 The last show we were in together had Chippendale furniture, so this is a bit of a come dpwn! Wrestling the walrus was a hard work, but turned into a truly great play, and I'm proud of the way we all created it. I said to Leanne, (best actor you could ever hope to work opposite & lovely, giving lady too), before the last show in London that I wished so much that I could go back to day one of rehearsals for this. When you’re out of work, (fuck..it's not resting even as a joke), as I had been from fully paid acting work anyway, for just over 2 years before this, you dream about being in rehearsals for a great play and a particular dream of mine has been to be rehearsing in the Royal Exchange’s Swan street rehearsal studios. Funny how things work out. Of course I envisaged a more traditional way of working, 3 weeks of learning script/stage directions, working on intricacies of character & the 4th fine tuning & polishing it up for performance. If Dan, the director… (though he preferred the title lead artist), of 154 Collective had told me all about how Wrestling the Walrus was going to be approached back in November when I did a day’s workshop with him & the musicians, then I’d forgotten. 6 months on, I meet up with him at a lovely girl called Emma’s house in Flixton, SE Manchester, (just around the corner from a church my dad designed 50 years ago), where we meet up for some pre show filming and she’s my on screen wife in the visual elements of the show. I ask him when we’d get a script and he said there’s no script, it’s all going to be devised! Cue mixture of shock and also excitement. Never really done any devising before, though my old friend John Dunne, with whom I had a very pleasant catch up with the other day, was quick to point out that working with him I’d devised a lot of my own lines without it being a requirement!  Well I can sit here for as long as you & the band can, until you remember the line you just devised! I’d always loved hearing about how Mike Leigh worked devising dialogue around a basic structure of a screenplay, but this was going to be something else. Back in November I remember Dan saying that him and Paul, aka Fabric Lenny, artist were going to shut themselves away in a remote log cabin in North Yorkshire in January to create the thing. Apparently though this was to create the concept rather than a script.  Best Actress ever. Leanne not me! Working with Leanne Rowley…(Goddess, super woman and easily the best actor, I’ve ever worked with) made the process a hell of a lot easier, often I’ve joked that Leanne has been my carer both on stage and off in all this. We got some great reviews, the Observer/Guardian called it 'Bold & inventive" even it did fail to mention the actors & musicians but its tone was positive. It gave Dan credit for the script, sadly there was no programme or details made available to press, informing them that it was a devised piece, that Leanne & I had written this script as much as Dan. We did get five & four star reviews from online review sites who more fairly appraised it, and at the time of writing I am still trying to coax 2 agents, both Leanne's ex & current agency to take me on, one saw it, one didn't & I may or may not get a meeting with the one that couldn't make it. Trying to keep positive about this, as think it was a great showcase for me, but who knows?  Nonchalant look inside my Royal Exchange dressing room. The biggest excitement about all this going into it, was the prospect of working at the Royal Exchange Theatre! Oh how I wish, I could get over myself with this venue… for fuck sake! But the place is deep, deep rooted in my psyche, ever since seeing plays here 40 years ago, even writing asking for any sort of job here when my dad was alive, (he helped me with the letter), only for them to not think at interview that this 17 year old, (still 10 years off getting confidence to act, never mind to live), intensely shy and head in the clouds, big lug was probably not someone it would’ve been productive having around, and understandably! I’ve frequently bored anyone who’ll care to listen with the oft repeated “I’ll never really feel I’ve become an actor til I work here” like it’s a whimsical benchmark I’ve imposed on myself for success. And of course by ‘here’ I mean inhabiting the magical lunar module of the Exchange’s main house, although the studio space has been wonderful and it’s just been a childish thrill to hang out here, come and go though the stage door and frequent the green room! You could easily say too much of my mind is romantic shit, but then again, rightly or wrongly it’s that romantic shit that is actual pretty hugely bloody well important, frames my life and helps me get to levels of emotion as an actor.  I think I was one sandwich short of a picnic! Working with Leanne was easy, she is such a giving actress, she had the right attitude throughout, sure she’s worked for Dan & 154 before and knew their way of working, but also she knew how use her time for the best & most productive results. I feel she and the very excellent band of musicians, Nick, Hayley & James held this show together. It must have been hard for her with her because a lot of her time was no longer her own, with a 5 month old baby Nia to care for, cutest baby ever, though she never made it seem hard, just like her performance. In the first week she sent me a beautiful little message on WhatsApp one evening saying how she was thankful to me making it easier for her. I hope she still felt that after all the rest of the weeks had passed, because I wasn't easy!  Director Dan Mallaghan on his knees to production manager, Matt Sykes-Hooban begging him to try & manage me! Dan was adamant that I had to be at least 10 years older than my age, their synopsis of my character, that made it onto the show fliers description was of an elderly man meeting a young woman on a park beach” I made him a little younger than I think they were set on, in fact an ageing punk as I thought of those who saw the Sex pistols, the Damned & The Clash first time round would have 10 years on me anyway and I didn’t want him to be traditional old man. A fella in the audience at the after show Q&A said he thought this brought home dementia far more powerfully, as he was a first time punk, and that old punks not only become old men but get dementia too. Dan’s main mantra throughout was that the play was not about dementia but rather about storytelling. This proved to be a battle to stay on track of this philosophy, right up to and beyond opening night, as before press night he wanted to 'glitch up' Mog’s only real lucid moment in the show, the wrestling story that I’d devised, but to his credit he changed his mind because I think the storytelling was absolutely paramount to this play being as good as it was.  Almost obligatory that every show I do has either a park bench or a suitcase! A feature of collaboration which impressed me was Dan’s ability to take literally everyones ideas on board. There must have been pressure on him. I don’t think I could’ve worked under these conditions as a director. I'm grateful to Dan for the opportunity, and to Leanne without whom I wouldn't have been considered. I do feel very lucky to have been a part of this I really do, working with some of the best creatives around, and most of all I really miss it now, it wasn't long enough a run. There’s talk of doing it again at some future date dependent on funding and I hope so, I put a lot into this play, it truly was a collaboratively devised piece and it’s to all our credits that we came up with a play that deserved to be seen, still deserves to be seen, and above all is a credit to the banner of excellence of the Royal Exchange Theatre, the greatest theatre in the world. I wrote this last sentence in a thank you email to Bryony Shanahan the forthcoming new co AD at the Exchange who came to see the show. Hope she really liked it. She ought to have done, even if it was still a bit raw in it’s previews when she saw it. Talking of raw, the rawness and the fact that we filmed everything so Dan could often write up our lines from the video, took me right back to City Acting Studio Salford 1991-92 where as I’ve said before I got my acting mojo. Funny these rehearsals put my mojo trough the grindstone with the same process, but I’ve come out the other side a little stronger and much, much wiser. So all good.  That's my patronus that is. It's a big cry baby Walrus! Crying was a big part of this show, for myself and Leanne. There were 3 moments in this play where I had to cry big time. Was that too many? I think not, because all were valid. Lots of people said to me that Leanne and I have real chemistry. We really fucking do! I’ve never found this with any other actor that I’ve ever worked with, I’ve often heard critics going on about chemistry between actors or bemoaning the lack of it and often wondered about it.. But this was powerful first hand evidence of it. It was there when we worked on Mr Browns Directions in Hull, felt it very strongly. It’s easy to get moved by her. Sad thoughts help of course too and the most powerful thought I had was something I didn’t and wouldn’t say to Leanne, for fear she’d think it sounded creepy, though I almost know she wouldn’t. It’s the big regret that I’ve never been a dad and looking into this beautiful young woman's eyes who could very well be my daughter that I’d forgot and of course she was in this, and I believed it for that moment. What I will take away from this experience mostly is a completely different take on dementia. I still consider it a horror, but the humanity behind this attack on humanity and losing your memories doesn’t make you less human. That stories are important to everyone, regardless of whether they have dementia or not. I like telling my oft repeated stories, so does my mum and to never begrudge anyone the joy in recanting their stories/memories even if you have heard them a million time before. Anyway here’s my first & only week of rehearsal diary entries, just so I can big up the moment of being an actor in a Royal Exchange show!  Mon 3rd June 2019, if certain photos were portals back in time. Mon 3rd June At The Royal Exchange, I’m excited sitting in the Green room an actor in a Royal exchange show, (even if it’s not one actually in the wonderful, magical lunar module), before the others arrive. Leanne arrived with her baby, Nia, really cute baby & her mum, Gail helping her. Director Dan Mallaghan, Paul (aka Fabric Lenny, visual artist ) & Yvonne, who took the original photo that I was poster boy for and filmed the visuals that are going to be in the show. Amy Clewes the Royal Exchange’s producer is there and she’s lovely warm & friendly. She takes us to do a meet and greet in the hospitality suite overlooking St Anns Square everyone mingles for a few minutes in pairs I seem to be the only one without a close confederate ! Then Amy gets everyone into a semi circle and we all introduce ourselves, Director of Creative Learning, operations etc, (women are strongly represented here, predominant, which is really great). I just say I’m Nik actor in Wrestling the walrus & try to appear all nonchalant & professional actor like not at all phased by being at the greatest theatre in the world! Afterwards I admit to Amy how much I love the Royal exchange and have been coming here since seeing 12th Night & she mentions Tom Courtenay’s name before I do, who’s Malvolio in the 1978? version was the one I was alluding to, even though the Exchange did it again a couple of years ago (a version I desperately wanted to Belch in & wrote to caster JKS begging him to see me for, although I don’t tell her this!) She seems genuinely interested Then we all walk the 10-15 min walk to the Royal exchange’s rehearsal studios on Swan Street, me hobbling away after still suffering with ankle injury and Amy shows us building, gives us a talk on how we all have the right to work in a safe environment, bullying in the workplace etc and gives us electronic key fobs for the doors. While the set is being slotted together, it’s a massive pre built thing in segments, a grassy mound with a park bench on it and a 4 sided wooden framework which they call a pagoda, but which really is a pergola! It’s already visually arresting without the visual effects which will be projected onto it’s back screen. Dan, Leanne and I are sat in kitchen & Dan gets all his notebooks out with his story ideas and bullet points as well as Fabric Lenny’s nightmarish drawings. He says that he doesn’t want this to be a play about dementia, but rather a play about storytelling and the millions of little memories that define us. Also touched on types of dementia & he’s settled on ‘Lewy bodies’ which is specifically one involving hallucinations which he wants, particularly a cat! Tues 4th June Paul (Fabric Lenny) & Yvonne (are they a couple? , are there when I arrive, Dan & Leanne, without baby Nia today soon after. This morning we’re going to be filming bits for a trailer on the set so close ups panning across my face and Leanne writing post it notes, which are a common thing associated with reminding dementia sufferers to turn things off, not to forget keys on leaving house etc etc. They record me audibly saying things “ Let me tell you a story about my life” After lunch we head over to the Exchange again where we’re going to be filming a nightmare sequence that I have in a maze of corridors and cages suggesting my mind I guess. We’re in the bowels of the Royal exchange, there’s an underground car park which I never knew about and we go through a little door into what is used as the theatre’s archives department. Amy from the exchange is with is even gets to participate as we are all filmed by Yvonne from the back of our heads. A light mounted on the camera is the only light we have, back & forth, meandering around the passages. I say to Amy how funny it is to be filming my characters memory of a nightmare when I am surrounded by so many happy memories of my past in the form of royal exchange programmes, posters and photos of past shows. Wed 5th June Just Leanne, Dan & I today, so first day of working on the play properly. Leanne has worked with 154 before knows Dan’s methods, there’s an understanding between them, so I feel a bit vulnerable as an outsider from their way of working. Dan likes his vignettes. 10 second scenes to suggest things like passage of time, try to get my head round what at first seems quite a ‘bitty’ way of working whilst not wanting to be closed to their way of working and willing to embrace it, initially find it hard to grasp and understand, but it does seem quite an effective tool. Get ever such a lovely message from Leanne on WhatsApp in eve reassuring me by telling me she is grateful to me for making her return to work after baby so easy, which is so lovely. She obviously senses my difficulty with this process She is such a very sensitive & considerate woman and I could want no better actor to work opposite Thurs 6th June Had a really good morning, most rewarding rehearsal so far going through the ‘wrestling’ scene, my big monologue bit telling story of how I wrestled a bear or it might have been a tiger or a walrus. I’d come up with names for the wrestling characters for example a big fat hairy wrestler who looks the spit of Pavarotti called Pulverotti geddit!!!? And who’s entrance is to the strains of Nessun Dorma, and me with my once physique of an Ancient Greek hero Jason who arrives in a golden fleece robe! Initially I wanted heroically to save the bear but Dan says he doesn’t want the character to be too compassionate, or to care about this in a way he says that people back in the day didn’t! Or said inappropriate things. Sweeping generalisations aside, I'm just glad he let me be the ageing punk rocker that I'd come up, though remains to be seen whether what we came up with ends up in the play, as after filming us do the scenes he’ll write them up over the weekend. The afternoon’s a bit of a blur as to what we actually did, (I keep thinking even if inappropriately that this play about a muddled mind is muddling mine), but we did come up with names for the characters. Well Fabric Lenny had apparently already come up with Meg for my missus. I’d thought of Max for me, and Dan wasn’t keen on two names the same letter, not even a hint that Meg was up for negotiation, but he let me keep Max but Max known as Mog! Meg & Mog. I thought straight away of Mog the Forgetful cat! No-one else seemed to & I said nothing as that appealed to me! Shared a vulnerable story with Leanne on a break touching on without elaborating on feelings that I’ve had a couple of times in plays when I’ve felt so vulnerable that I’ve feared I could be replaced. Dan came in on this and Leanne although well meaning, brought him into this private moment, cheerfully saying to Dan something like “Well Dan’s not going to fire you are you Dan?” To which Dan said No…pause… ‘not yet anyway!” I am too bloody honest for my own good sometimes! Friday 7th June. So we started to structure the play. Dan has a role of paper like wallpaper rolled out on the floor and we were sitting around arranging bits of card on it from my story, Leanne’s story, where our memories meet in real time & memory. I let Leanne do the writing down & arranging of things, whilst I neatly folded & tore the paper into strips, trying to get my head round the process. in truth this chart was giving me a headache, like diagrams in school used to do! We went through the first scene in the afternoon and Dan wants a false start, I liked this idea at first bit then Dan mixed it up and seemed to throw out all the truthful thought processes that we’d found, connected to the order a sandwich box, sketch book etc were brought out and my thing about 2 ways up the hill thing into an entirely different and random order confusing things. At this stage I don’t understand enough about dementia to be able to know that what I’m doing is convincing. It’s a bit more like OCD the way Dan’s having me do stuff just now, maybe that’s right, I don’t know, don’t think he does, and I know he wants to show good practice in all of this with it. A woman called Clare was supposed to be coming in to talk about this but Dan had made a mistake on the days. Are we in the care home or are we on the hill. Dan was initially adamant we were in the care home in this first scene, although now to his credit, he’s not sure himself and is thinking that this is a real memory. Or is he? I think he wants the whole hour or so of the play to be in ‘real time’ where I’m on the hill in my world, Leanne’s in the care home humouring me with my stories & trying to get me to eat, sleep etc, and there’s a third dimension (or fifth!!!) where we meet. We’re into like dance territory here with me, my kryptonite!! By that I mean doing something that I’m not enjoying, can’t seem to get right, makes me weak, lessens my powers, erodes my mojo and I know I’m apologising too much! There’s a lot going to be going on in the play, with the same visual imagery that’s in a lot of 154’s plays and I can't help feeling the actors are quite a bit down down the priority order here, but even if that's true, that’s just the way they work and I have to accept that & mustn’t let that worry affect my getting there with the character and any of the ‘effects’ distract me. SO at the end of the first week, looking ahead to the next & with 3 weeks to go today til opening night, what I need to most is convincingly portray this man going through this thing. To not get upset by it, as I am likely to do looking into its effects more deeply. It may prove to be one of the most difficult acting jobs I’ve ever had, but if I can smash this & turn in a great performance I will be happy, even more if I can make an impression with the Royal Exchange. I believe Mog’s spirit is still there even though it’s fragmented by the dementia and my spirit as Nik shall not be broken either. I MUST BELIEVE IN MYSELF, do what I think is right for the good of the play and the truth of the character and always, ALWAYS strive to keep good SPIRIT.  The whole crew apart from Dan, Dan you shoulda been in here! From L-R Leanne, James, Chris (lighting designer), Hayley, James & Mog the forgetful cat! x  It was looking a bit tarnished before they put it up. But I was proud of it none the less! x
