Daphna Baram – killer comic last night

I went to Miss D’s Silver Hammer last night – the weekly London comedy night run by Israeli comic Daphna Baram who tends to successfully deter any potential hecklers by pointing out in advance that she has diabetes and has been trained to kill by the IDF. Not, as I at first thought, the International Diabetes Federation but the Israeli Defence Forces.

Next Monday, she has an entirely Irish group of comedians performing her day-after-St-Patrick’s-Day show, but she did pretty well on the Celtic line-up last night too.

I was there to see Irish podcast supremo Christian Talbot perform and also because he and Daphna Baram had mightily pushed to me the talents of camp-ish Dubliner Al Porter.

Also performing were two Glaswegians – non-gay Gary Sansome (soon to de-camp to Australia) and extremely talented and gay-in-both-senses-of-the-word Larry Dean.

Al Porter last night, ooh missus, t’be sure

Al Porter was, indeed, as good as Christian and Daphna had told me. Both reckon he will become very successful very soon and he well might do, though one can never tell.

Talent is usually never enough but sure Al has the gift of rapid patter in depth, great audience controlling charm and very good clothes sense (never something to underestimate with this sort of act).

He claimed on-stage that the only reason he had accepted the gig was to meet the afore-mentioned gay Glaswegian Larry Dean who tragically, between booking and performance, had become tied-up in a monogamous relationship, thus scuppering Al’s cherished hopes.

In other circumstances, I might have thought this was part of the act.

Sadly, I fear the wreckage of Al’s shattered dreams may have been a reality.

I had been told there was an element of Frankie Howerd in Al’s act. I could see very faint traces, but only because the idea had been planted in my mind. The delivery was so fast, so smooth and so overwhelming that the act was nothing like the blessed Frankie.

Oddly, what last night reminded me of was seeing an early-ish stage performance by Steve Coogan at Manchester University Students’ Union in what, I guess, must have been 1992.

There was something about the self-confidence of the delivery and movements, something about the sharpness of the costume and something of the ambitiousness behind the eyes which reminded me of that 1992 Steve Coogan both on and off stage.

Christian and Daphna may be right.

Al Porter may well be very successful very fast.

But, as I say, you can never tell.

Sometimes talent – and even sharp, driving ambition – are not enough.

On the other hand, if I were being superficial – “perish the thought” as my dead father used to say (before his death) – a flamboyantly gay, brightly dressed, highly-self-confident Irish comedian with strong audience empathy is a good starting point and a good selling point for English and American audiences.

I expect to see him on the David Letterman show within five years.

Or maybe Al will have his own chat show in Ireland or the UK.

But my comic expectations are often dashed.

And, as I oft quote: Nobody Knows Anything (Saying © William Goldman, 1983)

Malcolm Hardee: the comic who got caught short on stage (Photograph by Vincent Lewis)

I was talking to someone – let’s call her Beryl – about how things change. My eternally un-named friend was there. The subject of the late comedian Malcolm Hardee came up.

“My mum refused to laugh at Malcolm,” Beryl told me. “He would try lots and lots of things to make her laugh. She’d say to me: Don’t laugh at him. He’s as silly as a goat! And Malcolm was attention-seeking, so he’d try his hardest to make my mum laugh. He would dance silly dances.

“I had this funny old radio that I’d bought from a charity shop and Malcolm would come in and say Oh, I like the radio. Let’s put it on and then maybe Saturday Night Fever would come on and he’d dance the John Travolta dance and my mum would snore. She did laugh when he wasn’t there. He was banned from the Albany Empire, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was there the night he pissed on the stage during his act and the people who gave out the grants to keep the Albany going were in the audience that night. I think he said, Oy Oy Hold on, I’ve got caught short! and went to the back of the stage – I think he may have turned his back on the audience, which was unusual, and pissed. You could see this arc of water.”

“He didn’t like it there,” said Beryl. “He said you had to be a one-legged lesbian to be accepted there. It was all politically correct. And he wasn’t terribly politically correct, was he? It’s such a good venue but they don’t really do comedy there now, do they?

“I don’t think they do anything much there,” my eternally-un-named friend said. “There’s the odd stabbing I think I’ve heard of. At a boys’ club. Usually of someone who’s organised a boys’ club. Some poor do-gooder. Big mistake.”

Charlie Chuck backstage last night

I went to Adam Larter’s very aptly named Weirdos Comedy Club in the East End of London last night with comedian Charlie Chuck, who donned his new-ish PVC suit for the performance at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.

It’s no wonder Weirdos and Bethnal Green are much talked about. Equally odd Holly Burn was on the bill (“one to watch in 2013” said the Independent) plus Lee Kern as four-letter one-man band British Pasta plus 2011 Edinburgh ‘Best Newcomer’ Daniel Simonsen and 2011 Edinburgh ‘Best Newcomer’ Thom Tuck.

“Will there be any TV talent scouts around?” a friend asked me.

“No,” I said. “Too trendy for TV people.”

Which demonstrates what I know.

Because, after the show, I bumped into Polly McGirr, TV producer for Princess Productions and Managing Director of Up The Creek Management.

People tend to assume that Malcolm Hardee, the late godfather of British Alternative Comedy, owned his Up The Creek comedy club. In fact, the money was put up by three brothers – I like to call them The Brothers – and he initially owned an equal 25% in return for handling the creative side of the club.

Up The Creek club could have been named Jools’ or Malcolm’s

I think at one early stage Jools Holland was going to invest in the club but decided not to and, at one point, the club was going to be simply called Malcolm’s but it was decided (oddly, I think) that it sounded too ‘Essex’.

Polly McGirr is the daughter of one of The Brothers and is wildly enthusiastic about comedy.

I was quite exhausted just hearing her enthusiasm.

“You remember Malcolm?” I asked.

“I remember the club that night,” she said.

“What night?”

“The night of his funeral. I remember all the acts getting on stage. I remember Jools Holland, Jo Brand and the naked balloon dance being performed and I remember when I was small Malcolm sweeping the stage. Whenever there was a shit act he…”

“You used to watch shows from the sound booth, didn’t you?” I asked, foolishly interrupting what could have been a good anecdote.

That’s what happens in snatched conversations.

“I’m so passionate about Up The Creek and I love it so much,” Polly enthused to me. “I remember being so young and my dad and my uncles allowing me to watch this comedy brilliance and seeing guys like Terry Alderton and Charlie Chuck. Brilliant, brilliant guys I adore so much now and Malcolm introducing new acts by saying Could be good. Could be shit. Fuck it! 

“On my 13th birthday, I remember going to the opening night of the Willesden club (there was briefly an Up The Creek offshoot there) and I remember Malcolm coming out and my mum screeching Noooo! He’s naked!”

“And now you’re managing director of Up The Creek Management,” I said.

“Oh,” Polly explained. “I just do the new talent stuff. I love the weekends at Up The Creek. There’s no other place like it. That spirit of Malcolm is still there.”

“And Sundays…” I prompted.

“They’re done by Will, Jane’s son (Malcolm’s stepson). It’s brilliant. I love Sundays. They’re amazing. But Thursdays is now New Talent night. It’s either established acts trying out new material or it’s brand new guys and it’s still the same thing – Could be good. Could be shit. You never know.

Polly McGirr enthuses after the Weirdos show last night

“People are always saying to me: Why don’t you vet acts before they go on stage on a Thursday? But I say No. It HAS to be open mic: the idea that a crowd will never know who’s going to come on next. Could be good, Could be shit. You just don’t know.”

“How long have you been doing it now?” I asked.

“Three years. And I love it. It’s my home. Really. Seriously. It’s ridiculous, but I love the club so much.”

“So how,” I asked, “did you get an interest in comedy? Just cos you were hanging around it so much? Because The Brothers’ background is not actually showbiz. They’re – what are they? – property magnates?”

“For a long time,” explained Polly, “I wasn’t really doing much about the club, because I’d been around it for so long… But now I work in television and, because I love the club so much, I thought What I really want to see is new talent back here and being established back here and I love shuffling through all the crazy acts to find a gem that you adore. When you feel that buzz and there’s a real mix of different types of acts.”

“And it crosses over with your television work,” I said.

“Yeah,” Polly agreed. “So now I can take acts from the club and put them on TV. Recently, we’ve taken two guys who I first met at the Up The Creek open mic nights and they’re on CBBC as Britain’s first black comedy double act – Johnny Cochrane and Inel Tomlinson. I first met them at the Open Mic and thought THAT is what it’s all about! Either side of them were insane acts and you saw their brilliance.”

“But people,” I suggested, “say television doesn’t like or want original comedy; it just does the same thing over and over again.”

“We’ve got Johnny Cochrane and Inel Tomlinson on screen.” countered Polly. “It took two years to get them on telly, but it has been the most amazing time to establish them. We’re not very good at doing it in the UK – cool comedy – until now. And I really believe there’s great female comedy out there as well.

“I really love Harriet Kemsley. What I love about her is it’s really, really ballsy. When she does a really aggressive joke, it’s brilliant, so beautifully written.

Up The Creek: Dane Baptiste, a new Chris Rock?

“But the new act you HAVE to see is Dane Baptiste.

“For me, he takes every brilliant element of the urban (black) circuit and he does what acts usually can’t do in the UK which is cross over from urban comedy to mainstream comedy. He is Chris Rock to me.”

Dane Baptiste is already signed with Polly’s Up The Creek Management, but it is unusual to see even a comedy manager let alone a TV person so enthusiastic, I had to go home, lie down and recover.

(A version of this piece was published on the Indian news site WSN)

Erotic supremo Grace Gelder yesterday

Back in January, I blogged about The Erotic Awards and The Night of the Senses, being organised in May by photographer Grace Gelder.

First though, this coming Friday, are the semi-finals of the live part of the Erotic Awards, which are taking place in London’s Shepherds Bush at an event called Great Sexpectations.

“What’s the venue?” I asked Grace yesterday.

“Bush Hall,” she told me.

“That seems appropriate,” I said. “Is there a dress code?”

“Kinky Dickens and Victorian Erotica is the suggested theme, but it’s not compulsory.”

“Kinky dick ins?” I asked.

“Kinky Dickens,” Grace corrected me. “It allows gentlemen to jazz up an outfit with nothing more than a top hat.”

“An Artful Roger?”

“Possibly. The costumes that people are dreaming up sound quite exciting. Ladies are doing corsets and frilly things. The Bush Hall is just such a gorgeous venue. It has Viennese chandeliers, deep red velvet stage. It is a beautiful room, a music hall in its first few years.”

“So,” I asked, “do you see Great Sexpectations as a return to Victorian values?”

“It is celebrating the venue and getting everyone dressed up, but with a modern twist.”

“Which is?”

A ticket for next week’s Great Sexpectations event in London

“I don’t think in the Victorian era what we’re doing would have been quite so publicly advertised. Perhaps, on the surface, Great Sexpectations is similar to a lot of other cabaret nights. But one difference is that we have strippers coming who would normally work in a strip bar; usually, in cabaret, it’s more burlesque. We have the burlesque, but we’ve also got the striptease category.”

“It’s a lot of work for you,” I said. “setting up an event like this.”

“Well,” said Grace, “we’ve had lots of support and advice from Tuppy Owens, who organised the event previously and I’m doing it with Lianne Coop, who is a radio producer. We’ve got a complementary set of skills. I’ve worked a lot in theatre and I’ve got a background in erotic photography. She worked at the BBC for a number of years and produced the New Comedy Awards for two years, so she’s got fantastic event production skills.”

“But isn’t this just trying to make nudity and lechery sound posh?” I asked.

“Well,” said Grace, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with admiring people who are comfortable to be on stage with gorgeous bodies and happy to perform in a sexual fashion. I also feel that, in the world of erotica – because it’s been such a taboo area in our culture – there’s a lot of people who do really essential work and who are regularly entertaining hundreds of people every week that don’t get the respect they deserve.”

“So,” I said. “I am Fred Bloggs. Why should I go along to see Great Sexpectations next Friday?”

“It’s going to be a fantastic visual feast for the eyes,” explained Grace. “Lots of amazing performances.”

“So you’re selling it as a Las Vegas cabaret event rather than a sleazy Soho event?” I asked.

“I think it really bridges everything. It’s visually-beautiful, cheeky, saucy but filthy in places. We’re trying to cater for everybody, because this is The Erotic Awards and erotica doesn’t just mean one thing. We’re trying to cater for people who might want something more extreme. We’ve got a woman called MisSa Blue who does fantastic performances with candles.”

“She’s burning the candles at both ends?” I asked.

