Jason Cook: grit, determination, a cracker of a story and a new movie…

Jason Cook on his phone in Borehamwood

Jason Cook has turned up occasionally in this blog.

The last time was in December 2021 when my opening sentence was “You need grit and determination – and nowadays, ideally, the potential for sequels – to get movies made…”

Jason Cook has grit and determination, is indefatigable, has a staggeringly fertile creative mind and he has sequels and now a prequel. 

He also has dyslexia but has so far published four linked semi-autobiographical gangster novels, a children’s book called Rats in Space (the title explains it all) and a novel about the Rave scene, set in the 1980s and 1990s – Euphoria – Pirates of the South.

He has long had plans to film the first of his four semi-autobiographical gangster books There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus.

But now his first film is being released and it is a prequel to that, a set-up, for the planned four main semi-autobiographical gangster movies based on his novels.

Cookster: The Darkest Days is being screened this Saturday at the adventurous Genesis Cinema in Mile End Road as part of the London Independent Film Festival.

The plotline? 

“A dyslexic teen misunderstood by his family, abandoned by the system and desperate for respect, becomes a drug dealer struggling to balance his addiction and debt to a local gangster while a rival threatens to destroy his world, driving him apart from the woman he loves and a daughter he’s never known.”

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JASON: So, after 20 years, we managed to get the budget together from various investors and a film production company called Silent D Pictures.

Indefatigable Djonny Chen of Silent D Pictures

JOHN: That’s Djonny Chen’s company.

He is almost as indefatigable as you…

JASON: Yes. Djonny has made 27 films since Covid – directed and/or produced/executive produced.

And he’s lined up to do another two films with me – Pirates of the South and Rats in Space. as well as Cookster: There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus, the follow-up to Cookster: The Darkest Days.

JOHN: And now you’ve written a fifth Cookster book to go with the film.

JASON: Yes. That’ll come out this year.

JOHN: So Cookster: The Darkest Days is about you growing up in Borehamwood, where we both live.

JASON: Yes. We shot it over 18 days in Borehamwood and Radlett – all on location.

Craige Middleburg plays the slightly older, dodgy Jason

In this film, I’m played from ages 12 to 18. Two actors play me: one younger, one older. Samuel Staite plays young Jason. Craige Middleburg is the older me.

Then there’s Nick Moran from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels who plays my dad and Tracy Shaw from Coronation Street plays my mum.

JOHN: You shot part of the film at the school you actually attended as a kid.

JASON: Yes. Parkside School in Borehamwood. It doesn’t have the same head as when I was there.

JOHN: Had they heard of you by repute at the school?

JASON: Yes. They’d heard I had been a naughty young lad and that I suffered from ADHD and dyslexia. Back then, they thought I was no use: I lacked confidence and lacked focus and they reckoned I would never amount to anything and I would end up in prison.

JOHN: Well, you did end up in prison, but now you’ve written all these books and co-produced this film.

JASON: I couldn’t read or write at the time when they reckoned I would never amount to anything. I spent most of my younger years standing outside the headmaster’s office: well, it was a headmistress back then.

JOHN: Did she ever amount to anything?

JASON: No. Not that I know of.

JOHN: Did the school welcome you back with open arms?

JASON: They were very helpful. We got the design team to come in and put the classrooms back to the early 1980s. We had the school uniforms, the chalkboards instead of the digital whiteboards they’ve got on the wall now. 

Cookster – The Darkest Days is coming

All the locations had to be re-dressed for the era. We’re talking about me from 12 to 18. So 1975 to early 1980s. We re-dressed my mum’s house.

JOHN: Do you appear in the film?

JASON: You’ll miss me if you blink.

JOHN: Djonny has links to Indonesia.

JASON: Yes, he has links to distribution over there.

JOHN: Any changes to appeal to the Indonesian market?

JASON: We changed one character in the script from British to Indonesian and it worked really well. The actress playing her is Elvira Devinamira. She’s Indonesian.

We leave the film on a cliffhanger, ready to go into the next film Cookster: There’s No Room for Jugglers in My Circus. The government has now given us more tax credits, so we can now claim up to about 70% on the production. 

JOHN: And other film projects?

JASON: I’m working on Rats in Space. We’ve got American producers involved now. It’s an animation, based on a true-life story that I wrote.

Jason has plans for Rats In Space – based on a true story ??

JOHN: Yer what? A true life story??

JASON: A French rat was put in a rocket and shot to the Moon. He never made it to the Moon, but he managed to get back alive. So I wrote a story about how he became an astronaut.

JOHN: Will the rat do any promotional interviews to publicise the movie when it comes out?

JASON: That’s difficult to say.

Hirsute Jason is a man of many hats and movie ideas but he has no dandruff…

Comedian Njambi McGrath has written a revenge novel…

Njambi’s latest  book/first novel…

Well, that is it in a nutshell… Comedian Njambi McGrath wrote an autobiography in 2020. (There’s a blog about it HERE.)

Now she has written a revenge novel. 

So I chatted to her about it…

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JOHN: You’re now being described as “a stand-up comic, author and political commentator”. So you’re on a roll. 

NJAMBI: Maybe. In America, Comedy Dynamics acquired four of my comedy specials. In the UK, Next Up have five.

JOHN: And now you’re a debutante… Your first novel Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul has debuted. 

NJAMBI: (LAUGHS)

JOHN: But you’ve already written a non-fiction autobiographical book: Through The Leopard’s Gaze.

NJAMBI: Writing a memoir was a lot easier. With a memoir, you already know the plot; you know the characters; you know it’s believable, because it actually happened. But, when you write fiction, you have to create a world and characters that are believable. It’s like creating a sculpture from nothing to something that has features.

JOHN: So why do fiction?

Njambi at the launch of her new book…

NJAMBI: Writing Through The Leopard’s Gaze, the non-fiction book, taught me a great deal. Although I knew the ‘plot’, it still had to have a thread for the reader to follow and engage with. I enjoyed crafting it and I did a lot of background research. When it was over, I felt I didn’t really have anything more to say about myself for now, but I wanted to tell a lot more about Kenya, about its history.

JOHN: So you wrote Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul…

NJAMBI: No. The first novel I wrote during lockdown was called Residents of the Ministry of Works. It had all sorts of characters. It was not published but, out of that first draft I did, I saw Mũkami living in this community. She doesn’t want to be there; she hates them; there is nothing good about her community. The published version of Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul was the 11th draft.

JOHN: Have you cannibalised that first Ministry of Works version so much in Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul that it can’t be used for a second novel?

NJAMBI: I don’t think I have. After writing that book I know a lot about the characters, so each character can have their own journey. The same community event can happen to them, but the characters are different: there’s the one who has an affair; there’s one that’s crooked; and so on. Individual stories. Just because they all share the same predicament, doesn’t mean each one doesn’t have a different story, a different journey.

I think Residents of the Ministry of Works may still be published. I signed a two-book deal.

I think it’s going to be a trilogy. Possibly more. I don’t think a second novel would be the end of these characters. They are so dynamic.

One of the characters in the novel is hiding something big, but I don’t know what it is.