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 Jacqueline Jones. My lovely friend. Memories are such a huge part of what makes us human. I am about to start working on a play where the characters memories are under attack from dementia, making him less a human? Well that is something I have to disprove. How terrifying to forget your life, even the regrets and the bad things, for they shape you and you hopefully learn from mistakes. Personally I spend a lot of time making the mistake about thinking about romantic disappointments and the dream desire to be loved by someone who I equally love has become unfortunately a lifetime quest. One of my favourite movies, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘ deals intelligently and brilliantly with erasing the memory of a lover from the memory, in a dream like science fiction & delightfully imaginative, if splendidly silly way. It is ultimately a hopeless scenario when 2 such lovers romantically find each other all over again, because they of course have not lost the ability to found new memories. But would you want to have past love remembrances erased anyway? With me I wouldn’t even want the memory of love that never got off the ground erased. Even though I do so apparently love to morbidly dwell on such memories and frequently, indulgently beat myself up with them. But some memories are to be cherished & to lose them is to lose the person and you feel this most acutely when that person has gone, and I have just heard that a woman I loved very much has died. I met Jacqueline Jones over 20 years ago through tour guiding in London and I fell in love with her. She never reciprocated, she was in a relationship and eventually married and had children, moved away, but still wanted me to be her friend. It is to my lasting regret that I selfishly wouldn't let her be. She died of a brain tumour, and apparently just 7 weeks after complaining of headaches, I had not thought about her for quite a few years, but her dying as made me full of sorrow and I am reminded just how much I did love her and even though I thought I'd got over her, wonder if I actually had, wonder why I’d jealously unfriended her 3 or 4 years ago. Was not allowing myself to be her friend, just a silly way of taking it out on her for in many ways epitomising my inability to find lasting love? So I’ve written her a letter to try my best to explain, to say sorry to her, in a way that I am now heartbreakingly denied doing in life. In my crazy mind I'm imagining this letter going out to you in the ether to reach her sometime in an eternity where there is no time and I hope indulgently & selfishly she will some time remember me and miss me as much as I miss her, and call me deluded or sad or anything else as disturbed, but I miss her terribly. May 31st 2019 Dear Jacqueline. You will never see this and if you can, I know just now you rightly wouldn’t notice anyway as your focus will be comforting your children & Barney, who at this moment will be terribly missing you more than I could ever imagine. I’m crying as I write this and it’s sorrow for myself as much as the fact that I won't see you again , sorrow how I lost you as a friend, because of my own jealousy & stupidity. I only knew you for a short number of years, and you had a huge life afterwards that I never knew about and chose not to be a part of, even though I could have. We were last in contact on Facebook 4 years ago when you commented on a picture of my dad that I’d posted for his birthday, saying that he looked Welsh. It takes someone Welsh to know someone Welsh and you were right! I shut you out of my life because of romantic disappointment. I took it out on you for being my biggest. And no shit, you were. Not that we ever were romantically involved. I desired you strongly, but you didn't or wouldn't see me like that. I remember the New Years eve Millennium running like an attention seeking little child away from central London’s revellers and the chance of spending it with you & your intended Barney Spender! It was jealousy, pure jealousy that you loved him & not me. I ran to my friend Therese’s house near Bromley. I remember one particular night of many, many, many nights in a pub with you, it was ‘The Ring’ in Southwark where we’d spent nights before in the good company of others, enjoying their lock ins, but this late night it was just you & I left, others had gone. We both had had a lot to drink, as usual. We both were in that dreadful Big Bus Company uniform, we rarely saw each other out of it, and we spent the bulk of every week daylight hours in it! I’d picked my time, as usual, horrendously badly and blurted out that I loved you fuelled by alcohol, but with no less sincerity. I think I may have been more calculating as you’d had a big spat with Barney, but my advances such as they were, were met with your wonderful scowl, a scowl I loved you so much for, and a ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, you don’t love me!” Or something like that. When you frowned it was amazing, your brow wrinkled on one side of your forehead spiralling complicatedly in to what I likened to a finger print. It was another feature I adored about you. You were a handful. I remember Liz Hogg saying that about you, and that wasn’t a criticism, from those of us who loved you dearly, it was a lovely fact, something we loved you for, and that’s a tremendous complement to you. Not many could be loved for being a handful! So you told me off for loving you, refusing to accept that I really did. You were the most intelligent woman I have ever loved or ever known and you may have been right, but I did love you. My saying I loved you, made me a handful for you, you were in a relationship and even if you had desired me, you wouldn’t have jeopardised that, and that was intelligent. Profoundly disappointing for me but sensible. But you knew I wasn’t sensible. I flatter myself that my being completely not sensible was one of the reasons you liked to hang out with me. But you would never have married me outside of my dreams, but that didn’t stop me loving you, and yes I really was in love with you and still am. I see pictures of your daughter Sydney now a young woman, who has inherited your beauty, who when last I saw her she was a young baby when I visited you at your home in Nunhead and I realise that a short time after that I just stopped knowing you, particularly when you moved away to France, though I became even more distant, you were a mum and have a son too, who I don’t know the name of. My desire for you was like a dusty antique that had been left there on the shelf and I realise as you surely did, that my attempts to block you out were simply a symptom of my never having moved on, of how I have consistently been disappointed and dread always being so, (I've long suspected that perversely I'm only attracted to unattainable women), If I’d met someone to be in overwhelming love with for always, I would have moved on and we’d have been the most brilliant friends. I’d never have not wanted you to be my friend. But I didn’t, I still haven’t and am terrified I never will, so all the shitty resentment and jealousy has been eating me up ever since. And it’s funny because I can still see you mouthing the word “bollocks” in response to this, but this time with a smile. And you will surely think, rightly what a rambling, pointless, self centred, self indulgent outpouring all this is, and it is. I’m sorry I missed out on being your friend, all the times you came to London, which you loved and I could've valued the pleasure of your company, instead of cutting that pleasure off in spite of my happiness. I miss all the laughter and all the good times we made out of the soul destroying tour guiding, and being thwarted in not being able to do what we wanted. I am so happy you found actual happiness and I can see you smiling sweetly and your beautiful, beautiful face and now a playful “fuck off!" You were fearless, it was just like you the time that you rounded on a threatening bunch of Mayday rioters at the foot of Nelson’s column after graffiti had been daubed all down Whitehall, telling them off ferociously and leaving them speechless, they didn’t know what had hit them! I can hear our friend Ian Birrell, who like you lost this life criminally young, (I miss the dear, dear, characterful souls out of both of you), teasing me about fancying you and losing out to 'Spender', (he always affected a Geordie accent in mentioning Barney’s name in reference to Jimmy Nail’s title character in the tv drama Spender ), We were at your wedding at Brompton Oratory along with a lot of the other Big Bus drinking gang, and he was playfully goading me to interject at the “ If anyone knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage, he or she should declare it now. “ bit to whisk you off! I wouldn’t have dared as you’d have gone absolutely, frighteningly ballistic, charged up to me, telling me to get out in no uncertain terms, before returning to Barney & you'd have hated me for ever more. I hope you didn’t think I was a cunt for cutting you out of my life, I hope you won't think me a cunt for admitting to still being jealous of Barney even now. I mean how could you marry someone who doesn't even have something as characterful as eyebrows!! How stupid I am. What a cunt I am. I know I could never have changed things, it was totally irrational to behave the way I did, nothing was to be gained, I just wish I could have just accepted things and been grown up about it, because It was my loss to lose being friends with one so fabulous as you, and it will be my eternal regret, one of my greatest, that I never will get the chance to say sorry to you in life, even though you never really stopped being my friend. “Welcome back Oh Prodigal One” you jokingly messaged me in 2011 after we’d not been in contact for quite a number of years. I remember you calling me cantankerous, which I thought at the time over the issue you called me it was unfair, but I guess I was so to you. I bore a silly grudge I'm ashamed to admit. I like to think you understood & didn’t think bad of me for disappearing again, but you may have thought I was just being a cunt! You were really supportive about me doing Beatle Mal in 2012, bigging me up on Facebook , and how did I repay you? One day I let my green eyed monster out & spitefully unfriended you on bloody Facebook. Leaving Faceybook aside, jow shitty a thing to do to a friend is that? I’m sorry Jacqueline that I missed out on being your friend after you got married, my shit got in the way and It was my personal, very huge loss that I missed out on all the years I could've known you as life changed so wonderfully for you. I am so, so sorry Jacqueline that you've been taken from your family and so suddenly. It must have been such a shock to you & you must have been so frightened to lose those close to you, even for one as courageous as you, who would so fearlessly take on the world in the name of good & I am I am more sorry than I could ever say in words. OH FUCK, I WISH TO THE POWER OF WISHES THAT YOU WERE STILL HERE! I want to say something stupid like, if I could have taken this horrible brain tumour on for you, heroically in a “It is a far, far better thing I do now, than I have ever done before” sort of way, then I would! I’m trying to visualise what you would say to that, most likely:“Oh fuck off, of course you wouldn’t, & don't be so insultingly stupid!" You would really tell me off for that stupid comment I know you would! I will just say then that if I am ever lucky enough to meet a woman as lovely as you, (Oh please that I am), and who loves me back, then I will have had the greatest luck ever in the history of luck & better than any glittering awards that acting or anything could ever give me. And then I see that wonderful, wonderful scowl that becomes your beautiful, sweet, sweet smile. Love always & never forget you Nik xxx Here's poem I wrote about Jacqueline 17 or 18 years ago... A frown like a finger print & scowl that was a howl, |
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"He didn’t have to have lots of tricks to make you look at him, he just came on with a bit of sunshine!"
Gammons & lemons
I don't want to hate anybody or compete in any intellectual contest, that I probably wouldn't win or couldn't be bothered to compete in anyway. I can be a little dim, alot of people are dim, regardless of their level of education or how much they might or mightn't have achieved. The EU referendum was fed by popular ignorance stoked by newspapers & perpetuated by hatred and or prejudice. The hatred is on both sides, I even had some fellow Brexshit opposers rounding on me after I jokingly contributed to a childish debate stoked by the BBC’s daft political editor calling remainers, remainiacs & I posed the light hearted question, would the opposite to that be a Brexiterrorist? One even called me a gammon, ME! A left leaning, EU supporting vegetarian, yes I do go red in the face, but more down to too much lubrication of the tonsils than emotion. Anyway I'm much more beetroot or tomato!
I neither understand economics nor want to, and that ignorance I share with a very large majority of people, It's the complete ignorance of the economic ramifications that we're all finding out about now, and that the people elected should have known about and so not thrown the dice out amongst the people with a referendum.
Because of both lack of finance & lacking significant other, (I don’t like travelling alone), I don't even get to go out of the country much nowadays but have always felt at home in European countries & love to think that I could travel to France or Italy, Germany or Spain & even settle there without hindrance.
Brexshit is really all down to arguments in both of the two main political parties that dominate UK politics & they’re still arguing. We look for wisdom in this who govern, supposedly! To paraphrase something Napoleon said of the British Scots Greys cavalry (well at least Rod Steiger said it in the movie Waterloo!) The UK is the noblest county in Europe but the worst led! The 2016 referendum was a narrow win for those who wanted to leave & now a lot of MPs are either so desperate to leave at any cost to the countries well being, (and Ireland’s), or apparently so scared to defy this so called will of people, even though it was nearly 3 years ago and we’ve had 2 such defiances of the will of the people with general elections in the last 4 years!
Sadly we can never look to Westminster to save us. Here, today, gone tomorrow politicians can only see as far as their careers and have form in being woefully short sighted & ignorant of history.
Anyone of any intelligence knows that leaving the EU is a stupid, stupid idea which will cause a whole new recession, just when we’ve been apparently come to the end of a 10 year one.
Shat upon by Tories, shovelled up by Labour. I think of that line from Withnail and I and we are and have been for too long. Let hese parties break up, lets have permanent coalitions of smaller parties, inevitably this will let the racist nutters & bigots in, they’re already there in the big parties anyway. And let 16 year old that’s can join the army but still can’t vote, vote!
There are things in life I find so mad that I wonder why it is there is a general acceptance of them and this Brexshit nightmare ranks highest in this long, dull, painful moment. Not our finest hour, I’d like to think Churchill would say, a lot of debate about him just now, hero or villain, almost certainly both, but for all his flaws he was a student of the past in a way that dopey Boris Johnson might claim to be, but isn’t and look at what a shameful embarrassment this is to the European stability that Churchill helped create. This country should be at the head of the table rather than having been seen as a begrudging party pooper! Britain, UK i use these terms that only the English call themselves, loosely, the Americans used to call us Limeys, but really we’re complete lemons!