“All I’d say,” continued Grace is that MisSa Blue is definitely one to catch. And we’ve got some fantastic burlesque, some fantastic drag performances. One of our judges – Rubyyy Jones - has been a massive help to Lianne and me. She is all over the London cabaret scene and is also a drag performer in a troupe called ‘&?!’ (pronounced And What?!). They will be doing a special performance for us. The idea is to make the night as diverse and celebratory as possible.”

“Have you ever had the urge to dabble in burlesque dancing yourself?” I asked Grace.

“We studied Latin at my school,” she replied, “and, when I was 11, I had an amazing Latin teacher. She wrote a school play set in Pompeii. My character’s name was Ava Gropadis – Ava-Gropa-Dis – and I was a prostitute. I had to stand there in a really short skirt and fishnet tights, being a bit tarty.”

“Was your mother proud of you?”

“She came to watch the play with my dad and was pregnant with my younger sister and she thought it was good. It was a good script. The loan shark was called Callus Lenda… and Sicka Fant was some grovelling bloke.

“Later, I was in Bugsy Malone as a flapper and then, when I was 15, I was in the musical Cabaret at school, as one of the slutty dancers. I loved it. It’s not completely out of the realms of possibility that I would stand up on stage and do that one day. It’s just not where my life’s leading.”

“Where is your life leading?”

“Much more into the photography. I do a lot of work with women to help them reclaim their own sexuality.”

“Their self-esteem?” I asked.

“Definitely,” agreed Grace. “There’s such a lot of fear of the male gaze. One of the things that annoys me in discussions of pornography is that some people assume all these women couldn’t possibly have actually chosen that career.”

A highly coveted Erotic Award – the Golden Flying Penis

“So,” I asked, “you don’t see the Erotic Awards as just putting on a show for a bit of fun and entertainment, it’s more an ongoing project?”

“It’s actually turning out to be really exciting,” Grace told me. “Lianne and I have both said it’s got masses of potential. The world has changed in the last 25 years it’s been running and we think we can expand it, raise its profile…”

“Expand it,” I asked, “in what sort of way?”

“Expand it in an awareness way, so people have more knowledge about what’s going on. We chatted to Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour) who wrote Secret Diary of a Call Girl about her book The Sex Myth – that’s been nominated. She’s hopefully going to attend the finals at the Night of the Senses in May.”

“And that bigger event will include…”

“The finals of the Erotic Awards… The finalists in the performance categories will perform and then it’s the prize-giving ceremony up until about midnight. And then it’s an after-party with lots of different areas where you can try out lots of different things with an emphasis on it being playful, inclusive, very diverse. You can have a massage, you can get spanked, you can spank somebody, you can get tied up, you can go and do some sock wrestling, you can…”

“Whoa!” I said. “Let’s do a re-cap there… Sock wrestling?”

“You have to take the other person’s socks off,” said Grace matter-of-factly.

“I feel I am an innocent in this world,” I explained. “Is sock wrestling an acknowledged sexual pastime?”

“I think it’s been quite popular on the festival circuit in recent years,” replied Grace.

I was advised rehearsals are vital for the sock wrestling

“And the object is…”

“…to get the other person’s socks off.”

“While retaining your own socks?” I checked.

“Yes,” confirmed Grace.

“And are you wearing anything else while you do this?” I asked.

“That depends on the event you’re at,” explained Grace.

“But at this event you would not be?”

“It’s optional,” said Grace. “There will be a nudist disco at the event which, obviously, speaks for itself.”

“What happens when you get the socks off?” I asked, pursuing my research.

“You’ve won,” said Grace.

“Then what happens?”

“You probably get a prize.”

“A pair of socks?” I asked.

“Could be,” said Grace. “I think someone’s going to be running it as an area.”

“So it’s not just one couple wrestling each other for their socks, it’s an entire sock wrestling area…. Are there any other things happening I would not guess about, having been brought up a Presbyterian?”

“There’s usually a nocturnal area,” explained Grace, “where you can be blindfolded and tickled.”

“Ah” I said.

Double-legged former dancer Anna Smith in her hospital bed

The So It Goes blog’s occasional Canadian comedy correspondent Anna Smith has just been released from St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver after being admitted to their emergency department on Valentine’s Day to get a Dacron patch sewn onto her aorta… She tells me she wants “to warn healthy young people about the dangers of enduring  years in murky subterranean caves that pass as limelight”.

When in London, before her move to the Dominion of Canada, she helped Sir Gideon Vein run the now ironically-named Open Heart Cabaret. She used to dance at the Nell Gwynne club in Soho during the day, the Gargoyle Club at night and then spend her time at the old Comedy Store until the early hours.

If she had died under the surgeons’ knives in Canada, she had wanted her obituary to include the fact she had performed with Julian Clary and the much lamented late David Rappaport and that she had been forced to learn to play the accordion as a child and appeared on Canadian television with Andre the Giant.

“Now,” she tells me, “I’ve been given a heart-shaped pillow as a physiotherapy tool and it says Open Heart on it….Veins, hearts, sternums being sawn in half and wired together.”

She also tells me she was given “orientation at the hospital for the cardiac rehab program… The walls were adorned with vapid monotone posters dedicated to mind-boggling philosophical questions like WHAT IS AN AVOCADO (printed on green paper) and NUTS – WHATS IN ‘EM ? (printed on brown paper). Now that dietitians and physiotherapists can produce their own amateur pamphlets with the push of a print button, there is no longer any need for the Department of Health to waste public money on artists or copywriters. I sat though a dull PowerPoint presentation about Cardiac Health, which I made bearable by mentally substituting the word Catholic for Cardiac: WHY CATHOLIC PATIENTS NEED FIBRE… HOW CATHOLIC PATIENTS RELIEVE STRESS…”

Anna tells me that recent local Vancouver news includes the story that “Immigration Officials abetted by a local television station and the National Geographic TV channel raided a downtown building site where they chased, captured and filmed migrant construction workers from Mexico and Honduras. The workers were made to sign legal papers which they did not comprehend and which turned out to be releases so that their images can appear on a reality TV show called Border Services to be screened on the National Geographic channel.”

Anna also tells me that her sojourn in hospital has made her realise there is “hope for mutilated dancers” but it also seems to have allowed her to develop a possibly unhealthy obsession about Signor Donato, an obscure one-legged dancer who was an enormous success touring Australia in the 1870s.

She reports:

“It appears there was more than one Signor Donato. The original was a hit in Covent Garden in London in the 1850s and danced dressed as a bullfighter with a golden tassel affixed to his stump which, it was said, resembled a cushion on an old fashioned sofa, his mutilated state notwithstanding.

Lola Montez – pursued by a one-legged man?

“The second Signor Donato was an imitator of the original, who toured Australia and New Zealand several times before heading to California… possibly following the trail of Lola Montez, the Sligo-born ‘Spanish Dancer’, toppler of governments, and creator of the infamous erotic Spider Dance who ended her days performing charitable work for the fallen women of Brooklyn.”

Anna continues:

“One of the Signor Donatos (the first, I think) was said to be an immense favourite in London, Paris and Milan. He was said to have lost his leg fighting under Garibaldi when a shell burst during the Battle of Magenta in 1859. He surprised his audience with the grace and agility he displayed and danced to an introductory adagio, followed by the Jeanette Polka (accompanying himself with castanets) and concluded with the Garibaldi March.

“I first heard of him in a book I read in the 1980s: Enter the Colonies, Dancing, an Australian history of their early touring dancers. Then I read an article titled Strange Players by Dutton Cook (Belgravia). Strange Players was written in 1881 and is a documentation of famous maimed and mutilated dancers and actors working in London at that time.

“This small advert appeared in the Wellington Independent, 16 August, 1872 :

SIGNOR DONATO
Who created the great furore
at Covent Garden in 1864
will appear at the
ODD FELLOWS HALL
for
ONE NIGHT ONLY
On his way to San Francisco

“I have no idea what the great furore was…..and can’t find out if he ever arrived in San Francisco.”

The preface to a 1895 German book (Fahrend Volk by Signer Saltarino, Leipzig) says:

“The one-legged dancer first came into style with Julio Donato, a Spanish bull fighter, who lost a leg in a bull fight. Through industry and practice, he was able to perform the most graceful, surprising and agreeable dances. His appearance, manner and personality were far from painful. He married the daughter of the Viennese actor Julius, herself a popular actress, who bore him a lovely daughter, Dora Donato, who became a very well known light opera singer. After Donato’s death, a number of artificial (kuenstlich) and genuine monopedic dancers and clowns sprang up, all of whom were only weak imitations of their prototype. Only the one-legged clowns who called themselves The Donatos after their famous original appeared not only to inherit the artistic ability of their predecessor but his luck.”

Anna tells me:

“The imposter Signors Donato were particularly prevalent after the Great War and some even teamed up together. One particular duo called themselves The Merry Monopedes.

Anna is recovering well from her operation but worried that she may become “the world expert on monopedic dancers”.

YouTube currently has a 1949 clip of a one-armed and one-legged dancer called Crip Heard.

Diane Spencer performed at launch yesterday

I went to Soho Theatre yesterday for the London launch of this year’s Brighton Fringe. The event was unticketed but there was a guest list.

Inside the auditorium, I got into conversation with a man who had wandered in off the street randomly.

“I was passing,” he told me, “and it looked like something was happening, so I just came in. I smiled at the girls on the door. It looked like a PR thing where there might be free food and drink. I go to see a lot of plays and musicals in the West End for free.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“I only go to see things that have been running a while,” he told me. “so there will always be some empty seats. I guess when the interval is going to be, get there a bit earlier and wander up to the bar. They don’t check for tickets on the door. I go up to the bar and wait for the audience to come out for the interval.

“When the interval ends and the audience goes back in, I wait in the bar until they’re all seated, then go in, look for an empty seat and go sit in it.”

“But,” I asked, “Don’t the people sitting next to what had been an empty seat look a bit surprised?”

“Not really,” the man told me. “Sometimes they do a bit, but I guess they just think I’m very late.”

“Have you ever been thrown out for not having a ticket?” I asked.

“Never,” he said.

“Don’t you have trouble following the plot if you’ve missed the first half?”

“Not often,” he told me. “And, with musicals, it doesn’t matter much. I know roughly what the story is about. I check in advance. Most people go for the songs. So do I.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“A couple of years,” he told me.

“I’ve always thought,” I said, “that it would be a good scam to go round churches on a Saturday afternoon when there are a lot of weddings. If you go in, they just ask if you are with the bride or the groom. They will direct you to sit at one side of the church or the other and, after the wedding, you could probably get to the Reception and get free food and drink. But I could never be bothered trying it.”

“There would be no spare seat for you at the Reception,” the man told me. “And wasn’t there a film about that?”

“Could have been,” I said.

“I never saw it,” the man said.

“Nor me,” I said. “If there was one.”

There was a long pause.

“I once went with two friends to Luton Airport on a Saturday night,” I said. “People never go to airports unless they have to, so I thought it might be interesting to have a night out at Luton Airport like it was a social event. Or a holiday. A one-night holiday at Luton Airport.”

The man did not look interested.

“We had a meal there,” I persevered. “We bought Luton Airport cowboy hats – Why Luton Airport had cowboy hats I don’t know – and we went to the Arrivals area and waved at people coming back from their holidays.

“It wasn’t as interesting as I thought it might be,” I admitted. “I thought it would be interesting to go for no reason to somewhere you never normally go to unless you have a reason. I suggested we should go to a hospital the next time. People don’t go to hospitals unless they have to and you can wander anywhere you like. I thought we might just see where we could wander. My friends thought it was in slightly bad taste.”

“Oh,” said the stranger at Soho Theatre, clearly bored.

He started taking photographs of the stage show.

A poster for the Nell Gwynn/Gargoyle Club

In a blog a couple of weeks ago, the So It Goes blog’s occasional correspondent Anna Smith wondered what had happened to her acquaintance, an exotic dancer from Winnipeg called Karen, who was last heard-of in London.

Unfortunately, I can tell her.

I had a drink this week with Philip Herbert, best-known to me as fire-eating comedy act Randolph The Remarkable.

“Sadly Karen passed away,” Philip told me. “She got knocked off her bike in London. She was overtaking a lorry and a bus came towards her.”

“When was this? I asked.

“About 15 years ago,” Philip told me.

“The last time I saw her, she was on her bike and I shouted: Careful on that bike!

“That was the last thing I said to her. And, about a fortnight after that, she was dead.

“At the time, I was on a 12-week tour, doing A Tale of Two Cities at the Oxford Playhouse. So I couldn’t get to the funeral. Her parents thought she was working as an au pair and teaching; they had no idea she was working on the strip circuit. All her friends were freaks, were punks, were entertainers. Apparently the wake was weird because everyone was pretending they knew Karen through her teaching.

