Talking on Channel 4 news

Today started at shit o'clock with an interview in a Soho cafe with Channel 4, talking about David Cameron's legacy. He leaves office today. It all feels a little sordid and sad if I'm honest. I genuinely think he will go down in history as the worst prime minister this country has ever known: the man who split the union. Somewhat grasping at straws, I think he has claimed that one of his proudest achievements in office was bringing in the Equal Marriage Bill. It's lovely that he is proud of this fact - and I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other Tory leaders whom it wouldn't have happened under - but let's not forget that gay marriage was never part of the Tory party manifesto, and, if it hadn't been for Lynne Featherstone and the Liberal Democrat coalition shouting very loudly, I doubt Cameron would have caved. Let's also not forget that Cameron was the only major party leader who elected not to congratulate us on our marriage as part of the Channel 4 film. Not that I minded. I hated those messages. It's sad, and perhaps a little churlish that I feel the need to take this one nugget of joy away from him, but Equal Marriage was Lynne Featherstone's victory and I refuse to allow the positive work of the Lib Dems to be written out of history.

I can't help but feel we're on the edge of a precipice today. This could well prove to be a day we all look back on. "Remember the day when she came into Number 10? The day before all THAT happened..." Part of me has given up worrying about the state of things. Part of me thinks it might have to get really awful so that we can all learn the important lessons that this sordid business was sent to teach us. Whatever the case, I think Cameron will always be held responsible: for being lily-livered, for valuing image above substance, for making austerity cuts which bitterly angered and divided the population, and for not understanding the British public well enough to know that he was going to be brutally punished if he went ahead with a referendum decided by people who literally had nothing left to lose. Any knowledge of history would have told him that these are the most dangerous people to piss off! The very fact that he spent his last Prime Minister's Question Time joking and laughing tells me that he doesn't really have the capacity to take anything seriously. Silly tit. It was all a game to him.

It remains to be seen how May will do. I guess it could have been a lot worse, particularly if that religious tart Andrea Whatever had been selected. I like the fact that May is a woman. I like that she intends to "promote" women in Parliament. That said, there are some shockingly awful, and potentially dangerous female Tory MPs, so we'll have to see. I sometimes think women make the very best and the very nastiest politicians. It's easier to be a crypto fascist if you're wearing a twin set and pearls. I guess a positive in all this is that May's astoundingly high approval ratings might just be enough to force Labour into giving greater thought about their own leader. The present situation is a proper Hobson's Choice. I would pick Corbyn over Eagle, in the same way that I would choose shingles over the Mumps. 

I'm sure you can watch our interview on the Channel 4 News on catchup.

I went to the gym after the filming, worked in a cafe in Kentish Town for a few hours and then headed back into central London for a lovely lunch at Wagamamas with Nathan and Matt, who was very excited to announce that he's reprising the role in Doctor Who that he played in the Christmas special. There was a bit of a mix up with the Yasi Soba orders. We all wanted different variants of the dish and ended up with one too many, which they kindly allowed Nathan to take home in a doggy bag for no extra charge. If I'm honest I think the guy who served us might have been a tad star struck.

I came home and then went to Euston for an evening meeting with a really lovely lady who works at Edge Hill university up near Liverpool. You know when you get an instantly positive vibe from someone whom you immediately recognise as one of your tribe? She reminded me of all sorts of people, and had a charming Liverpudlian accent, which occasionally dipped into a hint of Northern Irish, and a shock of brilliant red, curly hair, which reminded me of Llio. She plays the cello and the piano. Like me. We instantly started talking like old friends. It was such a privilege to meet her, and, frankly, to know that people like her exist.

I've recently been hearing a lot about the agitprop theatre scene in Manchester. Josh is very much a part of it, and the fabulous Julie Hesmondhalgh and her equally wonderful writer-husband, Ian Kershaw seem to be the leading lights. I am starting to wonder if my future needs to be in one of the Northern cities. There's a creative life in the North right now which doesn't quite feel like it exists in London, largely, I suspect because a lot of people are falling into a trap which suggests that innovation in theatre is only going to come from minority communities. Perhaps everyone in the North feels like a minority community. Or perhaps the grass is simply always greener...

