Ken Campbell

First published in The Independent, 1994

The main square in Bury St Edmund’s is packed with citizens. A military band is playing and American officers stand next to the mayor, saluting. Something to do with D-Day. Up the road people are shuffling into the nicely preserved stalls and circle of the Theatre Royal to see actor, writer and director Ken Campbell perform ‘Jamais Vu’, one of his legendary one-man shows. Ken ambles on, preceded by the hypertrophic eyebrows which, when he lowers his hairless head, appear as greying hamsters filing across his brow. The boiled egg eyes roll quickly round the auditorium before he kicks off with a convoluted anecdote about how he came to be doing the show he is now in the process of doing.

It seems, according to Ken, that Richard Eyre, Artistic Director of the National Theatre had had the idea that since they were doing all three of David Hare’s plays why didn’t Ken open his new one there and then do ‘Furtive Nudist’ and ‘Pigspurt’ and they could call it the ‘Year of the Trilogy’. So Ken goes along and Richard says ‘You know about the Hare trilogy?’ and Ken says ‘Yes. I understand you want a Bald Trilogy.’ And the discussion went so well that Richard suggested that since Ken was going to Sydney, Australia, why didn’t he pay a visit to Vanuatu in what used to be called the New Hebrides so he’d have something to talk about?

Before that bit, though, there was the business about the sink plungers. One minute the people of Bury St Edmunds are in the Royal National Theatre and the next Ken is sticking a sink plunger on his shaven head and they’re off down memory lane with the actor Eddie Davis who, Ken claims, once took a curtain call of My Fair Lady with no less than six sink plungers sucked onto his pate.

Ken loves Eddie Davis, describing him as a comedian who wanted HYSTERIA – an audience HELPLESS – BEGGING FOR LESS. When Ken says things like this you can hear the capital letters as if they were printed out on his large, discoloured teeth. Take away the shag-pile brow foliage and the thyroid gaze and you’ll still get value from the voice alone. Like Peter Sellers, Ken seems to have either half a dozen normal voices or none at all.

On stage the condition is even more advanced: he will mutter nasally, roar hoarsely, whine confidentially and generally produce a menagerie of vocal effects that, harnessed to his labyrinthine anecdotes, enforce a sense of chaos being channelled, only just, through one man’s gristled throat.

Anyway, the plunger, he informed an anxious Eyre, will constitute a central component of his next show, the one we’re watching now. Except now, of course, Ken has been to Vanuatu and has much, much more to talk about.

Ken’s devouring fascination with the unlikely, the fortuitous and the tangential helped spawn such unforgettable shows as ‘Illuminatus’ (1976), twelve hours long with intervals (“the intervals were a big hit in Liverpool”), an uproarious trawl through the worlds of conspiracy theory, numerology, mystics and pyramids which, incidentally, saw Prue Gee, mother of Ken’s daughter Daisy and “my ex-wife and friend” play Eris, the Goddess of Discord. Then, in 1980 at London’s ICA, there was ‘The Warp’, based on the life and visions of UFO-seer Neil Oram, clocking in at a compact twentytwo hours. In between alternative times, Campbell has racked up a respectable career as an actor, including stints in ‘In Sickness and in Health’ and ‘Brookside’. This has paid the rent while Ken has been concocting his own productions.

Ken had left RADA in 1960, and the tone was set early on; while sharing a flat with two dwarves, one of his first jobs was in Bournemouth directing the shallow-end acting in a swimming-pool based version of ‘Treasure Island’. After some relatively straightforward work at Stoke-on-Trent and the Royal Court in London, his subversive inclinations found their first full employment in the Ken Campbell Roadshow, which ran from 1969 to 1973 and made him famous.

The Roadshow’s currency comprised urban myths and tall stories dramatised by Ken and performed by promising young newcomers like Bob Hoskins. After a while the shows started to generate their own myths; it was under their umbrella that the first six inch nail was hammered into a man’s nose; it was here that the first ferret was lowered into the trousers of a valiant, and presumably leathery, performer. Presiding over all this was the comic genius of Ken Campbell, deftly presenting the wild tales that fascinated him with the confident touch of one who knew how to stage mayhem on a nightly basis.

The apprenticeship has borne fruit. Now, at the age of 52, Campbell is acclaimed as the master of the one-man comic show, a genius at marrying wit to the wilder shores of synchronicity. Last year, ‘Jamais Vu’ won the Evening Standard award for Best Comedy and delivered him from the admiration of cult audiences to a much broader constituency. He has just wowed them at the Almeida with ‘Mystery Bruises’ and, next Saturday the ascension will continue when Ken presents a brand new show, ‘Knocked Sideways’, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank.