“She was going into comedy. She was beginning to speak and tell stories and do poetry.

“In the old days, there was a cross-over between stripping and comedy. 69 Dean Street was the Nell Gwynne strip club until about 11 o’clock and then it suddenly turned into The Comedy Store. When it got successful, they stopped doing the stripping on Friday and Saturday and they did two comedy shows – an 8 o’clock and a midnight.

“If you were on the circuit then, you’d do first act in the first house at the Comedy Store, then go off and do a pub in Stoke Newington or wherever, then rush back and do second or third on the bill in the second show at the Comedy Store. If you were good, you were working in more than one place. Everyone worked round each other and there was a cross-over between street acts and alternative acts”

Philip performed feats of skill as Randolph The Remarkable

“I must have first seen you in the 1980s,” I said, “when you were Randolph The Remarkable.”

“I still do Randolph The Remarkable: Fire-Eater Extraordinaire. Feats of Skill Involving Fire and a Blue Bowl of Lukewarm Water. The only trouble is now, because of Health & Safety, you have to have a Risk Assessment and Public Indemnity Insurance and a fireman standing in the wings who holds a bucket of sand. If you can do all that, then they’re prepared to book you. In the old days at the Comedy Store, you’d get £5 and a drink token and I used to work under a sprinkler and there couldn’t be anything more dangerous than that. I don’t suppose they’d allow that now.”

Philip (right) often performed as Hugh Jelly with Julian Clary

“Back in the 1980s, it was much more risky and exciting and there was that cross-over from people who worked as street performers – I started off as Randolph at Covent Garden and Camden Lock… and people saw the act and said Oh, you must do the Comedy Store. Then people would see you at the Comedy Store above the Nell Gwynne strip club and say Oh, you must do the new variety Cast circuit.”

“How did you get into fire-eating?” I asked.

“I was an actor in a community company,” explained Philip, “and we were asked if we wanted to learn how to fire-eat for a historical tour. We did Southampton and Portsmouth. We took people round different historical sites and pubs and re-enacted history – it was a pub crawl, really – and then, as the light faded, we stood on the city wall and did fire-eating and fire-blowing.

“Then I was out of work for months and I thought This is ridiculous. I’ve got this skill. So I did it at Covent Garden and, back then in the early 1980s, you could just turn up and do it. You didn’t need a licence; you didn’t need to audition. Now you have to go through this whole rigmarole and they don’t allow fire there any more because there was a silly accident where somebody spilled paraffin into the crowd.

“I still do Randolph at the Punch & Judy Festival at Covent Garden every year.

Philip as Drag Idol favourite Nora (photograph by John Tsangarides)

“And I did Gay Pride last year and I also do a drag act now called Nora Bone. I was a finalist in last year’s Drag Idol. I was in the last four out of 200-odd acts. I wear a red wig; I’ve been described as a bloated Geri Halliwell, because I wear a Union Jack dress. Not a mini – just below the knee. And white tights and very low heels, because I used to be on a higher heel and I fell. A lower heel is much more sensible for a lady of my age.”

“Are you an attractive woman?” I asked.

“Beautiful. I make the boys’ heads turn. I’m trying to do songs that other people don’t do. Not Life’s a Cabaret or I Did It My Way. I do I’m Too Sexy For My Skirt, Save All Your Kisses For Me, Madonna’s Holiday. The idea is that I’m an ex-recording artist that people don’t remember; an ex-supersize model; that I did a lot of ‘before’ photographs in diet magazines; and I’m a stand-in for Adele.”

“Do you regret not being a full-time actor?”

“Well, Nora is all acting. And doing circus, doing panto… a lot of straight actors knock panto. But I tell them To do panto well is as difficult as doing Shakespeare well - because it’s a set piece. You’ve got all the set stuff with the audience, the interaction. And you’ve got men playing women and women playing men.”

“You’re a character actor, really,” I suggested.

“Last year,” said Philip, “I was in a play about music hall legend Dan Leno – The Hard Boiled Egg and The Wasp. When he was committed to what his wife thought was a care home but turned out to be an asylum, I played the warder.

…Philip The Poet…

“I also do a character called Philip The Poet. I’ve always written poetry. I met John Hegley on a bus on National Poetry Day and he said to me Why don’t you do a couple of poems? because he runs a regular night at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. He knew I wrote poems but I didn’t perform them. So I performed at John Hegley’s venue and I really enjoyed it, so I’m doing more and more of that.”

“Would you like to be a straight poet?” I asked.

“Straight-ish,” replied Philip. “With a comical kick at the end. I like my poetry. I comment on things I see. I can write a poem that isn’t a funny poem – that doesn’t need a smile at the end – but I think if you can say something that gets a sharp intake of breath that leads to a laugh… That’s as rewarding as a big guffaw. If you say something that’s quite shocking or meaningful and people gasp and then you undercut it with something that’s funny, then the gasp changes into a laugh and there’s a relief in the laughter. I do like my poetry, but there’s no money in it.

“I sometimes compere gigs as a character called Sebastian Cloy. He comes on in a big frilly shirt – old school compere but not gay – he tells jokes and does the odd song, if required.

“You’re always doing characters,” I said.

“If you create a character then you, in a way, hide behind that character. It’s like a mask. A clown nose. Basically, you put on the clown nose and that allows you to behave in a foolish way. I think it takes a lot of courage just to stand in front of people and say I’m now going to attempt to make you laugh or I’m now going to attempt to sing you a song which I hope will move you.”

“Do you ever actually perform as yourself?” I asked.

“Hardly ever,” said Philip. “though I’ve been doing a one-man show on-and-off for about three or four years. It’s called Naked Splendour. I’ve done life modelling for artists for as long as I’ve been an actor. When I started, the pay was £1.94p clothed and £1.98p naked – 4p difference.

The man himself in his own Naked Splendour (photograph by John Tsangarides)

“I’ve performed Naked Splendour at the Hackney Empire, the Edinburgh Fringe, Soho Theatre and The Rosemary Branch.

“In it, I sit and pose. People can draw – they’re given materials as they come in. I start dressed, then I undress and I sit and pose and tell true stories. Funny stories. Not all funny. Stories like falling asleep. When you’re in a long pose lying down, you do nod off sometimes. And then, at the end, I get dressed and invite people to bring their work down. They put it on the floor and we have a mini-exhibition like a show-and-tell.

“The trouble is, being on your own, you end up doing four months promoting via the computer. For me to do it again, I’d need someone to take it on.”

“So in Naked Splendour,” I said, “you are yourself.”

“But,” came the reply, “I always cringe slightly if I’m introduced as Philip Herbert, because I’m not used to it. When people say Philip Herbert’s here, I look round and say Who? Whereas, if someone says Randolph The Remarkable or Hugh Jelly from Julian Clary’s show… then I know that’s me.”

YouTube has a video of Philip in bed with Julian Clary:

An extraordinarily good London Varieties show every month

I went to see multi-talented Mat Ricardo’s monthly London Varieties at the Leicester Square Theatre last night – a show so good it could transfer straight to TV.

Every month, amid the hula-hoop acts, the cabaret singers, the juggling and the indescribably odd acts, Mat does a sit-down interview.

On previous shows, he talked in depth to Omid Djalili and Al Murray.

Last night it was magician Paul Daniels who told, among other things, how he got his first big break on British TV. People remember his Paul Daniels Magic Show which ran for 16 years on BBC TV, but his big break actually came on ITV.

Legendary Granada TV producer Johnnie Hamp followed the success of his series The Comedians (which intercut Northern club comics doing straight stand-up) with The Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club - a series which recreated in the studio a Northern working men’s club with its whole gamut of variety acts.

The rule-of-thumb for acts on this show (and on television in general) was/is that they should run three minutes, but more was often recorded so that the producer/director could edit the best bits fast and tight.

Paul Daniels performed three magic tricks for the cameras but…

- During the first trick, he mentioned what would be in the second and third tricks.

- During the second trick, he referred back to the first trick and referred forward to the next trick.

- During the third trick, he mentioned the first two tricks.

Afterwards, Johnny Hamp came up to him and said: “I don’t know if you’re stupid or lucky… but I can’t edit that.”

As a result, instead of a 3-minute spot, Paul Daniels got a full 12 minutes on the networked peak time show.

The way Paul Daniels told it last night, he was invited back on the show and did fifteen minutes, becoming an overnight star.

Johnnie Hamp realised Paul was neither stupid nor lucky: he was very shrewd.

The extraordinarily good show I saw last night – the third of Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties’ monthly shows – will be on Vimeo in a couple of weeks. The two previous shows are already online HERE and HERE.

It’s Springtime for Hitler and SE London

Sometimes it is strange what people find offensive.

Last night, my eternally-un-named friend and I went to Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly variety and comedy club Pull The Other One in Nunhead, South East London.

Ending the night was Frank Sanazi, the wonderful act that sounds like Frank Sinatra but looks like Hitler.

Three people walked out.

The problem was his new sidekick ‘Anne Stank’ who talked about being lonely up in the attic and sang Björk’s Ssshhhhh….It’s Oh So Quiet.

Anne and attic antics

“I don’t understand,” my eternally-un-named friend said afterwards, “why they didn’t find Frank Sanazi offensive but they did find the Anne Frank bit offensive.”

And, indeed, the three walk-outs did seem to have found Frank Sanazi’s re-versioning of Sinatra’s That’s Life as Third Reich entertaining and found the re-writing of the Strangers in the Night lyrics as Strangers On a Plane (as in the 9/11 hijacks) perfectly OK.

But Anne Frank they walked out on.

I had never seen the Anne Frank part of Frank Sanazi’s show before – his Das Vegas Night is returning to the Edinburgh Fringe this August (it got a 4-star review last year) – but ‘Anne’ told me after the show that I had blogged about her during last year’s Fringe.

“I was the one wearing a lettuce,” she told me.

“You didn’t recognise her with her clothes on,” Frank Sanazi added.

This is the reference from my blog last August:

__________________________________________________

I was walking down Niddry Street, and found comedian Bob Slayer standing in the street outside his Hive venue.

“I had to get naked in my show,” he told me. “I think it was the worst show I’ve ever done so I had to get naked. Jamie the sound guy sees my show every year and he told me: You failed on so many levels there, but it was definitely my favourite show. I had to get naked and there was a lady in the audience who turned up just wearing a lettuce.”

“Just a lettuce?” I asked.

“Just wearing a lettuce on her fanny,” said Bob.

“She had nice tits,” a female staff member added, tweaking one of Bob’s nipples. Passers-by ignored it. This is the Edinburgh Fringe.

“The lady with the lettuce was a friend of Frank Sanazi’s,” said Bob.

“That might go some way to explaining it,” I said.

__________________________________________________

Frank Sanazi’s 2012 Christmas show

The boundaries of offensiveness vary.

A girl wearing nothing but a lettuce leaf  over her frontal bits was almost normal in Edinburgh last August. But a girl with her clothes on (never referred-to as Anne Frank) in South East London last night triggered three people walking out of an always-bizarre monthly comedy show.

Personally, I thought it was slightly eerie and very funny.

But, then, I like Chinese pickled ginger with scrambled egg on toast.

I only just discovered this morning, when inserting a link into this blog, that James Hamilton has put a very large quote from me on his website. James is the writer and begetter of the Casual Violence comedy sketch troupe. The quote on his website reads:

“I think he might need psychiatric help. Though not creative help. There’s something very original in there – I just don’t know what the fuck it is.”

That pretty much covers it.

Over lunch yesterday, I asked James:

“How’s you father? Is he still living that odd Hobbit-like subterranean life in those strange Silver Vaults in Holborn?”

Gollum honestly does not live in the Silver Vaults in London

“He’s not in there any more,” said James.

“WHAAAAT?” I reacted.

“Did I tell you that my father and his brother fell out?” James asked me.

“No,” I said, smelling the hint of bloggable weirdness.

“He and his brother used to be in business together,” explained James. “But they fell out. They both had businesses in the Silver Vaults and…”

“In those strange, metal-and-stone, cell-like caves,” I interrupted.

“They both had businesses in the Silver Vaults,” repeated James, “and my father had to walk past my brother’s shop every day.”

“Like Gollum,” I mused.

“Your skin does changes colour down there,” James agreed.

“Do people down there call each other My precious?” I asked.

“No,” said James firmly.

“So your father and uncle don’t talk?” I said.

“This Monday,” replied James, “was my grandmother’s 80th birthday and that was the first time in 15 years or so that we managed to get the two of them to the same table for a meal. They sat at opposite ends of the table and did not talk.”

