Iestyn Edwards is...what?

Having notched up one hundred shows for the National Rural Touring Forum before becoming resident in various west end shows I'm going back on the circuit.  The impressive century record never helped me sell me to certain potential promoters on the scheme, who would insist I was too niche for their audience.  I'd send them the review that said Madame Galina Ballet Star Galactica 'is Mother Goose on LSD.' Nada. 'The love child of Anna Pavlova and Captain Mainwaring.'  Nope.  I would follow up with the audience survey form comment from Barry in Builth Wells:   'I’m going to tell all my mates to go and see him in Mold. I drew the short straw having to come and check it out tonight. You don’t need specialised knowledge of ballet or anything else you might think at all. And I thought the show was bloody hilarious. True, the rest of my mates just took one look at his flyer and thought “Who wants to go and see that fat poof being weird?"' And still some pro...

   Here we are...come along, do.  #bungay #mytutuwentawol #comedy #bingo #madamegalina #madamegalinaballetstargalactica 

  This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at that...  I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable.  But there was Olive... Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, ...

  He walked to the other end of the bench like a cowboy just off a horse. He looked like a hollowed out Richard Harris, wearing tailored jeans, a horizontally striped cotton t-shirt and a Miss Marple gardening hat. ‘May I sit here?’ ‘ Of course.’ He sat, nodding. Then, after a while, ‘What a quaint little town this is.’ ‘ Really? With all the Tudor and the Halls?’ ‘ Oh, granted. But I’ve just come back from living thirty years in Australia.’ Ah, that was the tang in the otherwise smooth, cultivated. ‘Sydney. Divorced my wife after all that time. Left her the house. A million dollars’ worth. The house, not her. Though I used to think she was. Women can do that to men. It’s because they have to ensnare – not all, of course, but quite a number in my experience – as they have fewer basic freedoms than us. Going to the pub alone, for instance.’ He had brightly cold blue eyes, that held no reflection of what he was saying. ‘I’m back here living in the flat I bought for my moth...

  Tammy, in her seventies, was waiting in the square while the caretaker fixed her hot water. She agreed to let me take notes. ‘ Well, as I say, I began as a Lucy Clayton girl.’ My friend Al went to Lucy Clayton. She told me, 'I learned deportment. That slight swivel walk. Getting in and out of cars. What blank expression to wear while a man lights your cigarette. How to eat your first mussel with a fork, and all subsequent mussels with the shell of that first one. Riveting and fully essential.' Tammy continued, ‘You probably can’t believe I went in for modelling. My face is like this because I get such bad depression.’ When she talked, her lower jaw made a juddery nutcracker movement. ‘I did shop modelling at Fortnum's. Fenwick's. Oh - now, then - also later on at the Co-Op. Their slogan being: Shop at the Co-Op and be H appy . I had to provide the clothes for that one. That didn’t make me happy. The canteen at Fortnum's was a cut above. We all loved it, our f...

  Here’s my audiobook for you.   Will you buy? Click here It’s self-narrated: with songs, adlibs and bloopers as standard. ‘Achingly funny!’ Daily Mail ‘A book unlike any other, of a story unlike any other. Totally mad, very funny and highly recommended.’ ***** Dr Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt: the Nation’s Favourite Book Guardian Here’s the story… I sang in private formally for Queen Elisabeth ii on HMS Victory , and then accidentally auditioned to take my drag ballerina act out to entertain troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In full tutu. When I realised my mistake, I thought I’d go anyway. Cut to: with tutu and tiara in a Primark bag, me arriving bedraggled in Basra. As Stacks, the Royal Marines Commando, commented: ‘Being flown out to one of the big two — Iraq and Afghanistan — is like you’ve been beamed down off the Starship Enterprise, and this time Scotty’s got the coordinates well and truly buggered!’ I went from this:         ...

'Brian the verger snapped at me after I tried gently to tell him the church was too cold for a first communion. And of course I didn't want to be physically rude back.' 'Look at the world around you. Where do you see glimmers of the divine?' 'You get to his age, and life is a process of getting gradually slower and smellier.' 'I've seen a harelip recently and someone with boss eyes. I thought we'd all but eradicated such things?  It'll be an urchin in callipers next.' 'Bus driver couldn’t say to me about changes of route but my mate in Radwinter had forewarned me she could feel them coming on.' 'Venus is in Aries. So don't flush your sinuses.' 'Judd doesn't understand the neck bit of his apron again.' 'He looks like he might be married to her. He's got a Mini-Filofax.' 'We toasted her teacake so fast we were wandering around announcing for someone to claim it and she was still in the queue t...