JOHN: You only discovered the character was hiding something when you were writing the book?

NJAMBI: Yes. Some authors plan out what the whole book is going to be about before they start writing it. But, with me, a lot of the discoveries I make are when I am actually writing the book. I discover a lot when I’m writing.

Njambi discussing UK politics on the Channel 4 News…

JOHN: Did you know what the end of the book would be before you started?

NJAMBI: No. My mind doesn’t work like that.

The first book I wrote was about 87,000 words. Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul started off around 60,000 and got bigger with every draft. The published version was the 11th draft. So it’s just short of 90,000. 313 pages in PDF.

JOHN: People say the first novel is always autobiographical…

NJAMBI: Kind of.

JOHN: It’s set in 1980s Kenya…

NJAMBI: I grew up there. You harness a lot of what happened to you.

JOHN: Rinsing Mũkami’s Soul is said to be about “gender, sex, redemption, revenge”.

NJAMBI: Mũkami is a young girl. Sixteen. She has ambitions; she wants to be a geologist. She is very studious; an all-round good girl. She encounters a boy and falls in love. She is raped and becomes pregnant. The book is about her trying to get her life back on track. She has to find a way of having a safe abortion in a country where it is illegal. 

JOHN: …in the 1980s.

NJAMBI: It is still illegal to this day. Half a million girls in Kenya go through this every single year. Some of them die; some of them have life-changing injuries. So Mũkami is in a predicament and has no-one to help her, because she doesn’t want to tell her mother who is ridden with problems because their community is being evicted. Mũkami’s father is dead; they are living with her mother’s boyfriend.

The book is basically about how all these men ruin her life. Women can be assaulted and it ruins their life; they can’t go back to what it was. I think the story will be identifiable for people round the world.

JOHN: A review I read said it had “brutal reality” but also “light humour”… That takes some clever writing!

NJAMBI: My publisher at Jacaranda Books said: “The first time I read it, I howled with laughter.” 

JOHN: How did you manage that?

NJAMBI: You have to buy and read the book.

JOHN: It’s also about revenge…

NJAMBI: Yes. She feels wronged. She was a good girl. She did everything that was asked of her. But her life was completely derailed. She ends up in scenarios that are seedy and horrid. She thinks: Who are these people who put me here? I’m going to get revenge!… and she does.

This live Porno stage show will try to do justice to the REAL Trainspotting sequel

Irvine Welsh‘s Trainspotting was published exactly 30 years ago. It was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, but was apparently rejected for the shortlist after “offending the sensibilities of two judges”. The film version came out in 1996 with the movie T2: Trainspotting emerging in 2007 as a sort-of sequel. But the actual novel sequel to Trainspotting – Porno – was published in 2002.

This Sunday, the new stage version of Porno will open at London’s Arts Theatre, running for seven consecutive Sundays.

It was adapted by Scots writer/producer Davie Carswell…

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The original novel

JOHN: This is a stage production of the T2: Trainspotting movie sequel…

DAVIE: No. Trainspotting 2 was a standalone film. 

JOHN: So this Porno stage show is based on the original Porno novel, which was a sequel to the original Trainspotting novel, not on the T2: Trainspotting film.

DAVIE: 100%. Fans of Irvine Welsh maybe weren’t as keen on the T2 film as… I mean, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it, but it maybe didn’t do as well as they hoped.

Everyone online is saying to me: This Porno play had better be Porno and not T2...

And it IS Porno. We’ve lifted large chunks of dialogue and monologues right out of the book, to give it that really effective Irvine feeling.

JOHN: Why is it titled Porno? Trainspotting was about drugs, not porn.

DAVIE: The title’s Porno because Simon ‘Sick Boy’ Williamson is trying to make porn to make his fortune and this is his last big Hurrah. He’s at an age – a mid-life crisis – and he sees time running out… By happy coincidence, back comes Mark Renton to make amends. The question is Will Simon be able to get himself out of the bitterness that has enveloped him? 

Because he’s a MASSIVE coke-head. A massive cocaine addict. He’s been doing cocaine every day for the last 15 years, so his mind’s a bit mushy at times.

That’s the story.

JOHN: You first produced this Porno stage show at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe.

DAVIE: Yes. We did it in Edinburgh last year and then we did three sold-out nights at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow this year. And now we’ve done Greenock, Liverpool, Crewe and Manchester. And the one common response we noticed was that the more shocking the line, the more controversial the joke, the bigger the laugh. That’s exactly what it comes down to.

Irvine is not a shock jock, but his humour is shocking; it’s dark. You only have to see something like The Acid House to see some of the darkness. But we love it; we fucking love the darkness and the controversy. You will see people laughing and then going: “Ooh! I shouldn’t be laughing at that!” The comedy instinct is right there to begin with; then the moralistic bit comes in. “Oh! Should I really be laughing at that?” But, by then it’s too late. You’re laughing.

JOHN: When you say ‘we’ enjoy it, you mean Scottish people? Not necessarily English?

DAVIE: That was my worry. That was why we did Liverpool, Crewe and Manchester before London.

JOHN: Ah, well, they’re different Oop North…

DAVIE: (LAUGHS) We would happily take them in an independent Scotland.

JOHN: But how do you manage in England with the Scottish dialect in general?

DAVIE: We are keeping as close to the book as possible. When you read the book, Simon and Mark – Sick Boy and Renton – their language is written in perfect English. Begbie and Spud are proper broad Leith dialogue.

When we asked some of the audiences in Liverpool and Manchester: “Did you understand that?” they said: “Well, we didn’t understand it 100%, but we know what they meant.” 

Irvine Welsh with Davie in Edinburgh last year.

Also, because of the dialect, at the beginning of the play in London, we are going have some slides up and run through a glossary of terms. “Bairn = child” and so on. The last one is “cunt = cunt”.

I mean, a cunt’s a cunt wherever you are and we must have the highest cunt count in any play that’s ever existed. The director has said he’s getting a bit of ‘cunt PTSD’, just hearing it so often.

JOHN: It’s interesting because, in London it’s an insult, but in Glasgow it’s almost a term of affection. Like ‘bastard’ in Australia. 

DAVIE: I’m writing a juke box musical at the moment, set in Glasgow.

JOHN: What’s a juke box musical?

DAVIE: It’s when you use the songs that are already out there.

We are going to use songs by artists with a Glasgow connection. So Simple Minds, Texas, Primal Scream, people like that. One of the lines in it is when somebody comes up from London and they can’t understand when people say: “Oh, you’re a good cunt”… He’s told: “Oh, no, it’s a compliment!” And he also sees close Glasgow friends insulting each other but just laughing it off; and the explanation is: “Look! We only insult him cos we love him!”

The guy from London tries it and he stands up and shouts: “Ya bunch of cunts!” but it doesn’t translate…

When you think about it, it was a minor miracle that Irvine’s first book, Trainspotting, ever got published. But thank God the publisher did. It started off as a book, then a very successful play, then a film. 30 years on and it’s still touring on stage all over the world.

Certain things are timeless. Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. We are now onto the second and third generation of people loving Trainspotting.