On that front, I am still reeling from the news that the National Theatre has set up a new musical theatre writing group to innovate the art form but has banned musical theatre composers from taking part. I have done NOTHING but innovate the art form. I was working on verbatim film musicals long before London Road existed. I've used computers to write musicals. I've used musique concrete. I even got married in a musical, for God's sake! Why is a singer songwriter who's only ever created conceptual pop albums better placed to innovate the art form than me?! That is a direct question to Rufus Norris!


That said, I am proud to report that I heard yesterday that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a fan of Billy Whistle from Brass. For me that is about as high praise as I could ever hope to receive.


The sun setting over the Archway Road this evening reminded me that all is not lost in the world. As long as the sun continues to rise and sink, there is still hope.

The witch hunter general

We're driving back from Thaxted in a very heavy rainstorm. Where has our summer gone? My Mum told me earlier that the weather is due to pick up considerably from Saturday. It better had. I'm running out of reasons to live here. Speaking of which, a considerable number of my friends are currently looking into the idea of taking out dual nationality with various European countries. Ironically, everyone's scouring their family trees for immigrants! I'm told the City of London is exploring the idea of moving wholesale to Amsterdam, and that the Republic of Ireland might do very well out of Brexit in terms of British companies moving there and continuing to trade with Europe. We're going to be like the kids who live in the council house at the end of the fancy street! We won't even be able to afford stone cladding or crazy paving to make ourselves look a bit posher!

It was lovely to see the parents, and my Mum surpassed herself with an enormous cold collation. There were salads, quiches, cheeses, lovely rosemary roasted potatoes, and a choice of gooseberry pie or lemon roulade for pudding. Why say "or" when "and" is a perfectly lovely word...

We got stranded on the North Circular for an hour on our way up. I think it could well have simply been a build up of traffic. We crawled along. I was driving, got clutch foot and went into a tragic spasm which I couldn't control! London is broken!

On our way home, the country lanes were covered in curious, and somewhat eerie little low-hanging, but very well derided wisps of mist, which the car headlights kept lighting up. I couldn't work out what was causing the phenomenon. Those roads around Thaxted are incredibly spooky and atmospheric: if it's not strange lights coming from (one assumes) aeroplanes touching down at Stansted, it's funny ghostly creatures dancing about on the white lines in the middle of the road. These lanes were, of course, the stomping ground of Matthew Hopkins, the 17th Century witch hunter, who was responsible for the murder of 300 so-called witches in a three year reign of terror in the early 1640s. The methods he used to extract confessions were bizarre and utterly inhuman. Many of his practices resurfaced some fifty years later in Salem, Massachusetts, which, of course, is where the extraordinary play The Crucible is set. "I saw Goody Till with the Devil!" I've always thought the British witch hunts would provide a very interesting backdrop for a musical. Or perhaps, more appropriately, an opera. I don't know why I feel an operatic work would fit the bill a little better. Just as Arthur Miller turned the Salem witch trials into a giant allegory for what was happening to so-called communists in 1950s America, I wonder if it would be possible to make some kind of parallel which links what happened in Essex in 1642 to what happens to anyone in Essex in 2016 who is accused of paedophilia. Witch hunts will always happen. We always need someone to blame for the ills of society. I suspect Brexit will generate yet another set of victims. Yawn.

My first ever trip to Liverpool

I went to Liverpool for the first time ever today. I'm not altogether sure why I've never been before. Well, actually, I have all sorts of theories which are far too complicated to go into, but the fact remains that Liverpool is the last major British city I've never seen, and it's always felt like quite a major omission. That said, I've always felt that Liverpool, unlike pretty much every other British city apart from London and maybe Manchester, seems like a rather self-sufficient place. It has its own arts scene. Liverpudlian kids don't tend to audition for things like NYMT because they have their own highly well-respected youth theatres and drama schools. Whenever I've approached the BBC in Liverpool to try and interest them in a project, I've always ended up feeling like there are a million Scousers they'd rather use! And why not? The Liverpudlians are a proud people.

