It was tipping it down with rain when I woke up this morning, so, instead of walking up to the village, I decided to take myself to Jackson's Lane to work. Sadly, as I arrived at the theatre, I was greeted by a closed door and the information that the cafe opened at 10, so I had no option but to take myself through the rain and up to the village with the knowledge that the damp air had made my T-shirt smell like broken biscuits.
We watched a show about ageing on the telly last night, one of an almost bewildering slew of shows about or made in Scotland. This one was great fun and actually made by a friend of ours, Paul. It was presented by Angela Rippon who, at 71, was representing old people. Ms Rippon is known in the industry as having a photographic memory. She can literally look at a piece of script for a second, read it through once and then deliver it faultlessly to camera. Bizarrely, this skill doesn't seem to be diminishing as she gets older. As part of the programme she was given a cat scan which revealed, where the majority of 71 year olds can expect 25% shrinkage of the brain, hers had only shrunk by 5%!
Later on, she was put into a US Airforce test which demonstrated her ability to concentrate. The idea was to take the test and then attach electrodes to her scalp to see if the results improved. The only issue was that she scored 100% first time round! The guy running the test simply didn't know what to say. His youngest, brightest students would normally not get higher than 75%!
Anyway, if you want to live longer, the advice seems to be to exercise, to learn new skills, to have a vegetarian diet and to eat plenty of naturally purple food!
Friday mornings are busy mornings at Costa. It's the time those pack-hunting animals, the yummy mummies arrive en masse to take time off their gruelling schedules of charity work, shopping, nanny-ordering, and driving their dogs to the Heath in giant Chelsea tractors.
I came home at lunchtime and went running in the pouring rain. I've always enjoyed running in the rain. It feels incredibly liberating.
I spent the afternoon writing new brass parts for the ensemble members who are also players in this summer's show. It was important to get the parts out as soon as possible because they're going to need to get their playing up to scratch to perform the music properly. I don't feel any guilt for asking them to work hard. If their actor musicianship is up to scratch then they're much more likely to get decent work when they go out into the big wide world. You've got to be cruel to be kind!
Friday, 15 April 2016
Thursday, 14 April 2016
As if we never said goodbye
I was up in the village this morning, writing in Costa, when I looked across at the bloke next to me who was reading a newspaper. He turned a page, and there was Arnold Wesker's face. The article described him as the "last of the angry young men." Funnily enough, Arnold always used to claim that he wasn't an angry young man, but that he was very definitely an angry OLD man! The man in the cafe had a cursory read of the article before turning the page and I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, "you should read Chicken Soup with Barley and then you'd understand the importance of this man." Actually, when Arnold, a notoriously bad speller, handed the first draft of Chicken Soup with Barley to the Royal Court theatre, a spelling mistake meant he'd actually titled his first play, Chicken Soup with Barely!
There's little else to say about today. Yesterday's Sunset Boulevard at English National Opera was a proper treat. It's very rare to hear a musical theatre score played by a 51-piece orchestra and Michael Xavier was tremendous in the role of Joe. Glen Close delivered one of those performances which I will be able to say I saw for the rest of my life. She created the most astonishing moment when she sang As If We Never Said Goodbye, and brought a breathtaking pathos and fragility to Norma Desmond. We sat in the Gods, so I was too far back to see the subtleties of her facial expressions, but something special was happening which the entire audience seemed to be buying into. Of course it's very difficult to know whether a lot of the buzz was happening because this was Glen Close. If a less famous actress had delivered an identical performance, would everyone have gone so gaga over it? She certainly didn't sing the music beautifully...
The show instantly took me back in time. Almost exactly twenty years ago (in fact to the actual month) I did my drama school work experience on Sunset Boulevard, observing a director called Andrew McBean as he rehearsed a new cast which included Petula Clerk and Graham Bickley. Pet Clark was taking over from Elaine Paige, who had done a limited run of the show. I remember sitting in on a rehearsal with the bloke who'd played the butler, Max, since the show opened some three years before. The resident director suggested that maybe he could shake things up and keep things fresh by changing the position of his hands at the end of his big song, to which the actor replied, "my dear man. If this hand position was good enough for Trevor (Nunn, the show's original director) then it's good enough for me..." I learned a lot about a certain type of actor in that one session!
I was very good friends with the stage door keeper of the Adelphi theatre in the run-up to that week of work experience. I was there when the news of the massacre at Dunblane broke. I remember discussing it with a well-known actress who was dating one of the cast at the time. I told her about the shooting at my own school and how strange I was feeling in a sort of "there but for the grace of God" kind of way. Strange days.
