A Holiday of Bank

What a bank holiday weekend that was! It started on Friday around lunchtime when, preparing for an evening at the Crow – I mean a night in with a discussion group on zoom – I noticed a little post on Facebook. ‘Is anyone interested in a free ticket to Withnail and I at Birmingham Rep tonight?’ it said. Was I interested? I bit the guy’s hand off, and two hours later I was on the train to Brum (you have to change at Leicester from here, which is a bit of a pain but there you go) arriving ‘into New Street’ as the announcers inexplicably say, where I paused to admire the Bull which had been a feature of the last Commonwealth Games (see pic below) before emerging onto a wet street ridged with tram lines. The trams are new since I was last there, and very impressive they are too, though I didn’t really have any use for one as I was just wandering around for an hour or two and hopefully finding a decent pub for a beer and a bite. Sadly it was cold and wet but I did indeed find a lovely little pub called the Sly Fox which had all the hallmarks of a traditional pub with some good grub and several real ales.

https://theslyoldfox.com/

I had a half of Butty Bach and a haloumi wrap, both gorgeous. After that I walked through the cold and drizzle to Birmingham Rep (I like walking through Birmingham; it’s a mixture of industry and grandeur and instead of trudging through the streets you get to walk through all the squares and admire the monuments). I arrived at the theatre and met the guy with the ticket. The performance was brilliant (see review below) though sadly I had to leave a little before the end to catch the last train or I’d have been stranded. I got home around midnight and of course didn’t sleep because I was so wired. Next morning we had a late breakfast at the pop-up vegan cafe in Fearon Hall (sausages, vegan bacon, beans, hash browns, tomatoes and mushrooms – gorgeous) and thence to the Singaround at its new venue in the church hall. I wasn’t too keen on the change of venue but there were beers available and I have to say it was a great afternoon. Then on Sunday after Meeting I went to Woodhouse Eaves Sustainability fair where I met a lot of people I knew and ate a vegan brownie before buying OH a Morsbag so that mine don’t go missing. Again. And yesterday we went to the May fair at Beacon Hill, run by Leicestershire Druids, where we got lost and ended up walking miles and missing the maypole dancing. After that the weekend caught up with me and I collapsed in a chair in the garden and didn’t move for several hours before the son came round with beers to revive me a little. And that was our Bank Holiday weekend. Hope yours was as good.

Kirk out

Free to Those That Can’t Afford it, Very Expensive to Those on Chesterfields

On Friday I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to see Withnail and I at the Rep in Birmingham.

https://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/whats-on/withnail-and-i/

I’d seen this advertised and really wanted to go but I couldn’t afford it, so when a ticket was advertised on Facebook I went to see Uncle Monty and prepared to rejuvenate in Birmingham by mistake. It was brilliant to be in an audience made up exclusively of Withnail fans, and if the scenery wobbled a little that was entirely in keeping with the anarchic ethos of the play. We were in the front row apart from the very expensive Chesterfields in front of us, each with its own oaf. Steve and I were both anxious about whether they would do the film justice but we needn’t have worried; from the first moment I knew they’d hit it and from then on I didn’t stop laughing till the end. This has more than a little to do with the fact that Bruce Robinson wrote the script. Adonis Siddique’s Marwood was just as uptight and anxious as Paul McGann’s, though less good-looking: I’d have had him even if it had to be burglary – and Robert Sheehan’s Withnail more flamboyant and less enraged than Richard E Grant’s. I kind of missed the rage (how dare you?) but I went with it and thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation. If our main worry was whether they’d do it justice, I guess theirs would be that the audience would just sit and yell out all the lines. But they played it very cleverly, disrupting the script to keep us on our toes so we were never quite sure where the familiar lines would drop, though we laughed and cheered when they did. Monty was absolutely delicious – more restrained but just as camp; and nearly all the familiar scenes were there; the Mother Red Cap (they did the urinal scene beautifully) the squalid flat with ‘matter’ in the sink and coffee in bowls; Monty’s shack at Crow Crag and even the exterior scenes, all done with backdrops and clever lighting. The only bit missing was the bull though I made up for that by running at the bull in New Street station, shouting.