The day started early. I was going to the city for just an hour-long meeting, but I wanted to be there for as long as possible. I'm writing a show which is set there and I had a list as long as my arm of places I wanted to see.

Euston Station was its usual bleak self, a place which, every time I visit, feels increasingly like the dyspraxic cousin of the Kings-Cross-St-Pancras cool kids. I always amuse myself at Euston by watching the rows and rows of people staring blankly up at the departure screens as though waiting for some kind of Rapture. Sometimes I wonder how those religious cults must feel whilst sitting on a mountain side waiting for the end of the world. Imagine that feeling, in the cold light of day, when you realise the comet hasn't come to collect you and the world hasn't ended as predicted. Do you instantly turn on your leaders and accuse them of lying, or simply assume that you must have got your calculations wrong? Imagine being the sort of person who delights in the notion of the end of the world? That said, the end of the world is fairly easy to imagine at Euston Station: a world which died of boredom.

The journey was smooth and passed without incident. Of course, the further north and west I travelled, the worse the weather got. I'll confess, it hadn't occurred to me that it might rain today, and as I got closer to Liverpool, I started to wish I was coming here for the first time in less inclement weather.

I sat for most of the journey opposite a pair of incredibly hard-faced women who were travelling with a seven-year old girl who had a black eye. I assume it was a grandmother, her daughter and her daughter's daughter. They were incredibly beady. You couldn't look at the grandmother for more than a second without her haggard face catching your eye, as though, at any moment, she were going to erupt into a chippy rant about posh people judging her. Both adults seemed to oscillate dramatically in mood. One moment they were smiling happily, the next they seemed rather angry. One moment they were lovingly handing hand sanitiser to the little girl, the next she was being smacked for not sitting properly. She was actually smacked four times. The final smack came with a warning; "do you want everyone on this train to know what a naughty child you are?" It wasn't a massive smacking, but it was firm, and wholly unnecessary to my eyes. The kid didn't cry or anything, but it was a million miles away from the gentle parenting I've become used to with my friends. Of course, my immediate thought was that the little girl's black eye was the result of an earlier smacking, but this, of course, has to be a million miles from the truth. Or does it?

I'm beginning to realise what a bubble I've spent my life within. There are millions of people across the country who live very different lives to me, behave in very different ways and think very different thoughts.

So, I arrived in Liverpool in a rain storm and took a taxi to my meeting which was up by the Anglican Cathedral. It's graduation season for the students of the city, and the ceremonies all take place there. The streets were closed off, which actually made walking around a great deal more pleasant - despite the rain. The tell tale signs of graduation were everywhere to be seen: One student in an ill-fitting suit flanked by two proud-looking parents.

After my meeting I met up with young Josh who'd come across from Manchester to hang out with me. It was brilliant to see him: largely because I knew I had six hours in the city ahead of me and it's always nice to explore somewhere new with someone of a like mind... And boy did we "do" Liverpool.

Josh had already been on a 3 1/2 hour walking tour of the place, so was able to share little tit-bits with me, but I had a list of quirky places I wanted to visit which I was able to share with him.

We walked the length of Hope Street from the Anglican Cathedral down to Paddy's Wigwam, the extraordinary modernist building which is as much a temple to brutalist architecture as it is a Catholic Cathedral. It is so beautiful inside. So powerful. So peaceful. The stained glass windows are every bit as impactful as those in Coventry Cathedral. The overwhelming colour which hits you as you enter is blue. Deep, lapis lazuli blue. Then you see a shot of deep red. Then you raise your eyeline and see that the atrium roof is a circle of rainbow glass, with every conceivable shade of each colour present. Then your eyes return to the blue again and realise there are flecks of salmon pink within. It is truly one of the great wonders of this country. I was deeply moved by the experience.


