Do not expect originality when my brain is fogged-up with flu
I have been in bed with flu since early on Tuesday evening. It is now Friday morning. So don’t expect much originality for the next two days at least.
When short of a blog, my first port of call is usually my old e-diaries.
Below is something which happened on this day in 1999 – sixteen years ago. I have absolutely no memory of anything like this ever happening. Did I mention that I have a shit memory? But this is what is in my e-diary. So it did happen.
The Dalí exhibition itself was worth seeing but, roaming round the rest of the Tate, I realised I had forgotten what a pretentious load of pseudo-intellectual twaddle modern art is.
There was one very nice Barbara Hepworth sculpture – basically a smooth brown sphere opened up to reveal smooth round white shapes. Very nice. Sadly, the note attached said it was “inspired by the landscape of Cornwall”.
Yeah. Sure. Cornwall is a big conker.
Dear me.
There was also a “video presentation” called HORSE IMPRESSIONISTS in which a succession of women did impressions on videotape of horses by whinnying and, in one case, a woman flapping her hands with limp wrists.
There were also four shelves with sea-shells propped up on them which, it was claimed, was a work “by” Damien Hirst.
Yeah. And I’m presenting my collection of dust to the Tate.
One exhibit was a series of tiny rectangular slit mirrors attached to the wall.
One of the museum keepers said to me: “When people look in them, they don’t realise that they’re looking at themselves!”
Yeah. Like they think they have a twin, maybe?
The highlight of my Dalí day was that, as I was looking at a painting, I saw out of the corner of my eye a blind woman with a white stick come into the exhibition….
The idea of a blind woman going to a surrealist painting exhibition was worth the trip to Liverpool in itself.
These are not two gentlemen’s urinals photographed in January 2015 at a theatre in central London
Matt Roper – a comedian barely alive after a bad night’s sleep
“I am a desperate man,” I told comedian Matt Roper, who has been living in my spare room for the last few weeks (with my knowledge).
“I need a blog. You said you have a sore back. What has happened to it?”
“I dunno,” Matt said. “It’s just the way I’ve been sleeping.”
“Or is it the fact you’ve got the weight of the world’s troubles on your shoulders?” I suggested.
“I’m glad you said that,” replied Matt, “because Lewis Schaffer needs to realise he’s not carrying them all on his own.”
“We’ve barely seen each other since you’ve been here,” I said. “Where have you been these last few weeks?”
“John,” said Matt. “This is not an interesting blog. Let’s get Wilfredo out.”
On stage, Matt plays the part of Hispanic singer Wilfredo.
“Nah,” I said.
Matt had been trying to persuade me I should interview him for this blog in character as Wilfredo in my back garden.
“My blog’s about real people,” I had told him. “It would be like Chortle (the comedy industry website) interviewing Alan Partridge instead of Steve Coogan.”
Lewis Schaffer, here talking to Martin Soan about ping pong
“Does Lewis Schaffer work at Greggs The Baker?” Matt asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Does he?” asked Matt. “What does he do there?”
“Of course he doesn’t work in Greggs The Baker,” I said. “Why on earth would he?”
“Don’t mention Greggs The Baker in your blog,” said Matt. “Lewis Schaffer will be upset by that.”
“No he won’t,” I said. “He probably wrote it.”
“I’m going to go out for a ciggie,” said Matt.
“Is there’s a picture in it?” I asked.
“John, this isn’t interesting,” said Matt. “We could invent a fake person specifically for your blog,”
“Lewis Schaffer is enough,” I said. “I’ll take a picture of you.”
“Get your garlic grotto in the background,” said Matt.
I have a Dalek grotto in my back garden & two weeping angels
“Garlic grotto?”
“Dalek grotto,” said Matt, correcting either me or himself.
I have a Dalek grotto in my back garden.
“How about publicising Wilfredo’s Christmas single?” asked Matt.
“Nah,” I said.
It started to drizzle rain.
“John, I can’t live in this country,” said Matt.
“Why?”
The normal British attitude to life exemplified
“It’s just so painful. Everything’s expensive. The people are miserable. Everyone’s got this glass-half-empty approach to life.”