But this particular June afternoon, Ken is at home in north London, working on a new script with two trusted henchmen, Colin Watkeys and James Nye. For some time Ken has been involved with Reality on the Rocks, a prestigious series on cosmology currently being made for Channel 4. It features Ken as a loveable but sceptical Everyman who gets to quiz quantum boffins about their inscrutable theories. The producers think it would be really marvellous if Ken were to work some of the cosmic materials into a special one-man show to be staged at Brentwood Theatre the following Saturday. They’ll have cameras there and will insert passages of the show into the documentary. Ken has risen to the occasion, as expected, but it’s Wednesday afternoon already and the producers want at least an hour’s worth off him. In the second half he has decided he’ll chat with his old visionary chum Neil Oram, now an enthusiastic participant in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “I am a supposer,” Ken says,”but Neil is a knower!”

Which is where Charles Fort, an American journalist, comes in. Ken loves Charles Fort. Understand Fort and you’ll understand Ken. In 1919 Fort published ‘The Book of the Damned’, a collection of weird and unexplainable phenomena culled from newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. Fort was content simply to record without theorising – he believed in the unity and connectedness of all things and felt that the apparent disconnection of events should be no barrier to supposing (he was also a major supposer) that a grand and unfathomable machinery organised them as well as disorganising us. Which is more or less how Ken sees anecdote. It’s not that his lurid stories lack narrative per se it’s just that they’re not links in a chain. They’re strands in a Gordian knot.

At the moment, Ken’s feeling uneasy about how to portray his recent meeting with Stephen Hawking. “I have this thing about cripples. And he’s the Brain of Britain. And it’s difficult to talk to him. Anyway, one thing I wanna…” He abruptly leaves the room.
“One thing you wanna…oh. He’s going to the loo, I presume,” says Colin. He turns to James. “Did you say that thing to Ken?”
“Yeah,” says James.
“Let it fester away, then. Let it fester away.”

Colin Watkeys, stocky and bearded, is Ken’s manager and outside eye. James is a red-haired youth with specs. It’s not clear yet what he does for Ken but he has sheaves of photocopies on his lap and he’s in the inner sanctum.

The sanctum is Ken’s place down by the River Lea in Stamford Hill. It’s an appropriately incongruous neck of the woods – a lost bit of London at the top end of the Seven Sisters Road between the Hasidic community and the big reservoirs. The estate is actually rather yuppyish, a private road enclosed by smart little terraced houses ranging up from the pleasant shock of the riverside.

“We’re only smoking in the kitchen today, chaps,” Ken announces. “Neil’s coming round with his daughter, raised in a violently anti-smoking manner. It’s a bit of thoughtfulness, so he’ll talk to me about aliens.”

Having smoked, the kitchen team moves to the sitting room with a view of jungle garden. A homely dog climbs onto the sofa. His tag reads ‘Fred Campbell’. Around the sitting room are a number of lewd wooden statues staggering under the weight of giant pillar-box-red penises. They must be from Vanuatu, where they worship the Duke of Edinburgh. Or were they from St John’s, Newfoundland, where, Ken announces, they didn’t know that you didn’t actually have to finish Stephen Hawking’s book with the result that everyone there had read it?

Essentially, Ken monologues at Colin and James in a style poised between anecdote and performance while Colin listens intently and James scribbles things down. Ken is musing on Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair, which carries not only the distinguished cosmologist but also his voice synthesising apparatus. “The thing about Hawking…you can’t tell if he’s too polite to press his ‘Fuck Off’ button. If he’s got one.” Ken warms to the theme, grasping the handle of his blue plastic shopping trolley, the battered and much-used carrier of Ken’s props and surprise items. “His voice is very good, in fact. It comes out of the back of his trolley.” He puts a brown hat on top of the shopping trolley. “That’s my impression of him!” Colin and James hoot with laughter, simultaneously shocked and delighted.

“He’s got three sorts of voice he can use: they’re called Perfect Paul, Uppity Ursula and Whispering Wendy. He prefers Paul. Anyway, I said to him ‘Stephen, what you want is an ironical Yes button.’ So he says ‘Yes’.” Ken imitates the flat, abrupt voice of Hawking’s voice machine. “And then he said ‘Maybe.'”
“Yes,” Ken growls. “It’s hard to know if he likes you. How would he show it? I think I wanna talk about his trolley language.” More laughter in the house. “Yeah…what would he do? Would he run it over your foot?” That goes in the notepad, definitely.

