Dear Diary

I thought I ought to essay a brief entry here after a lengthy radio silence of Third Programme proportions.

In that time I wrote a couple of drafts of 'blog entries that may well still appear here in time (the typed up versons went astray, I'll have to return to scribbled train journey jottings if I'm going to revive them), went up to Liverpool to plot a bit of a series of Ken Campbell events as part of the Biennial. It's been lovely meeting others touched by the man in different ways and glimpsing some of the different facets he presented us and that we drew from him. A remarkable figure, who I wish I'd managed to turn more of my friends onto (I think a couple were unlucky to see some of his lesser performances, as it happens). I think the fact the Facebook page "Ken Campbell Changed My Life" has over 300 members now says something.
Anyhow, more on that in November. Suffice to say I'll be giving a talk which will be somewhere between a lecture and a performance, precisely where depending on the audience. I've written a 4,000 word draft which I'm fairly happy with, good jokes, all true facts, and I hope a decent tribute.

I've also pitched another documentary and two series ideas at Radio 4, hopefully at least one of which will happen, and started properly thinking about my Afternoon Play. There are vague promises of ridiculously starry casting for this, though that'll be dependent ultimately on me writing something good enough and of course artist availability, so it could easily end up featuring The Speaking Clock and Timmy Mallett (not denigrating either artist). It's for airing next July I think, recording currently planned for mid-June, so it'll be much later before there's a lot more to say.

Closer to home I've also started operating a 'one in, two out' policy for books. I've too many books in the house that I'm never going to read again, and there's a few long-term unread ones that I reckon will stay that way so it's time to shed some baggage.
Today an old Arthur C Clarke book with a truly shocking back blurb joined the charity box- "Here are glimpses of the worlds of the future, of a decade, a century, even a millenia from now..." Two mistakes in just one word, what we'd put up with from publishers in 1983.

Talking of back blurbs, we've finalised the one for my book, and having jumped through the various editorial and legal hoops it's finally headed to the publishers. I'll give that a post of its own shortly.

All this and fun with the juicer, varnishing furniture, harvesting apples and tomatoes and, since we started getting a veg box, learning what celeriac is for. It's all gripping stuff, isn't it?

Oh and congrats on the new job if you still pop by here, Malevich! Just read about that today, sounds excellent to me.

This is not a full stop. This is a hyphen coming straight at you.

Hello. While I was away where the internet don't shine and incoming calls are hard to pick up I lost another hero. This time though, I was lucky enough to have known him too.
I probably first became aware of Ken Campbell in the early 1980s, a shadowy figure who it progressively turned out was woven into the story of so much I loved- theatre, Liverpool, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, conspiracy theories, urban legends, Doctor Who, the KLF, esoteric physics, ridiculous hoaxes and general mucking about... wait a minute or delve a foot or two deeper into anything that caught your eye and there would be Ken, staring back. Geoffrey Perkins, as you may know, once had to impersonate Ken in order to get a radio performance out of Ken that came over Kennish. That's a good Ken story, as typical is his response when I asked if it was true 'Yeah. Probably.'

I first saw him perfom on stage at the Library Theatre in Manchester in the early 1990s in one of the most thrilling pieces of theatre I've ever seen- Pigspurt or Six Pigs From Happiness, a virtuoso one man show, that went from Bad Manners to Ken Dodd via Philip K Dick and pulled out of me more species of laughter than anything I'd ever seen before, my snigger, my bellow, my guffaw and probaby a few more besides, and managed to provide food for thought as well. I left him a note among his stage paraphenalia after I saw his follow up show Jamais Vu, in which I suggested a few extra links to his Cathars and Cathode Ray Tube conspiracy, and he 'phoned me up for a chat. For a few years after that, London became a place I mainly went to do things that would allow me to pop in on Ken afterwards. Calls to and from Ken were great sources of fun and wonder, and I hugely enjoyed discovering bits and pieces for Ken on Elizabethan clowns and Egyptian pygmies, tracking down old telly of his, or doing drawings for him and discovering his new obsessions. Ken calls were commissions, calls to misadventure.

