The late comedy godfather Tony Allen: anarchy, creativity and a “Plan B” film

Tony Allen with the cast of the film Plan B, including Becky Fury and Tony Green…

Following on from the last blog – a tribute to the late performer Tony Allen by his friend Becky Fury – performer Tony Green was sharing some memories of Tony Allen with me…

At the end, he said: “Oh, I didn’t mention the film we did… Plan B by Jerri Hart, one of Tony’s workshop pupils. Tony’s impatience regarding continued re-takes – “Fuck! Another car’s just come round the corner! We’ll have to go again!” – made his performance one to cherish.”

But before we got to that, Tony Green said of Tony Allen…

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Tony Green (right) with Tony Allen in the film Plan B

Many people referred to Tony Allen as ‘Lofty Tone’ – he was 6’4″ and a half. 

I first met him back in 1981 and, like many others, could hardly fail to be impressed. 

This was at London’s first Comedy Store in Meard Street, Soho. Pete Supply (one of the ‘Demolition Decorators’) told John Hegley and myself about the place. All it said in Time Out was “…with Alexei Sayle and the Gong”. 

John and I were gonged off like most on our first night. Tony Allen was then one of the regular performers and always, as far as I can recollect, survived the dreaded gong with comparative ease – his was a finely honed act. 

By that time, he and Alexei Sayle had started ‘Alternative Cabaret’ and the next week I saw Tony at The Green Man (in the cellar) in Great Portland Street. 

This was in many respects a revelation for me especially in view of what we had passing for comedy on our TV sets at that time, which I found incredibly boring, tedious and offensive – on the whole. Even now we never get ‘Alternative’ Comedy on TV – just some severely watered-down version with little bite or content.

Alexei Sayle (left) and Tony Allen with ‘Alternative Cabaret’ in 1979

Somehow, I seemed to bond with Tony. Not that we were ever really great friends – It was an ego thing and Tony could be difficult (he may have said the same about me).

What Tony was saying was relevant. 

Any aspiring comic could learn a great deal from watching Tony and I am sure many did. It was an experience in itself witnessing him at his best which probably would have been between 1980-1995. 

He had a great friend in the sharp and talented Max Handley, who sadly died in a hang-gliding accident in 199o. I always felt that, like Sherlock Holmes going over Reichenbach Falls, Tony’s act was never quite the same afterwards. 

Max would work with Tony on his act almost as a conductor and I believe another person was involved – possibly Paul Durden; at best it was a finely orchestrated piece.

Tony Allen arrested at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, 1979. (Photo: Philip Wolmuth)

Tony had read Heathcote Williams’ (who was also a good friend, fellow Notting Hill squatter and writing partner) seminal The Speakers, published in 1964 when he was a mere 22. 

The book is four biographies of stand-out Speakers’ Corner orators. Tony was to become, himself, one of the leading lights at that particular venue for many years. Oration was a natural thing for him and I enjoyed many an afternoon watching Tone at Speaker’s Corner taking part in a heated debate. 

Tony Allen’s advice on comedy, Attitude

Of course, there was much more to Tone than just this. He was also a gifted writer himself (submitting work for TV and radio shows) and I can without hesitation recommend his books Attitude – Wanna Make Something of It? (him on stand-up) and A Summer in the Park (him on Speakers’ Corner). 

I was very happy to have been part of Tony’s ‘Performance Club’ which he had started back in the late 1990s at Smiffy’s Wine Bar in King’s Cross. Although he didn’t do to much stand up in the later years he continued to do comedy workshops which I sometimes went along to and, of course, he was doing a first rate job of imparting valuable knowledge and technique to the would be stand-up. 

He had a plethora of first rate one liners. In particular I remember: “Life should be more than a scented aerosol in the shithouse of existence”. Indeed Tony…indeed. 

Tony was something special and I feel privileged to have witnessed a talent like his at his best. If there is such a thing as an afterlife I would like to think that he is now playing snooker with his idol Joseph Grimaldi and perhaps Lenny Bruce is around there somewhere as well – along with Max and Heathcote. 

Tony Allen looking slightly impatient in Plan B

Oh, I didn’t mention the film we did – Plan B by Jerri Hart, one of Tony’s workshop pupils. Plan B included virtually all the Performance Club members at the time. Jerry was a well-known Exeter trumpet-playing busker. Tony’s impatience regarding continued re-takes – “Fuck! Another car’s just come round the corner!- We’ll have to go again!” – made his performance one to cherish.

The scene where I smash the derelict car window (this HAD to be one take) went for quite a lot of takes – ‘hair in the gate’, I think, was a term that Tony was getting increasingly annoyed with.

As you know, with filming, patience is a great virtue. You may think you’ve delivered your lines really well but then….  And you have to do it all over again. This was an area Tony wasn’t totally familiar with – although he’d done guest spots with The Comic Strip gang.  

The thing is it worked, I felt, beautifully – almost by default… as the more annoyed Tony got – “’Oh Christ, not again!” – the better he came over.  Quite clever, perhaps, on Jerri’s part. 

On the whole it was quite an enjoyable experience.

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Becky Fury also appeared in Plan B, so I asked her what she remembered of the filming…

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Becky Fury in character in Plan B

We shot it – a low budget film – in Devon 

It was a fairly unremarkable experience, except for one incident of high drama right at the beginning of shooting…

One of the cast members was in the process of getting sent home in disgrace for getting far too drunk on the night we arrived – thankfully before filming started. 

Being sent home for having too much to drink was quite a feat considering the amount of big drinkers involved in that particular production. Myself, at that time, included. 

I remember standing next to Tony (Allen), who was shaming the actor who will remain un-named and un-shamed, for several reasons… the main one being that Tony shamed him quite enough. 

Anyway, this all took place outside and Tony was just at the end of dressing the guy down when a goose came over out of nowhere and pecked the guy in the balls. 

It was im-peck-able timing. 

The actor was then banned from the set.

As if being told off by Tony and then goosed by a goose wasn’t punishment enough…

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THERE IS A 40” TRAILER FOR PLAN B ON VIMEO…

…AND AN 8-minute BEHIND-THE-SCENES SORT-OF DOCUMENTARY featuring Tony Allen, Tony Green and, in brief snippets, Becky Fury. 

THE FULL 15-MINUTE FILM IS HERE, THOUGH WITH SOME BUFFERING PROBLEMS…

A tribute to Tony Allen, oft-called The Godfather of UK Alternative Comedy

Here, award-wining stand-up Becky Fury pays tribute to her long-time friend Tony Allen, who died yesterday morning, in London… (Photos from Becky’s collection)

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Becky Fury with Tony Allen

Tony Allen was born like most people but, unlike most people, he was born on March 4th 1945, in the last months of WW2 in Hayes, Middlesex, to working-class parents. 

Tony attributed much of the anarchic politicization that informed his whole potent life and oeuvre, to his upbringing.

Tony’s mum had flourished as a result of the unprecedented freedom women (on the home front) experienced during the war and after she had struggled to readjust when these freedoms were redacted. As a child Mrs Allen regaled young Tony with tales from her gilded age and also expressed her sense of injustice to him regarding its passing. 

