Tales from my handbag

Friend X has a proposition for me: do I want to be a supporting artiste on a short film being made in Brighton? I’m to play ‘mature lady at a dinner party’. Any opportunity to show off, thinks I although I’m not sure about the ‘mature’ bit. When I learn there’s nudity and tomfoolery with creamy desserts AND buff thespians (ones off the telly) involved, I get very excited. My spirit is soon dampened when I learn I’ll be decked out in Harris tweed. Furthermore, my bouncing locks are to be scraped back and moulded into a sort of frigid librarian bun (a bit like my old Junior School teacher, Mrs Wibberly - yes, that was her name). When they’ve done with me (the hair takes longer than expected as daring bits keep trying to escape the confines of the bun), I meet up with my ‘husband’, Lionel, a gentleman with big teeth and a mustard sweater. Lacking any directorial lead as to my ‘motivation’; am I a chatty type? do I eat meat? how strong is my bladder? - I create my character - Daphne. Lionel and I are swingers although he’s very big boned so we decide he’s more of a voyeur than a participator. Daphne, however, throws herself into almost any milieu, most of it going on in Peacehaven. On set, famous telly actor is playing the piano in a private apartment. Daphne is sitting on a sofa, smiling serenely. Next scene, Daphne wears an Alice band and Lionel is hoola hooping on a Wii.  Daphne laughs a lot in this scene. Next scene, there’s a crowd of party-goers in a corridor. Daphne is in sludge coloured top with chunky necklace, chatting to Anthony, an effete older gentleman who keeps popping Polo mints. Famous telly actor barges past and nearly knocks Daphne’s ‘Shiraz’ all over Polo man’s shirt. Daphne looks miffed but then, noticing that telly man is barefoot, assumes a perplexed visage. Daphne then gets into a huddle with Polo man, as foreground for a close-up of telly man looking a bit deranged, this time with socks on.  We do low chat but I throw in a few shriekish laughs to fit in with my swinging personality. In the dressing room, it takes a while to shake off Daphne. Well, I am a professional, after all.

Acrobatics - let’s leave it to the Chinese shall we? There was a time when the only acrobatics you saw came courtesy of Olga Korbut and her steroid sisters, tossing and a-tumbling on the telly in pursuit of Olympic Gold. Now, everyone’s at it and I have to say, the flic-flacs and triple twist back flip with cartwheel combos are just not the same. Take the Insect Circus, witnessed at Brighton Fringe Festival. For a start, they weren’t real insects. They were people dressed up as wasps.zzzz Secondly, they were shite. There were ants standing on other ants’ shoulders and there was a bunch of bed mite hand puppets squirting water at the audience. Not forgetting the ‘bull’ fight with a stag beetle that was so piss poor, I was shouting for the coup de grace. I was hoping for a strip tease in a teacup to alleviate the boredom but this being a children’s show, we had to make do with a ladybird in a sequinned bra doing hula hoops. Come back Billy Smart, all is forgiven.

“What good is sitting alone in your room. Come hear the music play”, sang Liza. So when in Berlin, on a four day city mini-break, I thought, must see the Berlin Philharmonic. However, said orchestra and its crazy haired conductor, Simon Rattle, had gone on its hols to Salsburg which meant we were left with a manky bunch of fiddlers from the former Eastern bloc and their camp conductor, Igor. The concert was called ‘A night in St Petersburg’ so I knew it was going to be a bit Nutcrackery. However, what I wasn’t expecting was a troupe of lumpen ‘dancers’ in nylon ball gowns who couldn’t cock a leg  higher than their Slavic crotches. Needless to say, the highlight for me, was the jumbo pretzel in the interval which had an interesting cheesy filling. Other highlights: sitting on a toilet that David Bowie/Iggy Pop may or may not have also sat on, doing the cha cha cha at the gypsy ballroom and losing my passport at the airport on the way home.

Modern dance. Who, what, why? Questions left unanswered last night, despite two hours of dancing, prancing and bouncing to the unmelodic strains of a central heating system. Eat your heart out Margot Fonteyn, this was more nutcase than Nut Cracker. There was lots of running on and off stage, standing like a coat hanger and doing what looked to me like a contemporary Gay Gordons but without the skipping. And for variety, they threw in a bit of group semaphore. Plinky plonk went the violin. Bouncy, bouncy went those tight buttocks. SOS went the arms. Meanwhile, the man sat behind me had some sort of stomach condition. Trump or rumble? Who cares? This was art.

Ever since Christopher Boulter’s Bill Sykes bludgeoned my Nancy with a rubber mallet in 1970, I’ve had a soft spot for Oliver, the musical. At the weekend, I went to see some other 10 year old with a uni-brow and matching tash commit murder most horrid behind a bit of mdf. Rather like the Bill of my youth, this Bill couldn’t act to save his life but he had a marvelous lisp which made up for it. Dodger was ginger and Fagin kept fluffing his lines. Nancy, bless her heart, was three feet taller than the rest of the cast and had obviously been to the London Bridge branch of SpecSavers but her Oompahpah was tremendous. Other highlights: Mr Brownlow’s Peter Wyngarde sideburns and the valiant efforts of the assorted extras to casually mill around the postage stamp stage without a. bumping into each other or b. crashing into the cardboard book shop and Victorian vegetable barrow. Talking of vegetables, next day, on the allotment, Len, the hairy road sweeper with the Filipino, vegetable hating internet bride, approached me with an offer. If I wasn’t too bothered by excess gas, would I be interested in taking a bag of Jerusalem artichokes off his hands. It was a very windy night.