Opposite the Cathedral is a student halls of residence which once housed the Oxford Street Maternity hospital where John Lennon was born. It's also where my brother Tim came into the world, so Josh and I headed into the courtyard to have a look around.


Next up was a trip to a charming little book shop called Reid's. A number of scenes in the show I'm writing are set in a second hand bookshop, and I wanted to visit a place which I would be able to imagine when writing those scenes. I went online, searched for "central Liverpool second hand bookshops" and chose the one which looked the most inviting from the photographs. I doubt I could have chosen any better. The owner was so friendly and so knowledgeable. He went out of his way to help every one of his customers without being pushy or patronising. I told him about the project and we had a lovely chat about Liverpool in the 1960s.


From the bookshop, we went back up Hope Street to look at The Philharmonic Dining Rooms, known colloquially as "The Phil." It's opposite the concert hall of the same name. It's quite something inside. I'm wondering if I've ever seen such an opulent pub. It's decked out in the Art Nouveau style with seemingly no stone left unturned in the quest to make every surface, every wall, every ceiling cornice more outrageous and over the top than the one next to it! Even the loos are mosaic'd up the wazoo!


We popped into the concert hall, and looked through one of their brochures, trying to work out which of the performers they have coming up was the best looking. Yes. That's how classy I am when it comes to classical music! Of course all the artists had to be photographed with the instrument they play and there are some instruments which are just never going to look interesting in a photo. Imagine trying to make a clarinet look cool? Or a recorder?


We wandered down Bold Street, which is the funky street in town, and fell in love with another bookshop, where Josh bought a T-shirt daubed with a slogan demonstrating the LGBT community's solidarity with striking miners in the 80's: "Pits perverts! Lesbians and gay men support the miners." In return, scores of miners marched at the front of the 1985 Pride Parade in London, in a profoundly moving display of comradeship which a right-winger would never EVER either comprehend or experience. I bought a CND badge for old time's sake. Josh asked what CND was. I was horrified.


When wanting an epic, bird's-eye view of a city, it's always been my philosophy to head to the top of a multi-storey car park, and we chose a corker right in the middle of town from where we could see for miles - all the way across the Mersey to the mountains of Wales. I thought about Brother Tim and wondered if I could see all the way to Llandudno.


Liverpool has a fairly compact city centre. On a map it looks a little sprawling, but you can cover most of the sights in a single afternoon if you put your mind to it... And don't mind your feet feeling like stumps!


I wanted to visit the iconic department store, Lewis's. It was once a five-floor Liverpudlian institution which epitomised both glamour and the British wartime spirit. The building was badly bombed in the blitz but the part of the building which hadn't been destroyed opened for trading within a day. The building is also known as the home of "Fred", a naked bronze statue of a man mopping his brow on the brow of a ship, which seems to burst out of the wall above the door. Lewis's went into decline in the 70s, and by the 90s, two of the floors had closed down. They weren't replaced with offices. No one wanted the space, so they were simply sealed off with everything which had been inside left to rot. This included a 1960s "state of the art" hair salon.


The entire building has now closed down. A sign on the wall tells us that the place is being redeveloped with a grant from the European Union. We turned a corner and a row of down-trodden shops flanking a rotting and boarded-over Victorian picture house also displayed a sign which suggested the area was being regenerated by a European Union grant. I couldn't decide whether the tears I wanted to cry came from a place of anger or pain. I'm proud to say that the Liverpudlians recognised what Europe has done for them and voted to stay in. Unlike the Welsh. Or the Cornish.


A short walk took us to the Cavern Club. My Mum used to go there at lunch time for soup and a sandwich when she lived in the city. These days it's all a little touristy and lacking in atmosphere but it still feels like an important place.


