Steve Oliver: Part Website, Part Blog

None of the fun of the fair

2024-09-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

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I keep a fairly low profile these days, for example this year I have released one short film and compered twice. My showbiz heyday is a dot in life's rear view mirror, and my creative motivation never fully recovered from lockdown, and it doesn't help that the local media have done their best to ignore me. This year and last year I have been dealing with mental health issues so all enthusiasm has pretty much gone down the sink. Actually that isn't strictly true, as enthusiasm and creativity has manifested itself from a different direction altogether. During the summer just gone, following a breakdown, I have spent most of my time in the kitchen experimenting with recipes and making jam and pasta sauce, jars of the stuff! A bit of a change from the heyday when I was attending three or four gigs a week, sometimes two or three in one night, but reading books and watching television with four cats for company suits me better than I ever thought it would. I still get out of course, but little acoustic gigs and the folk scene is far more suitable these days.

To come back to the point of this essay, another change to my attitude, in particular my attitude to being a public figure, became apparent during the week leading up to today: Goose Fair.

As an unofficial ambassador for the annual event of 'Nottingham's Christmas' (yes, I invented that), I usually spend a lot of time filming the construction. Once constructed I film candid footage of the fair itself, and even eat most of my meals there, although this is my first Goose Fair as a vegetarian. That is another blog.

The truth is, this year I don't really give a shit about Goose Fair.

There are a few factors in place that have taken away my usual excitement for the fair, the main one is the ridiculous length of time it goes on for. Originally Thursday to Saturday, then Wednesday to Sunday, we are now looking at a ten day event. Goose Fair was cancelled in 2020 for the obvious reason, and cancelled again in 2021 due to Nottingham Council's greed backfiring on them. With that in mind, the extended time made sense in 2022 as the celebration to welcome back the highlight of the year, however now it has taken the shine off.

Today I made the trip in order to do the annual iconic/traditional photograph at the mushy pea stall (above) but didn't stay for long. I wasn't even sure if this was the correct Saturday as they tend to do the opening ceremony on the 'proper' Thursday, when the fair will have been on for nearly a week. I also don't know when the annual Goose Fair dinner is taking place at the Council House, so I don't know if they 'forgot' to invite me last night or this Friday coming.

All of Steve's Goose Fair videos can be found here

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The Year Was 2020

2024-03-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

When remembering the early part of 2020, it is amazing how normal everything seemed right up until the point where the world pulled on the brakes. This is kind of the basis behind my latest film, a short presentation in which I play two parts; myself as a much older man at some undetermined point in the future, and my grandson. In the story, the grandad remembers a time before 'the virus' but the grandson has never known a world in which he could leave the house. Obviously I noticed the plot hole as soon as I had finished filming - how would a grandchild be conceived under such circumstances? Perhaps I will one day write a prequal in which the whole family move into a big house prior to lockdown so they can stay together.

The weird thing about the very beginning of 2020 is how positive I felt about it, some pretty big projects were on the horizon which of course went down the toilet. Looking at my appointments diary for 2020 (big waste of money as it turned out), things were slow but sure. On Wednesday 8th January I recommenced filming on The Random Sessions, with Alex Hale's episode and a week later I filmed Jodie Rose, which I didn't realise was going to be an important one. At the end of January I went to Teesside to see my family for a late Christmas. I was meant to go the week before Christmas but my December was written off by an illness that was worse than any flu I had ever encountered and played havoc with my respiratory system - I have always been ahead of my time! It was while up north that I heard mention on the radio of some kind of virus originating in China but didn't really think anything of it, after all, we had already experienced coronavirus in 2002 and it didn't really make an impact over here.

In February I noticed a pattern of gigs being cancelled or postponed due to this virus, which at the time I thought was a bit of an overreaction. Please don't get me wrong, I soon realised that shit was getting real but I, in common with everyone else, had no idea what was going to happen next. While I was angry at live music being made to suffer, I was not a Covidiot. We went into lockdown far too late and came out of it in such a disorganised fashion that it is no wonder that people soon got fed up of the whole thing. The last thing we needed was the moronic brigade who 'did their own research' and suddenly knew more than medical experts. Of course lockdown was necessary and if it had been able to continue for the rest of 2020, or at least until everyone had been vaccinated, then the result would have been far different. I had fired a shot at the Covidiots in a previous video during lockdown. Anyway, this isn't the place to show up people and their idiocy.

To return to February, on the 26th I not only filmed The Random Sessions with Simon Waldram but also went to watch him play a gig afterwards which I also recorded. My diary notes that Sherwood Shessions took place on Saturday 29th February, which I was a bit taken aback by as I forgot that Sunday wasn't always the day it happened. I had already noticed that the town was becoming quieter, at some stage during this time there was a raft of fuckwitts buying toilet roll but I haven't recorded that in my appointment diary or work journal. What shocks me now is that two weeks before lockdown I went to two gigs and filmed an episode of The Random Sessions, and on Tuesday 17th I filmed the final pre-lockdown episode with Michael Upton, in which we discussed the impact on the music scene.

This is where my film comes in. The live music scene was already in chaos with musicians not wanting to cancel for financial reasons and having to wait for venues to make the call. By now a lot of performers were staging live stream gigs from the comfort and safety of their own homes and hopefully bringing in a bit of income via donations and virtual tip jars. My film starts with the grandson about to watch a live streamed gig because in the universe of the film 2020 was the beginning of the end. When I found the script in my archive I noticed that it was dated (always date and keep your work, my advice to all creatives) 16th March 2020, a full week before we actually went into lockdown.

I predicted the impact of downloads on the music industry, I predicted a future of online television, I predicted that podcasts would become as big as radio. Thankfully I got this one wrong!

The Year was 2020 is available to watch here.

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On the Buses: A Kitchen Sink Drama

2022-11-23T19:15:00.002-08:00

When it comes to the 1970s school of overacting in situation comedy, there can only be one winner. On the Buses. Here is a show that on the surface is terrible, yet at the same time it is strangely compelling.

On the Buses ran between 1969 and 1973, during which time seventy-nine episodes were churned out along with three movies, two stage plays, a board game, a strip in Look In, a sequel (Don't Drink the Water - a vehicle for Stephen Lewis) and even an American remake. In 1990 the cast appeared in a bizarre interview with Terry Wogan to discuss a purely speculative new series called Back On the Buses, which only Reg Varney seemed to want to get involved with. The show was amateurish and farcical yet despite being unanimously shit-canned by critics it was inexplicably popular. On the Buses was the Mrs Brown's Boys of its day.

Of course, On the Buses was far from highbrow. It didn't seem to weight too heavily on the writers Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney to write a second draft, and LWT's comedy department appeared to cock a snook at the hackneyed convention of rehearsal. However, the more I watched (this was one of my lockdown binges), the more an idea formulated in my head.

Stan Butler is trapped in a cramped environment, unable to escape his needy mother and the endless rowing between his sister and brother-in-law (a situation explored with pathos in Steptoe and Son). The front room is rarely used, a common working-class behaviour, so the day-to-day interaction takes place in the combined kitchen and living area that if 'smellyvision' had ever been invented would pump the aroma of fried food and cigarettes out of your television. Strip away the comedy (not a massive undertaking) and what you're left with is a traditional kitchen sink drama. Most of the conversations/arguments are about money and the lack of it, and Stan only really cares about pissing off his boss by doing the bare minimum at work before going out to pull a 'bird'.

