The 10m high Sooty and Sweep inflatables that flanked the entrance to the exhibition have been retrieved from the field in Belgium whence they were blown in a May storm. More worrying has been the claim by a Professor Doppelganger that the show’s centrepiece, the original Sooty glove puppet made by Harry Corbett’s grandfather (see my blog of 9th March), is a fake. The Gulbenkian Glove Puppet Museum of Bratislava, the owners of this cultural treasure, were outraged but strangely reticent when DNA tests were suggested to prove that the artefact was indeed made from a wolf’s bladder and two acorns. The whole affair will be in the courts for some time yet and in any case the publicity has probably increased attendance.

The surprise package in this cultural fiesta has been Null Point!, the story of the Eurovision Song Contest from earliest times. What is ingenious about this ground breaking show, which might have been just a dull compilation of Euro winners in sub-standard performance, is that it almost entirely ignores the songs and concentrates on the presenters and the scoring. On Eurovision night anyone who values their mental health will do almost anything to avoid hearing the ghastly songs but will return from the pub or their ‘Conversational Portuguese’ classes in time for the epic ritual that is Euro scoring. The show is performed in its entirety by a pair of Finnish impressionists/quick change artists who rattle through the years of Euro drivel at breakneck speed. Their impression of UK presenter Katie Boyle (1960/63/68), who single-handedly managed things with an aplomb that latter day Estonian and Serb duos can only dream of, is absolutely bang on. They switch costumes and languages with equal ease, they deliver the wooden ‘spontaneous’ by-play between hosts that obviously loathe each other with great relish. Above all the joy is in the detail. In much the same way that we all remember where we were and who we were with when Michael Portillo got dumped by the voters of Enfield in the 1997 General Election, we all remember Jahn Teigen getting Null Point in Paris in 1978. But do you remember presenter Dottir Lundqvist (Gothenburg 1985) getting caught short just before the final scores were announced and having to run off stage to pee in a fire bucket, or the now forgotten lady who inadvertently exposed a large and enchanting breast while giving the votes of the Belgian jury in 1974. This show is a wild wild ride and has got rave reviews across the board. “ …very much of the zeitgeist……Terry Wogan and Ulricka Johnson with an existential twist” (Time Out). “It’s Gardener’s Question Time on acid!” (Rose Growers Monthly)
The 2007 UK entrants Scooch were invited to be the cabaret at the First Night party but were intercepted by the police at junction 6 of the M3 and turned back to London in the interests of ‘public order’.

The Literary Lunches at the War Memorial Park Roundabout Harvester got off to a shaky start when Eric Haynes (publisher of the legendary maintenance manuals) had to cancel after a breakdown on the M3 but Dermot O’Dainty certainly got the ball rolling re-enacting early moments from his career with a Mrs Baldock of Sherborne St John under the luncheon table.

There is much more to come in this cultural beano. Next month we have “Celebrity White Water Rafting” on the Basingstoke Canal. Can’t wait!

Goop

2008-07-06T23:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I was writing about the year 2025 and what I should tell my grandson Cowell, who would be ten in that year, about how life would be when he grew up. I rather failed in my grand-parental duties and lied, saying “It’ll be alright” when I definitely felt that it wouldn’t. Since then I have checked horoscopes, read the Scientific American, memorised tide-tables. plotted economic trends back to the 16th century and tossed a coin or two, and my conclusions have changed completely. Only two years after Cowell asked his question the state of the world would deteriorate markedly, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had packed their sandwiches and were saddling up, we teetered on the abyss of global doom. Then a miracle occurred, a man named Jeremy Beadle (no relation), who worked for a small agro-chemical company just outside Cambridge announced the discovery of GOOP. What is GOOP? GOOP is ‘Genetically Optimised Organic Petroleum’. Beadle came to the obvious conclusion that the only way to harness solar power was nature’s way, photosynthesis. He took mono-cellular algae-like organisms and tinkered with their genetic make-up until he came up with something that both reproduced and photosynthesised at prodigious rates. All that was required was seawater, carbon dioxide, and human excrement (for it’s nitrogen and trace elements). Initial tests near Wisbech resulted in a significant proportion of Cambridgeshire being covered with GOOP, which looks very like the green scum you get on a garden pond. Beadle then took his product to the very nearly moribund motor manufacturing industry who, realising that their salvation was at hand, quickly adapted existing engine prototypes to run on GOOP. The nations of the world of the world stopped bickering over the few barrels of oil still under the ground because in effect the alchemists dream had come true, the manufacture of raw energy from components that were as commonplace as anything on earth. Of course there were doubters, environmentalists, embarrassingly still called ‘Greens’, who declared that GOOP would become a Frankenstein Monster among algae. US President Earl Dewberry declared that GOOP was the product of a plot by homosexual Jewish Communist bankers and the Boy Scout Movement to subvert the very being of the USA. His voters, realising that here, at last, was a chance to get their pick-up trucks out of the garage dumped him at the earliest opportunity and replaced him with President Clooney.
What made GOOP so revolutionary was that the technology required to produce it was minimal, a DIY GOOP starter kit cost little more than a barbecue. A suburban family could easily produce enough GOOP in a summer week to fuel the school run and a visit to Granny on Sunday. On a grander scale the UN and IMF embarked on a massive planet wide engineering programme and started by gouging out a mile wide canal from Dakar on the west African coast heading due east across the Sahara. The poorest countries on earth, Mali, Mauretania and Chad, with access to saltwater from the Atlantic and with limitless supplies of sunshine and shit, became the world’s leading GOOP producers and immediately constructed massive GOOP fuelled desalination plants to irrigate the desert. In a matter of years the Sahara became the market garden of the world and a new centre for narrow boat cruising. Similar schemes transformed Australia’s Northern Territory, Arizona, Nevada and the Gobi.
The greatest GOOP plus of all was the reversal of global warming. GOOP sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and temperatures are dropping again. Weather men predict that the Thames will freeze as it used to do 300 years ago. Bonnie Langford has promised to skate from Greenwich to Windsor to raise money for the Arlene Phillips Home for Dancers with Bad Knees when it does so.
The world’s leaders, with no scarce resources to squabble over, convened endless summit conferences, slapped each other on the back and disbanded their armed forces, pledging to spend the cash thus made available on the Arts in general and 18th century Italian opera in particular. The Four Horsemen unsaddled their horses and ate their sandwiches while watching reruns of The Midsomer Murders.

How to Put on a Musical 8 – The Theatre

2008-06-29T23:58:00.000-07:00

There aren’t enough theatres in London. It’s that simple. As you read this there are musicals circling the West End rather like jumbo jets over Heathrow, looking for somewhere to land. Some of them will never find a landing place, some of them will be forced off to a theatrical equivalent of Schipol or Manchester, some of them will simply crash and burn. Not only are there not enough theatres, most of the theatres that we do have are remarkably unsuitable for musicals being too small and designed as playhouses. They don’t have enough seats, their orchestra pits are a crush for a string quartet, and there is only one ladies toilet in the building.

The crucial thing to consider when deciding which theatre to go for is the ‘take’. How much money can you take in box office receipts per week. If this figure is less than what it costs to run the show then either the theatre is too small or the show is too big. Obvious, you would think, but producers don’t always get this basic arithmetic right. I know of at least one show where the theatre was sold out but the producers found that they were losing money and after a couple of weeks they put the notice up and closed the show. At a less drastic level there are plenty of shows that limp along just breaking even but needing to run for 80 years to recoup their investment.

So how does a producer choose a theatre? He doesn’t, he just takes what he can get unless of course he is Cameron Mackintosh or The Really Useful Group in which case he buys the theatre, renames it after a famous homosexual and puts on whatever he likes. Lesser mortals cast around desperately saying “location, location, location” to themselves and turn their noses up at the Piccadilly or the Shaftesbury. When they fail to secure their first, second, third or fourth choices of theatre they can be heard saying “a theatre is only as good as the show that is in it”.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Producers Alvin Toxteth and Samuel J Bloodlust enter the hunt for a theatre with some foreboding. They are aware that the show, which readers will remember is based on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit, has already acquired a reputation as the ‘Flop of the Year’ even before rehearsals have begun. In a curious way this may turn out to be to their advantage in that theatre owners may take the show as a short term filler, secure in the knowledge that, being a solid gold klunker, it will only run a few weeks and will pay their staff’s wages until something more durable turns up.
Toxteth and Bloodlust sift the rumours and counter-rumours that crackle through the synapses and ganglia (you can tell I’ve been watching too much House) of the West End.
Is business falling off on Happy as a Hapsburg? Has Shirley (the Shirley Bassey musical, with the underrated Bonnie Langford in the title role) shot it’s bolt? Will Lord of the Rings really transfer to the Criterion? Is that weather girl with the big lips going into Chicago? Is the New London going to be turned into a Chinese Cash & Carry?
They wheel, they deal, they are offered the Peacock (the one buried under an office block on Kingsway, which used to be called the Royalty) but decide they will only take up that offer when the Winter Olympics take place in Hell. As insurance Toxteth’s assistant, Kevin Whimper, is instructed to pencil book a pre-West End tour. There is strong possibility that Maintenance! will open in Sunderland……

Casting Update
After the Andover debacle, which has at least raised public interest in the show, the producers and Hampshire Gold TV have rescheduled Baby You Can Drive My Car, the TV audition show, and have discreetly selected two performers who they would like to cast in the leading roles and who they intend to feed into the show among the other hopefuls. A careful plan has been hatched to ensure that the judges, the public and the voting system are ruthlessly manipulated to ensure that Maintenance! gets the two leads the producers want.

Christopher Biggins has turned down the role of Max Sadistik, the vulpine Skoda production line foreman.

In the Year 2025

2008-06-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

“Grandad. What will it be like when I’m grown-up?” asked my 10 year old grandson. A big question and not one easily answered as we threaded our way through the rickshaws and minibuses that thronged the forecourt of the Lords Go-Kart and Cricket Indoor Arena. This was my Boxing Day treat for young Cowell, the final match in the 5 match England v Moldova 20/20 Test series. I beat a path through the noodle and dim-sum sellers with my walking stick, pausing only to drop some change into the hat of a limbless veteran of the Afghan Wars. How could I predict anything, let alone something up-beat and optimistic, to the eager little boy by my side when the previous decades had been so tempestuous? Who could have foreseen twenty years ago that private cars would be banned, that mobile phones and computers could be installed in a rear molar, texts and images displayed directly onto the retina, that linguine with a light squid and garlic sauce would appear regularly on school dinner menus.