Ken also supplied me with several more highlights of my theatre going life in that time, an amazing performance of his show Mystery Bruises at Manchester's Royal Exchange, a beautiful intimate version of his History of Comedy Part 1 – Ventriloquism in the Crucible, Sheffield which towered above the same show at the National where I felt it was slightly lost and a bespoke version of Theatre Stories he presented at a cyber-cafe for my stag do, which will be a long treasured memory.

I saw less of him over the last few years particularly after he moved out to Essex, but I was very pleased to catch up him last December at a great gig at the British Library, and was very touched that he spotted me in the audience and asked me not to rush off at the end. We had a lovely chat, promised to keep in touch, and he introduced me to one of the chaps there as his 'friend, Ian' which was something I felt very privileged to be. I don't remember now when he first called me that rather than a 'fan' it may well have been backstage at some theatre to help justify and dignify my presence there to some stage door border guard, but the title remains a badge of honour.

He was a warm, funny, mischievous, exciting, intelligent and challenging human being, I utterly adored him, and now he's gone.

The thing is though, remembering Ken now, for all the tears I've shed for what won't happen next (how dare the world have shunted him off before the big CERN gnothing gnowing gnockabout next week?), is basically a joyous thing, because pretty much all my memories of him are of laughter, wonder and at times utterly transcendent hysteria and I can find nothing there to be sad about whatsoever. He was a force of nature, and I'm not actually convinced being dead will curtail his activities so much as redirect the way Kenness is expressed in the world. His example and influence have enabled me to do a lot over these last few years that I would never have done without him, and I've decided the best way to honour him in the years to come is remain open for incoming calls and be ready to receive my next commission.
Don't rest, Ken- it isn't you.

So farewell then, Mike Flex

Very sorry to hear about the death of Geoffrey Perkins today. Another hero of mine from the world of comedy, Hitch-Hikers', Mornington Crescent, Radio Active... how could I not love him? And that was just the start of his career. Just this morning his index entry was one of the last tasks on my book, one of the references was to Jimmy Mulville talking about what a nice man he was.
I met him maybe three or four times very briefly when he was BBC Head of Comedy and I was an archive searching underling, our longest exhange was about the sheer bulk of stuff I was taking back up North after a summer at the BBC. He seemed as nice as everyone said.

The Intro and the Outro

I'm finally beginning to end one project- excitingly, it ended up 50 per cent longer than I'd initially planned, less excitingly, it took 50 per cent longer to complete. The blurb behind the link is now somewhat out of date, the book is going to be much more house bricky, now. I'm pretty pleased with it. It's been a labour of love and a lot of hard labour.
I think we're looking at a November launch, more as I know it. I just have to ask the fast moving world of the media to stop moving for a couple of months now, please.
There are still eyes to be crossed and teas to be dotted through the days, but the slow business of stopping is in hand, and I'm starting on some other things, for the first time in ages.

It looks like the contract's about to come through for my Afternoon Play but I'm probably not going to write in earnest on it until I've met up with the producer in a couple of weeks, I've also got a couple of sitcom ideas I'd like to play with- one is a fairly well worked out radio proposal, another is a slightly less focused TV one, an idea for a book I've been wanting to whip into shape for a bit, and I suspect documentary research will start up soon.

Starting is much fun than ending- bit more daunting, more chance to go horribly wrong, but all that potential, and you know starting things is so much quicker. Let's see how it all gets on.

In radio rerun news the Radio Times is now billing No Tomatoes as 'Language based comedy', which given it's on the radio is probably for the best. This is a marked improvement on the previous billing of 'Experimental comedy' which I can't help feeling has an unspoken suggestion of failure about it.