Davie at the Arts Theatre in London

JOHN: You adapted Porno direct from the book and a book is maybe 300 pages; you have maybe a 60 minute play. You have to cut out an enormous amount.

DAVIE: That is THE biggest challenge. Cutting out characters.

In a film, you can have a cast of 40 or 50. But you can’t really have that in a stage play – and you can’t really afford it.

There is a character in the book called ‘Juice’ Terry. Irvine’s fans love him, but I couldn’t fit him in – and also actors cost money – so I took the four main male characters and the female part of Nicky, whose name I’ve change to Lizzie. And I’ve brought in an authority figure – a local policeman – for them all to rebel against.

But I do think ‘Juice’ Terry should have his own play and I’m thinking of doing that.

JOHN: You’re an actor, writer, producer, director, but you decided not to direct this.

DAVIE: No. I think you need to have a bit of distance between a writer and director because otherwise it becomes too headstrong. I would class myself as primarily a writer. Occasionally I will tread the boards. I produce so I can put my writing on. 

Handing a script over to a director makes you a better writer, because the cast can then try things with it, do new things with it. 

JOHN: Did Irvine Welsh interfere with you writing the play from his book?

DAVIE: He just lets you get on with it. On you go: just run with it and see what you can do…

JOHN: He saw your Edinburgh Fringe production of Porno last year. Did you know he was coming?

DAVIE: I did. They were actually making two documentaries about him at the time and one of them asked if they could bring him along and film him watching the play. 

Right at the end he just jumped up and started a standing ovation.

JOHN: That must have been…

DAVIE: Amazing! We are doing seven Sundays here to start with…

JOHN: So it might get extended…

DAVIE: That’s my hope.

What are we going to do about Julie Samuel, actress and much much more?

Julie starred in the movie Ferry Cross The Mersey with Gerry and The Pacemakers. (Photograph by George Elam/ANL/Shutterstock -1355671a)

Julie Samuel has been around a bit, done most everything in showbiz.

She was an actress in well over 100 British TV shows – The Avengers, Coronation Street, Dixon of Dock Green, Z Cars et al… in movies including The Day The Earth Caught Fire, The Long Ships and Ferry Cross The Mersey. She has  produced stage musicals and Shakespeare plays, arranged events at Eton College and Windsor Castle and produced the parade for the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday procession at Horse Guards Parade. And she has managed/promoted her daughter’s band Saint Etienne.

Now she has written her autobiography What Are We Going To Do About Julie?

So we had a chat…

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JULIE: I’ve been writing this book for five years – a lot during lockdown. The reason I did it was because my parents didn’t write their autobiographies and they should have because they had such fascinating lives.

My father was the son of a couple of Music Hall artists called Lawson & Odell. They were in the Charlie Chaplin troupe. 

JOHN: The Fred Karno troupe?

JULIE: They travelled all over Europe.

My father could sing and do comedy and recitations. He had to give it up because he got tuberculosis when he was 40, then he worked part-time in a stables training race horses, then went to work in Foyles Bookshop, My mother was the daughter of William Foyle. 

He worked in the theatrical book department. My mother married him, despite all the advice of my grandfather, because my father was a bit of a rogue. He was a womaniser, a gambler. You name it, he did it. Smoked, drank. But he was a very funny guy and he got away with terrible things by just being charming and funny.

My mother was the opposite: straight, honest, kind. 

Opposites sometimes attract and she forgave him everything he ever did. He was really like a fifth child.

JOHN: Did you learn how to behave from your father or your mother?

JULIE: I was the youngest of four. I learned from all the mistakes my siblings made. So I learned to be very diplomatic. I knew exactly how to get round my parents. My middle sister would demand things. I learned how to get the best out of life by being diplomatic.

JOHN: You went to a Protestant Convent school, didn’t you?

JULIE: Well, I ran away from my first boarding school which was 13 or 14 miles away when I was 7 and I did it really because I was just fed up of being away from home. I took my best friend and the school dog with me. Well, the dog just followed me out. He made his own flight for freedom.

We got home and the headmaster came looking for me and the school dog ran out of the house and gave us away.

I stayed at that school for the rest of the term and then my mother took me to a very strict high church girls’ boarding school.

But, if you do something drastic like run away from school and you get away with it… what else can they do to you? From the moment I arrived at the church school, it was a horrible place. It was cold. It was miserable. It was a terrible place, but parents paid a fortune to send their girls there. The education side was OK, but I was dyslexic so the education side was actually not suiting me at all. 

And they wanted to get rid of me from the very start because they said I was inciting rebellion among the other girls.

Then I… There was a new laundry building being built just outside our school. And there was this young boy there – one of the builders – who looked a bit like Elvis and he waved at me. So I waved back. And then (LAUGHS) I met him by the fence and he pushed a letter through the bushes to me saying he really liked me. So I thought I’d better write back. I wrote a letter but then thought: That’s not my best handwriting. So I screwed it up and threw it in the bin and wrote another one on pink notepaper… No, that’s not good enough either! So I threw it in the bin.

Julie knew who Pyramus and Thisbe were…

I finally got the one I thought was OK and I gave it through the fence to him like Pyramus and Thisbe… but the school found all the thrown-away copies in the bin and that was their excuse to expel me, because I was ‘having a relationship’ with a builder,. Which was rubbish. I wasn’t at all.

It was half term when they did it and I was staying with a friend whose mother was a very strict Catholic lady and they were going to expel both of us because they felt we were too friendly. But her mother remonstrated with Sister Mildred, who was the Head, and said: “I’m going to report you to the Pope.” So they let her stay. But that was it for me.

JOHN: What happened to the builder?

JULIE: God knows! (LAUGHS) All I can remember was that his name was Stanley.

JOHN: After that, you went to the Italia Conti Stage School. Was that because you were desperate to be in showbiz?

JULIE: Well, having run away from one boarding school and been expelled from my second one, there weren’t that many schools that would actually take me. One of the teachers I had at the second boarding school told my mother I should be at stage school and, of course, my father knew all about stage schools. 

My parents asked me: “Would you like to go to stage school?” And I said: “Of course I would!” 

Who wouldn’t? Get away from all that Arithmetic and History and everything and just go and have a lot of fun. So I auditioned and got in and they were some of the best years of my life.

Julie as the cover star on TV Times magazine

(IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ALL THE GOSSIP AND JUICY SHOWBIZ, TV AND MOVIE TALES, YOU”LL HAVE TO READ JULIE’S BOOK!)

JOHN: You moved from being an actress to being a band and theatre manager.

JULIE: Possibly because of my daughter. I also started a company called Problems Unlimited and had a little shop boutique. I’ve always worked.

When my daughter was 15, she joined a local band and started singing. They got a bit of interest from a man who managed Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other quite big bands. So someone had to look after them and, I was the only person who had any idea what show business was about, so  I became their manager/driver/roadie and financer.

JOHN: Financer?

JULIE: Well, somebody had to pay for the rehearsal rooms, pay for the van, drive it.

That’s how I got into it and then I got quite interested in the business side. Very different to what I was used to. All the kind of deals that went on. I had always been in front of the camera and on stage. I never understood at first why you had to have a lawyer involved in everything, but I do understand that now!

