Comedy and variety in Bethnal Green + crime, stripping and porn films in Rome

Rose (left, without shirt) and Ellis (right, in dress) last night

Things are on the up. There seem to be a rising number of comedy clubs in London which are not just putting on very samey bills of 5-male-comics-doing-stand-up. There are several now staging genuine variety nights and filling their venues.

Among them are the highly-esteemed Pull the Other One comedy nights in Nunhead and Peckham, the occasional Spectacular Spectrum of Now shows in King’s Cross and the occasional Brainwash Comedy nights run by Ellis & Rose at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green.

I saw a Brainwash show last night, headlined by Harry Hill who, although he could be described as a straight stand-up, is considerably more weird than that.

I won’t even attempt to explain what was going on here

Tom Ward was, I suppose, the genuine token stand-up act. Other acts on the bill were sketch trio The Birthday Girls, Neil Frost (of The Spectacular Spectrum of Now) as moustachioed Victorian ‘Gentleman Johnson’ who ended up in a boxing match with a genuinely feisty girl from the audience, Casual Violence creator James Hamilton in a double character act, Mr Susie only partially on planet Earth and Lipstick & Wax doing a standard but nonetheless astonishing magic act.

So… one stand-up, six excellent variety acts, not a dud anywhere and Ellis & Rose impressively managing to be both effective MCs and constantly anarchic in themselves.

Perhaps London comedy clubs are changing.

They certainly have to.

Joe Palermo, Italian stallion, in Soho tonight

In the meantime, people are preparing potential Edinburgh Fringe shows for next year.

One of the most interesting could be Joe Palermo’s Mémoires of an Italian Stallion.

I saw an initial try-out tonight which took around 70 minutes and did not get even halfway through the story, which involves his somewhat colourful life.

From what I heard tonight and during a post-show chat at the Grouchy Club, I reckon his story might take about four hours or longer to tell – if heavily edited.

It will be interesting to see how this fits into a 55-minute Edinburgh Fringe slot. The briefest of headings would include:

• him as a child in Italy (watching porn on TV in the back garden)
• attempts to be a Roman teenage gigolo
• crime and the drug trade
• athletics
• modelling and becoming a male stripper
• porn movie experiences
• encounters with ‘proper’ movie people including stories of Cinecittà, famous actors and spaghetti western people

Joe says: “The show at this stage is mainly for a male audience, however open minded women or girls are welcome.”

I told him I thought Edinburgh audiences might crucify him atop Arthur’s Seat for sexism.

But, if his Mémoires of an Italian Stallion show does make the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, it will surely be an interesting ride.

The rules of being an Italian stereotype

Yesterday afternoon, I flew back to London from Milan. The English girl in the next seat on the Ryanair flight was at university in Italy. We were talking about the bureaucracy there. Italy is a good place to visit. Not a good place to live because of the bureaucracy.

“I’ve never known inefficiency like it,” the girl said. “I thought England was bad… but Italy…!

“It’s the lying,” she continued. “Constant lying. If they actually said something would take two months, I might be irritated. But they say it will take ten days, knowing it will take two months, then I’m just very, very angry. It’s like they enjoy it.”

That morning, on a motorway near Bergamo, I had been talking to my friend who lives near Milan about the cliché of Italians.

“They’re very conventional,” she said. “The way they dress, the colours of the cars they drive. The neatness of the way they dress. The women’s make-up. It’s like they obey the rules they think are expected of them.”

“What about the cliché of bad Italian drivers?” I asked. “I’ve never driven in Italy, but they never seem to me to be as bad as the stereotype. There’s a problem in Rome, but it’s because they have enormous wide-open street junctions and no traffic lights. The system’s haywire, not the driving.”

“I tell people who come here,” my friend said, “that the most dangerous thing on Italian roads is to drive slow. You have to drive fast because everyone else does. If you drive slow, they will go straight into the  back of you. You have to drive with confidence even if you don’t have any.”

“They drive far too close to the car in front,” I agreed. “No braking space if anything happens.”

“They ignore all the rules on the road,” my friend said. “It’s like they think they’re expected to disobey the rules of the road, so they all disobey the rules because that’s the rule. They weave in and out and use the hard shoulder. They tailgate like they have a death wish. I’ve been overtaken a hearse at traffic lights. He ran the red light at great speed, with the cross on the bonnet wobbling.”

“It’s the legacy of the Ben-Hur chariot race,” I suggested.

“Mmmm,” my friend said as we were overtaken on both sides by speeding trucks.

Guinness Book of Records spurns spaghetti-juggling as “too specialised”

The ghost of late, great godfather of alternative comedy Malcolm Hardee must be turning in his urn.

The Edinburgh Fringe this August will host The Malcolm Hardee Spaghetti-Juggling Contest – Year One but, today, Guinness World Records cruelly dealt a bitter blow to spaghetti-juggling enthusiasts worldwide when they shockingly refused to recognise spaghetti-juggling as a legitimate event.