You can hear the language and share in the experiment

here in the UK, or here in the rest of the world.

degiinnx

am 3
amazed 19
at 5
by 15
done 25
harder 10
hello 1
I 2
I'm 18
indexing 4
is 9
it 8
might 13
moment 7
reading 22
still 21
than 11
the 6, 16
think 14
this 23
way 17
well 24
you 12, 26
you're 20

More crowd-pleasing German Expressionism

M

You look at two thirds of this film, and you're looking at an episode of Taggart or Prime Suspect, perhaps Cracker. A serial killer is on the loose in the city, the people are terrified, the press are doing rather nicely out of it - printing mail from the killer and flooding the streets with extra editions, the police are clueless and their bosses are leaning on them to get a result. We follow their investigation and the killer in a race against time. All so-so sofa fare, so far.
Except, this is a 1931 German film not a 1990s ITV police procedural, one of the earliest talkies and, in the hands of Fritz Lang, a bit of a wonder.
If you've seen Metropolis at any of its various lengths or speeds, even with the addition of Pat Benatar and colouring in, you can't help being attuned to Lang's vision of the city and of class. The towering tenement at the film's opening has no elevator and a water pump in the square below, making you wonder if it has running water either, and you can't help being reminded that that really is how our cities' poor once lived. This is also a city in which industry has died, the derelict state of the warehouse of the film's climax is pointedly highlighted, the beggars are unionised, organised crime has more resources than the police, and yet the bank is protected by an elaborate security system which can draw the police in minutes, even at the height of a city wide murder hunt.
The use of sound is really impressive, pretty much every successful film audio technique is here from the off, intercutting dialogue, incongruous juxtapositions of image and sound, the whistled tune that tells us the killer is around before we see him, all great stuff, even if now a couple of the deliberately mute sequences now seem oddly lacking.
Peter Lorre is of course excellent, resembling some strange Orson Welles, Tony Hancock, Pete Doherty combo, all big eyes, round face and full lips, like a world weary baby with a penchant for long coats and hats, he doesn't seem to do much at first, but there's a powerful cumulative effect to this performance.
Cinematically, the whole thing feels very contemporary, bar a couple of frankly silly low angle shots, and the screen ratio is also jolly exciting for the likes of me, still chanting 4:3 good, 16:9 bad, it's almost completely square. I never got bored and looked at the black bits at the screen edges once.
Perhaps the one big weakness in the film naturalistically is that the people's court that appears towards the end feels rather out of place after a couple of superb demonstrations of the nature of mob justice, early on. Given what we know of human nature and what we see in the film, particularly when a fare dodge nearly gets lynched when Chinese whispers identify him as the murderer on the loose, it seems unlikely the killer would have lived for more than minutes after his discovery. This isn't a naturalistic film though, and its right the film's underpinning ideas get this slightly unrealistic outing, even if now seems a touch 'on the nose'.
Incidentally, for a late expressionist, early film noir (take your pick) movie about the hunt for a child killer, this is surprisingly funny, which no one's ever suggested to me, before. A lot of the scenes with the criminal underworld are quite broadly comic, including a quite lengthy sequence in which the police raid an illegal nightclub.
The heavy shadow of the Nazis hangs over the film of course, this is Weimar Germany in collapse on screen, which perhaps makes me more uncomfortable with the suggestion that a city's crooks and pan handlers might be all part of a secret and structured order- it's a little too close to the lies that allow whole classes of people to be demonised, declared subhuman, and eliminated, but that's also part of what makes the film live. There's a queasy lack of moral high ground, anywhere, and the final shot warns us that none of our cures for our social ills and illnesses are better than their prevention.
You should see this, the emotional tone is surprisingly broad and there's genuine suspense too, in which your sympathies shift in sometimes unexpected directions. If for nothing else, you need to see it for an utterly superb shot of a man smoking a cigar in a pipe. Recommended.

Old jokes

If you read this I expect I've probably already let you know that No Tomatoes is being rerun at the mo, but you never know...

You can catch it via the iPlayer these days at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007zh4d
if you're interested.

It now comes with a free picture of a cute dog, which I like to think is progress.