It just grew from there and I took on other people like Janey Lee Grace, who’s now a radio presenter and author. She was in a band called Cola Boy who got into the charts on their first release.

Then there was a rock band who had great potential – Mexico 70 – but – I dunno – they weren’t quite ‘together enough’. The lead singer was wonderful: a really good-looking young man, a bit Bowie-ish, a great songwriter, a great performer. But you need much more than that if you’re going to be a rock star. You need to be really tough and really determined and, to be honest, you really need to be a bit of an arsehole. You need to be me-me-me – everything has to be about me-me-me. And he never really had that determination.

They had a record out here, but it was on a very minor, indie label called Cherry Red. And then they had records out in America because somebody from Philadelphia who had his own record label ‘discovered’ them. So we signed a deal and he ‘pushed’ them in America and we did two tours there and they were beginning to do really, really well and then everything went wrong. There was a lot of drink and drugs involved, as there often is. Some survive it; some don’t. And they didn’t.

JOHN: Did the lead singer get success elsewhere?

JULIE: No. He sadly died not very long ago of an overdose. The usual sort of thing. They had potential, but never realised what potential they had and never… I don’t know… You’ve got to be so dedicated. Somebody in the band has got to be so dedicated that they’ll just survive anything. And they didn’t have that. I did my best, but they… just… disintegrated after a while. It’s all in the book.

(…CONTINUED HERE with SAINT ETIENNE, THE SCOTTISH WITCHES AND THE FOYLES BOOKSHOP CONNECTION…)

Yesterday, I was attacked in the street by a 12-year-old… Watching violence.

Yesterday, I was attacked in the street by a 12-year-old.

Writer Ariane Sherine’s highly-intelligent daughter was telling me how, in drama classes at school, she had been taught to (stage) fight. 

She demonstrated this by repeatedly punching me in the face (but stopping short of physical contact) and delivering flying kicks to my body (but stopping short of physical contact).

Each time I was saved from physical harm by about an inch or maybe two. But I was increasingly slightly worried she might miscalculate. I feared (slightly) for the potential physical impact. The odds, I felt, would shorten the longer she demonstrated.

Which reminded me of a blog I posted here twelve years ago about writing an autobiography.

My opinion was and is that people are interested in people not in facts.

People are primarily interested in people.

Which brings us back to Ariane’s daughter’s demonstration of her stage-fighting technique.

I read an analysis when I was at college of how people watch screen violence. The study was able to use cameras to see exactly at which point in the screen the subjects’s eyes were concentrating.

Their results were not what I would have thought in advance but made sense when I thought about it.

If, for example, on screen, someone shoots or punches a person in the stomach, the victim will double over as the bullet/fist hits. If they are punched on the chin, their head will jerk backwards or sideways with the force of the punch. 

So what does the audience look at?

The viewer does not look at the victim’s stomach as the bullet or punch hits. They look at the victim’s face. They do not watch the action; they watch the re-action.

When someone is punched on the chin, they do not look at the point of impact. They do not look at the chin. They look at the eyes and facial reaction of the victim. Of course they do. It seems obvious,

The point is that they watch the re-action not the action. 

They are not primarily concentrating on the act or the fact of the action. They concentrate on the emotional and physical reaction of the person. 

Because people are primarily interested in people’s emotions and emotional reactions, not isolated, cold facts.

That’s equally important in writing autobiographies (or thrillers) as it is in filming action or even comedy films.

‘Man (or woman or other) slips on a banana skin’ is only interesting in so far as it affects a person.

They are interested in re-actions more than actions.

People are interested in people not abstract facts, except insofar as they affect  people.

It’s all about people, people.

Steve Best is Britain’s Clowntographer

Last year, comic/photographer Steve Best published Comedians, an extraordinarily classy collection of his photos of, you guessed it, comedians.

Now he is about to publish a sequel – Comedians 2.

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Steve Best’s classy book Comedians…

STEVE: What I wanted to do with the first book was to get a lovely product out and to not lose money. It has made a bit of profit.

But the print cost of the new one has gone up because the cost of the paper has increased. It has gone up massively, like everything else.

But I want to publish it.

JOHN: Why?

STEVE: You want to leave something behind after you’ve gone. I want the book to be the best possible book I can do. It’s printed at EBS in Italy (Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei), the best fine art printers in the world.

JOHN: So what’s the difference between the first and second books?

STEVE: Well the first one got my name out there as a photographer and I got a lot of work on the back of it. There’s this big project that might be coming up soon.

JOHN: You have an ‘in’ with comedians because you are one of them. You are a comic AND a photographer.

STEVE: Yes, it gives me access and also I’ve grown in confidence. Now I’ve got to position myself – not to be aloof but – to be seen as a photographer rather than a comedian with a camera.

JOHN: The National Portrait Gallery has just re-opened…

STEVE: The Art world is really difficult to understand and break into. And there’s a difference between fine art photography and documentary photography. My biggest hurdle now is to convince the Art world that what I do is of some artistic merit.

Some of the photographic galleries are now saying to me These are great photos rather than Oh, you’re just a comedian who does a bit of photography.

JOHN: I love your photo of Johnny Vegas sitting in the middle, with Michael Redmond on the left and Dave Johns on the right. Three totally different characters in one shot.

Comics Michael Redmond, Johnny Vegas and Dave Johns in Comedians

STEVE: That was one of the first photos I took (2015) and it started me thinking There’s something in this.

JOHN: If photography became suddenly very, very financially successful, would you give up comedy performing?

STEVE: Until about six or seven years ago, I… well I… well, there’s another article to be written about what happened to the comedy circuit…

JOHN: What happened to the comedy circuit?

STEVE: Twenty years ago, the money was even better than it is now and you could earn a pretty good living by just being a good stand-up.

JOHN: So what happened six or seven years ago?

STEVE: Well, you know, Jongleurs fell apart, but the money hadn’t really gone up much anyway. Jongleurs had been paying just as well seven years before that. They were paying you to perform and they were also paying a hotel in advance and then it started slowly changing – you had to stomp up the money in advance and they’d pay you back and then they stopped paying. I wasn’t owed any money when Jongleurs went down.

I had a really strong 20-25 minute set I used to take round then but I feel I’m much more creative now with what I’m doing with the photography… because everything IS so different each time.

The very visual Steve Best: “What am I doing it for?”

You think… If I do a gig for £150 down in Sussex, I could instead do a shoot in my little studio – a portrait – and be at home… So what am I doing going down to Sussex and performing much the same material again? What am I doing it for?

JOHN: Surely every comedy gig is different because of the punters?

STEVE: Well, unless you are a really, really prolific writer, the act kind of stays the same. I’m not learning. Why would I carry on doing that? I’m not an observational comic; my act is one-liner jokes and visual routines. It doesn’t interest me as much as it used to.

JOHN: Are you getting into a niche of only photographing comedians, though?

STEVE: Well, it’s documentary photography. Because of my website and that first Comedians book, I was flown out to Zurich last week for a big pharmaceutical company – I was going up and down glaciers documenting the width and doing various photoshoots of people. Hopefully that sort of thing is the future.

