The non-start to the Season

I’ve never had such a strange start to my season.  Well it really hasn’t started at all.  Everything was ready.  New varnished flats, new burgundy jackets for the painted orchestra, a great new routine with the Rubik Cube, rehearsals with the Old Time Rags… and now with nowhere to go. Climate change has meant the cancellation of two big weekends, one after the other, both with waterlogged grounds.  And there’s nothing worse than a waterlogged ground. The Leisure Lakes and Rushden Cavalcade will both have to wait until 2019, and I will have to wait until Malvern Spring Garden Festival before any of the new array of props and routines can be appreciated (or I can be paid which is more to the painful point).

OK yes I did go to Silverstone, and I was really looking forward to my first visit to the historic car racetrack.  I had visions of super-rich families in tweeds, cotton twill and Rolls-Royces, picnic baskets strapped to the racks, the sound of champagne corks and the finely-tuned hum of the exquisite engines.  Another big disappointment all in all because something went wrong with the marketing and very few people came.  Except those with noisy cars to race. I ended up doing close up magic shows on a couple of picnic tables to six people in a carpark with the sound of distant (and sometimes not so distant) racing cars doing what racing cars do. Zoom, whoosh, roar, gone… Over and over.  Not that I’ve anything against racing but fast cars are not really me and I can’t help thinking that the weekend show cancellations have a global link to man’s apparent love of the rumble, whoosh, roar, gone… machines.

And I do mean man. The fathers (there were a couple of mothers but only a couple) who did attend I watched patriarchically dragging their children unwillingly past my show so they could watch race after race, whoosh after roar.  ‘We’re here for the races, not some prat on a unicycle…’

The strangest of strange tannoy announcements, preceded by the woman announcer’s very calm voice saying ‘Attention Panic! Attention Panic!’ giving me visions of cars spinning out of control and awful mangled messes of man and machine.  Until half way through the day when I realised with that growing sense of my own stupidity that I had misunderstood her and she was actually saying ‘Attention Paddock, Attention Paddock’.

The lovely young people who organised the event were devastated by the poor attendance.  Marketing was not their responsibility they said.  It could have been a sweet event.  Lots going on in the carpark, but just nobody there to appreciate it.  A Last Little Show at the End of the World par excellence.

Let’s hope it’s not an omen.  I don’t believe in omens.  Just accept it and enjoy the peace of a Bank Holiday weekend in my yard doing all those little things I’ve been putting off.  The season looks good.  A couple of new events to look forward to as well as all the old favourites.  A first visit to Morecombe and A Splendid Day Out on June 2^nd and 3^rd.  It has the look of an annual event for me with an interesting and fun Steampunk programme. (http://asplendiddayout.com). And you know how I love Steampunk.  I’m based right on the Promenade so walks with the doggies along Morecombe Bay and a cautious half in some local hostelry, no doubt.

The other one I am looking forward to visiting for the first time is Another Fine Fest on June 16^th and 17th, so named as Ulverston was the birthplace of Oliver Hardy and the town exudes the famous duo and the Festival is the town’s annual celebration of all things Laurel and Hardy.  I can’t wait.  It looks wonderful (www.anotherfinefest.co.uk) and if you would like a few days near the Fylde coast and the Lake District and a lovely event then do come and say hello.

The Old Time Rags (https://en-gb.facebook.com/theoldtimerags/) will be there at both of these and if you come you will see the World Premiere of our Interruption Sketch in my last show of the day, a revival of a what I think is a very funny piece I used to do twenty-five years ago on the first incarnation of the stage show.  It’s lovely to see the old pieces come round again.  A bit like me really.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Old friends and 17 new ones

Ken Dodd used to talk of his jokes as his old friends and as he thumbed through the hundreds of hand-written notebooks where he kept them all - that it was like meeting them again with such pleasure sometimes after a long time.  What a much sadder world it is without him. And all those jokes, ‘Are melted into air, into thin air…….. Leave not a rack behind.’

It’s been four months since I last met the thousands of props and parts which make up my performing life; the pins and bolts which hold the stage together, the tiny workings of magic essential to an illusion, my beautiful painted characters forever held watching my show by the artist’s deft stroke.  All my friends.  And it’s refreshing to meet them again after so long.  I even found myself saying ‘Happy New Year, Sisters’ to the nuns in the painted Stage Right box as I set it all up on the rain-soaked lawn of the stunning Holdenby House in beautiful Northamptonshire for the first gig of the season.

Each part of the three-dimensional jigsaw fits together precisely and forms part of the linear set of instructions which have been buried since November somewhere in the recesses of my memory without being disturbed.  And here yet again is that process of probably hundreds, maybe thousands of separate actions, each in the right, the only order.  Each one remembered to allow the minimum of wasted journeys across the stage, or up and down the stage steps.  And at every step my old friends are there. Their characters defined and recalled; thin pin, fat pin, long pin.  Nine thin long pins for this job, four strong thick ones for that. 

And tomorrow the ‘hero’ props (the name given to props which make an essential appearance in a film shot, and not just as the dressing of a scene.) In each and every suitcase lies some hidden treasure, untouched by my hand since November (except for one special Southsea wedding earlier this month).  And each year there they are, like Ken’s jokes, waiting to make me smile, laugh, gurgle with anticipated pleasure as they hit my hands, raise the muscle memory from long slumber and combine with the best and closest friends of all, my musical score, my beloved playlists, the heartbeat of the shows.  And so Doctor Gig works his therapeutic magic on me after a long, cold and black winter.

