Ah! I have one and a half minutes to mark the anniversary of the fire we were in last year. Because that's something people mark, isn't it? This should cover it

Coming up shortly another romantic, police-state-themed anecdote, but first:

"To accuse a serving Prime Minister of lying to Parliament is an incredibly serious allegation." So who better to dispel the gimcrack frivolity surrounding the Chilcott enquiry than TV's Richard "Books" Madeley? Who better? Nobody. Everything about this piece is perfect (apart from the pop-ups, sorry, you might have more fun watching it here). Okay Richard, ENTER!

This is my twitter wallpaper. It comes from Brady's, in Brixton. Yes that's another thing that happened last month, I started tweeting. Because John Cleese does. Once I tweeted Tom Waits teetering, but it's not a page I particularly recommend you visiting. However if you get the chance to see inside the building I actually took it from then visit that. This is Brady's below. I'd see the clock face at eye level whenever I went swimming, but for my nine years living in Brixton I never actually saw inside Brady's. You didn't go inside Brady's:

All finished!



"Yeah but hang on, Simon, eff off! You can't just disappear for a month then swan back online with 'The Public Reaction' like nothing's happ- Oo! Footage!"
 


Haha! Yet again I deflect your fictional carping, my shit-giving mental construct...  And now, look, if you didn't know by now, dear actual reader, regarding our show "Money" the press were good to us, very good. They said this ("cool"! four stars) and this ("teasing"! four stars) and this ("DISCERNIBLE"! four stars). There was also a not basically accurate reference to Shunt's own finances here ("Oo yeah let's read that!" four belms)... which, which, which...which is as good a place as any to mention that the Lounge will now finally be closing its doors at the end of next week. The fourteenth. Moving off. Sharded. So get your skates on. (Shit. Money's staying where it is though. That's safe. And sold out. Go Tweaks!) Various new locations have been considered. I'll show you one of them in the next post, and that will lead me on to other relocations I must fill you in on, which will in turn - basically it's alright, this blog is now sorted. Let's celebrate...



Whee.

Right I have to head off now. I'm using the Lounge's internet and everyone's gone. Nigel promised me a giant Nosferatu head left over from Halloween if I came round, then he shouted at me because I was on the computer all the time and wouldn't go with him on the boat in the tunnel of balloons George had made to look like the Super K Subterranean Neutrino Observatory after it had shut so I did. And it was good. Get your skates on.

And speaking of tweaks, you see that guy on the left in this video? That's us, in rehearsals. Okay, mainly me... Who's the guy on the right? No idea.



But the results speak for themselves.

Let's see if we can't squeeze another one of these posts in before Newsnight Review shows up tonight (pray God they respect to the Code of the Preview, that is all I ask...) Now - ah - I'm writing this on the office's IBM ThinkPad and there's odd little buttony growths all over it, what do they all do?!... Um, so anyway last night saw more cuts to the show: no more giant table cloth, and no more opportunity to sing along to this unparalleled two-minute ode to joy WHAT?! NO!



I do hop s ee its rurn. Oh how did the cursor get over there! I'm using my thumb to move and my forefinger to click, thi sis nonsense¬! LISTEN - no, bad caps lock! - listen, let's all just take a moment to be the water shall we? Let's fill the cup. Fill the bottle... That's better. Alan?



I mean, it's fine. I recognise the preview period will be intense and that changes need to be made. I recognize that the Simon Smith Karaoke segment wasn't working in context inasmuch as it was unbearable and stopped time itself Howard Campbell-like in its tracks, and I recognise that perfect as the song is we must pay attention to the doughnut, not the hole, and speed our plough over the bones of the dead. Of the dead bear. Of the dead child and his amazing dead dancing dead bear. That is fine. Huhhh... huhhhhh, huh huhhhhh.... I had a good conversation with Lizzie last night. She's the designer. It's good to talk to her because I think her priorities are spot on - how do you work on an audience's imagination without asking them to suspend their disbelief? That seems to me the - OH IT'S NO GOOD! ALAN PRICE! ALAN PRICE WHER ARE YOU?

Hello. I'm posting this from my phone again, from outside the machine which I think is now complete. I think. It's got bunting and a bell. And I feel I should post this because of course last night we opened, and that's a thing, and we're having a photoshoot, sitting around in towels with nothing better to do. (The costumes arrived yesterday but we're still going with just the towels, apart from Tom who having missed the towels note has shown up covered in clay and feathers with a shaved head. Good old Tom. But also, good old towels.) So how was last night? Well it felt like the first time I'd actually earnt my money, but the show itself, now I think about, reminded me of Zack Snyder's Watchmen: I - ng - liked it, but oo there was a lot missing... missing here not from the original, but from the sum and, when we were lucky, product (maths joke) of the past six months' settling of ideas, decisions and enthusiasms. Whole swathes of theme that it turns out just aren't there now. And what's interesting about that is this was evident last night even though the playing was crisp and the crowd jolly. But now let's see what we've got, less is still probably more. Already today we've axed the steampunk detox and the misunderstanding about the pen. And good. My voice is a three amp fuse right now with thirteen amps of quarrel run through it. Don't kiss me, I taste like a farm.

Ah, I've got to a computer now. Great. So here's a short animation I came across illustrating just some of the themes which didn't make it into last night's show. It's also ideally how I'd like to us to end it (I mean Germaine Greer's coming on Friday. She'd eat this up. Imagine.) Go!

We open on Tuesday and the fever and the cough are still tediously here. I was well enough for a run-through of the show today but there's still a lot not in place, cramped confusion elsewhere, and a baffling egginess in the playing of stuff that had found a nice place to itself months ago. I didn't enjoy a second of it. And that's particularly annoying as there's a lot of stuff here I should be finding incredibly enjoyable, just the kind of stuff I want to play. No actually, what's annoying is that the thing's so NEARLY there, but only if done by us at our best. Done badly, it's meaningless.