Mrs Allen was unknowingly talking to Tony about women’s liberation, (a cause he would later champion) but it would be another 20 years or so, before the experience of Mrs Allen and women like her could really be put into words because, until the counter cultural kick back of the 1960s, the language to describe the experience she was trying to describe didn’t exist. 

Young Tony with his parents

Tony’s dad had also had a good war. According to Mr Allen, his time as an artilleryman in North Africa had been something of a holiday. According to Mr Allen, it had mainly involved getting a suntan or “lying by a gunner and staring at the stars” so, unintentionally Mr & Mrs Allen indoctrinated young Tony into becoming a utopian. Into a belief that other, better worlds are possible… A belief that underpinned everything Tony strived for in his art and life – as an authentic anarchist and as an authentic revolutionary, comic thinker. 

After blissfully mis-spending the first part of his youth working odd jobs (“The odder the better”) and, most formatively, as a shark in the pool halls of 1950s’ Hayes, Tony became caught up in the revolutionary counter cultural movement of the 1960s.

Tony – street and pub performer/comic

He began squatting in North London and lived, until his death, in a housing cooperative in Ladbroke Grove that he and former squatters had created in a row of abandoned Georgian houses they had been gifted by the council because it was the 1970s and Why, thought the council, would anyone ever want to live in a tatty terrace in nasty old  Notting Hill?  

During this early and fertile period of anarchic creativity, aside from being gifted millions of pounds of real estate, Tony was also involved in the embryonic street art movement, wrote for situationist journal The International Times and founded a performance troupe called Rough Theatre. His friend and co-conspirator Tom Watson remembered an incident from this time…

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We had written a kids’ play about comic book characters where a mad scientist eventually blows up the world. The explosion was simulated by a theatrical device, called a Marron. 

It (usually) went bang, it was great fun, and it was a very successful show. We toured it around London play sites.

Tony Allen, anarchist

It was at this time the police were very hot on any potential terrorists who they thought might be living in squats. Both the IRA and the Angry Brigade were active – the Home Secretary’s car had recently been blown up in nearby Holland Park.

One morning, there was banging on the door at about 4am. Police were shouting “GET DRESSED!”. They were raiding London squats looking for suspects. Being a good Catholic boy I got dressed. While they were searching the house I could hear the police talking: “Hasn’t he got dressed yet?”. Tony would not put any clothes on. He’s a big chap and, to be honest, quite well endowed. He managed to make them feel very uncomfortable and unwelcome.

They seemed very interested in his diary. We realised afterwards why… It was full of  entries about our play, with references to bombs that didn’t go off.

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As Tony observed in an early stand up set:

“I came to Ladbroke Grove for free love and squatting, I settled for sexual politics and a licensed deri.” (A licensed deri is a licensed derelict, or squat, for those of you who aren’t au courant with counter cultural housing lingo of the 1970s.)

In keeping with his political activism, Tony also performed regularly with his Full-Frontal Anarchy Platform at Speakers’ Corner, which eventually evolved into a fledgling stand up comedy routine. As stand up comedy had not become a thing yet, he began looking for places to perform, finally hitting on the newly-founded Comedy Store in 1979. Two months later, he founded Alternative Cabaret with Alexei Sayle and together they ran a regular Alternative Cabaret Club in the back bar of the Elgin pub, Ladbroke Grove.

Tony was a resident comedian in the early days of London’s Comedy Store (1979–1980) and took over from Alexei Sayle as resident MC early in 1981, where he was described as “A tall, willowy figure who has the air of a Lenny Bruce mixed with the vulnerability of Tommy Cooper”.

According to an early article about him, Tony’s style of stand-up was not so much jokes and gags, as having ‘a funny take’ on the world and the lives and loves that go on therein.  

Always the risk-taker and one to break new ground, he was always innovating. These experiments, (like all experiments) had mixed results. A 1986 fanzine noted; 

”I’ve seen Tony Allen do minutes of cursing, swearing, abusing of hecklers and audience alike and equally I’ve seen him do sets of such comic brilliance as to take your breath away and send you home to your bed-sit on wings!” 

In 1980, Tony Allen and Alexei Sayle were the first alternative comedians to take their solo stand-up acts to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival under the title Late Night Alternative. 

Alexi Sayle joked recently that any comedian doing Edinburgh owes him and Tony royalties 

Tony also appeared in an episode of BBC TV series The Young Ones – Party. Essentially as himself. He’s a party guest, the  authentic anarchist who bedazzles faux radical Rik with his chat about “Blowing up pandas”. Rik misunderstands what he means by panda. Hilarity ensues. 

Tony had a long list of TV credits but they aren’t listed here as Tony actively avoided becoming television famous for his entire career because, as Gil Scott-Heron will tell you, “The revolution will not be televised”. 

He would most want to be remembered for being a passionate defender of stand up comedy as a risk-taking, living art form. One that is as delicate as it is Bolshy and one that can be easily stifled by the demands and production values of television… As a practitioner of stand up that uses the privilege of the platform it is given to give the audience what it didn’t know it wanted, rather than the same old, same old that it has come to accept. 

He was a fearless performer and performed comedy and stand up until he became too ill to want to bother any more. In his heyday he toured solo shows (like, the obituary-appropriate The Grim Reapo Man is at The Door) and also successfully supported bands like The Clash and Killing Joke, performing his stand up set before the band headlined. He once performed a gig at Glastonbury after accidentally getting involved in a fracas involving two undercover policeman which ended with him being CS gassed. He still successfully performed his set.   

An old hippy at heart, he was comfortable with his mortality and as a comedian he found solace in finding humour in everything, even his own death. As a result, his curtain call was attending (and walking out of) his own wake in August, in his stomping ground of Ladbroke Grove. A star-studded gala event, it was appropriately held in an unassuming smallish room above a pub. The sort of intimate venue which Tony loved to play as a performer. The event was humorously entitled THIS WAS YOUR LIFE. 

In his last days (he was 78 and had a terminal condition; but also throat cancer) Tony was being cared for by a close friend and lover from his squatting days; Andy. 

He passed away quietly in the early hours of Friday morning, in his own bed, under his own pink duvet, having discharged himself from hospital against the doctor’s orders. He was in good spirits, enlivened, by socking it, one last time, to The Man and appropriately recounted this final adventure in the format of a stand up routine to anyone who was granted audience. 

Not so much an inpatient but an impatient, Tony was an anarchic spirit, revolutionary and farce of nature to the last.

You must be righteously knackered, that was quite a ride, journey well, Tony Allen.   

Tony Allen 

Godfather of Stand Up Comedy 

4th March 1945- 1st December 2023 

MORE MEMORIES OF TONY ALLEN IN THE NEXT BLOG, HERE…

Becky Fury’s Identity: Putting the -ish in British, death and winning the FA Cup…

Becky Fury at Soho Theatre last week…

Last week, Becky Fury organised a celebratory ‘living wake’ – a ‘woke wake’ – for her ‘mentor’ British Alternative Comedy pioneer Tony Allen. He is still alive. 