Stan Butler therefore is Arthur Seaton if Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a shit sitcom. By isolating certain scenes, removing the laughter (fuck knows what the audience were laughing at most of the time), turning it to black and white, I was able to re-imagine On the Buses. I made minimal use of Bob Grant's character of Jack as he was far too cartoonish as was Olive, got rid of all the sexism and racism popular with 70s comedy (although on the racism front, OTB was by no way the worst offender) and used scenes where the actors weren't shouting their lines as if in a pantomime rehearsal. By focussing on the dialogue relating to being able to make HP payments, the need to do overtime and who manages to put the housekeeping on the table on Friday, I developed a look at working class life during the seventies. Assuming it is the seventies, the series seems to exist in a long-gone universe of mangles, coal fires and tallymen.

Taking inspiration from the aforementioned Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, I isolated some key scenes and attempted to make the opening and closing titles resemble the movie version. Then I was left with how to put these scenes into some kind of order to create a kind of story arc. For this I used the William S Burroughs cutting method, as used by another one of my creative heroes, David Bowie.

This was a whimsical idea that I only took a few days on to create what is known as a collage film. I have not made room on my awards shelf in anticipation, but I hope if you watch it, you will enjoy it. Please remember to share this.

On the Buses: A Kitchen Sink Drama is available to watch for free here

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The Sherwood Shessions

2022-11-14T17:22:00.004-08:00

I don't have a great deal to do with the Nottingham music scene these days, neither do I go to anywhere near as many gigs as I did when I was on the radio. My tastes have changed too regarding live music, and although I maintain that music sounds better if it is being played in front of you, it is also a sight better if you can sit down while they do it. One event I attend regularly is the Sherwood Sessions, an intimate affair on the first Sunday of the month at Bradey's Micro Pub.

The show is organised and hosted by Paul Carbuncle, a local folk-punk hero and one of my best and closest friends. Paul pulls together a selection of the best musicians around and opens the proceedings, usually accompanied by his daughter Tibbie Star on harmonica.

As I film all these performances, I have created a new playlist on YouTube. I am way behind with editing and uploading but there's a selection of videos available now.

The Sherwood Shessions collection on YouTube can be found here.

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All The Fun of the Fair

2022-11-10T18:54:00.001-08:00

The next presentation of my 2022 Goose Fair collection was filmed walking around the fair at various points during the ten days. In order to fully capture the magic of the occasion I have kept the shots long and made as few cuts as possible. I have never really been too keen on the urgent cutting style, and I am sure that a lot of filmmakers only do things because nobody has told them that they don't need to. My approach to filmmaking has always been rooted in the 'less is more' philosophy.

As for the sound, everything you hear is the genuine noise from the different aspects of the fair, the music, the crowds and the barkers. It's just a shame I couldn't capture the smells of the various food outlets.

This brings me to another influence on my filmmaking style. This influence is not the people behind the camera but those nameless figures in front of it. The archives of Pathe and Mitchell and Kenyon are just two examples of films of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and YouTube is littered with fascinating and totally random footage of street activity at various periods in time. A 1950s flickering black and white film of any High Street will present you with women in big dresses and hats pushing big prams, those babies being the only people possibly still alive, and men in immaculate suits, hats, moustaches and untipped cigarettes. Where were they going? What were they thinking? What was their story. Even street footage from the 1980s or 1990s will throw up surprises that remind us how life has evolved. Cars and vans of a different shape, town centres with far more traffic, clothes, hair styles and forgotten shops all spark something in us that we probably don't notice on a day-to-day basis. Even the most random slice of life from a Super 8 or VHS camera can present a social history lesson.

During the pandemic I stepped away from the camera due to a decision about not capturing a moment that most of us would like to forget. I was due to start filming a comedy drama during the 2020 Easter holidays but obviously that went down the toilet. I resisted returning to this project during the summer when lockdown sort of stopped because I didn't want to feature masks or social distancing. In hindsight I kind of regret this because these details will be forgotten about and then remembered for reasons good or bad. Repeats of Eastenders on the Drama channel will baffle people in the future with their sudden use of shockingly obvious greenscreen and people having conversations from a distance, as equally baffling to future generations watching gameshows or panel shows on Dave when the furniture suddenly gets further apart.

If anyone is watching my latest 'people' film All the Fun of the Fair in 100 years from now, then all of those differences and similarities will be noticed. Perhaps the Minions will still be around and as recognisable to children as they are today, Elsa from Frozen will have the same iconic status as Disney's Snow White has now, and of course the (the) mushy pea stall will still be there. I just hope that somebody carries on my photographic legacy once I am dead.

All the Fun of the Fair is available to watch for free here.

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Goose Fair

2022-11-09T20:07:00.001-08:00

The 2022 edition

As the world returns to normal, it was great to see Goose Fair return to Nottingham. Cancelled understandably due to Covid-19 in 2020 and due to Nottingham Council's greed backfiring in 2021, we saw Nottingham's Christmas return for a record-breaking ten-day stretch. Maybe it is going to remain that way, although I personally think it's a bad idea.

In my capacity as unofficial ambassador for Goose Fair, (although if there's an official role available, I'm on board), I was on hand to film as usual, both the construction and the ambience. Sadly, I was unable to make the opening ceremony this year.

Talking of tradition, 2022 also saw the return of my annual photograph at the (the) mushy peas stall, although I did keep this going despite the lack of the fair. Having had a quiet year workwise, I was looking forward to talking to the press about my comeback plans, but despite being given plenty of notice, inevitably not one representative bothered to show up. This was especially galling as there were plenty of them around. I imagine if Ladbaby, Vicky McClure, Jake Bugg or any other of my fellow Nottingham showbizzers had turned up it would have been a front-page story.

To get to my first released Goose Fair project, my usual construction videos are now available.

It wasn't until I started viewing the footage that it occurred to me to release two different versions. The first version is silent and inspired by the filmmaking of Andy Warhol. When I was at school, I first became interested in Warhol's art and later on I discovered his films. There is something about his audacity that I admire, a five-hour film of sleep and an eight-hour film of The Empire State Building are two examples of the anti-film. This is the approach I took with Goose Fair Construction 2022, which is only slightly edited footage of the week leading up to the fair, more of an endurance test than a film at one hour twenty-five minutes but will be of interest. Version 2 is a much snappier and viewer friendly watch.

Goose Fair Construction is available to watch here.

Goose Fair Construction - Version 2 is available to watch here.

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2021-01-11T16:24:00.002-08:00

At the time of writing this we are still in lockdown and dreaming of the day we can do something, anything in public. As much as I want the world to return to normal I am patient and realistic that the prospect of this not happening anytime soon. I know that we need to carry on adhering to the restrictions until we have all been vaccinated and only then can the lights go on. It pisses off all rightminded people to see the anti-lockdown protests (let's start calling them Covid Cavalcades) and idiots claiming that the whole thing is a hoax. A recent Covidiot Cavalcade took place in Nottingham beginning at Trent Bridge, and I received a 24 hour ban from Twitter for trying to help the police to deal with the situation.