Colin, who rarely takes his eyes off Ken’s face, is getting excited.”I do think that’s a very human way into all the science, Ken.”
He is interrupted by noises at the front door. “That’ll be Neil,” Ken says and then, without a pause “Who’s that mummified figure they bring out from time to time in that college?”

I see my chance to be helpful. “Bog Man?”
Ken is suddenly immensely fierce. “NO!! Not Bog Man!” he shouts. For three seconds the loveable goblin bristles with irritation and contempt, then moves to the open window. “Don’t let that little girl fall in that pond!” he barks. In the back garden a young woman in a long dress is holding a baby. She smiles nervously. Must be one of Neil’s three wives. A stooping, grey-bearded figure looks up, blinking beatifically. Neil Oram, radiant advocate of the unfathomable invisible, is taking a turn round the jungle.

Ken nods and carries on chatting about David Deutsch, an Oxford quantum physicist with an extremely untidy house. This makes for very promising material, as does the business of James Tilley Matthews, a Victorian asylum inmate who drew up plans for a giant persecuting machine that emitted effluvial rays causing the brains of the unwary to lengthen and burst. James Nye and Ken have sensed that there are links between the parallel universes theory of Deutsch and Matthews’ hell world. All will be revealed on Saturday night

The Brentwood Theatre is packed out and the camera crews from ‘Reality on the Rocks’ are cluttering the downstage area. As soon as Ken ambles on it’s clear that something is terribly wrong. His mind has either gone blank or there’s too much in it. Ken, not to put too fine a point on it, is crap. He stumbles, hesitates, mutters unintelligibly, gesticulates vaguely, flubs all his best gags. It’s down to Neil Oram, sage watcher of the skies, to revive the evening.

Neil, whose flies are undone, is otherwise splendid in papal purple shirt and waistcoat. Patient and good-humoured with a faint West Country burr to his voice, he reveals that flying saucers are, in fact, alien thoughts. Certain types of alien, acquired by abduction, are hyper-developed twelve week old foetuses. Cattle mutilations may be the means by which they absorb protein through their skins. On Ganymede, a satellite of Jupiter, live twelve thousand Earth people, developing their minds before their apocalyptic return. Assuming that Jupiter survives the comet.

“What I want to know is, Neil, why haven’t I come across any of these aliens?” Ken enquires. The sage strokes his beard. “Ah. They’re too difficult for you to encounter because you’re so high profile, Ken.”
Ken Campbell is high profile indeed. He’s also pretty hard-headed and too much of a pro to be unduly bothered by the cock-up at Brentwood.

“It’s a bit vast and weird,” he says, “that Tilley Matthews area. I thought it would automatically collide and fit in with my native wit but it was more native than wit, I’m afraid. It’s like these things often are at the beginning – you appal yourself and then it pulls together.”

Sitting across a table in the bar of the Almeida Theatre, smoking roll-ups, Ken Campbell presents only a modestly reduced version of his eye-rolling, voice-bending stage persona. There’s a faint edge of irritability obtruding from beneath the generally affable manner and for a man who professes a wish to share his experiences of the uncanny he’s pretty canny about deflecting personal questions – his technique being to have heard another question instead. On matters more Fortean he is, naturally, forthcoming. The significance of wild theories, for example, is perfectly clear. “They’re an area of humour. Most humour is neophobic – it expresses everyone’s fear of anything new. Mine is more the humour you find among the geezers at science fiction conventions, the neophilics who embrace projection, prediction and novelty.”

What about certainty then, does he need it or is he just certain that things are uncertain? Ken grimaces – either the roll-up or the question is faintly distasteful. “Yeah, well, some things seem pretty certain. I mean, when I was with Professor Roger Penrose he told me that actually there’s no such thing as time and then he said ‘Blimey, it’s half past six – I’ve got to run!'”

This is Ken Campbell, the old-fashioned comic with a taste for particle physics, demonstrating the collision between his down to earth love of the well punched gag and his taste for the unexplainable. Of such incongruities are careers made – in Campbell’s case his in-your-face delivery, his wacky props and his lack of cynicism align him more with music-hall than alternative comedy, yet he routinely deals with vanguard ideas that threaten to dissolve the most cherished assumptions about reality. In his rather blokish world of anecdotal pint-swilling eccentrics there are few women and little politics but the thrust, nevertheless, is resolutely modern. This makes for an uncomfortable comfiness, an attractive disturbance.