JOHN: People say glaciers have a limited future.

STEVE: But then there’s that big project I was telling you about that will hopefully happen. I would be part of a new music school in London.  I would be a creative director with a proper studio to kit out so I can take portraits of all the musicians and tour with them when they get good.

It could be the next step for me because I could still do my other comedy projects but also get into the music world as well. It could be really exciting.

JOHN: Have your children shown any interest in performing?

STEVE: My daughter is REALLY good on the violin. My son is on the piano; he’s a funny guy but quite shy, like me. I don’t think either of them will go into being performers. Their mum is a proper scientist so would want them to get a ‘proper’ job. She is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University College London.

JOHN: Your father was a mathematician.

Steve Best in Leicester Square, London

STEVE: Strangely, he was also into Amateur Dramatics. He was quite strait-laced. My mum was the ‘mad artist’. I was really good at maths in school. I did my O Level a year early and got an A grade. I was going to go on to do Maths at A level, but then I got obsessed by performing magic… In the end, my A Levels were Music, Art and French. I really loved Maths. But I went to a real rough comprehensive school and they weren’t really pushing me. Nor my parents.

My parents sort of said: “Well, if you want to do magic, go and do magic.”

And before going to school, I used to practise juggling.

JOHN: More than three items?

STEVE: Five.

JOHN: For how long?

STEVE: About a minute.

JOHN: Bloody hell. I’m impressed. Someone explained to me that juggling five items is three times as difficult as juggling three.

STEVE: Y-e-e-e-s…

JOHN: I don’t understand how your maths brain links up with comedy performance and photography.

STEVE: I think maths helps with everything else: art and everything.

JOHN: I was useless at science: anything where you had to remember X = Y. 

STEVE: I was fascinated by that. I loved the idea of memorising. I tried to memorise a pack of cards in a certain stack. Pictures and numbers; there are ways of doing it. I loved the Rubik’s Cube. I learnt the Rubik’s Cube when I was young.

JOHN: Malcolm Hardee used to say he was never impressed by juggling or mime because they were skills. With enough practice, almost anybody can become good. Whereas comedy is a talent. You can get better with practice but only to a certain extent; to be superb, you need to have some innate talent. 

With photography, too, you have to learn certain technical aspects, but you also maybe need some form of innate talent?

STEVE: Yes, I think with comedy and photography you do have to have something innately – and also it’s about timing. There are all these comedy courses and you can teach comedy and you can learn technique, but it doesn’t mean you are going to be funny.

JOHN: Do you absolutely need to know the technicalities in photography? Is it like movies? Objectively, The Blair Witch Project (which I have not seen) is technically bad but works emotionally. Is it possible to take a technically bad photograph that works?

STEVE: I think technically you do have to learn – how the shutter works; how the aperture works; how to control the light that comes into the sensor. But there’s a photograph of Julian Clary and Paul Thorne passing each other in my first Comedians book. Technically, it’s not brilliant because it’s a bit out of focus but the actual timing is brilliant because they are looking at each other for that split second. So it’s a good photo.

Eye eye – Paul Thorne and Julian Clary in Comedians

JOHN: That’s it. We’re finished. 38 minutes. I have to transcribe all this. 

STEVE: Where are you off to now?

JOHN: I’m meeting the Fabulous Flying Haidrani Twins… Identical twins.

STEVE: You know I’m a twin? Not identical.

JOHN: Now you tell me! After 38 minutes! What does your twin do?

STEVE: He’s a teacher down in Portishead, near Bristol. He teaches Art, including Photography, up to A-Level. Though he doesn’t really take photos. He is into Art. And he’s also a karate teacher. He’s very funny off-stage but never took it onstage. Whereas I was very quiet off-stage but went on-stage. 

JOHN: Not identical twins, then…

STEVE: What do the Fabulous Flying Haidrani Twins do?

JOHN: Well, separately, they each used to be multi-award-winning journalists. Now they go on extraordinarily exotic and almost incredibly gossip-worthy holidays. But they never write about them. It’s a great loss. However successful your photography becomes, you should never give up your live comedy performances.

KISS KISS. Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer is not for movie lovers.

Christopher Nolan

As of yesterday, I have given up on Christopher Nolan movies. Seriously.

Yesterday I sat through his movie Oppenheimer – exactly three messy hours of my life I will never get back.

He is or was a good director. The Dark Knight, his second Batman film back in 2008, was wonderful… but…

His third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises back in 2012, had Tom Hardy (a good actor) mumbling through a mask.

Then I saw Dunkirk in 2017 and – bugger me – there was Tom Hardy again mumbling through a mask as a wartime fighter pilot.

And – may the movie gods help us – then there was Tenet in 2020… with lots of mumbling going on all over the place – including, at points, star John David Washington mumbling through an oxygen mask – plus having to navigate a messy script and a largely incomprehensible plot.

With Tenet, it felt to me like Nolan should have gone back to Draft 2 or 3 of the script and tweaked it. The plot would have had more comprehensible momentum. It felt like there had been 23 or more drafts, all increasingly more complicated.

 ‘More complicated’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’.

I wrote a blog about Tenet when it was released.

One trouble with writing and re-writing and re-writing and re-writing, I think, is that you get so involved in the intricate world you have created – you know 100% of what is happening, you are so concentrated within your own creative mind – that you lose sight of the initial impact on the viewer encountering the thing for the first time.

It is slightly less of a problem with a book than a film because, as a reader of words on a page, you can adjust the speed of your comprehension and you can assimilate more information and intricacies. If you are watching a film in the cinema – if you miss something – it’s been and gone.

Yes, you can watch a film twice or three times and, yes, you can pause and rewind on a streamed or recorded movie. But, to get full viewer impact, a movie is still primarily a live, immediate, as-it-happens and superficial experience. You should not have to re-see it over and over again and analyse its intricacies as if you are on some up-your-own-arse masochistic academic media studies course.

I included the phrase ‘superficial experience’ there.

In a book, you can get inside someone’s thoughts and thought processes and abstract concepts. You can adjust the speed at which you assimilate the information while retaining total concentration and plot momentum. In a movie, you basically have to immediately process actual images and actual sounds which are transmitted instantly to your brain. In that sense, movies are, by the nature of the medium, more superficial than books.

Oppenheimer with… guess what… exactly three hours of a total overly-intricate mess of a script – is, at times, incomprehensible not because it is partly about atomic physics but because of the cutting back-and-forth in time and lack of a central plot hook… not helped by the actors’ occasionally indistinct words.

Fortunately, the muffled words were not quite as frequent as I feared.

Christopher Nolan, actor Cillian Murphy and IMAX camera.(Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

The problem with the sound in Christopher Nolan’s movies, apparently, is partly because he likes using IMAX cameras which give a much better, crisper visual image but which are slightly noisier than normal movie cameras. They are not fully soundproof. So, by slightly filtering out the sound of the camera, the voices get slightly filtered/muffled too.

Added to this is the fact Nolan does not believe in doing ADR – automated/additional dialogue recording – which is film industry standard practice.

If the technical quality of the lines is not 100% perfectly distinct on the original recording, the actor goes into a soundproof booth in post production and re-records them more clearly.