Charming. I was only trying to help.

Looking to the future, there are certain behaviours that we have adopted over the last year that I will take with me into the return to normality. As much as I am keen to shake hands and hug again, there have been changes to our lifestyles that makes sense even when there isn't a global pandemic hanging over us.

Shopping

Although queuing to get into a supermarket isn't the best way to spend time in the colder months, it is worth it when you get indoors. Aside from the occasional non-mask wearer or dickhead who doesn't understand how the one-way system works, shopping is a much more enjoyable experience. Even the Aldi checkout staff have dialled down the Olympic standard scanning.

Facemasks

A divisive topic this. Some people think that being 'forced' to wear a face covering is a diabolical piece of legislation orchestrated to turn us all into puppets of the state, these people are twats though. Personally I can't believe I haven't thought of this before, in built up public areas especially traffic heavy cities, a filter protecting our nose and mouth makes sense. If you have ever spent time picking what appears to be lumps of coal out of your nose during a London summer then you might be in agreement that a mask is an idea worth continuing with.

Working from home

The fact that you can't open a window due to the risk of snarling up the air-conditioning is one of the most hairbrained pieces of logic that anyone who works in an office will come across, much better to have someone else's coughs and sneezes blowing out all over the building. Only a couple of years ago working from home was discouraged and even refused on logistical grounds, but suddenly it was workable. Okay so you will miss the banter and the tea making rota (a good way to skive ten minutes) but you won't miss constantly feeling under the weather. If 2020 taught us anything it is that we can wake up an hour or two later in the morning, finish at five and not have rush hour to deal with and not have to get dressed yet still be more productive than when you had to spend half the morning talking idly with everyone. There's the added bonus of nobody noticing when you're late logging in (blame it on connection issues) and by leaving a weight on your laptop trackpad you can keep your laptop awake while you have a shower and extended lunch.

Hand washing/Hand sanitiser

All our lives we have understood the need to wash our hands after using the toilet and before preparing food. What is less obvious is the amount of germ handling we were seemingly less aware of. I always take a small bottle of sanitiser to gigs because music venue toilets (as far as I can remember, eh?) always have a part of the hand washing cycle missing, whether it is water, soap or hand dryer. Personally I have never had a lot of faith in hot air hand dryers. The handwashing awareness that came into being right at the beginning of the pandemic, even before lockdown, (aside from ruining 'Happy Birthday' for everybody) has made me think about those daily occurrences in which we should be squirting a drop of sanitiser on. Mundane activities like pressing the buttons that stop traffic, inform the bus driver that we want to get off, and entice money from the ATM are just three examples of touching other people's germs. I know we haven't used cash since last year but how often did you hand over coins or a note for a sandwich that you ate straight away with dirty money hands? Door handles, railings and that book you picked up at the book shop have all had other hands on them and how do you know the person before you didn't tend to a troublesome bum itch immediately beforehand?

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2021-01-02T17:55:00.001-08:00

It is something that can give comfort, but I cannot join in with this rose-tinted idea that 2021 is magically going to be better than 2020. Of course we will all remember 2020 and it was nice to see it end, but I have a feeling that the year ahead is going to be nothing more than an action replay. Perhaps this time it won't quite have the same spirit as the start of the lockdown, there will be a lot less banana bread this time around for a start.

Obviously most sectors have taken a kicking, but I can only speak on behalf of the entertainment industry. It has been shit. Maybe that's harsh, at least to start with there was a proliferation of live streams by musicians, comedians and actors staging plays and it was good to see everyone making the best of a bad situation. The downside of course being that a shitload of money was lost and although it is nice watching a musician perform without a load of people talking over them, I personally cannot wait to get out to gigs again. It seems likely that another lockdown is on the cards, which we need. Having different towns and cities in different levels of restrictions is, to use a phrase I have seem meme'd around social media, like having a pissing section of a swimming pool.

With the correct restrictions and safety measures in place, I don't see any reason why certain areas of live entertainment can't be reopened. Financially speaking it will put pressure on theatres and arenas to have to scale down the audiences, but a comedy club setting with cabaret style seating can be distanced enough to not even require the audiences to wear a mask, after all we managed during the brief period that pubs and restaurants reopened in the summer.

Worse than not being able to go to the pub is not being able to see family. I was lucky enough to spend time at my daughter's house in Scotland last year and was impressed at how Scotland (I can only speak for Aberdeen to be fair) were handling the situation. Social distancing and masks were the normal sight and even pubs appeared to be safe. What ruined it for me was getting back to Nottingham and seeing how blasé people were. Christmas shopping was an even bigger nightmare this year because people had started to ignore all the guidelines that were put in place. On another family note, in January I held my six month old twin nephew and niece then watched them grow up on videos and photographs, along with the other little people who call me Uncle Steve and that upsets me as well as not being able to see my dad, my mum and stepdad and my brother and sisters.

So here's to a slightly better 2021, once we have been vaccinated and shit calms down we can hopefully start to slowly return to the way of life that we all miss. I even missed those annoying fuckers that crawl out from under a stone every December and take over the pub.

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2020-06-16T11:06:00.002-07:00

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been nothing but a continual bedpost against the little toe and that we should be allowed to write it off and start again next year. Creatively it hasn't been too bad of course, it would be nice to be allowed out to do some of the filming that I had planned to undertake this year, but it has given me time to go through my archive and release some previously unseen/unheard material (unless you were there or listening to the radio of course).

The timeline to the Coronavirus is extremely scrambled in my mind, all I know is that although it has been about three months it seems longer and now every day just feels like the arse end of the Christmas holidays. It wasn't until I thought about events in some detail that I remembered that the toilet roll shortage was a part of this situation, nobody understands why of course, maybe people thought that this mystery virus caused violent diarrhoea. It seems such a long time ago because anything that happened before lockdown could have been a million years ago.

I remember thinking that everything and everyone was a bit hysterical about a virus that had no chance of being problematic, as did other people, and getting annoyed when gigs were being cancelled. In the week of Monday 9th March I went to two gigs and filmed an episode of The Random Sessions and nobody seemed too bothered by the impending crisis. The phrase 'self-isolating' was already part of our vocabulary, but it was something other people did, the big girls blouses. Walking through town I spotted the place getting quieter and more paranoid while at the same time an air of dismissal also blew around. The last episode of The Random Sessions was filmed on Tuesday 17th March, incidentally also St Patrick's Day, and people were still out and about. A gig I was due to go to on Saturday 21st was cancelled and lockdown happened on Monday 23rd.

By now we had another phrase, 'social distancing' and suddenly shit got real. From thinking that this was all a bit of a fuss, I now realise that we were in the midst of an actual problem and starting taking it seriously. At the time of writing the lockdown has been softened and the papers have been full of people queuing to get into the stores, for some reason Primark has been used as the big example. I personally am not going to rush out because there have been too many people who either ignored or didn't fully understand social distancing. We have already seen crowds of people on the beaches and parks, a massive crowd of people on Westminster Bridge clapping the NHS and missing the point, and VE Day street parties. This is going to lead us into a second wave of the virus (which a certain section of society will blame on the Black Lives Matter protests) and hopefully the knock on effect will be a stricter lockdown. I understand the need for businesses to re-open, especially the independents who don't have a massive cushion fund behind them, but if the staff and customers in supermarkets haven't realised that the virus probably also travels sideways then the crowds in Primark or Sports Direct are going to be dangerous.

