The end of the summer season

Well I did think I would be writing more chapters but somehow they didn’t happen, and I’m sorry to all my regular readers for that.  Not that it was an uneventful season, just a lack of inspiration to set it down in words as it was happening.  However, now it has gone, I am feeling much more inspired to sum up the summer.

It was a classic British one for me.  A memory of summers long passed, when you could say for certain on a Tuesday that the following weekend would be bright, sunny and warm. And it was, almost without exception. The one exception was the Cumbria Steam Rally.  Wet and cold for the second year running.  I felt so sorry for the organisers, particularly when the Friday before and the Monday after were both so glorious.  And, as a result, they have said they won’t be able to afford to invite me next year, so that’s my memory of Cumbria Steam – sitting watching the rain lash down the windows.

But the rest was epic.  Event after event of blasting heat and some exciting new places alongside the old favourites.  Despite a late cancellation as a result of waterlogged ground on the early May Bank Holiday at Rushden, the early season started well. MalvernSpring Garden Festival was as magical as ever with a much better location for the stage. It’s becoming a lovely annual occasion for me, and I am welcomed as an old friend. Herts County Show has changed committee, and after giving them loads of feedback, they didn’t reply and, despite reminders, were too late with their enquiry for 2019, so I won’t be back there again next year. Instead, I have been booked by the FairylandTrust for their annual frolics in Norfolk (very me, don’t you think?).  Look them up – they're brilliant. Sad for Herts County Show, but that is how it is.  There are always shows…

Barking Folk Festival was friendly and welcoming, although I found the cultural changes in London remarkable.  I am not sure if my show was fully understood.  Not just linguistically, although that too.  Just a feeling that I was being watched by people who didn’t have a vintage variety show in their cultural vocabulary.  They were friendly and appreciative, just slightly vague and open-mouthed.  Was it me?   Maybe.  I am hoping to be back next year and I will write a chapter as it happens. The immediate area around the Abbey where I was sited, was historically fascinating.  A few miles from the Thames on the River Roding, it had been the port which brought medieval fish into London.  I had noticed the fish on one of the flags and asked a few questions.  Alongside the Abbey Green is the old port and I could imagine it in medieval times as a bustling little fishing town, now completely swallowed by London.  Fascinating and almost forgotten.

And then there was Ulverston and Another Fine Fest.  Birthplace of Stan Laurel, hence the imaginative event name.  What a sweet event and such a nice town.  But strange reactions from several of the town traders to the event.  I always like to investigate local reactions to new events, and this one was quite revealing.  The ones I spoke to just didn’t like it.  Most of the reaction centred on the type of music played on the several stages through the town, some disliked the ‘type of people’ attracted. But I loved it.  The sweet Laurel and Hardy museum in the town’s cinema was the centre of the event.  I am hoping to be invited back again next year and will report again.

July and August was as July and August are always is for me.  The summer had arrived.  The back end fairs, with all the romance of early autumn came and went. I didn’t know until recently that ‘back end’ is a much more general Northern phrase for Autumn.  I thought it had been only associated with showmen.  There you go.

A final outing in October to a new event, but one which I think will grow on me.  Whitchurch Blackberry Festival.  A lovely season for blackberries this year.  The event has been going a few years.  I met a young man who I hadn’t seen since he was 8.  I had worked with his dad, Chris Panic of Panic Circus at Bodelwyddan Castle in North Wales in the early 80’s and he said I had apparently encouraged him to bring magic into his performances.  He did and still does.  How lovely.

And the summer has brought other changes which I will detail in the next chapter.  Watch out for it soon.  I’m back at the keyboard…

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

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