Final Thought
Gammons & lemons
I don't want to hate anybody or compete in any intellectual contest, that I probably wouldn't win or couldn't be bothered to compete in anyway. I can be a little dim, alot of people are dim, regardless of their level of education or how much they might or mightn't have achieved. The EU referendum was fed by popular ignorance stoked by newspapers & perpetuated by hatred and or prejudice. The hatred is on both sides, I even had some fellow Brexshit opposers rounding on me after I jokingly contributed to a childish debate stoked by the BBC’s daft political editor calling remainers, remainiacs & I posed the light hearted question, would the opposite to that be a Brexiterrorist? One even called me a gammon, ME! A left leaning, EU supporting vegetarian, yes I do go red in the face, but more down to too much lubrication of the tonsils than emotion. Anyway I'm much more beetroot or tomato!
I neither understand economics nor want to, and that ignorance I share with a very large majority of people, It's the complete ignorance of the economic ramifications that we're all finding out about now, and that the people elected should have known about and so not thrown the dice out amongst the people with a referendum.
Because of both lack of finance & lacking significant other, (I don’t like travelling alone), I don't even get to go out of the country much nowadays but have always felt at home in European countries & love to think that I could travel to France or Italy, Germany or Spain & even settle there without hindrance.
Brexshit is really all down to arguments in both of the two main political parties that dominate UK politics & they’re still arguing. We look for wisdom in this who govern, supposedly! To paraphrase something Napoleon said of the British Scots Greys cavalry (well at least Rod Steiger said it in the movie Waterloo!) The UK is the noblest county in Europe but the worst led! The 2016 referendum was a narrow win for those who wanted to leave & now a lot of MPs are either so desperate to leave at any cost to the countries well being, (and Ireland’s), or apparently so scared to defy this so called will of people, even though it was nearly 3 years ago and we’ve had 2 such defiances of the will of the people with general elections in the last 4 years!
Sadly we can never look to Westminster to save us. Here, today, gone tomorrow politicians can only see as far as their careers and have form in being woefully short sighted & ignorant of history.
Anyone of any intelligence knows that leaving the EU is a stupid, stupid idea which will cause a whole new recession, just when we’ve been apparently come to the end of a 10 year one.
Shat upon by Tories, shovelled up by Labour. I think of that line from Withnail and I and we are and have been for too long. Let hese parties break up, lets have permanent coalitions of smaller parties, inevitably this will let the racist nutters & bigots in, they’re already there in the big parties anyway. And let 16 year old that’s can join the army but still can’t vote, vote!
There are things in life I find so mad that I wonder why it is there is a general acceptance of them and this Brexshit nightmare ranks highest in this long, dull, painful moment. Not our finest hour, I’d like to think Churchill would say, a lot of debate about him just now, hero or villain, almost certainly both, but for all his flaws he was a student of the past in a way that dopey Boris Johnson might claim to be, but isn’t and look at what a shameful embarrassment this is to the European stability that Churchill helped create. This country should be at the head of the table rather than having been seen as a begrudging party pooper! Britain, UK i use these terms that only the English call themselves, loosely, the Americans used to call us Limeys, but really we’re complete lemons!
Final Thought
Another great actor Bruno Ganz died today (tweet from time of writing, 16th Feb)
Bruno Ganz was so great, everyone remembers him as Hitler in Downfall, but for me he'll always be Damiel in one of my favourite movies: Wings of Desire. Makes you believe in Angels x
"Is life under the sun not just a dream?"
Bruno Ganz was so great, everyone remembers him as Hitler in Downfall, but for me he'll always be Damiel in one of my favourite movies: Wings of Desire. Makes you believe in Angels x
"Is life under the sun not just a dream?"
Positively wired! For my first blog in quite a long while I’ve put aside just boringly listing what I’ve been doing in the last year, (not very much & it wasn’t a very nice year, though happily it did get better towards the end). I actually had some very good & unexpected news just before Christmas about an acting job, you’ll see it on my news page & I’ll excitedly talk about it in a later blog, And although you might naturally think this has influenced the tone of this, I'd actually decided on this radical course of action before!
Oh It was by the way a particularly lovely Christmas, spending it for the first time in years with every single one of my Fab 4 nieces, 2 nephews, mum, my sister & bro in law. I even had a fun new years eve, (never at the best times my favourite night), almost certainly because…(drumroll), I’ve been giving positivity a new appraisal!
Well, sure I’ve heard people extolling it’s virtues for years, often surprisingly in the light of sheer gloom & doom &bravest enduring the worst things in life happening to them.Although being moved I was never thoroughly convinced though & perhaps shamefully wallowed in me misery of happily nothing that awful happening to me, ( NOTE to self to stop doing that 'me" instead of my thing, I used to think it endearing, but not anymore), ... Except of course going without a girlfriend for a far too long, depressing periods in my life, not being allowed to be paid to act, again for far too long periods, trouble with accommodation & just, simply getting old whilst all that's happening or not happening as the case may be!.
I even prefer the word melancholy to positively. Positively, positive has a smug, self satisfied bearing to it, and those who utter it, do so with annoying upper inflections like they’re instantly lecturing you on the merits of self worth. Melancholy on the other hand is such a lovely word that delights the tongue and is unassuming & self effacing. It’s poetry & it’s beautiful & has always appealed to my gothic. sorrowful sensibilities.
Now although i may know a few Morrissey lyrics (not that anyway I subscribe to the view that Mozza's lyrics are just miserable, they're wonderful), and a large proportion of my favourite films don't have conventionally happy endings, I haven't tended to go about outwardly miserable, can do cheerful really well, maybe my finest acting half an hour!
I have indeed had my moments of being extremely positive, but it's never of course lasted and I haven't ultimately believed in it as a philosophy.
There is a lot to be negative about in life, always has been even pre Brexshit & we can't always be being our own personal North Korea, brainwashing ourselves that everything's great!
However I have come to believe, without any cause or reason or indeed epiphany this Epiphany, that this positive thing may be on to something, Positive thinking what have I got to lose? Only negativity. Optimism is on paper anyway a nicer word that pessimism.
Whilst still being suspicious of alacrity & not wanting fully to part company with my old acquaintance worry for fear of tempting fate in the real worry stakes. I’m of course not positive anyone else actually reads my blogs, but I'm positively not worried about that and positively they do help me, so I write them just for me and I do positively (positively over using the word positively now), think they are worth writing! That said if you should be reading, please bear in mind that I am a new convert to this positivity thing, so wish me luck & be positive about it!
Anyway as a celebration of my conversion, i’ve been whiling my time compiling a list, yes another list), of things in life to positively love most about it, a good percentage of them are material, but they are all life enhancing & the reason I feel joyful to be walking & sharing this earth with them, or the thought of them. Now i don’t want to appear smug or annoyingly self congratulating, (even if I do have good taste & a nose for the best, though I say it myself), but this is good. I’ve gone right inside my mind to the darkest, sweetest, pervyest & happiest recesses of it. This list is so much more than a list, that word undersells it so... negatively. What this is is just positively Earth magic!
So In the spirit of the great Ian Dury and his ‘Reason’s to be Cheerful' & also that magnificent Sunday Times ad, I don’t know if you remember it, when to the strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, ( I've helpfully added this accompaniment below & suggest you press play before reading the following), he magnificently extolled the virtues of simply being Magnificent….
HAVE SOME OF THIS…….!
Three masted ships, witches, liquorice
& cheese omelette and chips.
Playing Poets & Pirates, the short stories of RLS,
& the swish of a silky dress.
Straining spaghetti thru a tennis racket,
velvet jackets & being both empathetic & enigmatic.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Dorset’s Maiden Castle
& Dicken’s Christmas Carol.
The dawn when you don’t have to get up in the morn,
Raymond Briggs’ drawings, light up globes with snow storms
& french maid uniforms.
Playing gin rummy on trains, the Masterpiece board game
& the true theatre of dreams at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
Sinéad singing Molly Malone, being at home in Rome
& Paddy Kavanagh’s Christmas poem.
Mermaids, model railways, roman mosaics,
Hendrix’s Purple Haze & Richard Harris’ Bull McCabe.
The Damned’s New Rose, French toast, crows
& the peek of petticoats.
A piano when played at by Tori, telling ghost stories
& The Royal Observatory.
Weymouth’s seafront & harbour, Bowie’s Life on Mars,
my super power Tara & the musical Les Miserables.
Black cats. a pint of Bass
& Depardieu’s Cyrano de Bergerac.
Castle ruins, pickled onions
& double chocolate chip muffins.
Stevie Nicks voice, early Pink Floyd,
Dinky toys & Midnight Cowboy.
Lurrrve purrs, Helter Skelter & ginger preserves
& a woman’s curves in jodhpurs.
Dr JCC’S Beesley Street, old movies on Talking Pictures tv
& Jupiter from the Planets Suite.
The Pogues & the Cure, Kate Bush & Christy Moore
& John Lennon’s look in Magical Mystery Tour.
Dublin’s fair city, peaty Laphroaig whiskey
& darling Julie Christie.
Fairy lights, Marmite, The Beatles White
& Wuthering Heights.
Redheaded women, Alan Garner’s senses
& guitars even when i can’t play them.
Faustino Rioja, Eliot’s Prufrock
& any Little Richard rocker.
John Hurt, Botticelli's Venus, black satin pencil skirts
& a Gibson Les Paul in sunburst.
The Last of the Mohican’s, the Can-Can & Brendan Behan,
Robin & Marian, Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man
& tight shiny pants like worn by Olivia as Sandy when a vamp .
Conor McPherson’s The Weir, Cheshire meres,
Nell Gwynn, Emily Bronte & Boadicea.
Billie Fishers’s dreams, the colour green
& black stockings with seams.
Feeling refreshed when having overslept,
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec & a Jensen Intercept’.
Crooning I like New York in June & The Leaving of Liverpool,
always seeing a New Moon
& a wiseman who knows he a fool!
Chuck Berry singin You never can tell,
Peter Gabriel, Autumn’s smokey smell
& the word Mademoiselle.
And the bluest & the greenest & the greyest sea.
AND happily, luckily, wonderfully
that my mums still with me!
Oh It was by the way a particularly lovely Christmas, spending it for the first time in years with every single one of my Fab 4 nieces, 2 nephews, mum, my sister & bro in law. I even had a fun new years eve, (never at the best times my favourite night), almost certainly because…(drumroll), I’ve been giving positivity a new appraisal!
Well, sure I’ve heard people extolling it’s virtues for years, often surprisingly in the light of sheer gloom & doom &bravest enduring the worst things in life happening to them.Although being moved I was never thoroughly convinced though & perhaps shamefully wallowed in me misery of happily nothing that awful happening to me, ( NOTE to self to stop doing that 'me" instead of my thing, I used to think it endearing, but not anymore), ... Except of course going without a girlfriend for a far too long, depressing periods in my life, not being allowed to be paid to act, again for far too long periods, trouble with accommodation & just, simply getting old whilst all that's happening or not happening as the case may be!.
I even prefer the word melancholy to positively. Positively, positive has a smug, self satisfied bearing to it, and those who utter it, do so with annoying upper inflections like they’re instantly lecturing you on the merits of self worth. Melancholy on the other hand is such a lovely word that delights the tongue and is unassuming & self effacing. It’s poetry & it’s beautiful & has always appealed to my gothic. sorrowful sensibilities.
Now although i may know a few Morrissey lyrics (not that anyway I subscribe to the view that Mozza's lyrics are just miserable, they're wonderful), and a large proportion of my favourite films don't have conventionally happy endings, I haven't tended to go about outwardly miserable, can do cheerful really well, maybe my finest acting half an hour!
I have indeed had my moments of being extremely positive, but it's never of course lasted and I haven't ultimately believed in it as a philosophy.
There is a lot to be negative about in life, always has been even pre Brexshit & we can't always be being our own personal North Korea, brainwashing ourselves that everything's great!
However I have come to believe, without any cause or reason or indeed epiphany this Epiphany, that this positive thing may be on to something, Positive thinking what have I got to lose? Only negativity. Optimism is on paper anyway a nicer word that pessimism.
Whilst still being suspicious of alacrity & not wanting fully to part company with my old acquaintance worry for fear of tempting fate in the real worry stakes. I’m of course not positive anyone else actually reads my blogs, but I'm positively not worried about that and positively they do help me, so I write them just for me and I do positively (positively over using the word positively now), think they are worth writing! That said if you should be reading, please bear in mind that I am a new convert to this positivity thing, so wish me luck & be positive about it!
Anyway as a celebration of my conversion, i’ve been whiling my time compiling a list, yes another list), of things in life to positively love most about it, a good percentage of them are material, but they are all life enhancing & the reason I feel joyful to be walking & sharing this earth with them, or the thought of them. Now i don’t want to appear smug or annoyingly self congratulating, (even if I do have good taste & a nose for the best, though I say it myself), but this is good. I’ve gone right inside my mind to the darkest, sweetest, pervyest & happiest recesses of it. This list is so much more than a list, that word undersells it so... negatively. What this is is just positively Earth magic!
So In the spirit of the great Ian Dury and his ‘Reason’s to be Cheerful' & also that magnificent Sunday Times ad, I don’t know if you remember it, when to the strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, ( I've helpfully added this accompaniment below & suggest you press play before reading the following), he magnificently extolled the virtues of simply being Magnificent….
HAVE SOME OF THIS…….!
Three masted ships, witches, liquorice
& cheese omelette and chips.
Playing Poets & Pirates, the short stories of RLS,
& the swish of a silky dress.
Straining spaghetti thru a tennis racket,
velvet jackets & being both empathetic & enigmatic.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Dorset’s Maiden Castle
& Dicken’s Christmas Carol.
The dawn when you don’t have to get up in the morn,
Raymond Briggs’ drawings, light up globes with snow storms
& french maid uniforms.
Playing gin rummy on trains, the Masterpiece board game
& the true theatre of dreams at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
Sinéad singing Molly Malone, being at home in Rome
& Paddy Kavanagh’s Christmas poem.
Mermaids, model railways, roman mosaics,
Hendrix’s Purple Haze & Richard Harris’ Bull McCabe.
The Damned’s New Rose, French toast, crows
& the peek of petticoats.
A piano when played at by Tori, telling ghost stories
& The Royal Observatory.
Weymouth’s seafront & harbour, Bowie’s Life on Mars,
my super power Tara & the musical Les Miserables.
Black cats. a pint of Bass
& Depardieu’s Cyrano de Bergerac.
Castle ruins, pickled onions
& double chocolate chip muffins.
Stevie Nicks voice, early Pink Floyd,
Dinky toys & Midnight Cowboy.
Lurrrve purrs, Helter Skelter & ginger preserves
& a woman’s curves in jodhpurs.
Dr JCC’S Beesley Street, old movies on Talking Pictures tv
& Jupiter from the Planets Suite.
The Pogues & the Cure, Kate Bush & Christy Moore
& John Lennon’s look in Magical Mystery Tour.
Dublin’s fair city, peaty Laphroaig whiskey
& darling Julie Christie.
Fairy lights, Marmite, The Beatles White
& Wuthering Heights.
Redheaded women, Alan Garner’s senses
& guitars even when i can’t play them.
Faustino Rioja, Eliot’s Prufrock
& any Little Richard rocker.
John Hurt, Botticelli's Venus, black satin pencil skirts
& a Gibson Les Paul in sunburst.
The Last of the Mohican’s, the Can-Can & Brendan Behan,
Robin & Marian, Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man
& tight shiny pants like worn by Olivia as Sandy when a vamp .
Conor McPherson’s The Weir, Cheshire meres,
Nell Gwynn, Emily Bronte & Boadicea.
Billie Fishers’s dreams, the colour green
& black stockings with seams.
Feeling refreshed when having overslept,
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec & a Jensen Intercept’.
Crooning I like New York in June & The Leaving of Liverpool,
always seeing a New Moon
& a wiseman who knows he a fool!
Chuck Berry singin You never can tell,
Peter Gabriel, Autumn’s smokey smell
& the word Mademoiselle.
And the bluest & the greenest & the greyest sea.
AND happily, luckily, wonderfully
that my mums still with me!
I was 54 the other day, the same age Peter Sellers was when he died. His dying in the summer of 1980 was really the first death of someone I hugely admired. I remember I was with my dad in Wallasey that day, he'd had some business with his bank branch there, and afterwards we spent the day of doing special things, as if to mark the sad news. I always liked hanging out with me dad & especially going off on little excursions with him, that had wonderfully sometimes meant skiving dreaded school, (I remember a particular occasion when a poor dead bird found while taking me to school one day, was the catalyst to me skipping school and him, the school of Architecture, to go off on an adventure).
Later in about September when I was working in a record shop in Manc, I met up with Dad and we went to the Odeon, on Oxford road to see the new Peter Sellers movie, Being There, which had just come out. I've loved this dearly ever since, I showed this to my niece Jade a few weeks ago and I think she appreciated it's brilliance of this loverly, and in the light of even more unlikely absurdities at the top of US politics, hugely resonant film.
54 was still young to die nearly 40 years ago. Peter looked older because of heart disease that had been with him since he had been pronounced clinically dead for a few minutes on the operating table, when he was 38 in the year that I was born.
Last week Emma Chambers an actress people remember for her brilliantly comic, seductive goofiness in Notting Hill and Vicar of Dibley died at only 53, still not as rare as it should be to die so young of what her agent described rather vaguely as 'natural causes'.
And of course at the end of bad old 1980, Dr Winston O'Boogie was murdered and that hit me even harder than Peter Sellers, my two heroes gone in the spate of months. And then dad himself 2 years later. Dad frequently joked that you'll miss me when "I'm dead and gone" He didn't know the half of how much. It's a long time ago, but deaths sting-a-ling-a-ling sings stronger to me today.
Death stalks all our lives, we can't of course go round morbidly being obsessed with it, (although I've always had quite a Goth obsession with it, it's fascinated me as much as troubled me), we can't ignore it either. I fear losing those I love more than losing life myself and I do fear losing life a terrible lot, particularly because I haven't done what I want to, and extreme likeliness is looking very like, I won't.
I'm all too aware of my own mortality, death has invaded mine and so many others creative inspiration even more so in the last few years with for me particularly, with absolute heroes like David Bowie and John Hurt. Indeed at times it has been difficult to see beyond the wretched RIPERS on Facebook or twitter. How lazy an expression is RIP, how moronic! What does it actually fucking mean? Nothing! It's JUST a sheep-like meaningless mantra. Somebody I like and admire dies I will try to put into brief words what they meant to me, not bang off a thoughtless, pointless RIP! You know even if I believed in RIP, I wouldn't want to! Anyone says that to me and I'll come back and haunt them! No one will anyway.
I'm worrying with an even greater intensity these days that time ahead might be short for me. I find myself cheerily saying that within 10 years I'll either be dead successful or just dead. But I can't see myself living to be an old, old man, although I'm hoping that's just me being characteristically overdramatic, because I really want to, as life has gone faster than I take to think.
By the way If I did die now, I'll be a restless ghost, haunting The Royal Exchange Theatre, finally getting to act my bones off, literally on that stage from the afterlife and tormenting the directors there for never having wanted to know I existed!
I've always been one for taking one step forward, look ten steps back, but I've been indulging in some extreme looking back of late. well ever since I've started this anyway, and I certainly spend far too much time moping about me vanity website these days reminding myself of what I've done in the past, as if it's really wonderful, (which of course its not particularly), to remind myself that I am supposed to be an actor!
I only got 4 auditions for significant paid acting work last year,. I've just noticed one girl on twitter posting under the always annoying hashtag of #actorlife, that she'd auditioned for 42 roles in February, but maybe that's nothing to boast about if she still couldn't convince on the 42nd go!)
The one of those 4 I got was Mr Brown's Directions' a real life soap opera documenting 20 years in the life of 18th century owner, William Constable, his household and big plans for his gardens, (now part static caravan park), This was in part a promenade through his house with priceless Chippendale furniture that we were barely allowed to breathe on. A really lovely group of actors to work with, particularly Leanne Rowley, (rare, 'soul touching' interaction with her), and I liked the director Rachel Feldberg and fabulous, friendly and lovely producer Christina Lewis too.
Will this be my last ever, significant paid acting job? I've often told myself in the past that it seems like I'll never work again in acting, without really believing it, as if the Gods of acting will somehow hear my anguished plea and put some divine luck my way! Depressingly though for the first time now, I'm actually starting to believe that the prospect of me getting a good, at least month long paid acting contract ever again are scarily remote. For fuck sake I can't even get an audition for a company called 'Shit-faced Shakespeare' .....Me!!!! Well that's how desperately bad things are!
The story of my acting life has been a fluctuation in belief in myself, (ego one minute, eggy the next!), and so the absence of 100% dedication, hell I might have even been successful by now were it not so. That said, even with constant dedication, I still don't really know what I have to do to be a successful actor, it's just as much a mystery to me as it always was, and I've done classes, me, met casting directors, (never helpful), read or tried to and got bored of, 'how to be an actor' books.
I'm bored of hearing myself whinge on about unfair it all is, the inability to get even a half decent agent, and this is a stigma, particularly for the almost mythical Spotlight casting website, where legend has it only the Gods get cast! And the national lottery ticket that is your average job app, with just winning an audition, never mind the job, as jackpot...blah de blah de blahdey! I keep trying to believe in keeping positive and that I'm lucky just to be still living the dream, even if the dream has never seemed more remote.
Course I used to think Oh I'll just make me own work if no one wants to hire me, but 'Beatle Mal' and not getting enough audiences, never mind an inability to find like-minded people to work on projects with, put paid to such self producing dreams, though I continue to have ideas, and a kids show about archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, I've still got my screenplay idea set in Weymouth and frequently visualise the opening titles to the strains of OMD's 'Souvenir' Also an idea for 5 minute, comic, audio plays on youtube, (inspired in part by Piccadilly Radio's Bradshaws of Barnoldswick), about 'Piggit Farm' in the fictional Cheshire hamlet of 'Flem' are still a possibility?
I have just said no to a play offer with no money, sizable part in a play about sexual abuse in the work place, was flattered to be asked, I'm always flattered to be asked to act, but I couldn't afford the time and anyway didn't get excited by it, it would've been fun to work on, but an awful lot of effort for just a few dates at the Brighton Fringe and vague promises of others months down the line.
I just can't afford to do plays for no money anymore. Excitingly there are more theatres & theatre outlets than ever before, but depressingly money is equally tighter than ever before, and inevitably things are going to get worse with Brexshit, (everything is going to get worse with the wretched B word!), but I can't help wondering how people still expect actors to work for nothing but vague promises. There's a lot of money out there in big business, surely this can be tapped into, somehow, why can't producers get money before they even set these things up? Such times I wish I had a business mind, and I know how difficult producing a play is.
A positive is that I've worked with some good new young filmmakers in the last year, realising my first love of film, both at Manchester Film School and at Staffordshire uni, and last November spent a weekend filming a short for Staffordshire Uni students called 'Eden', playing a widowed father/farmer just before WW1 who's only child, a daughter, now she's of age has attracted some unwelcome attention from a young man at market, who's intention to take her away at gunpoint, leads my character off on a quest to find them across some high terrain, equipped with a Lee Enfield rifle. The film looks good, Sam Osbourne the director who wants to be a cinematographer, made the bleak terrain of the Peak District look beautiful, and I'm better than I was on screen, less of me gets past the probing lens these days!
Of course I'll continue to be a dreamer, (sometimes I live in an afternoon old movie dream that sees me not born in the wrong era, but rather getting work as a character actor in the post war era in British films, when surely my big eyed, gunning characters would have found commercial worth in Ealing comedies or early carry on films) But I strongly worry whether this all is just way too much of a dream.
At my mums house I watch a community of little birds clustering around their bird seed feeder, the crow coming for his, (or her) daily bread crusts and a lone wood pigeon sadly picking around for dropped seed from the feeder as he can't, or doesn't know how to, get up on the perches
It's all about survival, and you never see the bird who doesn't survive.
If I'm going to continue as I am fated to it seems, in this impossible dream, these practical survival instincts, are deffo what I need, I can't just wait around for scraps mind, I've got to soar high independently whilst being a part of that community. Whilst I do frequently doubt that I have a hunger for acting anymore, I'm still nevertheless worryingly undernourished!
Ultimately after way, far too much gloomy reflection on the miniseries miseries of me not being able to get on as an actor, I will just try and think of Peter Sellers and laugh, and maybe a lucky encounter with a hugely influential person, might make me appear to 'walk on water', or at the very least I'll 'corpse' my way through, unlimited takes of trying to get my particular long, rambling message to 'Raphael' across. I'm sure that's all you need to survive this silly fucking, life wasting charade is not to be straight faced, just to fucking well laugh, even if it's just at the sheer, silly preposterousness of it all.
Later in about September when I was working in a record shop in Manc, I met up with Dad and we went to the Odeon, on Oxford road to see the new Peter Sellers movie, Being There, which had just come out. I've loved this dearly ever since, I showed this to my niece Jade a few weeks ago and I think she appreciated it's brilliance of this loverly, and in the light of even more unlikely absurdities at the top of US politics, hugely resonant film.
54 was still young to die nearly 40 years ago. Peter looked older because of heart disease that had been with him since he had been pronounced clinically dead for a few minutes on the operating table, when he was 38 in the year that I was born.
Last week Emma Chambers an actress people remember for her brilliantly comic, seductive goofiness in Notting Hill and Vicar of Dibley died at only 53, still not as rare as it should be to die so young of what her agent described rather vaguely as 'natural causes'.
And of course at the end of bad old 1980, Dr Winston O'Boogie was murdered and that hit me even harder than Peter Sellers, my two heroes gone in the spate of months. And then dad himself 2 years later. Dad frequently joked that you'll miss me when "I'm dead and gone" He didn't know the half of how much. It's a long time ago, but deaths sting-a-ling-a-ling sings stronger to me today.
Death stalks all our lives, we can't of course go round morbidly being obsessed with it, (although I've always had quite a Goth obsession with it, it's fascinated me as much as troubled me), we can't ignore it either. I fear losing those I love more than losing life myself and I do fear losing life a terrible lot, particularly because I haven't done what I want to, and extreme likeliness is looking very like, I won't.
I'm all too aware of my own mortality, death has invaded mine and so many others creative inspiration even more so in the last few years with for me particularly, with absolute heroes like David Bowie and John Hurt. Indeed at times it has been difficult to see beyond the wretched RIPERS on Facebook or twitter. How lazy an expression is RIP, how moronic! What does it actually fucking mean? Nothing! It's JUST a sheep-like meaningless mantra. Somebody I like and admire dies I will try to put into brief words what they meant to me, not bang off a thoughtless, pointless RIP! You know even if I believed in RIP, I wouldn't want to! Anyone says that to me and I'll come back and haunt them! No one will anyway.
I'm worrying with an even greater intensity these days that time ahead might be short for me. I find myself cheerily saying that within 10 years I'll either be dead successful or just dead. But I can't see myself living to be an old, old man, although I'm hoping that's just me being characteristically overdramatic, because I really want to, as life has gone faster than I take to think.
By the way If I did die now, I'll be a restless ghost, haunting The Royal Exchange Theatre, finally getting to act my bones off, literally on that stage from the afterlife and tormenting the directors there for never having wanted to know I existed!
I've always been one for taking one step forward, look ten steps back, but I've been indulging in some extreme looking back of late. well ever since I've started this anyway, and I certainly spend far too much time moping about me vanity website these days reminding myself of what I've done in the past, as if it's really wonderful, (which of course its not particularly), to remind myself that I am supposed to be an actor!
I only got 4 auditions for significant paid acting work last year,. I've just noticed one girl on twitter posting under the always annoying hashtag of #actorlife, that she'd auditioned for 42 roles in February, but maybe that's nothing to boast about if she still couldn't convince on the 42nd go!)
The one of those 4 I got was Mr Brown's Directions' a real life soap opera documenting 20 years in the life of 18th century owner, William Constable, his household and big plans for his gardens, (now part static caravan park), This was in part a promenade through his house with priceless Chippendale furniture that we were barely allowed to breathe on. A really lovely group of actors to work with, particularly Leanne Rowley, (rare, 'soul touching' interaction with her), and I liked the director Rachel Feldberg and fabulous, friendly and lovely producer Christina Lewis too.