Withnail and I is a picaresque piece (what absolute twaddle) meaning that the same characters move through different scenes. It has become a cult partly because of its anarchic character (an unfortunate political decision) and partly because literally every line is quotable; there isn’t a duff or pedestrian line in the entire piece (and that’s what’s so essential isn’t it, the theatrical zeal in the veins.)

The piece de resistance, though, was the Jag in which Withnail and Marwood drive from London to Monty’s cottage in Crow Crag near Penrith (Penrith!) Somehow or other they managed to get the shell of a Jag onto the stage, sit the guys inside it and then project the motorway onto the surrounding screens. It was brilliant and got a well-deserved round of applause.

It was terrific to be in a theatre packed with Withnail fans as opposed to being at home with only one, and I wished OH could have been there but it was not to be. Friday was preview night, the first ever performance, and I felt very privileged to be a part of it. Unfortunately I had to leave just before the end causing half the front row to call me a terrible c**t, but I had to catch the last train or I’d have been forced to camp.

Thanks to Steve for the ticket.

Kirk out

Nye Then

I’ve been quite busy this week, as you can imagine, sorting out solicitors and estate agents and generally trying to make the garden look presentable, no mean feat as it’s very overgrown. I did a couple of days wrestling with blackberry canes and strimming the long grass (I feel bad about doing this as I’ve sent no end of beetles and ladybirds scurrying for shelter as I assault them with my loud whirring machine, but the better it looks, the better our chances for a quick sale.) The trellis is now visible which was hidden under brambles and ivy, and the grass is shorter at least. Sadly this time of year sees the first appearance of the – oh god, what’s it called? Not Japanese knotweed but close – nope, it’s gone. It’ll come back to me. They used to be trees in the coniferous period and they look very arboreal still, with a central stem and lots of little ferny branches. I kind of venerate them for being so old and yet persisting, but the trouble is, they are extremely invasive and impossible to dig up as the roots are soil coloured, highly frangible and can go down to a depth of five feet. There are always these tensions when living in a society like ours: you want to respect nature on the one hand, but on the other you want to sell your house quickly and move to Scotland.

Horsetail! That’s what it’s called.

By way of a break from all this, I went with a friend to see Nye in Leicester. This was one of those Stage on Screen productions which the National Theatre do, where they livestream a play to cinemas all over the country on specific dates. Nye is of course the story of Nye Bevan, the miners’ champion and the architect of the NHS. I really wanted to see this ever since I read about it, and I wasn’t disappointed. It blew me away. The story is told in flashback with Nye dying in a hospital bed in one of the NHS wards he created. The scenes change quite rapidly with a set of beds and curtains changing around in a highly imaginative way to represent various scenes such as Nye’s home, the green benches in the House of Commons and the Commons tea room. Michael Sheen plays the bull-headed, passionate and womanising Bevan, and the production doesn’t skate over the price paid by his wife and family for the creation of his vision: his wife says at one point that she sacrificed her career for him (she too was an MP, one of only five women at that time). Churchill is the villain here, along with the rest of the Tories fighting the NHS tooth and nail (and all other body parts too) while Bevan’s father lies dying of black lung, ironically neglected by his son as he fights for the health service that would have saved him. The PM Clement Atlee is played by a woman, an interesting bit of cross-casting which shows him as a somewhat Machiavellian figure whose heart is not in the radical reforms his government oversaw. The play is a blistering attack on the Tories as well as the privileged doctors who opposed the NHS every step of the way (they are portrayed in video as detached talking heads floating above the stage), and while it is a celebration of Nye it doesn’t skate over his flaws; his intransigence, his womanising and the neglect of his family.

There have been criticisms of the production, that a bio told in flashback is a cliche, and that it doesn’t spend long enough on the establishment of the welfare state, and I guess I can see those arguments but I was blown away by it. I’m so glad I got the opportunity to see it; and it’s a timely reminder that if we want the NHS we must be prepared to fight for it in every generation.

https://nye.ntlive.com

Kirk out.

