Skip to main content

If I had a Television, I'd only Shout at that Instead




  Being such a sagging trifle of tired this weekend, all I could was sit watching Agatha Christie mysteries on Youtube and shout along with them. In the midst of which something from The Body in the Library reminded me of how damaging laissez-faire attitude can be.
  Here's what I was shouting along with the various Marples and Poirots:

  Basil Blake once called Arthur a fossilised old b-u-g-g- etcetera. 
  I found a body. No, it's my body. I found it. In the quarry. 
  And we know fully well why she has her best nylons on, the silly great lump.
  Arthur just gets a little avuncular at tennis parties. You do understand, Jane? After all - I've got my garden. 
  A platinum blonde in our library!
  He called me Nemesis. "Let Justice Roll Down Like Water, and Righteousness Like an Everlasting Stream".
  Remember Edith: always a pointy little mountain and not a dumpy little hill. 
  Oh, dear me. I've been so terribly, terribly stupid and must telephone to Inch at once. 
  One sees so much evil, I fear, living in a village. 
  Grizelda...such an unfortunate name for a vicar's wife. 
  Mrs Church is a country woman - she'd know her mushrooms!
  Janet would explain quite convincingly how the mice had eaten the end of the cake and give herself away by smirking as she left the room. 
  You've got your central heating on.
  Now, Florrie Small, don't prevaricate. 
  I must advise you not to continue using your maiden name in the village.
  There was a lovely picture of the Cheviot murderer in the paper last Sunday. 
  That was stupid, very stupid. People don't put good heathrugs in dustbins. 
  I couldn't get her spangles out. 

  It was the the thing I shouted that reminded me of the dangers of having a laissez-faire approach. Except we're dealing not with spangles in this case, but with glitter.  Oh, and champagne! 
  We acts tried time and time again to make the executive producers of an international touring show do something when the booker they were going through stopped paying us. They did nothing. The booker then sacked our stage manager, who had been chasing him for unpaid monies more aggressively than had the rest of us, and instead employed someone with no experience of stage management. (But who he wanted to bum). Again, the executive producers did nothing. They were then sued for two thousand pounds by a theatre for the cost of repainting a stage 'after the forbidden use of both glitter and champagne being chucked about in the finale. We couldn't get the glitter out of the stage surface from being stuck on by the alcohol...'
  The executive producers paid. 
  Our dropped, properly trained stage manager would have known that, following earlier complaints, it was never champagne being used for the finale these days, it was carbonated water. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I've been going for tr

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded, simpering flounce reminded them of the girls

Where Babies Come From...

Haberdashery Girls... An excerpt from my forthcoming book of interviews:   Where Babies Come From. I asked people, ‘How were you told the facts of life?’ And, ‘What information were you given?’ Here is Belinda, who used to be an escort.  She is now in her eighties. My sister read about Dutch caps.  We looked at Old Masters paintings and wondered how having those funny big white hats on their heads would stop women getting pregnant. In British Guiana, we had native servants who would do the deed al fresco au natural.  From the age of five, I was playing 'sex' with my dolls.  They’d have their dolls’ tea party, a recitation lesson, then I’d have them mount each other. When we came back to England, I had a nanny.   Katrin was fresh from the convent. She was all mummy could get for me.  I expect it was a time of general strikes.  Mummy would send Katrin for breaks back to the convent meanwhile sending me for remedial elocution.  This would happen when I’d said one too many ‘tinks’,