Play Time...

It's the end of my five days off work to finish and revise the first draft of my play, Meat, before it goes in for the Vertity Bargate Award next week.

The play is about prostitiution in Victorian England and, with all the characters coming to a bad end, it basically argues that anyone who treats sex as a commodity is ultimately tainted by it and loses their humanity in the process.

Finishing and making the play much darker's been a bit of a grim process, but amid the gloom there's fun stuff happening. For a start we're finally getting the garden landscaped and the Boy's been at home too as he's finished his exams.

So here's what I've learnt with five days to write and ponder things...

i) You get what you pay for. We have paid top dollar for our garden people and they're doing a superb job. They arrived when they said they would, they've worked with minimum fuss and they've been astoundingly polite and upbeat about the whole job. And it looks great already and it's not even finished yet.

ii) I am rubbish at shaving. The Boy had his end-of-school Prom and he needed to have his first shave so he asked me to talk him through it – and it was only when we got under way that I realised how cack-handed I am when it comes to shaving. Between my idiocy and the fact my expensive Molton Brown shave wax didn't work it'll be a wonder if he ever wants to shave again. On the plus side he could form a ZZ Top tribute band.

iii) I am an obsessive martial artist. With my hapkido teacher away on honeymoon for two weeks I have been climbing the walls with no classes to go to. So much so that I organised a class between myself and another brown belt and actually felt like hugging her when she arrived at the Dojang. I did, however, feel less like hugging her when she executed a perfect wrist lock that had me yelping in pain.

iv) I am possibly the gayest straight man in the world. After class today I was on a real high as I cycled into town then trained and the endorphins were raging. In the changing rooms there was nobody about and after I'd showered I was singing along to Erasure on the radio and bopping around. I then caught sight of the naked me doing this. There are some versions of himself a man should never see...

v) Goats shed their coats. My Other Woman Who Loves Other Women is currently in charge of a theatrical goat in a play but the said goat, called Bruce, has apparently shed its coat and the play calls for a fully coated goat as it's a metaphor for raging sexuality or some such thing. It was a crisis for a while but apparently the goat coat is now back and the metaphor is intact.

That's quite a lot to learn in a week...

Other Woman News...

I forgot to mention that the Missus and the Other Woman, who is tomorrow heading to Paris to interview Russian clowns, shared a few drinks at the recent wedding we attended.

Sadly, rather than tell each other how great I was, they proceeded to swap stories about my general idiocy and kept turning around to me at five minute intervals to remark 'You really are an idiot!'

It was abuse in stereo.

No Laughing Matter...

Bernard Manning died last week and probably very few of my friends or family will shed a tear.

But I must admit that I found some of his gags quite funny – and to a middle-class, right-on, educated lefty like me this quite a guilty pleasure because at the end of the day he was a sexist, homophobe and racist.

Manning’s argument was that he was none of those things and that he picked his targets based on what he thought would get a laugh rather than what the political orthodoxy was at the time. So in many ways he always saw himself as very much an equal opportunities comedian as he didn’t discriminate or focus his gags on one particular race or group but instead let everyone have it.

But, of course, a lot of those gags did have black people as the butt of the joke, and if you tell enough of those jokes then the thinking is that it’s OK to use the dreaded ‘n’ word to describe black people. And the same argument follows with women or gay people.

Jim Bowen, however, did make the point that Manning’s humour was no worse than using a wheelchair user or a vomiting pensioner as a source of humour in Little Britain and I sort of see that.

Comedy is a serious business and the death of Manning temporarily opened up an interesting area of debate about what we can laugh at and what we can’t. And as a would-be comedy writer this is an area that does fascinate me.

So I’ll sign off with one of my favourite Manning gags – and before anyone gets upset please remember that Manning himself was from a family of immigrant Jews.

‘World War Two was tragic for my family because my father died at Auschwitz. He fell 40ft out of a watchtower and broke his spine.’

MP Watch...

Four months in and my local MP, Dawn Butler, still hasn’t replied to my letter asking her about EDM 595 on the Serious Fraud Office Investigation into the Al Yamamah Military Contract.

So I’ve dropped her an email in the hope that this will not get ‘lost in the post’! So far more than 100 MPs have signed up to this Early Day Motion to get the inquiry reopened but Ms Butler’s name is not on the list.

So maybe she thinks large-scale corruption and bribery to the tune of an alleged £1billion is OK as long as it tops up the national coffers.

Let’s hope not, eh, because she seems to have a strong sense of moral justice when it comes to marking the abolition of the slave trade and trying to defend local NHS hospital cuts. So let’s hope I’m not doing her a disservice…

From Russia With Love...