Coincidences

Life is full of odd coincidences I think; I was talking yesterday about a radio play wot I wrote which I had come across.  Then the following morning Facebook threw up a 12-year-old memory of this play, which I had totally forgotten.  I didn’t mention this but the play, a modern take on Dante’s Inferno, is triggered by a news item about the anniversary of 9/11.  The protagonist is asleep and dreaming but conscious enough to hear the early-morning news on the radio.  The entire dream in which he explores hell guided by a character from a BBC drama series, takes place in a matter of moments between sleep and waking.  Well: this draft of the play, though the content is quite good I think, needs a lot of reformatting, so to remind myself of the guidelines I went on to BBC writersroom which is the starting-point for anyone wishing to submit a script to the BBC.  I read through the guidelines and then I thought I’d read a script to give myself an idea, so I clicked on one of the two or three available.  It was called A History of Paper and was about a bloke who’d kept a box full of scraps of paper from a previous relationship.  It transpires eventually that she died in – guess where? – one of the Twin Towers on 9/11.  How’s that for a coincidence?

The current window for submissions isn’t up yet but I’ll try to get it in shape for then.  The BBC short story award is also open for submissions – and it’s free, with a first prize of 15k, so I shall submit something for that.  It’s all go round here… 

First of March today. White Rabbits.

Kirk out

Wicked Little Posts

Last night I exiled myself from the house due to an invasion of Christians. This is a familiar experience for me; all through my childhood in a London vicarage I lived in a semi-public house where you could never be sure of not coming across a convocation of bishops or a gaggle of engaged couples waiting to discuss their banns. It was a bit like living in Buckingham Palace only on a much smaller scale; you could have a furious row with someone, storm out of the room and be confronted by several startled-looking couples sitting in the hall; even more annoyingly, you could go downstairs to watch Top of the Pops and find the sitting-room (we called it the lounge but I’m pretending to be down with the folks here) and find it occupied by a gathering of men in black (and not the fun kind.) What with there being only one TV in the entire house and no i-player, it was a bit trying. Incidentally, my mother remains the only person I have ever known to call a sofa a studio-couch.

Anyway, last night I went to the cinema to see Wicked Little Letters (SPOILER ALERT.)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20234774/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_6_nm_2_q_Wicked%2520Li

I was of course treated to the usual half-hour of adverts and trailers, one of which, for Dune, looked overwhelmingly schlocky but the special effects seemed good. And then the film, thankfully devoid of the usual ‘and now, it’s the main feature. So grab your coke and popcorn, sit back and prepare to enjoy. Mmm. I hate things that tell you what you should be feeling; one good thing about going to the Phoenix (local arts centre) is that there’s none of this bollocks.

Anyway, the film. The Guardian had slated it, but they’re not always right, and the cast was excellent – Olivia Coleman, Timothy Spall and Jessie Buckley play the inhabitants of Littlehampton, a sleepy village in West Sussex which is rocked in the years after the First World War by a series of nasty poison-pen letters addressed to Enid. Poor Enid is a buttoned-up spinster who lives at home with her timorous mother and overbearing father (at least I think that’s what the film was trying to convey). The obvious suspect is the dodgy Irish neighbour whose child is of doubtful parentage and who has the temerity to live with a black man. It could easily have been a good film but alas, the Guardian was right; it was awful. The characters were incoherent, the dialogue was terrible and the whole plot utterly implausible. We are asked to imagine that during the 1920’s people routinely used words like fuck, bugger and arse in normal conversation, which I’m absolutely certain they didn’t – certainly not in Littlehampton (I know the place well from my childhood as my grandparents lived nearby and I can assure you that even in the 60s there was Absolutely No Swearing.) The Irish floozy spends the whole film standing with her hands on her hips and a sardonic smile on her face, telling everyone to feck off, and the whole case is solved by a young Asian WPC, who discovers that it is in fact the horribly suppressed Enid, now reduced to living alone with her father, who has sent the letters to herself. She is discovered and imprisoned, yelling at her father as she goes that she will never come back to him. Despite all these shortcomings I quite enjoyed it; having a good cast helped, and there was something of a romp about the story which made it likeable. I didn’t recognise any bits of Littlehampton though – not surprising as it was filmed in Arundel which is inland with a castle. Though based on a true story, it reminded me of Alan Bennetts Lady of Letters, one of the Talking Heads series about a poison pen writer who goes to prison and is happier in there than she’s ever been outside.