Twenty years in the business and never dropped a sequin!
There's little else to say about today. Yesterday's Sunset Boulevard at English National Opera was a proper treat. It's very rare to hear a musical theatre score played by a 51-piece orchestra and Michael Xavier was tremendous in the role of Joe. Glen Close delivered one of those performances which I will be able to say I saw for the rest of my life. She created the most astonishing moment when she sang As If We Never Said Goodbye, and brought a breathtaking pathos and fragility to Norma Desmond. We sat in the Gods, so I was too far back to see the subtleties of her facial expressions, but something special was happening which the entire audience seemed to be buying into. Of course it's very difficult to know whether a lot of the buzz was happening because this was Glen Close. If a less famous actress had delivered an identical performance, would everyone have gone so gaga over it? She certainly didn't sing the music beautifully...
The show instantly took me back in time. Almost exactly twenty years ago (in fact to the actual month) I did my drama school work experience on Sunset Boulevard, observing a director called Andrew McBean as he rehearsed a new cast which included Petula Clerk and Graham Bickley. Pet Clark was taking over from Elaine Paige, who had done a limited run of the show. I remember sitting in on a rehearsal with the bloke who'd played the butler, Max, since the show opened some three years before. The resident director suggested that maybe he could shake things up and keep things fresh by changing the position of his hands at the end of his big song, to which the actor replied, "my dear man. If this hand position was good enough for Trevor (Nunn, the show's original director) then it's good enough for me..." I learned a lot about a certain type of actor in that one session!
I was very good friends with the stage door keeper of the Adelphi theatre in the run-up to that week of work experience. I was there when the news of the massacre at Dunblane broke. I remember discussing it with a well-known actress who was dating one of the cast at the time. I told her about the shooting at my own school and how strange I was feeling in a sort of "there but for the grace of God" kind of way. Strange days.
Twenty years in the business and never dropped a sequin!
Wednesday, 13 April 2016
Dear Sir Arnold
I knew the day would come at some point and I've dreaded it for some time. Yesterday, at 6.50pm, actually whilst Fiona, Nathan and I were talking about him on Sandy Heath, my mentor and dear friend, Sir Arnold Wesker, died.
He'd been ill for some time, suffering from Parkinson's disease. When I last saw him, just under a year ago, he was a little unstable, but very definitely a man I still recognised. I feel a little guilty not to have seen him closer to the end, but there again, grateful that I never saw him fading away. In my mind he will always be the great writer. The barrel-chested ox. The man who taught me integrity. The man who went to jail for his anti-nuclear stance. The great working class playwright who was praised by Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons today. The bloke who liked it when I called him 'Nold.
It was Arnold who encouraged me to carry on writing music when all I wanted to do was direct theatre. I first met him in 1996 when he took up an invitation to watch my graduation piece at Mountview School. I had directed a show called America Hurrah by a New York playwright called Jean Claude Van Itallie. Arnold was astonished by how much music I'd found in Van Itallie's words, and I explained that I'd trained first as a composer at York University. We exchanged letters - countless letters - and I sent him a tape of my music: just a few odds and ends I'd recorded whilst studying. He sent me one of the lyrics he'd written for a show called Letter to a Daughter and asked if, "just for fun," I'd set it to music.
And the rest, as they say, is history. 'Nold gave me my first professional commission and in the process, introduced me to Julie Clare, and the ripples just kept expanding. If I hadn't met Julie, Julie wouldn't have met Sam, and, taking everything to its logical extreme, Nathan probably wouldn't be a knitter... Life would have been very different without Arnold.
Arnold supported me at every stage of my career. Every new project was sent to him, often before it had been officially screened or released, and I'd eagerly await the email or letter which told me what he'd thought of it. He always kept me on my toes.
We did countless projects together. In the olden days we wrote shed loads of songs. We actually came within an inch of getting a record deal and wrote an unsuccessful Eurovision Song Contest entry together. More recently, I interviewed him at length on camera for BBC London, taking him back to his childhood home as part of films we were making for the Oranges and Lemons project. He commissioned me to write a title song for his World Service radio play The Rocking Horse. And he even performed on my requiem, bravely singing the words written on his mother's gravestone just weeks after his own daughter, Tanya, had passed away. His words will always live on in the song Shone With The Sun from Brass.