Will this be my last ever, significant paid acting job? I've often told myself in the past that it seems like I'll never work again in acting, without really believing it, as if the Gods of acting will somehow hear my anguished plea and put some divine luck my way! Depressingly though for the first time now, I'm actually starting to believe that the prospect of me getting a good, at least month long paid acting contract ever again are scarily remote. For fuck sake I can't even get an audition for a company called 'Shit-faced Shakespeare' .....Me!!!! Well that's how desperately bad things are!
The story of my acting life has been a fluctuation in belief in myself, (ego one minute, eggy the next!), and so the absence of 100% dedication, hell I might have even been successful by now were it not so. That said, even with constant dedication, I still don't really know what I have to do to be a successful actor, it's just as much a mystery to me as it always was, and I've done classes, me, met casting directors, (never helpful), read or tried to and got bored of, 'how to be an actor' books.
I'm bored of hearing myself whinge on about unfair it all is, the inability to get even a half decent agent, and this is a stigma, particularly for the almost mythical Spotlight casting website, where legend has it only the Gods get cast! And the national lottery ticket that is your average job app, with just winning an audition, never mind the job, as jackpot...blah de blah de blahdey! I keep trying to believe in keeping positive and that I'm lucky just to be still living the dream, even if the dream has never seemed more remote.
Course I used to think Oh I'll just make me own work if no one wants to hire me, but 'Beatle Mal' and not getting enough audiences, never mind an inability to find like-minded people to work on projects with, put paid to such self producing dreams, though I continue to have ideas, and a kids show about archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, I've still got my screenplay idea set in Weymouth and frequently visualise the opening titles to the strains of OMD's 'Souvenir' Also an idea for 5 minute, comic, audio plays on youtube, (inspired in part by Piccadilly Radio's Bradshaws of Barnoldswick), about 'Piggit Farm' in the fictional Cheshire hamlet of 'Flem' are still a possibility?
I have just said no to a play offer with no money, sizable part in a play about sexual abuse in the work place, was flattered to be asked, I'm always flattered to be asked to act, but I couldn't afford the time and anyway didn't get excited by it, it would've been fun to work on, but an awful lot of effort for just a few dates at the Brighton Fringe and vague promises of others months down the line.
I just can't afford to do plays for no money anymore. Excitingly there are more theatres & theatre outlets than ever before, but depressingly money is equally tighter than ever before, and inevitably things are going to get worse with Brexshit, (everything is going to get worse with the wretched B word!), but I can't help wondering how people still expect actors to work for nothing but vague promises. There's a lot of money out there in big business, surely this can be tapped into, somehow, why can't producers get money before they even set these things up? Such times I wish I had a business mind, and I know how difficult producing a play is.
A positive is that I've worked with some good new young filmmakers in the last year, realising my first love of film, both at Manchester Film School and at Staffordshire uni, and last November spent a weekend filming a short for Staffordshire Uni students called 'Eden', playing a widowed father/farmer just before WW1 who's only child, a daughter, now she's of age has attracted some unwelcome attention from a young man at market, who's intention to take her away at gunpoint, leads my character off on a quest to find them across some high terrain, equipped with a Lee Enfield rifle. The film looks good, Sam Osbourne the director who wants to be a cinematographer, made the bleak terrain of the Peak District look beautiful, and I'm better than I was on screen, less of me gets past the probing lens these days!
Of course I'll continue to be a dreamer, (sometimes I live in an afternoon old movie dream that sees me not born in the wrong era, but rather getting work as a character actor in the post war era in British films, when surely my big eyed, gunning characters would have found commercial worth in Ealing comedies or early carry on films) But I strongly worry whether this all is just way too much of a dream.
At my mums house I watch a community of little birds clustering around their bird seed feeder, the crow coming for his, (or her) daily bread crusts and a lone wood pigeon sadly picking around for dropped seed from the feeder as he can't, or doesn't know how to, get up on the perches
It's all about survival, and you never see the bird who doesn't survive.
If I'm going to continue as I am fated to it seems, in this impossible dream, these practical survival instincts, are deffo what I need, I can't just wait around for scraps mind, I've got to soar high independently whilst being a part of that community. Whilst I do frequently doubt that I have a hunger for acting anymore, I'm still nevertheless worryingly undernourished!
Ultimately after way, far too much gloomy reflection on the miniseries miseries of me not being able to get on as an actor, I will just try and think of Peter Sellers and laugh, and maybe a lucky encounter with a hugely influential person, might make me appear to 'walk on water', or at the very least I'll 'corpse' my way through, unlimited takes of trying to get my particular long, rambling message to 'Raphael' across. I'm sure that's all you need to survive this silly fucking, life wasting charade is not to be straight faced, just to fucking well laugh, even if it's just at the sheer, silly preposterousness of it all.
I recently found out that an actor friend had died over 4 months previously. In truth I was only really in contact with him through faceybook. Nevertheless hearing about him has made me very sad, as well as, (probably very irrationally), depressed at the impersonal world we all enter into on social media and how isolating it can be, in spite of often sharing, intimate personal aspects of our lives. I've been musing about the fact that despite the myriad ways of being virtually sociable available to us these days, that we can still find ourselves more distant than ever.
I first met Mike Goodenough guiding on the Original London sightseeing tour, (or 'Orrible Tour' as I er playfully described the company), 8/9 years ago. Most often we'd chat while sat on the back of stationary sightseeing buses just off Leicester Square, while on standby, covering any of the guides that might blow out. I don't know maybe it was only 2 or 3 whole days over a couple of different years, but it always seemed like a short, out of season, Autumnal day, no guide had phoned in ill, no extra tours, and it was just us two sat on the bus, putting the world to rights, and having a bloody good laugh as it got darker outside and colder in!
We talked a lot about Manchester, and our separate memories of it. He'd gone to drama school at Manchester Met, now Manchester school of theatre, and we agreed how Manchester had the best theatre in the Royal Exchange, as well as a mutual love of Morrissey and the Smiths. The only thing about Manchester we didn't agree on was his love of Man United!
I'm sure i remember him telling me that one day when he was there, Manc Met old boy David Threlfall had come back to the school to do a talk and for effect to make a point about how tough the acting business was, singled out 2/3 people, "You, you and you will get work, the rest of you haven't got a chance!"
We both were doing tour guiding between acting jobs, and it was much more a case of between for Mike, as he worked a lot, and had done some good, high profile work.
But he too had struggled with work and money, and was still struggling too, but in a way I couldn't have guessed.
We didn't want to be there, we were just two of the many actors doing a fill in job while pursuing the dream, but we tried to make the best of it. He had this kids wooden ruler with all the dates of the Kings & Queens on it and although I never heard his tour guiding performance, seeing the way he brandished it to me with kid-like enthusiasm, could tell it must have been fun and funny.
I was with him when he heard from his agent that he'd got a part in Cirque du Soleil's Beatles Love show and was going off to Las Vegas! That big, big smile, the look of pure deep joy that painted his whole face, was a joy to behold.
He later joked that he wasn't allowed to lose any weight for the part of Mr Piggy, far from it, he said playfully patting his not inconsiderable stomach. Not long after that I didn't see him tour guiding again, and when he returned from Vegas it seemed he was on a roll of working, television, pantos.
Oh I admit that his joyful Faceybook statuses showing pictures of his various dressing rooms and rehearsal room shots, together with anecdotes, sometimes rather than make me happy for such a lovely guy, instead reminded me what a failure I was still tour guiding, and a little jealous, but one of the last statuses he shared suggests that despite his great successes, he'd encountered negativity and was feeling depressed.
"True confidence has no room for jealousy and envy, when you know you are great, you have no reason to hate."
I have since found out that Mike suffered from bipolar, which although there is a greater awareness of now than ever before, is still not really understood.
I'd talked to him about the highs and lows of acting and how you coped, but didn't really got an inkling from him that he suffered so.
I do remember when he kindly offered to get me a comp to go see him when he was in The 39 steps at the Criterion, Piccadilly Circus, and I got a message at the eleventh hour from Mike to say he was suspended from the show, but offering no explanation, which I thought at the time was odd. Now in retrospect I wonder whether this was something to do with his illness.
I suffer from depression I realise, and am reticent enough about admitting it to myself never mind friends for fear of appearing weak, but the extreme highs and lows you read about that are direct manifestations of what used to be called manic depression seem hard to fathom to me, even if this appears to be only just a grander, more terrifying stage to find yourself on.
When heroes like Robin Williams take their own life apparently as a result of this it affects you deeply enough, but when someone you know is so engulfed by it that they take their own life, as I now know happened with Mike. It brings it all home terribly.
I can only imagine what those who loved him closest have been through and are still going through to come to terms with this, it has shocked me, and I only knew him a little.
I remember worrying a couple of times that I hadn't heard anything from him in ages, as the very last Facebook status he'd put was an RIP for David Bowie in early January 2016. I'd lost his phone number on a lost phone, and anyway I have to say that remembering an earlier status he'd put saying "Facebook I want a divorce", I honestly just thought that he was having a long sabbatical from it.
I did this once, and didn't bother with faceybook for over 6 months, as I recall no one seemed to notice! :)
I don't mean to have a go a faceybook, it's put me back in contact with people I'd lost contact with and is the only way I can keep in contact with many, nice people I have worked with.
Anyway most acting jobs often mean that you become become very close friends with people for only a short space of time, then afterwards perhaps never get to see them again, no matter how close you may have become. That's not to suggest shallowness, but more the nature of the often lonely and frequently self centred business that it is! And of course you can't really be good friends if you only keep contact on faceybook. I'm very sad to have only found out about him dying over 4 months later, as are I know a lot of friends Mike made guiding will be. I was chatting to a good friend of Mike's from when he was in youth theatre years ago in Croydon, and he didn't know Mike had worked on the London tours. He's connected to a circle of Mike's oldest, closest friends who were informed on faceybook about his death, and the reason news is only now filtering through to those of us who knew him tour guiding, is that of course, none of us were.
Most actors I think share the desire to be well loved and Mike on top of achieving an impressive body of work, certainly was well loved. His dad told me that more than 40 of his acting friends attended his funeral and they sang "On the trail of the lonesome pine" a touching tribute in honour of Mike having played Ollie, both in the BBC film about Stan Laurel, as well as on stage.
I'll really miss seeing you again Mikey, even if our paths did only cross occasionally. In my minds eye you are on that bus that day you found out you were going off to star in Love in Vegas, all that excitement in front of you, with that big smile which will always be my biggest memory of you, the biggest smile I've ever known!
x
I first met Mike Goodenough guiding on the Original London sightseeing tour, (or 'Orrible Tour' as I er playfully described the company), 8/9 years ago. Most often we'd chat while sat on the back of stationary sightseeing buses just off Leicester Square, while on standby, covering any of the guides that might blow out. I don't know maybe it was only 2 or 3 whole days over a couple of different years, but it always seemed like a short, out of season, Autumnal day, no guide had phoned in ill, no extra tours, and it was just us two sat on the bus, putting the world to rights, and having a bloody good laugh as it got darker outside and colder in!
We talked a lot about Manchester, and our separate memories of it. He'd gone to drama school at Manchester Met, now Manchester school of theatre, and we agreed how Manchester had the best theatre in the Royal Exchange, as well as a mutual love of Morrissey and the Smiths. The only thing about Manchester we didn't agree on was his love of Man United!
I'm sure i remember him telling me that one day when he was there, Manc Met old boy David Threlfall had come back to the school to do a talk and for effect to make a point about how tough the acting business was, singled out 2/3 people, "You, you and you will get work, the rest of you haven't got a chance!"
We both were doing tour guiding between acting jobs, and it was much more a case of between for Mike, as he worked a lot, and had done some good, high profile work.
But he too had struggled with work and money, and was still struggling too, but in a way I couldn't have guessed.
We didn't want to be there, we were just two of the many actors doing a fill in job while pursuing the dream, but we tried to make the best of it. He had this kids wooden ruler with all the dates of the Kings & Queens on it and although I never heard his tour guiding performance, seeing the way he brandished it to me with kid-like enthusiasm, could tell it must have been fun and funny.
I was with him when he heard from his agent that he'd got a part in Cirque du Soleil's Beatles Love show and was going off to Las Vegas! That big, big smile, the look of pure deep joy that painted his whole face, was a joy to behold.
He later joked that he wasn't allowed to lose any weight for the part of Mr Piggy, far from it, he said playfully patting his not inconsiderable stomach. Not long after that I didn't see him tour guiding again, and when he returned from Vegas it seemed he was on a roll of working, television, pantos.
Oh I admit that his joyful Faceybook statuses showing pictures of his various dressing rooms and rehearsal room shots, together with anecdotes, sometimes rather than make me happy for such a lovely guy, instead reminded me what a failure I was still tour guiding, and a little jealous, but one of the last statuses he shared suggests that despite his great successes, he'd encountered negativity and was feeling depressed.
"True confidence has no room for jealousy and envy, when you know you are great, you have no reason to hate."
I have since found out that Mike suffered from bipolar, which although there is a greater awareness of now than ever before, is still not really understood.
I'd talked to him about the highs and lows of acting and how you coped, but didn't really got an inkling from him that he suffered so.
I do remember when he kindly offered to get me a comp to go see him when he was in The 39 steps at the Criterion, Piccadilly Circus, and I got a message at the eleventh hour from Mike to say he was suspended from the show, but offering no explanation, which I thought at the time was odd. Now in retrospect I wonder whether this was something to do with his illness.
I suffer from depression I realise, and am reticent enough about admitting it to myself never mind friends for fear of appearing weak, but the extreme highs and lows you read about that are direct manifestations of what used to be called manic depression seem hard to fathom to me, even if this appears to be only just a grander, more terrifying stage to find yourself on.
When heroes like Robin Williams take their own life apparently as a result of this it affects you deeply enough, but when someone you know is so engulfed by it that they take their own life, as I now know happened with Mike. It brings it all home terribly.
I can only imagine what those who loved him closest have been through and are still going through to come to terms with this, it has shocked me, and I only knew him a little.
I remember worrying a couple of times that I hadn't heard anything from him in ages, as the very last Facebook status he'd put was an RIP for David Bowie in early January 2016. I'd lost his phone number on a lost phone, and anyway I have to say that remembering an earlier status he'd put saying "Facebook I want a divorce", I honestly just thought that he was having a long sabbatical from it.
I did this once, and didn't bother with faceybook for over 6 months, as I recall no one seemed to notice! :)
I don't mean to have a go a faceybook, it's put me back in contact with people I'd lost contact with and is the only way I can keep in contact with many, nice people I have worked with.