Speaking of drama, quite by accident I came across a radio play I’d written a few years back. It’s called Auntie’s Inferno, Auntie being a reference to the BBC and the whole thing a take on Dante’s Inferno. I’d expected it to be awful but actually it’s not bad, so I may go back to it. And absolutely coincidentally (always supposing there is such a thing as coincidence) the very same play popped up on Facebook as a memory from 12 years ago. As OH pointed out, it would have to be a multiple of four as today is Feb 29th. Blast! Once again I missed my opportunity to ask OH to marry me. Just as well I asked in Feb 1993 then…

Enough already.

Kirk out

AI – Coming Soon to a Desk Near You

We’ve all read about AI and it may seem remote from us, if potentially threatening. But it came home to me yesterday in quite a startling way. I had sent some stories off for a competition called The King Lear Prizes.

https://www.kinglearprizes.org.uk/

It’s aimed at older people, the idea being that not only is Lear old but that Shakespeare wrote the play later in life. I found this idea quite encouraging so I sent off a couple of stories and poems and waited to hear. Competitions are always a long shot so I didn’t have great expectations and sure enough I heard this week that I hadn’t won or been shortlisted. Hey ho. But I had apparently ticked the box requesting feedback. I thought I might not agree with what they said but it might give me some insight into the particular brand of short-sightedness that led them to reject me, LOL. But when it came I saw to my disgust that the feedback was generated by AI. I have not the slightest interest in finding out what some algorithm thought of my work; I want a human response, thank you very much. So I deleted the email unread. But then I started to wonder: were the stories even read by people? Or were they filtered by AI and only the shortlisted ones read? And if so, how were they filtered? What was the AI looking for?Just when you thought writing couldn’t get any more disheartening, it does. Is this the future of literature? How long before publishers and agents start getting AI to filter manuscripts – and what gems might they miss in the process? After all, it’s often said that you don’t know what you’re looking for till you find it.

Speaking of Lear, there’s a new production directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. I’ve always suspected that Branagh had more ego than talent and when I listened to the review on Front Row my suspicions were confirmed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001rysh

There was a fantastic hoo-ha when Branagh first came on the scene in the early 90’s – he was the new Gielgud and everyone was raving about him. And then I saw him in a film – I think it was Dead Again which to be fair was an awful film – and I thought, What? This guy? He’s not a bad actor, he’s just… everywhere he goes, his ego seems to precede him. Anyway, all three critics on Front Row absolutely slated this latest production; it was too short, too rushed, too amateurish (all the other actors were students at RADA) and the dialogue was enunciated like 1954. So I don’t think I’ll be rushing to see this.

A couple of Lear productions do stand out in my mind though. The first one was in London when I was doing A-levels; I can’t remember who was in it but the guy playing Edmund was dressed in rags and at one point was flipped upside-down. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. That definitely left an image in the mind… The other was a very strange production at the Haymarket in Leicester directed by a Russian guy. All the characters were all wearing very long knitted garments which had been produced in Leicester knitwear factories. Alas, these factories are now long-gone along with the Haymarket theatre itself. What next? A King Lear directed by AI? I wouldn’t put it past them. Some days it’s so hard not to give in to depression.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

Kirk out

The Trans Woman’s Wife

About a thousand years ago I wrote a play called The Trans Woman’s Wife, about my experiences of being married to someone with gender dysphoria. ‘What is it like when your husband doesn’t have another woman but is another woman?’ was the strapline (at least I think that’s what they call it but that might only be for films.) I can’t remember if I sent it to the BBC – I probably didn’t because I don’t think it’s ready yet and in any case opportunities for new writers are shrinking year on year faster than the government’s moral compass. Writersroom is virtually the only place to submit and their windows are only open for a short period every year. However I have just found a site called Upload where you can send them anything at all, so I’ll probably give that a try.

