Just one of many hectic months in the trippy life of Nelly Scott aka Zuma Puma

I stopped writing this blog daily at the end of last year. I thought it would give me more time to do other things. But, as is to be expected from the Third Law of Surreality, I am even more tied-up.

Nelly Scott being low-key in London a month ago

Over a month ago, I chatted to performer Nelly Scott, aka Zuma Puma. It was the day before she left London on a one-way ticket for France. She wanted me to mention her web series Grumpy Lettuce.

“We’ve got 14 episodes in all,” she told me. “We’ve got ten released. There were seven in the first season and then we waited until February and then started releasing the next batch. We might come back with a third season, but we’re also writing short films and a feature. It was a wild, really crazy, long journey. It took so long! The editing!”

The same might be said about this blog.

“You’re going to France for an indeterminate length of time?” I asked her over a month ago.

“Well, yeah,” she told me. “I just got a one-way ticket. There’s a swami staying in my house right now.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A swami.”

“Is he sitting in your house or levitating?” I asked.

“He’s pretty much levitating. He’s reading all of our palms, telling our fortunes, giving us life insights. It’s great. He came to stay the night and he’s been there for about two weeks now.”

“How does one get a swami?” I asked.

“Basically,”Nelly told me, “you make a friend who has invited a swami over to this country to stay and then, when the swami arrives, your friend’s house is in complete chaos, so he sends the swami to you and then you have a swami and it’s kind of hilarious, because there are five of us in the house and we all are kind of swami-sitters. We pass him around.

“One day, I took Swami to see Big Ben. And the other night, I accidentally took him to a hip-hop night. I thought it was a hippy night but, when we showed up, there was hip-hop in a really cool space. He thought it was hilarious. He said: Nobody is going to believe that I came! He was taking pictures. All these really beautiful women were coming over and giving him hugs and saying: Wow! You look like some spiritual guru!”

“Did he bop?” I asked.

“No. He liked lying on a couch and watched. He observed.”

“And,” I asked, “you call him Swami? You actually say: Are you hungry, Swami? Do you want a cup of tea, Swami?”

“Yeah,” replied Nelly. “We know his name, but we just call him Swami, because that’s how he was introduced to us.”

“He’s from India?” I asked.

“No, he’s from Panama, but he’s been living in India for the last many years, living in caves and…”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“In Elephant.”

“So,” I said, “ he’s moved from the caves of India to the Elephant?”

“Yes. But he’s going to Spain soon. I’m going to meet up with him there. It’s kinda like he’s my brother, my uncle and a strange caveman all in one.”

“Why France and why a one-way ticket?” I asked.

Nelly as Zuma Puma promoting the Grumpy Lettuce logo

“Because I have a crazy friend who is a muralist and she met a man who lives in France and she said: Come stay with us and we will build a puppet. I am developing a one-woman show, but I keep questioning what its purpose is.”

“What sort of puppet?” I asked.

“It’s gonna be a creepy baby.”

“A glove or a string puppet?”

“I don’t know. It might be a harness puppet. Last time I met up with this friend, she convinced me to go to San Francisco and, when I showed up, the people she was staying with were so not-cool with her inviting me because she had never told them she invited me.

“I ended up homeless, sleeping in a tent in central San Francisco. Before that, I spent my nights looking for parties. I would go into a party and, before the party ended, go to a quiet corner and fall asleep cos, at the end of a party at 3.00am, you are not going to go over to a nice young lady who is asleep in the corner and tell her to go out into the streets where it’s cold in December.

“I did that for about two weeks – crashing parties where I didn’t know anybody. I would just pretend I was part of it, then fall asleep in the corner… until I found the tent.”

“Why have I not had a life like this?” I asked.

“You still can,” said Nelly. “You can meet Swami… Swami lives like that. He has no plan ever and he just lives in caves and does fire ceremonies all over the world.”

“So,” I said, “you are going to France just for the hell of it?”

“I guess,” said Nelly. “And to find new inspiration. I am going on a quest to reconnect with my creativity. I am going to go, live it and come back with all these stories.”