Anyway most acting jobs often mean that you become become very close friends with people for only a short space of time, then afterwards perhaps never get to see them again, no matter how close you may have become. That's not to suggest shallowness, but more the nature of the often lonely and frequently self centred business that it is! And of course you can't really be good friends if you only keep contact on faceybook. I'm very sad to have only found out about him dying over 4 months later, as are I know a lot of friends Mike made guiding will be. I was chatting to a good friend of Mike's from when he was in youth theatre years ago in Croydon, and he didn't know Mike had worked on the London tours. He's connected to a circle of Mike's oldest, closest friends who were informed on faceybook about his death, and the reason news is only now filtering through to those of us who knew him tour guiding, is that of course, none of us were.
Most actors I think share the desire to be well loved and Mike on top of achieving an impressive body of work, certainly was well loved. His dad told me that more than 40 of his acting friends attended his funeral and they sang "On the trail of the lonesome pine" a touching tribute in honour of Mike having played Ollie, both in the BBC film about Stan Laurel, as well as on stage.
I'll really miss seeing you again Mikey, even if our paths did only cross occasionally. In my minds eye you are on that bus that day you found out you were going off to star in Love in Vegas, all that excitement in front of you, with that big smile which will always be my biggest memory of you, the biggest smile I've ever known!
x
Mike in 2014 in the Birmingham Rep cafe with Albert Finney!
The south side of London Bridge, Southwark, Borough Market, Cathedral & Borough High Street were the first part of London I got to know well when I came to live here in 1998, it's become more gentrified and smarter in the almost 20 years from when I got to know it, but it still remains my favourite part of the capital.
I am from Manchester and like other Mancs have been in shock about what happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, and then on Saturday night I could not believe that this particular area of London, which I have always felt closest to, had become the new back drop for large scale murder.
The magic of history and literature first made me fall in love with London, and this area is as crammed with it as borough market is with people at weekends. Yes it has lost a little of its character in 20 years, where hasn't? It's shabby earthiness has been tarted up, and today the pubs are frequented by young professionals and tourists and there's some uber trendy restaurants, but it still largely retains its magic.
I'm an actor, who's also been working on and off as a tour guide around London since I first came down here from finishing drama school in Birmingham.
My first acting job on arriving in London in May 1998 was playing members of the crew on the replica of the Golden Hind in St Mary Overie dock by Southwark Cathedral. I was playing the ships Barber Surgeon, entertaining groups of school children who'd come with some of their teachers and spend from late afternoon to the next morning on the ship, with stories of the horror of Tudor medicine, and threatening to cut their gangrenous legs off!
They'd come to have the full Tudor navy experience, (well apart from the weevils in the ships biscuits), sleeping in the hold after a favourite part, the telling of bedtime ghost stories and wearing jerkins & caps. It was fun, and educational in a horrible history, ( before those books had become famous), kind of way. I had great fun playing the full pirate type of character of Sir Francis Drake's crew. Eventually I graduated to playing the ships master engaging groups of kids with the basics of Tudor seamanship, navigation as well as all about Drake's famous 3 year voyage of circumnavigation on this ship between 1577 & 1580. I loved telling them about the small flightless black birds with white heads observed on the Magellan straits, that had first been named penguins by Welsh speaking members of the crew!
That replica ship which I'd seen as a kid being built down in Devon, and which had travelled far more nautical miles than the original had, wasn't going anywhere now as it was in a dry dock, but still I felt, and think the groups of children that spent time on board felt,that the glass windows of the office blocks that closely towered above the vessel where really reflecting the ocean and we were thousands of miles away from home without having really gone anywhere.
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre with Mark Rylance in charge had opened just a few bridges along up river, (wish I'd bumped into him back then I'd have pleaded for an audition),for the full Tudor playgoing experience, so the area was starting to buzz with excitement. The nearby Clink prison, as in the expression "in the Clink" had opened as an attraction, I was always amused by the bored looking young lad dressed as a Norman soldier, earphones peaking out from under his hoody chain mail and helmet amplifying the tinny sounds of hip hop as he hung around outside it giving occasional leaflets out promoting it. Just yards from the Golden Hind were the remains of the canny 13th century Bishop of Winchesters palace. He'd found that by allowing prostitution his side of the river he could make a good extra living from taxing his "Winchester geese". I learned that Southwark, where Chaucer's tale of pilgrims journeying to Canterbury had started, was London's first suburb, and long been the rough & ready part of the capital where things went on that we're disallowed or disproved of on the City side of the river. This was where Londoners for centuries had come in search of a good time!
In the late 80s there'd been a wonderful two part film adaptation of Dickens Little Dorrit by Christine Edzard, (still one of my favourite films), set in this area where the then 12 year old Charles' own father had been imprisoned for debt in the former Marshalsea prison. I'd read the book after seeing the film, which had also been partly shot around this area. and these same streets for me were alive with the character and characters of that book.
After the Golden Hind I worked for many years for a variety of companies doing hop on, hop off open top bus tours, always crossing London Bridge. Today's concrete bridge despite being the most boring looking of the many London bridges that have spanned the Thames here since Roman times evokes all sorts of historical references from the nursery rhyme to the favourite and oft told tour guide story, almost certainly a myth that the rich American industrialist, Robert P. McCulloch who bought the bridge, thought that when he heard London Bridge was up for sale, that he was getting Tower Bridge! It is certainly not iconic to look at compared to neighbouring Tower Bridge most often thought of as being London Bridge by tourists, but I always see in my mind, for me the infinitely more iconic 13th century London Bridge with all the houses on it, the wonder of medieval London, the only bridge across the river in London until the middle 1700s. A tunnel under the approach to the bridge has some of steps from the 1831 bridge that now stands in Arizona and many tour guides call these Nancy's steps after Bill Sikes' girlfriend in Oliver Twist sealed her fate in being later bludgeoned to death by him for what an informant had told him was Nancy's betrayal of him at this location.
Yes a lot of this areas history and fictional history is dark, and at the point where dragons either side of the road guard the southern entrance into the city and where that old, old bridge displayed on pikes above the gateway entrance the heads of alleged traitors as a warning to people entering the city to behave themselves.
I had just returned to London from a day coach tour to Stonehenge & Bath last Saturday evening and was far too tired to go out, but watching the news about the horror of the attacks on London Bridge & borough, whenever I cross the bridge again on a tour bus, I don't think I'll ever again be able to describe with such, engaging gusto the former macabre spectacle of its southern gate without thinking of the very modern, though inherently medieval slaughter that went on here last Saturday night.
History reminds us something more terrible has always in the past, the quarter of the then population, around 100,000 that died of the plague 1665-66, and the over 40,000 killed in the blitz of 1940-41, London today of course feels the loss of seven on Saturday evening and the suffering of many more just as acutely as the London of those times past felt.
My thoughts will be with the victims and their families of this new and genuinely horrible history of the bridge and its environs and when I guide people from all over the world across London Bridge again they will always be foremost in my mind.
I am from Manchester and like other Mancs have been in shock about what happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, and then on Saturday night I could not believe that this particular area of London, which I have always felt closest to, had become the new back drop for large scale murder.
The magic of history and literature first made me fall in love with London, and this area is as crammed with it as borough market is with people at weekends. Yes it has lost a little of its character in 20 years, where hasn't? It's shabby earthiness has been tarted up, and today the pubs are frequented by young professionals and tourists and there's some uber trendy restaurants, but it still largely retains its magic.
I'm an actor, who's also been working on and off as a tour guide around London since I first came down here from finishing drama school in Birmingham.
My first acting job on arriving in London in May 1998 was playing members of the crew on the replica of the Golden Hind in St Mary Overie dock by Southwark Cathedral. I was playing the ships Barber Surgeon, entertaining groups of school children who'd come with some of their teachers and spend from late afternoon to the next morning on the ship, with stories of the horror of Tudor medicine, and threatening to cut their gangrenous legs off!
They'd come to have the full Tudor navy experience, (well apart from the weevils in the ships biscuits), sleeping in the hold after a favourite part, the telling of bedtime ghost stories and wearing jerkins & caps. It was fun, and educational in a horrible history, ( before those books had become famous), kind of way. I had great fun playing the full pirate type of character of Sir Francis Drake's crew. Eventually I graduated to playing the ships master engaging groups of kids with the basics of Tudor seamanship, navigation as well as all about Drake's famous 3 year voyage of circumnavigation on this ship between 1577 & 1580. I loved telling them about the small flightless black birds with white heads observed on the Magellan straits, that had first been named penguins by Welsh speaking members of the crew!
That replica ship which I'd seen as a kid being built down in Devon, and which had travelled far more nautical miles than the original had, wasn't going anywhere now as it was in a dry dock, but still I felt, and think the groups of children that spent time on board felt,that the glass windows of the office blocks that closely towered above the vessel where really reflecting the ocean and we were thousands of miles away from home without having really gone anywhere.
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre with Mark Rylance in charge had opened just a few bridges along up river, (wish I'd bumped into him back then I'd have pleaded for an audition),for the full Tudor playgoing experience, so the area was starting to buzz with excitement. The nearby Clink prison, as in the expression "in the Clink" had opened as an attraction, I was always amused by the bored looking young lad dressed as a Norman soldier, earphones peaking out from under his hoody chain mail and helmet amplifying the tinny sounds of hip hop as he hung around outside it giving occasional leaflets out promoting it. Just yards from the Golden Hind were the remains of the canny 13th century Bishop of Winchesters palace. He'd found that by allowing prostitution his side of the river he could make a good extra living from taxing his "Winchester geese". I learned that Southwark, where Chaucer's tale of pilgrims journeying to Canterbury had started, was London's first suburb, and long been the rough & ready part of the capital where things went on that we're disallowed or disproved of on the City side of the river. This was where Londoners for centuries had come in search of a good time!
In the late 80s there'd been a wonderful two part film adaptation of Dickens Little Dorrit by Christine Edzard, (still one of my favourite films), set in this area where the then 12 year old Charles' own father had been imprisoned for debt in the former Marshalsea prison. I'd read the book after seeing the film, which had also been partly shot around this area. and these same streets for me were alive with the character and characters of that book.
After the Golden Hind I worked for many years for a variety of companies doing hop on, hop off open top bus tours, always crossing London Bridge. Today's concrete bridge despite being the most boring looking of the many London bridges that have spanned the Thames here since Roman times evokes all sorts of historical references from the nursery rhyme to the favourite and oft told tour guide story, almost certainly a myth that the rich American industrialist, Robert P. McCulloch who bought the bridge, thought that when he heard London Bridge was up for sale, that he was getting Tower Bridge! It is certainly not iconic to look at compared to neighbouring Tower Bridge most often thought of as being London Bridge by tourists, but I always see in my mind, for me the infinitely more iconic 13th century London Bridge with all the houses on it, the wonder of medieval London, the only bridge across the river in London until the middle 1700s. A tunnel under the approach to the bridge has some of steps from the 1831 bridge that now stands in Arizona and many tour guides call these Nancy's steps after Bill Sikes' girlfriend in Oliver Twist sealed her fate in being later bludgeoned to death by him for what an informant had told him was Nancy's betrayal of him at this location.
Yes a lot of this areas history and fictional history is dark, and at the point where dragons either side of the road guard the southern entrance into the city and where that old, old bridge displayed on pikes above the gateway entrance the heads of alleged traitors as a warning to people entering the city to behave themselves.
I had just returned to London from a day coach tour to Stonehenge & Bath last Saturday evening and was far too tired to go out, but watching the news about the horror of the attacks on London Bridge & borough, whenever I cross the bridge again on a tour bus, I don't think I'll ever again be able to describe with such, engaging gusto the former macabre spectacle of its southern gate without thinking of the very modern, though inherently medieval slaughter that went on here last Saturday night.
History reminds us something more terrible has always in the past, the quarter of the then population, around 100,000 that died of the plague 1665-66, and the over 40,000 killed in the blitz of 1940-41, London today of course feels the loss of seven on Saturday evening and the suffering of many more just as acutely as the London of those times past felt.
My thoughts will be with the victims and their families of this new and genuinely horrible history of the bridge and its environs and when I guide people from all over the world across London Bridge again they will always be foremost in my mind.
Where The Old Bank Theatre used to stand, Chapel St, Salford. Being back in Manchester again checking out whats going on is great, but inevitably gets me feeling all reflective and comparisons with the past are inescapable, but there are a lot of positive things going on drama wise in Manc at the minute, sadly though of course, as is depressingly the norm everywhere else, no one seems to have any bloomin money!
I went to meet with 'Northern rep' a week last Monday, a new company that has pretensions to be the first repertory company in Manc in over 50 years, well me and about 70 others. They had what was billed as a face to face, which wasn't as the name suggests a face to face interview, and I was disappointed about this at first, but quickly got drawn into the infectious enthusiasm and big plans for the place. Standing around in a big circle listening to Tom who's the artistic director talk reminded me of my first day of being in Manchester Youth Theatre 34 years ago. Tom wasn't scary & formidable like Geoff Sykes, the AD of MYT was, but it was looking round at the big group of young faces looking hopeful. Even though I lacked the youth, I certainly shared their hopes for the thing to succeed. I wanted to be a part of it, I saw myself as the confident young actor that I dreamt of being when I was 19/20, but never was. I only got the minuscule parts where I could seemingly do as little harm as possible while at MYT!.
He wants it to be like a co-op where we all own it, even though of course we won't get to just be in it without auditioning. Everyone is encouraged to be a member of the ensemble from which they will cast future shows and hopefully have money to pay everyone a bit later in the year. Yes money, or the lack of it was the elephant in the room, well at this early stage of their development anyway. Such a shame that no, big commercial sponsor can be found, like all those years ago MYT had Ciba-Geigy, but the bottom has fallen out of such arts sponsorship and every enterprise hopes and competes for increasingly depleting arts council money.
I went to see their show, Midsummer Nights Dream in the space where they intend to build two theatres, with the setting in the sparse space being a nightclub, and even though I can think of at least 1 other immersive Shakespeare show set in a nightclub running at the mo, I thoroughly enjoyed this, was drawn in completely. It was fun, didn't seem like Midsummer Nights Dream, nor Shakespeare, and if they want to attract a bigger audience than just friends and families of the actors maybe that's a good thing. It helps if you know the basics of the story, but it really did immerse you and deserves hugely to be better attended than the 40+ people that were there on the admittedly probably quietest night I was there, Tuesday. I'm really glad I went to see Northern Rep, as it's reignited my interest in creating theatre for the first time since the huge disappointments of self producing my own play Beatle Mal over 2 years, and I really hope this is the genesis of something big.