The Missus is away in Russia for the launch of a vacuum cleaner. Yes. That’s right. The launch of a vacuum cleaner.

The launch is in Red Square as the vacuum is called the Revolution or some such name and some clever marketing bods have decided that the iconic site celebrating one of the most repressive and paranoid communist regimes in history would be a great place to unveil this new domestic toy.

Whatever next? A new style of gas oven first seeing the light of day at Auschwitz. Or how about the launch of an atomic-powered kettle at Hiroshima? Words sometimes fail me…

Fortunately they rarely fail the Boy and, with the Missus away and him now done with his GCSEs, he’s doing sterling work keeping up his end of the torture-the-idiot pact that he and the Missus sealed in blood long ago.

Tonight was a case in point.

I’d cycled home in time to listen to the John Taverner premiere concert on Radio 3. Now I’m hardly a classical music scholar but I like Taverner and I was planning on going to see this live at Westminster Abbey until the Missus went to Ruskieland and I ended up on Boy duty.

But I arrived home to listen to the concert live and cook tea for me and the Boy. So we’re sat at the table and I ask him if he likes the music.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I hate classical music.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘It was so rubbish I can’t remember…’
‘You’ll find something you like eventually.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it… Anyway I have trouble hearing it at the moment…’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re eating too loudly!’

The Missus often complains that I eat too loudly. But the nutcase I married has, on several occasions, even complained that I breathe too loudly too. Now the Boy has picked up on this theme and taunts me with it any time he can be arsed. I defend myself.

‘I don’t eat loudly…’
‘You do. It’s like an alien sound effect from a John Carpenter film.’
‘I eat at the same volume as everybody else!’
‘Look… You believe that if it’s what makes you happy but you eat with your mouth open.’
‘I only open my mouth to put food in it!’
‘Look. I know you know you do it, Mum knows you know you do it and the only person who seemingly doesn’t know it is you. And you know what that makes you?’
‘In need of help?’
‘No. It makes you an idiot!’

Patronised and insulted in the same exchange. His mother would be so proud…

Wedding Daze…

My martial arts instructor got hitched at the weekend and, as one of the senior students at the academy, I was lucky enough to get an invite.

The ceremony was very touching and the newly marrieds both looked fabulous. The whole day was great fun with lots of other senior belts from the academy present and we even had the Drifters to dance the night away to.

And dance we did – with the Missus throwing off ten years of reluctance and embarrassment and finally getting on a dancefloor with me. To actually dance with me! The Other Woman, who was also present and is well versed with my wife’s reluctance to dance with me, said I looked utterly stunned when she got on the dancefloor and we didn’t leave it for two hours.

The Other Woman Who Loves Other Women was also present and I met her very lovely other half. In fact it was a bit of an academy love-in with our Grand Master also making the trip from Chicago – and taking to the dancefloor with his wife and stealing the show with a very polished routine.

As he was over for the weekend the senior belts had a class with him in the morning and he was as impressive and inspiring as ever, bending his body into shapes that no 70-year-old man should be able to, correcting techniques here and encouraging there. And it was great for me because for the first time I actually realised I could do everything I was asked and I was actually getting quite competent.

Big mistake as I then started to relax and really enjoy matters and as the session neared its end I’d relaxed so much that I didn’t see a side kick head straight towards my nuts. Ouch! Fortunately my opponent pulled her kick as soon at it had made contact but it still bloody hurt. Fortunately I was having such a positive time that I was soon back up and running, if a little high voiced!

There’s a moral there. Somewhere…

The Apprentice…

So it’s over for yet another year and yet another halfwit won a six-figure salary with Alan Sugar while the far superior runner-up ended up with bugger all.

But next year viewers may get a worthy winner as there'll be an additional credible candidate on board – because I’m applying.

So here’s my letter:

Dear Sir Alan

I’m a journalist who’s thoroughly disillusioned with his chosen career so I’ve decided to have a go at this business lark. Because, let’s be honest here, if countless, dimwit, cocaine-fuelled, City-boy tossers can earn fortunes by following share prices and predicting obvious market trends then it’s can’t really be that hard, can it?

And let’s face it, if it’s a salesman you’re after selling is pretty easy if you’re smart enough to pick a decent product and know where your market is (although if I was charged with selling the Amstrad Video Phone it would probably beat even me).

I’m also stupidly organised and, unlike the bulk of the people who make it onto your telly show, I wouldn’t spend countless hours farting around with mood boards when the task was buying a toilet brush or making a calendar.

My main strength is a calm, intelligent, common-sense approach – but that probably wouldn’t be very good to watch when compared to idiots floundering around making total tits of themselves.

