I first encountered Frank Sidebottom when I bought his science fiction themed EP twenty odd years ago as a student in Sheffield. The felt tip drawn cover, the Casio keyboard versions of everything from the Star Trek theme to Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, the Timperley-centric mythology running through the EP and everything else Sidebottom did…it all added up to a package that fascinated me. Besides, who wouldn’t love a man who performed in a papier mache head, with a handpuppet version of himself called Little Frank, and did unaccountably hilarious versions of everything from Queen to Joy Division?

A couple of years later I was working in Hertford, with a fellow Sidebottom devotee called Ben, when we heard that Frank would be playing at London’s legendary Marquee Club. Famed for gigs by Jimi Hendrix and other rock icons, it seemed a curious venue for a slightly macabre childrens’ performer — but exactly where would Sidebottom be at home? Later gigs in museums and galleries confirmed the breadth and depth of his appeal.

I can’t remember details of that Marquee evening, except that it was a thoroughly entertaining show, and that Ben distinguished himself by fainting and breaking his glasses. Oh the fun we had driving back to Hertford, Ben at the wheel and me directing him from the passenger seat as the only person in the car with vision beyond ten feet. I caught Sidebottom live again some years later, but nothing could live up to that special night, where I first encountered catchphrases and props that had me smiling all over again as I watched clips from Frank’s shows on YouTube.

The reason for these reminiscences? Frank Sidebottom, or the man who created him, is dead. I won’t name the person behind the bulbous paper head, and I mean no disrespect by that. Sidebottom will live on in the memories of those, of all ages, who encountered him as a tv show guest, a football pundit, or the world’s least likely purveyor of Smiths covers.

Last year, my friend Niki was arranging a family festivity day for the company she works for. The idea was to have something for everyone, and she asked if I had any ideas. Hmm. I always have ideas, and this one was fun. Niki is an online acquaintance of Independent IT columnist Rhodri Marsden, who as well as being a journalist played keyboards — for Scritti Politti and…Frank Sidebottom.

I suggested Niki use her connection with Rhodri to get Frank to appear as the headliner of the event. What could be better for a day of family fun? Niki loved the idea, and ran it past her boss, who apparently collapsed laughing at the prospect…but pointed out the salient fact that a significant percentage of his business’s employees are from Eastern Europe, and might not get the subtle nuances involved in a bulbous headed Lancastrian doing amateurish renditions of The Beatles repertoire.

In the end, they opted for a petting zoo instead of booking Frank. I can see the sense of that decision, but personally I’d have chosen Sidebottom in the confidence that his dressing up box charisma could win over any audience given the opportunity. Why risk little children being bitten by exotic spiders when the whole family could be entertained by a singalong of ‘Mull of Kintyre’? And I wouldn’t put it past Frank to be familiar with equivalent repertoire from the Macedonian charts, or Bulgarian light entertainment shows, and engage the Eastern Europeans on their own territory.

But hey, that’s all in the land of make-believe, and meanwhile there are people out there who never had the privilege of seeing Frank Sidebottom for real. Here he is doing an unikely take on Love Will Tear Us Apart. Here, a Queen medley. And here, a discussion of his run-in with The Beatles back in the day.

I’m heading towards smug at the moment, which is never a good thing. But I’ve come up with two play outlines and script samples for each in the past week, and I’m really happy with them. And whether or not the theatre people who asked for the ideas bite, I’m more than satisfied that I’ve come up with concepts worth developing further one day, as stage or radio pieces probably.

The two concepts are very different. One is concerned with terrorism and celebrity, and hopefully has a satirical element. The main development process involved taking note of John Truby’s take on raising the stakes in a drama (it’s far from original with Truby, but I dipped into his Anatomy of Story for a refresher), so the story gets more and more intense as it continues, each new piece of information threatening to topple the whole over. That was a fairly technical approach, and it worked well, and made me realise how close thrillers and farces are structurally. Both follow that pattern of the stakes being raised, and tension is the result: the big difference is that farces resolve that tension with humour.

The other idea I’d got started as a small fun one, drawing on a world that fans of Shameless and Withnail and I would enjoy. But it became increasingly dissatifying as I wondered how to turn that seed into a full script. I wanted more, but I didn’t know what I wanted more of. Except that I didn’t want to get stuck in a world of seedy characters having misadventures. For all sorts of reasons, many of which I can’t articulate, I wanted to do something bigger and stranger and other than that.