Among the many performers were Attila The Stockbroker, Bob Boyton, Ivor Dembina, Jonny Fluffypunk, John Hegley, Mark ‘Mr Nasty’ Kelly, Simon Munnery and Alexei Sayle with a bar tab donation by Ben Elton. 

Becky told me the venue almost had as many acts paying tribute to Tony Allen as there were seats.

Ironically, the one person who did NOT tell a story about Tony on the night was Becky – because, she says, “I was massively over-stretched organising it”.

What she would have said was: 

“Tony was basically my Dad for a few years and ‘adopted’ me when I was fucked-up and precariously housed and nearly got addicted to heroin. As well as imparting a lot of wisdom to me, mainly through the medium of us dressing as clowns and dicking about, he gave me a much more productive addiction and form of self harm to indulge in than heroin: Stand-Up Comedy…”

Tonight, she opens her latest comedy show – IDENTITY – It runs every night for the whole duration of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

I asked her about it.

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JOHN: Your show is called IDENTITY…

BECKY: Well, obviously I’ve got lots of very fashionable identities. I’m brown and bi-sexual and non-binary and I’m all of these things and I have an outsider status and they’re all fashionable. So I could do a very fashionable show about those things, but I thought I’d celebrate something unfashionable instead. I thought I’d do it about being British. It’s about putting the -ish into British. It’s about British identity.

And it’s about MY identity and why my British identity has caused me… Well, it has also got the sort of edge you have to have in Edinburgh Fringe shows. It has caused me problems. Oh, poor me!

JOHN: This happens about 40 minutes in to the show?

(BECKY & JOHN LAUGH)

…the ‘Dead Dad’ spot where an Edinburgh Fringe comedy audience starts to flag and the performer pulls the rug from under them by suddenly bringing in a serious story about a dead dad or some other unexpected tragedy…

BECKY: (LAUGHING) Well, it IS about dead relatives. Not a dead dad, though.

JOHN: So, last week you had a wake for a comic with cancer who is not yet dead and now your new Edinburgh show this week has death in it.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) You told me there’s even death in the Barbie movie this week.

JOHN: Becky and Barbie – harbingers of death.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) It’s definitely a theme.

JOHN: Your show is about British identity. There must be stuff about racial prejudice in it.

BECKY: No. I don’t want to do all that.

JOHN: You must have had it, though.

BECKY: No. 

JOHN: Because you went to a posh school?

BECKY: And also because I grew up in South London – in Brixton! – and people don’t do that sort of thing down there.

JOHN: You’re too white in Brixton.

BECKY: Exactly. I grew up very multi-cultural, so I never really had that experience. There’s a story in the show about my ‘revelation’ that I wasn’t white. It basically involved me looking in the Sun newspaper and figuring out that their women had pink nipples and mine were brown.

JOHN: Can I mention that, given it’s a part of the show?

BECKY: Yeah. I haven’t told you the rest of the story.

JOHN: Someone I know in London has recently moved from Leytonstone, which is very very multicultural, to Upton Park…

BECKY: West Ham… 

JOHN: Yes. When I went there for the first time, I thought it was going to be full of dodgy white skinheads but it wasn’t at all. It’s Indian sub-continent with a smattering of blacks. 

BECKY: That’s interesting: that there are lots of Indians there now. Because my nan is from there. There’s a picture of her with the FA Cup from 1975, because she helped win it!

JOHN: I don’t remember seeing her in the team.

BECKY: She was making the sandwiches. She was the tea lady at West Ham football club when they were a proper family. She used to make the sandwiches for the team in her kitchen in Dagenham.

JOHN: The sandwiches must have been a bit stiff and curly by the time they got to West Ham.

BECKY: No!… She was my British nan: Violet Fury. 

JOHN: Even after all these years of knowing you, I can barely cope with ‘Fury’ being a real name not a stage name.

BECKY: Well it is. And if you had a woman with a name like Violet Fury making your sandwiches, you couldn’t help but win the FA Cup.

JOHN: You have done previews of the IDENTITY show?

BECKY: Yes, at the Morecambe Festival and the Barrow Festival. 

JOHN: Barrow?

BECKY: You’ve been to Barrow?

JOHN: Sadly, I have been to Barrow-in-Furness and Lima in Peru.

BECKY: What’s the connection?

JOHN: Both are shit-holes. Or they were back in the 1980s.

BECKY: I had to try to rescue someone from Lima once. He got stuck there in Lima Prison for five years: drug dealing.

JOHN: That must have been even worse than just living in Lima normally. I went to Barrow-in-Furness to research a blind man who wanted to parachute jump. Truly. That’s what Barrow does to you. 

You should take all your comedy shows to Lima. They need a good laugh there.

BECKY: But back to my new Edinburgh show… IDENTITY, 7.30 every night – Laughing Horse @ Bar 50.

JOHN: Well plugged. That’s enough. I have to transcribe this…

Becky Fury on scam romance, a possible murder attempt and Moroccan police

JOHN: You told me you had recently come back from Morocco after an anti-holiday. What’s that?

BECKY: It’s based on an urban myth. There was a taxi driver from Notting Hill who was unhappy with his life driving a taxi, so he went on an anti-holiday. He went to Doncaster to work in a pig factory, wanking-off pigs for two weeks. And, when he came back, he absolutely loved working as a taxi driver. That’s the concept.

JOHN: You went to Morocco to wank-off pigs?

BECKY: No. I went on holiday with my friend…

JOHN: Female?

BECKY: Yes. I went to eat some nice Moroccan street food and pet some cats, because there are a lot of cats in Rabat. 

Becky Fury found cats backpacking in Rabat

JOHN: Is that a song? A Lot of Cats of Rabat?

BECKY: No, but the street cats of Rabat are plentiful because they killed all the dogs off.

JOHN: The cats did?

BECKY: No, the locals. They had a cull because they were trying to posh the place up; they couldn’t have crapping, rabid dogs running around the streets. And, now they’ve killed the dogs, it’s full of cats. Even if you go into a cafe, you have to clear the cats off your seats.

JOHN: So you had a stroke in Rabat.

BECKY: Several. But about a year ago I went to meet my friend’s new boyfriend. She wanted me to tell her he was absolutely amazing and that he was not involved in a romance scam. He was a Moroccan man she met on the internet and I thought: She’s attractive; she’s young; she’s got loads of money; surely this can’t be a romance scam? But that’s exactly what it was. Though I suppose all those things are a traditional element of real relationships anyway.

JOHN: Not in Doncaster…

BECKY: I’m sure they are in Doncaster…

JOHN: Anyway… About a year ago, you went out to Rabat with her and met her boyfriend.

BECKY: Yes. The guy was nice enough, but I spotted from the beginning that this wasn’t a traditional romance. What she’d got me there for was to tell her that, actually, it was great. But I was observing that maybe the relationship wasn’t quite as she had explained it to me.