I am trying to practice non-attachment to results in this regard and finding it extraordinarily difficult. Non-attachment is a yoga practice (also a Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist and probably Christian idea too) where you try to detach yourself from the fruits of your efforts. Nowadays we tend to judge our efforts purely by the outcome but yoga says that the effort is its own reward. This sounds like something my Grandma used to say and I found it very annoying because I want the rewards. I want them badly. Don’t we all? But I can see the point, because if you’re happy with what you’ve done it doesn’t matter what others think; you’re not tossed about on the winds of public opinion.

I’ve only really attempted radio plays because I don’t think I’d be much good at the stage variety. I have a good ear for sound and dialogue but I don’t have a sense of ‘the theatre’ – of the space people perform in and what something looks like on stage. So I’ll leave that palm to Alan Bennett and carry on doing what I’m doing.

SPOILER ALERT Speaking of Bennett, we went to the cinema at the weekend to see ‘Alleluia’, a film about a geriatric ward based on an AB play. This was enthralling to watch with a great cast including Judi Dench, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Tovey and Derek Jacobi. The Bethlehem ward, known affectionately as The Beth, is under threat of closure from a government which doesn’t see the value of caring (sound familiar?) The place seems idyllic; caring and supportive with all-inclusive activities such as singing and games. It made me yearn for a time when people had the time to care. But all is not as it seems; the nursing sister played by Saunders, is quietly bumping off some of the patients by injecting morphine when they get too old. Judi Dench’s character, unwilling to take part in a TV programme that’s being compiled, is given a tablet to record her own views. In the process she accidentally records the sister injecting the morphine – and everything becomes unravelled. It’s a story of murder but what stuck with me was the caring of the staff – even the nursing sister – and the fact that they had the time to do it. Jennifer Saunders was a revelation in this straight role and though there were massive stars in the cast there was never a sense of there being starring roles. Everyone was more or less equal and everyone had a voice. It made me nostalgic.

I think I’ll send the radio play to Upload. That’s if I can get it into a PFD format; it seems particularly resistant to assuming that shape just at the moment.

If anyone would like to read the play please comment below and I’ll attach it. NB please note that copyright has been legally established – not that any of my readers would dream of passing my work off as their own. Just saying…

Kirk out

Line of Duty. Warning – Contains Spoilers

After all that! After all the expectation, after all the hype and the trailers and the podcasts, after all that had gone before, the twists and turns, the misdirection – I was expecting a huge, multiply-orgasmic explosion of revelations, gasp after gasp, plot twist after plot twist, from the final episode of Line of Duty. Instead what we got was a damp squib. To find out, after all this time, H – or the fourth man – wasn’t some criminal mastermind posing as a respectable senior officer, wasn’t the Chief Superintendent or the smug woman who took over from Hastings – wasn’t, in fact, Hastings himself (Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey, but that woulda been a twist!) but was in fact sad incompetent little Ian Buckles who was being used as the fall guy, was a bit of a let-down. His interview was a series of shrugs and ‘no comments’ – there were no major reveals, no car-chases or shoot-outs, nothing in fact resembling a climax. It was as if the curtain rose on a pile of charred embers and at the end of it all we were told that systematic corruption within the force was never pursued and hence never discovered. I was disappointed; I’d looked forward to it for so long and after all the build-up it was a real anticlimax.

Ah well. Onwards and upwards… life without Line of Duty was always going to be that little bit harder and I suppose the ending made it easier to bear. But that doesn’t prevent it from having been one of the best TV dramas in – well, probably ever; in this day and age, a programme that makes you concentrate every second in case you miss something vital is a rare gem. There’s too much ‘wallpaper TV’ – and I’m not talking about the Prime Minister’s apartment. What I particularly hate are the programmes which give you two minutes of clips showing you what the programme’s about when a single sentence would do; not to mention those which tell you what’s going to happen next time which thankfully Line of Duty never did. It had too much respect for itself.

When that landmark was passed, I watched the rest of Philomena, a great film based on the scandal of the Irish church selling the babies of ‘fallen’ women. Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan and introduced by Philomena everywhere as ‘Martin Sixsmith, News at Ten’, helps Philomena (Judi Dench) to find her lost son who was taken from her by the nuns and sold to American parents. It’s a shocking story, most of all because of the cruelty and hypocrisy of the nuns who could have reunited mother and son but lied and covered up the truth until it was too late. And after that I sat through a harrowing play about child abuse during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and even though I put on an episode of Motherland afterwards to take the taste away (this series has grown on me and now I love it) but the trauma stayed with me when I went to bed.