If you’re stuck in your thinking, put on someone else’s head. It’s something I’ve done quite a bit over the years, getting psyched up to come up with ideas by giving myself guidance from the imagined perspective of writers I admire for one reason or another. And somehow I knew that the writer I wanted to step into the shoes of for this project was Pete Milligan. I’ve written about my admiration for his comics work, which is effortlessly sophisticated and multi-layered and resonates with some fascinating influences, and I knew I wanted some of that for my play.

All very well, but how to go about that? I used to write myself notes as those other writers, and have even coached myself aloud as Alan Moore and others, but I’ve never tapped into my version of Pete Milligan before and those methods seemed redundant. I just waited, and then had an epiphany. Like you do. I realised that the protagonists of my story could transcend their seedy junkie beginnings, and become iconic English figures. And not just any English icons: they’d be St George and Boudicca, sharing a flat.

Quite how all this transpired, I couldn’t tell you. I know that ‘I’ didn’t come up with it. But when ‘I’ decided to write it influenced by Milligan, that’s the solution that came up, and I knew immediately it was the right one. Why St George? Well, it was his day on the 23rd, and something interests me about the fact that many people are kind of embarrassed by the English flag. It’s associated with football fans and the far right, and I think that’s sad. Not that I’m any kind of patriot, but I don’t see why this potent iconography should be tarnished. A bit of research turned up the fact that St George had a Roman father and Palestinian mother. Perfect: what could be more English than an immigrant, given that the nation’s history is one of successive waves of migrants?

Something about St George and Boudicca sharing a squalid flat and being visited by their drugs worker ignited all kinds of notions in me, and what’s resulted — in the plotting of it, and the brief extract I’ve written — is the nearest I’ve so far got to a state of the nation play. Blimey. Whether the theatre company are interested in that play, or the other one, I’m chuffed that I’ve come up with two strong ideas that have stretched me in good ways. And I’d like to thank the version of Pete Milligan that exists somewhere within me, for contributing to the process. Nice one Pete. Thanks also to Ms Chapple for valuable feedback.

There’s an exercise I sometimes get people to do in writing classes, to do with status. It’s inspired by a scene in Fargo, in which protagonist William H. Macy goes to visit criminals to ask them to kidnap his wife, a course of action he’s sure will set things to rights but which of course has the opposite effect.

Things start badly when Macy turns up an hour late, which has made the bad guys annoyed, a point that they come back to much to Macy’s chagrin. It also transpires that the kidnappers want a $40,000 upfront payment, which Macy’s character hadn’t bargained for. On top of which, they’re — reasonably enough — confused about why he’d want his own wife kidnapped.

Each of the beats in the scene contributes to the overall sense that Macy is out of his depth. The fact that he does a lot of umming and aahing is a further indicator of his bewilderment. All of this occurs, by the way, in the context of Macy being in a liminal zone. That is, space that his character is not familiar with, which he does not know the rules for. His actions here will determine much of consequence — and it’s no surprise that having fluffed things this early on, they only get worse when the kidnapping actually commences.

Anyway, I use that scene to get people to look at what constitutes status, and then to demonstrate that understanding by having them reverse the situation. That is, have Macy be the high status character, and the kidnappers low. It can happen all kinds of ways. If the kidnappers are broke, then the offer of work puts them on the back foot. If the client has the power to blackmail the kidnappers into committing the crime, then once again s/he has greater status. Size tends to be a clear indicator, at least in some contexts: a big bruiser of a doorman clearly controls the entrance to a nighclub in a way that Charles Hawtrey would find it hard to.

There are more subtle signifiers too. If you go to someone else’s place, as host they have higher status — unless you bring with you the attitude you have in your own larger more expensive residence. Clothes traditionally indicate status in some circumstances — hence judges wearing wigs, and graduating students hiring mortar boards. And language is important: if asking for a favour, you’re probably best off beseeching the person with the authority to confer it rather than telling them what to do.

All these facets of status are considered and weighed up when we interact with people, and are therefore useful to take on board when writing a scene. At the moment I’m writing a few sample pages of script for a play I want to be commissioned, and have spent some time considering the respective statuses of the three characters.