“But you’re from the North of England!” I laughed.
“Not as far north as you,” said Matt.
“Scotland isn’t the North of England,” I said.
“Maybe I should move back up North,” mused Matt.
“But,” I pointed out, “if you go too far north, you hit Glasgow, which is never a good idea. Talk about misery.”
“I’ve never been to Glasgow,” said Matt.
Glasgow – a fine and refined city of culture
“Misery and violence,” I said. “It’s a heady mix. Have you really never been to Glasgow?”
“I was once in a cafe called Leopold’s in Bombay,” replied Matt.
“It’s not the same,” I said.
“I used to spend a lot of winters out there,” said Matt.
“The cafe?”
“India. I used to sing in clubs in the summer down in Devon. There was good money in it.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Swing and jazz, all sorts of stuff.”
“Why have you never been to Glasgow?” I asked.
The show Matt saw on London’s South Bank last Friday night
“I did go,” said Matt, “to see Marianne Faithfull in London last Friday night.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “you told me you thought she should be a comedian.”
“She was very very funny,” said Matt. “She had a stick because she had shattered her hip bone. So she sits in a chair on stage with this stick, yelling at all the techies because the lights are too bright. Then she counts – One – Two – Three – and unseats herself grandly from this chair and all the audience applaud and she shouts Imagine! Getting a round of applause just for standing up! I feel like Tommy Cooper! and all the audience applauded.
The late great Tommy Cooper
“I love Tommy Cooper! she says. I AM Tommy Cooper! My kinda guy!”
“So there’s a scoop for your blog,” said Matt. “Marianne Faithfull is a huge Tommy Cooper fan.”
I left Matt outside, smoking in the drizzle.
Inside, there was a message on my computer from someone I know who had better remain nameless.
“I am listening to Lewis Schaffer attempting to interview Stewart Lee on Nunhead American Radio,” it said. “Worth a listen. Total chaos.”
Sometimes I think: Should I continue to write this blog? Does anyone really believe Lewis Schaffer exists?
Matt Roper as himself at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012
On 10th January, I got an e-mail from British comedian Matt Roper. It said:
“Albuquerque, New Mexico? Or Tuscon, Arizona? I’m at truck stop in New Mexico and I can get to either place to get to where I need to be. But I can only choose one. Your thoughts?”
“The Wikipedia entry on Albuquerque,” I told him, “has sections on Freight Service and Sanitation. If the only thing they can write about Albuquerque to make it sound interesting is its sanitary arrangements, the town has not a lot going for it.
“As for Tucson, Wikipedia says: The Arizona Daily Wildcat is the University of Arizona’s student newspaper and the Aztec News is the Pima Community College student newspaper. The New Vision is the newspaper for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson and the Arizona Jewish Post is the newspaper of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona. You can’t go wrong. It has everything.”
Matt decided to go to Tucson and, on the Greyhound bus trip, he got talking to a bounty hunter. But that’s another story.
When I talked to him two days ago, Matt was in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“I flew into New York and managed to do everything by train up until Texas and then I ended up doing car shares and Greyhound buses,” he told me. “I really like them, because you really meet the real characters on the buses.”
“Who’s the most bizarre person you met?” I asked him.
“Maybe the bounty hunter. Maybe the pimp’s nephew. There was the 18-stone Baptist preacher who tried to convert me to Southern Baptism. And the guy who coached Bobby Fischer, the chess champion. I think that guy is living in abject poverty in New York; he’s in his seventies, drinking quite heavily. He never received any money. Bobby Fischer went on to make loads and loads and he never gave the guy any.”
“But now you’re in Buenos Aires,” I said. “I’m green with envy. You’re just basically meandering around the world.”
“I’m always writing and trying stuff out, doing gigs here and there,” said Matt.
He performs as the rather greasy, slightly lecherous but strangely charming Spanish lounge lizard singer Wilfredo.
An audio EP of Wilfredo’s songs was recently released
“I got connected with some local comics and ended up doing a gig here last night,” Matt told me on Skype. “It was interesting doing a Spanish character in Buenos Aires. I felt as if I was being fed to the lions. But it went well. It’s been really inspirational.