Who could have predicted that Earl Dewberry would have emerged from Louisiana at the head of the Righteousness and Apocalypse Party of America to sweep away the Republicans and Democrats at the 2016 elections to lead the US into an era of unparalleled isolationism, an era when would be visitors to the USA would have to answer 3 questions at immigration control while attached to a polygraph.
1. Do you believe in the Lord God Almighty?
2. Do you believe that the world was created by the aforesaid Lord God Almighty on Tuesday 14th April 4326 BC at 2.00 in the afternoon?
3. Are you now or have you ever been a Canadian?
Anyone giggling when answering these questions is subject to a mandatory 7 day jail term. President Dewberry has moved the seat of government from Washington to Judgement Day, Montana (pop 403) and was only just dissuaded by his wife Charlene from nuking New York and Los Angeles declaring them to be the true Sodom & Gomorrah. Nato broke up after Dewberry’s allies found his habit of quoting large chunks of the Old Testament in summit meetings tiresome.
As unexpected was the entry of the Russian Federation into the EEC, as was the Russian army taking advantage of existing freedom of movement legislation to occupy all EEC capitals except London and Dublin over a Bank Holiday weekend in August 2017. A technical fault on Eurostar and a ferry strike prevented the Russians from crossing the channel and Prime Minister Johnson promptly took the UK out of the European Federation. European President Putin (elected with 98% of the vote, the 2% are currently in labour camps on an icy marsh near Archangel) declared Johnson to be “nothing more than a mad dog barking at the tree of progress”. In order to secure Chinese support for Britain’s tenuous position on the western fringe of a now hostile continent, Johnson has been forced to sell off most of the UK to Chinese developers. The sale of Leicestershire to the Shanghai & Kowloon Novelty Co was finalised a few weeks ago and only Clackmannanshire remains unsold, partly because no one knows how to spell it and partly because the Chinese can’t pronounce it. On the domestic front the ‘Arts’ have been “given back to the people” by Ministers of Art & Culture, Ant & Dec, who in their 2015 legislation made it a legal requirement for the ‘Big Four’ national companies (the National Theatre, RSC, ENO and the Royal Opera House) to fill all leading roles by TV audition. The public now vote regularly and have recently selected Ray Miggins, a Salford quantity surveyor to play King Lear at the National and Maureen Purvis, an Ealing traffic warden, to sing Brunnhilde at the ROH. The Post Office was closed down in 2012, “in order to give the consumer more choice” according to Prime Minister Johnson. The railways were tarmaced over in 2015. Commuters now hitch their bicycles to massive tow trucks capable of pulling up to 1000 cyclists to work. The economy survives solely by serving the needs of the luxury markets to the east. Cowell’s mother counts herself lucky to have a job as a supervisor in a cyber sweatshop churning out software for entertainment and brothel robots used in the Volga and South China Sea resorts.
As Prince Regent William said in his Christmas speech (with Mandarin subtitles) “these are challenging times but I feel sure that the indomitable spirit of the British people coupled with the technical expertise of the South China Moral Uplift Co will see us through”.
So what should I say to my grandson? Can I really put my hand on my heart and say it will all be OK. Of course I can. I say “It’ll be fine. It’ll be just fine. Would you like some noodles?"

Strangers on a Train

2008-06-08T22:55:00.000-07:00

This coming weekend I am off to Holland to visit Megacarta, billed as the ‘Biggest Dutch Postcard Fair Ever’ with more than 100 dealers. Not everyone’s idea of a racy weekend I’m sure but as we say in Basingstoke “It certainly rocks my ring road”. I could have gone on a cheapo flight to Schipol or Utrecht but I love trains, I love travelling on trains, I love dining on trains and I particularly love sleeping on trains. So on Friday (in fact by the time you read this I will have gone and come back) I am going by Eurostar, which has, inconveniently for me, shifted from Waterloo to St Pancras, to Brussels where I can visit the smattering of postcard and stamp dealers round the corner from the Gare du Midi, have a decent lunch and then catch the ‘Thalys’ (a Belgian version of the TGV) to Amsterdam and from there a commuter train to Utrecht and an uncongenial night in an Ibis hotel. After a long day buying stock to sell on ebay I will do the reverse and come back.
The thing about train travel apart from the trains themselves is the opportunity for random conversations to be had with total strangers and, yes, I am one of those people who irritatingly start off with “Turned out nice again” or “Going far?” and before I know it I am deep in conversation with a man who thinks that ‘Chip & Pin’ is a product of Satanism or with a woman worried about her mother who retired to the Isle of Wight and has never been heard of since.

Some years ago a dance company, who were planning a European tour, approached me to recce a handful of venues but were agonising over the cost of the flights. I stunned them by saying “No problem. I’ll go by train”. It also meant that I could visit my girl friend in Switzerland on the way. I bought the requisite rail-pass which in those days covered the whole of Europe and caught the boat train from Liverpool St to Harwich and after an overheated night’s sleep in a tiny cabin I was deposited at the Hook of Holland at 5.30 on a bitter February morning. This meant that I was at my first target venue in Utrecht before the cleaners, but after a quick measure up and a few photos I was on schedule to pick up the Copenhagen Express at Amersfoort. Whenever I go to Copenhagen I am always struck by how little traffic there is and I think “Damn I’ve arrived on a public holiday and everything will be shut” but no it’s just a very quiet place to visit. The Cannon theatre was a tin shed fringe venue and there was a rehearsal going on when I arrived. This being Denmark the rehearsal consisted of an entirely naked couple simulating sex to some rather nasty electronic music in a pool of light centre stage. The local technical manager said “This chap’s come from London. OK if he takes some measurements?” The couple cheerfully waved me on and I scuttled hastily around the stage with my tape measure feeling rather provincial.
There was time for dinner and a stroll round the city centre before catching an overnight sleeper (the Ostsee Express) to Berlin. In the buffet car I fell in with a bumptious young Englishman on a sales tour of Europe. He was based in Tokyo and was employed by a Japanese corporation, a position arranged by his father who had been at university with the corporation’s CEO. He was the very worst of British, talking fluent business bollocks, in the 21st century he would have found himself in Sir Alan Sugar’s Boardroom getting fired.
“How long have you been on the road?” I asked.
“Three months”. He replied and as he said it he blinked a couple of times and I saw his confidence falter.
“What are you selling?”
“This” and from his briefcase he pulled out samples of some very uninteresting plastic netting, the sort of thing that is used to clad scaffolding on building sites.
“Have you sold much?” I asked.
“No” he said looking rather pained “the problem is that with the current exchange rate it’s very expensive”. I could see his difficulty, at that point in the nineties the yen was sky high against any European currency. Suddenly it all became clear to me, this young man’s entire being was completely at odds with Japanese business life and his co-workers had gone to their boss and said “Either he goes or we go”. In the circumstances dismissal would have been out of the question and so he had been despatched on an impossible mission to Europe. The poor lad was like a latter day Flying Dutchman doomed to wander across Europe seeking salvation but unlike the Dutchman, who gained redemption from the love of a good woman, he just had to sell some of his absurdly expensive plastic netting. I wished him luck and went to bed.

At 7.30 am we arrived at Berlin Lichtenfels and I made a lighting change of train to the Budapest Express. I shared a compartment as far as Dresden with a jolly East German lady pensioner. She immediately insisted that I eat all her sandwiches and her banana and then told me that she had been touring West Germany by train. She explained that in the communist days in the east, pensioners had free rail passes. The Bonn authorities had agreed to honour these for the initial 6 months after unification and the West’s railways were awash with ex-communist OAPs seeing the sights. My companion had bought a postcard from every place that she had visited and she proudly flourished a wad of cards 4” thick. When I told her that my girl friend (now my wife) was Polish she promptly stood up and sang a well known number from an operetta the gist of which was that “Polish girls were the prettiest girls in all the world”.
As we approached Dresden she recounted her experiences during the great bombing raid and how she and her schoolmates had watched the tarmac boil outside the main station. Sadly she left the train at Dresden but her absence was made up for me by a sight at one of Dresden’s suburban stations where every platform was packed with thousands of Soviet soldiers. All dressed in khaki greatcoats with red shoulder flashes, black boots and grey fur hats, they looked magnificent. Apparently they were the last Russian troops in East Germany and they were waiting for trains to take them home. The rest of the run down to Budapest’s Nyugati station was uneventful though the station itself was vast and splendidly Hapsburg. After a night in a revolting hotel I found the Budapest venue, which was a pleasant hall in the middle of one of the city’s parks. The local crew were enthusiastic and particularly so when I described one of the key scenes in the show which involved a nude 65 year old woman getting trapped in a phone box which slowly fills up with water. After an afternoon admiring the bullet holes around the city that bear witness to the 1956 uprising I caught the night train to Zurich. At some point between Budapest and Vienna I was joined by a very drunk American back-packer called Simon who with 3 companions was on his way to Venice. He decided that we were the best of friends but this excess of affection led him to forget that the train divided at Vienna, the section we were in headed west towards Innsbruck while the section he had been sitting in, and where his friends were sitting, turned off south to Italy. As the train was divided it clanked and shuddered which alerted Simon to his danger and he hurtled off down the corridor towards his friends, luggage and passport. The train was already divided and the train staff had not yet closed the door between the two sections. Simon lurched towards the opening aiming to make a despairing leap for the vanishing Venice carriages. Luckily for him both I and the guard grabbed him by the belt and hauled him back to safety before he fell onto the tracks below. We dumped him in a compartment by himself and he passed out to wake up in Switzerland with a hangover and a lot of problems.
As we pulled out of Vienna it started to snow heavily and the train inched its way through the Alps. By dawn we had only got as far as Innsbruck but there the snow stopped and the sun rose on a pristine new world. I had what remained of the weekend to indulge in sensual pleasures in Bern. You may well say “Switzerland and sensual pleasures? Surely a contradiction in terms”, but let’s not dwell on it.

On Monday morning I took the direct TGV from Bern to Paris. At Pontarlier, the Swiss/French border, two French police or customs men, both with guns on their hip, boarded the train and started to question a young man sitting eight seats from me. As the train accelerated into France they searched his bags and after a while they took him away, perhaps to the Guard’s compartment to subject him to a more intimate search. After some time one of them came back with a screwdriver and started to prise fascias off the interior of the train near where the young man had been sitting. Presumably they never found what they were looking for and the young man, looking a little smug returned to his seat. I arrived in Paris in time to fit in a visit that day at our proposed venue which was tiny and staffed by incompetent and rude Frenchmen. Finally I made the boat-train and was back in London that night.

How to Put on a Musical 7– Staff (Part 1)

2008-06-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

Production Manager
There is not a dictionary or thesaurus yet published that contains words enough to describe the awesome responsibilities shouldered by the saintly individuals who undertake the role of Production Manager on a West End Musical. If only the governance of the world could be handed over to a small committee of theatrical production managers global conflict would cease, famine and disease would be eradicated, North Korea would become a tourist hot-spot and the Israelis and Palestinians would put out a joint cricket team.
What exactly do they do? A Production manager is employed by the Producer to deliver the physical production, to employ the staff, to draw up the schedules, to run the technical half of the budget, to supervise rehearsals, the list is endless, but most importantly they need to be ‘The Most Sensible Person in the Building’.