The protagonist begins with high status as he has something — a highly marketable true story — that a publishing agent wants. But at the same time, the publishing agent has the ability to say yes or no to that story, which gives her considerable power: she has the keys to the kingdom. And her assistant, new to the job, apparently has low status — but for reasons central to the plot ultimately has the highest status of all the characters.

Working that dynamic out helps me decide how to play the story. Who has the opening gambit, how it might be responded to, and countered, and so on. And then how the whole situation changes when the agent’s assistant reveals her hand. Status alone doesn’t determine what unfolds, but it’s a key tool in keeping track of what’s going on for each of the characters — and that goes for any story you’re working on.

Someone contacted me earlier today by Facebook, asking if I’d be interested in writing the script for a low budget feature they intend to make. I had to pinch myself, since the filmmaker in question is someone I consider highly talented, and who I’ve always felt some kinship with despite us never having met.

And that approach is one answer to the question of why I maintain this blog. One collaborator, a good friend at that, has never really understood why I write anything for free. And it’s not something I can explain in purely rational ways. Maintaining a web presence is not easily reduced to something that can be identified in a cost/benefit analysis. I do it because I enjoy it. I do it because I want to build up my profile. I do it because I enjoy the discipline. I do it because of the unexpected things that happen to me as a result.

The filmmaker’s overture was not today’s only step forward. I had a meeting with a theatre company who’ve established a good reputation for their work, and identified an opportunity to collaborate that none of us were expecting when we first sat down around a coffee table. There was something we knew we would talk about, and we did. But then this other thing came up, which if all works out you’ll be hearing more about soon.

So, advance two spaces. It feels good, and it validates the approach I’m taking to develop my writing career. These are very interesting times, and it’s possible that Mr Gladwell’s tipping point is nearing for me. But, the trick is not to get too caught up in the possibilities. Right now, and write now, is what matters. There are three ideas to develop for the theatre company, and so far I have one. There is a short story to be read that the filmmaker wishes the script to be developed from, and the process of assembling my thoughts about it. Oh, and there’s the screenplay I’m writing, which is a little behind schedule. And a novel, for good measure.

All of this is fine. All of this has been achieved by making good use of my time. What seems to work is either doing work, or doing other things. No need for all that other stuff which used to consume me, about wondering whether I’d ever get anywhere, whether I was any good. All that kind of thinking does is waste energy that could be more productively used in writing, in networking, in blogging.

Put another way, the above amounts to saying ‘cut out the trying’. There is only doing, and not doing. Anything else is an indulgence. Which includes the speculation about approaching a tipping point. That may be the case. It may not be. Pondering about it is an irrelevance either way.

All of which gives a samurai-like dimension to the life of the writer. And why not? It beats endless agonising and reflection and recrimination. I’d rather be Mifune than Woody Allen any day. Except, for all the angsty stuff, Allen gets things done. That’s the thing. Also noted by someone on talking to Helena Bonham Carter about her husband Tim Burton, commenting what a practical man he is. That makes sense. Making films is not a pursuit for dreamers who only dream. This is a business. And it’s a business for people who get things done.

It’s 11.15 at night now. Time to do some more work. To write up the first play idea I have, and see if I can conjure another one. And then, I will sleep. A few nights ago, I dreamed of the filmmaker who contacted me today. I wonder what I’ll dream of tonight?

The thing with writing is, nothing’s wasted. There are things I wrote years ago that I continue to pull out and dust off and send out. And it’s happened again just now. Breaking In, which you’ll find as one of the scripts on this site, has been chosen as one of the plays that Drip Action will put on during a festival week in August. Which will be its third outing so far.

Breaking In was written in 1997, and the rehearsals started with the play two thirds written. Which is one way to do things, but not necessarily one I’d recommend. Fortunately we had two excellent actors in Johnny Lynch and Dee Whitehead, who guided by director Cris Green conjured up the characters from that first chunk of story, and then cemented it all into place when I coughed up the final third of the script.

The play was requested by Nottingham Playhouse, one of four off-stage productions I did there. I learned a lot doing those shows, not only writing them but getting involved in producing and direction, and — most important — having access to gaffa tape, the secret currency that theatre shows work on. They asked for a play about the power of language, and I did my best by incorporating what I was learning about hypnosis at the time as part of my NLP studies. The part where Greg and Jill are talking at the same time at the end uses a lot of that knowledge — fun for me to overhear from a RADA tutor in the audience that he was ‘entranced’ by the show.