Matt Roper (left) with Argentinian comic Gregorio Rossello in Buenos Aires this week
“The Argentinian comedy scene isn’t huge, but I met some local comedians. There’s a group of four young Argentinian comics who flyer every weekend. Their work ethic is so inspirational. They hire this little room above a pub like we do in London – 60 capacity. They flyer all day and night on a Friday and Saturday and do three shows a night every weekend – a 10.00pm, 01.00am and 03.00am show – because no-one goes to bed here till gone dawn.
“I have a blessed life. I support myself with writing commissions and gigs.”
“Yes,” I said, “You write these promo scripts, which is sort-of like what I used to do. But I had to go to places like Salford. You get to travel the world and work via the internet.”
“You’ve been to Tibet,” said Matt. “I haven’t been to Tibet. I’ve never seen the Potala Palace.”
“You’ve come to my home,” I said. “You’ve seen the picture.”
“I’ve only seen him talk at Wembley,” I said. “You’ve been more exotic.”
“I was an English teacher in China for six months when I was about 27,” said Matt, “teaching adults. I used to wind them up. I would play Odd One Out with them. I’d put the names of four towns on the board and get them to pick which one didn’t belong, say: Lhasa, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen. Beijing! they’d say – Why? – Capital city! – Good, but wrong. It’s Lhasa, cos Lhasa’s the only one that’s not in China! They’d go ballistic. I’d been with the Tibetan community in exile at Dharamsala in northern India.”
“No,” said Matt. “I fly out of Buenos Aires in five hours. Basically, I’ve come all the way to Argentina, rented an apartment out in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, miles away from anywhere, and mostly what I’ve done is sit here and written, drunk a few bottles of wine and taken a taxi into town every now and then. It’s ridiculous.”
“So you haven’t seen the pampas,” I said. “You haven’t seen men on horseback with large balls. None of that?”
“Say hello to my leetle friendz” Matt with his cockroach killers
“None of that,” agreed Matt. “But I’ve seen cockroaches. I don’t mind insects and I love animals, but cockroaches! Buenos Aires is one of the great cockroach cities of the world. You can see them all weaving in-and-out of the human traffic on the pavements. But there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not because the place is dirty. It’s the heat and… I just can’t fucking cope with cockroaches. I don’t want to cook. I lose my appetite.”
“How do you sleep at night?” I asked.
“I just leave the light on. They don’t like lights and they don’t like noise. So I usually keep some music on.”
“So why,” I asked, “did you want to go to Buenos Aires?”
“Because I had to leave the States cos my visa was up and I’ve always wanted to come to Buenos Aires. But I’m going back to the States now… LA and New York… I have to leave the apartment in 35 minutes. Cockroaches can survive nuclear holocausts, you know.”
“And you’re back in Britain in May?”
“Yes. And then I’m doing a tour of Central Europe in June with your Facebook friend Alex Frackleton, because he’s keen to get back into stand-up. We play Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague, two dates at an arts festival in the Czech Republic and I’m hoping to play Martin Soan’s Pull The Other One club in Leipzig as well.”
“I saw the first show there,” I said. “It was full. They had to turn people away. Alex Frackleton told me there was a story about you and him meeting up in Prague.”
Matt Roper and Alex Frackleton with their unknown Czech friend
“Yes, we went to the big Gay Pride event in Prague,” said Matt, “and were photographed with an enormous transvestite. Alex was looking up: Can we have a photograph? – We’re not gay! We’re comedians! – We’re not gay! We’re comedians!”
“Why might you play Leipzig?” I asked.
“Because it’s Martin Soan and because it’s close to Prague and because my dental technician is in Berlin. She’s the woman who makes Wilfredo’s teeth.”
Yes, dear reader, Matt Roper wears specially-constructed teeth when he performs as Wilfredo.
“Have you got two sets for safety?” I asked Matt.
“Yes, I always keep one set in my pocket, just in case the first set fly out and break. You gotta have spare teeth, John!”