From the Cavern we went down to the Mersey to see the "Three Graces", a triptych of late-19th Century sandstone buildings on the river front which scream to visitors that they have arrived in a world-class city. My Mum actually worked in the Liver Building, which has to be the most beautiful of the three. Scattered around the Three Graces are three far less attractive modern buildings which, I'm told, came first, second and third in a poll to find the worst examples of architecture in the North West. They're known locally as the "Three Disgraces."


We went to Albert Docks, which, of course, became famous as the location where they filmed This Morning with Richard and Judy and where Paul O'Grady's Lily Savage found her first mainstream audience. There was something rather marvellous about the way that Richard and Judy championed her and made it okay for Middle England to like a drag queen whose previous audiences had been reserved for gay bars. I still remember Judy laughing uncontrollably at his antics. Good old Judie.


I was a little disappointed not to find Fred's giant floating weather map of the U.K. in the dock. I don't know how long it lasted as a landmark after the programme transferred to studios in London and took with it another little piece of regional TV programming with a national reach.


Our day ended with a visit to a Liverpudlian gay bar. How could it not? We went down a dark, gritty, grotty, somewhat filmic alley, and found ourselves standing outside a bar with darkened windows, a red neon sign and a black shuttered door which looked about as inviting as a puddle. It was like stepping back into the 90s and the days when gay bars were all in impenetrable-looking buildings hidden from prying eyes. I think poor Josh, who's used to the open "family friendly" vibe of Manchester's Canal Street was terrified about what we might find inside. As it happened we found exactly what I was expecting to find. It was as though we'd stepped back into the 90s. The place was cavernous. There was a bar man and two customers. The Goombay Dance Band singing Seven Tears was playing on the stereo and 1990s erotic films shot on low-definition video cameras were playing on screens around the place. It was astounding! We sank a couple of glasses of coke and headed like the wind for the train station.


What a splendid day! You know, sometimes, when you're a bit depressed, it's a really good idea to take yourself for a day of exploring with a good friend. I'm going to do this more often. I'm also going to sleep like the dead tonight!

Not Angela Eagle, please

I woke up thinking about the Labour leader today. Those who read this blog will not be surprised to learn that I've been a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn. I like his politics. I like his honesty. I like the old school way he goes about being a politician. I respect his atheism and the fact that he's a vegetarian. I think he's a good man. It has become clear to me, however, that he's not a leader. I was sorely unimpressed by the way he dealt with Brexit. I never once saw him step up to the mark and show his strength. I absolutely appreciate the difficulty of the situation he was in; he'd have to have shouted very loudly indeed to get himself heard by the media, who've largely ignored him since he was elected, but if you're required to shout, shout you must, and unfortunately he came across as weak and complacent instead. I'm not sure I ever saw him as our next PM, but I was looking forward to him being brilliant in opposition just as Kinnock was the perfect foil to the abhorrent Thatcher.

But would Kinnock have stood by and watched the Tories ripping themselves apart without going in for the kill? Not on your nelly! When the shit hit the Conservative Party fan, however, Corbyn seemed to do nothing but shuffle about in the shadows just like Michael Foot in the early 80's, whilst people were desperate for him to offer them a voice of hope.

...And yet he clings on. And I absolutely understand his reasoning. He was given a whopping mandate by the unions and Labour members and there's a lot of support for him in the rank and file from those who respect his integrity. I have seen banners all over North London urging us to get behind him. Scores of Facebook posts are doing the rounds pointing out what a decent socialist he is and how he claims less in expenses than any other MP. All this is true. But does he posses the attributes we require from a leader?

Think about this: Corbyn's election came out of the same stable as the Brexit result. People are tired of politicians caring more about their image than actually making a difference to the world and they have twice now made a protest vote. In the case of Corbyn, this was admirable, but it all goes to absolute shite if half of his "supporters" ignore him and side with UKIP at the first opportunity in order to "punish" him for not listening. Whatever they say, when push comes to shove, the British people demand a leader who is charismatic and thrusting!