It’s true to say that we attracted a larger audience to Breaking In than the Playhouse managed to pull to their main stage production of the time. Which I like to brag about because I wasn’t paid to write the script, so technically I can’t call it a commission. Sucky attitude, I reckon: if you’re going to ask people to write shows and not pay them, the least you can do is give them payback in some other form. Being able to use the word ‘commission’ would be a start: besides, what else do you call it when someone asks you to create some work for them?

Johnny and Dee were both in their 40s, and that and their relationship to the characters gave the production a particular feel. Johnny, quite a character himself, went out one night and only used lines from the script when he talked to people. One way to rehearse, I guess. A few years ago, a chance came up to put it on again with performers in their early 30s. David McCaffrey and Louise Hooper brought a very different energy to a production directed by Iain MacDonald at the Hen & Chickens in Islington, for a series of performances as part of the venue’s Guerrilla Theatre Week. Just as fun, though the organisers failed to produce the press reviews that we’d been promised. Hey ho.

And now it’s up for another showing, as part of a one week festival in which a number of plays will be performed. This time round I get to experience the novelty of payment — £150 isn’t much, but it’ll get me to Arundel and back to see it playing, and if I’m lucky I’ll receive another £200 for the best play. Fingers crossed. It ain’t all about the money, that’s for sure — but it’s just as surely welcome.

All this for a one-act two-hander, the starting point of which was me wondering about a man and woman whose first sight of each other is at extremes of their experiences — his appearance in CCTV footage on Crimewatch, and hers in a porn mag, the photo taken by a man who’s part of both their lives. If you like the sound of that, and you enjoy a good bit of swearing, I reckon you’ll get on with Breaking In.

Once upon a time, I kept up with the news. It was a habit that started when I did a politics degree, which coincided with the Russian state coming down and the IRA trying to blow Thatcher up. I also read Hunter S Thompson, who made following the news into an artform, stories turning up on the mojowire and sending him into a frenzy before spitting back his own incensed and partisan take on matters of the day. But over the years I’ve lost that fascination with information for its own sake. So, in recent years I’m aware of controversy around, say, Bill Clinton without being sure of the details. Ditto any of the more recent Tory leaders. And then there are nouns which surface and have little real hold on my consciousness, though I’m aware they have significance in the wider scheme. Blackwater. Intifada. Enron.

So when a friend said she’d bought us tickets to see a celebrated production of a play about the American electricity-to-everything supplier Enron, I was pleased. My trips to the theatre are rare, and this one was a doozy. Scripted by Lucy Prebble, Enron is a scathing trip into the Looking Glass world that is corporate high finance. Clearly Lucy has done her research, and used it not to present mere reportage, but to conjure the characters and court they inhabit, in which real world cause and effect, action and consequences, are abandoned in favour of a topsy turvy world where profit counts above anything else. As such, it’s a story that has its precedents in the likes of 18th century tulip fever, when fortunes were won and lost on growing and importing Dutch tulip bulbs…when they weren’t eaten by sailors who mistook the bulbs for onions.

Enron is a tale about hubris then, of men and women devising systems to make themselves wealthy in the face of any logic. The company prided itself on thinking outside the box, and in the process abandoned any connection to the sort of economics where actual people create actual goods which are bought and sold. Instead, it jumped wholehearted into the wibbly wobbly world of trading intangibles, such as the predicted cost of electricity at some point in the future. Only, such fancies have unanticipated feedback loops back to the world of matter, in this case leading to black-outs in the state of California. But hey, the lawyers can magic any attending problems away, right?

Not even the laws of physics would stop Enron’s leaders in their tracks. Having decided that they were going to offer video-on-demand to consumers, the realisation that bandwidth at the time couldn’t cope with the concept was not well received. Instead, it led to Enron trading in bandwidth like it did in other ephemerals.

Such hubris cannot go unpunished, and it was fascinating to see how the play presented the company’s downfall. The key was in hiding debts within companies that it owned 97% of, and redefining the sums of money so they no longer appeared to be debts. Nonsense on stilts, basically, and the massive debts lurking in the backs of the company managers’ minds were presented on stage as suited raptors, darting about the stage with red eyes, which themselves connected to another of the play’s visual metaphors. The effect was powerful and visually striking, and entirely apt to the state of mind of the power-crazed leaders of the company that America took to its heart for a while.