“How long was the table?” I asked.

“Long enough,” replied James. “Anyway, my uncle is still working down in the Silver Vaults and my father recently left. So now he’s… I don’t know what he’s doing… He’s off… He’s just trying to make money doing stuff… I don’t keep track.”

“How long was he toiling down in the Silver Vaults?” I asked.

“25 years or so.”

“And he sold the entire business?”

“No, he just sold the premises. He’s still keeping the business going.”

“So where’s all the silver?” I asked. “Everyone down there has things like giant silver ostriches and small Regency pepper pots and extravagant pheasants.”

James honestly does not know where the family silver is now

“I genuinely don’t know where it all is,” said James. “I presume it’s still in Britain.”

“He could have sold it and bought some country,” I suggested. “Perhaps Greece.”

“That’d be good, wouldn’t it?” said James.

“Not Greece,” I said.

“No, not Greece,” James agreed.

“There’s the basis of a sitcom there,” I suggested.

“Well,” said James, “If you do comedy, the one thing you do hear a lot is, if something ridiculous happens in your family, people say: Oh! There’s a sketch in it! or That’s a sitcom!”

“Oh,” I said, rather deflated.

“They tend,” said James, “to be people who’ve never seen my comedy. When they see what I do, they tend to stop saying that.”

“I’ve seen your comedy,” I said, slightly crestfallen.

“It’s really rather sad,” said James. “As a result of the falling-out, my dad has had no contact with that other side of the family. I have got little cousins between the ages of 8 and 13 and they were chatting away about their lives at my grandmother’s birthday party on Monday and that was simultaneously lovely to see and quite sad. My grandmother was really happy and was hopeful that, at some point in the future, my dad and his brother might be able to do that again.”

“What?” I asked. “Not talk to each other?”

“Yes,” said James, “not talk to each other, but in the same room rather than being in different places… Have you met Jorik Mol?”

“Alas,” I said, “no.”

“He has this running joke, when he sees my Edinburgh Fringe shows, that they are all about my daddy issues.”

“But you don’t particularly have dads as characters in your shows,” I said.

“Well, we kind of do,” said James. “In Kick In The Teeth, the only one was in the battleship sketches where we had the father who dies at the beginning and the son who goes out to avenge him. But, in Choose Death there was Roger & Charlie in the taxidermy house, which is like a whole father/son relationship. And I’m returning to it this year in our new show House of Nostril. The main storyline is a father & son relationship.

“When I do my solo show next year – at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 – it’s going to be the first time I’ll have consciously mined my own experience to write stuff. The Casual Violence shows are not about me.

James will not be playing the part of Conk, Dyslexic Goblin

“In this year’s show, House of Nostril, the character of Conk, The Dyslexia Goblin came from two separate ideas. I wanted to have a carer/caree relationship where the guy who’s being cared for can see a goblin but the nurse can’t.

“And there was a play we’d all done years ago about using face cream to cure illnesses. So we started talking about curing dyslexia with face cream. And that became Conk, The Dyslexia Goblin and there’s a lot of cream being rubbed on people’s faces while the goblin makes sandwiches.”

“Not at all weird,” I said. “It’s social realism, really.”

“That’s the only weird part in the new show,” said James warily.

“What else is in it?”

“We’ve got a series of sketches about chimney sweeps. The premise is that one has retired at the age of 10 and this other 8-year-old sweep is trying to convince him to come out of retirement, but he doesn’t want to do it because he’s on the wrong side of 10.

“Our director said to me: Oh, I see – it’s a metaphor for the coal mining thing! and I said No and he got really annoyed with me, because apparently that’s what I had written: I just didn’t know I had.

“And it was the same with Conk, especially with what happens in the storyline, which I won’t spoil. Somebody at the last rehearsal told me that Conk, The Dyslexia Goblin was actually all about Alzheimer’s and dementia… No, it’s not about dementia; it’s about goblin dyslexia cream and loneliness and that’s all it’s about.”

“Loneliness?” I asked.

“He is a lonely goblin,” explained James. “Only the old man can see him. If nobody can see you, it must be quite lonely and depressing. I don’t think that’s actually where the story is going now, but we were playing with that idea. We’re still trying to have characters end up miserable and alone… because that’s the Casual Violence way.”

“Are they always miserable and lonely?” I asked.

“They were last year,” said James. “Our last show was very bleak. This one is less bleak. It’s sillier, it’s like our previous one Choose Death. It’s less oppressively horrible.”

“But still weird,” I said.

“Only the dyslexia goblin part,” said James.

I am still not convinced James has not got a strong weird gene in him.

Martin Soan yesterday, with friends from the Nunhead area

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Pull The Other One comedy club runners Martin and Vivienne Soan in Nunhead aka a little bit of Peckham in South East London.

And I found out to my shock that, in August, there will be creative things happening in parts of Britain other than Edinburgh. Specifically Nunhead and Peckham.

Martin and Vivienne have lived there for over 30 years.

They have run Pull The Other One there for 8 years.

In my ignorance, I still think of Peckham as down-market Only Fools and Horses territory, but Martin knows someone in a local estate agent and house prices in the area recently rose by around £7,000 literally overnight. A two-bedroom house across the street from his home sold last month for over £500,000.

“When property’s cheap,” Martin suggested yesterday, “the artists move in and make it a ‘groovy’ area to go to. That’s exactly what’s happened to Peckham. And we had all these diverse cultures from all over the world gather here along with the artists because it was cheap. But now it is coming up and I want to introduce this influx of Yuppiedom and money to the side of Peckham that actually made it happen.”

So Martin is organising The Village Hall Experience on Saturday 17th August.

“It’s going to happen on the site of the old Peckham Lido,” Martin told me. “It’s very rarely visited and completely under-used, apart from a few dog-owners who let their dogs shit on it. Three-quarters of it is surrounded by trees so, once you’re there, it’s actually rather nice and it’s near where William Blake had his boyhood vision of angels in a tree.

William Blake – from trees to Jacob’s Ladder

“It’s 25 years since the Lido closed and the reason I can remember that date is that Vivienne was one of the last bathers in there, while she was pregnant with our eldest daughter Sydney,”

“So what’s the concept?” I asked.

“Basically,” said Martin, “anything you can imagine happening in a village hall we are going to endeavour to put on in one large marquee and three smaller satellite marquees. That ranges from Taekwondo demonstrations to Cubs & Scouts, to the local fire brigade, police and ambulance, to jumble sales, white elephant stalls, a youth club involving black light ping pong – you play in total darkness with ping pong balls that glow in the dark – to a Women’s Institute formation team, a little bit of professional cabaret, maybe a beetle drive or a bingo game, a pet competition, a funny vegetable competition, a cake competition… There’s going to be a bit of a tea dance, a bit of rock ‘n’ roll and a village hall disco.”

“Heavens!” I said. “So this is an all-day event?”

“At a usual village hall event,” said Martin, “each of those things would take up several hours. But we’re going to compress each and every one into tiny, tiny vignettes.”

“So how long?” I asked.

“I would say the jumble sale would last five minutes,” explained Martin. “The Taekwondo people wanted to do a half-hour demonstration. I said That’s out of the question. It will be seven minutes maximum. The youth club will probably be about 15 minutes. The cabaret will be about 25 minutes.”

“How do you demonstrate a youth club?” I asked.

“Well,” said Martin, “there are three basic elements to the show and we’re going to do it twice. There will be a matinée show and an evening show.”

“How long is each show?”

“About three hours long. People can come in and go out any time they want – just join in for the bits they’ve come to see. Someone may just come in to see his mates sing in the local choir.

“The first section will come under the heading of The Tea Dance. The middle section is The Youth Club. The end section is The Cabaret. Within that, we will have all the other elements.

Martin and Vivienne Soan on an unusually quiet day at home

“There’s going to be a team of Women’s Institute volunteers all dressed-up like my giddy aunt, along with Vivienne and comic Lindsey Sharman. They will all have clipboards and they’ll basically be my stagehands. They will be busybodying around and getting everyone moving along.

“As soon as you’ve sat down and got into the jumble sale, it’s going to be over and the volunteers will transform The Tea Dance into The Youth Club and into The Cabaret.”

“Any nudity and The Greatest Show on Legs?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” said Martin. “It’s a family show and, because the Council have funded it, we have to be inclusive of all the different minorities and majorities in the area.

“Three events have been funded in this project, all happening on the same day – Saturday 17th August. There’s our Village Hall Experience, but there’s also separately The Peace Picnic with a stage and a picnic and The South American Flower Festival in Camberwell, which involves dancing and food and doing mosaics with the petals of flowers. We have to all co-ordinate with each other and we each have all these designated disparate groups to include within the community. So these three funded festivals are all after the same minority groups.”

“Are there,” I asked, “enough minorities to share around between the three festivals?”

“Well,” said Martin, everybody’s clamouring for the Mia Dancers, who are all aged over 70 years old. And I’m going to the parts of the community that others don’t reach – the Afghan Khans I deal with all the time and some other Afghan guys who run a street food thing. There’s the South Americans and the Turkish delicatessens. Through the traders, I will hopefully get to those ethnic minorities: they are the representatives of the communities.”

“You seem to be taking it very seriously,” I said.

“I’m treating it very seriously indeed,” said Martin. “The Polish I have got in through a nail parlour. What excited me about it is squashing it all down and doing it twice in one day. The impetus you have to put into it; the restrictions you have to put onto the people… That makes it a rollercoaster ride.”

“And it all takes place in one big marquee?” I asked.

“One big marquee with three smaller satellite marquees,” Martin corrected me. “The main marquee has to be capable of a total blackout because we’ll be having the black light ping pong when it’s still daylight outside.”

“And, in the satellite marquees…?” I prompted.

“The first one – and it’ll be quite a big one – will have The Nunhead Municipal Museum and Sideshow Gallery. There’s an artist called David living in Nunhead. And then there’s the Peckham Pathé News Theatre – a 15-20-seater cinema screening a loop of specially-filmed spoof news items and clips. And then there’s going to be street traders, food and we’re licensed and there’s going to be an art gallery. It’s everything you could possibly ever think of. It may sound perfectly normal…”

“What??” I said. “Only on Planet Soan.”

“There will be two entrances to get into the area,” Martin enthused. “One will be for Good-Looking, Intelligent People. The other one will be for Useless Wasters With No Imagination and No Hope, Going Nowhere. The second entrance will take you round this maze and, along the way, there will be art, notices and all sorts of stuff.”

“And the entrance for Good-Looking, Intelligent People?” I asked.

“That one will be locked, so no-one can get in,” said Martin

(A version of this piece was also published on the Indian news site WSN)

The Krays – they were idiots & amusing

“We were going to kill Reggie Kray. I had a .38 revolver and we were waiting for him late one night….”

That is the first line in Micky Fawcett’s extraordinary memoir Krayzy Days about the era of London ‘gangsters’ the Kray Twins. I met him yesterday at the May Fair Hotel in London.

“The first time I came here was with Sonny Liston,” he said, when we met.

Micky was born in 1937 in London’s East End. “But I’ve never really got on that well with Eastenders,” he told me. “I don’t like the culture. I’m not a very good mixer.

“I passed the 11-plus exam, but I didn’t like schooling. I took up schoolboy boxing and had loads of jobs, some just for a day – you could just walk in and out of jobs then, just for a day. Eventually, I got a job on a fruit stall – a barrowboy – and I quite liked that. It was in Aldgate, which was a great place in the 1950s.

“In those days, barrowboys ruled the world. Families ran big fruit stalls around Upton Park. They were bullies, criminals, flash, they had big cars. It was a bit like New York at the start of the 20th century. I got to know a few of the lads round there… They used to go to various pubs and clubs around and one of the places was a club in Bow Road called The Double R.”

It was called The Double R because it was owned by Reggie & Ronnie Kray, the now-iconic London gangsters.

“I spent a good ten years associating with them,” Micky told me. “I was very, very involved with the Twins but, when they shot Georgie Cornell, that was it for me. I’d had enough of the madness. Before that, I’d thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like being in a film. I wasn’t doing it for money. Yeah, Get enough money to go out tonight. But it was like good fun. Great fun. Big men in cars driving up and down the Mile End Road.”

“You were in your twenties?” I asked.