He never held back either with his praise or his criticism. He wanted me to better myself and encouraged me to "kill my darlings" - those beautiful songs and speeches which get in the way of story-telling and push a piece of art into a piece of indulgence. Or art, as we used to say, with a capital F. He felt our wedding was a little indulgent. He thought Hattersley didn't quite match the Radio Ballads of Ewan McColl but he played A1: The Road Musical to anyone who'd watch it and he loved the Requiem with a passion and wanted the world to hear it. He anonymously bought countless copies of the CD on Amazon, unaware that all of his orders were coming through me. He sent copies to people in Sweden, Japan, the US and the Czech Republic. That was the kind of man he was. When I lost a court case, 'Nold sent me a cheque through the post. That was 'Nold. Generous. Loving. Deeply loyal. Principled. He never suffered fools.
He believed that everything we did together should create a buzz. On one occasion he made Julie and me perform songs from Letter to a Daughter to the workmen who were setting up the Edinburgh Assembly rooms a full five weeks before our run at the festival started. We'd go on mad-cap trips around the country to meet potential backers. As we drove, I'd teach him English folk songs and he'd teach me songs in Yiddish. They were happy, optimistic, music-filled days.
I cried myself to sleep last night and the tears came again whilst Glen Close sang "As If We Never Said Goodbye" in Sunset Boulevard at the ENO, which we were lucky enough to see tonight. It felt right to be in a theatre.
I feel a little sad that the Brits don't dim the marquees of their theatres when key figures in our noble industry leave the world like they do on Broadway. I would have been proud to see the lights dimming in the West End for Arnold tonight.
Just before we entered the theatre, I received an email from Arnold himself, which made my blood run cold. For the briefest moment I wondered if it had all been a mistake, but the email merely carried the details of his funeral.
Arnold is survived by his wonderful wife and brilliant cook, Dusty, so named because Arnold thought her hair looked like gold dust. She is the inspiration for Beattie in Roots, which is surely the most iconic role he ever created.
'Nold always used to say that, had he had a musical bone in his body, he would have wanted to be a composer. He had a great passion for music. Perhaps that's why he took such an interest in me. The most perfect words he ever wrote were in his autobiography. When I read them for the first time, they struck such a chord that I immediately asked him to write them out on the inside cover of my copy of the book:
"Never stop anyone from singing. Stop their singing and you stop up their joy."
Sir Arnold, I loved you deeply and I shall miss you bitterly. You will never ever be forgotten. Thank you for being a part of my life.
He'd been ill for some time, suffering from Parkinson's disease. When I last saw him, just under a year ago, he was a little unstable, but very definitely a man I still recognised. I feel a little guilty not to have seen him closer to the end, but there again, grateful that I never saw him fading away. In my mind he will always be the great writer. The barrel-chested ox. The man who taught me integrity. The man who went to jail for his anti-nuclear stance. The great working class playwright who was praised by Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons today. The bloke who liked it when I called him 'Nold.
It was Arnold who encouraged me to carry on writing music when all I wanted to do was direct theatre. I first met him in 1996 when he took up an invitation to watch my graduation piece at Mountview School. I had directed a show called America Hurrah by a New York playwright called Jean Claude Van Itallie. Arnold was astonished by how much music I'd found in Van Itallie's words, and I explained that I'd trained first as a composer at York University. We exchanged letters - countless letters - and I sent him a tape of my music: just a few odds and ends I'd recorded whilst studying. He sent me one of the lyrics he'd written for a show called Letter to a Daughter and asked if, "just for fun," I'd set it to music.
And the rest, as they say, is history. 'Nold gave me my first professional commission and in the process, introduced me to Julie Clare, and the ripples just kept expanding. If I hadn't met Julie, Julie wouldn't have met Sam, and, taking everything to its logical extreme, Nathan probably wouldn't be a knitter... Life would have been very different without Arnold.
Arnold supported me at every stage of my career. Every new project was sent to him, often before it had been officially screened or released, and I'd eagerly await the email or letter which told me what he'd thought of it. He always kept me on my toes.
We did countless projects together. In the olden days we wrote shed loads of songs. We actually came within an inch of getting a record deal and wrote an unsuccessful Eurovision Song Contest entry together. More recently, I interviewed him at length on camera for BBC London, taking him back to his childhood home as part of films we were making for the Oranges and Lemons project. He commissioned me to write a title song for his World Service radio play The Rocking Horse. And he even performed on my requiem, bravely singing the words written on his mother's gravestone just weeks after his own daughter, Tanya, had passed away. His words will always live on in the song Shone With The Sun from Brass.