Last Friday I walked into the past, down Bridge street and crossed the Irwell for the first time in ages and ages, in search of the genesis of my acting mojo and well my mojo generally I think, in Salford, 25 years ago!
I'd gone over to Salford for an audition held at the Kings Head pub theatre for a company called Lion Tamers, very short audition, very hurried. I could tell from this lad in charge's awkward demeanour, that I wasn't what he wanted. Anyway not disappointed as they're unsure of money, and only have enough to do what they call a 2 week R&D in the summer & even if they do get the cash to do a tour at some point, it's pretty small scale, no lions roar glory, in fact all a bit too tame! I wasn't familiar with this term R&D until recently, but a lot of theatre companies seem to be doing this, very in vogue. What they call Research & Development, as I understand it a workshop to interest schools or what have you in the project. The current R&D buzzword reminds me of a line from a favourite Peter Sellers film 'After the Fox', one of his funniest for me, with some great lines written by Neil Simon. In it Martin Balsam's character Harry cynically explains the then current creative buzzword 'neo realism' to the vain film star he manages, Tony Powell, (a very funny Victor Mature, sending himself up wonderfully!)
"What's Neo Realism?" asks Tony. "No Money!" replies Harry.
But anyway it wasn't to prove a wasted trip across the Irwell, with this year being my silver anniversary of my finding my acting mojo! my confidence to act, in actual fact, my confidence generally after awkward teens and so far tense twenties where I didn't have the confidence to even ask directions or pick up a phone, ( I'm still a bit rubbish at both of those if truth be told).
I was introverted and intense, desperately shy and added to this, roughly from the ages of 17 til 26, until ultra violet light treatment at Salford Royal eliminated it, my chest was covered in large areas of psoriasis resembling a primitive map of the world, which didn't help. Girls? Women were dreams. In actual fact they still are!
I walked past the Mark Addy pub by the river, where we all used to go, we being the first intake of students of the newly founded 'City Acting Studio', based initially in a warehouse in Salford, can't remember where, and ran by theatrical agents Laine Management. Inside what was quite a biggish space we established a theatre, then latterly a move to an old bank building on Chapel street, when the agents fronted by Elaine, moved into offices upstairs, the ground floor was cleared out & painted by us and what we called 'The Old Bank Theatre' was established. This was early 1992, I was working at the then Granada studios tour attraction and getting occasional extra work through Laine in Coronation Street, Cracker & Medics etc.
It's funny because even though I do spend a lot of time thinking about the past, I usually have a reticence about actively going back, seeking out old haunts or having reunions. Maybe because I'm making Manchester my permanent home again for the first time in 24 years, I'm acutely aware that my connections to the place are all past ones, even though I've come back sporadically over the years, I haven't lived permanently in this city since I left to go time drama school in Birmingham in 1994. For 5 years I've been thinking whether to reestablish myself in Manc, after 15 years or so living in London, but lack of friends, contacts, and of course not least job opportunities put me off, until now. So my little pilgrimage down Salford the other day is me re establishing my links to Manc, (and Salford) again!
Back in 1991 acting dreams came back to me 7 years after my first unsuccessful attempts to audition for drama schools and 2 unspectacular years with MYT, prompted by working on tv sets a lot, I wanted to act again.
We had Andy Devine, who's now best known for his time in Emmerdale, as our acting coach, studying Stella Adler technique, the method as some have called it. I liked Andy a lot, do remember having a fair few clashes with him artistically, but he was a good teacher, better than all but one of the people I was to have a few years later at drama school & that person wasn't an actor as Andy was.
For the final half of what I think was 6 months, (though in a good way it felt like a year), of these I think maybe only once a week night classes, after getting the new theatre space ready, we were rehearsing for our final showcase which was to take place for a few weeks over Easter 1992. Every scene we worked on had always filmed by a video camera on a tripod which we all took in turns to use, I remember Albert, in the class early on before he dropped out, always wanted to be camera man!
It was frequently painful looking back at this video footage afterwards, but it was meant to be, not just the mistakes, but the just watching yourself. Hugely useful though, picking up on all the nervous ticks & personal mannerisms that still crept in to the most unrecognisable characters that you created! I still have my video tape from back then and will eventually get round to watching it again. Sure it will probably help me as much now as it did 25 years ago!
Every month or so of the course we'd have a show open to friends & family usually, showcase scenes selected from plays or written and devised by us, with Andy of course directing.
For this last showcase excited that I managed to get Sophie Marshall, the then casting director of the Royal Exchange Theatre to see us one night. Anyone who knows me knows how I've always been obsessed with working in this theatre, and this night was the closest I've ever come to potentially working at my theatre of dreams.
I've a strong feeling she didn't stay till the end and I never heard from her afterwards what she thought. Although I do remember after this I did audition for something non Royal Exchange related in a warehouse opposite the old Granada HQ on Quay Street, for which she was sitting on a panel for with others, anyway at least she always seemed approachable, not the like the current caster there sadly.
For this final showcase in the new Old Bank Theatre, Andy Devine had us all do scenes from 'Feiffer's People', comic & bittersweet sketches about American domestic & marital life written by Jules Feiffer, who's probably best known for writing the screenplay for the movie Carnal Knowledge in the late 60's. We had our work cut out to adapt these, even for then I think rather dated and very American 2 or 3 hander sketches into a more familiar setting for all of us. Come to think of it I do remember doing a lot of other pieces at City Acting Studio with an American accent though, including Jack Nicholson's devil monologue about women from The Witches of Eastwick film script. "Eat Broccoli!"
In this final showcase I was in 3 scenes. I did a scene with Lucy who was a lovely girl who I had an almost brother and sister like friendship with. The scene was called Brewers Droop about a couple of course who can't get it on because the fella had consumed too much booze & couldn't perform in bed and Lucy's character in a sexy back underwear attempts to reassure me, playing him. I remember it was a hard.. ha ha scene to do. Just overcoming shyness at performing an intimate scene with her, even when nothing actually happens and indeed just before anything does and my uptight Woody Allenesque character comes to the realisation that "Sex is dirty!" the scene comically ends.
Another scene from Feiffer was called a "A Rose in her teeth" I did this with Pauline or Erina,
Dear Pauline, she helped my confidence grow enormously, and although I know it wasn't a particularly happy time for her personally, I've often thought of her over the years, hoping she's good, hoping she's happy, because the last time I saw her she was desperately unhappy.
She was a nurse, a stewardess for British airways, and she was a wonderful, sexy, generous, and just generally fabulous woman, and I'll never forget her, She believed in me and quite honestly the confidence I got from City Acting Studio was as much from her as from the course itself. All these years later I still buy Eternity aftershave because of her, I remember she told me she could shag a man all night, (or maybe for eternity), with that on!
I did find her on Facebook while writing this blog, and glad to say she looks likes she is happy. I have thought about contacting her, as well as the so far, 3 others I've found in the pictures of for our final show at the Old Bank theatre, which I have posted below. 25 years is a long time though and I'm not at all sure I should bother her, she'll maybe think I'm raking up the past for no good reason, and I worry whether she or the others will be receptive to what is intended as a friendly, good intentioned overture after all these years, I know they've all moved on and so have I. Maybe the past should stay past, and it's only me that is proud of this positive and important moment in my life, I do hope not. I do hope everyone else at least shares fond memories of this time.
Earlier at our previous base, (wonder where that was?), we'd had quite a few more people, many more than the 10 of us in pictures below, but we were the die hards who completed the course, survived to the end! As for Andy, It'd be nice to speak with him if I could find him, I read that since leaving Emmerdale 7 years ago he's been living on a boat up in Stanley, near Wakefield, West Yorks. I liked that he said in an interview I found with him, that he always wanted to be a pirate. Me too, must be something in 28th February born pisceans water wanting to be pirates, as she shares the same birthday with me!
Pauline's mum was from Ireland and she strongly identified with the Emerald Isle, as indeed do I, so she wanted to give 'A Rose in her teeth' an Irish setting. I loved playing this imposing Bill Sykes like Irish labourer character in donkey jacket and flat cap who when he enters the pub everyone notices. I love playing intimidating and supremely confident characters, a million miles from me. But this was Pauline's scene completely and I remember she played it beautiful and subtle, while I was chewing the minimalist scenery! I still have somewhere the red rose used as a prop, a fake one, plastic, though there was nothing fake about the emotions at work in that piece.
Everyone was good as I remember, that last showcase was full of high standard pieces, far better than the creaky source material sketches deserved to be, and I think allowing for the limitations of what showcases allow it was entertaining for our audiences to watch, better than any showcase I've seen ever since and I've seen a fair few. The best thing of all was, I think we'd all seen our confidence grow as the course had progressed.
I walked down Chapel Street trying to decide where The Old Bank Theatre had stood, I'd read somewhere it had been demolished, knew it stood roughly opposite Salford Cathedral and took a picture of a couple of bits of likely wasteland where there had been a big curved corners into side streets. I've since tracked down pictures of it before demolition, so I can. pinpoint exactly where it stood and the pictures I took, (the ones below), were spot on, I knew it!
Oh I'm there imagining standing there these big double doors on the corner of the building, where once certainly the most dramatic thing in the buildings history as a theatre took place.
One evening, I want to remember it as mid performance in one of our shows, but it might just have been us rehearsing, these doors were ram raided! Must have been strong doors especially made for Salford banks under attack back in the day, as they didn't fall, but the whole building shook and dust fell from the ceiling, (I'm fairly sure onto an audience), before the vehicle, never saw what type, backed up and sped off. Did they think the bank was back in business or did they just hate actors in Salford? Never found out, but whichever way you look at it, they severely dented their vehicle or their egos for no good reason!
I've read that the building which had been condemned as unsafe, (maybe our ram raiders had started something back then), was gutted in a fire before its eventual demise about 4 years ago. Apparently only one of many things it had been back in the day, was an Irish bank, looking after the accounts of a lot Irish Catholics in the city, including the Cathedral just opposite. Pauline & I had been spiritually at home with our Irish themed piece then!
Did hear a few years ago that there was a nice plan to build a wall, 'The Salford Wall', a nice non divisive, but creative kind of wall, but I hadn't really appreciated that the wall was to be built with this very buildings bricks which were salvaged and numbered by a local artist!
I feel as though I want to go and perform a piece on The Old Bank Theatre's derelict site as a tribute to its importance to me, very sad it's gone and that I didn't come looking for it sooner.This is indeed the first time I've been back in those 25 years.
I wonder how long it continued as a theatre after we were there, and I wonder about the hopeful actors who used it after us first lot. Hope they felt as positive about it as I did/still do.
For me my time there paved the way of having the confidence to try to make my own theatre. With Pauline's help, I tried to found a theatre company called Mischievous Fools, together with Lucy, my good friend Simon Lind, Chris Joyce who'd been with us at City Acting Studio, and a nice friend of Pauline's called Nigel. I had big plans to do an open air production of a little play I'd written called Robin Goodfellow. And a year later in the summer of 1994, just before I went to drama school in Birmingham, I did my own Treasure Island street show in Edinburgh. None of this and getting into drama school would have been remotely possible without what came to an end on this now, sadly bit of derelict wasteland in Salford in the week after Easter, at the end of April exactly 25 years ago!
Blimey 25 years since City Acting Studio, 20 years since leaving drama school, the anniversaries are racking up, but are they to be celebrated when I'm still so woefully struggling?!
It's bittersweet looking for ghosts of your past, being somewhere where once those people were close besides you, but are now are far, far away. As I look at the pictures of my dark haired younger self, I wonder how much I've changed apart from the obvious stampede of crows under my eyes, fairer hair, ( I must stop dying it, Trump has killed my desire to be a blonde), not to mention my considerably less slimmer outline. But not that much really inside, still living the dream that began here! I wonder about the others. Sadly I lost contact with everyone from City Acting Studio within a few months of Mischievous Fools finishing and Pauline too went out of my life.
That really saddened me even though I understood and I retreated into myself for a while, wrote Morrissey-like love poems as I've often done at such times. Added to this I'd lost my sister-like friend Lucy too. If I remember correctly she had joined a Christian group or something like that and apparently shut everyone out, wasn't contactable. Can't remember exact details of this now, but I lost 2 friends in quick succession and to lose a good friend is as bad if not worse than losing a lover, doubly so if they're both. But my confidence to keep acting kept on track.
Now with all this looking back, some might easily accuse me of being mawkish...urgh horrible word, maudlin….even worse. well lets just try over sentimental then? You're not on my wavelength if you do! I think sentimentality is good, it embraces detail, the little things, savours the moments of pleasure. Some might say don't dwell in the past, go forwards, not backwards, I am looking forward, that's a lot of what this blogs about. Going back is in actual fact a valuable way of re evaluating your life, and you have to look back to go forwards at decisive moments in your life, and as I do have the feeling that I've come to another of life's cross roads after a fair amount of time on a long, uphill road that's been in places scenically very lovely, and full of great things, but ultimately still has led to nowhere!
I went to meet with 'Northern rep' a week last Monday, a new company that has pretensions to be the first repertory company in Manc in over 50 years, well me and about 70 others. They had what was billed as a face to face, which wasn't as the name suggests a face to face interview, and I was disappointed about this at first, but quickly got drawn into the infectious enthusiasm and big plans for the place. Standing around in a big circle listening to Tom who's the artistic director talk reminded me of my first day of being in Manchester Youth Theatre 34 years ago. Tom wasn't scary & formidable like Geoff Sykes, the AD of MYT was, but it was looking round at the big group of young faces looking hopeful. Even though I lacked the youth, I certainly shared their hopes for the thing to succeed. I wanted to be a part of it, I saw myself as the confident young actor that I dreamt of being when I was 19/20, but never was. I only got the minuscule parts where I could seemingly do as little harm as possible while at MYT!.
He wants it to be like a co-op where we all own it, even though of course we won't get to just be in it without auditioning. Everyone is encouraged to be a member of the ensemble from which they will cast future shows and hopefully have money to pay everyone a bit later in the year. Yes money, or the lack of it was the elephant in the room, well at this early stage of their development anyway. Such a shame that no, big commercial sponsor can be found, like all those years ago MYT had Ciba-Geigy, but the bottom has fallen out of such arts sponsorship and every enterprise hopes and competes for increasingly depleting arts council money.