Enron went way beyond reportage into creating a play that is a powerul commentary on the state of contemporary business. The script and performances are moving, funny, scarcely believable while at the same time clearly grounded in truth. There’s no surer way to present satire than to offer a mirror to the world, and that’s precisely what this incisive play does — see if you can book a ticket while it’s still on in London.

This week’s Dragons’ Den featured an unusual solicitation from a gasmask wearing nurse and some bloodied mental patients.  They were part of a team bidding to raise £200,000 for a live horror experience in central London, a consortium of people active in a scene I’m tangentially aware of through a somewhat exhibitionist friend with cybergoth tendencies.  He’d been involved in a smaller scale interactive horror experience that seemed to be about freaking out the straights to use sixties parlance: ooh, people with body piercings eating flames, kind of thing.

I didn’t realise that there was a larger version of the live horror experience that traffics in six figure sums of money, but it makes some kind of sense.  Horror as a genre seems to be doing pretty well overall, if you take into account not only the constant stream of horror films appearing at cinemas, but the number of computer games based on a horror premise, and the amount of bookshop space devoted to horror.  You could arguably include misery lit within its orbit, though I hope we’re some way off from paying for live experiences where people vie to be the runner’s up prize in a domino tournament for OAP swingers.  We have, after all, got Jeremy Kyle for such titillation, and it’s all the better for the screen it puts between us and its subjects.

The live horror experience the medical mutants on Dragons’ Den were pitching was a very particular sort of horror, familiar to people who’ve heard of emo and Silent Hill.  Which is another way of saying teenagers, or people whose teens featured those icons.  It’s all very Slipknot; people with randomly bloodied costumes and hints of BDSM gear.  And I can see how such an experience would be enjoyable and could indeed make commercial sense, given the number of horror fans looking to drop disposable income on having the bejesus scared out of them.

What’s interesting is the range of experiences at the moment being offered to the live event fan.  I’ve spoken to a couple of people who’ve been massively impressed by the walking dinosaurs of, err, Walking With Dinosaurs, coming to an arena near you soon.  The show is a technical triumph; basically a beauty parade of animatronic dinosaurs ambling around while an excitable Steve Irwin type provides some sort of commentary as they frolic, fight, and fart.  And why not?  No surer way can have been devised of introducing children to the world of live entertainment than a show populated by monstrous reptiles with matching merchandise.  Ker-ching.

And that’s just the start.  Down in London recently I saw posters for what promised to be yer actual chariot races.  Like what they had in Rome.  I salute the logistical ambition of someone creating a show based on real horses pulling real chariots with real riders round indoor arenas given contemporary health and safety legislation, something the Romans never had to contend with.  Has a risk assessment ever been done on those cool scythes that come out of the wheels to hack at opponents’ legs?  The horses that is: presumably this is not thoroughbred stallions they’ll be using in these shows, more the equine equivalent of an Aldi 3 for 2 offer.

Where chariot races are in the air, gladiator battles are not far behind.  And yes, there are some of those coming up.  Jousting is fairly well established in the British summer holiday calendar, but I’m looking forward to seeing men marinated in olive oil prod at each other with short swords, tridents, and nets in the interests of entertainment.  Maybe put a few ASBO offenders up on crucifixes at the entrance to set the mood.

If all of this stuff was seen as evidence of the decline of the Roman Empire, what does it say about our own culture that we’re embracing simulacra of what a previous civilization did to get its kicks?  Are we too wedded to reproducing what has gone before, branding it with the name of something known and trusted, to come up with something new?  Or have we indeed reached the end of history, and all we have to look forward to is variations on a theme, starting with Obama’s plan to put America back on the moon, and ending who knows where and when…

I’m not a New Year resolution kinda guy, doing pretty well at setting directions for myself without the need for an arbitrary deadline.  But one desire, which came out of a couple of workshops I attended in December, was to take up classes in impro comedy.  And come January, that’s just what I did.  I did the second session last night.

What are my motivations?  Well, it’s partly about becoming more spontaneous in groupwork, which I’m sure will be useful in leading my own creativity workshops.  And with two coming up between now and early March, might as well hit the ground running.  Besides, being more flexible in the moment has got to be useful in any context.  Never know when I might get kidnapped by deranged gunmen and have to get out of it by improvising a ragtime song about Bin Laden.  Plus, coming up with ideas on the spot might help generate material for stories that I want to devote more time too.  And, somewhere in there, I feel the glimmer of an urge to do stand-up comedy, for the sheer hell of it rather than as a new career direction, and this can only help prepare me.