A recent Insider interview with Christopher Nolan was headlined Christopher Nolan explains why you might have trouble hearing the dialogue in ‘Oppenheimer’…

It’s actually not as bad as some of his other recent movies, but…

He says: “I like to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor revoice it later, which is an artistic choice.”

That’s all well and good in theory, but not if you can’t hear in the cinema the actor’s already muffled line under the music and sound effects added in post-production.

Art is all very well unless it becomes incomprehensible.

A book may be some great work of Art and admirably creative, but not if you can’t read parts of the text because they are fuzzy.

When his 2014 movie Interstellar got criticism for muffled dialogue, Christopher Nolan told the Hollywood Reporter: “We made carefully considered creative decisions. There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is.”

Well, OK, Sunshine, but I would rather know what is going on in the plot. If the dialogue doesn’t move the plot forward, cut the dialogue. There were lines in Tenet where (I think) important plot explanations were being made but which were incomprehensibly mumbled/muffled.

Fuck me with an armadillo, it is all very admirable being a ‘great movie artist’ and having perfect visuals but not to the detriment of the sound.

I want to know what the hell is happening in the plot.

By and large, that is communicated in the script – in the spoken words. If the script doesn’t advance the storyline, then cut the script.

And, if being arty is more important than hearing what the characters are saying, then go make silent movies, not ‘talkies’ where you can’t hear (sometimes vitally important) spoken lines.

Movies and books are different media.

If you want to write an intellectual book, write a deeply complex multi-plotted book.

If you want to write a movie that affects the viewer instantly and has visceral AND intellectual impact then (as has been wisely said by others before) KISS.

Keep It Simple… Simple.

You will not be less of an Artist. You will just be a better movie maker.

My advice: If you want to see a film that treats serious subjects in a serious way, clearly go watch Barbie, not Oppenheimer.

Barbie has an understandable, clearly thought-out adult storyline and a clear soundtrack.

Leave Oppenheimer to media studies students who want to seem academically intellectual but who don’t want to watch ‘movie movies’.

I expect Oppenheimer to get Oscars from pseudo-intellectual Hollywood.

The censorship and re-writing of dead authors’ books in our Newspeak era…

(Photo by Freddy Kearney via UnSplash)

I was once peripherally involved in someone else’s non-fiction book – to repeat… This was a factual, non-fiction book.

The writer described a Northern bar which I guess you can best imagine as a traditional Irish bar. It was long, narrow and dark with almost no exterior windows. I actually went up to see several of the locations in the book myself – including this one – and it was an excellent description of the old-fashioned bar. 

When the high-profile publisher (we are not talking about a minor publisher here) received this part of the manuscript, he took it into his head to ‘improve’ it.

So he changed the description to an open area with tables and chairs and the sun streaming in through the windows, making the drinking glasses glint and sparkle. He was, in effect, describing the lounge bar of a modern South East English pub, not the actual Northern bar which was being described as it was in the 1960s.

A verbal fight ensued over this change and other attempted interferences in the manuscript of this factual, non-fiction book.

The major publisher’s view was that not every fact had to be correct in a non-fiction book. I am not in any way distorting that opinion as expressed to me.

When the book was eventually published, it became a bestseller and not a single word or comma had been changed from the manuscript (except for I think one change, made for legal reasons – the book was read by two separate legal eagles).

The reason the publisher could not – in the vernacular – fuck up the author’s work was that the author was still alive. 

My understanding of standard publishing contracts is that the publisher has to accept 100% of the text submitted by the commissioned author (unless they can claim the quality is not up-to-standard or there are legal reasons).

The writer owns the text. The publisher owns and can choose and change the cover and the blurb on the cover. As I understand it.

Pity the poor author, then, who dies. If the publisher can successfully bully the dead author’s estate, they can – in the vernacular – fuck up the author’s work any which way they want. Or the money-grabbing estate can try to (in their minds) maximise their sales by changing the author’s text.

Thus the furore recently over changes to Roald Dahl’s children’s books.

The Guardian reported that:

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Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat,” just “enormous”. In the new edition of Witches, a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”.

The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in 1970s The Fabulous Mr Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”.

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Apparently Roald Dahl, when alive, threatened to never write another word if his publishers ever changed his language. The Guardian reported that, in comments made 40 years ago, he promised to send his “enormous crocodile” – the character in his eponymous novel – to gobble them up if they did so.

Now he is dead, of course, his work can be shat upon willy-nilly.

Apologies if the word “willy” is offensive.

Today, the Sunday Telegraph reports that the James Bond books are now being censored by their publishers and made more ‘acceptable’:

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Ian Fleming – Never the most PC of authors

In the sensitivity reader-approved version of Live and Let Die, Bond’s assessment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” becomes – “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

Another altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated.

The original passage read: “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.”

The revised section replaces the pigs reference with: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

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Arguably, the publisher is not, in this case, wholly to blame. The Telegraph reports:

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Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author’s work, commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.

The Telegraph understands that a disclaimer accompanying the reissued texts will read: 

“This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.

“A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.”

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Sibling is Watching You!
(Photo by Arno Senoner via UnSplash)

Somewhat bizarrely, references to the “sweet tang of rape”, “blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work” and homosexuality being a “stubborn disability” … remain.

I look forward to all the morally dubious sex and sadistic violence being removed from the James Bond books and their re-marketing as period travel guides.

Presumably there will also be revisions to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with ‘Big Brother’ being changed to ‘Brother’ or, as someone else suggested to me, to the more acceptable, less sexist and more Newspeak-friendly ‘Sibling’.

Award-winning act The Iceman has a new book out… no waffle, but lots of ice

The Iceman with ice in a cup and rubber duck in hand at London’s South Bank Arts Centre…

Occasionally, The Iceman turns up in my blog.

As my avid reader in Guatemala will know only too well, The Iceman’s stage act involves attempting to melt a large block of ice using increasingly desperate methods.

I first met him in 1987 when I auditioned him for Channel 4 TV’s The Last Resort With Jonathan Ross.

I would have booked him.

The powers that be did not agree.

Now, with Robert Wringham, he has a new book out called Melt It! The Book of The Iceman.

It is illustrated, according to publishers Go Faster Stripe, “in thrilling Instamatic colour”.

I met The Iceman for a chat on London’s South Bank and co-author Robert Wringham (see my May 2022 blogs) joined in from Scotland via FaceTime.

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THE ICEMAN: Last year, John, you mentioned my book Thespian Follies in a blog and, about five minutes before I met you today, I got an email from the drama people, saying: “You have been selected to receive an award regarding your publication Thespian Follies and we have an item to post to you.” Isn’t that lovely? It’s a New Author award.

JOHN: And now there’s your new book Melt It! You’re on a roll…

THE ICEMAN: The exciting thing is there’s a lot of fine art in this book.

The Iceman, in London with duck looking on, holds up a near-invisible ice cube to Robert in Glasgow

JOHN: So how did this book Melt It! come about, Robert? You wanted to be put in touch with the Iceman and I gave you his contact details.

THE ICEMAN: I was at the top of the Himalayas, I think.