He never held back either with his praise or his criticism. He wanted me to better myself and encouraged me to "kill my darlings" - those beautiful songs and speeches which get in the way of story-telling and push a piece of art into a piece of indulgence. Or art, as we used to say, with a capital F. He felt our wedding was a little indulgent. He thought Hattersley didn't quite match the Radio Ballads of Ewan McColl but he played A1: The Road Musical to anyone who'd watch it and he loved the Requiem with a passion and wanted the world to hear it. He anonymously bought countless copies of the CD on Amazon, unaware that all of his orders were coming through me. He sent copies to people in Sweden, Japan, the US and the Czech Republic. That was the kind of man he was. When I lost a court case, 'Nold sent me a cheque through the post. That was 'Nold. Generous. Loving. Deeply loyal. Principled. He never suffered fools.
He believed that everything we did together should create a buzz. On one occasion he made Julie and me perform songs from Letter to a Daughter to the workmen who were setting up the Edinburgh Assembly rooms a full five weeks before our run at the festival started. We'd go on mad-cap trips around the country to meet potential backers. As we drove, I'd teach him English folk songs and he'd teach me songs in Yiddish. They were happy, optimistic, music-filled days.
I cried myself to sleep last night and the tears came again whilst Glen Close sang "As If We Never Said Goodbye" in Sunset Boulevard at the ENO, which we were lucky enough to see tonight. It felt right to be in a theatre.
I feel a little sad that the Brits don't dim the marquees of their theatres when key figures in our noble industry leave the world like they do on Broadway. I would have been proud to see the lights dimming in the West End for Arnold tonight.
Just before we entered the theatre, I received an email from Arnold himself, which made my blood run cold. For the briefest moment I wondered if it had all been a mistake, but the email merely carried the details of his funeral.
Arnold is survived by his wonderful wife and brilliant cook, Dusty, so named because Arnold thought her hair looked like gold dust. She is the inspiration for Beattie in Roots, which is surely the most iconic role he ever created.
'Nold always used to say that, had he had a musical bone in his body, he would have wanted to be a composer. He had a great passion for music. Perhaps that's why he took such an interest in me. The most perfect words he ever wrote were in his autobiography. When I read them for the first time, they struck such a chord that I immediately asked him to write them out on the inside cover of my copy of the book:
"Never stop anyone from singing. Stop their singing and you stop up their joy."
Sir Arnold, I loved you deeply and I shall miss you bitterly. You will never ever be forgotten. Thank you for being a part of my life.
Tuesday, 12 April 2016
Impromptu shoots
Fiona is here. We're watching Bake Off: Creme de la Creme on iPlayer, or at least we would be if the Internet connection in our house weren't so utterly dreadful. Naughty Talk Talk. Quick. Everyone ignore them...
We've just been for an evening walk on the Heath. The weather was beautiful. The sky was a vivid blue, but clouds of all sorts of different colours and shapes were merrily drifting across the sun. Fiona very kindly modelled some of Nathan's knitwear for us, and we did an impromptu photo shoot down by Kenwood House. The gardens around the house were a riot of colours. There was blossom everywhere, the bluebells are coming out in the woods and the daffodils haven't yet gone over.
We walked up to the magic ponds in the triangular sliver of the Heath between Spaniards Lane and the road to Golders Green. I found out today that the area is officially known as Sandy Heath. It was quarried extensively for sand in the 19th Century. Two oak trees stand proudly on a hill. They apparently date back a magnificent 300 years - Samuel Pepys himself could have seen them as saplings. These days they are considered to be so precious that they've been fenced off and a protection order has been placed on them. The trees around them are all pollarded so that enough light can reach them.
I don't know why I feel so drawn to that particular spot. I find it incredibly calming. The ponds are pitch black, so reflect everything around them like a ghostly mirror. The area has a sort of soft light about it and it's pretty much silent, but for the whispering of the trees. Perfect.
We had tea in the Bull Pub which is where Nathan attends a knit night on Tuesday evenings. Sadly, none of the other knitters turned up, so, had we not been there, Nathan would have sat at their reserved table like a Sad Sack. I understand the very same thing happened last week whilst I was in Sevenoaks. Heartbreaking. If you happen to be a knitter, and you live in the Highgate area, I'd say it was fairly imperative that you got yourself down to the Bull on a Tuesday night so that Nathan no longer has to be the Madam Butterfly of yarn!
We've just been for an evening walk on the Heath. The weather was beautiful. The sky was a vivid blue, but clouds of all sorts of different colours and shapes were merrily drifting across the sun. Fiona very kindly modelled some of Nathan's knitwear for us, and we did an impromptu photo shoot down by Kenwood House. The gardens around the house were a riot of colours. There was blossom everywhere, the bluebells are coming out in the woods and the daffodils haven't yet gone over.