That was over a month ago. So, yesterday, I thought I had better catch up on what has happened since. I got this reply:

“You silly, ridiculous man, hahahah! Since we spoke, I have gone to France, devised a show, made a weird music video for music we have yet to find, travelled to Spain where I stayed for 4 days on the top of a quartz crystal mountain with seven women as a tag-along, then travelled down Catalunya and filmed for ten days with my dear friend Swami – the Fire Keeper movie – returned home, did a voice-over job, started an improv intensive to refresh me and am already one third sold out for my very own clown intro workshop called Clown Life which I will be facilitating April 23rd & 24th at the Pleasance Theatre in London.

“Here’s the Facebook link: Clown Life Weekend Intensive, London and the ticket link: https://billetto.co.uk/clown-life-weekend-intensive

“Grumpy Lettuce is still happening. We have the final two episodes of Season 2 to be released in the next few weeks. They had to go on hold, obviously, because of my going away but we will start to release them again in the next few weeks.

“Here’s the link to our YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF2TqFBtMiEyuU1TFaUfbsg and the last episode we released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLGnLWfcw4 ”

I feel exhausted just reading about what Nelly Scott has done in the last month.

I am unworthy.

I have wasted my last month.

Where can I find a cave?

What will Nelly do next?

Why comedy writers and performers are different and clowns are not clowns?

James Hamilton – Soho Theatre bar yesterday

So yesterday afternoon I went to the Soho Theatre bar to talk to Nelly Scott aka Zuma Puma about her weekly – always unique – Friday night Lost Cabaret shows in London.

It never happened.

I arrived early and found multiple Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award nominee James Hamilton sitting at a table, writing his sketch group Casual Violence’s next show for the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

“How much have you written?” I asked.

“10%,” he said glumly.

“I was going to do a solo show this year,” he told me, “but I got talked into doing a Casual Violence one. Do you remember the Siamese Twin hit-men from Choose Death? I am giving them a full story. They work together as assassins until one of them decides he would rather be a baker instead. They fall out and decide to go their separate ways.”

Casual Violence: new 2014 Edinburgh show

“The Siamese Twins?” I asked.

“Yes,” said James. “It’s about the brotherly dynamic.”

Then Nelly arrived.

James and Nelly had never met before, but it transpired they had both been on Dr Brown/Phil Burgers‘ clown workshops.

Clown workshops seem to be trendy for performers at the moment but, as far as I can see, have nothing to do with clowns as any normal person would recognise the word. They are actually improvisation workshops under a ‘sexier’ title.

Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, James (a writer who performs) found the workshops more difficult than Nelly (a performer who can write).

“The people who could be themselves or a version of themselves on stage,” said James, “were the people who did best in the workshop and I wish to god I could do it. I loved the workshop and got so much out of it but I also really struggled. It was so difficult.”

“It is really difficult,” agreed Nelly. But those people had probably been to loads of these workshops and practised a lot of dropping it and ‘being with themselves’. Or hadn’t been to anything at all.”

“Yes,” said James, “a lot of people who did best in that workshop had never done any performing of any kind.”

“The people who find it hardest, I think,” said Nelly, “are people like actors or stand-up comedians. With actors, there’s always this mask: that they never want to show themselves. With comedians, they’ve always got to have a punchline. Stand-up is very wordy; it’s always about what they’re saying, not what they’re doing. Whereas, in clowning, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it and how you do it. It’s all about How not What.”

Nelly Scott aka Zuma Puma with James Hamilton yesterday

“It’s a very performance-driven thing,” said James, “whereas I tend to approach stuff from a very writery point of view. Writing is very introverted and thinking about ideas and not letting go. All the clowning stuff is very counter to that. Not in a bad way. But it’s the opposite of what you’re taught as a writer.

“I remember at the workshop,” James continued, “being told off because I had an idea before going on stage. So what I did for the rest of the workshop was every time I had an idea ahead of going on stage I would immediately dismiss it because I knew if I went ahead with that idea he would pull me up on it. He wanted people to go on stage with nothing and then find something.”