Company Manager
The Company manager is the Producer’s representative in the theatre and apart from running the payroll, petty cash and a welter of other administrative stuff, they face other more challenging tasks like allocating the dressing rooms, not always easy when the Producer has often made contractual arrangements with both leading artists to have the ‘Star’ dressing room. Company Managers are also responsible for maintaining company discipline, a tricky balancing act between being a management ‘Iron Fist’ and having to work with an insecure group of emotional retards, oops! sorry, actors on a day to day basis.
In my youth I was a touring Company Manager for a few years (it was long enough ago that during the second house on a Saturday I would go up to the House Manager’s office to settle up over a glass of whisky. If the show had made money, a rare occurrence, he would hand over cash from his safe) and keeping the company’s morale up in some of England’s more dismal venues was not always easy. On a tour of Michael Frayn’s Donkeys Years I was faced with a bored company whose performances had become sloppy and self indulgent. So before a mid-week matinee in Scarborough, which I knew would be poorly attended I gave the cast a pep talk. Apart from giving them a “pull your socks up” speech I also said that while the matinee audience would be thin on the ground, they would have paid their money the same as anyone else and deserved as good a show as a packed Saturday night house. The cast nodded dutifully and I went round to the back of the stalls to watch and to give the cast their due they took my words to heart and gave a vital pulsing performance until a point in Act 2 when George Leighton was ‘farcing’ as hard as he could down stage centre and a blue rinse lady in the front row turned to her friend and said, clear as a bell (I heard it at the back of the stalls), “Oh this is very boring”. The performance deteriorated from then on.

Project Model – Maintenance!
The Producers of Maintenance! have struck lucky and acquired the services of Stewart Cowless as Production Manager. Stewart is one of the most experienced in the business and if ever there was a man who can impose order on the unruly elements that comprise this particular musical Stewart is that man. At his initial meeting with Alvin Toxteth he failed to mention one or two little availability clashes, namely that during the fit-up and tech rehearsals of Maintenance! he is also booked to be at the fit-up of Trevor Nunn’s new adaptation of The House at Pooh Corner, the tech of Cameron Mackintosh’s Oliver 2 and is also supposed to be organising the opening ceremony of the World Netball Championships in Hobart, Tasmania. These schedule clashes may come back to haunt him.

After interviewing 3 candidates for the post of Company Manager the producers offer the job to Anthony Fawning who is always immaculately turned out and has a nice line in psychedelic bowties. Of the other two applicants one smelled distinctly of sherry at ten-o-clock in the morning and the other had child care issues.

Casting Update
The shortcomings of Hampshire Gold TV’s organisational skills are revealed all too soon as the small ad they placed in the Basingstoke & Andover Gazette announcing open auditions for Baby You Can Drive My Car at Andover’s Corn Exchange bring 17,352 hopefuls to the town all on the same day. The town’s car parks are full from dawn, trains from Waterloo are packed to bursting, public toilet facilities give way under the strain, the queue stretches out of the town half way to Stonehenge. By 11.00 the audition panel consisting of director Kevin McHarrowing, writer Dermot O’Dainty, choreographer Bobby Brasso and musical director Gareth Dixon (grandson of Reginald) have only seen 43 candidates. This is due mainly to McHarrowing’s insistence on discussing each auditionee’s political and religious beliefs in some detail regardless of their suitability for the two parts on offer. By lunchtime the town has been stripped of all food and drink, the High St has become an open sewer as the North Rd ‘Pay & Display’ Conveniences overflow and the crowd turn ugly. Local police are unable to cope and the situation degenerates into what locals will later refer to as ‘the Sack of Andover’. Fortunately a detachment of the Welsh Fusiliers are stationed nearby and are making final preparations for their departure to Iraq. They quickly move into the town (codenamed Basra for the day) in full desert combat gear and clear the streets corralling the furious would-be Barrys & Sharons in the Cattle Market, the Bus Station and the Azda car park. Alvin Toxteth then speeds up the selection process by rejecting anyone whose surname does not begin with A,B or C and who wasn’t born in July. This cuts the queue down to a manageable 200 or so. The remainder are herded at gunpoint onto buses and trains out of the town, many are dumped randomly at motorway services all over the southern counties. Toxteth bravely trots out the old cliche about “there being no such thing as bad publicity” while a CNN helicopter hovers overhead. Questions are asked in the House of Commons as to why a sleepy Hampshire town has been put to the sword in the interests of musical theatre and the resignation of the Home Secretary is demanded.
At the end of this debacle not a single possibility for either of Maintenance!’s two leads has been found.

How to Put on a Musical 6 – Casting

2008-05-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

Traditionally musicals were cast by a mixture of personal contact, auditions and thumbing through Spotlight while sitting on the loo. In recent years casting directors have become fashionable and these doughty individuals now do most of the legwork and murky work it is too, trapped between actors, their agents, and impossible to please producers. In my view casting directors deserve every penny they earn, not least because they have to attend auditions on an almost daily basis. The world at large has become familiar with the audition process through the endless stream of TV talent shows but these are a pale reflection of the unrelenting tedium of the real thing. 6 hours a day watching a river of variable talent flowing across the chilly stage of an empty theatre. At the end of the day the creative team gather to compare notes:

Director: I rather liked the blonde girl in red. What was her name?
Director’s Assistant: Tania Mischmasch. Yes I liked her.
Casting Director: She’s just come off the Balkan Phantom tour.
Choreographer: She’s a bit fat.
Director: Good voice too. What did the Music department think?
Musical Director: Yeah not bad. Has she got just a touch of a speech impediment?
Choreographer: She’s too fat.
Director: Just a touch of a lisp is no problem. Rather endearing.
Choreographer: She’s got legs like tree trunks.
Director: Oh alright! What about the redhead with the slightly foreign accent? She was sensational.
General Manager: Sorry, we’ve just discovered that she is a Russian national and doesn’t have a work permit.
Director: Bugger! OK I also liked that little northern girl, Emily something.
Assistant Director: Ah yes Emily Entwhistle, now she could play the Chip Shop Lady, the Taxidermist’s Assistant…..
Choreographer: She’s too short.
Assistant Director: …..the Mother Superior, be first cover for the Librarian and the Dog Trainer……
Musical Director: She can’t sing for toffee.
Assistant Director: ….and she could be second cover for the Traffic Warden.
Choreographer: She’ll only come up to the boys’ navels in the Tango.
Director: (Sigh)

One final thing to bear in mind when casting is Rule 3, (Never sleep with the Turns), and therefore never cast anyone purely on the basis that you might like to sleep with them later on, it always ends in tears.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Producers Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth have quickly discovered that there are no ‘names’ prepared to take on the leading roles of Barry and Sharon in Maintenance! They decide to follow the well trodden path that Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Ian and Cameron Mackintosh have made by reaching out to the British public in their own ‘audition’ show Baby You Can Drive My Car. Their proposal is rejected by all the terrestrial networks and at writer Dermot O’Dainty’s suggestion they approach Hampshire Gold TV. HGTV are very much new boys on the digital TV block, they operate out of an industrial unit on Basingstoke’s ring road and have relatively few subscribers, but have ambitious plans for national coverage in the coming months. They are producers of O’Dainty’s reality show Call the Receptionist, in which honeymoon couples and dirty weekenders are publicly humiliated in a cleverly rigged hotel room and insulted by the hotel receptionist (a heavily disguised Carol Smiley) and a drunk porter (Keith Chegwin). When the producer feels that the unfortunate couple have been put through enough O’Dainty bursts into the room to confront them with the news that it has all been a TV wheeze, at which point the couple show they are good sports and join in the general hilarity while collecting their scattered underwear. HGTV are also makers of the popular CSI Dorking (this week’s episode involved the theft of some pet food from a parade of shops in Carshalton) and their all-night Law and Boredom, which shows unedited CCTV footage from the Basingstoke area, has achieved cult status.
HGTV’s Chief Executive Lew Fade announced the project in glowing terms “This is the sort of programming that will put HGTV on the British cultural map and when I tell you that we will be following this up with The Allotment Hour and GP Surgery Waiting Room Action! I think you will agree that our cup truly runneth over”.
Bloodlust & Toxteth do the deal with HGTV despite director McHarrowing & composer Eisenkopf’s concerns that their two leads will be chosen by a relatively small number of viewers, of limited intelligence, living in the Basingstoke and Andover area.

My Career in Stand-Up Comedy – Part 2

2008-05-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

A few moments later Harry gave me a shove and I made my first entrance as a stand-up comedian to a chorus of the Eton Boating Song gleefully delivered in thick Geordie accents by the ramshackle house band. There was a faint ironic jeer from the body of the room and loyal applause from Hilda and Vivienne behind the bar as I launched into the routine that Harry & I had put together. There was nothing post-modern in the act, most of the jokes were as tried and tested as a Morris Minor. There was the one about the Geordie polar bear that goes into a chemist to buy condoms, there was the hardy annual about the three blokes in a shipyard and the encyclopaedia, and of course there was the classic Geordie prostitute and the poltergeist gag, though the punters being thick northerners I had to explain what a poltergeist was which rather took the edge off the joke. I quickly realised that the simplest way to get an audience reaction was to say the word Arsenal which immediately drew a hostile growl. We had chosen a Tuesday night, the quietest of the week, for my debut and there were only a few more customers in than on my first visit, but I got some response and as I went off a solitary scampi basket was hurled at the stage.
“Not bad lad” said Harry as I tottered weak kneed into the wings. “We can sharpen it up a bit but they were starting to hate you. Well done”.
Over the next few days we tinkered with the act, cutting set piece gags and putting in more snide comments about northern beer, barmaids, table manners, women in general and as audience numbers and my confidence increased, so did the volume of abuse and the number of missiles that were hurled at the stage. From Harry’s point of view we were achieving our aim in gingering up the audience and the response to the rest of the bill was much better than before. By Saturday night word had got round the local pubs that there was sport to be had at “Harry’s Place” and at closing time we filled up with drunks ready to let fly at the “Southern Bastard”. During the week I had taken a couple of direct hits from ashtrays and had to duck the odd bottle but nothing prepared me for the Saturday show when virtually anything that wasn’t screwed down (luckily the tables were) came my way. I battled on out of sheer Home Counties pride (the spirit of Woking runs deep in the Irwins) and finished the act with “Fuck you, you northern shits. Up the Arsenal! Goodnight!” Not exactly Noel Coward but effective nonetheless.
Harry was ecstatic, takings were well up on previous weeks and the local press were starting to take an interest. I however had a problem as I found as I peeled off my sweat sodden tux that Saturday night, I was black and blue, bruised from head to toe. There was no dressing room for me in the club so I had taken to changing in the area at the bottom of the fire exit stairs, where George, the backstage handyman, used to store empty crates, beer kegs and so on. George was there that Saturday and said “Bloody heck lad, you’ll not be able to take much more of that. Hang on I’ve got an idea” and he disappeared down into the basement. He returned a few moments later with a heavily quilted canvas coat that apparently riveters in the shipyards used to wear to protect themselves from flying rivets and from being scorched by neighbouring welders. It was incredibly heavy and stank of sweat and sump oil but it covered me from neck to ankle. A moment later Vivienne appeared from Front of House, “Here pet you might find this useful” and she handed me a bright orange cycling helmet that she had found in the Lost Property box. Thus in a couple of minutes the trademark costume of “Ted Irwin – The Irritating Southern Bastard” was created. It’s funny how ‘Art’ sometimes works that way.