ROBERT: The thing I knew about the Iceman was that he took a photo of each block and recorded it in a ledger. I thought: Ah! Maybe that would be a nice photo book! and he was amenable to that but he only had 56 Polaroids.

JOHN: How many ice blocks had you melted over the years?

THE ICEMAN: That’s a good question. I used to be meticulous, but… Somewhere between 800,000 and 5 I guess.

JOHN: So basically you’ve done a 184 page book with 56 photographs of different blocks of ice.

THE ICEMAN: There’s a lot of text as well…

ROBERT: I had not known that, as well as taking Polaroids, he was painting pictures of the blocks. I wanted to interview him to get some answers, at last, about his motivations, because there are people that want to know. And I wanted to know. We spent a day together at Battersea Arts Centre and we ended up with a 15,000 word interview with no waffle.

The Iceman book as seen from Glasgow via cyberspace

So I approached some publishers and they all told me to get fucked. But then Chris from Go Faster Stripe saved the day. He’s got the right audience for it. Thousands of people with an interest in niche or fringe comedy and a lot of them know of The Iceman and want answers too.

THE ICEMAN: Rob was very good at glueing it all – freezing it all – together. He is hard-working; he’s a grafter; he works fast.

ROBERT: I’m always worried that I’m going to lose interest or that other people will lose interest.

THE ICEMAN: Rob is resuscitating The Iceman and I’m game for anything. After my retreat in the Himalayas, it’s time to be back. I like working with Rob.

JOHN: You can see royalties on the horizon?

THE ICEMAN: Money is not my main priority.

ROBERT: We may do a book launch in London.

JOHN: Simon Munnery wrote the Foreword to the book and Stewart Lee wrote the Afterword. They are both big fans. Stewart put you on at the Royal Festival Hall.

THE ICEMAN: Yes, and Simon wrote quite an incisive Foreword – He concentrated on an ice block in Sydenham at the Greyhound pub. I think it was Block 126. He said it was “beautiful art”. I was quite touched by that.

ROBERT: Neil Mullarkey described your set with the repetitive music – the one I saw for The Last Resort With Jonathan Ross – as…

THE ICEMAN: …a riposte to showbusiness…

ROBERT: When Neil saw that act, he said the only people in the room laughing were him, Mike Myers and Ian Macpherson.

THE ICEMAN: …and Ian Cognito.

JOHN: I wonder whatever happened to Mike Myers.

THE ICEMAN: He died didn’t he… on stage… like all the greats.

JOHN: Mike Myers?

THE ICEMAN: Ian Cognito. He used to bang a nail into the wall at the start of his shows. The audience was scared from the word Go.

JOHN: He was certainly tempestuous. You don’t bang nails into walls, but you have turned from performance art to fine art painting of late…

THE ICEMAN: I’ve actually got a formal exhibition at the Guggleton Farm Arts – ‘The Gugg’ – in Dorset. It’s on 7th July to 5th August this year (2023). Four weeks of solid ice work. It’s a farm. I’m in the pigsty.

JOHN: Literally?

THE ICEMAN: (LAUGHS) Well, it’s an art community farm now. It’s owned by the Countess Isabel de Pelet. I’m going to have ‘security’ there.

JOHN: What? To try and keep you out? They have specifically talked to you about security? Why?

THE ICEMAN: I used to live on a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal.

JOHN: That’s not an answer.

THE ICEMAN: It was called the Tivoli… It sank… It was a converted lifeboat… I can ask the Countess if she will stock my book. That’s why I need security.

Guggleton Farm Arts – now more tasteful gallery than a pigsty

JOHN: It’s a farm; they’re used to having stock. She’s turned the farm into a gallery?

THE ICEMAN: It’s been going 25 years, but not many people know about it. 

JOHN: They approached you?

THE ICEMAN: I approached them. A friend had an exhibition there. I thought: Ooh! They could exhibit MY art! And they said Yes… You know I worked in a circus? I know all about animals.

ROBERT: …and in a chicken factory.

JOHN: You worked in a chicken factory?

THE ICEMAN: You need to read the book.

JOHN: Long ago I met someone who used to ‘sex’ chickens. It’s very difficult with animals that small to…

THE ICEMAN: …to see?

JOHN: Yes. To see the relevant bits. And it matters because of breeding. It matters if they’re male or female. So he made lots of money travelling the world checking the sex of chickens at speed. If your book doesn’t sell and the ice work dries up, you could look into becoming a chicken sexer.

THE ICEMAN: It sounds a bit intrusive to the chickens’ privacy.

(THOUGHTFUL PAUSE BY JOHN AND THE ICEMAN)

ROBERT: Look! The book is full of The Iceman’s beautiful art.

THE ICEMAN: I’m glad you got the better quality paper.

“This is the book I’m proudest of… It’s so… so pure…”

ROBERT: Yes. This is the book I’m proudest of. It’s so… so pure…

THE ICEMAN: Pure… Pure…

ROBERT: There’s not a single regret in it. 

THE ICEMAN: Pure… Pure… 

ROBERT: When I look at my other books, there’s always some weird phrasing or something I wish I’d done differently. This is just a perfect book.

THE ICEMAN: What more can we say to ‘sell’ the book? I want to be a businessman like Andy Warhol said.

JOHN: He did?

THE ICEMAN: He said “Good business is the best type of art”.

ROBERT: I don’t like that quote.

JOHN: No. Surely art is the best type of business?

ROBERT: Ice is the best type of art.

JOHN: What’s your next project, Robert? How can you follow The Iceman?

THE ICEMAN: By turning the book into a hardback.

ROBERT: Yes. An Iceman hardback. Also, I’ve written a novel.

THE ICEMAN: Is that The Man in The Bath?

ROBERT: Yes. Well, it’s actually called Rub-a-Dub-Dub, but it’s all about a man in a bath. (MORE ABOUT THAT IN A PREVIOUS BLOG.)

THE ICEMAN: I love my rubber duck. (MORE ABOUT THE DUCK IN A PREVIOUS BLOG.)

The once but maybe not future cover…

ROBERT: There was going to be a rubber duck on the cover of Rub-a-Dub-Dub, but I’m not sure now.

THE ICEMAN: What about your James Thurber thing? You were going to go to the States.

ROBERT: That’s a long way away…

JOHN: …about 3,000 miles.

THE ICEMAN: He’s very keen on James Thurber.

ROBERT: Things like that generally. I like short humour.

JOHN: Charlie Drake?

(A LONG, LONG PAUSE, THEN…)

THE ICEMAN: Poor… Poor…

JOHN: I did Latin at school. Now I’m reduced to this…

(THE ICEMAN’S WEBSITE IS HERE…)

(…AND THERE IS A BOOK TRAILER ON YOUTUBE… )

James Harris and his novel about being an English comedian in Germany…

James Harris at Soho Theatre with his novel

Comedian James Harris has written a novel titled Midlands.

So I talked to him...

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JOHN: How long have you been doing stand-up?

JAMES: I started when I was 17 and I turned 40 last September.

JOHN: And you decided to publish your first novel because…?