We walked up to the magic ponds in the triangular sliver of the Heath between Spaniards Lane and the road to Golders Green. I found out today that the area is officially known as Sandy Heath. It was quarried extensively for sand in the 19th Century. Two oak trees stand proudly on a hill. They apparently date back a magnificent 300 years - Samuel Pepys himself could have seen them as saplings. These days they are considered to be so precious that they've been fenced off and a protection order has been placed on them. The trees around them are all pollarded so that enough light can reach them.
I don't know why I feel so drawn to that particular spot. I find it incredibly calming. The ponds are pitch black, so reflect everything around them like a ghostly mirror. The area has a sort of soft light about it and it's pretty much silent, but for the whispering of the trees. Perfect.
We had tea in the Bull Pub which is where Nathan attends a knit night on Tuesday evenings. Sadly, none of the other knitters turned up, so, had we not been there, Nathan would have sat at their reserved table like a Sad Sack. I understand the very same thing happened last week whilst I was in Sevenoaks. Heartbreaking. If you happen to be a knitter, and you live in the Highgate area, I'd say it was fairly imperative that you got yourself down to the Bull on a Tuesday night so that Nathan no longer has to be the Madam Butterfly of yarn!
Monday, 11 April 2016
Limp
Nathan and I have been watching a show called Episodes on Netflix, which follows a pair of British writers as they attempt to break Hollywood. Again, I'm aware that we're incredibly late to this particular party, but the premise of the show is that the two writers have written a successful English TV show which a major TV station in the States wants to develop and reshoot for a US audience. At first they're told the scripts will remain the same, and then, piece by piece, committee by committee, the show becomes something entirely different.
It's deeply painful viewing which will resonate with any writer, particularly those who work in the fickle world of telly. The over-arching theme which permeates the series revolves around integrity. Do you resolutely stay true to your own vision and risk obscurity or being accused of being impossible to work with? Or do you sell out to appease studio bosses and their quest for ratings? Who can you trust? Who's telling the truth? Who defends you behind your back? Who will stab you in the back when the shit hits the fan? How many people will insist on having their opinion heard even if it's really clear they know nothing about the project you've written?!
Something which I'm finding deeply irritating at the moment is the sheer number of covers of famous songs which are currently being used on adverts featuring a female vocalist, singing in a weak, slightly out of tune, whispery voice, often with a strong London accent and a speech impediment whilst a piano in the background plays something wispy. Nathan calls them "limp covers." They usually advertise supermarkets or companies trying to portray themselves as caring. I can hear the ad execs right now siting around a table saying, "we want the music to sound like Lily Allen doing Somewhere Only We Know." "Let's have a brainstorm." "What about Shine by Take That? That's got the right sort of message. We want our customers to know they shine." "Ooh... Shine bright like a diamond." "What's that one off of Les Mis? I Dreamed a Dream?" "love it!" "I thought that song was meant to be sad?""Let's change the lyrics then to make them happy... And remember we want one of those fragile London voices. Musical theatre performers doing musical theatre is so 80s."
I didn't much like waking up this morning. I had the strangest sensation that I was waking up for no reason. I hauled myself out of bed, went up to the village, and did a morning of work. The afternoon was spent back at home doing admin.
I went running as well. Spring is definitely here. The trees in Highgate Woods have started sprouting lime green leaves, there's a definite smell of pollen in the air, and many of the tees are now covered in blossom with bees flying happily from petal to petal, or, more specifically, I guess, stamen to stamen.
It's deeply painful viewing which will resonate with any writer, particularly those who work in the fickle world of telly. The over-arching theme which permeates the series revolves around integrity. Do you resolutely stay true to your own vision and risk obscurity or being accused of being impossible to work with? Or do you sell out to appease studio bosses and their quest for ratings? Who can you trust? Who's telling the truth? Who defends you behind your back? Who will stab you in the back when the shit hits the fan? How many people will insist on having their opinion heard even if it's really clear they know nothing about the project you've written?!
Something which I'm finding deeply irritating at the moment is the sheer number of covers of famous songs which are currently being used on adverts featuring a female vocalist, singing in a weak, slightly out of tune, whispery voice, often with a strong London accent and a speech impediment whilst a piano in the background plays something wispy. Nathan calls them "limp covers." They usually advertise supermarkets or companies trying to portray themselves as caring. I can hear the ad execs right now siting around a table saying, "we want the music to sound like Lily Allen doing Somewhere Only We Know." "Let's have a brainstorm." "What about Shine by Take That? That's got the right sort of message. We want our customers to know they shine." "Ooh... Shine bright like a diamond." "What's that one off of Les Mis? I Dreamed a Dream?" "love it!" "I thought that song was meant to be sad?""Let's change the lyrics then to make them happy... And remember we want one of those fragile London voices. Musical theatre performers doing musical theatre is so 80s."