I settled into life at ‘Harry’s’, I was earning a living and it was a change from watching stage crews unload trucks. The club staff and artists were friendly (apart from Audrey who maintained her glacial cool) and Harry treated me like a. son. Audrey though haunted my waking thoughts and most nights when I had changed out of the riveter’s coat into my street clothes I would stand in the wings and watch her sing. One night in the middle of Funny Valentine she turned and sang the lines
“Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you're my favourite work of art”
straight at me and half smiled before turning back to the audience. It was a heart stopping moment but later as she came off she brushed past with her normal hauteur.
The following night I had just come off and was chatting to George when we heard the clack clack of high heels coming down the fire exit stairs. It was Audrey in her pink silk dressing gown.
“George be a pet a get us some ciggies will you? 20 Capstan Full strength please” George looked a little startled but took the money from her and went out into the street. As soon as he was gone she turned to me and said “Hello southern bastard”, the dressing gown dropped to the floor and she stood there naked apart from her 4” heels. “Let me help you out of that”, she said starting with my top button and we began our affair right there on the floor among the beer barrels and Newcastle Brown empties, right there on the riveter’s coat which forever after smelled of sweat, sump oil and sex.
As I left the club that night Harry tapped me on the shoulder and said “Hey lad come to Sunday lunch tomorrow. The missus and I would love to see you.”
I readily agreed and floated out into the night.

The following day I drove to Harry’s place a couple of miles out of town on the Morpeth road. It was a bit more tasteful than I had expected, it wasn’t called ‘Dungaggin’ and there were no gnomes, in the drive was his pride and joy, a red Humber Super Snipe. Harry himself opened the front door to my knock and called over his shoulder, “He’s here love” and Audrey came out of the kitchen wearing rubber gloves and an apron with a map of the Costa Brava printed on it. At that moment I realised that there was one momentously, earth shatteringly, fundamentally, important and crucial fact that no one in the club had ever made me aware of. Audrey was Harry’s wife and I was in deep shit.
Audrey simply smiled and said “Hello Ted. I hope you like your roast beef well done.” She never looked more beautiful to me than at that moment in her apron and Marigolds.

We pursued our affair through that summer with relentless passion and with great care. Audrey told me at the outset “Harry’s old fashioned, he’ll kill both of us if he finds out.” When I replied that surely that was a little extreme Audrey said “You don’t understand, Harry’s not just a comic, he knows some very bad people and he didn’t get to own all his clubs by just telling jokes. He’s a bloody gangster.” I took her word for it and we met at lunchtimes in distant pubs out on the moors and at the seaside, but best were Tuesdays and Thursdays which were my landlady’s bingo afternoons and we could lie together in a sweaty contented heap at my digs.

During the summer Harry took the show on tour, mostly to his own venues in the north-east but we also ventured further afield, as far as Workington in the west, and to a few scabby working-men’s clubs in Manchester (where I made an appearance on the Parkinson show as a late stand in for Tarby who cried off after a freak golfing accident) and we played a club in Hexham where there were more sheepdogs than humans in the audience. In early September we fetched up in Roker (Sunderland’s Riviera!) playing at ‘Harry’s Showbar’ a few yards off the prom.
Audrey and I used to sneak off in the afternoons and find a secluded spot on the sands, she would puff away at her Capstan Full Strengths and sometimes we would share a jar of pickled onions, Pedro, Audrey’s Schnauzer, would chase the seagulls.
It was on just such an afternoon that I felt Audrey suddenly tense.
“Don’t move!” she said, and said it in the tone that in the movies means that there is a scorpion on the back of your neck.
“What is it?”
“Harry’s standing on the Prom right behind us. Oh shit! Look do you see that man in the donkey jacket by the ice cream van?”
“Yes”.
“That’s Eddie ‘Razors’ Docherty…”
“Oh”.
“…and do you see the man in the dark suit over to our left by the Conveniences?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Joey ‘Mad Dog’ McKlusky. Jesus! Look! Coming along the beach it’s Andy ‘Whitley Bay’ Norris.”
“Why is he called Whitley Bay?” I asked
“It’s where he lives…”
“Oh OK.”
“….and where he dumps the bodies.”
“Ah. What shall we do? Can’t we go and stand next to a policeman for a bit?”
Audrey was contemptuous “Harry buys policemen like bags of crisps. We’ll have to run for it. Where’s your car?”
“In the lane behind the club”.
“OK. Now listen. Razors has had trouble with his knees for years, he’s our best chance. You go to the right of the ice cream van and I’ll go to the left then we’ll both head through the amusement arcade, out the back, turn left and the car is only 100 yards away”.
It didn’t seem to be the moment to mention that my aging Ford Escort was not the snappiest starter or any of the dozen other flaws in this plan that immediately occurred to me.
“One. Two. Three. Go!” and with that Audrey grabbed Pedro with one arm, hitched her skirt up with the other and sprinted towards Razors. I was a bit slower off the mark and for a girl of her excessive smoking habits she could really shift when she put her mind to it. Razors put out an arm to grab her, but was promptly bitten by Pedro, I followed up with a good public school style shoulder charge which flattened him and we were up the steps, across the prom and into Funland. Weaving past the Penny Cascades, I looked back, I could see Whitley Bay, who had no obvious knee problems, closing fast and Harry striding calmly behind. I grabbed a giant plastic walking stick full of gob stoppers off the sweet counter and whacked Whitley Bay across the head with it. He reeled and gob stoppers flew like shrapnel, they also acted like ball bearings on the floor and he went arse over tit into a ‘Lucky Balls’ pintable. Up to that moment I had never in my life hit anyone in earnest and it was a deeply satisfying (if reprehensible) thing to do. Harry came remorselessly on and I ran for the back door. Mad Dog was already there, grinning as Audrey came towards him, she paused as if she was giving up and then suddenly thrust Pedro at him who dutifully sank his teeth into his nose. She left Pedro hanging and ducked under Mad Dog’s arm and into the lane behind, as I passed Mad Dog I grabbed Pedro and dragged him and possibly a part of Mad Dog’s nose away and sprinted for the car. As I ran I fumbled for my keys and shouted to Audrey “Do they have guns, do you think?”
“Of course they’ve got guns, they’re fucking gangsters you pratt”
We were at the car, Razors and Whitley Bay were only 50 yards off and I was sorting through the 20 odd keys on the ring and in a rare moment of clarity it occurred to me that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to have the keys to my old bicycle padlock, my mother’s front door, the Fiesta I wrote off 2 years before, and the allotment shed all on the same ring as the Escort’s.
“For Chrissake open the door” shrieked Audrey
I did and threw Pedro onto the back seat and in a startling reversal of Sod’s Law the Escort started first time. As we pulled away I could see Razors and Whitley Bay running back towards Harry who was getting into his Humber at the other end of the lane.

What to do? Where to go? All I could think of was that as long as we kept moving they couldn’t get us. I couldn’t believe that they would start shooting on a busy Saturday afternoon with crowds of eager pleasure seekers thronging the streets wondering what they were doing in Roker. At the end of the lane I turned right only because the road seemed clearer that way and then right again but Harry’s red Humber Snipe loomed large in the rear view mirror. I also noticed that as I looked back that Pedro had a wild look in his eye which I put down to his having tasted human blood for the first time. We turned left at the prom and headed north with the sea on our right. For a while the road was clear and we got up speed but then I saw a coach up ahead disgorging OAPs, zimmers and wheelchairs, traffic was backing up and the only way out was hard left across a shallow ditch and onto the golf course. Bizarrely dressed golfers queuing at the 13th tee scattered (why on earth is it that perfectly normal people think that it is necessary to wear a lemon yellow sweater and tartan trousers in order to play this stupid game?) and I gunned the Escort down the fairway. Harry followed and reasoning that there must be a road by the distant club house away to my left I headed in that direction. Audrey was unhelpfully screaming “Faster! Faster!” Harry saw what I was up to and headed over to his left to cut me off but in doing so he made the same mistake that many golfers on Roker’s 13th hole must have made. He didn’t notice the concealed bunker to the left of the green. There was a resounding “Crunk” and we looked back to see the Humber’s front bumper firmly embedded in the sand and the rear wheels spinning in thin air.
“They’re buggered” said Audrey concisely and delightedly.
We got back on the road and I turned to her and said “Where shall we go?”
“South. Let’s go south” she said.
So we did. With only the clothes we stood up in and a wild eyed Schnauzer on the back seat, we headed south down the A1, branching off at Leeds to join the M1. At one point Audrey asked me “Have you got somewhere to live in London?”
“Yes. I’ve got a place near Victoria”
“Who’s she?” she asked suddenly concerned.
I realised then that Audrey had never been to London and that life was going to be interesting.
At about eight-o-clock that evening, with the sun low in the sky we pulled into Leicester Forest Services for petrol and food. On the first night of our new life together we should have been toasting the future in champagne, as it was we sat down to saveloy and chips, I had coffee and Audrey had a bottle of Vimto.
When she finished she got up saying “I’m just going to buy some knickers and a toothbrush” and went off to the shop. A few minutes later I felt a kiss on the back of my neck.
“Did you get everything you needed love?” I asked
“Yeah I got you” said a deep Geordie voice. I whirled round and there was Mad Dog McKlusky, his nose shredded and with a kitchen knife in his hand.
“Get up slowly. We’re going to the car. Do as I say or I’ll fucking fillet you”.
I got up, McKlusky took my right arm and Whitley Bay the left, in the doorway stood Audrey, eyes wide with terror, flanked by Harry and Razors.
We all moved awkwardly out of the cafeteria and into the broad corridor that led towards the car park. On the right of the exit doors was a plump woman in a headscarf selling AA membership and on the left was a tall bespectacled man selling RAC membership.
“Gosh I’d like to join the AA please” I announced loudly. The plump lady leapt forward with her clipboard.
“Certainly sir! I just need to take some details”
“Ooh the RAC! I’ve always wanted to be a member of that” cried Audrey who was always quick on the uptake.
“Now then my good woman, tell me what the AA has to offer” I said.
“Well sir! Where to start? I could offer you our premier package which includes Relay, Home Start, Full Breakdown Cover, European Breakdown…”
“Hey big feller, you can offer a better service than that fat bitch over there can’t you?” said Audrey seductively to the RAC man.
“Er well the RAC are UK leaders in…” he began hesitantly.
“Who are you calling a fat bitch? Is she with you?” the AA lady demanded of Harry. “You should keep her under control”
Harry and his hitmen were unsure of what to do and we were starting to collect an audience of interested spectators.
“Listen” I said to Audrey “that long streak of piss next to you wouldn’t know a breakdown from shit in a bucket. You should stick with plumpy here and the AA”.
The RAC man finally started to lose it. “I’ll have you know that I am a fully qualified..”
“Pratt” I finished for him. “Give me that clipboard sweetie. You want details! I’ll give you details!” I shrugged off Whitley Bay and Mad Dog and snatched the AA lady’s clipboard and pen. Harry’s men were starting to show their natural desire for anonymity and were stepping back into the crowd, only Harry stood firm.
“Here’s one detail for you! This is Harry Ackroyd the famous one-eyed comedian” and with that I poked him in the eye with Plumpy’s biro and Audrey and I were through the doors and sprinting through the car park. Harry and his men didn’t take long to disentangle themselves from the fracas between the UK’s top motoring organisations but then they hesitated, not sure whether to come after us or to go for the battered Humber which was at the other end of the car park but by that time we were in the Escort heading for the slip road to the M1 and the south.
Foot to the floor the Escort had a fair turn of speed, but the Humber was certainly faster but how much faster?. How much of a lead did we have? Could I risk turning off or would they catch us on the roundabout at the top of the slip road? If we stayed on the motorway would they just shunt us off the road or shoot out our tyres? Did they really have guns? Why had I decided to have an affair with a gangster’s wife?
“Can you see them?” I asked Audrey
“No. No sign”. She and Pedro stared back up the M1.
“Keep looking. Harry won’t give up”
By the time we had gone about 15 miles from the services I was starting to relax but then Audrey swore “Fuck! They’re coming”
“How far?” I asked.
“Way back but they’re gaining. Can’t this thing go any faster?”
“Nope this is it”
We were on a long stretch with no exits, Watford Gap services were coming up in about 12 miles but that would effectively be a cul-de-sac.
All we could do was keep going and hope that something would turn up. Eventually I could make out the Humber clearly in the rear-view mirror and as it drew closer I could see Harry was driving, his trilby silhouetted against the setting sun.
“Shit what are we going to do?” I asked no one in particular.
Audrey looked across at me. “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what Southern Bastard. I’d do it all again”.
What would Harry do? If they rammed us they were as likely to die as we were. No they would probably try to draw alongside and shoot us from close range. I started to swerve from side to side across the motorway to prevent them doing that but other traffic started to get in the way and a couple of miles short of Watford Gap the Humber started to creep up on the inside. Audrey opened her window and started to fling anything loose that she could find at the Humber’s windscreen, her shoes, my AA book (yes, I was already a member), a can of de-icer, the previous weekend’s Sunday papers, a packet of Fisherman’s Friends, but to no avail, I could see Razors, gun in hand, ready behind Harry. Then a miracle, the Humber vanished, or to be more accurate it peeled off into the slow lane and turned into Watford Gap services.
“Where’d they go? What happened?” I gasped.
“I don’t know” said Audrey “We’re OK aren’t we? We’ve done it!”
Then she stopped talking and started laughing. It took a while before she could speak. “I’ve just remembered something. On his deathbed Harry’s Dad made him swear never to go further south than Watford Gap unless Newcastle were in the FA Cup Final. Harry always kept that promise.”
So we were saved by an old man’s loathing of the South and all it’s works. Excellent!