'New normal' is another phrase that is used now, and I worry about the future. I can't imagine face-masks leaving everyday use on public transport or in shops, and as much as I fancy going to the pub again I don't like the idea of screens and limited numbers. Once the Hop Merchant re-opens (if it does) then I should be okay filming The Random Sessions but even that will have to have a different approach.

Earlier this year, before lockdown, I finally got a divorce. It is fourteen years since I escaped and I have written before about my experience as a victim of coercive control so I don't want to go into it again. However if I can take one good thing from those dark and depressing days it is that I am well practised for this year's conditions - can't go to the pub, can't pursue my career and can't see friends. I've been here before!

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2019-02-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

Top picture - The Guardian

Bottom picture - Pinterest

It was announced today that the actor Albert Finney has died at the age of 82. With understandable predictability most of the reports focused on the whole 'Angry Young Man' angle and how he was a part of the new wave of post-war kitchen sink dramas. Reading through the various stories today it occurred to me that I have only seen him in three films. One of them is a film I really enjoyed, Tim Burton's Big Fish from 2003, although I hadn't remembered that he was in it.

Of the two films I refer to, the first is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I don't necessarily think it is because I am from Nottingham that I got into the works of Alan Sillitoe but it was nice to discover from an English teacher at school that the world I was from had been committed to literature, and was certainly a lot more relatable than the Famous Five for example. Finney's portrayal of Arthur Seaton was almost exactly how you would imagine from reading the book, although he does prove that the Nottingham accent is a difficult one to pull off, something that Stephen Tompkinson demonstrated when he failed at it in the 2018 biopic Torvill & Dean.

Naturally this was the main focus of the reports in the local news, treating Finney as an honorary Nottingham person in much the same way they do with Brian Clough. The Nottingham Post and Leftlion do like to write about its notable people (nearly all of them anyway) and the Post in particular has no understanding of the word 'tenuous' so at least they had a reason to publish some photographs of the cast in the Market Square.

Anyway, although I have seen very few Albert Finney films, there is one in particular that I have seen a great many times. As regular readers of my blog or Twitter feed will know, I collect versions of A Christmas Carol, both books with different artwork and movie and audio adaptations. One of the highlights of our December viewing of the different versions of the film is Albert Finnay's Scrooge, a musical that I described on Twitter today as 'joyously bonkers'.

This particular movie adaptation of the A Christmas Carol story takes the story we know and love and liberally sprinkles it with batshit craziness. Finney's portrayal, which I have no doubt influenced Harry Enfield's Old Gits characters, has everything and more. Starting with the isolated and mean Scrooge and suddenly becoming overly enthusiastic while seemingly pissed up on the milk of human kindness and joining in with a game of The Minister's Cat despite the fact that nobody could see him. The scene in which Scrooge joins in with the first version of 'Thank You Very Much' while his coffin is wheeled away is unfortunately and inappropriately what popped into my head when I found out that he had died today. For someone known as a dramatic actor, Albert Finney just let his hair down and threw himself into the role with a reckless abandon and for that I tip my hat to him on the sad occasion of his passing.

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2019-02-03T15:47:00.002-08:00

I was asked recently if I thought that we have reached the point where there are too many podcasts. Too many was an interesting angle to take but I had to concur that my answer was yes. By yes I was agreeing that we have too many podcasts for one person, not too many podcasts in general. Now I feel as if I should explain my answer.

Of course there are too many podcasts, nobody will ever listen to every one ever made and neither would anybody want to. You have to filter it down. The question was put to me in a negative way by someone who doesn't really bother listening to podcasts and as such doesn't really know what all the fuss is about, presumably he is waiting for talkies to blow over.

A few years ago I gave a talk about the future of podcasting as an entertainment and information medium and I compared it to the magazine market. Have a look at the below photographs that I took in my local supermarket.

Even in this computerised, supposedly paper free day and age, we still have shit loads of magazines devoted to specialist interests, even computers bizarrely. However nobody reads them all so you don't buy them, if you're interested in railways, cross-stitch, fishing or home interiors there's magazines for you, but if these subjects are not for you then you don't buy them and that is the same for podcasts. By the same argument you could say that there are too many songs, movies, radio stations or breakfast cereals. I listen to about ten regular podcasts, all comedic, and am always interested to find more but I don't like finding them too late because this gives me too much catching up to do.

During the run up to Christmas I threw out some tweets advertising my Christmas audio books with my usual line about it being a nice thing to do if you are buying someone an MP3 player to fill it up with some of my wares. A friend of mine pointed out that MP3 players are no longer bought or used. When did this happen? I tend to listen to podcasts on my laptop while I am working, so I was unaware of the change regarding the portable listening market. What makes this revelation especially weird is the use of the word 'Podcast', a portmanteau of 'iPod' and 'broadcast' and was presumably a futuristic word when it was first thought up in 2004. Nowadays podcasts are massive news, possibly bigger than radio in terms of regular listening, yet it has an apparently archaic name. This means that as the future generations consume podcasts more and more until eventually radio becomes a thing of the past, and not before time, they won't understand what the word means or where it came from.

I predicted in 2006 that in the future we would rely more on online content over mainstream methods, and that television and radio would have to up their game. Although podcasts have been around for a long time now, and YouTube has been around since 2005, it is only in the last ten years that these have been seen as serious contenders in the viewing and listening marketplace. When I tried to pitch the idea of an online 'television' show in 2007 I was met with blank expressions but nowadays it is a real thing with YouTube being as important as any television channel since they removed the ten minute time limit. This was in evidence last year when I spent the week at my nineteen year old daughter's house; not only did she change stations on her car radio to avoid all the talking, she watched YouTube videos on her phone and doesn't have access to what us oldies call 'proper' television opting instead for a stick containing Netflix, iPlayer and the like.

In the interests of podcast sharing I recommend the following in no particular order, (click on the red type for links).

Looks Unfamiliar An alternative take on the 'do you remember' nostalgia podcasts presented by Tim Worthington.

Stalking Time for the Moon Boys A podcast about David Bowie presented by David Baddiel and Tim Hincks.

Rule of Three In which comedians and comedy writers talk about influential comedy, presented by Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley.

Betamax Video Club Guests talk about movies from the 80s, presnted by Rich Nelson.

Round the Archives Lisa and Andrew discuss old television with guests. I'm new to this one so am currently bingeing my way up to date.

NG Meets & NottinghamLIVE NG Meets is my former radio co-presenter Darren Patterson interviewing prominent Nottingham people from the world of entertainment (COUGH - AHEM), and NottinghamLIVE is Tanya's weekly round up of what's happening in Nottingham.

Number One Rerun A nostalgic look back at number one singles and pop culture. I must confess I have only listened to the first episode but intend to binge up to date.

Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast Chat show presented by Richard Herring, who is probably best known for playing one of the police officers in Ant and Dec Unzipped.

