I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip through 1980s music for the last few years and I've rediscovered some wonderful stuff.
My most recent re-find, however, is Cyndi Lauper. She's sometimes wrongly just seen as a kooky American artiste, but I've been delving into her back catalogue and there's some truly wonderful stuff there.
True Colours, Time After Time and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, plus her cover versions of I Drove All Night and I'm Gonna Be Strong, are songs that still absolutely stand up. And if there's a more joyful and celebratory love song than That's What I Think then I've yet to hear it.
Lauper's also still going strong and, most recently, won a Tony award for her work on the musical version of the Brit flick, Kinky Boots, and also released a 30th anniversary version of her debut album, She's So Unusual.
In summary, Lauper kicks all kinds of arse. And she's not kicking that arse yet!
Myself and the Missus recently went to see another recording of Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP), with Peep Show actor Robert Webb and film-maker Louis Theroux guesting.
RHLSTP has been going since 2012 is now in its fourth or fifth series. We were relative late-comers to this podcast series, but it's consistently excellent stuff.
The basic premise is that Herring interviews the great and the good of the comedy world, plus a few others, and, among the funny stuff, there's often some quite revealing moments and cracking anecdotes. Herring's naughty schoolboy persona and sometimes potty mouth is funny and his not-like-Michael-Parkinson-at-all interview technique is a thing of wonder. Herring-Nixon would have been much better than Frost-Nixon.
It's also a self-funded enterprise with income from the theatre audience and the online campaign encouraging people to donate barely covering the costs of the whole shindig.
My advice: RHLSTP is a free download so download and enjoy. But also donate some cash so it can continue. I did, the Missus did and the Boy did, too. So, if you download an episode and enjoy it, and end up downloading the entire back catalogue, then you probably should pay some cash, too.
It's well worth the paltry money its makers ask for in donations. Fact.
I am a magazine journalist and, as such, I have to browse lots of magazines. It's a professional interest thing.
Today, I read Hello. This should be renamed Look How Fucking RIch I Am! Go on! Fucking Look! Look Fucking Long And Look Fucking Hard And Be Jealous Of Us, Our Homes And Our Wealthy Lifestyles You Fucking Unwashed Scum.
It's just an idea. They may not go for it...
I remember reading the 1976 Caryl Churchill play, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, which is set in the period just before and just after the English Civil War, while I was at college. I thought it was a brilliant piece of theatre that explored so many diverse ideas about politics, sovereignty, state, ownership, government, religion, freedom and privilege.
I also loved the construction of the narrative and the quality of the writing.
Some 27 years on, I've finally seen my first production of the play, at the National Theatre, and it was a less memorable experience than that first read. The staging is inventive and very impressive, with a lord's banqueting table becoming a debating chamber, a soaked field complete with earth and various other locations.
But the National have used this production and its quite demanding script to experiment with a community company, which essentially means amateur actors working alongside a professional cast.
This works in one way because it allows for the production to have a much bigger cast than the budget probably allows. But the difference in standard between the professional cast and many of the amateurs is quite big, and that damages the production, particularly in the scenes where there are lengthy debates about political ideas and religious theories, which need incredibly skilled performers to breath life and vitality into them.
The idea of the community company is a noble one. As somebody who worked on large-scale community plays and grass-roots community arts projects in the 1990s, though, it genuinely sickened me to see lots of major theatres suddenly claiming ownership of the term 'community' if it meant they could soak up some new pot of funding in that period… and often take it away from long-established grass-roots projects who needed the funding and weren't just doing 'community' work to tick some box on a funding aplication.
It would worry me if the National was going down this route, even though politically I support the idea of a community company and the development of any real community project.
The play could have been better. The jury's out on the rest of it at the moment. I hope it succeeds, though. It's a brave idea. We shall see...
An occasional series of useful thoughts: Today, something Oscar Wilde may have said.
'All of us are in the gutter, but only a few of us actively choose to shit in wheelie bins as well.'
