Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  Am all over touting for presales of my book My Tutu's Gone AWOL! Discussing the crowdfunding aspect with Xander at Unbound I was a bit bemoany, as the report from the reader was that she shouldn't have read the book ahead of the other projects waiting for her attention, but the title made her so curious. She began reading at once, getting curiouser and curiouser and curiouser, came to the end, stopped, and happily recommended it for publication.     So why do I have to crowdfund it, why can't it just be taken up?    Xander said I had in passing mentioned that I would be approaching my banker mates - well, blame them!    I have done.  They don't like it.    What I don't like is any lack of response to my crowdfunding pleas. With hints strongly pre-dropped, I've so far proofread a film script - no pledge made. Edited a How to Handstand article - no pledge made. Given four two hour long singing lessons - no plege made.  ...

   'Hilarious and touching stories of Iraq.  Go, Tutuboy, you rock!'                                                                                              Joanna Lumley    Pre-buy your copy of the book here...   Xander Cansell, Head of Digital at Unbound Books, is already dealing with emails from friends and enemies asking, before they pre-buy, if they're mentioned in my book.    'I always know it's someone emailing about your book, Iestyn. Their names tend to be jewels, cakes or  innuendo...'   Basra Regimental Sergeant Major and ex-Guardsman 'Tina' Turner, however, has emailed me directly:   'Iestyn, my mate, you are still fully barking, I see.  I believe with  My ...

   Click to pre-buy for self, family, friends, loathed ones...   Great to catch up with Rupert Durrant, who I first met when he was eighteen and rowing Beccy Oliver around the Meare in Thorpeness, conniving to take her onto the most deserted of the islands.  A marketing guru these days his thoughts on the crowdfunding campaign for my book were that I need to get across that the act succeeded out in Iraq and Afghanistan against all the odds. Cannings off from squaddies, death by camel spider, insurgency attack, I braved them all.    'I remember when you did Madame Galina for the Marmalader's at the Lighthouse the year I was Commodore,' Rupert said. 'Your performance then could have gone either way. What am I saying - it did go either way. Sneath wanted Madame Galina to have his children; Tedder had a panic attack and left. Once he'd refitted his wooden leg.'    The thing is how to turn that comment into a sales pitch...

                                        c Magnus Hastings   When I performed for Combined Services Entertainment in Kandahar, a South Carolina army captain, known as Solo, made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Tanned, bantam weight and with a buzz-cut, Solo said that Madame Galina reminded him of ex-and current-girlfriends back home in Calhoun Falls. It was her flounciness, screaming imperiousness and habit of stopping mid-flow to stare into the middle distance as though a catatonic seizure had just hit.    'That's why I felt I just had to, I mean it needed doing, really I felt it behoved me to cuss out that New Yorker you got onstage for not carrying you correctly. Lack of manners. I mean just not chivalrous. I'm saying graceless.'   Solo shouting that the New Yorker was a fucking yankee dickweed had nearly caused fistifcuffs.    He and I were ...

  Learning the St Matthew Passion bass solos has reminded me of Royal Marine Stacks's granny. She was a church organist until Devotions one Easter.    She played a hymn every hour, on the hour. The church was directly opposite the Dog and Feathers. Between hymns she went over to the pub for gin. Before"When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", Stacks had to half carry her up in the organ loft. He told me:   'After "There is a Green Hill", chick, we left her up there to sleep it off. She beer-snored right through Easter Saturday and well into the Resurrection. '      

  Lizzie Roper, actor, had the following to say in 2001, when she produced our two-hander Ballet Who?! Some of the advice is obsolete. There's now the Free Fringe. Some of the venues Lizzie mentioned are no longer there.   There’s a bit of a mentality that Edinburgh is going to find the diamond in the shit. No – you have to be enormously well prepared!   Not going when you’re eighteen, please. We don’t want you up there before you’ve been getting changed in the toilets and ignored in grotty pubs for at least three or four years. You’ll be pissing money away and lowering the tone. What’s the latest calculation?  It would take something like twelve years, six months and two days to watch all the shows back to back. So the less eighteen year olds wasting everyone’s time with cack, the better.   Why should you do it? Because it’s trade fair visited by people trying to make TV for less and less every year.    So, right, if you ...