Since losing the calling for the full-length play – “It wasn’t stage-fright, it was play-fright” – Ken is freer than ever to mould his professional life around his most absorbing preoccupations. “I’d much rather meet someone who saw a gnome last week than someone who’s being quite successful as Macduff, or who danced rather well yesterday!”

The Fortean comic cackles loudly. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall the audience won’t meet a gnome. What they will meet are foaming aerosols and what he calls a “real shaggy dog story” in which the life and times of the enigmatic hero Werner are extended so far that they commingle in an improbable way with a commentary on the practices of a notorious cult of self-improvement. The mixture is described as improbable because Werner, it should be noted, was Ken’s dog before Fred.

1994

Bexhill Bummer – Intro to ‘What Did De La Warr?’

It sounded good on the phone. My partner from the days of Lumiere & Son, Hilary Westlake, asked me if I fancied writing a speech for an event to be held in Bexhill-on-Sea on August Bank Holiday, 2005. The De La Warr Pavilion, a 1930s Modernist architectural gem on the seafront of that town, had been refurbished and an enterprising producer had approached Hilary and some other artists and performers with a view to commissioning them to devise an entertaining opening ceremony.

My job would entail writing one single speech, to be used by an actor impersonating a VIP who had been invited to open the building. The VIP would prove to be so incompetent that the building itself would be affronted and attempt to silence him by flashing its lights, rumbling its plumbing and finally erupting with gouts of water and clouds of steam. Live music would be provided by French performance group Les Grooms while the building would be animated by Avanti Display. One of the perks of the job would involve a trip to France for a week’s discussion and rehearsal.

I started thinking about just what sort of incompetence the VIP might demonstrate. I concluded that he hadn’t done his homework and had arrived under the impression that the Pavilion was of the sort used by cricketers in the course of a match. This would cause him to digress dramatically from an appropriately themed opening speech.

I spent several hours on the first few paragraphs then sent them to Hilary to get some feedback before proceeding any further. I also wrote to the producer, requesting a portion of the money up front, as per standard practice. A day later I learned that the funding for the entire project had fallen through.

It felt a bit like a film experience – the one where you write outlines and treatments and sample scenes for no money and nothing whatsoever happens. It had never happened to me on a live performance project. And I had half a speech that would never get used. I’m mounting it on the site because I quite like parts of it and it would only go off otherwise.

2005

(Warr is pronounced wear or ware. I didn’t know that until I was told. I was pronouncing it war or waugh. 01/2024)

What Did De La Warr?

an unfinished monologue commissioned for a celebration to mark the completed refurbishment and re-opening of the De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea in 2005. The celebration never took place as funding fell through. I stopped writing at that point but I quite like some bits of the first draft hereunder.

All the geographical and some of the historical references in this monologue are to real places, institutions and events. I imagined this fastidiousness might lend the text a frisson communicable to locals in the audience.

The VIP speaker has not done his research and thinks that the Pavilion is used to house cricketers.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with a sense of tremendous pride that I am able to welcome you this evening to the opening of the splendidly refurbished De La Warr Pavilion. We are gathered here, in this elegant and inspiring entrance area, to pay tribute to the vision and indefatigability of a number of highly motivated individuals, civic groups, local supporters and national benefactors. Before acknowledging the contributions of these dedicated people, I would like to invite you to consider some of the rich associations conjured by the idea of the ‘pavilion’.

Those of you here, and there will, of course, be many of you, with a passion for cricket, particularly that generated within the hallowed precincts of the Sussex County Cricket Club, which has thrust forth such legendary national team captains as C. B. Fry, who, it will be remembered, did much to foster international relations when he suggested, in 1934, to Herr Hitler that Germany might take up test cricket, a suggestion that the German leader did not put into practice although he did see to it that a group of boys from the Hitler Youth would visit our country where they were made welcome on the HMS Mercury training ship at Southampton which dear old CB ran with his wife of 48 years, Beatrice. Southampton is, of course, readily accessed from Bexhill by the A259 which leads, after a few miles, to the junction with the A27 at Polegate, after which it’s a pretty straight run along the South Downs through to Hampshire. This, of course, forcibly brings to mind Rother Council’s splendid Polegrove Recreation Ground in Brockley Road, Bexhill, site of the Bexhill-on-sea cricket club, which returns me to my theme and our common purpose here tonight.