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2019-01-14T06:06:00.000-08:00

I bought Mandi a box set of various works of Victoria Wood for Christmas and we have been dipping in and out of it, and I have been struck by the various strings to her bow. For starters we watched the travelogue Victoria's Empire, in which she visited the former British Empire countries that Queen Victoria didn't, because evidently she couldn't be arsed. There is something about comedians that seem to make brilliant travel presenters, I don't know what it is exactly, perhaps because comedians don't properly grow up and maintain a sense of wonderment. Did Michael Palin start this? Palin, Billy Connolly, Paul Merton, Paul O'Grady and Karl Pilkington are just a few names I can think of while I write this.

Victoria Wood presented this show in the same natural way that she performed stand-up, as if she was sitting in a pub chatting to her friends. I have said before that Wood, Alan Bennett and Peter Kay are all from the same school of writing and delivery, I would have loved to have seen the three of them doing an unscripted work on stage or television at some point.

My main knowledge of Victoria Wood was her stand up shows, in fact on the night she died we dug out two VHS tapes and watched them. She didn't waste a single word throughout the whole show which I don't doubt that wasn't scripted to the letter but made to look as if she had just wandered in and started talking. What I was less familiar with was the series Victoria Wood as Seen on TV which ran on BBC2 for only two series, as do a lot of the classics. Of course I was aware of the famous sketches, but mainly due to seeing them in retrospective clip shows. What I didn't realise was despite writing every word of the show herself, Wood was happy to allow others to take the lead. For example, one of the most famous sketches from the show (Victoria Wood's very own 'Dead Parrot' or 'Four Candles'), to me at least, is 'Two Soups' and she doesn't even appear in it. Patricia Routledge appears as a prototype Hyacinth Bouquet/Bucket called Kitty who delivers a monologue to camera which I didn't time with a stopwatch but I guess took up a good four minutes of the half hour. Obviously Victoria Wood knew what she was doing because these sketches work perfectly, I wonder if there exists the first take with Wood performing?

The other thing that had escaped me was how the show jumps around with regards to content. As the opening credits fade we are met with Victoria introducing the show with a few minutes of introductory stand up comedy before she jumps off the stage and it's showtime proper. On the surface we have a very broad mainstream sketch show peppered with some strong quickies, characters, and of course the dodgy daytime soap opera Acorn Antiques. What I hadn't remembered or realised until I re-watched was how dark some of the content was, and how much of a jarring gear change this would be if handled by a less talented, less capable comedian and writer. The first example being Swim the Channel, in which a young girl who these days we aren't allowed to refer to as 'a bit slow' talks of her ambition to swim the channel despite having no parental support or safety boat following her and goes missing presumed dead. In the sketch On Campus, Wood plays a plain, overweight girl who initially befriends her roommate only to be eventually bullied into a suicide attempt. This is the kind of territory that The League of Gentleman might have attempted twenty years later but was a new and shocking thing to include in a sketch show in the 1980s, I certainly don't think Little and Large or Russ Abbott would have got away with such behaviour.

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2019-01-13T17:33:00.000-08:00

I had my actor hat on today as we continue forward trying to finish filming The Curse of The Jester. If I have it right then I only have one more bit to do now but today I was shooting a sequence with Sara-Louise in front of a green screen so who knows what is going to be happening behind us.

Incidentally, you can watch Sara-Louise performing on The Random Sessions here and just for shits and giggles I made a badly edited mash up of her cover of 'House of the Rising Sun' with John Otway's famous call-and-response rendition which you can see here.

The Curse of the Jester was originally a series but now is being made into a film by editing old footage with newly filmed scenes. We were up until recently filming in sequential order which is unusual but at least we know where we are. However today we went out of sequence and we still need to fill in the gaps left in the story when we filmed in Matlock last summer.

This has been a great project to work on especially given how Glenn has been making this film on a non-existent budget (I don't usually work for free these days but I am supporting this project out of admiration for his vision and hard work behind the camera and in the edit). Not only is he filming it he is also doing all of the editing as he goes so that he will have a film in much quicker time than if he had to edit from scratch. The vast majority of the dialogue is improvised too so this is just the type of film making I am into, quick and easy. By cocking a snook at such formality as asking permission to film in a specific area things get done a lot quicker.

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2019-01-12T16:45:00.000-08:00

stock photo

I remember the first time I bled a radiator by myself and how amazed I was that a stone cold radiator suddenly became red hot once I had finished. It was a true sense of achievement even though I wasn't sure exactly what I had done. For those who don't know, radiators need to be full of water fir them to work, if air gets in then they stop working. If they don't stop working altogether then only a part of it will warm up which will be pretty useless. I am not sure why they called it bleeding rather than de-airing but it is still something that gives me a full sense of job satisfaction and makes me feel grown up.

My office is on the top floor of the house and the radiator frequently needs bleeding for some reason, maybe because of the distance between it and the boiler. It doesn't bother me though because it gives me an excuse to bleed it, which I did. I am always a bit disappointed when I have finished and you get the drizzle of water because it means that I no longer need to do it.

Ideally I would operate as a door-to-door radiator bleeder if I could charge enough to make it worthwhile. I imagine that most people know how to undertake this mundane task so if someone was to knock on the door and offer to do it they would probably turn down your offer to do it for a fee. Having said that, it isn't as daft as some of the jobs that used to exist and I don't doubt that if central heating had been a thing in the late 19th and early 20th century then a radiator bleeder would have pounded the pavements alongside the muffin man, rag and bone man, and the person with a big stick who used to reach up and tap on your window to get you out of bed for work. That's the trouble, everybody is too clever and self-sufficient these days so they don't need to employ people to do these jobs any more. Part of my problem is the fact that I am never not thinking creatively, so I am already weighing up the possibility of a podcast devoted to radiator bleeding.

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2019-01-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

Picture from Pinterest

I didn't fit their demographic the first time around and I can't say I am that bothered now. I have seen a bit of Matt Goss's crooner act that he does in Vegas and he seems to fit that role a bit more comfortably than as a pop star, but as far as the group's history is concerned there are gaps in my knowledge that I am not in any particular hurry to fill.

I would recognise one or two of their songs, and I know that there was once a non-Goss member at some point, Ken, who is now something big in the music business. I also know that they are responsible for a very lucrative little business I had going on when I was about twelve. My dad took over a pub and the cellar was full of crates of empty Grolsh bottles so I sold them at school for people to put in their shoes. My final bit of information is that they went into financial trouble and vanished, Matt does his aforementioned Vegas thing and Luke is a jobbing actor for who the phrase 'straight to video' could have been created.

With this apathy in mind it would probably not have occurred to me to watch the documentary When The Screaming Stops that broadcast on BBC4 before Christmas. Initially not a big ratings winner, word of mouth and memes helped to make this a big hit on the iPlayer.

On the surface it does like Matt and Luke were stitched up by a cool AF filmmaker who wanted to make a name for him/herself by editing together the batshit crazy witterings of two has-beens before going off to the Groucho Club to tell everyone about it.