Did we live happily ever after? No of course not. About six weeks after we set up home in London, Pedro, the window cleaner, after whom the dog was named, turned up while I was out and Audrey ran off with him to Malaga. They have run a successful Bar-Cabaret there for the last twenty five years, I get a card every Christmas. She did leave Pedro, the dog, behind with a label on his collar saying “Please look after this Schnauzer. Thank you” which I thought was quite witty by Audrey’s standards and of course I have the riveter’s coat hanging at the back of the wardrobe and it still smells of sweat, sump oil and sex.

My Career in Stand-Up Comedy

2008-05-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I found myself at one of the crossroads that life throws up and almost entirely by chance I chose the road signposted ‘Stand-up Comedy’. I was in Newcastle supervising the RSC’s annual season. The job wasn’t too demanding and I spent a fair amount of time in the Dog & Table Lamp just around the corner from the Theatre Royal. It was a quiet bar that discouraged the younger trade and one could sit at the bar and brood on life’s unfairness undisturbed. One night I found myself sitting next to a thickset elderly man with a trilby jammed on his head. As men in Newcastle do we started to talk about football and football and as time went on I noticed that he was getting more attention from the staff and the rest of the pub than normal. When he tottered off to the loo I asked the barmaid who he was.
“Ooh don’t you know! That’s Harry Ackroyd, the comic. ‘That’s my dog that is’.“
“What?” I said.
“That’s his catch-phrase silly”
As I found out later it had once been the best known catch-phrase north of the Trent. When he returned I explained that I too was in “Showbiz” albeit a very different branch and for the next few nights we met and despite the disparity in our ages, Harry was well into his sixties then, we got on famously swapping jokes and anecdotes until he had to return to his club and I to the Theatre Royal for curtain down. One night Harry said to me “Listen lad when you’ve finished with that Shakespeare lot tonight come down to the club. I’d like you to see it before you go”.
So after collecting a few ‘meaningful’ notes from the director of Titus Andronicus on curtain down at the Theatre Royal I slipped away and, following Harry’s directions, I headed down Grey St towards the Tyne. As instructed I turned left before the viaduct and there tucked away in a seedy cul-de-sac was “Harry’s Place”. The name was set out in red neon and below that was the image of a cheeky terrier peering up a pretty girl’s skirt, the terrier’s tail appearing to wag only intermittently as some of the neon circuits were not working. On the poster next to the entrance Harry himself was top of the bill, followed by Audrey Fairclough “Songstress of the North”, Eduardo & His Marimba Muchachos, and a ventriloquist called Alvin Toxteth, “The Little Chappie with the Little Chappie”. The tiny foyer appeared to be deserted until a head popped up from behind a counter and said “Can I take your hat sir?”
“Sorry I don’t have a hat” I replied.
“Oh I know. I know. Nobody wears hats these days. I don’t know why I come in at all”. This I learned later was Vivienne, the octogenarian hat-check girl, who Harry had stopped paying in 1965 but she came in every night to keep warm and get the occasional free port and brandy.
“You’ll be that London feller, Harry’s expecting you. He’s at the bar”, she continued, gesturing towards a pair of red and gold double doors.
I went into the club itself, it smelt the same as clubs the world over, from Macclesfield to Macau, stale beer, stale fags and stale hopes. There was a whiff of disinfectant and the Gents in the air and the carpet stuck to my shoes. I walked over to Harry who was deep in conversation at the bar with three heavies who looked like extras from ‘Get Carter’. He shooed them away as I approached and gestured to the barmaid, who was only a little younger than the hat-check girl, for two scotches.
“Glad you could come lad. I want you to watch the show and tell me what you think” he said briskly.
“Er OK Harry but…”
He had already gone backstage. I sat down at the nearest table and studied my fellow punters. There were barely 30 people in the room and most looked as if they had been there as long as the club’s staff. The band, which consisted of piano, guitar and drums, stumbled onto the stage and played a rousing version of Tijuana Taxi before Alvin Toxteth, the teenage ventriloquist, came on, his dummy a cheeky Geordie layabout, his material low grade smut. He was followed by the Marimba Muchachos, three skinny blokes, who, as the barmaid Hilda helpfully told me, all hailed from Gateshead and were remarkably untalented acrobats. At this point I started to look for the Fire Exit and a hasty escape before Harry returned but then something remarkable happened, Audrey Fairclough walked out onto the stage. In her mid thirties, with honey blonde hair, wearing a simple black dress, she stood quite still for a moment centre stage before nodding to the MD to start her first number. The room came to life, the band sat up straighter, the fossilised audience stirred, Hilda stopped washing glasses and I was aware that Audrey Fairclough had that something that makes people want to watch, even if she was only doing the ironing. She started with The Girl from Ipanema and followed on with a string of standards, Funny Valentine, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the usual stuff, the sort of music that made the invention of Rock & Roll inevitable. At the end of her set she introduced Harry who bounced onto the stage and launched into a routine that I guessed had barely changed in 40 years. Sure there were topical gags (Thatcher had just been elected to her first term and Newcastle United were in the Second Division) but there was a period flavour to his act, a black and white quality of the sort that Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse have sent up mercilessly in recent years. However at the end the loyal fossils applauded gamely and Harry wound up the show by encouraging the audience to keep drinking at the bar. He then popped his head out of the pass door and beckoned me through.
“Look Harry I…”
“I know it’s crap lad, you don’t need to say anything. I asked you here tonight because together we can change it”.
“What do you mean?” Over his shoulder I could see a blonde figure in a black dress disappearing up the wing. Harry led me into his tiny office and there surrounded by photos of Harry shaking hands with Englebert Humperdinck, kissing Shirley Bassey and, curiously, playing golf with Alma Cogan, he explained his plan.
“The whole show is old hat. I know that. Audrey is special but those three poofs from Gateshead are useless and the vent is a smarmy little shit. What the show needs is energy to kick it off and that’s where you come in. You’re a lah-di-dah educated bloke from down south and the punters will hate you. We are going to trade on that. Together we are going to write a short routine that you are going to open the show with. I’ll bet you can be a patronising bastard if you try. We can really wind them up, they’ll love it. Brilliant eh!”
“No Harry. You’re crazy. You may be right about me being a patronising bastard but doing it professionally, that’s different”.
“No trust me lad we can do this. What else have you got on? Nothing! “
Unsurprisingly at this point I thought to myself “What the fuck am I doing here in this time warp of a nightclub listening to this insane scheme from a deranged alcoholic comic?” But then I had three further thoughts.
a) Harry was right, I had no other work lined up.
b) Why not? I was a bumptious young man and fancied a change and a challenge.
And most importantly
c) I could tread the same boards as Audrey Fairclough.
It’s also worth mentioning that I was drunk at the time. After a certain amount of persuasion I agreed to come back the following afternoon to start work writing the routine with Harry.
So for the remainder of my stint on the RSC season I led a double life, during the day Harry and I ground out a script designed to piss off anyone born north of Watford and by night I tended to Stratford’s finest.
After a few days Harry decided that our plan was sufficiently well advanced to be broached to his fellow performers and took me round backstage to meet everyone. First I was introduced to George who looked after everything technical backstage as well as Hilda’s empties. As my act was explained to him he looked from Harry to me as if he was in presence of two simpletons and then deciding that I must have been totally conned by Harry he patted me on the back and said kindly “You’ll be fine”. I had to agree with Harry’s opinion of the artists at the bottom of the bill, Alvin Toxteth was a smarmy little shit and the Muchachos were absolutely useless but then he took me to meet Audrey. She had the biggest dressing room which she shared with Pedro, her Schnauzer, (who George told me was named after a window cleaner that she had once taken a shine to), and as we entered she didn’t turn round but looked at me in her mirror.
“Harry tells me you’re here to give us all a kick up the arse” she said coolly.
“ No. No. Not at all. I’m only…”
“I’m looking forward to that” she continued. She was wearing a pink silk dressing gown and was showing one naked foot and one very elegant ankle. I felt what little confidence I had as a budding cabaret artist dribble out through the soles of my shoes and gazing at that ankle I idiotically said “Just think of me as a warm-up man” .
“I’ll certainly do that” she replied without a change of expression. At this point Harry decided that I had made a big enough tit of myself and pushed me out of the door.
“Don’t worry about Audrey, she’s takes a while to get to know folk” he said apologetically.
The RSC completed their season and moved on to the Barbican. I stayed behind to become “Ted Irwin – That Irritating Bastard from Down South”, that was how Harry had me subtly billed, as I discovered when I entered the club on the night of my stand-up debut. Harry and I had a last minute run-through, I got into my rented tux (we had thought about tweeds and a monocle at one point) and went off to the loo to throw up. When I came back to the stage Harry rushed up to me saying “You haven’t got an intro. You need an intro to get you on stage”.
“Oh great Harry! What do you suggest The Eton fucking Boating Song? “ I retorted.
“Brilliant lad!” He cried and scuttled off to tell the MD. As he left I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Audrey. “Good luck southern boy “she said and as she turned away she gave me the sauciest wink imaginable.
A few moments later Harry gave me a shove and I made my first entrance as a stand-up comedian to a chorus of the Eton Boating Song gleefully delivered in thick Geordie accents by the ramshackle house band.