Reggie Kray, Micky Fawcett, singer Lita Rosa, Ronnie Kray, actress Barbara Windsor and actor Ronald Fraser in 1960s

“Yes,” said Micky. “It went on until 1966, when Cornell got shot. But I was getting fed up with the Twins before that. I knew they were going to reach a limit and I couldn’t see what they were going to do once they got past that. They didn’t have the ability. They were terrible judges of character. You couldn’t tell them anything. You couldn’t advise them, unless they came to you. Reggie’s wife was seeing another fellah just before she married him and he came to me about that. I handled it and I got on very, very friendly with the Twins, but they were…”

“You said they wanted to be something more than what they were capable of being,” I interrupted. “What did they want to be?”

“They wanted to be the Al Capones of London,” said Micky. “They were hooked on publicity. I’ve been involved in the boxing game as a manager, so I know the feeling when you drive up in the middle of the night to buy Sunday’s papers to see what they’re saying about the night before. I understand that. But the Twins were so hooked on it and you must always remember that Ronnie was insane. Completely raving mad. Totally insane and I never used to stop laughing day and night. It was hilarious.”

“But occasionally violent,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve been in some bad fights and shootings and stabbings and I’ve been wrongly arrested for bombing,” said Micky.

“Because…?” I asked.

“I had a fight with a family called the Tibbs,” he explained.

“It’s possibly unwise to have a fight with the Tibbs,” I said.

“Well,” said Micky, “it was unwise of them to have a fight with me. And there was another family called the Bennetts before the Tibbs, where somebody got shot and somebody else got stabbed and that sort of thing.”

“But, at some point,” I said, “you got wrongly arrested for a bombing.”

“Oh yes,” said Mickey, “and I was arrested for a shooting ten years after it happened.”

“Was that one of the Tibbs?” I asked.

“No, the Bennetts,” said Mickey. “I didn’t shoot him. The feller I was with shot him. I was in the fight. I had a knife and he had a gun… I have to say I’m really not into putting that about and saying Oh, I done this and I done that. I’m genuinely not into that at all. But you asked and these things happened. Maybe that’s why I don’t like the East End very much. There’s always somebody wants to have a go at you. It’s not that friendly old East End image.”

“So who was bombed?” I persisted.

“It’s all in the book,” said Micky. “I had the most intensive efforts to arrest me. I was actually in Brixton Prison, charged with attempted murder. Then I was arrested again and went to Belgium for a while. Then I came back and was arrested at the airport on a warrant  for causing explosions with intent. That was dropped.

“What was happening was that the Tibbs family were getting bombed and they couldn’t get their hands on me, so they were screaming their heads off to the police. They had the police straight. They were metal dealers and, in those days, metal dealers always had the police straight.”

“The Richardsons were scrap metal dealers, weren’t they?” I asked.

“Yes. They had the Old Bill (the police) straight as well,” said Micky. “There was a metal firm at Bromley-by-Bow and the police used to get jobs there. He used to give them jobs, then that safeguarded him because, in those days – it wasn’t that long after the War – there was loads of scrap metal around. So they could go out, collect all the scrap metal, take it to the dealer and, if he employed policemen, the dealer didn’t have to worry about getting turned over by the police. His Head of Security would be an ex-Chief Inspector or something.”

“Police corruption never changes,” I said.

Ronnie Kray, boxer Sonny Liston, Micky Fawcett in 1960s

“No,” said Micky. “The Twins had wanted to sign up young Jimmy Tibbs, who was a very good boxer and his father came to me and said Mick, can you do anything for us? He told me I had a lorry load of whisky in the yard the other night – stolen, obviously - but I didn’t have much to worry about, because I had a police squad car outside, minding it for me all night. You can’t beat people like that.

“So, when I had the row with the Tibbs family, I had a row with the Metropolitan Police as well – a section of them. Eventually, I had a fight with one of the Tibbs and he got his throat cut. So they wanted to kill me and they’re chasing round attacking people who had nothing to do with it, smashing into people I don’t even know. Then there were a few serious attempts on them. A bomb was placed in the yard; another bomb was under Jimmy Tibbs’ motor car.”

“And it went off?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” said Micky. “Serious attempts. Bombs going off. And a few shootings. Teddy Machin got shot and killed. Micky Machin got shot. Then I was arrested and alleged to have been the instigator of the whole thing. It came back to me that the Tibbs had said Our Old Bill will fit him up with ten sticks of gelignite when they get their hands on him.

“I’d already been fitted up twice by the Old Bill. Once after we had a row with the Bennetts, when a feller got shot. Me and another guy were going along in the car one day… Police cars with bells going… We’re boxed in and dragged out, slung in the back of a police car… and they gave me an iron bar, celluloid, stockings for masks… and they said they found them all in my car.”

“Did you go down for that?” I asked.

“We were in West Ham police station and a friend of mine said to me in a bit of Romany, a bit of Yiddish, a bit of rhyming slang, he said to me We’ve got nothing to worry about. We’ve had a talk and we’ll bung ‘em £200 and they’ll leave it as Being in Possession of Offensive Weapons – a 3 month sentence – not being charged with Conspiring To Rob – a 5 year sentence. So we gave them the £200, did the three months and that was that.”

“Why did you write the book?” I asked.

“I’m 76 on Thursday and you start looking back a bit and thinking I wonder why this? and I wonder why that?

Entrepreneur Steve Wraith (left) and Micky Fawcett recently

“For literally years, I’d been annoyed by the books I had read about the Krays and the things people said: glorifying them, building them up. It’s ridiculous. Reading all the rubbish that had been written, motivated me to write my book. I wanted to write a book saying what idiots the Twins really were. And how amusing.

“Monty Python and Michael Palin did a brilliant… That nail-the-head-to-the-floor thing came from headlines in the Daily Mirror. But it was a foot that was nailed to the floor and it was the Richardsons. They did it with a knife to a feller. But the Krays were getting the blame for it.”

It’s around the corner in Soho, where other broken people go

It’s a small world in oh so many ways – a small world with lots of coincidences – Prague, television, Bar Italia and the Edinburgh Fringe.

“Hey, John!” Wingman said to me yesterday. “What are you doing here?”

I had accidentally sat down next to him at Bar Italia in London’s Soho.

Bar Italia has been there for what seems like ever – actually since 1949. In I guess the 1960s and 1970s it became legendary among music and film/TV people because, back then, it was the only place open in the wee small hours in the middle of the night when dawn was approaching and people staggered out of recording studios and editing suites in Soho. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp even wrote a song called Bar Italia:

There’s only one place we can go.
It’s around the corner in Soho,
Where other broken people go.

Yesterday lunchtime, I was waiting at Bar Italia for itinerant comedian Matt Roper, back from his travels in the Far East and South Africa.

Wingman and I worked together at Granada TV years ago. Now he is a TV executive, though I don’t suppose he thinks of himself as that. He had been chatting to a colleague called John who had just come back from shooting promos in Prague.

“You worked there, didn’t you?” Wingman asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “for UPC in the mid-1990s.”

Then Matt arrived and Wingman & John left.

Earlier in the year, I blogged about Matt having deep vein thrombosis in Vietnam, Burma and Thailand.

In South Africa, Desmond Tutu (third from left) and Matt Roper as his character ‘Wilfredo’ (second from right)

Now he had just returned from a month in South Africa at the comedy festival and looked very healthy.

While in Saigon, he had had to cancel his Edinburgh Fringe show this year, because the Vietnamese hospital could not tell him when he would be able to fly again. He could have come back to Britain by train via Beijing and Moscow. But, at the time, he had to have weekly blood tests and, he told me yesterday, “I didn’t want to be messing around trying to find Mongolian and Russian hospitals. It was a challenge, but it’s my health.”

“It’s not a challenge,” I told him. “It’s a 2014 Fringe show and you look healthy now. Did you like South Africa?”

“Very much,” said Matt, “though, I only went to Cape Town. We went to a game reserve and to vineyards, sat on an ostrich and then ate an ostrich.”

“The same one?” I asked.

“No. We met the smallest ostrich in the world. He’s there. He’s a Guinness record holder.”

“I’ve never met a nice white South African,” I said.

“I have,” said Matt.

“Like the song says, they really are all a bunch of arrogant bastards,” I said.

“I like them,” said Matt.

He is just about to go off on his travels again – to help a friend research a book – Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, back through the Ukraine, the Czech Republic – Prague – and then fly back to Britain from Austria.

The reason he was in Soho, though, was because he was going to Totnes in Devon.

Frank Zappa on the crapper in 1967

“Robert Davidson lives there,” he told me. “You should meet him. He’s a photographer. He photographed Frank Zappa on the toilet in a hotel room in 1967.”

“He shot that for International Times,” I said. “I saw it when it was published. I wrote for IT a few years later.”

At this point, comedian Chris Dangerfield – oft blogged about here – walked into Bar Italia.

“I was thrown out of Totnes,” said Chris. “I was literally taken up an alleyway by the police and told to leave town.”

“Totnes,” said Matt, “is sometimes like an open hospital ward. It’s full of bizarre people. So to actually have been asked to leave is…”

I was distracted by a group of people clustered outside Ronnie Scott’s jazz club opposite Bar Italia.

Tourists crowd round Ronnie Scott’s club’s bricks in Frith St

“What are they doing?” I asked.

They were just standing outside, looking up at the building.

“It’s a tour,” said Chris Dangerfield. “It’s on the tourist trail. They’re taken to places like that and told: Oh, Mick Jagger once looked at that.”

“They come and look at Bar Italia too,” said Matt, “because John Logie Baird invented television in a room above here.”

“Although he didn’t,” I said. “He invented the wrong system.”

“Who did invent TV, then?” asked Matt.

“I think it was EMI and maybe some Germans,” I said. “But back to Chris getting thrown out of Totnes…”

Matt Roper (left) & Chris Dangerfield in Bar Italia yesterday

“I was the second time,” said Chris. “It was my return to Totnes, because I done a degree down there, so when I went back to sell crack, all the pubs were empty because everyone was spending all their money on crack. And that was essentially what the police said: The local economy has taken a dent because of you. Take your cocaine back to London. So I did.”

Chris then got on his black bicycle and rode off quickly.

“Drive safe!” Matt shouted after him, then turned to me and said: “We’ve never properly met, him and me. We just keep bumping into each other. Coincidences. Life’s all coincidences.”

“I was once,” I said, “sitting outside Bar Italia talking to your chum Grace Gelder and Chris Dangerfield walked by and said Hello and walked on. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through Soho with someone and I got a text message saying You just walked past me – Chris Dangerfield.”

“Well,” said Matt, “I yelled out of a car window at you once, but it wasn’t you.”

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said.

Miss Behave with her heel in London

On my trip home, I picked up a voice message on my mobile phone from comedian Bob Slayer. He told me that  Miss Behave – who is allegedly compering the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show on 23rd August – has broken her heel in Ireland and doctors have told her she should put no weight on it for six weeks.

“She keeps doing this,” I said when I talked to Bob. “She nearly died a couple of years ago just before the Fringe. Now a lame excuse like this. Let’s hope she can do it in a wheelchair or in plaster. Where are you?”

“Leith,” he told me.

“Is there sunshine on Leith?” I asked. “It’s horrible, hot and sticky here in London today. 30 Centigrade. I think that’s about 90 in Fahrenheit. Would-be SAS men are dying on the Brecon Beacons.”

“There is sunshine on Leith,” Bob confirmed.

“Send me a picture,” I told him. “Why are you there?”

Meanwhile the Chief puts sunset and Bob Slayer in Leith… (photograph by Keara Murphy)

“I’ve been buying fridges for my new venue Bob’s Bookshop,” explained Bob. “For all the beer. I have a licence and people can buy beer there. I went into the British Heart Foundation’s charity shop in Edinburgh – they have one for electronics and I bought lots of their stuff. I told them I would give it all back at the end of the Fringe and they  could sell everything a second time.

“I have found Miss Behave a great flat. It’s right next to the venue so it’s very convenient and right in the middle of town, but I’m not sure which storey it’s on. Not good if you have a broken heel and it’s on the third storey up. With luck, she’ll be on the first.”

“That’s another storey,” I said.

One day, the original version of this book may or may not be published

When Malcolm Hardee and I wrote his autobiography in 1996, the editor at Fourth Estate publishers persuaded Malcolm to change the opening of the book to one which I thought and still think was a much less interesting opening. This is the way Malcolm’s book – I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake – originally started:

___________________________

I stole Freddie Mercury’s birthday cake. He was one of the most famous pop stars in the world and I was booked to perform nude at his 40th birthday party.

The Kray Twins seemed to split their lives into 95% criminal activity and 5% Showbiz. I’ve tried to go for 95% Showbiz intermingled with 5% criminal activity, but I only had about 3% of the success the Krays had.