“Well,” said Nelly, “it’s OK for you to come on stage with an idea, but you have to be ready to drop it in a split second if the audience hate it. People who come on stage with an idea can be more in love with their idea than they are with the audience. It’s not necessarily that he wants people to come onto the stage with nothing, because some people literally don’t have anything and it’s boring. You need to have something. What’s your impulse? What are you thinking? But, if it doesn’t work, you just throw it out the window. You do whatever it takes to make the audience love you.”

“I think, when I do more solo things,” said James, “it will be more of an even balance but the way it works at the moment is I’m the sole writer for a group of people, so I need to bring stuff in. It doesn’t need to be perfectly finished. We play with it and develop it. But it does come from a very scripted starting point.”

“When I go on stage,” said Nelly. “I always have an idea of something. I’ll have a character and a costume or I’ll come up with a game and go on stage and play with that.”

“The fact people can do that is amazing,” said James. “It just terrifies me. Though in an appealing way. It makes me want to do it.”

“It doesn’t matter if you flop at some point,” said Nelly, “provided you bring the audience eventually to this place of magic and then they forget about the bit that flopped.”

James had told me earlier that he had been “talked into” doing a Casual Violence show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and, in a sense, the same thing had happened with Nelly and Lost Cabaret.

Zuma Puma (centre bottom) + her collective

“I wasn’t going to go to the Fringe this year,” she told us. “I thought: I need a break. I’m going to be in Spain for the month lying naked on the beach or hitchhiking to Morocco and singing on the top of mountains until five in the morning. But then (regular performer) Dan Lees applied for a spot for Lost Cabaret at the Fringe and told me about it after we had been accepted.”

“So,” said James, “you will have to defer your month of naked hitchhiking to the top of mountains at five in the morning.”

“I’ll still do that,” said Nelly. “Maybe before I go to the Fringe.”

“You told me,” I said, “that you’ve been going for lots of castings recently.”

“Lots of auditions for short films,” said Nelly, “which I’m finding interesting, because a lot of writers are shit.”

“Are you cast as Girl 1 or Girl 2?” asked James.

“I’m usually cast as a femme fatale killer,” Nelly replied, “which is fun. I’m OK with that. But how many scripts are just so degrading to women?”

“Women are either in films to have sex or to be killed,” I said.

“There is a website called Casting Call Woe,” said James, “which has genuine casting calls which are horrendously sexist and awful.”

Currently on the site are these four descriptions of projected movies:

The actress would need an ‘Easy Access Skirt’ with leggings underneath so that the skirt could be lifted up and it would look convincingly like she was ‘being taken from behind. Consent to have fake vomit thrown on her. 

Please send a pic of your tongue so I can approve of your tongue length.

The egg shoots from her vagina and directly into the doctor’s mouth.

Bikinis will get this movie attention. Great acting will get it respect. 

“I got a script for a short film,” said Nelly. “Somehow they had got funding for it. I don’t know how. They were looking for an actress who could play seductive but bad and I thought Oh, I can play femme fatale no problem. But then I read the script and there is a scene where a female crime investigator is talking to me – I’m this girl who is covered in blood and freaking out – and she starts putting her hand up the girl’s skirt and fingering her. There was no conversation before the investigator starts randomly fingering the girl. And, in the next scene, her face is in the girl’s vagina – there’s a shot of the investigator’s head between this girl’s legs. What the fuck has this got to do with the investigation? And then she kills the girl. It drives me nuts. I will have to start writing.”

There is a Lost Cabaret showreel on YouTube.

and also a trailer for Casual Violence’s comedy.

The Greatest Show on Legs wearing Clockwork Orange noses for Dave Lee Travis’ Manfred Mann clown video

A couple of days ago, comedian Martin Soan was staying at my home and showed me a 1985 BBC TV clip he had found on YouTube in which DJ Dave Lee Travis introduced a BBC-specially-shot video for Manfred Mann’s 1966 song Ha Ha Said The Clown featuring The Greatest Show on Legs – Martin Soan, Malcolm Hardee and (as the clown) Steve Bowditch. You can see it HERE.

Steve Bowditch told me “I remember the director saying to Malcolm We need someone to be the clown and Malcolm said Bowditch can laugh... so I laughed and he gave me the job!”

