Wild Camden.
Posted: January 6, 2017 Filed under: Amusements, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Events, Interiors, Public Announcements, Wildlife | Tags: Almuth Tebbenhof, Andrzej Maria Borkowski, Camden art, Christopher Reid, Danuta Sołowiej, Heather Barnett, Jens Schaumann, Julia Schrader, Katy Evans-Bush, London art galleries, Marzena Pogorzały, Natalia Zagórska-Thomas, Roisin Tierney, Studio Ex Purgamento 1 Comment
Natalia Zagórska-Thomas wearing Julia Schrader. Photo © Jens Schaumann.
DS: Well, we managed to negotiate our way out of 2016 only to find 2017 looming before us like a rogue ice shelf. Yet although the festive season was full of foreboding there were occasional moments of optimism amidst the gloom; one of the most enjoyable events in my pre-Christmas calendar was the private view of Call of the Wild at Studio Ex Purgamento in Camden.
Antlers © Julia Schrader.
Visitors to the gallery are often wrong-footed by the address; it is located in a second-floor extension in a private home, a flat that belongs to artist and conservator Natalia Zagórska-Thomas and her husband Simon. If there was ever an enterprise that demonstrated devotion to an ideal of what art can and should be, Studio Ex Purgamento is it.
Going into the Thing Seriously; or These Influences Have Been Exerted for Good. © Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (alternative titles provided for the artist by Diane Williams).
Profit, apart from a tiny percentage above a certain price to try to recover some costs, goes to artists directly. Some years we sell a lot; others, not at all. I want to show established names alongside lesser known artists whose work interests me, and to mix visual art forms with text, design, performance, architecture, design, music and science. I show many Polish artists to promote their profile and contribution to the culture of the city.
As to the current show, Natalia describes it thus: This is not a tidy show. This is not a tidy subject. What I wanted is what I think I always want: a contemporary version of the cabinet of curiosities, a camera obscura, an idiosyncratic collection of specimens picked up along the way. It feels like life: messy, chaotic, undisciplined, joyous, violent and confusing.
Pale Blue Hexapod © Danuta Sołowiej.
Somehow, Natalia has managed to fit work by 25 artists into her small gallery; these include sculptures by Almuth Tebbenhof, Danuta Sołowiej, and Andrzej Maria Borkowski, wearable art by Julia Schrader, photographs by Jens Schaumann, Marzena Pogorzały (whose images of massive Antarctic ice sheets are elegant visual tokens of the strangled metaphor I opened with) and your own correspondent. The show also features an extraordinary ‘biological’ installation by Heather Barnett, and poems by such luminaries (and friends of The London Column) as Roisin Tierney, Christopher Reid and Katy Evans Bush.
Ice 3. © Marzena Pogorzaly.
© Andrzej Maria Borkowski.
You hardly need me to tell you that the London art scene is full of bullshit, any more than you need me to tell you that 2017 could be a rough year. We will need all the optimism we can get our hands on; and any blows against philistinism or the dead weight of cultural conformity are as welcome as they are necessary. As Katy Evans-Bush writes in Call of the Wild‘s exhibition catalogue: ‘At the time of going to print no one knows what’s going to happen next. Old ways of being uncivilised are being exhumed and new ones invented. The one thing we do know is that we will need to call on all our most civilised impulses – as well as our deepest, wildest aardvark’. Or, to put it another way, if you think the world is going to end tomorrow, plant a tree today. (Who said that? Answers on a postcard to …)
Ruan Minor, Cornwall, 1978. © David Secombe.
Gallery photos by Natalia.
Call of the Wild runs at Studio Ex Purgamento until 15 January; open weekends from 11 am — 6 pm. To visit during the week, call for an appointment. (132D Camden Street, London NW1 0HY; 07799 495549; info@studioexpurgamento.com. http://www.studioexpurgamento.com.)
Give a little Whistler.
Posted: November 6, 2015 Filed under: Architectural, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Meteorological, The Thames | Tags: 5th of November, Albert Bridge, flinging a pot of paint in the public's face, foggy day in London town, Guy Fawkes night, James Whistler, John Ruskin, Thames in fog Comments Off on Give a little Whistler.
The Thames at Chelsea in fog, November 2015. © David Secombe
From J.M. Whistler’s ’10 o’clock Lecture’, 1885, reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1892:
And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us …
The recent fog in London, despite its inconvenience for air travellers, commuters, etc., proved to be quite a popular meteorological event: instead of invoking Bleak House’s November gloom it made the city look impossibly glamorous. The above photo was taken on the evening of Sunday, 1st November, during a wander along the Chelsea Embankment: Whistler territory. The great American painter was a local from 1859 until his death in 1903, and his ‘Nocturnes’ of the Chelsea/Battersea foreshore transform the Victorian industrial Thames into a Japanese world of shadows and fugitive lights. (Whistler was fond of applying musical terms to painting, so his nocturnes derive from Chopin: by the same token, Debussy was a fan and his orchestral Nocturnes return the compliment, evoking the Seine in the same mood as the painter’s Thames.)
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver (Battersea Reach) 1872.
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, 1872.
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea 1871
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Gold (Old Battersea Bridge) 1872-5.
The final nocturne was ‘The Falling Rocket’, a sort of proto-Abstract Impressionist take on fireworks at Cremorne Gardens, a pleasure garden located roughly where Lots Road Power Station is now. You don’t need me to tell you that this is the painting condemned by Ruskin in terms incendiary enough (‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’) for artist to sue critic. Whistler won the case but was awarded joke damages and went bankrupt. No matter. Posterity has found in Whistler’s favour; he even has his own statue now, on the north side of Battersea Bridge.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Black and Gold (the falling rocket) 1875.
This post is really a couple of years late, as there was a reportedly excellent show of Whistler’s Thames paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I say ‘reportedly’ because I was marooned on the south coast at the time and missed the bloody thing. But I’m back now, which is why I chanced to be walking along the Chelsea Embankment on Sunday night … (As it happens, I am writing this on Guy Fawkes night. Even in the pissing rain, I can look out of my 6th floor window and see the whole city lit up by sparkling lights. Some of them are even fireworks.) D.S.
Blind Chivvy.
Posted: August 6, 2015 Filed under: Architectural, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Churches, Eating places, Entertainment, Food, Graffiti, Housing, Literary London, London Music, Performers, Vanishings | Tags: 12 Bar Club, 1890s London, Arthur Machen, Brydges Place, Corpus Christi Maiden Lane, Denmark St., Dennis Nilsen, Ernest Dowson, Larry Parnes, Mariachi at E.N.O., Rules Restaurant, Save Tin Pan Alley, The Port House Strand, The Salisbury 6 Comments
Brydges Place, looking towards St Martin’s Lane. © David Secombe 2015.
From A London Phantom by R. Thurston Hopkins:
I spent many evenings with Dowson in the Bun House. Though the name of this rendezvous has a doughy sound, it never at any time offered buns to its customers. It is just a London tavern, but it was part of the literary and newspaper life of the eighteen-nineties. It was there that I saw Lionel Johnson, the poet, John Evelyn Barlas, poet and anarchist who tried to ‘shoot up’ the House of Commons, Edgar Wallace, just out of a private soldier’s uniform, Arthur Machen in a caped ‘Inverness’ coat which he told me had been his regular friend for twenty years. …
After I had met Dowson a few times at the Bun House we would sometimes rove forlornly about the foggy London streets, initiated bohemians, tasting each other’s enthusiasms. … As we wandered about London at night we often played a sort of game which we called Blind Chivvy. The idea was to find short cuts or round-about-routes from one busy part of London to another by way of slinking alleys and byways which then were not well known to the average London man.
D.S.: We at The London Column like to think of ourselves as being in the vanguard of the Ernest Dowson Revival, but we can’t deny that our Ern remains something of a niche interest. My friend CJ – one half of the award-winning (really) wine blog, Sediment – is unconvinced by my claims for the poet who wrote the quintessential ‘decadent’ poem of the 1890s, Cynara. That said, CJ liked the sound of ‘Blind Chivvy’ and agreed to join me for an afternoon in a bid to play it. Admittedly, we were doing it on a bright July day rather than a murky November evening, and a few things have changed since Dowson’s time, but the promise of some light lunchtime drinking rendered CJ putty in my hands. We met at The Port House on the Strand, an Iberian sherry bar located in the building that was once The Bun House. In the candle-lit gloom, CJ and I munched tapas, drank white wine and attempted to visualise the interior peopled with the bohemian talent of decadent London. We failed. The ambience in the Port House is that of a bodega in Madrid, and there was no way we were going to conjure up the shades of Dowson, Johnson, Machen or anyone else. But it was a start.
Ernest Dowson has left the building … The Port House, Strand. © David Secombe 2015.
Emerging from the Port House, I led a dubious CJ into a narrow entrance next door. Exchange Court is one of those ancient pathways off the Strand that bears witness to a lost London landscape. Halfway up this remnant of 17th century town planning there is a courtyard behind a new (early 1990s) bar called The Porterhouse. Before the construction of this establishment, it was possible to come here – a spot no-one had any reason to visit – and discover a genuine fragment of the ‘Great Wen’: a desolate cul-de-sac that Dickens would have recognised. When I visited in 1984, you could still see the original box office window of the Adelphi theatre, complete with Victorian London prices, bricked up in an alcove. Then they built the pub and the alcove disappeared. Now they store barrels here and the court seems almost cheerful.
We followed Exchange Court to the end and emerged in Maiden Lane, CJ looking around him like a lost Japanese tourist. ‘Where are we now?’ Doing my best Peter Ackroyd, I replied that Maiden Lane was one of the oldest thoroughfares in the West End – and, in the same mode, indicated a plaque above the Adelphi’s stage door commemorating the murder of William Terriss. ‘Who? What?’ On cue, the shutter of a loading bay was yanked open and for a moment we had a glimpse of the business end of a working theatre. The sight of the vast maw of an empty auditorium brought back memories of other West End venues, not to mention Proustian associations of childhood visits backstage. Me: ‘What’s playing here now?’ CJ: ‘Kinky Boots’. We moved on.
Your correspondents reflected in the doorway of Rules. © David Secombe 2015.
We crossed the road to look in the window of Rules, ‘the oldest restaurant in London’ (est. 1788). To celebrate the august history of its dining rooms, Rules’s website features a poignantly misjudged piece of copywriting which is worth reproducing here:
As well as being frequented by great literary talents – including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Galsworthy and H G Wells – Rules has also appeared in novels by Rosamond Lehmann, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Dick Francis, Penelope Lively and Claire Rayner.
Whilst studying the menu I asked CJ if a publisher had ever taken him to Rules and he looked at me beadily, suggesting that I might be confusing him with someone else; Ian McEwan, maybe. Or Marian Keyes, perhaps.
Bull Inn Court. © David Secombe 2015.
Rules faces Bull Inn Court, another alley where Dowson might have gone to find company (‘absinthe makes the tart grow fonder’ is his line); in July 2015 it is a spot where office workers go to juggle cigarettes and smart phones. But a couple of doors further along, the tone is abruptly elevated by the ecclesiastical majesty of Corpus Christi. Mirroring the promise of the Adelphi, its doors were invitingly open, affording views of ‘the grey twilight of gothic things’ (or the 1870s repro version) in WC2. Dowson converted to Catholicism in the last years of his short life, so it’s at least possible that he took communion in Corpus Christi. In any case, we yielded to the lure of its gilded interior and behaved like a pair of sightseers, taking photographs and lighting candles (25 pence a go).
Corpus Christi. © David Secombe 2015.
We backtracked west along Maiden Lane, down Chandos Place and thence into Brydges Place. We have featured Brydges Place on The London Column before, so I won’t dilate on this atmospheric passageway here – except to note that there were more homeless pitches since my last visit and the stink of piss was overwhelming. Brydges Place debouches into St Martin’s Lane next to E.N.O., where we emerged to see a Mariachi band posing on the steps of the Coliseum. Mexican dance music seemed like a bit of a departure for English National Opera, but the band looked fun and an obliging gaucho performed some impressive lasso moves for the cameras. Diverting as it was, this wasn’t the woozy, drink-soaked metropolis we were looking for, so we repaired to The Salisbury to re-group. The Salisbury was once a well-known gay pub, extensively referenced in the Dirk Bogarde film Victim, and where the serial killer Dennis Nilsen cruised in the 1970s and 80s – but any flickers of the city of dreadful night were banished by the holiday crowd ramming the bar. The Salisbury’s ghosts were as lost to us as those at The Bun House. We sat behind an etched glass window, drank London Pride and swapped stories of career disappointment. The phantom of Thurston Hopkins’s essay, who they fear is haunting them on their nocturnal rambles through London, is a man Dowson described as having ‘a face like a wizened bladder of lard’ – but in the noisy saloon of the Salisbury, CJ and I were merely haunting each other.