Whatever you feel about him, the one thing that is certain is that Corbyn's present behaviour is alienating the majority of his fellow MPs. There's a doggedness, almost an arrogance about the way that he's refusing to engage with them. This worries me greatly. You HAVE to have the backing and confidence of the MPs you're leading or they will make you look foolish at every opportunity. The Labour Party has never needed to be more united and yet, for many reasons, it has never been so divided. This needs to change.

I personally think he should go, but I don't know we have the system to get rid of him or an obvious replacement...

Angela Eagle strikes me as instant canon fodder. As a friend of mine pointed out this morning, "I know absolutely nothing about her except that she looks like a spud." My friend, of course was being flippant, but she hit the nail on the head. If Angela Eagle is the best that the Labour Party can offer, then we're in desperate trouble. She comes across as treacherous, and the British public will be down on that like a tonne of bricks. Furthermore, Eagle is one of those career politicians which everyone hates at the moment. She did a lot of student politics and then worked for a union. She entered Parliament in 1992, so has been around for quite some time, which is why it's quite worrying that she hasn't done or said much to get her head above the parapet. In 2008 she tried to claim that there wasn't an issue with escalating house prices and denied that a recession was on its way, describing those who thought there was of speaking "colourful and lurid fiction." She was highly critical of Gary Barlow's tax affairs (what a thing to get riled about), and highly offended when told to "calm down, dear" by David Cameron. This put down sparked a fairly pointless argument about sexism in politics. And that's about the long and the short of her impact on Westminster politics. Is she a good orator? No. Has she got the charisma and appearance of a party leader? No. Will she take politics back into the arena where a leader does anything they can to stay in power regardless of belief? Probably.

The only thing I actually find interesting about her is her sexuality. I think it might be time for a party leader to be gay, if for no other reason than that she can temper any homophobia coming from the Prime Minister. But that's no real reason to back her. She's just a stalking horse, and Corbyn will win a competition with her hands down.

I was buoyed extensively by Murray's Wimbledon win this afternoon and wondered how a great sportsman like that must feel playing in front of someone like Cameron, who spent the match gurning from the Royal Box, somehow attempting to bask in the glow of the nation he ripped apart. I wondered if I would have stopped the match and simply refused to play in front of him. Then I heard that Cameron was there with his mother and instantly felt guilty for having such aggressive thoughts. That said, if Farage had tipped up to watch me play a match of tennis, I would certainly have made my opinions known...


After the match, and feeling lonely for a second day running whilst Nathan went to another gig, I decided to take myself off to Brother Edward's house. I hadn't seen him and Sascha since we rallied together in Trafalgar Square, so I'm hoping he'll have good news to tell me about the world of international banking post Brexit. I'm not exactly holding my breath!


Highgate Station was closed and I had to take a bus down to Archway. As we sped around Archway Roundabout, I was stunned to see a pile of about three hundred cardboard boxes piled up on the pavement. All of the boxes were filled with clothes, and a group of people were scavenging. It was like something you might expect to find in Inner City LA. I don't know why the boxes were there, but their presence felt a little chilling. A taste of post-Brexit Britain, where the poorest in society are kept alive by soup kitchens and clothes banks. It was a deeply unnerving scene.


I took the tube to Canary Wharf and instantly got lost trying to find my brother's house. It happens every time. The area is in a perpetual state of flux. Roads close. Buildings appear and disappear. You spend hours walking in circles before finally snaking your way around to a road which leads you to where you need to be. Google maps won't help. No one can keep up!

Rant. Ignore.