When you’re closely involved with another person in a relationship, often it’s just that external eye that begins to show up the cracks and imperfections in the relationship.

JOHN: So you were dubious and told her…

BECKY: But she was obviously in love and didn’t want to hear that. So we went surfing.

JOHN: Because?

BECKY: He was a ‘surfing instructor’. I’m not that strong a swimmer and I had never surfed before in my life. I was on the surfboard and he said: “We’re just gonna go for a little ride,” so he jumped on the back and then suddenly I was in a riptide, which is a tide surfers use to pull themselves out to sea so they know where they are…

So I was in this riptide I had been told to avoid by my friend and I was being dragged out to sea and now the ‘surf instructor’ was nowhere to be seen.

So I had to manage to get myself out of the riptide and paddle back…

Basically, I managed to save my own life, got back to the beach and then my friend had a go at me. She said I had put her boyfriend in danger by going into the riptide.

About two days later, I woke up and realised it wasn’t me that had put myself into the riptide: it was the surf instructor who had been on the back of he surfboard. He had put me into the riptide…

Now, I don’t know if that was just to ‘teach me a lesson’ for my meddling or just to try and get rid of me cos I was interfering with his nefarious scheme… I have no idea.

Anyway, I spoke to my friend about it when we got back to Britain but she – obviously in love with him – didn’t want to hear it at all. So I didn’t hear from her for about six months after that: not after telling her that her boyfriend had maybe tried to murder me.

In those six months, she went back to Morocco three or four times, married him and he stole her money.

JOHN: How did he manage that?

BECKY: He was very charming and she was in love with him. She put it into his bank account so he could get a visa to leave the country and come with her on her globe-trotting adventures.

The only reason she married him was she wanted him to come surfing with her in Portugal and that was the only way she could get him out of Morocco.

JOHN: He could have surfed out…?

BECKY: No. People have tried that to get from Calais to the UK. It doesn’t work.

JOHN: So he took her money and did a runner. What did she do at this point?

BECKY: She and I made friends again and she asked me if I wanted to go back to Morocco with her.

JOHN: For why?

“So he took her money and did a runner. What did she do?”

BECKY: She wanted to go to the police station. I said I would go along with her because I wanted to see the conclusion of the story.

JOHN: Difficult to prove if she put the money into his bank account of her own volition…

BECKY: Yeah, but she had ‘lent’ it to him and this was all detailed in the text messages she had kept.

He had told my friend, who is an acupuncturist…

JOHN: Then maybe she should have been wiser about little pricks…

BECKY: She’s an expert now… He had basically told her: “Don’t come to Morocco because you are an acupuncturist and Moroccans are very religious and, if you go to the police, they will arrest you for witchcraft and cut off your hands.”

JOHN: So you went to Morocco anyway and went into the police station and…

BECKY: They were lovely. They did get out a knife… and we thought Are they going to cut off our hands?… But it was just to cut some fruit to give us while we were sitting there gossiping about this man.

They were absolutely the nicest police I have ever dealt with. In the UK, the police are quite judgmental and conservative. In Morocco, it’s the complete opposite. People who are rebels join the police because they’re secular. They are not religious.

If you are a sort-of rebellious character who doesn’t like the over-arcing hierarchy of Morocco, you join the police – because then you get to have some autonomy as citizens.

The police lady was absolutely lovely. She wasn’t wearing a hijab. Her hair was dyed, she had flowing locks and she loved us cos we were Western and she was very excited to talk to us. She shared stories with us about her awful Moroccan boyfriends and showed us pictures of them on her phone. 

The police station is not a normal tourist destination but it is absolutely one I would recommend if you want to find out what Morocco is really like.

JOHN: Did they go out and find the surfing boyfriend?

BECKY: No. But it became very exciting at that point. My friend arranged a double-cross. She messaged him and said she was in Morocco and they arranged to meet the next day.

She told the police and we flew out the night before and he was met by a policeman at the rendezvous.

JOHN: And the outcome was…

A prime example of lying seductively in the Saharan sand…

BECKY: It’s going to go to court. But my friend is not very interested in dealing with the court, because she’s unlikely to get her money back. I don’t think he has the money any more; I have seen pictures of him on his Facebook page, driving round the Sahara in a jeep and lying in the sand seductively.

JOHN: So what is she going to do?

BECKY: She has made a website to warn other women. It has pictures of him and his name.

JOHN: She will divorce him?

BECKY: I don’t think she will. That way, he can’t marry anyone else.

JOHN: Isn’t polygamy legal in Morocco?

BECKY: It is, but I think it’s very uncommon. very uncommon. There are financial restrictions and a husband must have written permission from his current wife before marrying a second wife.

JOHN: Is he still a surf instructor?

BECKY: Allegedly, but that’s actually how a lot of con artists pick up Western women.

JOHN: So, do you think if I go down to Bournemouth seafront and say I’m a surf instructor, I could pull a few aged widows?

BECKY: Yeah. Go on. What have you got to lose?

JOHN: My dignity.

BECKY: You have none.

JOHN: I am becoming strangely attracted to Doncaster as a holiday destination…

(Photograph by Ben Salter, via Wikipedia)

Becky Fury + the creepy clown sex cult

As if she had not suffered enough, Becky risked all by travelling on a rare Thameslink train

So I got an email from Malcolm Hardee Award winning comic Becky Fury. It read:

“Do you want to do a blog about this creepy clown sex cult that I narrowly avoided joining?”

Well, obviously, there is only one answer to a question like that.

I was, to an extent, however, literally laid low with a spinal problem, so the ever-plucky Becky – rather than talk to me over Skype – decided to risk the wild uncertainties of train travel by Thameslink and the physical risks posed by my coughing fits and nose sniffles to come up to my home in Borehamwood.

This is how the conversation went…

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JOHN: A clown sex cult?

BECKY: There was a clowning course. All sex cults need a good USP.

JOHN: How did you find them?

BECKY: He found me.

JOHN: Who?

BECKY: The guru.

JOHN: There’s a guru?

BECKY: Of course. All sex cults need a guru.

JOHN: And his selling point as a Messiah is…?

BECKY: That he has a clown school in a European city.

(NOTE TO READERS – THIS IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, IN PARIS)

BECKY: It seemed to have lots of interesting teachers. But I started getting suspicious when he started offering me a very reduced fee. Also I did an interview online and he wanted to re-name me.

JOHN: To what name?

BECKY: (LAUGHS) Miss Behave.

JOHN: (LAUGHS) Did you point out there is already a well-established Miss Behave?

BECKY: I didn’t want to give him any more information.

JOHN: But you wanted to be a clown?

Becky having a happier time in Borehamwood

BECKY: No. That’s the thing. I didn’t want to be a clown and certainly not using the name of someone who was already using that name. I had wanted to learn some techniques. There are always interesting things you can learn from people who are masters of their arts. But he sent me a list of classes that would take place and they included things like ‘Oil Massage’ which I thought maybe should not be on the syllabus for a Clown Course.