Karaoke is cracking. Frazzles are fab. Together, they make for a formidable Saturday night’s entertainment. The location of my weekend Bacchanalian extravaganza is a small village hall on the outskirts of Brighton. I know this is going to be a night to remember when I’m accosted at the door by a man in trackie bottoms and Chinese slippers who’s selling raffle tickets. I buy three strips and make my way to the karaoke where two tuneless pre-pubescents are caterwauling their way through P-p-p-p-poker Face . At the bar I am served by a sneering teenager with enormous knockers who is smoking and eating a mini quiche while simultaneously thrusting said knockers at the man in Chinese slippers (who’s too busy preparing his trolley of Lambrini-esque prizes to notice). When it’s my turn to perform, I warble my way through ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to’, ruing the day I chose a song with so many choruses and soooo many high notes. After I’ve hit the last duff note, there’s a not inconsiderable round of applause, but that could be for the six year old boy who’s been spinning on his head for the last half an hour and who has just moon-walked his way to the toilet. I make up for my shocking singing with a near-perfect Macarena but lose my way during Agadoo. At which point I call it a night and go home to watch Casualty.

I do like a bit of showing off so when I was asked to be an actor in a natural disaster training exercise for some Foreign Office types, I jumped at the chance. We were on location in a Sussex forest. Except it wasn’t Sussex; it was Kretinsburg, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, an unruly, God-forsaken place, full of hare lips and polyester tank-tops. There had been a mud-slide and a team from the Foreign Office had flown in to assist any British Nationals in the region. My first role was that of a surly soldier in charge of checking bags at the ‘airport’. This mostly involved me rifling through delegates’ ruck sacks and confiscating Kit Kats. Every now and again, just to mix things up a bit, I’d slide my gun up and down someone’s leg, a sneer dancing over my thin Soviet lips. I then played  ‘Jane’ a British national who had a mouth like a sewer and a missing husband, ‘Alex’ who had asthma and a poor sense of direction. After that, I was driven to ‘Kretinsburg’s General Hospital’ where I played a woman with hypothermia who spent a lot of time pacing the ‘wards’ dressed in bacofoil, moaning a la Lady Macbeth. By the end of the exercise my fingers were ice and my emotions raw. As for the delegates, I believe a few had nervous breakdowns. That’s show business eh!

How many saxophonists does it take to burst an eardrum? Who knows but I can tell you that when there’s seven of them in an enclosed space and they’re jamming hard, doobie, doobie, do, and the spit’s flying, it’s not advisable to sit on the front row. The leader of the band had a gammy leg so he was sat centre stage for the duration of the set while other band members wandered on and off, drinking beer while admiring each other’s finger work. There were also a lot of appreciative ‘yeahs’, ‘woahs’ and head noddings from band and audience alike as soloists went into dizzy raptures with their instruments. In fact, the bass guitarist seemed to spend most of his time on the verge of an orgasm judging by his gaping mouth and squinty eyes. Disappointingly, I didn’t see one black polo neck although  there were a lot of people with beards, including one woman but that’s jazz for you.

I’m not a fan of folk music; tin whistles and tapestry waistcoats leave me cold but I do like a berber with a bongo so I was very happy to go and see Tiramisu or whatever they were called. They were a lively bunch of swarthy gentlemen dressed in robes and wrap-around bonnets and they played a pretty mean geetar. The lead singer resembled Keith Richards (weird but strangely cool) while his sidekick was a sort of Bob Marley type (hair like a brillo pad and wavy arms). That was last week. Last night, I went to see a blast from the past - Yellowman, a cross between dance hall reggae and High School Musical. Another lively performer, now in his sixties, Mr Yellowman came on dressed like a basketball player and proceeded to high kick and grind his scrawny groin at the crowd. How we whooped. The audience all had dirty necks and wild, stary eyes but they were very appreciative of Mr Yellowman’s gurgling and moaning. I quite liked it too.

If God was still alive he’d have done a Reggie Perrin yesterday, such was the mayhem of Brighton seafront. I challenge anyone to enjoy a game of volleyball when, a. Concorde 2 is playing host to a thrash metal screamathon involving bats, babies and quite possibly lesbian vampires, b. there’s a hairy bikers’ convention in full throttle, and, c. said hairy bikers’ are all experiencing a simultaneous mid life crisis and think they’re Dennis Hopper, giving the world the finger from the comfort of their own low-arsed,  ’sit up and beg’ motorbike that looks more like a commercial lawn mower. All that, and there was a force 10 gale and intermittent showers causing our ball to go anywhere but inside the court. This meant, every now and again, one of our ultra clean and perfectly manicured Men’s Health readers had to go and retrieve the ball from amidst the melee of greasy ponytails and bandanas, thereby risking being weed on in an act of ritual humiliation. Phew, what a day.