Iestyn Edwards is...what?

  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...