Last week’s class had three more people.  This week we just had three.  Plus the tutor, a New Zealander doing a Philosophy PhD.  Which may or may not help you answer the question of what kind of people run impro classes.  Anyway, Charlotte is a kind and good-natured philosopher, and her feedback as we went through the session was very helpful.

Broadly speaking, the class consists of exercises and games, the former preparing you for the latter.  One exercise was to stroll round the room pointing at objects and giving them the wrong names.  Sounds silly, but doing it with confidence takes a certain swagger, as you point to a cushion and declaim ‘Baby rhino’.  Finesse that for a few years, and you’ll be well equipped for work as a spindoctor.

The games you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? They’re tremendous fun to do, as long as you can rely on your colleagues to support you and play fair; ie accept the ridiculous propositions you make rather than putting them down.  The alphabet game is one classic, our first featuring two astronauts whose sentences begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet and magicking from nowhere a twisted scenario in which one astronaut’s oxygen is running out and the other refuses to share.

Our favourite game was one in which we created a poem on the spot as a trio.  The theme was to do with a character and their wish to achieve a particular goal, and our contributions had to rhyme.  I found my natural home as the third contributor, doing my best to wrap up the preceding lines to create something along the lines of a story.  And we managed that more often than not, which while not up there with the invention of the Swatch was nevertheless an achievement of sorts.

The biggest stretch for me, not surprisingly, were the games when physical rather than verbal skills were called for.  In one game we had to relay the death of poor Mrs McGinty to another player, and could only convey the means of her demise physically.  Sounds easy?  Well, each person adds to the sequence and has to remember and act out again what happened before.  By the end, she’d died as a result of shooting herself, having her eyes explode, injecting a lethal dose of heroin, being run over, having a safe fall on her, being strangled, subjected to eletrocution, attacked by a shark, and experimented on by aliens.

If you’re looking to limber up your imagination, and have a lot of fun with likeminded people in the process, I heartily recommend that you give impro a go.  And if you don’t believe me, think about some of its leading exponents: Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence, Ken Campbell, and Greg Proops to name a few.  Sure, you won’t make it look as effortless as they do, but achieving that effortlessness takes a lot of effort.  And that starts with finding where your local impro class is.

I come not to bury Ken Campbell but to praise him, because even though the old bugger’s gone and died on us I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulled some kind of stunt. That would be the Kennish thing to do, after all. Yes, dissatisfied by audiences in the here and now, Campbell is off doing research in the afterlife, and maybe it’ll be up to me to interview him through Ann, the medium I met regarding me writing a script based on her life story. And why not? If it hadn’t been for a medium, Ken would never have bought a huge telly to watch Jackie Chan films on, a story he relates here (Part 1): Part 2 and Part 3.

Ken Campbell has cropped up in my life a few times, and continues to feature in workshops on creativity I do, most recently at DruidCamp, a spectacle that Ken would have appreciated. I was the only male over the age of ten without any facial hair, and felt somewhat out of place because of this, but with his distinctive eyebrows and amazing presence Ken would have commanded DruidCamp, and got up to who knows what antics there. Basically, I use one of Ken’s tales to encourage people to get off their arses and do something fun: if you read about it here you have to promise likewise, OK?

Ken and I met a few times over the course of the last twenty years. First time was, as recounted above, in his picnic bench office in Walthamstow Marshes, where I was happy to listen to him tell me tales of the prophet of Haverstock Hill, and the secret of invisibility (the art of hiding in front of things, it turns out). The interview featured in a comic anthology called Discordia that I published while attending the London Cartoon Centre.

Discordia is the name for the Goddess of Chaos. At least the Roman name. The Greeks called her Eris. I first heard about her in The Illuminatus Trilogy, written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Discordianism – either a joke disguised as an ancient religion, or an ancient religion disguised as a joke – predated the books, and its ‘bible’, Principia Discordia, is written in part by Kerry Wendell Thornley, a counterculture figure with connections to the assassination of John F Kennedy. All of this improbable stuff, and much more, was brought to life in a theatre production of the trilogy, directed by Ken Campbell. He talks about it here and here.