“No embarrassing questions at Customs yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Matt. “But, when I got to Buenos Aires, I unzipped my bag and the owners of the apartment saw this pair of big teeth and a black wig. Because I don’t speak much Spanish and they didn’t speak English, there was nothing said. Just this silence.”
“I always think travelling makes people better people,” I said. “But has it made you a better comedian?”
“I think the States has given me tons of material,” said Matt. “Not so much Argentina. I think Argentina is more similar to Britain than the States is. It seems to me that Argentinians enjoy nothing more than to see somebody fail. Like the British. They’re very pessimistic. Whereas, in the States, they love to see people succeed. They nurture success and I find that quite attractive. All this Have a nice day! stuff wound me up at first. Have the best day of your life, sir! But, after a while, with everybody saying it, it’s actually quite nice. It’s better than calling somebody a cunt.”
“In Glasgow, calling someone a cunt is a term of affection,” I said, “according to Janey Godley and Jerry Sadowitz.”
“I don’t know Janey that well,” laughed Matt, “but we were both on the Nicholas Parsons show together in Edinburgh and, when she looked across at Wilfredo, she said: Fucking hell! 25 years ago I would have fucking married you!
“Me, half my family is Irish Catholic. My dad’s family is Liverpool, which is naturally like a Celtic city. All the religious suppression, all the guilt is good for comedy. I think that’s why Liverpool is such a great comedy city. And Glasgow. From that religious suppression comes a lot of humour. How else are they going to get through the day?”
An extract from the documentary Wilfredo Comes To Town in which Matt’s character sings Moon Riveris on YouTube.
A few years ago, a Liverpudlian friend of mine who is of Indian descent (by which I mean to explain she has a gentle voice) went to Glasgow for the first time.
When she came back, she told me: “At first, I couldn’t understand why everyone I met was so angry and why they were all so angry with each other. Then, after about forty minutes, I realised it was just their Glasgow accents.”
That was no joke. She genuinely was initially confused.
It came to mind today when I heard Glasgow comedienne Janey Godley discussing Scottish football managers on both BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and on BBC World Service’s lunchtime Newshour. (There are now seven Glasgow-born managers of English Premier League teams.)
“There’s something that’s come through so much today,” Janey said in the Newshour interview, “and it’s that a Scottish accent equals aggression. It’s something that people like me have had to fight for a long time. People don’t say I’m a strong comic; I’m called a tough, aggressive comic because of my accent. But our accent isn’t always synonymous with aggression.”
Janey puts the “don’t mess with us” accent down to “gritty Celtic upbringing” in Glasgow.
But the bizarre other side of the coin is that British telephone call centres are often based in the lowlands of Scotland because a Scottish accent is also found by English people to be comforting and honest.
I am old enough to remember when this started and it was specifically to do with soft-toned Glasgow-born actor Gordon Jackson who, in the early 1970s, appeared in the high-rating ITV series Upstairs, Downstairsas calm, reassuring and authoritative butler Mr Hudson.
To cash in on his TV image, a financial services company had him voice their TV commercials and their business rocketed. He – and other Scots ‘voices’ – became much in demand for financial ads. One bonus was that, unless the words were rasped out in a clearly scummy Rab C Nesbitt type accent, the English were unable to socially place any Scottish accent: they could not label the accent as belonging to any particular ‘class’ or any particular area… the accent was just “Scottish” and came with images of financial probity and Mr Hudson style trustworthiness.
Cliche images, of course, are a fascinating area of illogicality. as with Rab C Nesbitt AND Mr Gordon Jackson both being the epitome of cliche Scottishness.
The Scots have an unusual dichotomy of cliche images. They are seen as both drunken petty criminals and morally-strict Calvinists… as both penniless jack-the-lads and dead-honest people canny with their money.
Perhaps Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United lies sandwiched somewhere between Rab C Nesbitt and Gordon Jackson.