Some major changes, some good ones, some sad.  Let’s deal with the sad ones first.  Mimi and Blue will probably not be with me much this year.  Mimi had a very bad year last year.  She was stood on accidentally, dislocating her hip.  I’ve told the story.  But although she has recovered from the follow up operation, she has been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in her front legs too.  So she has been in a lot of pain.  My best friend, my wife, the lovely Hilary has taken them both on (Mimi can’t be without Blue or vice-versa) and when she comes to a gig they will too but their outings with me will be limited.  It is such bittersweet sadness to know that each year of our lives our faithful friends gain seven.  Mimi is now nearly 70.  Same as me.  And so she is taking early retirement.  I already miss them both terribly and life will never be quite the same again.  But then it never is.  And that’s what makes it so fabulous, so enticing, so delicious and so worth celebrating.

Another sad one.  Martin, my marvellous accompanist has disappeared from the performing scene.  He was always so vulnerable and a genius at his art.  The two things went together and the vulnerability has won over, we all hope temporarily. I would love to have him at my side in the show again. (I don’t say that to many performers.)  Those who caught those few great gigs we did together will testify.  I hope they weren’t his swansong.  I will miss him.

But on the plus side, I have 17 new friends.  Mr Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Making their debut this season. They need names.  Please see them below.  Spot Telly Savalas and Charlie Dimmock.  Any other suggestions gratefully received and appropriately rewarded.  A huge thanks to my artist and friend Rob Symington (he who painted the lorry.) I think a few of them need burgundy rather than blue jackets and dresses.  The wardrobe mistress (another good fantasy friend) says she can knock them up before the first May Bank Holiday. 

Where would I be without my friends?

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

International fame at last

All my life I have felt ready for fame.  Not the fame of the 21^st century celebrity with the attendant tears, but a former fame.  The days of crossing the Atlantic on a steamer with Chaplin and Alastair Cooke, of hoofing the boards with The Good Companions in J B Priestley’s story of an inter-world war travelling troupe or starring in a socialist sensation directed by Joan Littlewood at Theatre Royal, Stratford East in the 1950s.

So I have to wait until I am staring at my biblical allocation of three score years and ten before the first tickling of what international fame might have been like.  I am still ready. Perhaps even more so now because I won’t be so egotistical in its consumption, so ‘I’d like to thank my agent and my mother’ in welcoming its strange fleeting state.  ‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’, said John Milton.  I’m ready for that kind too.

The strange thing is that after all this time of readiness, international fame has arrived twice in the same month.

Anyway enough of this obtusity (not a real word but it fits anyway).  The first hit.  Those who regularly read these pages will know of my winter work with Cat’s Paw Theatre, a company I co-founded over twenty years ago and which has annually presented forum theatre productions on important social issues, mostly, but not exclusively, to children and young people.  For the last nine years we have been closely occupied with one fundamentally important issue for 13 and 14 year olds.  Rape and Sexual Consent.  Initially co-funded by the North Wales Police and other agencies arising from the chilling statistic that more than half of the victims of rape in North Wales were under sixteen, the piece has toured to every high school in the six counties in Welsh and English, each year dependent on funding clawed from whatever agency deemed it that important or in keeping with their current political perspectives.  And in 2018 it finally did look as though, despite all our efforts and passionate beliefs, there was to be no more funding. 

And then there was The Guardian.  A chance, brought about by the current preoccupation with #metoo, a young hack discovers Cat’s Paw Theatre and writes an article.  You can read it here: 

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jan/11/drama-theatre-sexual-consent?

Within a week of publication, we had offers of work in Ghana, visits from UK practitioners wanting to view the work and, the most relevant for this chapter, an invitation from Wolverhampton University to explore and develop a MA Social Care level action research partnership examining the potential use of Cat’s Paw forum theatre in that Higher Education sector.  WOW.  Our resultant workshop piece titled, ‘Sex.  Relationships. Intimate violence.’ will be seen at the university by the BA and MA students and their lecturers in April.  Watch this space.

Hit two.  An email from Rhys Edwards.  Would I be OK with the National Geographic featuring his film of me on their website showcasing the best short documentaries which “look for work that affirms National Geographic's belief in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world”?  Err let me think about that…

If you haven’t ever seen it, grab a cup of tea and a comfy seat, make sure the computer is all set and click.  It’s only eight minutes. Let me know what you think.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/video/shorts/a-look-at-the-whimsical-life-of-a-traveling-showman/

If you’ve seen it before watch it again. This time, don’t watch it for the cavorting shenanigans of its crazy subject but for the sheer artistry of a genius filmmaker at work. Spot the marvellous slightly slow-motion moments (my personal favourite few seconds) when three or four from the young audience watch the linking ring fly into the sky. Or the clever GoPro camera shot as they run after me on the big unicycle.  If you still have time while your tea is cooling, spend another three minutes watching his other nominated National Geographic film short – ‘A Good Bitch’, politely renamed for National Geographic sensibilities, 'How to Whistle for a Sheepdog the Traditional Welsh Way' - the touching gentle story of a welsh sheep farming family, which won first prize in the reed.co.uk national film competition. The prize from which allowed Rhys to invest in the film he made of me.  The opening shot sequence is worth the prize alone.

And now I’m going away to brush up my acceptance speech.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander