Not eating, but waiting

Passing the time last Thursday morning between my weekly turn on Radio Scotland and lunch…

Here I am perched on a stool by the Chinese romance DVDs at the Charing Cross Library killing an hour before I meet my friend Janet for lunch, before spending the afternoon trying to find something to do before I attend some musical soiree at a church in Piccadilly which is something to do with The Guardian and VSO.  Why is it that as a Londoner I can’t think of anything I’d really want to be doing in central London – one of the most exciting cities on earth – for a few hours whereas if I was abroad there would be dozens of exciting prospects.  All I really want to be doing is updating my Facebook status and I can’t even manage that because there are no free unsecured networks I can log onto.  It’s pathetic.

I shall tell you this instead.  After previously moaning about Nigella Lawson serving food which took under four minutes to cook yesterday I was obviously punished by the kitchen gods for mocking a saint of theirs by being on the receiving end of an example of behaviour from the other side of the culinary coin.  I remain fascinated how in the French café I lunched in, where I was literally the only customer, and where there were at least four members of staff that I could see, it took over half-an-hour to produce the croque monsieur I ordered and ten minutes more than that to show up the with the frites. Remember a croque monsieur is a ham and cheese sandwich fried in butter, then topped with béchamel (just what someone of my girth should be eating) and frites are small shards of potato cooked in fat.  The sort of thing a French café can’t be astounded to be asked for, especially when you consider it’s on their menu.  But the time it took to appear you’d think I’d asked them to bone a dozen ptarmigans blindfolded.  With their hands tied behind their back.  I wouldn’t have particularly minded – I’d only gone out for lunch to get out of the way of my cleaner  (no I can’t do my own cleaning that would be ridiculous) – if the sweaty top-lipped South African maître d’ hadn’t refused to acknowledge that anything might be slightly wrong and obsequiously brushed away my queries.

I didn’t order a coffee (only because I needed to be in Camden for nine pm) but while he was checking with me for the second time that I didn’t want “anything hot to complete the meal” he unexpectedly became rather keen to explain what had gone wrong.  Nothing as far as I can see.  Apparently it had bugger all to do with ineptitude in the kitchen but rather the phone had rung once with an enquiry about a waiting job that had been advertised and someone else had brought in their cv.  Talk about inundated.  (God only knows what would chaos might ensue if there was more than one customer to serve.)  Apparently most of the job applicants are “all those Africans who can’t even speak the Queen’s good English”  - quelle horreur indeed – and lunch finished on the deeply unappetising note of a white South African doing impressions of black Africans asking for a job.  I suspect this chap is always quick off the mark when it comes to an opportunity for one of these performances; it’s just a shame he can’t chivvy the kitchen along when it comes to sarnies.

Not cooking, but walking

I watched Nigella Lawson’s new tv show last night where she makes food very quickly by opening tins and packets and sprinkling grated chocolate on the contents.

In the old days when my straight male friends rather fancied the fat Tory chancellor’s daughter I too used to like Nigella. Like most people I enjoyed watching her ooh and aah over roast chickens and pies and puddings, stews and soups; I loved the way how she talked about how she was the greediest person she knew and couldn’t stop eating and yet had the figure of a streamlined Marilyn Monroe; I loved the way she felated wooden spoons and other kitchen equipment (although thankfully not the Moulinex on full speed) and I simply adored the way there was always time in the show to demonstrate how la Nigella puts on lipstick and how her shoes are an utter and terrible muddle but somehow the Minolos are always on top. Then of course the guests arrived as seen through the wistfulness of a Vaseline-smeared lens and they all laughed and noshed off the tableware and talked about lipstick and shoes and how fat they all were. It was spellbinding.

This new series seems to have lost the magic somehow. For one thing Nigella doesn’t now look like Nigella. Not simply because she’s older but because she moves about. I realise in the past we never saw our hostess do much in the way of shifting her arse. There was the occasional arm lifting up to crush the oozy, creamy slice of cake into her pouting lips and she would – when necessary – slide a bowl along the counter all the time talking about how she likes saving on the washing up as if we’re expected to believe that when tea was finished her kids rushed into the front room to watch EastEnders while she had not only the dishes to do but had their packed lunches to make as well. Probably with a JPS hanging from her lips the while.

In this new series, we are invited to watch her as she exits Sloane Square station for no obvious televisual reason, how she rides an old London routemaster bus (curious indeed as no one else living in London can) and I sat there slack-jawed with excitement while a excruciatingly bizarre scene played out of her picking up her strange Tadzio-type son from a swanky mews house, bundling him into a cab, and then softly chiding him for not doing his homework. She explained somewhat mysteriously that it wouldn’t take him long as she was cooking a three-course lunch for six and that would only take half-an-hour. Do you see. We then jumped to watch freaky little Tadzio skateboarding around the street outside his mum’s house in Eaton Square in his pink drainpipe jeans just like any other kid, apart from the fact that it was in the most expensive square in London and it’s just occurred to me that he’s the spit of that odd boy with the hair like a blond walnut whip who used to turn up on shows like Wogan in the 1980s and talk about antiques and is now a woman called Margueritte or something and runs a firm selling dog cleaning products from near Godalming.

But mostly, the problem with this show is that the food looks vile. She fried a steak which is fine but then served it with what looked like a pound of tile grouting; her Thai chicken curry slopped about like watered down stew and was the colour of the National Theatre in a downpour. Her chocolate mousse had all the allure of a Sarah Lee cake. Why would anybody want to know how to make this gunge? Let alone eat it.

I presume the idea is that for those people who live on prepared meals here is a way of spending the same amount of time as you would on removing some packaging, pricking the cellophane and slinging your frozen lasagne in the microwave but you produce something delicious and homemade instead. Sadly, the results aren’t remotely convincing.

Why don’t you come over to mine where you can watch me riffle through my collection of old Camper shoes, then rub Camomile lotion into my currently rather flaky and sunburnt ears before I astound you with a feast of beans on toast? Ooh tempting.

Chris Neill – Bearded Wonder

For my shiny new show I find myself thrilled to be avoiding the money-sapping bitch-fest known as Edinburgh in August, and instead am a little giddy to be making a temporary home in the tie-dyed, syringe-strewn, old suede jacket-wearing capital of Britain that is Camden.

In this too-hot-to-handle, just-out-of the-oven, brand new sixty minutes (or a bit under if I can’t find a way of making my routine about opera work),  I shall throw myself at a variety of topics (genealogy, surrealism in suburbia, my desire to make passionate love to every beautiful girl in England* to name but three), wrestle them to the ground, and have them begging for mercy.  That, or I might tell some jokes about offal and jam.

* One of these is a lie.

*****

“Not just funny but on the nose.  Neill is the epitome of intelligent middle-class camp.  … A talent for observational comedy to hilarious effect.”  – The scotsman

“this acidic storyteller is the natural successor to Kenneth Williams.”  – evening standard

“Like an over-enthusiastic bachelor uncle stealing centre stage at a family Christmas dinner.” – The Stage

“Chris Neill is deliciously funny; bitchy and sharp, he would suit Have I Got News For You perfectly.”  - The List 

“Chris Neill is doing his show.  Tickets Still Available” – Bracknell Herald

*****

Venue: Etcetera Theatre, Oxford Arms, Camden High Street

Time: 21.00 (22.00) 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 August

All tickets £7.50          Ticket booking 020 7482 4857 or www.camdenfringe.org

Here’s a dodgy photograph I’ve never had the courage to use before…

The latest showbiz news

God. Having a blog is a tiresome business. Despite no readers to speak of, I still feel guilty that I haven’t written some words for nobody to read.

To be honest, I’ve got lots on at the moment: there’s a new sixty-minute show to write, a treatment for Radio 4 to get done, and the freezer needs some organisation – game soup doesn’t make itself, you know.

As I sat in the Radio 2 building last week waiting for a taxi that had been booked – rather unhelpfully – for the middle of the night I found myself for that wasted hour or so rather holding court. Here comes Ken Bruce and we have a little chat, there goes Stuart Maconie looking strangely squat who waves a cheery hello, and here’s lovely Stephanie Calman fresh from the Jeremy Vine show who shares my taxi back to Dulwich with me, while we moan about taxi drivers a lot but apologise to our cabbie who is perfectly nice.

Perfectly nice he may be but he cannot compete with one of his peers. The very fantastic Roy of Sydenham. Roy occasionally drives me to Broadcasting House (as he did so that morning) and he is the most fantastic character. A big bloke who’s done a lot of “showbiz security” over the years – “sometimes the two dames can be a bit much, you know Chris.” That’ll be Judi and Helen then.

He told me and Piers about Damien Hirst’s skull of diamonds. Apparently it was Roy’s job to bring back the sparklers from Antwerp in his jacket pocket; we’re then treated to the latest news on ‘Cill’s’ (that’s Cilla Black to you and me), Paul O’Grady’s state of health, and the price of Rod Stewart’s new carpets.

Why, he told us that he had only recently asked Kevin Spacey, doesn’t he just come out of the closet? “It just seems so bloody ridiculous – everyone knows. I love the gays, me.”

Only Roy, large and mildly intimidating in his big car, with his Metropolitan Police badge which allows him to park anywhere he could fancy in the capital for nought could do that.

The only slightly icky moment comes when Roy and I disagree a tad on quite the level of loveliness personified by the Krays. Roy is more generous in his assessment of Ronnie and Reggie than me. (Maybe it’s something to do with all their names beginning with the same letter.) But like the pro he is, when the conversation plateaus at an impasse he moves the chat swiftly on to west end musicals. He’s got the measure of me and Piers indeed.

Three nights and three strange gigs

Not really strange gigs as such, just rather contrasting. But the word contrasting doesn’t, I feel, sitting enticingly in a headline.

A couple of Wednesdays back I happened along at my first Book Club since Christmas. I’d gone to the Battersea Arts Centre show back in March but decided not to take to the stage as I was having a nicer time round the back of it. This outing (back at its home at Lowdown At The Albany) for the old stalwart was an intimate, if not entirely deserted occasion, as Robin had forgotten to send out any billings. I felt rather giddy as I could drink because I wasn’t driving and I therefore re-hydrated splendidly on white wine spritzers. Flushed as I was I think I did a nice enough little set until I worried that I might have done it all there before: a bad and wrong thing at the Book Club.

The next night my oh-so glamorous life took me to the Cafe de Paris for a charity gig which had something to do with one-parent families. Why comedians are booked for these sort of dos is an eternal mystery, if a mystery not entirely worthy of much contemplation. Everyone in the room is a bit pissed and I suspect the last thing they want is to listen to a succession of needy souls trying to raise laughs. Preceding me was the brilliant Antonio Forcione who was the first act to go down a storm: that’s it I thought they want clever and talented variety acts and Italians slapping guitars will be the thing, how disappointed will they be when I come on moaning on about offal and old ladies buying tampons. Thankfully, Antonio had warmed them up splendidly and I rode his wave merrily for ten minutes. The event was headlined by Simon Amstell who spent a while being extremely rude about Neil Morrisey who, along with Michelle Collins, had conducted the raffle. It all ended rather bleakly and I suspect Simon and Neil won’t be mooning at each other over a frothy coffee for quite a while to come.

Unfortunately I missed this excitement on stage and had it reported back to me second-hand as I was being interviewed by a blonde lady who apparently is the ex-wife of Chris Tarrant and is in that show on ITV 95+7 about a putting a magazine together with Janet Street-Porter. The Tarrant lady had a terrible problem with her camera and I only realised later that this has become a leitmotif of her performance. I suspect she’s been kicked off the show by now…

The chap filming the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’s host’s ex was rather handsome and seemed to have rather a lot of his tip-top body on show but curiously he wore the facial hair arrangements and a weary-looking mullet of a 1970s footballer. I thought it was a party fright wig arrangement at first and maybe he was part of the show in some sort of Life On Mars segment but no. It was all for real.

Taking inspiration I’ve grown a beard which I thought might be slimming. Unfortunately I realised I’ve confused growing a beard with weight loss. Thankfully I don’t have enough hair on my head to craft a dodgy hair-do.

The next night was a much more pedestrian affair: to a football club near Kingston. The gig took place in the sort of large, low-ceilinged function room that surely has held host to some of the drabbest weddings you could imagine. The audience was lovely though and thankfully didn’t include any footballers which I would find exciting and terrifying in equal measure.

Nature’s way?

Living the dream as is my wont to do, I was in Lewisham’s Superdrug this afternoon.

Ahead of me in the queue was an extremely stooped, extremely old woman buying the most enormous pack of tampons (by my guess, catering size at least, although I concede I’m no expert).

I wondered had biology played a cruel and tiresome joke on her or perhaps was it a rather crass, if at least practical, present for an unlucky grand-daughter?

Putting the greats in their place

I spent a busy afternoon today sitting in bed, wishing for a shawl for my shoulders, and watching Rear Window on DVD.

Finding myself quite gripped by the whole thing as I watched it, I was somewhat bemused to realise that my reaction once it finished was to think that it wasn’t terribly good. Is it a heresy to point out that the movie is rather oddly paced? Nothing much happens for ages and then in the last twenty minutes or so the there’s a mad rush to the finishing line. I almost started laughing out loud when the murderer – Lars Thorwald – played by Raymond Burr…

… fesses up to the police in about 30 seconds flat when only moments before he’d tipped a plaster-cast-hampered Jimmy Stewart from the window to protect the details of his nefarious doings.

I did enjoy it though and it must be said that my favourite bit came much earlier on when for some random and rather bonkers reason the Alfred Hitchcock cameo was to be had in the form of the great director winding up a clock in the tipsy pianist’s heavily bewindowed flat. Here you go…

Bowing to the advice of wise counsel

A week or so ago I posted a blog which someone advised me for perfectly good and politic reasons to remove. I did so but in the way of all of us who don’t like to edit ourselves this act of pruning has been hurting. So, I’ve decided to repost the blog with offending words taken out…

This week has seen the start of that strange parallel time system which settles on us at Christmas making each day the same as the last and the next; blurring boundaries between days so that Monday feels the same as Thursday and Saturday feels no different from… I shall stop there otherwise I’ll have to compare them all to each other and I think you know what I mean. For me the one day that I look forward to in this awful ground hog day of a fortnight is January 2nd when the whole bloody thing is over. I must concede that there is a little bauble on my tree this year as I’m flying to Glasgow on the 28th to take part in two shows for BBC Radio Scotland. A much greater treat.

Here was my week: one evening I was mediocre at Robin Ince’s Christmas Book Club. There’s a website called Chortle which said as much and the bloke who runs it is perfectly entitled to his view although I must say I feel he’s rather been following me about since the end of Edinburgh. Always there at gigs with his glum face looming out of the dark ready to point out how much better it all could be. A much cheerier evening the following day where I appeared on a recording of Just A Minute for Radio 4 at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. Paul Merton, Tim Rice and Alun Cochrane were also the panel and they seemed most jolly shows all in all.

The next evening: supper with a man who I try to like, occasionally find myself doing so, and then aggravatingly listen to him say something which reminds me why I struggle to even tolerate him in the first place. He is a ferociously rich, utterly self-absorbed closeted old ***** brimming with witless snobbery. Amusing in a way but then he starts complaining about something and I should, were I braver, slap him about the head with his copy of the ***** ********* to shut him up. As we sat in the sitting room of his house in ***** ********** – one of the richest areas of the universe – sipping champagne, he had the audacity to ridicule an NHS nurse he had encountered who for about five minutes didn’t seem to be doing very much. Needless to say, the fact that she earns in a year probably what he spends in the same twelve months on antique trinkets for his house in ***** was beyond him. As far as this chap is concerned unless you’re a lawyer or work for a city bank he’s not that interested. Oh and also she was black. Can you imagine, my dear…

His second whinge concerned some tiresome little name-dropping fag he had met who had had the audacity to refer to some duke or other by his real name. As our host pointed out when you consider that this fellow’s father was a clerk in the city the indignity of it all was a little too much to stomach. In real life our nursing expert lives in ****** *** in 2006, in his head he has a role in a sub-Evelyn Waugh novel about seventy years ago.

Later in the week we made up numbers at a curiously popular concert of the ************************ at the ********. Hosted by **** *********** this well-meaning and ***-**-*****-**-*-******** event just seems so curiously old-fashioned. Not of the between-the-wars variety of our erstwhile supper companion but rather as if we haven’t moved on over the last ****** years. Parodies of seasonal songs with lyrics about ****** *** on Christmas Day, the inevitable rendition of ********* **** *** ***** and even a select close harmony group (who looked like, in ***** words, the musical equivalent of a circle jerk) made me wonder for a short while if we’d taken a tinsel-festooned time machine back to the ****s. I almost expected a dummy of ******* ******* to be wheeled on at the end and torched to the strains of * **** *** ** ********.

Goggle-eyed

With the exception of Coronation Street and the rolling news channels I don’t watch a great deal of television. Last night, however, was an change to my printed schedule.

Even if you are one of several millions you feel somehow privileged to be witness to an exceptional event. And that is how I felt yesterday evening, as for reasons too complicated to explain but principally connected to apathy and then increasing levels of astonishment, I bore witness to what surely is contender for Biggest Pile Of Shite Ever To Make It On Screen.

ITV1’s Million Pound Giveaway is a mish-mash of all those other shows where people come up with daft ideas and try to get some smug millionaires to invest in their hare-brained scheme, and a return to the ethics of charity as exercised by the owners of Victorian workhouses. Basically some rich people (one of whom is a grumpy Scot who has popped up on tv before being rich, another is a woman who founded her fortune on the sale of dildos and nurses costumes, a third is everyone’s favourite perjuring ennobled fantasist crim, Jeffrey Archer and the other two were lost on me although there was a chap who has based his hair-do on Miss Piggy’s) have invested a million quid between them and then decide whether to give any of it away to the begging saps who turn up to scrape any remaining shred of dignity from the bottom of their shoes.

The show veers queasily between the mawkish and the surreal. When we turned it on some poor boy with cancer was asking for some money to do something cancer-ameliorating buses (which he was obviously given). I knew we were onto a winning 30 minutes of prime-time entertainment when the host of this bilge Richard Madeley observed that we’ve all lost friends with cancer including him. His cancerous friend apparently, we were told, believed in angels. Why we were told this I don’t know but it adds texture I suppose. For the record, someone I know who died of cancer believed in the Yellow Peril and the endemic corruption of the Catholic Church but that, I appreciate, is not nearly as winning as dead people believing in angels. I hope the afterlife hasn’t proved a disappointment for her.

Following our young friend was a selection of rough lasses who belonged to a football team somewhere and wanted some cash to pay someone to sing their football team’s anthem. Surely they realised that following Cancer Boy they didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell and they were proved right. If their bid was doomed then what the next contender thought was going to happen with her request for a few grand to buy a big new telly, a four-seater sofa and a selection of white goods for her kitchen is anybody’s guess. Her most persuasive argument was that she would like to furniture to get up from which hadn’t sunk so low through collapsed springs that she had to roll on the floor first and then clamber up by holding on to her out-dated stereo system. Movingly, she observed of the panel’s chairs that they would present no similar problem when they dragged their wealthy arses off them. My heart strings were tugged. Sadly our millionaires didn’t feel the same.

Now, it was about time for someone to win something. A mentally ill woman arrived dressed as Pocahontas and told us she wanted some money to fulfill a life-long dream of travelling across America in a Greyhound bus seeking out Red Indians. Apparently she has had a passion for native American culture for ever and a day and in case her fancy dress hadn’t convinced us of her searing thirst for knowledge she demonstrated further by miming along to a 1950s novelty song about wigwams. The cash was hers.

Away from ITV to BBC2. For This Life + 10. According to the hype everybody from the Queen Mother downwards was gripped by the story of some 20-something lawyers sharing a house in London in the mid-1990s. The nation’s matriarch and her adoring masses would sit down as one we are told to tune into to the saga of some some quite good-looking people having sex, eating breakfast with hangovers before going to the office. She bloody loved it. Last night’s somewhat interminable special was set ten years on from when we last left them which I remember involved somebody punching somebody at a party. What’s happened is this. The gay one is grieving for the death of somebody I couldn’t remember, the feisty Scottish one wants babies and not just a career, the nice young couple are still together and the male half who is named after a dairy product has stopped being a waste of space and become the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Novelist (to prove this he was interviewed by the one and only Mark Lawson. When I say the one and only I mean that he is the one and only person who works in the BBC’s Arts Department. No one else is ever allowed to do interviews it seems). So: the Dairy product writer is still with the nice one and they have a kid. Unfortunately, she also wishes she had a career. This is a source of tension with the feisty Scottish one and leads to a big row. Finally, the good-looking one who used to have rows with the feisty Scottish one all the time has become very rich. This wasn’t really explained except that he lived in Hong Kong for a few years and that apparently made him rich. Oh and he met his beautiful Vietnamese-model wife there who got in the way of the plot after about twenty minutes so left to see her aunt in Edinburgh. It then transpired that he wasn’t so rich after all and the bailiffs turned up at the end and performed a feat worthy of a the most brilliantly designed tardis. They emptied his 25-bedroomed castle of all its contents (apart from a rug) into a small truck. I’m arranging for them to pack for me the next time I go on holiday. I want to be able to get a fortnight’s clothes and accessories into a single egg cup. The greatest shock for me was that the uber-rich-one-who-wasn’t used to be really goodlooking but has now become fat and with big hair.

Finally, with the blood pumping and the mantra “We Have The Best Television Television In The World” tattooed onto my knuckles with the sharp corner of the remote control we turned breathlessly and agog to BBC4. First of all to catch the end of Mark Lawson interviewing Armando Ianucci about being clever (Mark must be worn out) and then to watch The Thick Of It which, being a bit dim, I didn’t really understand but involved the most brilliantly funny scene of Roger Allam playing a Tory shadow minister trying to look more relaxed by not tucking his shirt in his trousers. Everyone who’s ever done remotely well at the Edinburgh fringe had a role in last night’s programme and it was all rather tip-top. The only cringe-inducing moments came when reference had to be made to Chris Langham’s character being stuck in Australia. Is that what they call it now?

The nice folk of Glasgow

The people at BBC Radio Scotland are very good to me. I flew up there yesterday morning to appear in the studio for MacAulay & Co and then took part in a broadcast pilot of a new panel game called Next Year’s News with Sanjeev Kohli, Wendy Wason and the very entertaining BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor. Colin Paterson was the host. Unfortunately, partly due to only four hours sleep, but also because I was unforgivably unprepared I was quite rubbish at both shows. I’ve been a producer long enough to be able to listen to the tone of voice as he expresses delight at the end of recording to know his true feelings. This is all very self indulgent but you can’t help but want to kick yourself when you know you could have been better.

I’ve only been to Glasgow a few times before but in the cab returning to the airport I was absolutely bowled over by how beautiful it is. It doesn’t have the astonishing geography of Edinburgh but with its crescents and avenues and sweeps of sometimes almost chaotic gothic architecture and a light winter evening’s mist settling down the sight is almost magical, and the newly restored hothouses in the botanical gardens look like something out of film set.

Admittedly I was going through the Glasgow’s West End and Kelvinside and not any of that city’s schemes but there is so much rampant ugliness in Britain’s urban areas (although thankfully most of it is focused on the English Midlands) that when you see something as lovely as this you can’t help but think things in this country may not be so bad after all.