This week, I was talking to Israeli-born, London-based freelance journalist Daphna Baram, who wrote a fascinating book Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel about that British newspaper’s relations with and perception of Israel. (The 2004 hardback is currently on sale at amazon.co.uk for an eye-popping £94.98p)
The only prejudice I know I have is that I am unthinkingly pro-Jewish, largely because I went to a grammar school with a very high percentage of Jewish pupils. That prejudice in favour of Jews used to transfer equally to Israel.
Hey! – remember why Israel occupies the West Bank, the Golan Heights etc – it’s because, in 1967, the countries surrounding it were foolish enough to threaten to attack Israel (not for the first time) in an attempt to wipe it off the face of the map… They lost their gamble… and, in six days – spookily the same amount of time in which the Jewish God allegedly created the Universe – Israel created more defensible borders. Like him, they rested on the seventh day.
Egypt, Jordan and Syria miscalculated so badly that Israel’s defensive attack originally pushed the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Canal and threatened Cairo, while Jordan’s West Bank territories were over-run and Syria lost the Golan Heights. But, when I hear the words “Golan Heights”, I don’t think “wantonly occupied by Israel”, my memory is of the Syrian Army pouring heavy artillery shells down onto the farmland of northern Israel from the heights before the Six Day War started.
My automatic pro-Israeli thinking, of course, has lessened. Bulldozing the houses of terrorists’ families and taking ten eyes for an eye if you are attacked smacks of the Nazis in their occupied territories in the 1940s and makes me think Have the Israeli government never read their own history books? It was counter-productive for the Germans. It is counterproductive for the Israelis. When they bulldoze a house, does the name Lidice never spring into their minds?
They only have to look at a map. The town of Lidice is still there on modern day maps.
I am always a simplistic thinker.
If you constantly fire rockets into Israel, then Israel is going to react, possibly – and not unreasonably – by sending troops into the country from which it is being attacked. If the IRA had been repeatedly/constantly shelling Liverpool from positions just outside Dublin, the British government would have done more than send a few SAS men into the Republic of Ireland to assassinate people (as they did without the provocation of suffering rocket-attacks from foreign soil).
But I mentioned to Daphna Baram that I thought Israel’s image in the UK had mainly gone downhill since my erstwhile youth largely because of accents.
When I was a kid, the Israelis were automatically the good guys because they sounded like us and wore Western clothes, whereas the Palestinians/Arabs sounded like foreigners and wore costumes straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.
In my erstwhile youth, Prime Minister Golda Meir had an American accent and looked like a grandmother from Baltimore. Israel’s long-time Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke like he had been educated at a rather stuffy English public school and dressed like the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yasser Arafat, on the other hand, looked and sounded like a rather dodgy bloke up an alleyway in Casablanca or some similar black & white movie, selling dirty postcards to tourists.
I mean… Golda Meir – she was a Jew, the Israeli Prime Minister – and she titled her autobiography My Life… you have to admire her for having a sense of humour. Yasser Arafat did not look like he sat at home and watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus on TV. Golda Meir might have watched The Benny Hill Show.
It was around the time of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his successor Yitzhak Shamir that things started to go downhill for Israel in PR terms. This was, I think, mainly because Begin and Shamir both had a guttural accent when speaking English though – yes, OK – there was also the minor matter of them both being former anti-British terrorists.
Begin had been leader of Irgun and Shamir was a former member of both Irgun and The Stern Gang.
But that has never been an insurmountable problem for the British – from Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya to Michael Collins, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in Ireland, we have always accepted terrorists as the political leaders of ‘our’ former countries.
The trouble with Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir was that they sounded as foreign and alien as their Palestinian rivals – and their suits were not as smart as Abba Eban’s had been.
Daphna did not really agree with me about accents changing Britain’s attitude to Israel, but she did tell me a story about Abba Eban.
In the late 1950s, when Abba Eban was Israel’s representative at the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered an especially murderous raid across the border.
Abba Eban stood up at the UN General Assembly and made a particularly brilliant speech defending the raid. He than phoned David Ben-Gurion to express his utter outrage at what he considered had been an appalling and reprehensible attack.
Ben-Gurion listened to Abba Eban, then said:
“Well, I was having second thoughts about the raid myself but, after I heard your outstanding speech, I was convinced that I did the right thing”.
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