It's been a depressing day. Nathan was gigging, and I was at home contemplating the fact that I've lost my mojo whilst wondering what Brexit will actually mean for this country, worrying what would happen if the gay-hating Andrea Leadsome became Prime Minister, wishing I had a job, wishing I had the energy to write some music, panicking that if I do write something it will be rubbish, thinking that it doesn't matter anyway because even if I write something brilliant, the economy is collapsing and the first thing that gets cut is the arts. I have started to realise with great horror that talking to people who voted Brexit is like talking to born again Christians: no amount of sense or logic will make them do anything but glaze over and look at me with pity because they know something that I don't know. I sent three documents to one of my Brexit voting friends today. Has she read them and got back to me? Has she fuck! I wonder if any of them are secretly panicking yet. Talk amongst my European lawyer friends suggests that our only ally in Europe, and our only hope for a decent financial deal with Europe on the back of this is (ironically) Germany. The French and Belgians are up for causing us as much trouble as they can. "The Brits were never really in Europe" they rightly say, "they caused a huge amount of bother when they deigned to join us so fuck it, let's punish them." The Calais district of France is run by the National Front, so the moment we come out of Europe, the very first thing we can expect to happen is for them to provide boats for all the migrants in Calais to come to the UK, so, for the first time in God knows how long, we shall have camps of migrants living on UK soil. Ireland is fucked because of the sheer amount of trade it does with the U.K. In order to keep global businesses on British soil, domestic taxes will rise. The poor will get poorer and they'll turn to fringe right wing parties. There will be class war. A civil war perhaps. A world war when someone steps in to stop the march of fascism, except the good guys won't be be UK this time round. We'll be the ones invading Ireland or using violence to force the Scots to remain in the Union. On and on it goes. The shock waves reverberate and yet still the Brexit voters seem incapable of breaking into a sweat. Perfectly placid. Self-righteous. Telling the thinkers of this world that they're bad losers. Accusing us of not understanding the concept of democracy. It's like it's a giant game. You can see them laughing smugly to themselves, "we really whipped their arses this time, didn't we?" And of course they're behaving like that: For way too long, public voting in this country has been about who your favourite wannabe celebrity is, rather than anything serious, so we've got used to using our votes to punish people like Simon Cowell when they're not humble enough or they get too big for their boots. We vote for the shittiest act, or go out and buy a terrible single just so the underdog charity act can make it to the Christmas number one. I hate it. I hate being British right now. I hate feeling so small in the world. I hate feeling like a laughing stock. I hate feeling mediocre. I plainly have nothing constructive to write, so I will sign off before my head explodes in a bag of self pity.

Snogging on The Archers

I switched the radio on today to hear people snogging on The Archers. They were making loud, wet, slurpy sounds which made me feel quite queasy. I imagined the poor actors laughing embarrassedly whilst kissing the backs of their hands, or whatever it is that radio actors do when the script tells them to make out. I assume there wouldn't be much point in actually kissing for the sound effect. It reminded me just how awful radio drama is! It's so awful that it can only be compared to itself. It's very possible to say "that was really good" but you actually mean, "that was really good... For a radio drama" which, of course, means "that was really shit." The delivery of the lines in radio drama is always so stilted and RADAesque and it's always so utterly formulaic. It's like it's not been subjected to the same degree of innovation as other art forms and has remained in its own bubble since the 1970s.

I worked at the kitchen table today, dangerously close to the giant bottle of PVA glue I'd used for crafting with Deia yesterday. I discovered rather swiftly that it felt quite good to smear a bit of the glue onto my hand, wait for it to dry and then peel it off. For the record it comes off in satisfyingly large clumps, all of which had the image of the lines on my palms on them. I haven't had that much fun with glue since Copydex! It gave me some good thinking time whilst working on lyrics.

This evening I took the tube down to Tottenham Court Road where I met Nathan at the ticket barriers before continuing down the Northern Line to Clapham North. We'd been invited to be photographed for an art project called Sing Out, which involves a chap called Gaz taking pictures of members of the LGBT community who work within the West End theatre industry. We all have to sing in the photos. Heaven knows how I look when I sing. Probably like some kind of deeply self-conscious toad. It's a good job we did it before Nathan has one of his back teeth removed. Ah joy! We'll look at the photo and I'll be able to say, "that was taken in the days when you had teeth!"