JOHN: Maybe all clown courses have it… Maybe Gaulier in Paris has a…

BECKY: No, I don’t think his is a sex cult; more a hate cult.

JOHN: Well, he allegedly breaks you down to build you up. A bit like Charles Manson.

BECKY: Well, this clown cult guy kept re-using the term ‘Family’… and also the word ‘polyamory’. The guy is from the 1960s, so he’s the sort of guy that took a load of acid, ’freaked out’, then became a ‘clown’.

JOHN: I still don’t understand how you got into this. You saw an ad somewhere?

BECKY: No. he found me. He was a Facebook Friend and he contacted me and said he was interested in stuff he had seen I was doing and he thought maybe I would want to attend his course. It all seemed very innocent to start with. But I said I didn’t think I could afford £3,000 for the month’s course. So he said: “What about £1,500? It’s not about the money; it’s about who we get on the course.”

And then he dropped the cost again and I thought: Well, what’s the exchange here? What am I going to have to do? How am I going to be paying?

Becky Fury minting it – but only with chocolate coins

This was just before the Edinburgh Fringe, so I was very distracted. He kept asking me to go on the course, then I got one last message from him and then suddenly I got contacted by another woman who was a clown and it turned out she was his wife. And she was saying: “Well, actually, it’s going to be £3,000.”

So I think I had done something to piss him off. And then there were some other women he was involved with. And then there was an email from another woman basically accusing him of being exactly what I thought he was: that he was this kind of very controlling guru who basically got lots of weak women to come to what was billed as a clown course but basically it was a sex cult.

JOHN: But you are only surmising.

BECKY: Yes.

JOHN: What was the ‘sell’?

BECKY: He said he wanted to direct me in a show and then have me go round Europe saying, “I am the protégée of (HIS NAME),” and all his clown mates would think: That sexy woman? What a fucking man he is! He’s moulded this woman; she’s doing his bidding. It’s a big male ego trip and I’ve had that before. There was another older comedian – a British one. His thing was he wanted me to be his protégée and have everybody saying about him: “Oh! Wow!” 

This recent guy was wanting to change what I was doing. I said: “No. I do comedy… I don’t want to go round Europe doing ‘clowning’. I want to go on the course and learn interesting techniques that I can put into what I do… not be something that you’ve created.”

JOHN: What’s the difference between Comedy and Clowning?

BECKY: Well, you can use aspects of clowning in comedy. It’s just that heightened quality of performance… Well, it’s basically just fucking around, isn’t it?

JOHN: Can I quote that?

Becky knows a thing or two about… erm… messing about…

BECKY: Yeah. That’s all it is. That’s another reason I didn’t go. I’ve done bits of clowning before and really all it is is just fucking about. You need to get yourself in the zone of just fucking about. There are courses on how to be ‘stupid’ and how to ‘uncover your inner fool’. But all of these things are about remembering how to play. And that’s what comedians do. They play – mainly with language a lot of the time.

I’m kinda fed up with these older men wanting to use me to be some kind of extension of themselves.

JOHN: To create through you.

BECKY: Yeah.

JOHN: Those who can do and those who can’t manipulate.

BECKY: They end up using you as a vessel for their thwarted youth – and they get off on it as well, because it’s a male thing. I’ve had this before. I’ve already had that one guru. He did a lot of stuff that was very manipulative and controlling. A lot of the time with these old men that go out with younger women, the reason they do it is some inadequacy of theirs that they don’t want women of their own age to pick up on. So they’ll go for women that are young and naive who think: Oh, wow! This guy is really sorted! when, actually, he’s just a dickhead.

I’m not making any moral judgment. I think it’s just an interesting aspect of humanity.

JOHN: Randy men?

BECKY: Randy clowns.

JOHN: You could have formed a double act: Randy & Miss Behave 2.

BECKY: In a way I would like to have had time to find out what was actually going  in the clown sex cult.

JOHN: But?

BECKY: Unfortunately we only have a finite amount of time on this planet and I have a new comedy show to write for the Leicester Comedy Festival. Anyway, after all that, I never heard from him again.

JOHN: Perhaps you will. Perhaps, one day, there will be a knock on your door and standing there will be a man in a red nose wearing long floppy shoes and beeping a horn at you.

BECKY: Mmmm… Different type of clown.

Edinburgh Fringe 3 – a rail accident, Malcolm Hardee, #JusticeForObonjo

Some insights into the lives of three comedy performers at the Edinburgh Fringe…

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(1) GERRY CARROLL is performing at the City Cafe, part of the Laughing Horse Free Festival. He describes his show Crock or Gold as “the story of the first 66 years of my life told in jokes, clown numbers and songs.” He came up to Edinburgh from London on the Caledonian Sleeper. He tells me:

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Gerry Carroll – famous for rolling not laughing stock

When the train arrived in Edinburgh, it passed quite fast through Haymarket station and Waverley station and then stopped in a tunnel. We waited for an hour, as train staff walked through the carriages saying that the train had lost power. 

Eventually, the train moved back to the platform and I got off.

I had Tweeted that I was on the Sleeper and a journalist from the BBC contacted me. 

The incident had potentially been much more serious. The train’s brakes had failed and it had to be stopped by an emergency brake. The journalist arranged to interview me on camera outside my venue, the City Cafe, and I told the story as I’ve written it here. Basically…

“What happened?” 

“Well, nothing much.” 

The piece was shown on the BBC Scottish News that night. 

Since then, I have been recognised twice in the street, once by a woman who asked to have a photo with me.

I am more famous for having been on a runaway train than for my show.

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(2) BECKY FURY is performing her show One Hour to Save the World (in 55 Minutes) Upstairs at the Waverley Bar, as part of PBH’s Free Fringe. Her Diary (first part posted here 3 days ago) continues…

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Becky Fury: she goes for the cute, autistic type

SATURDAY

My first show goes well. I tell an audience member he’s cute in that autistic way I like and add the caveat that he looks like he’s that far down the spectrum he might not be able to give consent. Legally. Or might need to get a signed letter from his carer giving permission if he wants to come home with me. 

After the show, I’m informed he’s someone important. Luckily he’s not so autistic or important that he doesn’t have the capacity to appreciate humour. I am also told afterwards that the Malcolm Hardee Awards are still running and the man I flirted with/insulted/diagnosed is involved.

I tell him, “They’re not,” and somehow agree to have Malcolm Hardee’s face tattooed on my arm if they are.

It seems I am being pranked by the Godfather of alternative comedy from beyond the grave as the next day I am anonymously messaged with a list of tattooists in Edinburgh.

SUNDAY

My hippy friend comes over for breakfast. He has brought me an offering of a chorizo sausage he found “dumpster diving”. I look at it, tell him I don’t eat meat and I especially don’t eat mouldy meat from the bin and I throw it away. 

He redeems himself after Chorizogate by unlocking some features on Photoshop so I can design a new flyer. 

I get engrossed in the design process and forget to flyer.

I end up performing to a small but lovely audience. Two of the girls are university students. They are studying journalism and have come to the show because they want to save the world. I ask them if they know what capitalism is. They say they have no idea.