“While we certainly do not underestimate your proposal,” Guinness World Records write, “we do however think that this item is a little too specialised for a body of reference as general as ours. We receive many thousands of record claims every year and we think you will appreciate that we are bound to favour those which reflect the greatest interest.”

How can people not be fascinated or, indeed, be obsessed by spaghetti-juggling?

I am sure I read somewhere that Nero juggled spaghetti while Rome burned. He later spread the rumour he was playing the violin because he wanted to seem more cultured.

My lifelong hopes and dreams of spaghetti-juggling becoming a recognised, legitimate – perhaps even Olympic – sport may have been dented today, but they will not be so easily crushed.

Spaghetti-juggling may not be in the Olympics next year nor in 2016, but the stupidity and pointlessness of an idea should be no barrier to its acceptance as an event. This is Britain, where stupidity and pointlessness have been widely cherished for centuries. And still are.

Clay pigeon shooting.

Marmite.

I rest my case.

And spaghetti-juggling is an event in which Britain could take a decisive lead this August.

Throwing a javelin is a remarkably pointless thing to do in the 21st century, except possibly at Celtic v Rangers football matches. But people still get gold medals for it. Or arrested.

Spaghetti-juggling has the potential to rival javelin-throwing and curling – an Olympic sport which is basically just polishing ice as quickly as you can.

Spaghetti-juggling is the future for pointless sports. It has its days of glory ahead of it, starting this year at the Edinburgh Fringe Outside The Beehive Inn on 24th and 25th August.

Be there or risk missing the start of a cultural phenomenon.

The fickle finger of fate, fame and mortality, featuring comedy, cancer, Libyans and a nuclear explosion

Yesterday I had tea in London with David Kirk Traylor. widely known for his character Mr Zed…

Born in the US, he has lived in Rome for many years. He has starred in eight television series, seen in 35 countries worldwide. He has done command performances for the Pope and the President of the United States and had a top 40 hit record in Europe. He has dubbed and voiced literally hundreds of films, cartoons, CD ROMs and computer & arcade games including an Indiana Jones game for Lucas Arts. His success became such an international phenomenon that he was the subject of a special report on CNN. I booked him on Jack Dee’s Saturday Night on peaktime ITV in 1996, yet he remains ‘unknown’ in the UK.

So it goes.

He told me two of his friends died of cancer around 25 years ago. Their cancer was caused by the radiation cloud from the 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. The radiation cloud was blown over Rome and they died about a year later. The Italian government lied about the cloud and no-one knew the danger. Several hundred people are thought to have died.

So it goes.

I remember reading about a man who was mending his bicycle in his living room just before Christmas 1988. He lived in a small, quiet Scottish town I knew slightly when I was growing up because, when I was a child, my parents had friends who lived there. The man who was mending his bike died in his living room and neither he nor his house were seen again. Nor the bicycle. They disintegrated. Nothing was left of them. A jumbo jet fell on them. They lived in Lockerbie.

So it goes.

The then-apartheid South African foreign minister Pik Botha was supposed to be on the jumbo jet, but got an earlier flight.

The Four Tops singing group had been due to fly on the jumbo jet, but had been late getting out of a recording session and overslept.

Johnny Rotten, formerly of the Sex Pistols, had been due to fly on the jumbo jet, but missed the flight.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 of bombing the jumbo jet in 1988, was released from his Scots prison in 2009 because he had terminal cancer and had about three months to live. He returned to Libya to die. He is still alive now, in 2011.

BBC TV News has just reported that Human Rights Watch claim, in the last week in Libya, at least 233 people have died in the ongoing demonstrations.

So it goes.

A friend of mine, whom I have known for 36 years, now has cancer.

A death in Scotland yesterday, Albert Einstein and the legend of the horsemen of Central Asia

Yesterday morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, my mother’s cousin died at home in Scotland.

Here is the closing passage from a book I almost wrote: the biography of an Italian archaeologist. There were personality problems. It may still get written…

***

“One of the most famous legends of Central Asia tells of a horseman,” he told me as we sat in his book-lined room in Rome. “The horseman is the standard-bearer of the great Khan. As the Khan’s army are entering a city after a glorious victory, the standard-bearer sees a dark lady looking at him. The dark lady has fearsome eyes, as if she is looking right inside him. He becomes scared that this woman is a witch and she has put the Evil Eye on him, so he goes to the great Khan and tells him his fears and says he wants to go to another city.

“Of course! says the great Khan. Give him the finest horse we have! Let him escape!

“So the standard-bearer takes the fastest horse in the Great Khan’s army, rides off across the desert and, in record time, arrives at the other city. Then he sees the dark lady standing by the city gates, waiting for him. She looks at him, smiles and says:

“I was so worried. I knew I was due to meet you here today but, when I saw you in that other city so very far away, I was worried that you would not reach here in time for our appointment.

“And the standard-bearer realises that the dark lady with the eyes that look right inside him is Death. I always feel I am running like the standard bearer,  that there is never enough time and I know I will never complete what I should do.