I saw a few of Ken’s extraordinary one man shows, which are alternately hilarious and moving as he recounts tales of doing productions of Macbeth in pidgin English, expounds on the occult history of ventriloquism, shares his experiences in psychiatric care, and mourns the loss of loved ones by howling along with a huge sled-pulling dog. They are – were – amazing examples of a man determined to get to the outer limits of human experience, who lived to be amazed, and came back to tell the story.

And I came across him from time to time; on a training course in London, at a forum about the state of cinema at Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, and after performances at Nottingham Playhouse. He was always generous with his time, a warm and humane presence eager to swap tales and share laughter. More recently, I attempted to engage his services for an event I’ve been involved in. Nothing came of it, though that’s not because of Ken — sad to say, being hailed as a visionary and a genius doesn’t mean it’s easy to put food on the table. If anything, people were wary of employing him. Certainly, if you’d got any kind of preciousness or ego, Ken would be no fun to be around, and that applies to many of those who hold the purse strings in arts circles.

So, what is there to remember Ken by? Some amazing shows that anyone who’s seen will treasure. A scattering of tv and film appearances. And flotsam like the YouTube clips I’ve already linked to. And for me, I’ll keep telling Ken’s tale of the German artist that I already linked to, and hope to inspire people to discover within themselves a fragment of the madcap creativity that drove Ken to make the world a more magical place.

So, I finally got to see Willy Russell’s musical play Blood Brothers. And I get why it’s so popular, and very much enjoyed it, even if I disagree with a lot of Russell’s beliefs, at least as they come across on stage. Yeah, like he or anyone else is going to be bothered, 26 years into this phenomenon’s international touring history.

In essence, Blood Brothers is old-school Marxist thinking as rendered in three dimensions plus orchestrated sound by Jim Steinman. Steinman, you’ll remember, is the record producer responsible for Meat Loaf, whose approach could be summarised as ‘never knowingly understated’. I read an interview with him once in which he described his job being to produce music “for people who wear chrome pyjamas in leather beds”, and that sums up his melodramatic approach to musical narrative perfectly. Subtle, he ain’t.

The story is semi-Shakespearean, in kitchen sink drag. A put-upon mother of many children becomes pregnant once again, and ends up swapping one of her new twins in exchange for a week’s paid holiday from the posh woman whose house she cleans. No, it doesn’t make much sense if you think about it, even with some swearing on the Bible involved, but please swallow this conceit or what follows really won’t sit with you.

What follows is tried and tested stuff in which the twin brothers grow up in separate homes of very different sorts, but become bosom buddies none the less. Actually, the title of the piece gives away the nature of their relationship with more precision. One brother is socialised with proletarian values, the other becomes a member of the bourgeoisie. It’s put with slightly more subtlety than that, but only slightly.

It’s when the brothers are young – though played by adults – that the play was at its strongest for me. The performers (I was too much of a cheapskate to buy a programme to find out who, save that one of them, the mother of the twins, was a Nolan Sister) did an excellent job at bringing their characters to life as kids. Looked like some time had been spent to good effect getting them to inhabit what kids look and sound like – stuff that wouldn’t have been in the didactic script I’m sure, but was brought out in the rehearsal process. Anyway, it paid off: these sequences were lively and convincing.

Unfortunately, somewhat florid narration got in the way of emotional connection with the audience. Sequences that could have been conveyed by the good actors were rendered redundant by what amounted to voiceover. Perhaps this is because the show has its origins in what amounts to a theatre in education piece, and Russell wanted to make the script immune to the vagaries of directors and performers. Anyway, what it means is that the flow is interrupted from time to time.

This being a piece with a message, it’s no surprise that brother Mickey, the working class one, got a raw deal. Heading for minimum wage work while his middle class sibling swans off to university, it’s not long before Mickey gets caught up in crime, locked up, and hooked on medication to deal with depression. Or maybe that should be anomie, the correct Marxist term for what happens when workers are alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Yes, it’s heavy handed. But there’s also a kind of truth in that dogmatism, and when put to relatively stirring tunes with super-retro syndrums booming and thwacking away and a sax tootling over the top, it makes for grand entertainment. And that relieved me of notions of my place in the global economic order for a while and allowed me to enjoy myself, which is what musical theatre should be all about.

(Please note that Jim Steinman was not the actual musical director of the show on this or any other occasion: that was a metaphor of some sort.)