It is great being able to tell an audience: “If you haven’t laughed, at least you’ve learnt… You need to get an analysis of capitalism.” 

Life goals achieved. 

Lovely kids but are they meant to be our future? Seriously? 

We are so fucked.

Fate is taking a big post-coital toke of her vape and lying back in a euphoric haze of fruit-flavoured carcinogens as I type.

I meet the Spirit of the Fringe again when I return to the flat where I’m staying.

He is sitting outside. 

He tells me he is called George and shakes my hand.

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(3) Man of the moment Benjamin Bankole Bello aka President Obonjo, is performing his show Goodbye Mr President at the Voodoo Rooms on PBH’s Free Fringe. He writes:

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Richard Blackwood, actor and playwright, meets Obonjo

Yesterday, was the best day ever so far at the Fringe and these are the reasons why:

– A 4 star review for Goodbye Mr President. 

– Met Tim Vine, Tony Slattery, Stephen K Amos, Omid Djalili and so many top stakeholders in the comedy industry. Tim Vine knows about #JusticeForObonjo. So unreal chatting with Omid and Tim about the case. 

– A prominent comedy club in Edinburgh, that we have been trying to get into for years, finally offers spots whilst the President is in Edinburgh.

– Met Tommy Sheppard, SNP MP. Someone introduced me to him, saying: “I am happy to introduce two of my favourite politicians”. Tommy burst out laughing.

– Confirmation that #JusticeForObonjo is having a positive impact on sales for the Triple AAA compilation shows.

– Audience members shouting out “Justice for Obonjo!” at the end of show last night 

– Finally, finally, top agents in the country are interested.

#JusticeForObonjo !

In Edinburgh, Becky Fury finds the Spirit of Comedy may have Alzheimer’s

This year’s Edinburgh Fringe started on Wednesday – or yesterday – or possibly today – depending who you are and with whom you are performing.

I am not going to be in Edinburgh for the Fringe but, already, people are telling me what is happening up there. For example, Malcolm Hardee Award winning Becky Fury, who is up there 3rd-25th August performing Becky Fury’s One Hour to Save the World (in 55 Minutes)…

This is her Diary so far…

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THURSDAY

I arrive in Leith.

I am sitting outside the digs waiting for my host to arrive.

An elderly neighbour pops outside to enquire as to ‘who I am’. An existential question with infinite answers but in this instance I choose to tell him I’m performing at the Festival and I’m waiting for a friend to let me in to the house where I’m staying. 

He seems more than satisfied with this explanation and tells me there is a key hidden under the mat and I can let myself in. I decide this is poor etiquette and decide to wait for my friend. 

It turns out that was the right decision as, when she arrives and I tell her about the friendly elderly neighbour, she tells me she does not have an elderly neighbour and it turns out I was sitting in front of the wrong house.

The old man either has Alzheimer’s or is an arch prankster. 

I would like to think, as I am at a comedy festival, that it is the latter and I have just been welcomed into my new home by the Spirit of Comedy, an archetypal trickster greeting me with all the possibly comic chaos that could ensue.

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FRIDAY

Arriving at the venue – Upstairs at the Waverley Bar – we are informed we have to fetch some chairs. We are part of PBH’s Free Fringe.

An interesting discussion ensues with me telling the boys, as banter, that they should carry more chairs than the girls. They look quite hurt. 

I am guessing they are aware of the current bias towards female comics and are feeling that, if they are going to take second place to them, they don’t want to carry all the chairs for their audience to sit on too.

I am in the mood for banter rather than feminist hectoring but I mine the latter for comedic potential and point out that men are physically stronger than women and should accept and capitalise on that or risk becoming a completely obsolete technology and they need to carve some kind of niche for themselves in a world where jars come with a vacuum seal.

To illustrate my point, I say I am carrying three chairs, so the biggest of the lads should take at least four chairs. I size up the smallest guy and offer to carry his chairs for him and give him a piggy back.

Later at the venue a competition ensues with another comedian about who has had the most threesomes; I win, without even needing to resort to the less salubrious back catalogue of tales I have collected. 

The discussion then returns to walking to the venue with the chairs. 

He informs me he did it with six chairs. 

My metaphorical dick is very tired from all the swinging it has been doing this morning, so I allow him that victory. 

I love all the comedians in my venue.

RIP Ian Cognito, dangerous comedian and great opera singer

“Even when I walked on stage and touched his arm I was expecting him to say Boo!”

Comedian Ian Cognito died on stage on Thursday night at the Lone Wolf Comedy Club in Bicester, Oxfordshire.

So it goes.

He reportedly “sat down on a stool while breathing heavily, before falling silent for five minutes during his show” and the audience thought it was part of his routine. He had earlier joked: “Imagine if I died in front of you lot here”.

In the US, Variety quoted audience member Ryan Mold: “He sat down, put his head and arms back; his shoulders were twitching… His behavior didn’t come off as unusual to those used to his flamboyant character.”

Compere Andrew Bird told the BBC: “Everyone in the crowd, me included, thought he was joking. Even when I walked on stage and touched his arm I was expecting him to say Boo!” 

The BBC quoted audience member John Ostojak as saying: “Only ten minutes before he sat down, he joked about having a stroke. He said: Imagine having a stroke and waking up speaking Welsh… We came out feeling really sick, we just sat there for five minutes watching him, laughing at him.”

Andrew Bird said dying on stage would have been the way Cognito “would have wanted to go… except he’d want more money and a bigger venue.”

The comedy website Chortle rather understated the case when it wrote he was “known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage act and would often boast of the number of clubs he was banned from”.

At one time, he used to start his act by walking on stage with a hammer, banging a nail into the wall and then hanging up his hat. “This lets you know two things about me,” he would shout. “Firstly, I really don’t give a shit. Secondly, I’ve got a hammer.”

Over the course of a 30-year career, no British TV company ever took the risk of putting him on screen. Yet today The Times, reported his death and called him a “cult comedian”. The Daily Mail today called him “a proper comic”.

The lesson to other comics seeking media coverage is clear: literally die on stage.

In comedian Malcolm Hardee’s 1996 autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, there is an anecdote which starts: “An excellent performer called Ian Cognito was there and he was very drunk, as is his wont. When he’s drunk, he gets aggressive.”

I always found him very amiable and intelligent though with a slightly insecure glint in his eye. Well, he WAS a comedian.

In 2005, I shared a funeral car with him and Jenny Eclair at Malcolm Hardee’s funeral in Greenwich. Malcolm had drowned by falling in a dock while drunk… So it goes. 

Ian Cognito and Pam Ford at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013

In a 2013 blog from the Edinburgh Fringe, I wrote: “Last night, Cognito told comic Pam Ford and me a very funny series of stories about his own dad’s funeral and what happened to the ashes afterwards. Alas, I don’t think I can repeat them, because I was harassing Cognito that he should do death stories as an Edinburgh Fringe show in 2014.”

He didn’t, but no matter.

And, alas, I have now forgotten the stories.