And, now I think about it, I’m not enough of a stereotype (aggressive Tre, posh dimwit Rory, bitchy ice queen Katie, etc) for viewers to get an easy understanding of, so it’s probably better that I don’t apply at all.

Which is a shame because I think you’re actually quite funny (which is more than be said of that twat Donald Trump).

Yours truly

A nearly potential candidate

Wise Words…

The Boy is in the middle of his GCSEs.

He’s worked pretty hard throughout his school career and he’s also cracked on with his revision so we’re all hoping he’ll be OK. At worst we’re confident he’ll get good enough exam grades to start his A Levels and at best… Well, me and the Missus could be losing a lot of cash through our success incentive scheme – or bribery as it's called in other cultures.

The best thing about him, though, is the fact he’s not stressed or phased by it all. He’s always been a remarkably laid-back kid so this should not come as a surprise but he’s refused to be panicked in any way, shape or form.

The Missus asked him why he wasn’t getting stressed and he simply replied:

‘Because you can’t let that shit mess with your head.’

It took me nearly three decades to learn that. I think he should get a qualification just for displaying that type of maturity. I may start a campaign…

Blind Light...

Me and the Missus ended our week of culture by going to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward – and it's brilliant. Utterly compelling.

Gormley is the man who created the Angel Of The North and most recently his work entitled Event Horizon can be seen dotted around the London skyline along either side of the Thames. This 'free art' takes the form of bronze casts of Gormley's body standing on top of various London buildings and the idea is that it makes people look up and interact with their environment more.

Two of his bronze body casts are also positioned on opposite sides of the pavement on Waterlooo Bridge and I happened to be cycling over the bridge when workmen were installing them. I was a bit thrown as I thought somebody was trying to steal them rather than install them but now they've become one of the pleasures of my ride home.

The Hayward exhibition features various body casts and installations but the eponymous Blind Light is the work that steals the show.

It's essentially a brilliantly lit glass room filled with dry steam but the steam is so dense that visibility ends at about 50cm so you have to very carefully negotiate your way around the room as well as the other people in it. It sounds very unnerving but it's actually great fun and it's one of the rare times I've been in an art exhibition where people are actually having a fun experience and talking and laughing about it.

The other major massive work at the exhibition is called Space Station and it's 27 tonnes of different-sized metal boxes with square holes punched through them. They're all welded together and the whole piece looks as though it's precariously balanced on its edge, but as you look through the holes and the spaces inbetween it's a bit like an industrial children's climbing frame where you actually want to physically clamber through as well as look at the spaces inbetween the boxes.

Allotment II is also a large piece comprised of 300 rectangular block sculptures representeing the height, width and size of the 300 volunteers who took part in the 'modelling' process. These individual pieces fill a huge room and it's like a maze of anonymous people, until you start walking through them and working out their dimensions and how they differ from the other pieces. It's like blank puzzle where you give the individual bits meaning but only by comparing them to the other bits.

Gormley's work is about the relationship between the body and the spaces it inhabits (or so it says in the Hayward brochure) and I fully get that after seeing this exhibition. It's clever without being smug and interesting without being academically alienating.

Artists I like, whether they’re poets, writers, playwrights or painters, either explain the world to me in a way I fundamentally connect with or they make me look at the world in a slightly different way.

Gormley does the latter for me and I'm now a convert to his work.

The Future Is Unwritten...

The Missus is an old punk who adores the Clash and it's a love she passed onto the Boy, who used to fall asleep in his pirate ship bunk beds listening to London Calling and Combat Rock.

My own dalliance with punk came when I was nine and myself and three friends formed a punk band called the Danglers. We couldn't play instruments of any description, but we had album cover artwork all prepared and another of our friends also came up to us and asked the immortal question: 'Can I be a Dangler too?' We were pretty rubbish punks to be fair.

But Joe Strummer wasn't and The Future Is Unwritten is a film charting the life of this godfather of the punk movement.

And it's bloody good, capturing Strummer's rise to prominence as the frontman of the Clash, his subsequent removal from the limelight and his return to performing with the Mescaleroes. It's not quite a warts and all portrait, but it's informative, funny and even moving.

In short it's a massively accessible film about a fascinating man.

US And Them…

I fear I’m becoming a racist, a big bigot and a hate monger of the worst kind.

That’s because I am starting to loathe Americans. Fortunately it is not all Americans as I have several friends from the US who I know to be reasonable, decent, fair-minded and level-headed people. So it’s not them (but then again they have been over here for a while now so many of our better national characteristics – fair play, calmness, self-depreciation, irony – have probably rubbed off on them).