To be continued

Apologies

2008-05-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry but a mixture of domestic crises and bank holiday outings have prevented me posting this week. Back next week with "My Career in Stand-Up Comedy".

How to Put on a Musical 5 – The Creative Team (Part 2)

2008-04-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

Costume Designer
Get a nice one. Get a cheerful one. They don’t have much of a life. They spend most of their time in small rather smelly rooms looking at actors in their underpants. The rest of their time they are dragged round the shops by the Costume Supervisor looking for fabrics, when they find one that they like they are firmly told by the Supervisor that they can’t afford it. The biggest cross they have to bear is that producers, who are nearly all men, don’t understand a) how clothes are made, b) anything about shopping and c) how a wig can cost as much as a decent second-hand car. So in the initial budget the allowance for costumes and wigs is normally 50% of what it should be and there is no end of woe and misery in the process of negotiating the figure up to a realistic amount.

Lighting Designer
In the good old days Lighting Designers didn’t exist, in those days the Company Manager would pop into the theatre, tell Cyril, the electrician, which colours to put in the ‘battens’ and then return to the pub to finish his pork pie and bottle of stout. Then at some point in the 1960s someone called Richard Pilbrow insisted that we all take lighting more seriously and it became a legal requirement to have a lighting designer. Engagingly the first generation of lighting designers were drunk most of the time. I have fond memories of a tech of a musical where the LD was spark out with is head on the DSM’s lap at the production desk. She gamely claimed that the LD had “just gone out to buy some cigarettes” and lit most of Act 2 herself. For almost a decade a bottle of Scotch on the lighting desk was de rigeur and alcohol fuelled creative differences, with headsets hurled across the auditorium, were the stuff of legend. These days it’s hard to come up with a convincing risk assessment for that bottle Scotch on the production desk, broken glass hazard, fire hazard, ill judged proposition to the choreographer’s assistant hazard and so on.
Today the top-notch lighting designer needs to be sober and on his mettle just to keep up with the latest technical developments, someone is likely to have invented a new moving light in the time it takes to fit the show up and there is always a smart arse 20 year old at the production desk who is desperate to impress.

Sound Designer
The first thing any aspiring Sound Designer needs to know is that, statistically, they are more likely to be fired before the First Night than any other member of the creative team. Why should this be? It’s because unlike the other disciplines, lighting, set and costume design which nobody understands, where sound is concerned anybody including the Producer’s mother-in-law (possibly particularly the Producer’s mother-in-law) can stand at the the back of the stalls and say “Ooer I don’t think much of the sound”. Anybody who ever owned a Decca Dansette thinks that they are a sound expert.
Historically Sound Designers are even later arrivals at the Musical Theatre Ball than the Lighting Designers. It’s only relatively recently that we have all decided to take Sound Design seriously and even now we sometimes smirk a bit when we think that no one is looking. In the Good Old Days there was no amplified sound, the band played in the pit and the cast sang on stage and if you couldn’t hear them you fired them and employed someone that you could hear. In the early days of the amplified musical it was considered a result if you heard the words and the music on the same evening. How things have changed. These days the sound rental package for a West End Musical is likely to cost twice the lighting package and you hear every note, every word, it’s almost as if you were in the same room as the performers.
Sound Designers need two important qualities. Firstly they need Secretary of the UN style political skills to deal with all the dozens of people who will come up to them and helpfully say “I was sitting in Row G/ Row AA/ Upstairs/ in the Bar and I couldn’t hear anything. I just thought you should know.” More importantly they need to spot the poisonous bastards who don’t pass on this helpful information but go and whinge to the producer about it. They also need obvious technical gravitas. It’s absolutely no good for a sound designer “Hmm that’s not loud enough” or “Turn the bass up on that”, they need to move in a techno-babble universe that only they and their keen bean assistants understand. When the chips are down this is likely to be their only defence against anything that the producer’s mother in law can throw at them.

Fight Director
All you need to know about fight directors is that they are never available and you probably don’t need one anyway. Figures from the Michigan Institute of Spurious Statistics show that on average Fight Directors are available for 8 minutes per calendar month. So it’s best to do without unless you are doing Zorro or Fight Club – The Musical in which case you will need squads of them working in relays.

Project Model – Maintenance!

The producers of Maintenance have done themselves proud in employing Buzz Phelps as Costume Designer. She has worked with Alvin Toxteth many times before and apart from being talented she is also unrelentingly cheerful, a keen Arsenal supporter and likes gin. She may be a welcome antidote to the Director/Set Design team who tend to be a little dour.

Geoff Osram, Maintenance’s lighting designer, is a direct descendant of Sir Horace Osram the inventor of the late 19th century automatic pig feeder which revolutionised breakfast, but he has no connections with the light bulbs which were invented by a bunch of Germans. He has been around a while and though not considered top rate or inspirational he is definitely a safe pair of hands. He tries hard to understand the creative needs of his directors and designers even if, at times, he completely misunderstands them, not being the sharpest tool in the drawer. He likes to wear pullovers.

Ian “The Geek” Geek is a new talent in the West End and much to everyone’s surprise picked up an Olivier for his sound design on Noddy & Me, the Slade musical, and his Heston Aerodrome sound effects on the Neville Chamberlain musical Whoops-a-Daisy were well regarded by his peers. He is known as “The Geek” not only because that is his name but because he is the ultimate anally retentive, techno-bore who only reads manuals and catalogues. He is the sort of man who reads the instructions on a Pot Noodle. He was reputed to have no sex life at all until one day in the middle of the ‘tech’ of Hedda Gabler at the National, a Mrs Geek appeared with four children, who she deposited in the stalls, she then hurled a bunch of keys at The Geek screaming “The car’s in the NCP. I’m off you boring bastard”.

How to Put on a Musical 4 – The Creative Team (Part 1)

2008-04-21T02:11:00.001-07:00

Choreographer
Musical and dance go together like Germany and France - centuries of conflict. Directors resent the Choreographer’s need for rehearsal time and space, Set Designers resent the need for ‘a big flat bit in the middle’ to accommodate show stopping routines and Costume Designers despair at all those splitting gussets. Worst of all most dancers can’t act and don’t necessarily sing too well so the arguments start at the casting stage. Then again there are those who just don’t like dancing at all. Queen’s Roger Taylor expressed this point of view clearly the day he arrived at We Will Rock You rehearsals during a run of Radio Ga-Ga and loudly declared “Oh I fucking hate dancing! Can’t we cut all the dancing?”

Before you hire a choreographer you need to consider the dance style of the piece,
arty-farty balletic or tap, there is some middle ground but these are the two ends of the dance spectrum. Human beings have long known something of the emotional impact of tap dancing, the Romans were the first to attach ‘taps’ to their shoes, there are the accursed Morris dancers, and we should never forget the achievement of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard who routed Marshall Kutozov’s 4th Division by the sheer ferocity of their tap dancing on the cobbles of Austerlitz. After a peak in the Fred & Ginger years, tap dipped in popularity until relatively recently, and now nearly every village hall in the land echoes to the relentless tramp of OAP and toddler tap classes. Whichever way you go your choreographer needs protection from the forces arrayed against him/her, they tend to get the rough end of the schedule, the rehearsal space, the casting and are quite often presented with a set at an angle of 45º with a surface like black ice.

My best example of a choreographer in extremis was probably Reda, the French/Algerian choreographer of the awful musical version of Romeo & Juliet at the Piccadilly. He had the shortest fuse imaginable and was a rich source of entertainment to us all throughout the production but he excelled on one occasion during the tech. He asked the director David Freeman if one of the set trucks could be moved slightly, David mildly pointed out that if the truck were moved it would block the next entrance. Reda exploded, he bounded off the stage, into the auditorium, and ran around shouting “Fucking English! Fucking English!” at the top of his voice for several minutes before vanishing through the Front of House not to reappear for several days.

Set Designer
Stage Design! What a rich field of human endeavour this is. On the one hand ‘design’ has transformed some musicals from just being successful into a global brand, on the other inept design can strangle the life out of a perfectly good musical and dump it into a shallow grave.
The key thing is to make sure that your director and designer are at least on speaking terms and it’s even better if they have had a meeting or two before rehearsals. Surprisingly this is not always the case. You would be simply staggered by the number of design presentations that I have attended where it appears that the director and designer only met on the bus on the way there.
I could fill a book with quotations from set designers, bewildered, embittered, angry, betrayed, and I probably will, so you will have to wait until then to hear them.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Kevin McHarrowing has insisted that the set for Maintenance be designed by his regular designer Ulla Hoos. Dungaree clad Ulla is Latvian born but UK based, she won her theatrical spurs working as assistant to Frankfurt Opera Artistic Director Klaus Kronstadt on the notorious nude Carmen (set on a croquet lawn) and the even more notorious Der Rosenkavalier, which closed after three nights following violent protests from animal welfare organisations. Maintenance producers Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth have their doubts (like McHarrowing Hoos has never done a West End musical) but have agreed to his proposal. Bloodlust said at the time “She’s what we need. We need to be edgy on this one. Why the fuck does she wear dungarees all the time?” Ulla has already set off for Mlada Boleslav, location of the main Skoda plant, in order to stay with a typical Czech car-worker’s family in the interests of research. The Kopecnick family are puzzled as to why this grim faced Latvian lady has come to live with them but they take her money with good grace. Mrs Kopecnick, particularly, got rather flustered when Ulla insisted on taking a photograph of the entire family in the bath together. The time has not been wasted, McHarrowing has been bombarded with giga-bytes of gritty car plant imagery, hectares of gear boxes and brake linings, rows of dumpy canteen ladies, men in showers, girls in showers and Skodas, lots of Skodas. The only piece of research material that Ulla may choose to disregard is the farewell advice from Mrs Kopecnick’s mother “You are are a nice girl but you will never find the love of a good man while you are wearing those fucking dungarees”.