“We never met Dave Lee Travis,” Martin told me. “All three of us went up to Birmingham. It was done in-house by the BBC. They gave it to young… they weren’t producers… Maybe they were trainees. They all had to put in ideas for pop videos and then a director shot it with a crew of about 20.

“I think it took three days to shoot. After two days, they’d done with Steve and Malcolm but I had to spend another day doing stuff in toilets and things like that.

“Toilets?” I asked.

“Toilets,” repeated Martin.

Clowning around on the sofa – but Martin was being polite

“Steve and I had to get on top of the girl on the sofa. I did it very politely and got it out of the way within a couple of minutes. Bowditch then had to lie on top of her dressed as the clown and he took about three hours lying on top of her for that shot.”

“I was a bit dubious about the noses,” I said. “I seem to remember the rapists in Clockwork Orange wore those sort of noses.”

“I think President Reagan originally had Clockwork Orange eyebrows as well,” said Martin. “I’m not quite sure what they were trying to say. But the bit I remember most was where Steve, the girl and Malcolm marched across the screen.

“The director said: I just want you to go One-Two… One-Two… One-Two… Turn… One-Two… One-Two… One-Two…

Malcolm Hardee completely out of step with everyone

“When they did it, Malcolm was completely out of step. In the first direction, he was kicking the girl’s heels, then they turned round and he was treading on her feet. He was unintentionally completely out of kilter with absolutely everything. I was laughing and the director was looking horrified.

“They did it and Malcolm went: Alright! Oy! Oy! In the can! One-take Hardee! Stick a cheque in the post! and walked off, leaving everyone open-mouthed it was so bad… and then they all broke out laughing.

“I don’t think they attempted to do it again because I guess they thought: No… No… We could spend too much time on this.”

Why Charmian Hughes is back for an erotic dance at the Edinburgh Fringe, but without dog, tortoise or husband

Yesterday, I had tea with Charmian Hughes at the Pleasance Dome in Edinburgh.

It is twenty years since she last performed at the Edinburgh Fringe.

“Last time I was here,” she told me, “I got a review on an airline magazine that someone saw six months later; I’ve never seen it myself.”

The show was called Greyfriars Bobby Speaks to the World.

“I had my dog Arthur with me on stage,” she explained. “He was quite old and he just sat there. It started with the theme music from Lawrence of Arabia and I pushed him on and he had a camel hump bag on his back. In the show, he was called Catharsis: Dog of Love and Healing. I hung the whole show round that. Every so often he was supposed to channel the thoughts of Greyfriars Bobby.

“It was a 50-seater and, in the first two weeks, maybe 7 or 8 people would come in each day. Then, after that, I had 50 people in every night. I have no idea why. But I also got children in because I had mis-directed with the title. I had lots of irate parents trying to get their children in because they had thought it was a children’s show.”

Charmian is back this year with her show The Ten Charmandments in which she allegedly gives her audience the benefit of her own esoteric wisdom… and it also includes an erotic dance, of which more later.

“I’ve had to wait all this time – twenty years – to get away from my children,” she told me.

“When I go to perform at the Glastonbury Festival, I take my children and my husband David but, even though they are meant to be self-reliant, I spend my whole time looking after them. Or watching them go off to have fun while I go off to work.

“This year was the first year my younger daughter – 14 – could hang out on her own with my husband holding the fort. David can’t come up because the dog – this is another dog – has already been in kennels because we went on holiday just before I came up here and he is a bit emotional. He has been very difficult, but now he is in his own space where he feels he doesn’t need to react to other dogs with violence. He’s very calm and peaceful. But, to keep him that way, David can never go out while I’m away; we have to nurture his emotional needs. The dog’s, not David’s.

“I am enjoying being up here on my own it because I’m doing a lot of walking, I haven’t had many late nights and haven’t drunk lots. I’ve been eating really well at Henderson’s every day: a fantastic vegetarian restaurant. I used to go there years ago when I was at St Andrew’s University and visited friends in Edinburgh.

“But how do I get coverage in the press?” she asked me.