I didn't much like waking up this morning. I had the strangest sensation that I was waking up for no reason. I hauled myself out of bed, went up to the village, and did a morning of work. The afternoon was spent back at home doing admin.
I went running as well. Spring is definitely here. The trees in Highgate Woods have started sprouting lime green leaves, there's a definite smell of pollen in the air, and many of the tees are now covered in blossom with bees flying happily from petal to petal, or, more specifically, I guess, stamen to stamen.
Sunday, 10 April 2016
Midland spirit
I sat on a rail replacement bus today with a woman and her son. The lad seemed to be in a bit of a funk. He was annoyed because Mummy had taken him on a surprise trip to London and whatever she'd chosen to do had been "really boring." The mum was, understandably unimpressed, "in that case we won't come to London again" she said, in a sort of martyry way. "But I want to come next year," the child whined, "I just want to know what the surprise is going to be, so that I can tell you if it's something I want to do..." "In which case," she sulked, "you'll have to behave yourself on the way home. Do you think you can do that?" "No. Yes. No." Said the child. On and on it went, permeated by little high-pitched shrieks, which surged through my body like a fork in a pickled onion... I was wondering if a child should have the right to negotiate whether or not it's going to behave on public transport. No wonder the silly lad got bored on his special trip. He's plainly been indulged all his life. Sometimes defenestration is the only option!
I slept-in today. I must have put in about eleven hours, which is going some even for me. After waking up, I felt utterly incapable of doing anything other than sitting in front of the telly watching episodes of Storage Hunters. I've written about this show before. I find it utterly compelling. Nathan says sitting in front of it is wasting life. The premise of the show involves white trash bidding ever-higher sums of money on shite trash which they discover in reclaimed storage units. There are all sorts of brilliantly dreadful people, with names like Jessie and Brandon, who seem to have almost bottomless pockets when it comes to money. They all make a fortune out of the lots. The auctioneer tries to create the illusion of talking insanely quickly by inserting the word "brrrrrrah" between every word he says. I'm not sure why. I'm sure people think it sounds cool. I think it sounds like someone saying "brrrrrrrah."
They've tried to do something similar in the UK, but everything in the storage units over here seems to be absolute tat. The Brits bid restrained sums of money on the shite they're offered and nothing ever seems to yield a profit.
It's the same as the antique programmes on telly these days. We all know the value of everything and everyone is way too arch and obsessed with making a profit to let something go for a song. The winners of these terrible antique format shows are always the ones who make the smallest loss. Profits were a thing of the 1990s.
We watched The Voice last night. The standard of singing seemed very high, although I often wonder whether our standards go up and down depending on what we're watching. How many times have I heard a proud mother or auntie saying "I genuinely think that school show was West End standard..." I'm wondering whether the singers were merely good for a talent show or actually good by professional standards, but I enjoyed the ones I didn't sleep through and it's lovely to see Boy George as a guest.
The Voice has had an almost catastrophic record when it comes to artists (or "ar-ists" as Jessie J calls them) hitting the big time. To my knowledge, not a single person associated with the UK show has had a top ten single or album in their own right, which makes me wonder what the BBC is doing wrong. It's the same reason why I'd rather like Simon Cowell to take care of the Eurovision one year, because, like him or loathe him, I think he'd find the formula for British success. The BBC, on the other hand, can't be seen to be making a profit, marketing anyone, or getting involved in the external promotion of anything it makes. It used to have its own record label. These days, anything which it thrusts externally on the world has to be released for the Children In Need charity. It's sort of irritating. If we'd been able to spend the money which A Symphony for Yorkshire made when it was successfully released on DVD, I would have had enough to make another similar film, and another community could have benefitted. Much as I'm proud that the film made a shed load for charity, I'm also a bit sad that we couldn't make another one. BBC cuts have meant we've never been able to repeat the project. Boo!
I'm still a bit blue following Brass. It was such a special week, and the thought of re-entering a world where the emphases is on me to find more paid work is a depressing one. I hate hustling.