I was a Number Six man myself but I had among my retinue boys who were partial to Senior Service, Kensitas and even the rather racey Peter Stuyvesant. There we would gather, of an early morning perhaps, or during break time, sheltered from authority’s gaze by the bike sheds on one side and, on the other, the Stanley Evershed Pavilion, donated to the school by that renowned industrialist from Lincoln who did so much to establish the tubeless tyre in this country to the extent that the term ‘tubeless tyre’ is now in broad household use. Lincoln, founded by the Romans and formerly known as ‘Lindum colonia’ from the Celtic for pool, itself a popular pastime even to this day and easily reached via, largely, the A21, M25 and A1.

Cupping our hands around the forbidden ‘fags’ as we called them – this was before the gay community had commandeered the term, nothing wrong with that, I hasten to add, if cricket has taught us one thing it is that every team needs its Deep Fine Leg and must be prepared to deploy a number of unconventional positions in the field – we would inhale deeply, thinking nothing of the very real possibility that we were stunting our growth.

Indeed, as we are gathered here in celebratory mood, I can say that I have enjoyed a number of cigarettes a day since the age of fourteen and can report no significant developmental arrestation, as my smiling and recently refurbished wife will aver. Only joking, of course, she is a lovely woman and sports the same firm, regular bodily features that drew me to her so hotly when she was a youngster, if I may refer again to sports, that great binding theme that glues us to this large opening.

So there we have it – a place where groups of men may slip out of their workaday garments, ease into a protective box then don the distinctive whites before striding out to seek the sweet spot on the wooden bat before the slender stumps. And afterwards, regardless of what has been notched up, these tired but limber teamfolk, now stained at the knee with chlorophyll and at the groin with red leather, will troop into the welcoming hall clitter clatter the sounds of spikes upon doughty concrete where the players’ wives have laid out a terrific spread “Oh well done Margery!” the cry of the captain as he spots the neat sandwiches and bright fancies. And Arthur ‘Girly’ Brickham, useful medium pace bowler, turns to me and jovially calls, as he always does, “Come on, ‘Smutty’, Inky pinky parlez vous!” referring to the slightly saucy song beloved of sportsmen around the English-speaking world, I’m sure you can all remember a verse or two:

(SINGS) Two German soldiers crossed the Rhine – Parlez vous
Two German soldiers crossed the Rhine – Parlez vous
They kissed the girls and drank the wine. (BREAKS OFF)

Actually, they didn’t ‘kiss’ the girls but there are children present, surprisingly, considering the late hour, but I think you’ll get my meaning if you’re from Effingham in Surrey. Which is, of course, the headquarters of the Effingham and Leatherhead Cricket Club.

2005

not to be continued…

Jokes

A ‘lecture’ commissioned by Forced Entertainment for ‘Marathon Lexicon’ (2003)

I like a laugh, me. I’d do anything for a laugh. I look for opportunities. You have to. You have to watch out, be tuned. After a while you’re joking all the time. Which could be fucking sad. A person that can’t stop joking. You read about them – famous ones that were sad all the time when they weren’t telling jokes or doing their act. What is better is to know that if a situation arose in which it was advisable to joke all the time then you could handle it. This is very satisfying, like running the marathon. If you’ve run the marathon you know if someone fell off a cliff and was trapped halfway down you would be able to run reliably to the coastguard. In the same way, the fulltime joker would be able to stay with the person and tell them a great many entertaining jokes until help came.

At this point I need to tell you about Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands was a member of the IRA who had been interned in Long Kesh, one of the notorious H-Block prisons set up by the British in their war against terror. He died in a prison hospital after a 65 day hunger strike. Once I was sitting with some people outside a pub on a nice day in north London. We were all involved in making a film with Sally Potter and were waiting for the next setup. Around a table were six of us, including my dear friend Keith, although he was not particularly dear then, and his then girlfriend Marie. I began to tell a joke that I was fond of. You should tell them fairly soon after hearing them because they are usually gone after three days. It seems that when Bob Marley died he went straight to heaven, as you would expect of such a gifted artiste and who should he meet and he’d only been there a few minutes but Elvis. Wow, Elvis, I’ve always really loved your work said Bob and Elvis said That’s very kind of you Bob, I have enjoyed your music greatly as well. In fact said Elvis why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow we’re having a bit of a do. Fantastic Bob thought, I’ve only been in heaven a short time and already I’m going to Elvis’s place for a do. So next day he goes across to Elvis’s part of heaven and there are tables laid out with white cloths and everything but to his surprise he finds Elvis in a corner, crying. Hey what’s the matter Elvis said Bob. It’s that fucker Bobby Sands said Elvis he’s eaten all the sandwiches.