Mariachi at English National Opera. © David Secombe 2015.
Opposite The Salisbury is an entrance to another 17th century survival, a passageway called Goodwins Court. Needless to say, Goodwins Court was a surprise to CJ, who remarked upon the beautiful bowed shop-fronts (18th century, I am told, although they are no longer shops, and it is hard to tell exactly what they front now). When I was a boy my parents took me to a show-business party in the house at the end, the one that abuts Bedfordbury. The host was the late Tony Sympson, an actor whose family were instrumental in preserving Goodwin’s Court against destruction. I remember a jewel-box of a house composed of implausibly large rooms, their Regency elegance constituting an act of defiance: as late as 1978, the threat of wholesale demolition still loomed over Covent Garden. The house is still someone’s home; perhaps the most desirable place to live in all the West End. Next door is Giovanni’s, a discreet Italian restaurant popular with old-school actors and producers. I have purple memories of this place too: a lunch with an actor friend which deteriorated into an afternoon lurid enough for me to give up drinking for months afterwards. After mistily reminiscing on all of the above, CJ pointed out, not unreasonably, that those anecdotes are specific to me, and that the state of my liver was of little interest to him.
Bedfordbury, looking into Goodwin’s Court. © David Secombe 2015.
Taking the hint, and with time against us – CJ’s dinner beginning to call, in far distant Mortlake – the rest of our dèrive went at something of a galop. By this stage, I had a destination in mind, a spot with more recent associations than the 1890s. We walked swiftly up Garrick Street, crossed Long Acre towards Seven Dials, cut up West Street (past The Ivy and those strangely conjoined twins of tourist theatre-land, The Mousetrap and Stomp), crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, continued north on Stacey Street – alongside the vast bulk of the Covent Garden Odeon and beyond the fragile greensward of Phoenix Garden – and finally arrived in crumbling, doomed Denmark Street.
In the 1950s Denmark Street (‘London’s own Tin Pan Alley!’) was London’s music business quarter, an Expresso Bongo world of post-Suez Britain. Then, the street was the domain of the impresario Larry Parnes, (much-mocked svengali of improbably-named singers like Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle, and some others who actually made it), songwriter Lionel Bart (‘King of Denmark Street’), the jingle writer Johnny Johnston (Softness is a thing called Comfort, Beanz Meanz Heinz, and 5000 others), and all the other personalities of the pre-Beatles universe. In the 1960s The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Donovan, Bowie, Hendrix all came here to record, in studios carved out of 17th-century basements. Ten years later it was the turn of the phlegm-flecked protégés of Malcolm McLaren (the ’70s version of Larry Parnes) The Sex Pistols, who rehearsed and lived here for a while. And, whilst he is unlikely to get a blue plaque, Dennis Nilsen – abovementioned, hanging around the Salisbury – spent the early ’80s working in a jobcentre that used to be on the corner with the Charing Cross Road. This jobcentre’s speciality was the catering industry, and for one Christmas staff party Nilsen made his colleagues punch in a large cooking pot he brought from his home, the same pan he used for boiling his victims’ heads.
Hanks, Denmark St.; Centre Point behind. © David Secombe 2015.
There are still music shops to be found on Denmark Street, but the redevelopment of St Giles has been the cause of much anguish amongst London’s music lovers, as first the Astoria and then the 12 Bar Club have been laid waste in favour of Crossrail and a looming corporate/retail zone. Around 1900, the year Dowson died, the great loss London suffered was the destruction of Wych St. and environs to create ‘new’ Aldwych and Kingsway (the subject of one of our previous walks). That particular act of civic philistinism didn’t just obliterate some of the prettiest streets in the capital, it cauterized life on the streets – which is exactly what it was intended to do, removing ‘unwholesome’ theatres and booksellers and erasing one of London’s cultural centres. The destruction of the area around Denmark Street is the 21st Century equivalent. How do we characterise it? London dans le style Boris, perhaps, London après Cameron, London sans coeur, etc. Chalked graffiti on the hoarding in front of the remains of the 12 Bar was eloquence itself …
Hoarding where the 12 Bar Club used to be. © David Secombe 2015.
By now CJ and I were starting to feel generally chivvied out. The day-glo office blocks opposite St.Giles in the Fields measured the gulf between the city of our imaginings and the one we are actually stuck with. Calling it a day, Charles headed for Waterloo and his train to Mortlake, and I boarded a quasi-Routemaster 38 to Hackney. Sitting on the top deck, in an interior as retro as the Orla Kiely catalogue, I considered the dilemma: if Soho is dead, if the West End is dead, if Chelsea is dead, if Shoreditch is dead (no cheering please), what is left? A Bright New World safe for out-of-town consumers to play in – but not somewhere you would want to live, even if you could afford to. Hence London becomes the new Dubai, and Margate the new Peckham. Good for Margate, perhaps, but London as a place of invention and creativity becomes no more than a historical footnote. Don’t look for culture here, mate, only ad agencies can afford the rent. Live music? Try the relocated 12 Bar Club – it’s on the Holloway Road (if you can find it). No call for it round here, pal. The revolution will not be televised – but you can download it as a podcast.
Denmark Place. © David Secombe 2015.
(I have just noticed that this post is the 250th on The London Column. I was going to apologise for the fogeyish tone, but then thought ‘why should I?’)
See also: In Search of Old Wych, The Riverine Strand.
Adventures in the Voice Trade.
Posted: February 16, 2015 Filed under: Amusements, Artistic London, London Labour, Performers | Tags: Andy Secombe, Ken Humphries photography, Star Wars artistes, Star Wars franchise, voice-over artiste, Watto Comments Off on Adventures in the Voice Trade.
Andy Secombe. Photo © Ken Humphries.
NOT RESTING by Andy Secombe:
The address is a unit on an industrial estate in West London in the shadow of a mouldering brutalist tower block that would have looked ugly in Soviet-era East Berlin. Even though it’s a Sunday, 747s on final approach to Heathrow growl endlessly overhead and the traffic on the North Circular rumbles incessantly across a flyover not a hundred yards away. The unit’s door is locked and, after some minutes trying to get a response from the intercom entry system, you lose patience. You try several tactics: shouting, pressing the buzzer for sustained periods of time, eventually succumbing to violence, smashing the already broken intercom unit with your fist and, finally, your face. At last, as if by magic, the door opens. It’s a young chap in full evening dress.
‘Oh, hello. Bloody thing’s broken,’ he says, cheerily, indicating the now cracked and bloodied intercom. ‘Go on in – everyone’s in the green room.’ He pulls out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You all right? You’ve cut your forehead.’
You stare at him for a moment in disbelief. ‘You’re wearing a tuxedo.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He looks a little sheepish. ‘Well, you know, I thought, James Bond…’
‘Sorry?’
‘Thought it might help me get into character.’
‘Character?’
‘For the recording.’
Phil Pope and Andy Secombe. Photo © Ken Humphries.
The approach, as ever, was last minute:
‘Andy, mate, hi! I was wondering if you were available tomorrow. I know it’s short notice and, unfortunately, we can only offer expenses, but I’ve been lumbered. I don’t think you’ve met Terry – the guy who owns the studio – but he’s been asked to tender for a string of idents for a new commercial radio station. I wouldn’t usually ask, but things are pretty tight at the moment and we really need this. I mean, no one’s being paid – Terry’s taking a loss on this. The thing is, we’re in competition with a few other studios for this gig, so it’s got to sound classy and for that, of course, we need top talent, hence: this phone call. The thing is, if they like what we do, they’ll put a lot more work our way. It could be a regular little earner. It’s a James Bond spoof – should be fun.’
Let’s deconstruct this a little.