We first join the Brothers Dim doing some plot exposition by showing us around their American homes and lives. Once we get the formality out of the way we get down to the business of trying to out-Spinal Tap Spinal Tap with a liberal sprinkling of David Brent type quotes for good measure. When Luke Goss gazes wistfully into the sea and pinpoints what he misses about London, "Big Ben, The Embankment, cab drivers", I was half-expecting him to say 'jumpers for goalposts' but he didn't. Matt has a painting of his dog with a pint of beer, which was my cue to pause the documentary and laugh so hard I nearly went to the toilet in my clothes.

In their defence, Bros were worked into the ground on the pop music treadmill during their initial fifteen minutes of fame and once they had outlived their popularity they were thrown unceremoniously down the dumper and forgotten about and left to seethe whenever New Kids on the Block or Jason Donovan appeared on the television. By the time the wheels fell off they were skint and presumably as jaded and fucked up as it is possible to be. Matt and Luke apparently didn't speak for around twenty five years and the tensions were plain to see once they got together, especially during band practice. Matt threw a strop when Luke suggested something, Luke threw another strop, and it began to look like the reunion gig would never happen. You could argue that it didn't really happen as a great deal of arena shows (including Nottingham) were cancelled for no reason. Perhaps the scale was a tad ambitious, so they ended up doing one show.

Among all the fall outs and rows we see the genuinely emotional moments when Matt and Luke talk about the deaths of their mother and sister. While I take my hat off to them for opening up in this way, it jarred with the unintentional comedy of the programme. A massive set-to backstage at This Morning during which Matt called Luke a cunt actually made me root for the guys even more. Yes they came up with some moments of bonkers quotes which have been meme'd to death, but deep down when we saw how much they mean to each other despite their rift, you wanted them to succeed and get the gig over with.

When Will I Be Famous? Matt once asked. Now, but not entirely for the right reasons.

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2019-01-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads this blog a lot or follows me on Twitter will know that I am such a big fan of A Christmas Carol that I collect books with different covers and illustrations, and also attempt to watch as many film and television adaptations as possible. For Christmas I was bought a DVD box set of BBC adaptations of various Dickens novels which included A Christmas Carol. We are several episodes into the 1985 series The Pickwick Papers which stands up as a period sitcom which knocks that terrible Upstart Crow into a cocked hat.

However before we started this, we watched A Christmas Carol and made it the last one of the season we watched. As hard as it was for me to deal with, I can't remember actually seeing this before. How I managed to miss it I don't know. Michael Hordern played Scrooge and John Le Mesurier played the ghost of Jacob Marley, aside from June 'Dot Cotton' Brown appearing as Mrs Dilber I didn't recognise anybody else in the cast. Although it is a faithful adaptation it is obviously abridged to fit into an hour long play, but is a pretty credible version that I will now add to my growing pile of versions that I insist on watching every Christmas. If you watch it you will immediately notice that the BBC didn't spend a great deal of money on this production but this doesn't matter. You can throw millions of pounds or dollars at a film project but if you can't tell the story then it has been a waste.

Before Christmas I saw Simon Callow's new interpretation at the cinema, which was subsequently shown on BBC4. I went in not knowing what to expect and was blown away by the low maintenance style. Callow told the story in modern clothing in a derelict warehouse and aside from sound effects everything was left to the imagination. This is storytelling at its very best and Callow delivered the story perfectly. Callow veered away from the book a little but not in a way that most people would notice and dropped a wonderful reference for those paying attention when the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge sent the poulterer to deliver the prize turkey to the Cratchit house at 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town. If you don't know then go and find out for yourself.

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2019-01-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

Three years have passed since the sad death of David Bowie, it seems like yesterday that the news dropped early in the morning, the anniversary being tomorrow. On his birthday in 2013 I remember the excitement that he had suddenly reappeared with no warning and released 'Where Are We Now?' and there was a feeling that he might tour. This was sadly never to be, I personally wonder if he knew then that he was on borrowed time. When you think about it he did things the right way round, usually you work all your life before retiring if you are lucky to get that far. However people in the entertainment industry tend to work until they drop without enjoying that well deserved rest. David Bowie did it in typically skewed fashion by spending ten years doing very little work-wise so he could be at home and be a dad to his daughter before hitting a final creative peak right before the end. It is easy to listen to the album Blackstar in retrospect and read between the lines looking for clues, especially within the video for 'Lazarus'.

Although I observed his birthday as I will the anniversary of his death tomorrow, quietly to myself, there was something that disturbed me slightly. The news showed up on the official Bowie Twitter feed (I am against the practise of verifying Twitter accounts for people who get someone else to do it, which was the case when Bowie was alive, but that's a different story) that Parlophone are going to release a collection of rare tracks and demos.

Maybe Bowie made provision for this, he did seem quite organised after all, if you saw the David Bowie Is... exhibition you would realise the attention to detail that played a part in his life. I don't doubt that there is a lot of music in the vaults, but what I am worried about is the over selling of the legend. Spying Through A Keyhole isn't an album, it is a collection of 7" singles of rare tracks and previously unheard demo versions of well known songs. Once upon a time I would have bought anything, I would have bought a tape of David Bowie reading takeaway menus but my feelings are changing.

Since the death of David Bowie, his social media has turned into advertising space for reissues, picture discs, and other such lucrative endeavours. You only have to look at the way that Brian May and Roger Taylor has squeezed every drop of goodwill out of the Queen legacy to worry that David Bowie will be the next victim of this. After all, they do say that death is the best career move for a musician.

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2019-01-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

Picture from Stickypedia

Someone I used to know when I lived in Teesside bought a small rectangular piece of turf when Ayresome Park closed in 1995. A nice souvenir for the Middlesbrough Football Club supporter to remind him of the old ground. He rather brilliantly set this piece of turf in a window box and around it he build a football ground around it out of balsa wood, not a replica of the old ground but it was the thought that counted, he even marked out the lines using Tippex. Several other items from the closure of the ground are now owned by ardent fans such as seats and assorted furniture. Wembley Stadium was subjected to a similar souvenir stripping as I am sure were other now defunct grounds.

We are a bit more knowledgeable nowadays when it comes to memorabilia, some people own bits of the Berlin Wall for example because they knew that this would become an interesting piece of history. Clothing worn by famous people, bits of old buildings and the like all have a market, which brings me to something happening in Nottingham. Rock City is having its notorious main floor replaced for the first time in the venue's 39 year history. Anybody who has been to Rock City will be aware of the floor, because it is always as sticky as arseholes. The official line is that the floor's stickiness is a mystery because they clean it after every gig, but I suspect that to be slightly economical with the truth. Sections of the floor will be sold for around the £25-£30 ballpark after they have been cleaned, sanded and branded with the Rock City logo.

This is where Rock City have dropped a slight bollock regarding this. While it is ironic that if you buy a piece of the floor it will have been cleaned, how will be even be able to know for sure that it is indeed a piece of Rock City's dancefloor? For the true collector of live music artifacts, you would want the floor to remain as dirty and sticky as always, wouldn't you?

I was going to buy a bit to put in my kitchen as a fly catcher but I won't bother now.