Apart from me there’s no showbiz in the family, as far as I know, but my grandfather was born behind Greenwich Music Hall, which is now Greenwich Theatre. And when I was in Ford Open Prison I read a music hall book which mentioned an act 200 years ago called ‘The Great Hardeen’. A magic act. He was Greenwich-based like me, so I wonder if there was any link-up there.

When I was one day old, my Dad bought me a train set. It was a steam train and ran on methylated spirits in a little container underneath the train. It was bigger than your normal train set with a big circular track. What you did was set light to the methylated spirits and this started the piston. My Dad set it up in the hall. He didn’t let me play with it. You know what fathers are like. He set it off and it went so fast centrifugal force took the train off the rails and it set light to the carpet. (Nearly burnt the house down.)

My mother wonders if this may account for my early interest in setting fire to things.

I was born in Lewisham Hospital on 5th January 1950. But after I was born I was almost immediately whisked off to an orphanage in Ware, Hertfordshire. My Mother was in a sanatorium with tuberculosis and they didn’t allow fathers to keep their babies then. My father was working all hours on the River Thames as a lighterman.

My mother came out of the sanatorium when I was 2 years old. She quite reasonably wanted to go out and have a good time. So I was brought up by my two doting grandmothers really. They were poles apart.

My mother’s mother was the down-to-Earth, down-the-Bingo type. She’d worked in Service when she was younger – as a maid or something.

My father’s mother put on big airs and graces. She was a docker’s wife, but thought she was sort of royalty and she used to take me up to the Cafe Royal where we’d sit around and have a cup of tea. Another treat she used to give me was to go and see various relatives laid out after they died. She loved a funeral. The biggest news she ever gave my mother was that she had worked it out with funeral directors that my mother could go in the Hardee family burial plot – as long as she got cremated.

When my mother came out of hospital, we moved into Grover Court, a 1930s block of flats with flat roofs. We were in No 20 and there were about 100 flats. It was almost like a village in itself just because of where it was – set off the road.

I’ve almost always lived near someone famous. In Grover Court, I grew up next to Val Doonican. When we moved from there, Michael Leggo lived next door to me. He later invented Mr Blobby. After that, I had a flat in Lee Green and three doors up was Mark Knopfler from  Dire Straits. (I never talked to him.) Later there was Jools Holland – he lived over the road from me in Blackheath. (I did talk to him.) And now I live about five doors away from Miss Whiplash. Dire Straits played in local pubs in Deptford. There was a definite Deptford sound in music. It’s been covered in a book called South East London Rock and Roll. There was Squeeze, Dire Straits, The Flying Pickets. They all came from Deptford. They all sound different, but that’s not my fault.

At Grover Court, we lived in No.20 and Val Doonican lived at the back of the block with his mum. He wasn’t famous then. He used to sit in an armchair on an old porch, playing a guitar. He must have been in his mid-twenties. He taught me the mouth organ when I was about ten or eleven. There used to be an apple tree outside and we used to nick apples. Not him. Me and some other boys.

He came over here from Ireland with  a group called The Four Ramblers and three of the Four Ramblers lived in Grover Court. The others were a bloke called Pat Sherlock and a bloke called Pat Campbell.

Pat Campbell went on to be a Radio Luxemburg disc jockey and Pat Sherlock produced a Sunday night telly show called The Showbiz Eleven. based on football teams. They used to have The TV All Stars on one side and The Showbiz Eleven on the other. The Showbiz Eleven were the sort of people you didn’t normally get on telly – like Norman Wisdom. Pat Sherlock had a son called Barry Sherlock who was a couple of years younger than me and Barry was my mate. People in these ‘football teams’ used to come round to visit Pat Sherlock, so I used to see Tommy Steele and people like that.

In November 1957, when I was seven, I remember the Lewisham train crash happening behind my house. ‘The Great Lewisham Train Crash’ they called it in the papers. It was caused by the very thick fog which you used to get in those days. I remember foggy winters and very hot summers. I suppose it was foggier because they hadn’t passed that smoke law and we all used to have coal fires. (All that’s gone now.)

Several railway lines cross on two levels at Lewisham. There are three at the bottom and one that goes over the top. On a foggy day in November, two trains collided in the middle. Shot up in the air and knocked a whole train off the top. About 117 people died. My Dad’s garage was next to the line and afterwards there were railway wheels in it. A brick wall at the back had to be rebuilt after it was hit by a fire engine coming to rescue people.

I remember my Aunt Rosemary was in the house with her husband, Uncle Doug (though he wasn’t  my real one). He was meant to have travelled on the very train that crashed. They heard it on the radio.

I didn’t hear anything and I think I was sort of hidden away afterwards. A woman called Mrs Fantos was the hero of the crash and she went out to the main road and commandeered cars and blankets and stuff. The injured were brought into the car park space probably suffering from post-traumatic shock although, of course, they didn’t ‘have’ that in those days.

The next day I think the showbiz bug got into me. I climbed onto the flat roofs. The TV cameras were there to film it and I was up on the roof waving while they were carting dead bodies about. I felt excited because suddenly these little flats in South East London were the centre of almost world attention.

We used to play on bomb sites in Lewisham. I found old gas masks and all that sort of stuff. There were lots of bomb shelters we used to play in and there were still people who had gardens with the Anderson shelters in.

It was the Fifties, so it was still a bit bleak after the war. Rationing never affected us too much because my Dad worked on the river. They used to have all the cargo coming in, so we got bananas and things. Legally. My dad never stole anything – he was a very honest man. People who worked on the River tended to get more goods than other people. I know he didn’t steal anything because he was known as ‘Honest Frank’ Hardee.

My dad was a lighterman on the River Thames. A lighter is a barge. A lighterman pulls the barges along. He did that all his life. And his Dad before him and his Dad before him. A big family thing. It was a job for life really.

The family assumed I would do that too, but I turned out quite bright – in fact I got the highest grade in the Eleven Plus at my school. So I ended up going to grammar school. Lucky I didn’t go on the River, as it happened.

My dad was a bit eccentric. We used to go on holidays on boats. He used to work on boats then he used to take us up the River on a boat for a holiday.

He used to do impressions – Maurice Chevalier. Every time he got drunk he sang: Thank ‘eaven for leetle girls. That was the only one he could do. He sounded like Maurice Chevalier a bit. (Except he wasn’t French and couldn’t sing.)

____________________________________________________

Malcolm Hardee photographed outside Grover Court in 1995

Malcolm Hardee drowned in 2005.

There are currently three annual Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards in his memory.

This year, they will be presented during a two hour variety show – The Increasingly Prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show – at the Edinburgh Fringe on Friday 23rd August.

Malcolm Hardee iconic autobiography

Towards the start of comedian Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, this passage appears:

______________________________

There was a club in Catford called The Witchdoctor. It was a club we all went to although they didn’t sell drink. Downstairs there was ‘Mr Smiths’ – a gambling casino….

Eddie Richardson was involved in a big shooting at Mr Smith’s, underneath The Witchdoctor. It was a inter-gang thing. They all met down the gaming club and this bloke got shot and was bleeding all over the place from an artery. ‘Mad Frankie’ Fraser (the Richardson’s infamous ‘enforcer’) hit a bloke who subsequently died and ‘Mad Frankie’ himself was shot in the thigh. He got outside and the police found him lying in a front garden round the corner in Fordel Road, Catford, where my Aunt Rosemary and Uncle Doug were then living. His mates had just left ‘Mad Frankie’ there. A bit inconsiderate to the neighbours. 

No-one outside South East London knew the Richardsons until they were arrested and there was a lot of publicity at their trial about torturing people in a home-made electric chair. 

But everyone knew The Krays. As comedian Lee Hurst says, the Blind Beggar must be the biggest pub in the world. Every time you meet a London taxi driver he says he was in the Blind Beggar the day Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell.

Some people say the Krays wouldn’t have been big if there hadn’t been the shooting in the Blind Beggar. But these days people are getting shot all the time. In the paper yesterday there was a bloke shot in a pub in Yorkshire at lunchtime. I suppose The Krays were setting a trend.

The Krays also had that showbiz thing about them. They actually owned a club;  the actress Barbara Windsor was a girlfriend of Charlie Kray and later married Ronnie Knight who worked for The Krays; and the Conservative politician Lord Bob Boothby, whose mistress had been Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s wife, was having it off with Ronnie, the gay Kray.

______________________________________________________

Micky Fawcett in the May Fair Hotel, London, yesterday

Yesterday, I had tea at the May Fair Hotel in London with former Kray Twins associate Micky Fawcett.

His new book Krayzy Days is that rare thing – a totally true insight into what it was like being with the Kray Twins – Ronnie & Reggie –  and their brother Charlie.

“Did the Kray Twins have a sense of humour?” I asked.

“Ronnie had a very good sense of humour,” Micky told me, “Reggie had no sense of humour, but Ronnie did.”

“What type?” I asked. “Black humour?”

“Yes,” said Micky. “Black humour.”

“Or maybe black and blue,” I suggested.

“He was an Oscar Wilde type,” mused Micky. “I’m not saying he was witty, but he would have loved Oscar Wilde. The way Oscar Wilde used to carry on.”

“Because he felt he was clever and superior?” I asked.

Ronnie Kray (left) with boxer Sonny Liston & Micky Fawcett

“Well, Ronnie felt superior,” Micky agreed. “He was called The Colonel. He thought he was superior to everything and everybody. As I say in my book, I was round the Twins’ house one day and somebody dropped in a copy of Private Eye. It was about ‘Knacker of The Yard’ (Private Eye’s name for un-named policemen) and all that – I can’t remember exactly what it was about. But Ronnie read it and laughed for the rest of the day.

“He used to describe himself as ‘a well-known thug and poof’.”

“But,” I said, “he took exception when George Cornell called him a poof.”

“No, that’s…” said Micky.

“When Ronnie shot him in the Blind Beggar pub,” I added.

The Blind Beggar pub in London

“Well,” said Micky, “in the book I tell the true reason for that. It has nothing to do with homosexuality at all. It’s in the book. I was visiting someone in Dartmoor Prison. But, the day before the Blind Beggar shooting, there was the big tear-up at Mr Smith’s in Catford.”

“That’s the one mentioned in Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography,” I said.

“Yes,” said Micky. “Everybody was Whoa! Did you hear that? Whoa! My God! and all that. Frank Fraser finished up with a bullet in his leg in that front garden. It was a big tear-up between the Richardsons and another local ‘firm’.

“The following evening, I was going to Dartmoor, so I went over to the Regency club to meet the fellah I was going with – the Regency being a club in Hackney frequented by the Krays, who had a small share in it. People think they owned it, but the Barry family owned it.

“When I got to the Regency, I saw Reggie outside and he said: What about the news! Reggie was a very uptight sort of fellah. He never hardly showed his emotions. But he grabbed hold of me and he was waltzing me round on the pavement saying: What about it, Mick? Wasn’t it great? The Richardsons had been arrested.

“But I didn’t feel very elated by it at all. They had never done anything to me and, as I came away, I thought to myself: I’ve a feeling now that the next thing is going to be them (The Krays). Once these things get underway, the police nick everybody. The Richardsons had been arrested, but it wasn’t something to celebrate.

“I met my pal. We went to Dartmoor Prison. Visited a fellah down there. Frank Mitchell was on the visit as well. When we used to go to Dartmoor, we’d get my mate out and say to the screw (the prison guard): Can you get Frank Mitchell too? and he’d get Frank Mitchell.”

Nine months later, ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell was sprung from Dartmoor Prison by the Kray Twins and subsequently murdered on their orders when they found out he really was uncontrollably mad.

“Frank Mitchell would come for a chat at Dartmoor,” explained Micky, “because he didn’t have any visitors of his own. He’d sit down and say to the screw: You look after him, cos he’s a friend of mine and I’m telling you, if you don’t... and the screw would say Alright, Frank, alright. OK, Frank, keep calm... That’s a fact. They were good experiences when I look back.

“Anyway, we come home to London and, early in the morning, I got a newspaper and it said: MAN SHOT DEAD IN THE BLIND BEGGAR PUB. So I get on the phone straight away to Charlie Kray. He says: Meet me outside Mile End station. So I go straight there and I can remember it as if it was yesterday.

George Cornell in a police photo

“I said to him: Reggie? and he said No, Ronnie. I said Yeah? He said Yeah. What’s happened, Mick… you know that turn-out down there…”

(Micky and I agreed that, for the rest of the exact detail of this story, you will have to buy Micky’s book… He’s no fool and I am not going to argue with him. So there is a section of our conversation missing here… Micky then continued…)

“So he’s going to throw a petrol bomb into Freddie Foreman’s pub.