I guess I'm quite lucky on the teeth front. Despite only having 26 of them, due to their enormity, they have maintained a good ivory colour, haven't gone rotten and haven't stained like many of my friends' teeth seem to have. That's probably because I don't drink red wine or coffee. I am astonished by how many of my friends allow their teeth to get dirty around the edges. A quick trip to the hygienist and everything looks wonderful again!

Anyway, the photo shoot happened around the corner from the Landor theatre, in a really beautiful, slightly gothic, Victorian street. Gaz was a lot of fun, and instantly put us both at our ease. Nathan sang The Prayer (beautifully) and I sang Shone With The Sun as a tribute to Arnold. I kept changing key like a right old passenger and felt like a tit when I started forgetting the words. I guess the joy about stills photography is that it doesn't matter if you get the words wrong. They say the camera never lies, but actually, when it comes to documenting live performance, I think it often does just that! When you see pictures of Florence Foster Jenkins, you can't tell that she was singing really badly. An actress might forget all her words and a photograph might show her throwing a tantrum as a result, but it will still make her look like a Grande Dame! When I show people images from the theatre shows I've directed, they only have my word for it that the show ever happened, and that the photographs weren't just set ups. There was a legendary Bauhaus initiative called the Triadic Ballet, which purported to be an actual ballet performed by people in astonishingly geometric costumes dancing against backdrops of lemon, pink and black. Music was by Hindemith. There are all sorts of amazing photographs of people standing in the costumes. They look incredibly cool and have cemented the ballet's iconic status. I bet the show itself was pretty dreadful!

The Triadic Ballet

The woman opposite me on the tube today sounded like Daffy Duck. I didn't know where to look, particularly when she took a bottle of wine out of her bag, started necking it and then tried to engage everyone in the carriage in a conversation about the fact that she was necking a bottle of wine. She looked like the sort who could turn nasty in a flash, so we all humoured her. And no one told her she looked like Daffy Duck. Except with our eyes.

Making crowns

I have pretty much spent the entire day with other people. I did a morning of work before Philippa and my god daughter, Deia, came up to Highgate to meet me for lunch. We ate at Papa Dels. A nice plate of pasta. Then Philippa went up to the Village to have her teeth whitened whilst I took Deia back to our house to do some crafting.

I like crafting. We made crowns out of wire and then coated them with papier-mâché made from different coloured tissue papers. One for Deia and one for Deia's sister, Silver. We had a lovely, messy time, and I thought the crowns looked really rather good at the end. I am so paranoid when dealing with young people, however. I spent about half an hour coating all the wire with layers of masking tape in case any of the joins had sharp edges!

It was a lovely day, so I stuck some sun cream on Deia's face and arms and we took ourselves to Highgate Woods for a walk and a lollipop. We played I Spy and I showed her the tree stump where the bumble bee nest used to be. We walked into the cafe in the middle of the wood via its little garden and were instantly confronted by about eight enormous black dogs. Each seemed more enormous and blacker than the one before. I'm really not a natural parent. It didn't strike me that the dogs might frighten little Deia who was about the same height as one of them! It was only when I turned around to open the gate that I saw she was trying to keep as far away from them as possible with a slight look of panic in her eye. I asked if she was okay. She pretended to be brave.

We walked across the glade to the wonderful adventure playground in the wood, which I'd obviously never explored before. It's full of rope swings, wooden climbing frames and zip wires. And who should be walking past with his son, Flynn, but Mr James Fortune. We had a wonderful time together, swinging and sliding, and catching up on old news. James has terrible hay fever at the moment, which made me realise that Nathan hasn't been as bad as usual this year. That's what you get for a crappy summer!

Philippa arrived with teeth gleaming like sticks of chewing gum. Actually, she looked fabulous. I was assuming they were going to make her look like something from The Only Way Is Essex, but her teeth looked subtly white and very healthy. Now I want to have my teeth whitened!

The crew departed at about six, and, at just gone seven Harrison from the cast of Brass came over for a natter about his exciting forthcoming finals project which is related to Brass. We ate pasta for tea and it was only when I started tucking in that I realised it was my second pasta dish of the day!