JAMES: There’s a lot of novels which feature stand-up comedians, but none of them are particularly realistic. They’re about Stand-up comedian kidnaps someone or Stand-up comedian murders someone…

There was a Lynda la Plante miniseries on TV in the 1990s called Comics about an American comedian who witnessed a gangland killing. It’s always that sort of angle. It’s never Stand-up comedian develops material and does gigs…

So I wrote this book over the last ten years. A memoir of the time I was doing comedy in Germany. 

JOHN: Why is the book called Midlands?

JAMES: Well, I’m from Nottingham and Germany has always been known as Mitteleuropa. It’s a play on Germany being in the middle of Europe and the character being from the East Midlands.

JOHN: Is Midlands a ‘comic novel’?

JAMES: It has lots of jokes in it and everyone who’s read it says it’s funny.

JOHN: All first novels tend to be autobiographical.

JAMES: It IS partly autobiographical, but I’ve made it more interesting.

JOHN: It’s a novel in two parts. Why?

JAMES: What’s the old joke? I didn’t have time to write a shorter book.

JOHN: The two parts are separate?

James performing as a stand-up comedian in Berlin in 2011

JAMES: Separate but interlinked. They join up in the middle. There are two central characters and they both live in Berlin. So the first half is about a stand-up comedian. It’s basically a fictionalised memoir of my performing days in Germany.

The book imagines that the lead character had stayed in Germany and made his life there, which I didn’t do.

The two characters diverge: one leaves, one stays.

JOHN: The second half of the book is about…?

JAMES: A love affair, a break-up and losing an important relationship. It’s about a blogger who writes a regular newsletter called The Pessimists’ Digest where he puts together all the worst news stories from around the world to… to communicate (LAUGHS) that human life isn’t worth living.

JOHN: Was it always your intention to write it in two parts?

JAMES: No. I had two things. One was too short, according to publishers, to be published on its own. That was the second part. So I wrote the first part to link into the second part.

There IS an outstanding precedent – Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood: in that case, several long stories linked together as a novel. 

JOHN: So is your book a homage to Goodbye to Berlin?

JAMES: Well, you can’t really write a homage to a book you haven’t read… I’ve not read Goodbye to Berlin.

My book was inspired by the fact there weren’t enough people writing about what it was like to live in Berlin in the 2000s through to the 2010s. The book takes place around 2011-2012. I lived there full-time 2005-2013 and had been there before that in 2004 for six months, to start learning German.

JOHN: Because?

German poet Heinrich Heine, in an 1831 portrait by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim

JAMES: I always wanted to learn a language and a lot of the stuff I wanted to read was written in German. Like Freud and Heinrich Heine, a very funny German Jewish poet. I am part-Jewish. My grandad was a Jewish refugee who came here from Belgium via France in 1939; the rest of his family got killed by the Nazis.

His escape was very dramatic. He went over the border on a motorcycle but fell off and had to have a large metal plate inserted into his cheek, which gave him a lot of pain for the rest of his life. His life was in metal as well. He was in ballistics during the War: he was involved in the development of the bouncing bomb. After the War, he did metal engineering at Cambridge. He died when I was 16; we were extremely close.

JOHN: Did living in Berlin feel strange because of all that background?

JAMES: No and the book doesn’t go into this sort of stuff. But, just towards the end, after ten years and maybe because I was getting a little bit more interested in my Jewish side, I did sort-of start to think: Is it a bit weird that you live here? In some way? It’s not that long ago. And I had German friends who had worked on historical archives and stuff like that. It just began to be a little bit of an interesting question. 

I had the choice at the end of whether I wanted to become a German citizen. You could have it after eight years and I’d been there nine by then.

JOHN: And you chose not to because…?

JAMES: I knew I wanted to come back to the UK and didn’t think it was fair.

JOHN: You have some German roots.

JAMES: My family name on the Jewish side is Gompertz, which is a village in Germany. They were Ashkenazi Jews.

JOHN: Harris is a Scottish name.

JAMES: Gompertz is my mum’s side of the family. My dad is a Welshman. I’m not matrilineally Jewish, because my mum’s mum is from Manchester. I would get into Israel but I wouldn’t get in with the Orthodox.

James Harris performs at the Fabelhaft Bar, Berlin, in 2012

JOHN: You mentioned there was Jewishness in your act when you were in Germany?

JAMES: I did have a lot of jokes about it in my stand-up at the time.

A German comic said to me: “One thing I really like about the comedy you do is that you take the piss out of the Germans but you don’t hate them.” 

I said: “I’ve got no reason to hate the Germans, apart from the fact they murdered my great-uncle.”

JOHN: Only him?

JAMES: It was everybody, yeah. There were some people who managed to hide but one of the problems with the Jews in Belgium and the Netherlands is there’s nowhere to hide. It’s very flat. No mountains. The casualty rate of Dutch and Belgian Jewry was very, very high.

I did have a cousin who was hidden by nuns for the entire Second World War. She was taken in and disguised as a young  nun.

JOHN: Germany was odd. One of the most cultured countries in Europe and then it descended into…

JAMES: …barbarism. Yeah. Though there was a seam in German culture that We are the anti-Modern… We are resistant to other countries like France and Britain who have sold out to money and commerce and mercantilism, whereas we have kept this pure German soul. That was an idea that was quite prominent before the Nazis came into power. So you could see a lot of it coming.

JOHN: Have you got another novel in you?

JAMES: I’ve pretty much finished the second draft of a new one. 

JOHN: A comic novel?

JAMES: No. It’s a mystery novel set in Bexley. And there’s not a single reference to stand-up comedians in it.

JOHN: No Germans?

JAMES: No.

JOHN: No Jews?

JAMES: No, but there are some Mexicans in it.

JOHN: And what about your stand-up comedy career? There was the enforced two-year gap caused by Covid…

JAMES: I think I’m pretty much finished with stand-up now… which is a shame in a way because I miss it. But, at the level I was at…

Well, I did my show, which you saw. I toured that round and did some festivals, but it’s just too much to do work and two creative things: writing and stand-up. And writing is the more important.

JOHN: You write a weekly newsletter.

JAMES: Yes, I write my Stiff Upper Quip for Substack. I write about comedy and culture and personal experiences but less about politics than I was intending to. The most successful post I wrote in the first 18 months was about professional failure in creative pursuits. 

JOHN: The other posts which were popular were…?

JAMES: There was one about a sex club and one about working the night shift in a warehouse in Perivale.

JOHN: Those two are unconnected?

JAMES: Yes.

JOHN: And your day work is?

JAMES: I teach English. I’m an interpreter. I translate.

JOHN: And so, beyond Midlands and beyond the Bexley novel…?

JAMES: I have an idea for a science fiction novel set in the future about a gigging comedian travelling between different planets. They’re doing like 10 minutes on Andromeda and then taking a shuttle to do another gig at the Rings of Saturn. I thought that could be a nice little starter…

JOHN: Midlands has illustrations…

JAMES: Yes, a lovely Chinese lady has provided ten illustrations.

JOHN: Your wife.

JAMES: Yes. She has only read three books in English. Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby… and my book Midlands. I think she’s got the essentials. 

James Harris and his graphic designer wife Ke Zuo