The upfront “Are You Available?” from “Mate” is designed to grab your attention; the promise of work sets any actor’s heart beating just that little bit faster. All hopes are immediately dashed, however, by the word “tomorrow”, which could not state more clearly that his first second, third and possibly fourth choices have turned him down. But as your capacity for dealing with disappointment and ignoring tactlessness has been honed by years of practice, you think, Hey, it’s a job, let’s not be too precious.
Then he hits you with, “We can only offer expenses”. The beautiful dawn of hope just risen in your breast – complete with birdsong and the gentle plashing of heavenly fountains – not to mention the wonderful vision of you striding manfully into your local NatWest with a large cheque (or even a small one) is replaced by a feeling akin to leaping from a hot air balloon clutching an anvil. This feeling, however, is short-lived as, almost immediately, with the realisation you’re being taken advantage of, pressure builds in the magma chamber of rage called your heart, which, swollen by years of poor pay, poor conditions, and being taken advantage of by ‘Mates’, searches for release. Knowing this, and anxious not to have his eardrums blown out by your pyroclastic fury, he follows up almost immediately with the “I’ve Been Lumbered” ploy, designed to both deflect blame away from him and to prevent you from venting your molten rage which you must now swallow.
After all, it’s not his fault, but the fault of someone higher up the pecking order, in this case, the “Studio Owner”. This tactic implies that Mate’s hands are tied: that uncaring management is breathing down his neck and you are his only hope of salvation. This is not true. Mate – the studio recording engineer – and the studio owner are, in all probability, business partners and this little plan was no doubt hatched over a three-bottle-lunch at the local gastropub. And finally, the icing on the cake, the promise of future and regular work. This, both you and he know, is a myth but, paradoxically, is almost always the clincher.
You consider your options for a few moments.
‘When you say, expenses..?’ you ask.
‘We’ll pay your rail fare, petrol money… Tell us how much you need.’
Translation: We’ll give you a tenner.
‘When do you need to know?
‘Now.’
This is what’s known as the rush, designed to leave you no time to think or to talk things over with your spouse. And yet, however many times you hear this tired old argument and, despite knowing it’s all bollocks, you somehow still find yourself saying,
‘Well, OK.’
After all, it might not be a bad way to pass the morning: there’s bound to be someone you know there and it’s always nice meeting old friends. Besides, the studio – on Greek Street – has got leather sofas, a coffee machine, free Wi-Fi and Sky Television in the green room.
‘Oh, by the way, our studio’s being refurbished – so we’ve had to relocate temporarily. We’re on an industrial estate near Acton – I’ll email you the address.’
You put the phone down, feeling used and slightly soiled. Nevertheless, somewhere between the phone and the kitchen, you somehow manage to convince yourself that allowing yourself to be exploited by people well able to pay you is a noble calling.
Spouse sits at the kitchen table, elbow deep in bank statements and bills, and immediately you have one of those tingly, out-of-body experiences, born of the sudden recollection that tomorrow you promised to look after the kids while Spouse’s rich best friend – who has a lead part in a long-running soap – was going to treat her to lunch at the Ivy: a long looked-forward to treat; a little oasis of glamour in the otherwise endless grey desert of child-centred domesticity.
‘You’ve done what?’
‘Well…’ you begin unsurely, ‘As you said yourself, I can’t really afford to turn anything down at the moment and…’ You find yourself reiterating the lies Mate has just fed to you. They sound even more ridiculous in your own mouth. You talk of the future: although there’s no money this time, who knows what may happen further on down the line? It could lead to more work… I could be in on the ground floor of something huge!
The rest of the day passes in tight-lipped silence and, following the unwritten laws that underpin marriage, you cover yourself in ashes and pay penance. You take out the rubbish, you walk the dog, you rush to change every shit-soiled nappy, you cook supper – her favourite: seared tofu in quinoa with grated raw celeriac – you eschew watching the final episode of Breaking Bad in favour of Strictly Come Dancing and, when it seems you can sink no lower, you find yourself phoning her mother to thank her for the fingerless gloves she sent you for your birthday and allow her to tell you the details of her recent hysterectomy.