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2019-01-07T18:22:00.000-08:00

There were still a fair number of festive decorated houses when I went for a walk with Jack on January 2nd, inspiring me to come up with a song that sounded great until I got home and realised I couldn't remember it. One of my favourite pastimes as a kid was seeing how much Christmas was left and how long for, houses decorated until 6th January and those items that are missed out such as public Christmas trees still up in towns until well into January. What amuses me is that the decorations are removed and the tree remains, probably the result of some internal work-to-rule within the council.

I was annoyed to see that a load of household shite had been fly tipped on the pathway near to my house. The sad thing was that this had been dumped on Christmas Day, and it seemed to consist of decorations and a fake tree among a load of clothing and kitchen stuff. I noticed this on Boxing Day morning, which is how I know this was dumped on Christmas Day. Maybe a massive row took place, perhaps prompted by an underdone turkey, and one of the couple decided in a fit of rage that Christmas was over.

Although I feel, even with my lack of seasonal fucks to give, that it is nice to see a tree up in a sitting room when I walk past, I am alarmed to see that at least three houses on our dog walk had a full on outside light show going on that would shame Clark Griswold on the second. Do you really feel festive so long after the main event? I used to insist on Christmas lasting for the whole period but now I am all done by Christmas Day afternoon if I'm honest.

The above picture summed it up for me, taken just up the road from my house. The pressure of Christmas had obviously been too much for someone who couldn't even be arsed to remove the decorations and just wanted it all to be over.

The householder came out of the front door and asked why I was taking a picture of his bin. My response was probably not what he was expecting. I told him that I was photographing his festive wheelie bin because it was a work of art and when the binmen (or whatever you call them nowadays - environmental cleanliness operatives or something) chuck it in the back of the truck it will be gone forever and the art world will suffer for the loss. His face was the very definition of confusion.

I'm thinking of getting it printed and turned into Christmas cards.

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2019-01-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

Picture from Derby Telegraph

Almost as if to prove my point about the declining quality of local newspapers, this week the Nottingham Post and their collection of chimpanzees with typewriters have been full of stories about the fact that a branch of Wimpy is closing down. Admittedly this is moderately newsworthy as the branch at Nottingham's ghost of a shopping mall that is the Broadmarsh Centre has been there since 1975 making it the longest serving outlet in the place in Broadmarsh, especially poignant because these days a restaurant only stays open for a matter of months before the keys get handed back to the landlord. In this era of environmental awareness I am surprised that Wimpy didn't make more out of the fact that they served food on plates and drinks in cups and glasses rather than in cardboard receptacles. There's only a handful of these outlets in the UK these days, which is a shame given that Nottingham city centre has three McDonalds and two Burger Kings. I admit I do like Burger King's food when I am in the mood for that kind of thing, although I haven't been into a McDonalds since they turned the ordering system into that of Argos.

This whole episode seems to smell of a concept I have written about before, negative marketing (the promotion of something so ubiquitous that it doesn't really need promoting). Apart from the fact that the Nottingham Post has wrung at least a week's worth of material out of this closure, it was interesting to see on Twitter that the place was packed out yesterday, the final day of trading. Most of these love letters came from people who had not darkened their doors in years and had popped in for one last look. Whoever came up with this whole escapade is nothing short of a genius because they have managed to get bums on seats in Wimpy, the name all over social media and a shit load of free publicity in the local paper. Obviously it doesn't take a lot to excite the Nottingham Post into creating content, unless I'm involved, but even so this has all been free publicity.

Here's the big twist though, Wimpy hasn't vanished for good. It will be back in Broadmarsh once the revamping work has been done, okay so that could be a million years from now but everyone seems to have downplayed the fact that Wimpy were merely saying au revoir rather than goodbye.

I imagine that not one person who nostalgically ate there yesterday will be seen anywhere near the place when it returns.

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2019-01-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

The Nottingham media have done their best over the years to totally ignore me and my achievements for the time I have been in the business, and while it used to bother me I now find it funny to an extent. The decline of the Nottingham Post over the years is a sad thing to see in a way because like radio before it, we are losing a quality newspaper too, and it isn't just Nottingham. Local news is suffering for whatever reason be it lack of money, lack of advertising or most obvious of all lack of quality writers. The Nottingham Post website has turned into a generic local paper site that is impossible to read, especially on a phone, because of pop-ups and the page refreshing itself at random points. Plus once you get to the bottom of the article you are bombarded with the usual click bait bullshit, 'you won't believe what happened next'.

Leftlion, a free arts paper that is available in selected shops, bars and cafes, is another blinkered publication that has ignored me. I even did a radio show with Penny Reeve who was an editor at the time, and that didn't warrant a mention within its pages, neither did my doing a radio show in America showcasing Nottingham music and giving artists their first overseas airplay. I don't need to mention the ignorance of the Nottingham Post when it came to the way they handled the 'retirement' of their food critic and basically kept him going so he could copy exactly what I pitched to them as a replacement.

I don't know what prompted this embargo but over Christmas they took it too far and just acted out of nothing more than childish spite. At the Hockley Hustle I joined The Breakfast Club on stage for their song 'Top Shop' and with the band's permission I released it as a single in order to raise funds for the Hockley Hustle charities. Once I had the single and video ready for release I emailed the Post, Leftlion, Notts TV, BBC Radio Nottingham, Nottingham Live, Kemet FM, and the local television news strand East Midlands Today. Only Nottingham Live picked up on this but nobody else even replied. Instead they threw their attention behind the novelty hit 'We Built This City on Sausage Rolls', admittedly a funny idea (one of those funny ideas that get progressively less funny with each revisit) and for a worthy cause but I am sure that they didn't have to throw all their towels on the one sunbed. Such is the local media and their obsession with ignoring me that they jump behind a guy who doesn't even live in Nottingham anymore.

If you would like to support local charities, then download the single from here and have a look at the video here. Because you won't read about it in the local press. To be honest I could cure cancer and the Nottingham press would ignore it.

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2019-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

I have written before about how the Kimberley Sessions is one of, if not my favourite gig to attend, and after the December edition it was nice to be able to enjoy it from a comfortable vantage point rather than from the stage. For the December show, Bill Kerry III and I both thought it would be a good idea for me to read A Christmas Carol in between the bands, we were wrong. The bit in between acts is for talking even louder than you do when the acts are playing, going to the bar and going outside for a cigarette. Not one person paid any attention so things fell apart a bit. I missed an entire chapter too as I found out the news that Pete Shelley had passed away so I coerced Bainy and James (aka Salisbury and Bain and half of Blue Vulture) to perform an impromptu tribute. Also as the last two acts were Selfish Gaiden and Frankie Vacuum, and before them Deke Hardman, I decided to rush through the end of the story and make it as offensive and sweary as possible which at least got a few laughs. For good measure I joined Frankie Vacuum onstage for a tasteful rendition of Gary Glitter's song 'Another Rock 'n' Roll Christmas'.