“Another Central Asian legend tells of a horseman who rides alone across the desert but, when he looks at the shadow he casts, he sees that Death is riding behind him. The shadow of her long scythe is touching his shadow as she swings it backwards and forwards. At any time, she may strike the final fatal blow but, until then, he only sees the shadow.

“Since Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, we know that time and space cannot be separated: if you travel across physical space, you are travelling through time as well. When I was given that bouquet of flowers in Iran, the past caught up with me. I had been running, turned round and saw a shadow. I realised I had managed to destroy my life piece by piece. I destroyed almost everything. Lovers, career, options, the potential for wealth, peace of mind, success.  I somehow managed to throw away all the possibilities. My failure at the Burnt City was too great to recover from. When I saw the site for the first time, remember I shit in my pants? When I sat in that tent and saw the sunlight coming through the flap and saw the desert, boundless and bare, stretching beyond. I couldn’t deal with it. I could feel the ground starting to go down and down in a spiral under my feet. I could see and feel Time sucking me in. But the irony is that, as an archaeologist, I don’t feel I’m dealing in dead and destroyed things. I feel the continuity and the importance of what has survived, lasted and developed. Archaeologists don’t uncover dead civilizations. They uncover the interplay between events and people.

“I know I was close to death in Kurdistan when the young boy shot me in the arm; I still bear the physical scar.

“I know I was closer to death when I was in Haiti and faced the Tonton Macoutes. That was really very close.

“But the effect of imminent physical death was much less on me than the effect of those events way back in my childhood. Those scars stay with you through time and they never heal. The first five years of your life are what is important because you are so receptive and the scale of importance given to each event is so gigantic. When I was about three, my father came and told me that, if I didn’t do some little unimportant thing he was going to beat me. I was three years old, looking up at this overwhelmingly strong adult who was looking down at me with a very serious face. I felt so helpless and in such immediate danger. But my father was just joking. Joking! The result was that all the insecurities started to take hold of my mind and, later in life, I wanted to either control my insecurities or run away from them or both. I never wanted to feel that helpless again. My father doesn’t even remember it happening. But I remember it vividly 51 years later. The scars have travelled through time like the bullet wound on my arm.

“Maybe you are even affected before you are born. The foetus is receptive to light and sound and voices and pressures and pains and chemical variations in the body of your mother…..and your individual mind – your unique neural map – is formed at the same time your brain is formed. By the time you are five years old, maybe 80%, 90% of your future is already within you?

“People tell me I have a good memory for dates, but even I am still surprised how vivid something that happened 51 years ago can be in my mind. Things that happened 10 years ago are as vivid as the present. I remember my days with Wendy the Wessex Bird so vividly. The feeling of her body; the first time I penetrated her. Just a week ago, I saw Ingrid crossing a street in Rome to avoid meeting me. She is now 48 and still looks lovely; I could vividly remember her coming through a door thirty years ago. As vivid as yesterday. The past is not the past; it is still living today, travelling with you in your memory.

“If I find a ruined building, I need to know what happened inside the building: the forces that co-operated to make it what it was. The energy and social inter-action. About 5,000 years ago, the Arabian civilization was created. But it is not a distant planet. Those ‘dead’ things and ‘dead’ people’s actions are alive because of the long-term effects of their existence and their actions. That is the psychology of archaeology. It is like a giant meteor falling on Earth; it creates all kinds of changes and has all kinds of after-effects. When you watch a stone thrown into a pool, the effects ripple out and eventually disappear but, with events in history everything is linked. In order to understand the Arabian civilization of 3,000 BC, you have to go back to what was happening between 5,000 BC and 4,000 BC. Ruins don’t talk; what talks is the actions of people and you can only judge people by their actions.

“At the end of the Don Juan story, as I remember it, he is having dinner with Doña Aminta who is a depressed, boring, unhappy woman. But he has also invited the Stone Guest to dinner – the ghost of Don Gonzalo, whom he killed. While Doña Aminta is praying, the hellish Stone Guest invites Don Juan to follow him to Hell. He is not dragged or kidnapped…he has a free choice between life with a depressive, unhappy woman and the road to Hell. And Don Juan chooses to go to Hell. That’s my choice too. I want to be engulfed in the flames.

“I don’t want any name on my grave, because I have never had a name of my own,” he told me. “I only want those two lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.”

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

“Do you remember the four lines before that quote?” I asked.

“I forget,” he said unconvincingly.

“The full quote is better,” I suggested.

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

But, when he died at the very start of the 21st century, it was suddenly and violently and there was no tombstone because there was no body. He had gone to talk to an acquauintance in the New World. The acquaintance’s office was high atop a tower which looked down on the rest of the world as if from heaven. I checked which side of the building the office was on. He must have have stood high up in the financial district of New York early on that bright, clear September morning and seen the plane coming straight at the building. He was consumed in the flames when that first airliner hit the World Trade Center on Tuesday 11th September 2001.