“Claim Scottish heritage,” I told her. “Or find any Scottish link of any kind. St Andrew’s is a good start – or do a bizarre publicity stunt that may get you nominated for the Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award,” I advised her, solely so I could then mention it in this blog and give it a plug.

“Cunning Stunts are what brought me into showbiz,” Charmian said in reply. She did. She really did. Truly.

“I worked in an advertising agency,” she said, “as a copywriter and I was very depressed because I had thought I was in a creative job and it turned out I wasn’t. All the other people said: Ooh! You’re so wacky! because I wore tartan trousers.

“I used to put all my creative energy into writing things that ended up as: Oh, come and be a nurse in Saudi Arabia. You don’t have to pay tax. Whereas I had tried to write: Come and heal the sick! because I had thought it would be more interesting… The uniform is all-encompassing.

“I was about 26 and thought, at that age, my life was over. It was so depressing. What have I become? I have done nothing! I am not a Nobel Prize winning writer.

“I was driving my car and, on the radio, they were talking about an international theatre festival and there was a group called Cunning Stunts doing women’s theatre workshops. So I went along and I spent the first evening having to pretend I was a rock, which I had never done before; I was a good rock; it was lovely.

“So I did their course, then I did clowning at City Lit where Pierre Hollins was teaching and I suddenly found I was rather good at drawing attention to myself. Pierre was a clown then and did street shows. He had a teaching exercise where you just had to make everybody look at you rather than the other person on the stage. People tried all sorts of clever tricks but actually being as still as possible but being stupid drew their attention.

“Lots of them went off to join Gerry Cottle’s Circus but I gave up my job and did a bit of children’s theatre.

“Then I met this old man, aged about 70, called Eugene Boller who was a Hungarian acrobat and he taught acrobatics to lots and lots of students in the front room of his huge house in Brixton which had loads and loads of junk because he was a hoarder and it stank of cabbage all the time. He had electricity in his home, but no heating. People said, Oh you have to be really good to go to him! and I could just about do a cartwheel.

“I met him at a tea party where I was sitting alone feeling sorry for myself and he invited me along because he said he could teach anyone and I stayed for about 20 years and I never managed to do anything.

“It was a very small room and these very athletic students used to queue round the room to go in this harness where he flipped you over.

“I had a lot of resentment from the other people because they didn’t know why he was letting me be there. He would dismiss some really good people, saying, I don’t want you in my class any more; I don’t like your attitude but with me he’d go Hahahahaha…. The other students would ask me:

“So you’re doing a stage show are you? What do you do in it?

“Talk.

“Hah!

“I used to be quite good at roly-polys. Everyone else was doing back-flips; I was doing remedial moves. Eugene said he had me there because I made him laugh. He told me that a fat girl doing ballet will get everyone watching.

“He said watching me do a cartwheel was more entertaining than watching the athletic ones go backflip-backfliip-backflip.

“I started going to him in my 30s, then I had the children, then he invited me back when I was about 42, then he got very very old in about 1992 and he said, Oh, I’ve had this… I dunno… stuff… I think it’s called cancer… but, ah, stuff and nonsense, stuff and nonsense… and, once he had it, he had to go to the toilet for a long time and people told him You should go to the doctor and he said Oh no, I just take my olive oil.

“He had a massive bowel tumour and he was about 90 years old by then. With lots of people of that age, they don’t bother to operate. But they did operate on him and he was teaching again six weeks later.

“Later on, when he was dying, we all used to go up to his bedroom, where he now had a small gas fire, and just sit around talking to him. One of his great pupils, Annie Griffin, came along and he asked her: What have you been doing?

“Oh, she said, well, I’ve written a TV series called The Book Club. and I wrote and directed a film called Festival about the Edinburgh Fringe…

“Enough of that stuff, he said. Show me your handstand! Show me your handstand!

“When he died, he got an obituary in the Guardian.

“He had a tortoise called Jimmy, who he had found in a rubbish skip and who I was meant to look after when Eugene died but his weird niece took Jimmy away and sold him. We had a fight about that.”

And that is why, if you go to see The Ten Charmandments at the current Edinburgh Fringe – as you certainly should – Charmian Hughes does an erotic dance.

It is very funny.