At times the dedicated and adventurous humorist will make mistakes, often in the area known as ‘going too far’. This is an occupational hazard. In the area of sick humour, the humorist enters a rich domain in which schadenfreude, glee and the depraved eternally return, bursting forth under the intolerable pressure created by the unthinkable. The risk is that for every chorus of glee vented by those who are so appalled that they crave the exhilarating double shot of moral amnesty and anaesthesia, there is present in the house someone who has simply done the work, stared unblinking into the horror and suffered the suffering. These are the people who just don’t get it.

Having finished my Bobby Sands joke, I smiled complacently, awaiting the laughter that would be my reward. There were, indeed, some titters, but my enjoyment was curtailed by the look of profound unease on Keith’s face. As I turned to examine him more closely, I noticed that Marie had gone white. Her hand was clutching her glass tightly and her gaze had suddenly become baleful.

“Do you want this drink in your face, David?’ she enquired, rather quietly.

I began to stutter. Marie was obviously upset by the Bobby Sands joke. I had got it wrong. Not the joke, the audience. Without moving, all the figures around the table receded. As they drew into the distance, I noticed that they all appeared to be ill. Marie continued to glare at me coldly.

“Um…I…I’m sorry…that you didn’t like the joke,” I squeaked.

Marie got up and walked away from the table. Keith was the first to speak.

“Oh dear.”

And then he said, “Marie works on the H-Block Committee.”

This committee, in case you’re in any doubt at all, was formed by Republican sympathisers to support those imprisoned in the H-Blocks.

Over the next few days I told people about my joke and Marie. They couldn’t see why I was upset. “Fuck her,” they said. “Tell her to get a sense of humour,” they said. And “Why on earth are you worried?”

Those who live by the joke know that when you go bog-snorkelling you do not glide above the mud, you wriggle through it. You cruise close to the coast of the unthinkable, taunting it with the unsayable, toying with the moral obliteration, saying the unsayable, gasping with glee in the temporary moral vacuum. So I wrote Marie a little letter, conceding that her presence in the firing line was unfortunate and that I was sorry. I couldn’t say that I had not meant to give offence because patently the giving of offence was very much the thrust. Ideally the gift is followed by its conversion into nervous energy: it backfires. On this occasion the gift fired.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He had no memory at all. Not just short term, everything. You’d say stuff and it was gone – straight through, never stopping. He was also very frail. Just a little bird of bones and shakey legs. I was leading him across the dining room in the retirement home. A lot of oldsters were eating lunch or sitting around. I let go of my Dad for a minute to retrieve my youngest daughter. I kept an eye on Dad though. Suddenly his trousers fell down. He’d forgotten to put a belt on. He was wearing battered old white pants with his shirt and vest tucked into them. His legs were very thin and shiny, with sores on them where he’d scraped his shins and they were taking ages to heal. His thigh muscles were wasted. I ran across the dining room and took hold of the trousers and pulled them up. Dad was muttering something like “What’s going on here?” Most of the old people were silent but two old ladies said “Oh dear” and laughed.

2003

§§§§§

I Must Be Joking – Intro to Jokes

I got a call from Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment. The company had been touring a show called ‘Marathon Lexicon’ for which pieces of writing had been commissioned from a variety of writers and academics. The pieces had simple titles and were assembled into an alphabetised collection. The show would run for several hours, during which some but not all of the lexicon would be presented. The audience could come and go throughout the presentation if the prospect of sitting still for twelve hours unsettled them.

Tim asked if I would write a piece on jokes. As I’m rather keen on jokes I was pleased to take the commission.

I knew I had a couple of unused joke-related bits somewhere on my hard disk so I dug them out. The text for the anecdote about Bobby Sands was adapted from the outline to an as yet unwritten autobiography, as was some of the material on humour and risk assessment. The rest of it was fresh.

I haven’t seen the show yet – I’ll have to wait until it comes to London again.

2003

Note: the ‘autobiography’ stalled at about 140 pages. I tried calling it a ‘memoir’ in order to make it feel less burdensome. It didn’t make a lot of difference. (2019)

Note: I have finished it. (2023)