I also wrote in that blog: “He was wearing a hat. He said he had a song about the late Malcolm Hardee. I invited him to perform it at the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Awards Show on the final Friday of the Fringe. He said Yes.”

He didn’t.

But no matter.

Today his son, Will Barbieri, shared a quote from his father: “I hope when I am gone, that you will remember me for all the things I didn’t do, but could have done so easily.”

In 2014, I quoted the comedian Matt Price in a blog. He said:

“I mentioned to Ian Cognito: There’s a rumour going round you used to be an opera singer and he said: Oooh! Keep that one going, dahlin’ – I do like that one!”

So I will remember Ian Cognito as an interesting human being, a fascinatingly dangerous performer and a great opera singer.

But I did not really know Ian Cognito.

Malcolm Hardee Award winner Becky Fury did know him better. She sent me what follows under trying circumstances this morning.

She wrote: “I am a bit distracted by a total freak show in the kitchen and a man naked in the kitchen. Just a standard day in Deptford.”

Here is what she sent me…

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‘Cogs’… in one of his quieter, more reflective moments…

I’m sad about – but also keep laughing hysterically about – Cogs.  

He actually died on stage, the mad bastard, and people thought he was pretending but he was actually dead. The compere came on and went to prod him as he thought he was joking but he was actually dead. Fuck me, that’s hilarious.

The man was a crazy, beautiful diamond and, like all diamonds, it’s the darkness that give them their brilliance.

Last night I went on stage and told the story of Cognito’s last prank. I’m still hoping he jumps out of the coffin at the funeral and shouts: “Gotcha, you cunts!” and then dies again – because that will be really funny.

It is interesting giving people permission to laugh at death.

It’s a taboo and Cogs liked smashing those. 

It’s the essence of liberation. 

It is nice to be given permission to continue to erode those taboos and it is an honour to explain to an audience your friend died like Tommy Cooper but he did it better. Dying on stage is a very naughty thing to do and the person was very naughty to do that but you can and should laugh because the person was a great comedian and it’s what he would have wanted.

I also explained I would be doing my Ian Cognito tribute act later and I had already taken the capsules of cyanide which was the grand finale after the crowd surfing just to put my own spin on it.

I’d known Cogs since I was 19. He ‘pulled’ me after a gig I was running with my we’ll call him ‘ex’ boyfriend as he was after that happened and who also happened to be the promoter. 

My relationship status with the promoter was unknown to Cogsy but was in hindsight a classic Cogsy as he had an almost supernatural knack of pissing off promoters

We were friends after that. Me and Cogs.

Me and the ex-boyfriend never recovered.

The Cogs I knew was a lovely, fascinating guy and I had a load of really interesting times with him, like a lot of people did. 

After our initial encounter, we met again in the backstage area of Reading Festival and spent the weekend getting drunk and talking and not seeing any bands. Why would you go and see Blur when you have Ian Cognito to talk to?

He even surfaced a few months after that and helped me get rid of another unsuitable ex-boyfriend and helped end another relationship for me. Like a sexy, crazy, cool dad that you can shag.

He had an uncanny knack of appearing when he was needed like a swaggering Cockney genie that lived in a bottle of Jameson’s.

And then a few more times after that.

When I started comedy, I did a few gigs with him at the Edinburgh Fringe where he was kind enough to offer me to share a spot he had in a show at the Pleasance. I was unfortunately too pissed to take him up on the offer. I could blame the fact I was keeping up with his drinking habits but that wouldn’t be true and truth was something that was very important to Cogsy in his life and his art – not that he would have said anything that pretentious.

I never knew him to be anything other than a lovely, wise, bright, shiny, gem of a person. An authentic soul and genius comic. 

There are very few of those and now one less. 

I’m still kinda hoping he kicks his way out of the coffin, does that song about his dog farting and then makes use of some of PR his death generated. But it was never about that.

It’s about living your truth to the full and making your life and death a work of art.

Becky Fury in Morocco with the Tantra teacher & the boy with the magic penis

Late last night, I received this from from Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award winning Becky Fury…

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I am travelling in Morocco.

John said there was probably a blog in it. 

I told him I wasn’t sure where.

He said: “Find someone interesting to interview.” 

I am travelling with Jade Lotus, who is a Tantra educator and her boyfriend who has a magic penis. 

So I asked her about that.

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(L-R) Becky Fury, Jade Lotus and the boy with the magic penis

BECKY: When we first met, you had just graduated from Kings College, London, with a law degree and now you are a globetrotting Tantra educator on a mission to give yourself and the world better orgasms… What happened?

JADE: By the time I finished my law degree, I realised law was really boring and I wanted to do something more fun with my life. But I  still wanted to help people and realised if people got more help with their sexuality than maybe they would need less help with their divorce papers. So being a Tantra educator was a win-win situation for everyone.

BECKY: Whilst we were flying to Morocco you were making a GIF for your website that involved an image of your boyfriend’s penis. As the person in the seat next to me exclaimed: “Have you no shame?”

JADE: I think people should only feel ashamed if they hurt other people. Shame and guilt is a mechanism of social control that is used to stop people blossoming. We are in Morocco which is a country ridden with shame and guilt: sexual shame in particular. You would be hard-pressed to find someone here who isn’t deeply ashamed of their body and their desires – and unfortunately people pay for this in many ways, not just sexual enjoyment.

In terms of sex. we should not feel ashamed unless what we do doesn’t involve consent. 

We are sexual beings and shame is a psychological barrier that stops us from fulfilling our potential.

As I mentioned before, we are in Morocco.

The Gare Evil – “hell on earth”

The dirt on the streets, the tatty buildings and the broken sign at the railway station that reads ‘Gare Evil’ or ‘Evil Station’ is a reflection of the manifestation of hell on earth that sexual shame creates.

BECKY: So is good sex a revolutionary act?

JADE: Yes. When a person is stuck in a cycle of sex as tension-release instead of getting the full experience of sex, they are stuck in a low-grade experience and this will be reflected in their life.

We are in Morocco. People earn tiny wages, there are no workers rights and therefore people are treated badly as employees. This is a projection of the sexual repression.

If we can dispose of the shame and guilt associated with sex, then we open ourselves as people and as a society and we can start to evolve. The more pleasure we find in sex, the more value we find in ourselves as individuals and in each other.

Good sex is a beautiful, peaceful revolutionary act that has the power to overhaul ourselves and eventually the world.

BECKY: In your GIF, the boy has a magic penis. Just the boy in the GIF? Or all boys?

JADE: All boys have magic penises. All penises are magic and all vaginas are magic. (LAUGHS)  All sexual organs hold energy. 

Most men think sex is about ejaculation. Imagine if we channeled that energy, that life force, into healing ourselves. If we used that energy to feed our intelligence, our creativity, our projects, to get what we want in life rather than throwing it away. That’s a big part of Tantra.

BECKY: So how do you know that that’s not just hippy bollocks?

JADE: ’The hippy’ is a recent phenomenon. This is old knowledge and people have been using these practices for thousands of years. They’ve been passed on despite the efforts of governments to repress and destroy them and they are gathering in popularity again because they work.