Please have a listen to my interview on the What's Offstage? programme, Soho Radio                                Clearly channeling my Nana Silcox today...      I h ad a thoroughly good time this morning being interviewed by Nina Davis on Soho Radio. We discussed Cafe de Paris, my book about entertaining in Iraq and Afghanistan coming out, my association with the start up Getclipcrowd media curation app, my floaty high notes, my stress rash, my fall over the timber that the gardeners had left in the kitchen where I'm house-sitting. Nina also played a track of me singing, which I did like, nicely!  But don't take my word for any of that, have a listen via the link above. Perhaps you've already had a listen, seeing as you're this far down the page. Perhaps you're going to go back and have a listen when you've finished reading. Perhaps not. Perhaps you won't finish reading, eith...

     No, the shameless self-plug is not that technique I learned while I was doing cabaret at the sexual health and lifestyle exhibition Sexpo UK ...   It's this: at 9am tomorrow, Friday 19th of February, I'll be the guest on Soho Radio. Songs I love, anecdotes about the performing business.      Soho Radio   I'm being interviewed by Nina Davis. She was studying at the Guildford School of Acting when I was a singing tutor there, and remembers when I coached Rania al Kurdi to perform "The Lonely Goatherd" the Method Acting way.      Here that is...   "The Lonely Goatherd" will my opening song choice for the Soho Radio programme because it was the first song I learned to sing. Picture this: Christmas. I'm four. It's four in the morning. I'm more than half way through my Cadbury's Selection Stocking. My parents are seriously regretting that they've bought me the record and the sing along book to The Sound of Music ...

  Motivation is to doing what the fluffer is to the pornstar: the middle man   'Your motivation is your pay packet at the end of the week.' Noel Coward.   Take my mate Rob. Rob is now doing well, with west end and TV leads on his CV. I met him when he was the tech on my first gig at the Lawrence Batley theatre. He was twenty-one. Tall, gorgeous, clever, funny, he'd been in musicals at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, in adverts, and had done bits and pieces in Heatbeat and Coronation Street . He also had one of the most beautiful singing voices I had ever heard. Yet he would cry because he couldn't motivate himself to chase more work. He would motivate himself. When the time was right. One fine day.   'When the time is right,' he said. 'When I get more than one day off a week from teching the pantomime. When my sister’s back from her gap year in Africa and I don’t have to worry any more about her getting malaria or being Simba sushi. Whe...

    If you're a variety turn, as I am, trust me - you will never get the big break doing any of the following:   Bankrupting yourself to show off nightly at the Edinburgh Fringe   Overacting in the audience of Judge Judy/Rinder/Milian, et al   Heckling on Jeremy Kyle   In a podcast   Collecting for Every Child on Camden Road in character as Medea   Singing loudly while tearing tickets front of house   Giving TED talks   In a podcast playing your eccentric aunt giving her gardener instructions   Appearing on your local TV news programme   Being the barista of a bike setup with an espresso maker where the basket should be   Being in anything site-specific   Cruise ship showcases   Performing in your local library   Performing in your local church   Being on Vimeo singing hymns as your eccentric aunt    Performing in your local dog-friendly cafe   Performing for th...

  As the dying Mozart no doubt found time to affirm in the middle of giving a pupil instructions for finishing the Requiem which he had always believed he was writing for himself.  Or that Franz Schubert surely used as his daily mantra when he was making sketches for a tenth symphony while typhoid killed him. Or Jane Austen said with sister Cassandra as witness as she struggled to write Sanditon while the Brill-Zinsser disease took hold. Or as Kathleen Ferrier was thinking when cancer in its final stages caused her femur to disintegrate mid-performance at Covent Garden...    Or not. Just not.    