January however was back to normal and a strong line up to kick off the new year with a high bar already set. What made this a special one was that all the acts stayed on and came together for a jam session at the end, something that isn't always possible but on this occasion it worked. Martin Gallimore kicked it off, someone I want for The Random Sessions, and making their debut, I seem to remember having a hand in suggesting them, Malin Hill. They went down really well I am glad to report, especially as the line up was folk leaning, this is my friend Gary's project (formerly of Prefontaine, a band I supported heavily on radio which of course led to their inevitable demise) and will no doubt go far. Borderland Folk were another new to me band, although it is made up of Martin Carey from King of Rome, Misk Hills Mountain Rambler III and Terry Faulkner, thus keeping in with the Kimberley rule that you have to be in more than one band. Again I want these for The Random Sessions and we discussed a way of making a special episode to promote an album they have made with others of traditional mining songs.

After such a strong start to the year of Kimberley Sessions, I can't wait to see what they have in store for February.

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2019-01-03T13:59:00.000-08:00

In October I hosted for the Hockley Hustle at Bunkers Hill for the fourth and final time as I am slowly stepping away from the music business in order to concentrate on other projects. Last year I also called time on The Sunday Alternative podcast after two hundred episodes as I just didn't have the time to give it my all. Initially I would record it during the week, upload it on Friday or Saturday and release it to social media fanfare on Sunday lunchtime, as I got busier I eventually ended up at times recording it on Sunday morning and uploading it straight away. It was a decision I gave a lot of thought to as the podcast was getting some mind-boggling listening figures and of course it was initially the radio show that gave me my big break. Hopefully I will be doing something under the Sunday Alternative name at some point but I don't feel in a rush. Having at one point been quite a big hitter in the Nottingham music scene it is weird to look back on a few years ago compared with now, especially when you consider that we haven't been replaced. A few months ago I posed the question on my personal Facebook page asking who the influencers are nowadays and didn't really get a definite answer. NottinghamLIVE, which I presented with Darren Patterson, and its predecessor Notts Live with Bainy and Andy Haynes, ran for roughly five years in total. Not a huge amount of time but Andy pointed out on the Facebook comments about what an achievement it was. Three hours of live radio a week with a live on-air performance, sometimes two, is something that has never been replicated and Nottingham's music scene is the poorer for it.

I'm not totally out of the loop though, because The Random Sessions continues to be a delightful way to keep my hand in. As I have written before, it is not an original concept and anybody could do it really so I am not claiming that this is in any way special. What it is though is a great way to spend time with musicians I know and to meet up with new ones. The balance between older more established performers and relative newcomers that are young enough to be my children is at just the right level, and I am glad that more women are getting involved. The original incarnation, The Random Saturday Sessions was very much a boys' club and it is nice to have moved away from that.

The good news is that after taking December off I have managed to get a new block of filming sorted in record time. January is a strange month for pubs and a lot of performers tend to still be decompressing after a busy festive season so I gave up trying to get the whole month sorted so I only have one session lined up, but February has six lined up so there will be plenty of episodes in the bank. I still have three from last year to release and I want to try and get in the habit of releasing them on a more regular basis, and really fly against convention by experimenting with putting them out in order. Crazy but it might just happen.

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2019-01-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

Stock photo

A heartfelt Christmas story in two acts.

Act 1

It was the Friday before Christmas and I was on the bus heading into town to do some Christmas shopping. Behind me, on the seats at the back, I could hear the frustrated but patient pleas from a mother to her daughter to sit still while the bus was moving otherwise she would fall and hurt herself. I could tell that this wasn't one of those mothers who shouted and swore at her child in a way to make you wonder why she reproduced in the first place, this was a nice mother who simply didn't want her daughter to hurt herself. From my seat I heard the mother gently remind her child that Santa would be watching her and that she should be good. It has often baffled me why more parents don't use this tactic, especially as it has traction from around September. In fact I think this should be a feature of the tannoy announcements on public transport - "Hi kids, if you're making a noise or being a nuisance, Santa will not bring you any toys".

Eventually I caught the daughter's name, I won't say it here for privacy reasons so I will refer to her as 'Alice'. This was my chance to inject a bit of Christmas magic to their lives so I got out of my seat and sat opposite 'Alice' and her mother and started a conversation. "I am really busy today", I began, "I work for Santa Claus and I have to make a note of who is being good". I took out my notebook and wrote down her name, helped by her mum who immediately played along, "Yes that's right, Alice Jones". I had a brief conversation with 'Alice' who agreed to be good, and I agreed to cross her name out of my book at the end of the day. We exchanged a high five and I returned to my seat, listening all the way to my stop to 'Alice' discussing this encounter.

The nice thing here is that she might or might not remember this next Christmas, but there's a strong chance that her mum will remind her. Maybe 'Alice' will recall this every year, and when she grows up and has children of her own she will regale them with the story of how she met one of Santa's helpers working undercover one year when she was little. Hopefully I will see 'Alice' and her mother this December because this will add to the magic. The ultimate result would be me living long enough to meet 'Alice' as a grown up mother and see her near Christmas and this will back up her story to her kids and keep the magic of Christmas alive as I tell them about how I visited 'Alice' when she was a child and introduced myself as one of Santa's helpers.

Act 2

We were in Sherwood on the same afternoon. While in and out of various shops I became aware of a commotion. A car was beeping at another car to move out of the way, but it was the beeper that was in the wrong. The car in front was trying to reverse into a space but couldn't because of the impatient beeping fool. Intermittent flashes of his reverse lights didn't seem to be getting the point across so I decided to help, fresh from my success with 'Alice' and buoyed by my new position as the spreader of Christmas spirit. I tapped on beeper's window and when his wife rolled the window down I pointed out that the other guy was trying to reverse into the parking space. The husband replied to me, "He's a daft cunt isn't he!?" I pointed out that he was in the right and that if he reversed up a notch then the guy would be able to reverse into his space. "Fucks sake" he murmured and reversed.

Tidings of comfort and joy!

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2019-01-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

I wonder how long I will keep this going if I start writing a blog again? It is hard to believe that I used to do this daily and although I attempted to revive it last year it soon fizzled out. Last year was quite unproductive work wise, or at least I thought so until I looked at my list. The list will be published on my first newsletter of the year which will appear towards the end of the month, in time for the first payday of the new year after which everyone will be back in funds after Christmas.

This year I have a list of projects that I need to get on with, but we really need to make an effort with the donations. This is partly why I have decided to have a go at this blog again because at least I will be able to draw people's attention to the PayPal button at the top of the page. Crowd funding doesn't seem to have taken off but we need to make an effort to work together here as every penny donated goes towards entertaining everybody and none of it goes in my pocket.

New Year's Eve isn't something I particularly make a fuss of nowadays, not that I ever did to be honest, and last year I just watched telly with rather a lot of festive food. We watched the Madness gig on BBC1 which meant that we got away with not having to watch Jools Holland's annual bollocks. The decorations came down today, which made me think about the time I used to have more enthusiasm for Christmas and insisted on dragging it out until the 6th January. It is only because I am still living with Mandi that I had decorations around me, I am hoping to be out this year which means that I won't have so much as a paper chain to put up in future as I simply can't be bothered any more. I came up with a song title a few years ago called 'I Simply Can't Be Arsed With Christmas', and I am sure I wrote a few lines too, it will be somewhere in the archives scribbled on one of my many notebooks. When I walked Jack this evening I was struck by not only how many Christmas trees were still up, but how the garish lights covering houses were still shining and merry, so maybe there are still people who insist on continuing the merriment.

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