Telling men to have sex and not ejaculate sounds crazy but…

Telling men to have sex and not ejaculate sounds crazy but, with some effort, men have found they can have full body orgasms, find more energy, focus… and that their lives have been changed in amazing positive ways. 

Misdirected male sexual energy is a dangerous force, even within Tantra. 

There have been lots of scandals recently and all of the scandals have involved male teachers who just use it to try to get laid. 

That is one of the reasons Tantra is traditionally taught by women.

Comedy performer Becky Fury in Berlin with the man who had had too much fun

Becky Fury… And this is the way the conversation went…

My last blog, a week ago,  was about What happened when award-winning performer Becky Fury went to Berlin for a week to create art but she only stayed for a day. 

It was not exactly clear why her stay was so short. And several readers of this blog have asked me (yes indeed they really have) why.

The only explanation in the previous blog was: “the guy that invited me to Berlin, who has taken way too much acid… didn’t really think about the logistics of inviting people to make art there. So I decided to get a plane back to London after I went into Berlin itself on a psycho-geographic ramble.”

So, obviously, a couple of days ago, I sat down and had a cup of tea with Becky (we are, after all, British) and asked her to be more specific. 

And this is the way the conversation went…

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BECKY: The guy read your blog, contacted me and said he had been wondering what happened to me.

JOHN: He didn’t realise you had left Berlin?

BECKY: No. I hadn’t told him.

JOHN: You left over a week ago.

BECKY: Well, there were a few things he didn’t notice and the fact that I had left Berlin was one of those things. 

JOHN: He had done too much…

BECKY: He had done too much… of something. He had had… erm… He had had way too much ‘fun’. That’s a nice way of explaining it.

JOHN: But he never noticed you had gone? Did you leave a stuffed dummy of a human body under your bedclothes?

BECKY: This was the thing. I didn’t have a bed to sleep in. That was mainly the reason I left. Because I was given a couch in a freezing cold warehouse in East Berlin in January. 

JOHN: We couldn’t afford couches in my day…

BECKY: Maybe I should have considered myself lucky… And I had a dirty sleeping bag to sleep under.

JOHN: Sounds ideal. This is the stuff of award-winning Edinburgh Fringe comedy shows.

BECKY: I know… I… err… I don’t want to get distracted by what you’re saying.

JOHN: Few people do.

BECKY: Basically, I went to Berlin to do some art. We had had this really, really interesting conversation, this guy and me. I had met him when I first started to do squatting and alternative politics in 2002. It was a really interesting thing to catch up with him and have a conversation about all the things that had happened since 2002. And he told me we could do a film in his ‘green screen room’ in Berlin. I knew that, over the previous 17 years, he had been taking a lot of… having a lot of ‘fun’.

“I can’t work in this space and I can’t work with you.”

When I got to Berlin, he took me up to see the green screen room and it was the size of… well, basically, you couldn’t stand up in it. Which is a bit of a problem for a green screen room. And he had a tent in the green screen room and he was sleeping in there.

I looked at him and he looked at me and he said: “Oh, no, no, well, we could do it like a rocket. We could film it like we were in a rocket ship in here.” 

And I was thinking: No, we couldn’t. We could only film it in here like we were two tramps living in a tent in a green screen room. There’s nothing else you can do in this space. You ARE actually like a tramp living in this tent in a room that you have green screened and this is fucking insane. I can’t work in this space and I clearly can’t work with you.

And he kinda knew there was something wrong, but this is the thing about people having too much… who have had too much ‘fun’. It is like you’re tripping all the time.

I wasn’t angry with him at all. He was in his dream and he wasn’t really seeing why there was a problem. In his dream, it was fine. We would absolutely make an amazing film with us in a tent flying through space.

He told me this guy from (a well-known cabaret music group) was coming down. And he did. But the date he had given the guy was totally wrong: it was like four days afterwards. I mean, you really can’t get people to fucking come from other countries to meet up and the two people who are meant to be doing the project together arrive four days apart!

He had not done the logistics and I was meant to stay on this freezing cold couch under a dirty sleeping bag for four days. He told me that is what everyone in Berlin does.

So I wandered off. 

There was also inter-personal politics with people in the house.

Basically, they had set up an art space in an enormous warehouse space.

There was the original Tacheles squat after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the squatters got evicted and it was turned into luxury flats. And these were the same (squatter) people who had moved and set up a new Tacheles.

That’s what he told me and it is, but there were two sets of agendas going on.

He has sort-of ‘arted’ all over the warehouse – like he has pissed all over the place, but with art. Art everywhere. So the people upstairs have to deal with him: this guy who is ‘arting’ all over their place.

JOHN: Is this not good? Whatever happened to the joy of anarchy?

“Like I had seen The Ghost of Anarchy Past and had to leave. and run away very fast.”

BECKY: Well, the thing about anarchy is it needs some level of organisation for it to function, otherwise it’s just chaos and a big mess. Which is fun. And it was interesting to go and visit it. But I think that might be why, in the picture you put in the last blog, I look like I’d seen a ghost: that I had seen The Ghost of Anarchy Past and had to leave and run away very fast.

JOHN: So, basically, you just left because you were a bit cold…

BECKY: (LAUGHING) Basically, that’s it! I could have waited to find out if the guy turned up from the (well-known cabaret music group) – which he did.

JOHN: So, at what point did this bloke who enticed you over to do art discover you had left Berlin? Only when he read my blog?

BECKY: No. When the other guy turned up four days later and I wasn’t there.

JOHN: How had you left?

BECKY: I said: “I’m going to go for a walk.”

JOHN: To the guy who had had too much fun?

BECKY: No. To the other guys upstairs. They said to me: “We don’t really know what you’re doing here.”

And I was thinking: I don’t really know what I’m doing here either.

I could have won them over with my natural wit and charm and – obviously – the opportunity to be mentioned in your blog. But I thought: I don’t really want to be here and I’ve got other shit to be getting on with. So I said I was going for a walk and was thinking I’d get an AirBnB or something but, by the time I had left and got a bit of food and was near the station – I hadn’t eaten since I got there because the guy didn’t have any food…

JOHN: You had only been there for like half a day! That’s hardly hardship…

BECKY: (LAUGHS)

JOHN: So you said you were going off for a walk like Captain Oates?

BECKY: Yeah. “I might be some time” and they never saw me again. I did my Captain Oates bit and bowed out disgracefully.

JOHN: Though, unlike Captain Oates, you went to a warmer place.

BECKY: Though we don’t know what happened to Captain Oates, do we?

JOHN: No we don’t. But you left because…

BECKY: I had thought it was going to be a really functional space with loads of people. Not just three cold and very irritable hippies and a man who had taken too much fun.

Although, to be honest, that is a better audience than I’ve sometimes had at the Edinburgh Fringe…

So I came back to London and learnt the script for Political, my show at the Leicester Comedy Festival on 22nd February.

JOHN: Well promoted.

BECKY: I try.

JOHN: And you’ve succeeded.