I went to see their show, Midsummer Nights Dream in the space where they intend to build two theatres, with the setting in the sparse space being a nightclub, and even though I can think of at least 1 other immersive Shakespeare show set in a nightclub running at the mo, I thoroughly enjoyed this, was drawn in completely. It was fun, didn't seem like Midsummer Nights Dream, nor Shakespeare, and if they want to attract a bigger audience than just friends and families of the actors maybe that's a good thing. It helps if you know the basics of the story, but it really did immerse you and deserves hugely to be better attended than the 40+ people that were there on the admittedly probably quietest night I was there, Tuesday. I'm really glad I went to see Northern Rep, as it's reignited my interest in creating theatre for the first time since the huge disappointments of self producing my own play Beatle Mal over 2 years, and I really hope this is the genesis of something big.
Last Friday I walked into the past, down Bridge street and crossed the Irwell for the first time in ages and ages, in search of the genesis of my acting mojo and well my mojo generally I think, in Salford, 25 years ago!
I'd gone over to Salford for an audition held at the Kings Head pub theatre for a company called Lion Tamers, very short audition, very hurried. I could tell from this lad in charge's awkward demeanour, that I wasn't what he wanted. Anyway not disappointed as they're unsure of money, and only have enough to do what they call a 2 week R&D in the summer & even if they do get the cash to do a tour at some point, it's pretty small scale, no lions roar glory, in fact all a bit too tame! I wasn't familiar with this term R&D until recently, but a lot of theatre companies seem to be doing this, very in vogue. What they call Research & Development, as I understand it a workshop to interest schools or what have you in the project. The current R&D buzzword reminds me of a line from a favourite Peter Sellers film 'After the Fox', one of his funniest for me, with some great lines written by Neil Simon. In it Martin Balsam's character Harry cynically explains the then current creative buzzword 'neo realism' to the vain film star he manages, Tony Powell, (a very funny Victor Mature, sending himself up wonderfully!)
"What's Neo Realism?" asks Tony. "No Money!" replies Harry.
But anyway it wasn't to prove a wasted trip across the Irwell, with this year being my silver anniversary of my finding my acting mojo! my confidence to act, in actual fact, my confidence generally after awkward teens and so far tense twenties where I didn't have the confidence to even ask directions or pick up a phone, ( I'm still a bit rubbish at both of those if truth be told).
I was introverted and intense, desperately shy and added to this, roughly from the ages of 17 til 26, until ultra violet light treatment at Salford Royal eliminated it, my chest was covered in large areas of psoriasis resembling a primitive map of the world, which didn't help. Girls? Women were dreams. In actual fact they still are!
I walked past the Mark Addy pub by the river, where we all used to go, we being the first intake of students of the newly founded 'City Acting Studio', based initially in a warehouse in Salford, can't remember where, and ran by theatrical agents Laine Management. Inside what was quite a biggish space we established a theatre, then latterly a move to an old bank building on Chapel street, when the agents fronted by Elaine, moved into offices upstairs, the ground floor was cleared out & painted by us and what we called 'The Old Bank Theatre' was established. This was early 1992, I was working at the then Granada studios tour attraction and getting occasional extra work through Laine in Coronation Street, Cracker & Medics etc.
It's funny because even though I do spend a lot of time thinking about the past, I usually have a reticence about actively going back, seeking out old haunts or having reunions. Maybe because I'm making Manchester my permanent home again for the first time in 24 years, I'm acutely aware that my connections to the place are all past ones, even though I've come back sporadically over the years, I haven't lived permanently in this city since I left to go time drama school in Birmingham in 1994. For 5 years I've been thinking whether to reestablish myself in Manc, after 15 years or so living in London, but lack of friends, contacts, and of course not least job opportunities put me off, until now. So my little pilgrimage down Salford the other day is me re establishing my links to Manc, (and Salford) again!
Back in 1991 acting dreams came back to me 7 years after my first unsuccessful attempts to audition for drama schools and 2 unspectacular years with MYT, prompted by working on tv sets a lot, I wanted to act again.
We had Andy Devine, who's now best known for his time in Emmerdale, as our acting coach, studying Stella Adler technique, the method as some have called it. I liked Andy a lot, do remember having a fair few clashes with him artistically, but he was a good teacher, better than all but one of the people I was to have a few years later at drama school & that person wasn't an actor as Andy was.
For the final half of what I think was 6 months, (though in a good way it felt like a year), of these I think maybe only once a week night classes, after getting the new theatre space ready, we were rehearsing for our final showcase which was to take place for a few weeks over Easter 1992. Every scene we worked on had always filmed by a video camera on a tripod which we all took in turns to use, I remember Albert, in the class early on before he dropped out, always wanted to be camera man!
It was frequently painful looking back at this video footage afterwards, but it was meant to be, not just the mistakes, but the just watching yourself. Hugely useful though, picking up on all the nervous ticks & personal mannerisms that still crept in to the most unrecognisable characters that you created! I still have my video tape from back then and will eventually get round to watching it again. Sure it will probably help me as much now as it did 25 years ago!
Every month or so of the course we'd have a show open to friends & family usually, showcase scenes selected from plays or written and devised by us, with Andy of course directing.
For this last showcase excited that I managed to get Sophie Marshall, the then casting director of the Royal Exchange Theatre to see us one night. Anyone who knows me knows how I've always been obsessed with working in this theatre, and this night was the closest I've ever come to potentially working at my theatre of dreams.
I've a strong feeling she didn't stay till the end and I never heard from her afterwards what she thought. Although I do remember after this I did audition for something non Royal Exchange related in a warehouse opposite the old Granada HQ on Quay Street, for which she was sitting on a panel for with others, anyway at least she always seemed approachable, not the like the current caster there sadly.
For this final showcase in the new Old Bank Theatre, Andy Devine had us all do scenes from 'Feiffer's People', comic & bittersweet sketches about American domestic & marital life written by Jules Feiffer, who's probably best known for writing the screenplay for the movie Carnal Knowledge in the late 60's. We had our work cut out to adapt these, even for then I think rather dated and very American 2 or 3 hander sketches into a more familiar setting for all of us. Come to think of it I do remember doing a lot of other pieces at City Acting Studio with an American accent though, including Jack Nicholson's devil monologue about women from The Witches of Eastwick film script. "Eat Broccoli!"
In this final showcase I was in 3 scenes. I did a scene with Lucy who was a lovely girl who I had an almost brother and sister like friendship with. The scene was called Brewers Droop about a couple of course who can't get it on because the fella had consumed too much booze & couldn't perform in bed and Lucy's character in a sexy back underwear attempts to reassure me, playing him. I remember it was a hard.. ha ha scene to do. Just overcoming shyness at performing an intimate scene with her, even when nothing actually happens and indeed just before anything does and my uptight Woody Allenesque character comes to the realisation that "Sex is dirty!" the scene comically ends.
Another scene from Feiffer was called a "A Rose in her teeth" I did this with Pauline or Erina,
Dear Pauline, she helped my confidence grow enormously, and although I know it wasn't a particularly happy time for her personally, I've often thought of her over the years, hoping she's good, hoping she's happy, because the last time I saw her she was desperately unhappy.
She was a nurse, a stewardess for British airways, and she was a wonderful, sexy, generous, and just generally fabulous woman, and I'll never forget her, She believed in me and quite honestly the confidence I got from City Acting Studio was as much from her as from the course itself. All these years later I still buy Eternity aftershave because of her, I remember she told me she could shag a man all night, (or maybe for eternity), with that on!
I did find her on Facebook while writing this blog, and glad to say she looks likes she is happy. I have thought about contacting her, as well as the so far, 3 others I've found in the pictures of for our final show at the Old Bank theatre, which I have posted below. 25 years is a long time though and I'm not at all sure I should bother her, she'll maybe think I'm raking up the past for no good reason, and I worry whether she or the others will be receptive to what is intended as a friendly, good intentioned overture after all these years, I know they've all moved on and so have I. Maybe the past should stay past, and it's only me that is proud of this positive and important moment in my life, I do hope not. I do hope everyone else at least shares fond memories of this time.
Earlier at our previous base, (wonder where that was?), we'd had quite a few more people, many more than the 10 of us in pictures below, but we were the die hards who completed the course, survived to the end! As for Andy, It'd be nice to speak with him if I could find him, I read that since leaving Emmerdale 7 years ago he's been living on a boat up in Stanley, near Wakefield, West Yorks. I liked that he said in an interview I found with him, that he always wanted to be a pirate. Me too, must be something in 28th February born pisceans water wanting to be pirates, as she shares the same birthday with me!
Pauline's mum was from Ireland and she strongly identified with the Emerald Isle, as indeed do I, so she wanted to give 'A Rose in her teeth' an Irish setting. I loved playing this imposing Bill Sykes like Irish labourer character in donkey jacket and flat cap who when he enters the pub everyone notices. I love playing intimidating and supremely confident characters, a million miles from me. But this was Pauline's scene completely and I remember she played it beautiful and subtle, while I was chewing the minimalist scenery! I still have somewhere the red rose used as a prop, a fake one, plastic, though there was nothing fake about the emotions at work in that piece.
Everyone was good as I remember, that last showcase was full of high standard pieces, far better than the creaky source material sketches deserved to be, and I think allowing for the limitations of what showcases allow it was entertaining for our audiences to watch, better than any showcase I've seen ever since and I've seen a fair few. The best thing of all was, I think we'd all seen our confidence grow as the course had progressed.
I walked down Chapel Street trying to decide where The Old Bank Theatre had stood, I'd read somewhere it had been demolished, knew it stood roughly opposite Salford Cathedral and took a picture of a couple of bits of likely wasteland where there had been a big curved corners into side streets. I've since tracked down pictures of it before demolition, so I can. pinpoint exactly where it stood and the pictures I took, (the ones below), were spot on, I knew it!
Oh I'm there imagining standing there these big double doors on the corner of the building, where once certainly the most dramatic thing in the buildings history as a theatre took place.
One evening, I want to remember it as mid performance in one of our shows, but it might just have been us rehearsing, these doors were ram raided! Must have been strong doors especially made for Salford banks under attack back in the day, as they didn't fall, but the whole building shook and dust fell from the ceiling, (I'm fairly sure onto an audience), before the vehicle, never saw what type, backed up and sped off. Did they think the bank was back in business or did they just hate actors in Salford? Never found out, but whichever way you look at it, they severely dented their vehicle or their egos for no good reason!
I've read that the building which had been condemned as unsafe, (maybe our ram raiders had started something back then), was gutted in a fire before its eventual demise about 4 years ago. Apparently only one of many things it had been back in the day, was an Irish bank, looking after the accounts of a lot Irish Catholics in the city, including the Cathedral just opposite. Pauline & I had been spiritually at home with our Irish themed piece then!
Did hear a few years ago that there was a nice plan to build a wall, 'The Salford Wall', a nice non divisive, but creative kind of wall, but I hadn't really appreciated that the wall was to be built with this very buildings bricks which were salvaged and numbered by a local artist!
I feel as though I want to go and perform a piece on The Old Bank Theatre's derelict site as a tribute to its importance to me, very sad it's gone and that I didn't come looking for it sooner.This is indeed the first time I've been back in those 25 years.
I wonder how long it continued as a theatre after we were there, and I wonder about the hopeful actors who used it after us first lot. Hope they felt as positive about it as I did/still do.
For me my time there paved the way of having the confidence to try to make my own theatre. With Pauline's help, I tried to found a theatre company called Mischievous Fools, together with Lucy, my good friend Simon Lind, Chris Joyce who'd been with us at City Acting Studio, and a nice friend of Pauline's called Nigel. I had big plans to do an open air production of a little play I'd written called Robin Goodfellow. And a year later in the summer of 1994, just before I went to drama school in Birmingham, I did my own Treasure Island street show in Edinburgh. None of this and getting into drama school would have been remotely possible without what came to an end on this now, sadly bit of derelict wasteland in Salford in the week after Easter, at the end of April exactly 25 years ago!
Blimey 25 years since City Acting Studio, 20 years since leaving drama school, the anniversaries are racking up, but are they to be celebrated when I'm still so woefully struggling?!
It's bittersweet looking for ghosts of your past, being somewhere where once those people were close besides you, but are now are far, far away. As I look at the pictures of my dark haired younger self, I wonder how much I've changed apart from the obvious stampede of crows under my eyes, fairer hair, ( I must stop dying it, Trump has killed my desire to be a blonde), not to mention my considerably less slimmer outline. But not that much really inside, still living the dream that began here! I wonder about the others. Sadly I lost contact with everyone from City Acting Studio within a few months of Mischievous Fools finishing and Pauline too went out of my life.
That really saddened me even though I understood and I retreated into myself for a while, wrote Morrissey-like love poems as I've often done at such times. Added to this I'd lost my sister-like friend Lucy too. If I remember correctly she had joined a Christian group or something like that and apparently shut everyone out, wasn't contactable. Can't remember exact details of this now, but I lost 2 friends in quick succession and to lose a good friend is as bad if not worse than losing a lover, doubly so if they're both. But my confidence to keep acting kept on track.
Now with all this looking back, some might easily accuse me of being mawkish...urgh horrible word, maudlin….even worse. well lets just try over sentimental then? You're not on my wavelength if you do! I think sentimentality is good, it embraces detail, the little things, savours the moments of pleasure. Some might say don't dwell in the past, go forwards, not backwards, I am looking forward, that's a lot of what this blogs about. Going back is in actual fact a valuable way of re evaluating your life, and you have to look back to go forwards at decisive moments in your life, and as I do have the feeling that I've come to another of life's cross roads after a fair amount of time on a long, uphill road that's been in places scenically very lovely, and full of great things, but ultimately still has led to nowhere!
 Brewers Droop. Lucy & I  A Rose in her teeth, Pauline & I. |  Suzy Yannis & I  Curtain call for the Big Kids! |  Poster I drew for our final show. Andy's idea calling us Big Kids, which I didn't think was cool! |
 It was at this point on the stage that I once stood next to a lovely Irish girl with a Rose in her teeth!  Those big double corner doors at centre that protected us from Salford Ram raiders 25 years ago! |  And here she is, but without the Rose in her teeth.  Back row: James, Claire, me, Lesley & Denise. Front row: Pauline, Peter, Lucy, Andy, Suzy & Gaynor |
The Mischievous Fools, post City Acting Studio. The only one of many pics I have from this where I don't look disgustingly as much like a young Tony Blair! Lucy, Chris, Simon with guitar, me in front, Nigel & Pauline.
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