I’d had plans to go for a walk yesterday – the day before I discovered a beautiful bluebell wood – but those plans were scuppered by the weather so in the end I just went to Sainsbury’s and stocked up. In the rain.

Kirk out

I Have Ended But Not Finished…

For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to get together a radio play. Aimed at Radio 4’s Afternoon Play slot, it’s called The Trans Woman’s Wife and basically does what it says on the tin, being the story of my experiences since the whole trans thing erupted. It’s a story that needs to be told, though whether the BBC will agree remains to be seen; anyway, I managed to write about two thirds of it but was then stumped by not knowing how it ended. How does this story end? I don’t know how it ends in real life so I couldn’t finish the play. I was well and truly stuck.

And then it came to me. That’s it! That’s the ending, not knowing what happens! So now it finishes with the main character saying ‘I don’t know how it ends.’ It begins with a voice-over and ends with a voice-over. Perfect! I was able to put the play to bed (at least until I edit it further down the line) and go down to dinner feeling a deep sense of satisfaction and release.

It’s not often I feel that in writing. I generally get little spurts of release followed by yet another bloody great brick wall. I generally go down to dinner with a sense of deep frustration and blockage. Not this week. This was a good week.

On the down side, my book arrived – and it’s not my book. It’s the story of a lawyer hired to trace the provenance of a painting and nothing to do with the writing process at all. Turns out there are two books called The War of Art. Who knew? So now if I still want it I shall have to order it again.

Aaaand, if you have a parcel to send, don’t use DHL. They picked up our parcel OK and gave us a delivery slot for the next day but then weren’t able to deliver. Instead of telling us, they took it back to the depot and filed it away, forcing me to chase it up with the hospital and then DHL themselves. When I complained to the woman on the line about it she said in a dull, robotic voice, ‘that must be very frustrating for you.’ I wonder how many times a day she has to say that phrase. Anyway the upshot is the parcel will eventually arrive back here – and we will not be using DHL again.

Happy Friday

Kirk out

The Play Wot I am Writing

During lockdown I’ve been writing mostly poetry but today I couldn’t get down to any of my usual routine stuff. I couldn’t come up with a blog post, I couldn’t get on with writing my diary or composing poems or doing Greek; I couldn’t focus on anything. But I know from experience that days like this which seem problematic at first, are in fact opportunities for something new to emerge. So I sat down with pad and pen and waited for something to happen. And lo! My radio play happened.

I’ve had several stabs at radio plays in the past and have even completed one or two but I’ve never been totally happy with them. And it came to me today that this is because I’ve yet to develop my own method. I have an idea in my head of how I want it to sound, but between the planning and the execution lies a great gulf which I don’t know how to fill. Even when I do start to write I get bogged down in stage directions and sound effects, all of which ought to come much later.

So I sat and thought about this for a while and then I went and fetched my flip-chart and post-it notes which contained The Story So Far. There was a gap at the beginning of Act 2 and it suddenly came to me what should fill that gap. An old flame suddenly comes back from the past! I filled in the gap and could see that from the post-it notes I was now in a position to evolve an outline of what should happen in each act. Having done that, I could begin to break it down into scenes – and then the whole thing would write itself. I’d do the dialogues first and worry about the rest – sound effects and stage directions – later. I then transferred this outline to the computer and for the first time I could really see my way ahead. I began to write Act 1, Scene 1.

And I saw that it was good.

So that was this morning – apart from the fact that OH, who’s a little confused these days, came in and asked me if I’d now decided to work weekends. ‘It’s Friday!’ I said, whereupon OH smote the forehead in remembrance, since we’d already had a conversation about this earlier:

‘What day is it today?

‘Friday.’

‘I keep thinking it’s Saturday.‘

‘Well, perhaps you could forget to phone your Mum a day early.’

Happy Friday. Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves.

Kirk out