“And Charlie Kray told me I wish you’d been here, Mick, because you’d have been the obvious choice to send over because I would have liaised – I used to – but they sent Nobby and he’s come back and gone Oh, it’s all off again! Murders! We’ve gotta do something! They’re going to burn Fred’s pub down!

“And Ronnie’s gone What? And Ronnie’s got all excited, cos he’s mad and he’s gone Give me a shooter! Right! Right! Let’s have a drive round and see if we… and he’s gone into the Blind Beggar and Boom! and that’s it. Just cos Cornell was one of them, cos he was associated with the Richardsons.

“I got on well with Georgie Cornell. He came from Stepney but was very friendly with the Richardsons in South London. He wasn’t 100% with them all the time. And all kinds of strange stories have gone on about why he was shot.

Micky Fawcett’s new myth-busting book

“The strangest of them all is that Georgie Cornell gave Ronnie a terrible beating on some previous occasion. John Pearson says it in his book. But the fellah who told Pearson is a terrible liar.”

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well I’m not going to print that he’s a terrible liar, am I?” I said. “He might take it amiss.”

“Don’t worry about him,” Micky told me. “He’d have trouble getting out of his armchair.”

“There are so many stories,” I said to Micky: “The comedian Lee Hurst used to say that the Blind Beggar must be the biggest pub in the world because, every time you met any London taxi driver, he would claim he was in there the night Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell.”

“Well,” Micky told me, “in the pub that night there really was this fellah called George The Fib.”

“Is he violent, is he still alive and does he live near me?” I asked.

“You’re OK,” said Micky, “he’s dead. But he was called George The Fib cos he was known for lying about everything so, when he told people he had been in the Blind Beggar the night of the shooting, no-one would believe him. He was going around afterwards saying What about that turn-out? I was in there that night… but no-one would believe him. The Old Bill didn’t even interview him.”

“Krayzy Days indeed,” I said.

Del Strain shares bis thoughts in Trafalgar Square yesterday

“I’ve never really understand why anyone wants to perform comedy,” I said to Scots comedian Del Strain yesterday.

“Because when I’m on stage,” he told me, “for them twenty or thirty minutes – when you’ve got the audience, for that piece of time, my legs ain’t sore, no matter what’s going on in the world, no matter what your financial state, no matter if someone’s died in your family that day… there’s nothing else there. It’s just like being a surfer riding a wave.”

“And why are your legs sore?” I asked.

“Cos of the gunshot wound,” replied Del. “Getting knee-capped. When I’m on stage, nothing else matters. It’s a better buzz than any Class ‘A’ drug I’ve ever took. I’m buzzing on adrenaline all the way home. That’s why I do it… It don’t feed you, it don’t put shit in your fridge, but it feeds you in the soul.”

“Why a gunshot wound?” I asked.

“Cos I got shot by accident,” replied Del, after a pause. “The gun went off by accident and I got shot.”

“Who accidentally shot y…” I started to say.

“My brother,” said Del immediately.

“How come?” I asked.

“Because, basically, I was winding him up,” said Del, “and he picked up the gun and he didn’t realise that there was still one in the chamber and it went off. He didn’t mean it to go off, he didn’t mean to shoot me, my parents were very, very…”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“About 17. But my parents were… Let’s say they didn’t have the best morals around, but they did teach us how to shoot. If it had been intentional, it would have been in the head.”

“It may seem a bit dull,” I told Del, “but, when I grew up, we didn’t have guns in our house.”

“We did,” said Del. “We had quite a few guns in the house.”

“Because?” I asked.

“Everyone I knew had a gun,” Del replied.

“This is in Kilmarnock, Scotland, in the 1980s?” I checked.

“Yeah,” said Del. “Late 1970s, early 1980s. We grew up with pump-actions and .22s. People did use guns up there for legitimate reasons, I suppose. Like shooting vermin on their estates.”

“Depends on your definition of words,” I said. “What did your parents do?”

“They were heroin wholesalers,” Del told me. “Well, my dad… The first 20 years of his life, he was heavily involved in drugs. But my dad’s been ‘clean’ 27 years and actually started working in a rehab. So he spent the first half of his life putting people on the gear; and the second half of his life getting them off it.”

“He’s had a full life,” I said.

Del in St Martin in the Fields’ crypt yesterday

“My birth mother actually died a year ago yesterday,” said Del. “Cancer. It was horrible. Fair warning: anyone who’s had an alcohol or a drug problem in their life and who has anything like that on their medical record… When you come to the end of your life, the NHS will treat you like a piece of shit. They will Hum and Hah about benzos and morphine and they won’t even give you the duty of care – because you’ve got that on your record.

“Even though you’ve got like a week to live, they think you’re trying to blag them to get some extra morphine. It wasn’t until the third day that the Macmillan nurses came in and done great work… She came in and she trebled the morphine and my mother had two peaceful days, God bless her, and she slept and went. That was a bit of a shock to me when I saw it with my own eyes.

“My dad’s been clean 27 years. He had a liver biopsy and he went to the hospital and asked What about pain relief? He’d never took no pain relief, cos that’s the way he rolls. But the doctor’s still looking at him after 27 years like my dad’s trying to do him out of 4 or 5 codeine a day. Like 10 pence worth of codeine. Which I take as an insult but also find pretty funny.

“It’s people’s psyche. They don’t change their opinion about you, no matter how much you turn your life around. Every day of my life, I try to do two mitzvahs – two acts of random kindness. I’m a big believer in What goes round comes round and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and I’ve had Bad back for those mistakes, but the way I’ve tried to live my life for the last seven or eight years is just trying to be a better person, trying to be creative and trying to make the world a better place.”

“When we talked about this a few years ago,” I said, “you told me your son had turned your life round.”

“That was it,” said Del. “I went to jail and I had never been away from my son for a day of his life – he was about 5 – and that was a shock to my system. What I was doing at that time – selling pot – gave me what middle class people would call flexi-time. So I did very little work. I would go out for three hours on a Sunday and make £1,000. I could live on that and spend lots of time with my son. Going to jail was a shock to my system. I wanted positive affirmation for my son. My son is now in all the top classes at school, never been in trouble at school. He is all the things I wasn’t at 15.”

“And how old is he now?”

“15.”

“Even if I stop doing stand-up tomorrow,” Del told me, “in the last eight, nine, ten years, it was never about fame or fortune. It was about me actually putting some good into the world. It was about bringing my son up with positive affirmation, because I don’t want him to be a scally like I was. But I don’t know what’s going to happen. Tomorrow, I could go back to doing what I done ten or twenty years  ago. Who knows?”

“You sold pot,” I said, “and…?”

“Only pot,” said Del. “I’ve never sold any Class ‘A’. After everything I saw with my parents, I never ever wanted to sell Class ‘A” – I don’t believe you get any luck with the money.”

“And your father…” I prompted.

“They were the main dealers,” explained Del, “for the whole West Coast of Scotland for about eight years.”

“And he was using it as well?”

“Yes. He was using it from the 1970s. But people don’t understand that there were no illegal drugs in this country back then. There was a small select group where he came from of about eight people. And that’s all there was for many years. They got their drugs by breaking into pharmacies and chemists and, in chemists at that time, you had 98.7% pure heroin and cocaine.

“In 1979, my dad was one of the first five registered addicts in the whole of Scotland and he was on a scrip (a prescription) from Edinburgh… But the first thing Margaret Thatcher did when she got in as Prime Minister was take away the junkies’ scrips and that’s when the illegal drugs market started. It was an accumulation of the (Soviet Union’s) war in Afghanistan and the Shah getting thrown out of Iran. The 1980s were just flooded with heroin for a catalogue of reasons but, if Thatcher hadn’t done that then, we probably wouldn’t have had the numbers on heroin that we ended up with.”

“I’ve never understood why we stopped supplying heroin to addicts,” I said. “We seemed to have a system that worked at that time.”

“There was 300 addicts in London in 1973,” said Del. “The whole of London. Think about that. While my dad was on that scrip, he had a job, an apprenticeship. He was actually working, going to his work every day, living a normal life.”

“And, getting back to your gunshot wound…?” I said.

“I still get horrific pain,” replied Del.

“And there’s nothing they can do about it?” I asked.

“No. It’s fucked,” said Del. “It makes my leg swell up and the blood don’t pump properly. Veins and nerve damage. All smashed-up. They wanted to cut my leg off and I wouldn’t let them.

“I went home and, after about four years, when I came to London, I was doing Class ‘A’ and my leg swelled up and Guy’s Hospital threw me out with some morphine and told me if I started urinating blood to come back. I sat in a room for fifteen months and my leg wouldn’t straighten – bright red, like a boxing glove – nearly lost my leg – and it took me fifteen months to learn how to walk again, to straighten my leg. I was shot in my left leg and now, when I walk, I walk on three toes on my left foot and the heel on my right foot.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. That’s just how I’ve adapted to walk. The blood clot caused nerve damage in my ankle so, when I pull my sock on… you know when you hit a nerve in your tooth and you go Agghhhh!? My ankle’s like that. But it’s been like that since I was 23. I take prescribed drugs now to block the spasms: you know the drugs they take to stop seizures? It’s them things. It stops the nerves from jigging.”

I would quite like to die on another planet.

As a way to go, it beats dying in the gloomy upstairs bedroom of a nursing home in Clacton-on-Sea, which is where I sat and watched my father die.

Is it rocket science to build pages with links?

So, two days ago, I lightheartedly tried to enter a London Evening Standard contest to win a trip into space. Well, OK, ‘trip’ might be a bit of an exaggeration. It seems the return flight takes 30 minutes overall but the time spent actually outside the earth’s atmosphere is only 4 minutes.

Still, if I want to die on another planet, it’s a start. One small step for a man…

The first problem I had was that the link to the Evening Standard’s competition’s page didn’t exist. Clicking the link just brought you back to the page you were already viewing. It took about a day to rectify this. Obviously creating a working weblink was a step too far in rocket science for the Evening Standard.

When the page was up and firing on all cylinders, I ploughed through the application form only to be told at the very very end of the process that I had to agree the Evening Standard could access my entire Facebook Friends list. Why? The only possible reason I could think of was that they wanted to spam the (at the time of writing) 4,854 people on my Friends list. And I would be responsible for that.

When I queried this, the Evening Standard Reader Offers department replied:

Maybe London Evening Standard’s explanation is groundless?

“Hi! The message you refer to is actually letting you know that the system we use to run the promotion will be able to access your friends list, which will allow you to share the promotion should you wish to. However we will not access or use that information for anything, so none of your friends will be effected (sic) because you have entered.”

Apart from my nagging worry that the Evening Standard people can’t spell ‘affected’, why would they need to have access to my Friends list in order to allow me to send a link for the Evening Standard’s offers page to any or all of my Facebook Friends? If I copied and pasted the web address into a message and posted it on my Facebook page, would that link somehow mysteriously not work unless the Evening Standard had on its computers each and every person on my list?

It is enough to make you paranoid.

I mean, it is surreal enough that the London Evening Standard (like the Independent newspaper) is now owned by an ex-KGB officer. Is this a case of old habits dying hard?

Not a woman in a burka

Shortly afterwards, I went out to Holborn in central London and there I saw (I presume it was) a woman dressed in full burka standing next to a Post Office pillar box. It was like something out of a Magritte painting or an imagining of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

A medium-sized red-painted pillar with a horizontal slit towards the top through which I could post letters beside which stood a medium-sized pillar of black cotton with a horizontal slit towards the top through which I could see a pair of eyes staring out at me.

This oddness was not topped until a few hours later when I saw Red Bastard perform in the East End of London, strangely just round the corner from Vallance Road, where gangsters the Kray Twins used to live – and from the Repton Boxing Club where they… well… boxed as and with young men.

Showman Adam Taffler celebrated last night

The Red Bastard event was staged by showman Adam Taffler aka Adam Oliver who had managed to successfully promote this off-West-End show at short notice so effectively that the original single show and single workshop by Red Bastard had been upped to two shows and three workshops. (The second show is tonight.)

The show last night seemed to have attracted whatever the collective noun is for a wide collection of some of the most cutting edge, potentially not-far-from-breakthrough acts in London including Holly Burn, Adam Larter, Lizzy Mace, Real McGuffin Dan March, Darren Maskell and Lindsay Sharman not to mention half of Nelly Scott/Zuma Puma’s new clown workshop.

Bob Slayer’s underpants were sponsored last night

One unexpected yet somehow not unexpected sight of the evening was comedian/promoter Bob Slayer acting as barman – obviously, occasionally without his trousers so he could display the underpants supplied by his Edinburgh Fringe sponsors Bawbags, purveyors of fine Scottish undergarments.