No. I’m talking about the others. Specifically that gaggle of loud-mouthed wannabe sophisticated yummy mummies who brought their scrapbag of ill-mannered kids to the cinema yesterday. Yes, that’s you, the same awful bints who then proceeded to let the little brat bastards talk all the way through the film, despite everyone else’s attempts to politely ask them to convince their kids to be quiet.

And I’m also talking about the loud-mouthed, lard-arsed dummies who happened to be following me and the Missus around the surrealism exhibition at the V&A today. Yes you, you fucking idiots, who not only decided to have VERY LOUD discussions about the meaning of surrealism, but also managed to mispronounce the name of every artist and get every fact your hamburger-eating mouths uttered entirely wrong – then to top it all off dismiss the entire movement with the following sentence ‘Well, surrealism was never very big in the States any how.’

Lots of things are clearly not very big in the States – like manners, education and healthy eating if you idiots were anything to go by – but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world dismisses them as unimportant.

Anyway. Rant over. I’m now going to read some Arthur Miller or Mark Twain and listen to some Steve Reich to restore my Yanks Are OK equilibrium…

PS. The surrealism show was fantastic. A really well laid-out, well-planned and superbly researched exhibition. The exhibits were wonderfully bizarre too.

PPS. Magritte is not pronounced Mah-grit and never has been.

PPPS. Dali is not pronounced Dalai as in Dalai Lama. Even by people undergoing speech therapy. You utter prize idiots…

Movie Madness!

Me and the Missus have a week off work and, as the Boy is in the middle of his exams, we’re not going away. So we’ve decided to glut ourselves on movies and do other cultural stuff so here’s what we’ve seen so far:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End
The first film was smart, had a good villain in Geoffrey Rush and let Johnny Depp steal the show with his comedy pirate turn. Even the second one, while not as good as the first, had many good moments. But the third instalment of this shiver-me-timbers saga is shockingly bad. It has no coherent plot or character development, it’s about 45 minutes too long and it relies on a tidal wave of CGI to cover up its tsunami of deficiencies. The projector cocked up ten minutes from the end at the cinema we saw it at and I wasn’t actually all that bothered if it started working again.

The Prestige
A really smart mystery thriller with Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Michael Caine about two rival magicians who are determined to outdo one another. Throw in a murder, some excellent performances and several plot twists and it’s an utter winner. It’s so good even a cameo from David Bowie can’t ruin it!

Jindabyne
Directed by Ray Lawrence, the same fella who did the superb thriller Lantana, this Aussie drama focuses on a group of four friends who discover the dead body of a murdered Aboriginal girl while on a fishing trip and, bizarrely, decide to carry on fishing rather than immediately report their find. The film follows the fallout from this decision and how the quartet deal with the reactions of their own families and the wider community when this secret breaks. A bit of a slow burner but a worthwhile and fascinating piece of film-makming. Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney are excellent as the marrieds struggling to come to terms with the fisherman husband’s behaviour.

The Christ Of Coldharbour Lane…

I attended a theatre discussion earlier this year where Oladipo Agboluaje was one of the panellists and I liked him a lot. He was funny, unassuming and quite smart with the ability to nutshell a point without boring the arse off everyone.

So I’m glad I liked his play, The Christ Of Coldharbour Lane, currently on at Soho Theatre in Dean Street, London.

This satire follows a former mental patient who hooks up with a Christian mission in Brixton to spread the Word. Unfortunately he’s not massively interested in the message of the mission as he’s convinced he is the Messiah come to wake slumbering Brixtonians out of their consumerist sleepwalk.

But nobody will believe him until he performs a miracle – and when he does all hell breaks loose…

The writing is very strong and Agboluaje’s dialogue is sharp and funny. Some of the script feels like it needs a bit of a trim and the cast were still feeling their way a little bit on the second night, but it’s a wonderfully funny, moving and even thought-provoking piece.

And it’s an all-black cast, which is something you don’t see in the West End too much.

The directing by Paulette Randall is also worth mentioning, too, as it’s very fluid with actors playing several roles and slipping in and out of costume and character on stage.

It’s very much an ensemble piece but Jimmy Akingbola as would-be Messiah Omo is very strong, the Smoking Room’s Nadine Marshall as his friend Dona is nicely underplayed and Dona Croll is at turns very funny and a little bit tragic as hooker/stripper Maria Maudlin.

All in all it’s a pretty fab night out.

Little Green Men...

Apparently the Imperial War Museum is currently hosting a Camouflage Exhibition.

Let's hope everybody can find their way in. And out...