Andy Secombe. Photo © Ken Humphries
You push past the Moss Bross-suited youth and find yourself standing on a thin, water-stained carpet in a dank reception area smelling slightly of damp – hardly the womb-like, leather-clad, luxury experience you were looking forward to. Following the sound of voices, you pass down a small corridor which eventually opens out into a sort of green room, equipped with the latest in used Styrofoam cups and melted plastic spoons. The instant coffee jar is empty because most of it’s in the sugar bowl and the only tea bags on offer are the squeezed-out ones lined up by the kettle. The young cast lounge on a selection of ancient, mismatched furniture of indeterminate colour. The sofa, as specified in the standard non-Equity contract, is mouldy, stained and leaks stuffing like a squashed cockroach. On a small table in front of it is a large foil dish on which are the remains of lunch – your lunch. In a tangle of Clingfilm lie half a tomato, a green smudge of mustard and cress, a dollop of egg mayonnaise and half a sausage roll. You search in vain for a familiar face, then feel a slap on the back as someone bellows in your ear,
‘Andy, my old darling, how are you?’
You turn and find yourself staring into the face of a man you hoped you would never see again. Indeed, after the last time you worked together, you told yourself you would rather eat your own liver than repeat the experience. To the list of people one should never work with, just after animals, small children and, of course, amateurs, should be added, The Desperate.
‘Michael,’ you say, attempting to replace your look of horror with something approaching friendliness. You can’t. Your face is beyond your control, like an alien clamped to your head it refuses to obey your commands and draws itself instead into a half-scowl, your lip curling upwards while your eyes narrow beneath knotted brows. You end up looking like a dodgy impersonation of Bert Kwouk.
Michael grabs your arm and pushes you into a corner. ‘So, how are things?’ Without waiting for an answer, Michael leans in, too close, and mutters ‘I haven’t worked for nine months,’ as his fingers crush your forearm, his stale breath brushing your cheek like the stench from a recently-opened tomb. After twenty minutes or so, when Michael draws breath in the middle of a deeply disturbing anecdote about a dresser, a pasty and a tube of KY, you ask if there’s a script. Michael, momentarily wrong footed, pauses long enough for you to free yourself from his iron grip and go off in search of what are known in the business as ‘sides’: the loose leaves of script that are usually provided on these occasions. Your eye lights on a pile of tea- and tomato-stained pages on the table.
As you read, your heart sinks even further – it’s beyond execrable. You consider walking out the door. But you can’t. Mate sometimes does pull you in for the odd paid job, and, despite his unforgivable exploitation of you on this occasion, you want to keep in his good books.
You’re stuck.
When you look up from the script, Michael catches your eye again, so you hide in the loo.
Twenty minutes later, Mate comes and finds you, asks if you’ve had everything you need, whether you had lunch, if you’ve had a coffee.
‘No,’ you say.
‘Great,’ says Mate. ‘Have you seen the script?’
‘Well…’ you begin.
‘Great,’ says Mate again, ‘I was up all night working on it. I’m rather pleased with it. You’re playing Q – you know the sort of stuff, lots of jargon. It’s just the one scene, with Moneypenny and Bond, should be very funny.’
One scene, you think – how long can that take?
Thankfully – as Michael is likely to argue with anyone who will listen about the interpretation, pace, volume and intensity of every word – your scene is not with him; it is with the evening-suited youth and the blonde ingénue playing Moneypenny.
Andy Secombe. Photo © Ken Humphries
At last, the cast is assembled around the microphone, scripts in hand.
‘OK,’ says ‘Mate’ over the headphones, or, ‘cans’ as they’re known in the business. ‘I’ll give you a green.’
The green light just under the microphone blinks on and off. Nothing happens. “Moneypenny” has the first line, but remains dumb, frowning intently at the script as if it’s one of Kierkegaard’s knottier propositions.
Mate comes over the cans. ‘Anything wrong?’
You realise what the problem is: “Moneypenny” is not wearing cans. ‘Hang on,’ you say, taking a pair of headphones hanging from the mic stand and passing them to her.
She looks at you as if you’re something stuck to her shoe. ‘Do I have to wear those? They’ll ruin my hair.’
‘Yes, you have to wear them, otherwise the recording engineer won’t be able to communicate with you.’
She grabs them bad-naturedly, placing them deliberately but delicately over her expensively-coiffed hair.