On the choreographic front Toxteth and Bloodlust have opted for experience and proven success and have snapped up the doyen of Broadway choreographers, Bobby Brasso. Brasso has become available after the abrupt cancellation of Fight Club – The Musical and has promised to make something “Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!” out of the opening ‘Skoda Production Line Clog Dance’. He is a legend on the ‘Great White Way’ for the commitment and intensity that he brings to his work. He is such a dauntingly intense individual that he makes Bob Fosse look like a Golden Labrador jumping into a pond. Also there isn’t a row of tents anywhere in the world camper than Bobby Brasso.

A Dull Day at the Post Office

2008-04-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

The life of an international internet postcard dealer is not as glamorous as you might at first think. True there was that meeting in a West End hotel with a young Swiss banker representing a reclusive Geneva based collector who passed over a briefcase full of Swiss francs in return for the only known copy of a card showing Gustav Mahler playing snooker with James Joyce in Trieste, and then there was the time when a lady in a fur coat and not much else offered me far more than the asking price for a rare photographic card of the 1907 Upton-on Stour Coronation Day Sack Race in the car park of the Les Dennis Memorial Hall in Droitwich during the West Midlands ‘Card Bonanza’. But on the whole it’s a pretty mundane business, hours at the computer, scanning, listing, sending invoices, packing and finally the queue at the Post Office and the latter is where time stands still and you begin to question your whole existence and you think “What does it all mean?” “Why am I here?” “Is that blonde bloke in Hollyoaks really a girl?” I have tried to pass the time by humming the overture to Flying Dutchman in it’s entirety but there were complaints.
Last week however something remarkable happened while I stood near the back of the queue beyond the photo-booth, a lady wearing a badge on her ample bosom that proclaimed that she was both Valerie and a Supervisor approached me and said “Mr Irwin?”
“Er yes”
“Come with me please. Let me take those for you”. She seized my carrier bag full of post and strode to the nearest counter, elbowing aside an OAP who had waited 2 hours to buy a single second class stamp, “Sort these out for Mr Irwin”, she ordered the counter operative and then led me through the door next to the foreign exchange counter. On the right just inside the door was a young man sitting in a cubby hole surrounded by video screens.
“This is Craig” said Valerie “, he’s responsible for the CCTV round here. He’s the one you have to thank for all this. Craig has calculated that you have queued for more than 500 hours in this post office during the last year”.
“Very nice to meet you at last Mr Irwin” said Craig “I’ve put together a little montage of your highlights”. His nimble fingers sped over his keyboard and a series of images flashed up on the screens around me. There I was standing next to the drunk who asked me 26 times how long it would take for a letter to get to Kettering, there I was in the summer dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, and there I was so far back in the queue that I was next to the cheap DVDs with titles like “The Glory of Sudoku” and “Design Your Own Garden Pond”.
“I’m not sure what to say” I said
“You don’t have to say anything at all Mr Irwin” said Valerie and led me along a bleak corridor to a door labelled ‘Staff Canteen’. She pushed me through the door and as she did so champagne corks popped, streamers flew across the room and a sea of grinning faces sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. A pretty girl thrust a glass of champagne into my hand. A beaming chubby man stood on a chair and ‘tinged’ on his glass with a teaspoon until there was quiet.
“Welcome, Mr Irwin, to this little get-together to celebrate your sterling efforts in queuing for more than 500 hours in the last year. A remarkable effort and a branch record, furthermore you have achieved this feat without complaint. I think I am right in saying that you have not once asked for a complaint form”.
“Er there didn’t seem much point” I replied
“Quite right” said Mr Chubby. “Ooh by the way does anyone here know where the complaint forms are?” he asked the room in general. Everyone laughed uproariously at this. “Thank you for joining us today and now I think Mrs Winterbotham would like to meet you”.
Valerie took me by the elbow and led me up some stairs and along a carpeted corridor to a mahogany door with a brass nameplate.
“Mrs Winterbotham is about as big a cheese as it’s possible to be in postal circles round here” explained Valerie as she knocked on the door.
“Enter” said a commanding voice.
“This is Mr Irwin” said Valerie and she half curtsied as she left the room.
I was in a large and richly furnished office with a vast desk at one end and an open fire, sofa and coffee table at the other. The walls were hung with expensive Turkish rugs, there was a Faberge pen-holder on the desk and a polar bearskin rug in front of the roaring log fire. The room reeked of money and power. Behind the desk sat an attractive raven haired woman.
“Ah Mr Irwin, Valerie has told me all about you. Thank you for taking the time to pop up and see me”.
“Um …no problem” I replied.
“I’m interested to know which of our services you found the most useful”. She said as she stood up, and as she did so I saw that she wasn’t an attractive woman, she was a very attractive woman. She wore a bright red suit with an unexpectedly short skirt and had legs to die for. She gestured me towards the fire and sofa.
“Well I just use whatever seems appropriate…” I muttered.
“I see. Are you are a big user of ‘Proof of Posting?” she asked as she came closer “a lot of people find that very useful these days….”
“Er yes”
“….and the ‘Next Day Special Delivery’ is that something you might consider”.
By this time we were both on the polar bear skin rug. “Phoo it’s hot in here” she said and shrugged off her jacket revealing a sleeveless black silk top that set off her light tan but was having trouble restraining the gentle thrust of her breasts.
“I er…”
“Valerie tells me that you’re a big man for ‘International Signed For’. Is that right?” She was closer now and never once took her large brown eyes from mine. “Can I have a sip of your champagne?” She took the glass from my hand, our fingers touching for an electric instant, she sipped and returned the glass with a perfect semicircle of lipstick on the rim. She was standing as close now as was possible and not touch.
“Have you ever tried ‘Air-Sure’ ?”. She put her hand on my arm, I felt dizzy. “I think you might find ‘Air-Sure’ just the ticket”. Her lips moved closer to mine but then out of the corner of my eye I saw something in the fire that distracted me. It was an ‘International Signed For’ sticker. I bent and looked closer, the fire was no log fire it was a parcel fire. There were letters, packets, parcels, ‘Special Delivery 9.00am’s, ‘International Signed For’s, ‘Special Delivery Saturday Guarantees’ all ablaze. I turned back to her.
“What’s happening? This isn’t right!” but she had changed, her skin had yellowed and coarsened, her hair seemed grey. I felt time passing very fast and Mrs Winterbotham first became a cackling skeletal hag and then crumbled into bones and dust. I ran from the room, down the stairs and back into the main body of the Post Office. For a moment all seemed normal, the queue hadn’t moved an inch, but then I realised that the queue was petrified, mummified, skeletons clad in yellowing flesh and rags, a Royal Mail version of the Terracotta Army. I ran for the exit but as I did so the ghastly figures shuffled forward to bar my path. The horror was too much for me and I swooned and all went black.
I felt a prodding in my back. “Move along dearie” said the old lady behind me “Position 6” is available”. I was at the head of the queue and phew! It had all been an awful dream.

Great Shortcuts of Our Time

2008-04-06T23:31:00.001-07:00

1. The Strand – Embankment
Should you be stuck in heavy traffic on the Strand thinking “Oh I wish I was on the Embankment”, turn into Adam St, first right into John Adam St, second left into York Buildings and then almost immediately left into what appears to be an underground car park but is a street. Lower Robert St, this will take you down to Savoy Place, near the riverside entrance to the Savoy Hotel.

2. Don’t bother to brown your meat when making stews or casseroles. This comes from the TV series Nigella Express and the kitchen goddess has got it absolutely right. Every recipe since the dawn of time has started “First fry the meat until golden brown” (not that meat ever goes golden brown it just goes ‘abattoir grey’) and you don’t need to bother. It makes no difference it doesn’t “seal the flavour in”. Apart from this gem the rest of the series was pretty dull only enlivened by Nigella looking coquettish in cardigans that are too small for her. Incidentally “coquettish” doesn’t just mean looking a bit tarty while you open the fridge door it is also the name of a 17th century dish made from partridge feet and quince, traditionally served during Advent.

3. Orange St to Trafalgar Square via the National Gallery.
The back entrance to the National Gallery (free entrance) in Orange St is unimposing and usually deserted. There is a security man behind a desk, who doesn’t disturb incomers and once past him you have the choice of going upstairs or downstairs. Downstairs (if it is open) is a large gallery packed with paintings roughly arranged by century and hung densely packed on hessian screens. The total value of the art in the room is probably several billion but it looks like a West Country auction room. At the far end of the gallery stairs take you up to the front of the building.
The upper path is definitely quicker than the lower, once you have learned the route through the Rembrandts, Poussins, Tiepolos etc, but of course the whole point of this short cut is to be distracted. If you find yourself in the vicinity of the gallery with five minutes to spare, why not skip that cappuccino and go in and see something extraordinary and amazing. My personal favourite is a self-portrait by Madame Vigee-Le Brun which normally hangs in Room 33. The fact that it is by a woman is remarkable enough in a gallery where I think that she may be the only pre 1800 female artist and she has done herself proud. A sexy self confident artist gazes back at you, palette in hand, with blue eyes, full red lips, a straw hat with a jaunty feather, nice knockers and curls of grey hair falling down her neck. She can come to tea anytime.
My other favourite is the Tale of Patient Griselda told in Medieval comic-strip form on 3 panels painted in Siena around 1490. The panels are hung in the ‘Carbuncle’ Sainsbury Wing of the Gallery which is mostly cluttered up with dreary Madonnas with Child and silly haloes. Who first came up with the idea of haloes? At some point one artist must have thought “I know what I’ll do, I’ll paint the Blessed Virgin Mary with a golden frisbee behind her head” and instantly haloes became an industry standard across Europe. Anyway I will now relate the Tale of Patient Griselda just to show you that Renaissance men certainly knew how to have a good time. The Count of somewhere or other was out hunting in the forest when he met a poor but beautiful girl named Griselda. He asked her father’s permission to marry her, which was readily given, and then he proposed to Griselda but only on condition that she swore to be utterly obedient for evermore which she duly did. The Count took her back to his court where he stripped her naked in front of his courtiers before giving her a wedding dress and marrying her. In the fullness of time they had a son and daughter. While Griselda was asleep the Count took the children away and told Griselda that had had them killed. He then staged a fake divorce, stripped Griselda naked once more and sent her back to her father. After some years the Count came back and ordered Griselda to return and prepare his house for his new bride, a young and beautiful woman with a handsome brother. Griselda did as she was told and at that point the count finally revealed that the new ‘bride’ and her brother were in fact her own children whom she thought had been dead all those years. How Griselda must have chuckled! Bizarrely they lived happy ever after.

How to Put on a Musical 3 – The Director

2008-03-31T00:28:00.000-07:00

What does a director do? He/She tells the actors where to stand, tells them not to bump into the furniture. Well that at least is the common misconception. A Director does much more than that, a director manages the whole artistic side of the project and it’s best to get a good one.

Directors in my view broadly come in three grades.

The Dictator: Top of the range autocrat who knows what he/she wants and how to get it. They are the true auteur of the production and will mercilessly bulldoze anyone who gets in their way. They don’t give a damn who gets bloodied buttocks from the savage mistress that is Musical Theatre.