       Make positive affirmations. They work.    Or, perhaps, looked at another way: Be careful what you wish for.    Throughout my twenties I visualised the comedy character I play, Madame Galina, touring the provinces like Anna Pavlova. In my daydreams I was dragging a blue trunk, staying in old-school theatrical digs and being partnered by either of my two idols in the Royal Ballet at the time: Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. This was before I had ever performed further afield than my own front room with all the furniture pushed out of the way.    Then, in my mid-thirties, about to move back to London from Aldeburgh, where I'd been living for a time, I was walking past the Sue Ryder shop and volunteer Janet signalled furiously for me to come in. Then she dragged a blue trunk out of the stockroom and round the counter, gesturing for me to take the handle. The trunk was heavily full of something....

     The BBC has latched onto something my mother told me c1981:   Shops try to inveigle you into impulse buying.  What to Buy and Why , BBC Two.    'Look at all those useless things down the in and out shop, now, Iestyn, put out so as to be directly in your eyeline, with  Lara’s Theme  from  Doctor Zhivago  piped around the shelves,' was how my mother put it.    Neurological testing has proved the opening phrase of  Lara's Theme  inspires an acute sense of lacking something.  In my case, apparently, a train set for my Muswell Hill student digs, an ironing-board cover (I didn't have an iron, let alone an ironing board) and all  Ten Commandments  toast stamps. It was week six of the spring term before I finally completed the set with:  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox...

  Stacks, Royal Marine, arranged a sponsored fun-run between Kandahar and Kabul, with proceeds going to various charities. He kept some of the money back and bought a radio for his late grandmother's childhood friend Edna. Edna's thank you letter went up on the wall of the Royal Marines' Kabul HQ.      Dear men of 42 Commando - must single out  Stacks, of course,      God bless you for the gift of the transistor radio.  I am ninety-seven and live at the Miller's Hill Rest Home. My family has long since past away and I very rarely have visitors.  As a result, I have very limited contact with the outside world. This makes your gift especially welcome.    My roommate, Maggie Cook, has had her own radio as long as I've known her. She listens to it all the time, but usually with an earplug or with the volume so low, I can't hear it. For some reason, she has never wanted to share it.    Last Sunday morni...

            Never buy branded, always buy mid-range, buy in bulk.    NB: don't apply the above rules to coffee, mascara or toilet paper.     Be fully au fait with a coupon -  received as a reward for doing consumer surveys, cut out of in-store magazines, found in-store on products/on promotional displays/on the floor . Keep coupons clipped to a wall-calendar so they won't go out of date, use them shrewdly in as many different shops as need be, with no nonsense about loyalty.    Get your fruit and veg from a market at the end of Saturday trading when the stallholders are likely to sell at a knockdown price for a quick sale.    Ask your butcher to talk you through the cheapest cuts of meat. The ones that require the longest cooking time. Oleaginous slimy oozings will make their way to the top of the pot. Skim this off, freeze it and use it.     In the supermarket, g...

  I woke up this morning with a cold. As always my first thought was: 'But I've got to sing!'    I tried the wide-ranging phrase from Donizetti's Anna Bolena  where Anne Boleyn tells Lord Percy not to be in England next day, and could feel that my voice was there under the gunk; the cords weren't waterlogged with laryngitis.                                   'Let not another dawn find you in England...'   I feel both exhausted and wired. I look like a mortuary photo. I'm upbraiding myself for not wearing my sou'wester and wellies down to the Jubilee Hall where I sang So In Love and spoke and danced as Tytania in to the Wonderful Beast Shakespeare Gala. I'm remembering school days when my mother would make me a bed on the settee, leave me a Vesta Chow Mein to cook for myself, and I would try to eke out a cold caught at the start of the week al...