My work on Brass has made me think a great deal about the Midlands spirit. This is a bit of a generalisation, but I have noticed a tendency for young people from the Midlands to be not just somewhat inward-looking, but also incredibly back-footed. Where Northern and Southern kids exude confidence, I've noticed a real tendency for the Midlanders (and by this I mean those Midlanders who didn't have the benefit of being educated at a private school) to feel like they don't deserve opportunity, or worse still, a tendency to shun opportunity because they've been told by their peers that they're either not good enough, or somehow arrogant if they find an aptitude for something. "People like us don't have aspirations above our station." I recognise it wholeheartedly from my own upbringing, the witty Midlanders will crack jokes about how rubbish they are, how crap they look, how poor they are or how unintelligent they are, because that is the currency which they're expected to deal in. By and large, the Midlands kids I work with will need to be drawn out of their shells. They don't tend to hear about things like NYMT or the National Youth Orchestra. If they're aware of its existence, the assumption will be that they're not good enough to do it. I think a great deal of it comes down to lack of identity. When everyone argues about the North/ South divide, the Midlanders are assumed to align themselves with either one or the other rather than having their own proud identity. I have tried and tried to get Midlands initiatives off the ground, but no one is interested in the Midlands unless I'm proposing projects about the Asian communities in Birmingham or Leicester.
I would genuinely be interested to hear if anyone strongly agrees or disagrees with this statement. Has anyone else had this experience, or does my Northamptonshire shoulder-chip mean I'm noticing, or worse still searching for something which just isn't there? Answers on a post card.
I slept-in today. I must have put in about eleven hours, which is going some even for me. After waking up, I felt utterly incapable of doing anything other than sitting in front of the telly watching episodes of Storage Hunters. I've written about this show before. I find it utterly compelling. Nathan says sitting in front of it is wasting life. The premise of the show involves white trash bidding ever-higher sums of money on shite trash which they discover in reclaimed storage units. There are all sorts of brilliantly dreadful people, with names like Jessie and Brandon, who seem to have almost bottomless pockets when it comes to money. They all make a fortune out of the lots. The auctioneer tries to create the illusion of talking insanely quickly by inserting the word "brrrrrrah" between every word he says. I'm not sure why. I'm sure people think it sounds cool. I think it sounds like someone saying "brrrrrrrah."
They've tried to do something similar in the UK, but everything in the storage units over here seems to be absolute tat. The Brits bid restrained sums of money on the shite they're offered and nothing ever seems to yield a profit.
It's the same as the antique programmes on telly these days. We all know the value of everything and everyone is way too arch and obsessed with making a profit to let something go for a song. The winners of these terrible antique format shows are always the ones who make the smallest loss. Profits were a thing of the 1990s.
We watched The Voice last night. The standard of singing seemed very high, although I often wonder whether our standards go up and down depending on what we're watching. How many times have I heard a proud mother or auntie saying "I genuinely think that school show was West End standard..." I'm wondering whether the singers were merely good for a talent show or actually good by professional standards, but I enjoyed the ones I didn't sleep through and it's lovely to see Boy George as a guest.
The Voice has had an almost catastrophic record when it comes to artists (or "ar-ists" as Jessie J calls them) hitting the big time. To my knowledge, not a single person associated with the UK show has had a top ten single or album in their own right, which makes me wonder what the BBC is doing wrong. It's the same reason why I'd rather like Simon Cowell to take care of the Eurovision one year, because, like him or loathe him, I think he'd find the formula for British success. The BBC, on the other hand, can't be seen to be making a profit, marketing anyone, or getting involved in the external promotion of anything it makes. It used to have its own record label. These days, anything which it thrusts externally on the world has to be released for the Children In Need charity. It's sort of irritating. If we'd been able to spend the money which A Symphony for Yorkshire made when it was successfully released on DVD, I would have had enough to make another similar film, and another community could have benefitted. Much as I'm proud that the film made a shed load for charity, I'm also a bit sad that we couldn't make another one. BBC cuts have meant we've never been able to repeat the project. Boo!
I'm still a bit blue following Brass. It was such a special week, and the thought of re-entering a world where the emphases is on me to find more paid work is a depressing one. I hate hustling.
My work on Brass has made me think a great deal about the Midlands spirit. This is a bit of a generalisation, but I have noticed a tendency for young people from the Midlands to be not just somewhat inward-looking, but also incredibly back-footed. Where Northern and Southern kids exude confidence, I've noticed a real tendency for the Midlanders (and by this I mean those Midlanders who didn't have the benefit of being educated at a private school) to feel like they don't deserve opportunity, or worse still, a tendency to shun opportunity because they've been told by their peers that they're either not good enough, or somehow arrogant if they find an aptitude for something. "People like us don't have aspirations above our station." I recognise it wholeheartedly from my own upbringing, the witty Midlanders will crack jokes about how rubbish they are, how crap they look, how poor they are or how unintelligent they are, because that is the currency which they're expected to deal in. By and large, the Midlands kids I work with will need to be drawn out of their shells. They don't tend to hear about things like NYMT or the National Youth Orchestra. If they're aware of its existence, the assumption will be that they're not good enough to do it. I think a great deal of it comes down to lack of identity. When everyone argues about the North/ South divide, the Midlanders are assumed to align themselves with either one or the other rather than having their own proud identity. I have tried and tried to get Midlands initiatives off the ground, but no one is interested in the Midlands unless I'm proposing projects about the Asian communities in Birmingham or Leicester.