‘Right, can everybody hear me now?’
“Moneypenny” scowls up at Mate beaming through the glass window of the control box. ‘OK, yah.’
Mate gives a thumbs up. ‘Let’s try that again. Green coming.’
The cue light blinks on again. Nothing, again.
‘What’s that little green light for?’
As patiently as rage will allow, you answer: ‘It’s a cue light. When it blinks, you speak.’
‘Oh, right. Yah.’
‘One more time. Green coming.’
The cue light blinks. She speaks. ‘Right, now look here, zero-zero seven…’
Mate’s voice crackles in your ear. ‘Um, sorry, Matilda, it’s “Double-O Seven”.’
‘Well it’s written, zero-zero seven.’
‘Um… yes, I suppose it is, but it’s pronounced, Double-O Seven.’
‘Look I got a 2:1 in Third Century Middle Eastern Ceramics, so I can read. There are three figures here: two noughts and a seven. In my book that’s zero-zero-seven.’
This dents even Mate’s ever-cheerful carapace. ‘Er… Good point, but the thing is, as Double-O Seven is the name he usually goes by, we’re going to stick with that.’
‘The name who usually goes by?’
‘James Bond.’
‘Who?’
You stare at her incredulously. Even “Bond” is aghast.
‘Er… Ian Fleming? You know – Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, Dr. No…?’
‘No.’
‘Have you never seen the films?’
‘Is this from a film?’
You can sense Mate’s patience wearing thin. It’s the only enjoyable moment of the day so far.
‘Ah,’ says Mate, ‘It’s like this: Moneypenny is M’s secretary, and-’
‘Who’s M?’
‘Yeah, um… er… Andy, you can probably explain better than me…’
Bugger him.
‘OK, er, Matilda, is it?’
She stares at you like you’ve just dropped your trousers.
‘It’s like this…’ You explain, as succinctly as possible, the set up, the history, the mores and quirks of a franchise that has been running for nigh-on sixty years, at the end of which she gawps at you incredulously.
‘Sounds like something my grandfather might have watched.’
‘He probably did.’
‘Well how am I supposed to know about it then?’
‘Well, it is common knowledge amongst most people who haven’t spent the past decade studying Persian ceramics.’
‘Assyrian, actually. Are you taking the piss?’
When you finally leave the studio it’s dark. Managing to avoid Michael and his inevitable invitation to go for a drink (you’d be paying), you melt away into the night. Trying as best you can to purge your mind of the memory of the day, you pick up a bottle of Chateau Londis on the way home. In your mind’s eye, Spouse greets you at the door, sees past the wilting offering to the thought behind the gesture and beams her gratitude.
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she says, ‘Your day sounds awful. Well, don’t worry, Matthew’s asleep, I’ve made a chilli and we can settle down in front of the TV with a film.’
The reality doesn’t live up to expectation. You walk through the front door to World War Three – the baby is screaming, a smell of burning pervades the kitchen and your flowers look even worse in the cold light of disdain. Now, you reckon, is not the moment to tell her that you’ve blown the tenner you were paid on wine and flowers.
Spouse orders you to take charge of the kitchen while she puts the baby to sleep – again; you open the wine and are halfway through the bottle by the time dinner – slightly singed – is ready.
Finally, settling down on the sofa in front of the news, with a steaming bowl of what might have once been minced meat, but now has the consistency of grit, you ask your beloved how her day has been. Compared to your day, she has been through the equivalent of the Anzacs’ landing on Gallipoli. With an attempt at levity, you say, ‘Well, it’s better than working…’ This is not wise.
Dawn slants in through the venetian blinds and worms its way under your eyelids and you wonder, not for the first time, when you last spent the night sleeping on the sofa.
Never again, you promise yourself. From now on I will value myself and my talent and on no condition let myself be exploited by unscrupulous “Mates”.
Happy with your resolve, you roll over and try to move your body into a position where the sofa’s broken spring is not poking you in the back. Then, just as you are drifting back to sleep, the phone rings.
‘Hi, Andy, mate. Look, I feel really bad about asking you this…’
But this time, you tell yourself, things will be different…
Watto (voiced by Andy Secombe) from the Star Wars franchise.
… for The London Column.
The London Column 