The Chairman: A democrat who ‘chairs’ the creative team, often a vegetarian, always happy to listen to reason, sees other peoples point of view, recognises the producer’s anxiety about the budget, understands the leading lady’s unwillingness to wear blue, is concerned about the band’s comfort, and doesn’t sleep with the turns.

The Flounder: A hopeless inadequate, out of his/her depth and the reason for this is that they may never have directed a West End musical before. It’s truly amazing the number of productions that are staged with someone at the helm who really doesn’t have the right experience and when the going gets tough (and the going doesn’t get much tougher than on a West End Musical) they crack. ‘Flounders’ tend to alcohol and drug abuse. They are prone to paranoia and self pity and at the end of the day they cast about for a scapegoat (normally the sound designer) to blame as the production careers downhill towards the cliff edge.

Quotes from the directorial front line:
The delightful George Roman expressed his lack of confidence in the product (in this case the lamentable 1988 Sherlock Holmes - The Musical at the Cambridge) as follows, “Jesus Christ this is shit! Why the fuck are we doing this?” This particular production held my personal ‘Golden Klunker’ award for many years.

Trevor Nunn: after the fire alarm went off twice in ten minutes on the first day of the ‘tech’ of Porgy & Bess at the Savoy, each time requiring a full evacuation of the building: “Ted! call the producers, we’re moving theatres”.

Nicholas Hytner: in the middle of a 1980 tech of Britten’s Turn of the Screw which was overdesigned, understaffed and out of control: “Why does it have to be like this?” A howl of directorial anguish, that sad to say was greeted by insensitive guffaws from backstage.

Anonymous: (for legal reasons but from the director of a musical currently running in the West End): “I don’t know what to do. I really don’t know what to do. I could go to the airport I suppose”. A sentiment shared by all of us at some point our career.

Project Model – Maintenance!
The producers of Maintenance! have offered the director’s position to some of the top names from both the West End and Broadway. All declined possibly put off by the general vacuousness of the concept or by composer Gunther Eisenkopf’s unnerving sense of humour. The final short list has come down to two names, the veteran Ronny Duveteen, whose recent production of Lilac Time at Chichester got reviews like “This is a load of camp old tosh, but I loved it” (Petersfield Evening Argus), and Kevin McHarrowing whose all-black production of Murder at the Vicarage at the Tricycle was well regarded and whose 14 hour production of The Long March, the story of Mao’s creation of the Peoples Republic told in words and music got reviews like “An ideal family show for the festive season” (China Peoples Daily, circulation 1.2 billion). The latter played over 3 nights at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre and Ernest Bigelow, the only member of the public who managed to stick it out through all 3 parts, said when interviewed later “Fantastic! An emotional roller-coaster. There were moments when I didn’t know if I was asleep or awake”.
The producers, Alvin Toxteth and Samuel J Bloodlust together with composer Gunther Eisenkopf met Duveteen for lunch and were impressed by his experience and wealth of anecdote. In fact by the time they hit the brandy at about 3.00pm they had only got as far as Duveteen’s early career as a dancer in Binkie Mottram’s Talk of the Town revue Footlight Floozies of 1964. By that point Eisenkopf was looking increasingly irritable and eventually broke into Duveteens’s anecdote stream shouting “If you don’t get your hand off my knee I vill focking kill you”. Toxteth sensing a clash between the German’s Heavy Metal background and Duveteen’s cosier showbiz origins hastily broke the meeting up. The producers’ doubts about his suitability were reinforced on their return to the office where PA Charlotte Gore-Wincanton reported rumours that Duveteen had outstanding legal issues arising from a recent holiday in Thailand.

The following day the group was joined by book writer Dermot O’Dainty for lunch with Kevin McHarrowing. Things went much better apart from Eisenkopf’s failure to understand much of McHarrowing’s heavily accented Glaswegian account of his early struggles to find sense and meaning in his Gorbals childhood. By 3.00pm they had got to the bit where McHarrowing’s Uncles Jimmy and Dougal hold up a Paisley bookies shop in order to raise money to build a set for their favourite nephew’s production of The Good Person of Szechwan at the local church hall. At this point O’Dainty broke in saying, ”Great! Fascinating, but what did you think about the script?” McHarrowing made his pitch. (I won’t bore the reader rendering his words into Glaswegian but just take it from me that like all Glaswegians he sounded uncouth and a little bit whiney).
“Well fellers when I opened the script my first thought, and I guess anybody’s first thought, when they read the script was ‘These people are insane. These people are stark raving mad.’ At first sight the idea that you could base a musical on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit is just plain daft but then as I read on I started to think perhaps these guys are on to something. The Skoda represents that something in our lives that we all strive for but when we achieve it we find that it just doesn’t work for us. Am I right?” At that point Eisenkopf and O’Dainty, who were so drunk when they conceived the piece, that they have no idea what the show is about, nod sagely. “And then I realised all of us in some form or other already own a Skoda and that the Skoda represents in emotional and cultural terms a return to….” McHarrowing continued in similar vein for some time and I won’t reproduce the remainder of his pitch here as it also forms part of his ‘First Day of Rehearsal Speech’ which I am planning to offer as a podcast. At the end of his preamble he produced 6 model Skodas that he had bought at Hamleys that morning, and proceeded to demonstrate to the production team his idea for the “Skoda Fandango Finale”. As he described the final moments he paused and looked round the evidently impressed production team and asked quietly “Guess what my first car was?” “A Skoda” whispered O’Dainty. McHarrowing nodded and this barefaced lie (his first car had been a Cortina that Uncle Dougal gave him once it had been wiped of fingerprints) got him the job.

The Spiders in My Shed

2008-03-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago while going on about music downloads I mentioned my shed and I may have given the impression that it is a chilly and unwelcoming place. Not so, my shed is not a garden shed with a flymo, balls of green string and a smell of creosote, my shed is paradise on earth. In my shed is my desk, a drawing board, groundplans of most UK theatres, 50,000 (roughly) postcards, 120 Eisenbahn Journals (a German railway magazine that has glossy pics of Dresden shunting yards and the like), 200 Model Railway Journals (this is as hard core as railway modelling gets), a bronze bust of Marshal Pilsudski, several hundred 54mm scale model soldiers, 2 rather good 19th century watercolours of Napoleonic scenes, and a lot of other stuff.

I also share my shed with a variety of insect species that feel it’s a great place in which to pupate and spiders with extremely long legs called Pholcus phalangioides. The latter presumably eat the unfortunate insects as they emerge from their pupal state making the shed not quite such a great place in which to pupate. On the whole these Daddy Longlegs spiders, as they are commonly known, lurk in the corners making untidy webs which they vibrate at frenzied speed if disturbed, but in the evenings they come out for a stroll. There is one that regularly ambles across the keyboard of my computer with all the casual elegance of an Edwardian toff on the river bank at Henley and as he, or more likely she, passes slowly from ‘Caps Lock’ to ‘Pg Up’ I study her closely, she completely unflustered by my close attention with a magnifying glass. Sometimes the spider will stop at ‘Y’ and turn left ascending the sheer cliff face of my laptop’s screen to disappear without pause over the back. My fascination with these lodgers prompted me to reread the chapter about spiders and their webs in Richard Dawkin’s “Climbing Mount Improbable”. This chapter answers all those questions about spiders and their webs that have been troubling you over the years. For instance, why don’t spiders get stuck in their own webs. Apparently they have the ability to exude different types of silk and they make the radial spokes of the web non-stick, the spiders using these spokes to rush out and disable their prey struggling in the sticky cross threads. The other question that has always bothered me is this, when you walk through a wood you come across a web stretched across the path 6 ft above ground level. Did the spider fix one end of the silk then drop down to the ground cross the path and climb the tree on the other side. No, what they do is make a kite which they float in the air paying out thread until it touches and sticks to the branch opposite. This book is also useful if you get stuck in a lift with religious enthusiast who believes that the world was created after tea on a Tuesday 4357 years ago and who challenges Darwinian theory by asking how the human eye could possibly have evolved. There is a chapter in Dawkin’s book describing exactly how the human eye might have evolved. My desk top may not be the Serengeti but these extraordinary, pale green semi transparent, hunters that live only 2 feet away behind the router box and the envelopes are a lot more interesting than all those dreary elephants, giraffes and rhinos that tramp across our TV screens nightly.

Apart from communing with nature the other great pleasure of shed life is listening to football on ‘BBC 5 Live’ on Saturday afternoons. I often have to invent a pressing professional crisis that demands that I retire to the shed to produce a rush groundplan/budget/schedule to enable me to do this. If you have never shared this pleasure the following will mean nothing to you.

5 Live at the Proms

Announcer: Lets go back to Alan Green and summariser Annex Footballer at the Albert Hall where the second half of tonight’s Prom is just under way.

Alan Green: Did you hear that! The flautist is obviously, and I mean obviously, 2 bars behind the rest of the orchestra and Herr Stickschift our so called conductor has done nothing, absolutely nothing about it. What do you make of that Annex?

Annex Footballer: (with mouth full) Sorry Alan I wasn’t listening. But I tell you something, these pies are excellent. Not as good as the pies at the Wigmore Hall but well up there.

Alan Green: I don’t know! These foreign conductors get paid a fortune and the flautist is getting away with murder! Anyway let’s go over to Cardiff where Mike Ingham has news from Welsh National Opera.

Mike Ingham: Yes Alan we’ve just heard that Peruvian tenor Enrico Singalotto will not be on tonight. Dressing room sources say that he is suffering from ‘an annoying little tickle at the back of the throat’. So at tonight’s performance of Tosca Cavaradossi will be sung by Owen Smallwelshperson, the young utility tenor recently signed from Swansea. Back to you Alan.

Alan Green: Thanks Mike. “An annoying little tickle at the back of the throat” what are today’s young singers like?

Annex Footballer: Couldn’t agree more Alan. In the old days John Vickers with “an annoying little tickle at the back of the throat” would have sung a full Ring Cycle without stopping for a glass of water and then have bitten the head off a whippet for an encore.

Alan Green: Quite right too. OK news from Stuart Hall at the Halle.

Stuart Hall: Ooharghroyalgargleloofahdropbelarusbabypowdermargeandpop-pop-music I know a bank where the wild thyme grows….

Alan Green: OK. Back here at the Albert Hall Maestro Stickschift has finally got the principal flautist under control and we are into the second movement of the concerto. What do you make of it so far Annex?

Annex Footballer: Well it’s a concerto of three movements..

Alan Green: Yes but clichés apart don’t you thick Herr Stickschifts performance has been lamentable?

Annex Footballer: No Alan. Apart from that little contretemps with the flautist I think his tempi have been both sensitive and intriguing. His colouring and lightness of touch have….

Alan Green: And don’t forget Classical 606. You can call me with your comments on tonight’s fixtures. We’d especially like to hear from anyone who was at the Bournemouth Symphony’s concert at the Les Dennis Memorial Hall in Droitwich where their new music director…...