Bob’s presence was partly explained by the fact that, on 20th October, he and Adam are jointly promoting Malcolm Hardee Award winning Adrienne Truscott’s one-off show at the nearby Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.

Red Bastard – the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award nominee

I saw Red Bastard at the Edinburgh Fringe – he was a nominee for the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality – and several people have asked me what he does.

I have never been able to find words with which to tell them.

Much like The Short Man With Long Socks, the act is uncategorisable.

That is, after all, a sign of true originality.

If you could include it in a single existing category – comedy, mime, therapy, actor training, psychology, performance art, voyeurism, drama, audience involvement – it would not be truly original. Perhaps the Red Bastard show is best described with that unfathomable 1960s word – an Event.

You cannot describe it; you have to experience it.

Please do.

Arthur Smith: man, myth and playwright

Last month I slept with comedian Arthur Smith.

Oh, alright, we stayed in different rooms in the same house on different storeys after I saw him perform at the Comedy Lounge in Totnes. He left before breakfast.

No depth is too deep for me to plumb for a shallow, eye-catching headline.

But the point is… on the bill with Arthur at the Comedy Lounge was a young comedian called Archie Williams Maddocks who showed remarkably good stage presence and audience control. I wondered why, so I had a chat with him in London last week. He is 25.

“I did my first gig just over a year ago,” he told me, but I’ve been going properly – trying to gig every week – for about ten months and I’ve only started gigging three or four times a week since June of this year – about four months.”

“Why do you want to be a comic?” I asked him. “You don’t appear to be mad.”

“It’s a problem, isn’t it?” laughed Archie. “I’m not unhappy. I’m not crazy… I was doing an improvised play and someone came up to me afterwards and said The way your mind works is very quick: maybe you should try stand-up comedy. I had always liked comedy but never thought about trying it… It looked like a horrible life to me.”

“It is,” I said.

“Well,” said Archie, “I thought I’d give it a try and, when the first wave of laughter hit me, it was like Fuck! That’s amazing! It’s like a drug. I’m addicted to it now.”

“But you didn’t want to be a comedian before that?”

“I’m a playwright by trade,” Archie told me. “In the summer, I had something on at the Royal Court Theatre as part of their Open Court season.

The Bush Theatre is to be the site of a Brixton funeral parlour

“And I’ve just been commissioned by the Bush Theatre to write a play about gentrification in Brixton seen through the eyes of guys in a West Indian funeral parlour. It’s all about the idea that Brixton was once a very West Indian area and it’s becoming gentrified and the West Indian community which was there has moved out to other places like Barnet and the shops serving the diminishing West Indian community no longer really have a purpose. So my play questions the role of tradition and whether you should re-invent yourself, which means losing a bit of what you established in the first place.”

“Is this going to be totally straight or with laughs?” I asked.

“The first three-quarters is going to be funny and then…”

“… then you undercut the audience’s expectation?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Archie. “I find with a play, if you make it funny and accessible, they’re going to warm to it more quickly. If it’s a serious drama the whole time, you can’t help like feeling you’ve just been beaten up. It’s hard work watching a drama for two hours, so I want there to be laughs – not massive ones, but little titters here and there and quite big laughs.”

“Will you be acting in it?”

“No. The whole idea of playwriting in the first place was to be in the plays but the more I write them the less I want to be in my own plays, because I think I would get too controlling. I kinda just want to create them and I’m getting all my performance needs from doing comedy. I’ve always loved people looking at me, watching me and enjoying what I’m doing or hating what I’m doing – as long as I get a reaction from them.”

“Isn’t there a problem about people doing something with your play that you didn’t intend?” I asked.

“It’s kind of like you’ve made a baby, but then you’ve given it up for adoption and you watch someone else raise it. You think it’s going to come out one way and it doesn’t and it can be a bit of a shock but, at the same time, it can be amazing. So far, I’ve been lucky and directors have kept in constant contact.

“I’m also working on a play that’s going to be put on in London and in New York at the same time. It’s about the relationship between Africans and Caribbeans here in London and black Americans. This notion of blackness in two different spectrums and the dichotomy between that.

“It’s going to be about a West Indian woman meeting a black American man in America and it’s going to be about their different attitudes and perceptions towards race. Two black people from two different countries talking about race in America is almost like a black person and a white person talking about race in England. I think it’s quite an interesting dichotomy to explore.”

“How many plays have you written now?”

“Nine. Well, including short plays, I’ve written about eighteen.”

“And you’re 25.”

Yes.”

“You always wanted to write?”

Archie Williams Maddocks, as seen in his 15-year-old dreams

“No. Until 15, I wanted to be a wrestler.”

“An American wrestler?”

“Yeah.”

“Because they’re macho and showbizzy?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And because you get to say the most ridiculous things.”

“Did you have a wrestling name you were going to use?”

“I was going to be The Dominator… or Half Man Half Amazing.”

“So when did you lose your ambition to be a wrestler?”

“When I properly figured out it wasn’t real. I figured I wanted to do something more serious than this. I wanted to act and follow in my father’s footsteps.”

“Your father’s an actor.”

“Yes.”

“So,” I said to Archie, “you’re very serious about writing plays and you think you will be able to continue doing that as well as doing a little bit of acting and doing stand-up comedy?”

“Well,” replied Archie, “I’ve started to put the acting on hold a little bit, because I’ve grown to love comedy so much that I want it really, really badly: I want to be out there every night. Comedy and playwriting sort of go hand-in-hand: it’s two different forms of writing.

“If you’re doing comedy, you’re out to make people laugh and to forget themselves and their troubles whereas, as a playwright, you’re out to make people think and evoke questions and loads of reaction. But I think you can do both at the same time.

“For me, the comedy brain works very quickly; it’s off-the-cuff and instinct. Whereas my playwriting brain I let cultivate ideas over time so the ideas I have are fully-formed when I come to them and I can write them out in two or three weeks.

Archie Williams Maddocks is no longer an aspiring wrestler

“What I’m doing now is four days a week of playwriting, three days a week of comedy writing and trying to gig every night. Yesterday I was in Wincanton in Somerset; tonight I’m in Brighton; over the next few weeks, I’m going to be in Stockton-on-Tees, Newcastle, Leeds. That’s what you gotta do. You gotta get out there.”

“How would you describe your comedy?”

“I’m an observational storyteller, an anecdotalist.”

“Totally scripted?”

“I try to do a bit of improvisation in every gig and I try to do something new at every gig. There’s no set script. There’s beats and units in my mind where I know what I want to come next, so there’s a flow to it. But I never end up saying it the same way two nights in a row.”

“Are you going to the Edinburgh Fringe next year?”

“With a comedy show. I would never take a play up there at the moment. Far too expensive.”

“Yes,” I said, “The cost of hiring a venue – and the free venues don’t really put on plays.”

“And,” said Archie, “in Edinburgh, if you have a choice between seeing a play that you pay for and a free play, what are you going to see? You’re going to see a play that you pay for because you think it will be better quality. Whereas, in comedy, ‘free’ is the way it’s going at the moment – ‘free’ is not taken as being rubbish any more.”

“Your father is an actor?” I asked.

“Both my parents are actors,” replied Archie. “My mum, Mary Maddocks, is an actress: she was in The Rocky Horror Show when it was in the West End; and my dad is Don Warrington (of TV’s Rising Damp etc).

“The main thing I get from both of them is they understand the art of performance and the need to perform. It’s not something you choose to do. It’s something that you can’t not do. I’d rather be poor and do something I enjoy than be rich and have to go into work every day at something I don’t like and be miserable. I’d rather live outside in the cold literally – I hope I don’t, but…”

The last King of Poland was not a plumber

Yesterday afternoon, with my eternally-un-named friend, I went to Brunel University in West London for the launch of their new Centre For Comedy Studies Research which aims to “promote and facilitate academic research on the comedy/society interface”.

In some ways, it is good for academics to treat comedy seriously though – as is often the case – this can sometimes lapse into intelligent people creating abstract academic ‘things’ to study to get an income and to spend their time on. The phrase ‘looking up your own arse’ is ready-made for these situations and deserves more detailed research.

When I sit through a discussion of ‘Polish jokes’ and encounter the sentences “The Polish trickster is a master of the paradoxes of porosity” and “It moves from a phobic to a philic register” I sometimes think a psychopath climbing up a university bell tower with a high-powered rifle and picking-off people at random is not necessarily performing a negative function in society.

On the other hand, the delightfully dour Rose – one of comedian Lewis Schaffer’s entourage – is currently writing her third academic thesis on Lewis Schaffer and there could be entire university departments profitably studying the psychological and sociological intricacies of Lewis Schaffer’s neuroses.

Hellfire! There must be multiple theses to be written on why he keeps repeating his full name “Lewis Schaffer” and why he attracts off-the-proverbial-wall incidents at his shows. Last night was no exception – and a good antidote to academia. It was one of his ongoing twice-a-week Free Until Famous shows which go hand-in-pocket with his ongoing weekly pay-to-enter American in London shows.

Lewis Schaffer performing at The Source Below last night (Photograph by my eternally-un-named friend)

I arrived slightly late which, a whole two minutes after I was seated, managed to distract him from the flow of his performance. He was on form, though. Good show, good audience reaction.

Later, amidst the glamour of Leicester Square’s flagship McDonalds, Lewis told me:

“I’ve lost track whether my shows are good or not. My shows are like a rollercoaster. Most rollercoasters start with a slow incline up. Mine start with a drop into a pit. All I care about is making them interesting for me. I can’t start a show with people enjoying themselves because I’ve just got a feeling it’s going to get worse. I feel I have to start off with them hating me and build it up. I guess I want to be loved – I want to be loved by people who don’t love me.

“If they come into my show with high expectations of enjoyment, I just want to quash that. The key to my shows is that the audience, at some point, has to believe I’m a professional comedian and I can only be self-deprecating for a short period of the show. But I didn’t feel I was that brilliant tonight.”

“And then there was the drunk,” I said.

At the end of the first part of his nearly two-hour long show, Lewis Schaffer told the audience he was going to hide behind a curtain during the interval so that, if anyone wanted to leave without embarrassment, they could.

“Why were you hiding behind the curtain?” I asked.

“For scientific purposes,” Lewis Schaffer told me.

Lewis Schaffer plays with a bottle last night

While Lewis Schaffer was hiding behind the curtain, a drunk came down into the basement venue and sat in a corner. At the time, I was upstairs buying a coffee for my eternally-un-named friend.

“He was young middle-aged,” she told me later, describing the man who came in. “He shuffled in wearing a dark jacket. He sat down at a table where two people had been sitting, but they’d gone to the bar to get a drink. He sat hunched over, holding a carrier bag to his chest in the way of the psychologically wounded or drunk, like someone who is cold. I thought Oh, is he a drunk who often comes in and tries to sleep in the corner during Lewis’ shows?

“If he’d come in without being so obviously drunk or damaged and then just leant against a corner in the dark, he would probably have been left alone because it wouldn’t have felt like he was so obviously the elephant in the room but, because he was slumped forward in a sleepy, drunken way… Rose realised there was this guy who was going to alter the atmosphere of the room, so she went to warn Lewis behind the curtain that there was a possible situation.”

“He was a proper, full-on, drunk, homeless guy,” Lewis told me. “He came in and passed out at the back of the room. He was very huge and very dangerous and we had to start the second half of the show and I felt I didn’t have the time to escort him out myself, so I asked the bartender to escort him out.”

“The barman was young,” explained my eternally-un-named friend, “and Italian, so English was not his first language. I think he was telling the guy You’re only allowed in here if you buy a drink and you’re too drunk to have one, so you’ll have to leave and the drunk guy was disputing this.”

I came back into to room when the barman had got the drunk man on his feet and they were both shuffling towards the bottom of the stairs.

Things apparently got physical up in the street and the drunk guy allegedly punched the bartender, the bartender allegedly punched the drunk guy and the drunk guy allegedly threw something at the kebab shop above the venue, cracking the window.

Broken dreams, broken window in London’s Soho last night

“It caused maybe £1,500 of damage” Lewis Schaffer told me,

“And your point is?” I asked.

“My point is that I feel horrible because I’ve had 20 years in the bar business – that’s what my job is compering and hosting comedy shows – and I know how to get people out of a place without getting them angry. I should have done it myself… Is there something funny in that for your blog?”

“Your shows are never less than entertaining,” I told Lewis Schaffer. “Some people see the bottle as half empty; some people see the bottle as half full. You always see an empty bottle.”

“So it goes,” he said.

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY REMOVED FOR LEGAL REASONS UNCONNECTED WITH ME