I would genuinely be interested to hear if anyone strongly agrees or disagrees with this statement. Has anyone else had this experience, or does my Northamptonshire shoulder-chip mean I'm noticing, or worse still searching for something which just isn't there? Answers on a post card.
Saturday, 9 April 2016
Last day
We had our last day of rehearsals for Brass today. We'll pick up the reins again in August, and, in the meantime, I've told the cast to write hundreds of letters to each other. One of the themes of Brass is letter-writing and the importance of that particular method of communication in the First World War. I really want the cast to know how amazing it feels to receive a hand-written letter from a good friend. I'm encouraging them to put photographs and little gifts inside. My friend Ellie and I used to put mini Cadbury's Cream Eggs inside letters because we found it so amusing that they got so royally squashed in the process of delivery.
So our last day was essentially a stagger-through of the entire show. Because we're in a very advanced stage with the music, Hannah decided it might be possible for us to put the show on its feet in a sort of improvised way, and the experiment was a good one. The cast got a true sense of the piece and its emotional arc. The huge amount of character work they'd done with Hannah really came into its own.
By the end of the rehearsal, emotional carnage had descended. As the lads went over the top, tears started pouring down the actors' faces. Some of the men seemed particularly distraught. It's hardly surprising: here was a group of people who'd spent the past week becoming the best of friends, who were now watching their new friends being blown to smithereens in No Man's Land! I also think the plight of the First World War Tommy is something which has the power to resonate with all young men. It hit me at the age of 15 when our school did Oh! What a Lovely War, so I'm rather proud to find that Brass is achieving the same thing.
I discovered a most surreal and wonderful fact today. Ethan Maltby, who has written this year's new commission for the NYMT was a year behind me in the Northamptonshire Music School. We worked out today that we'd played in the same orchestra for at least a year. Both of us were on the tour to Canada where the plane's engine exploded! Ethan's show, which, I'm told, is absolutely incredible, is also about the Battle of the Somme, but told from the perspective of a group of young children. As a result, it's already being described as mini-Brass, although I hope Ethan isn't too insulted by the comparison. I'm sure the two shows are like chalk and cheese. Whenever anyone offers a new piece of art to the world the first thing people want to do is compare it to something else! Anyway, I rather like the idea that we both hail from the same county's earth. Up the Midlands!
We left Sevenoaks, feeling a little deflated and sad, and happened to drive past the Hackney Empire on our way back home, which felt rather prescient. We tried to watch The Voice on the telly this evening but I kept falling asleep. I'm officially a zombie.
So our last day was essentially a stagger-through of the entire show. Because we're in a very advanced stage with the music, Hannah decided it might be possible for us to put the show on its feet in a sort of improvised way, and the experiment was a good one. The cast got a true sense of the piece and its emotional arc. The huge amount of character work they'd done with Hannah really came into its own.
By the end of the rehearsal, emotional carnage had descended. As the lads went over the top, tears started pouring down the actors' faces. Some of the men seemed particularly distraught. It's hardly surprising: here was a group of people who'd spent the past week becoming the best of friends, who were now watching their new friends being blown to smithereens in No Man's Land! I also think the plight of the First World War Tommy is something which has the power to resonate with all young men. It hit me at the age of 15 when our school did Oh! What a Lovely War, so I'm rather proud to find that Brass is achieving the same thing.
I discovered a most surreal and wonderful fact today. Ethan Maltby, who has written this year's new commission for the NYMT was a year behind me in the Northamptonshire Music School. We worked out today that we'd played in the same orchestra for at least a year. Both of us were on the tour to Canada where the plane's engine exploded! Ethan's show, which, I'm told, is absolutely incredible, is also about the Battle of the Somme, but told from the perspective of a group of young children. As a result, it's already being described as mini-Brass, although I hope Ethan isn't too insulted by the comparison. I'm sure the two shows are like chalk and cheese. Whenever anyone offers a new piece of art to the world the first thing people want to do is compare it to something else! Anyway, I rather like the idea that we both hail from the same county's earth. Up the Midlands!
We left Sevenoaks, feeling a little deflated and sad, and happened to drive past the Hackney Empire on our way back home, which felt rather prescient. We tried to watch The Voice on the telly this evening but I kept falling asleep. I'm officially a zombie.
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