May 8th - May 14th 2006
Sunday History
Saturday Wapping
Friday Schindlered
Thursday Chipolata
Wednesday Badgered
Tuesday Sultanmania
Monday Wapping
Sunday 14th May
Five things I dimly remember
(and you probably don't):
Mr Pastry - a character from BBC children's television, a sad Chaplinesque figure with a droopy walrus mustache and a dusty suit (one of my regular cab drivers looks like his younger brother)
Hovis mini-loaves - free from their stand at The Ideal Home Exhibition, a shockingly miniaturised version of a familiar domestic item
The National Anthem - played at the end of each and every cinema performance, with the audience standing up for the duration
The Rag and Bone Man - driving his horse-driven cart down our street once a week, calling out incomprehensibly (not unlike the mobile Asian grocery van that now visits our estate every day, equally incomprehensibly)
Holiday camps - situated in obscure coastal resorts, over-scheduled with mildly mystifying and entirely embarassing mass-leisure activities in which I was expected to enthusiastically participate in order to give my widowed father time off in which to pursue women
Saturday 13th May
Wapping, Spring 2006
Friday 12th May
I wasn't there, and can claim no responsibility, but apparently the office was much taken by the story about the BNP leader's gay porn film, and fell to musing on suitable titles for his next production.
The winner, so far: Schindler's Fist.
Thursday 11th May 2006
You don't think it a little.. suggestive that the legacy of a President's affair with an intern is jokes about dry-cleaning bills, whilst that of a Deputy Prime Minister with a secretary is jokes about cocktail sausages?
Wednesday 10th May
And the moral of this story, Badger?
If in doubt, discover a troubled childhood...
A few other opinions you won't find on the otherwise comprehensive Apprentice web-site:
Tuesday 9th May
This weekend, the question on every Londoner's lips was: "Have you seen the elephant?"
Not, for a change, the ubiquitous elephant in the sitting room but The Sultan's Elephant lumbering around town courtesy of France's highly-talented street theatre company Royal de Luxe.
Aristotle's infamous unities have always played well in France, and here we had them in spades:
Unity of action? The story, such as it is, is certainly not over-burdened with sub-plot. There's this sultan, right?, and he's looking for this little girl, right? And...that's it. Oh, did I mention the sultan has a time-travelling elephant?
Unity of time? Once arrived in London, the elephant and the little girl wander around the streets for the next four days, moving as fast as they can. Which, understandably enough, is not very fast.
Unity of place? Aristotle said that the stage should represent one place and one place only. Not a problem when your stage is central London.
Aristotle did not, presumably, envisage a production whose main problem, for this audence-member at least, appeared to be locating just where on the stage the action was happening.
No sign of anything happening on the Horseguards Parade, the company's professed base-camp - just piles of straw and a giant deckchair.
No much action on Waterloo Place either, unless you count the sight of a post-Verne space-capsule being hoisted onto a low-loader.
But what's that, looming over the buildings at the top of the Haymarket. It looks like..It can't be..It's an elephant!
Monday 8th May
Wapping, Spring 2006
......previous week
