Uncensored: What two Brits thought while watching the Royal Wedding…

Yesterday, Britain’s Prince Harry married US actress Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle.

This is a genuine SMS text message exchange between two Brits who were watching the BBC’s live wedding coverage. One was watching on a TV set; the other had an iPad. There was a delay of about 40 seconds between pictures appearing on the iPad.

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BRIT 1: 

The mother of the bride looks sweet. Classy outfit

BRIT 2: 

I was about to text about and use exactly the same word – sweet. What on earth must be going through the woman’s head?

BRIT 1:

I am now slightly worried for her feeling like needing the loo with the stress and excitement.

BRIT 2:

Good point! And she seems to be alone. You would think they would have given her someone to sit with.

BRIT 1:

Nah that would be a drag if you didn’t know them and they wanted to talk etc. She’s into yoga so should be OK.

BRIT 2:

Let’s hope she doesn’t fart.

BRIT 1:

Grace Kelly style?

BRIT 2:

Two of Harry’s ex-girlfriends are there… gulp. A pity his dad can’t be there! The mum has a black woman sitting next to her so maybe she DOES have a chum with her…

BRIT 1:

Not on my screen yet.

BRIT 2:

There’s been a couple of side shots. There’s a gap between them as they sit. Presumably to give the cameras a clear shot of mum. 

BRIT 1:

Oh.

BRIT 2:

In the vows, neither Harry nor Meghan has agreed to ‘obey’ the other.

BRIT 1:

Harry’s ears are very different from the wotsisname army affair guy

BRIT 2:

Ooh. You’re right. He has Charlie’s ears.

BRIT 1:

What was the bit in their vows where everyone laughed?

BRIT 2:

I don’t know. I didn’t understand the laugh bit.

BRIT 1:

You said sommat about not obeying. I’m making lunch.

BRIT 2:

They said they would love and cherish but neither said they would obey.

BRIT 1:

Solomon features a lot. FGS, now Martin Luther King.

BRIT 2:

God this Black Yank preacher is a bit OTT. Meghan loves him. Harry looks rightly bored. And her mum is looking bored. I like her mum. Haha Harry’s expression…

BRIT 1:

Yup a load of daggers in everyone’s head.

BRIT 2:

Camilla is hiding a titter with her hat and Kate is slightly smirking. 

BRIT 1:

Who is responsible for booking this preacher guy?

BRIT 2:

Meghan wanted him. I think Charlie is masking a smirk. I blame George III for this.

BRIT 1:

Are you sure it’s her idea? If so, first strike.

BRIT 2:

Fuck me. He’s got onto slavery now. Yup. She wanted him and an upcoming gospel choir. Prince Philip looks like he is thinking bad thoughts.

BRIT 1: The preacher is narrow minded. Let’s sacrifice him. I’m losing the will to live.

BRIT 2:

If Martin Luther King was like this, no wonder they shot him.

BRIT 1:

Just think of the meal after.

BRIT 2:

Harry must be reconsidering the marriage now. 

BRIT 1:

Hmmm…

BRIT 2:

Ah! One of the Fergie daughters was openly smirking. This preacher must surely be over-running. Jesus! On he goes! About love.

BRIT 1:

I am feeling hate.

BRIT 2:

Ha ha.

BRIT 1:

Solomon has been mentioned again. He must be winding up.

BRIT 2:

Take me to Syria.

BRIT 1:

Er no. This is a laugh.

BRIT 2:

Meghan is lapping it up.

BRIT 1:

OK. I’ve stopped laughing. Are you sure she’s not just acting about liking the preacher?

BRIT 2:

Naw. She wanted him. He’s gone mad now.

BRIT 1:

He’s mentioned the invention of fire. Next, the wheel? This could be even longer.

BRIT 2:

Where is an assassin when you need one?

BRIT 1:

Someone has got to cart him off. Men in white coats.

BRIT 2:

He paused and waited for applause at the end!! Now it’s the Gospel choir.

BRIT 1:

This rendition is too slow

BRIT 2:

Yes. Nothing special.

BRIT 1:

Haven’t we done this bit? They are getting married again.

BRIT 2:

Yes. I thought they had already got married. What was all that “I will” bit earlier where they were not going to obey each other? Maybe they are giving Harry the chance to change his mind after that awful preacher.

BRIT 1:

That preacher stuff really fucked up. 

BRIT 2:

The Yanks will be confused she is a Duchess not a Princess. Harry is very sweet. She’s on another planet.

BRIT 1:

She’s 36. Still time to realise different opinions.

BRIT 2:

Elton John has let himself go!

BRIT 1:

Your pictures are 40 seconds ahead of mine.

BRIT 2:

They have just got divorced.

BRIT 1:

Ha ha

BRIT 2:

Harry is running away down the aisle. Prince Philip is yelling racial obscenities. 

BRIT 1:

Now it’s like a Christmas type song.

BRIT 2:

Elton is having a heart attack.

BRIT 1:

Where is something more upbeat? It’s gone funereal.

BRIT 2:

Harry’s two ex-girlfriends are beating up Meghan. Charles is doing a Goons impression.

BRIT 1:

Has the preacher been burnt in a wicker man?

BRIT 2:

I like the way you think. They are going to have to suffer that preacher at the Reception. Now there is some decent black woman chaplain to the Queen. They could have had her instead of the Yank.

BRIT 1:

They should have jumped over a broom and stamped on a glass in a handkerchief. Yes woman chaplain much better.

BRIT 2:

There’s some Jewish bloke on now! What is that on his head?

BRIT 1:

Hello? He is Greek Orthodox!

BRIT 2:

Ah!!! That’s it. Confused the hell out of me. Where is the black preacher now? On his way to the Tower?

BRIT 1:

I like Christmas carols.

BRIT 2:

Yup, Awww. Prince Charles and Meghan’s mum smiled nicely at each other. Serena Williams appears to have  a yacht on her head. Do weddings always have a musical interlude?

BRIT 1:

Somehow I missed the “I now pronounce you man and wife” bit.

BRIT 2:

That was in the bit where they got married a second time. Remember it happened twice?

BRIT 1:

I was thinking I haven’t been to enough weddings to know. That preacher really addled it.

BRIT 2:

Posh Spice’s marriage is looking grim! On your screen now?

BRIT 1:

I’m missing screen by texting.

BRIT 2:

Harry and Meghan got married. Posh and Becks were looking grim-faced.

BRIT 1:

Ah.

BRIT 2:

This poor sod is cello-playing away and everyone is chatting through it.

BRIT 1:

Give her time to recover from crying at knowing she made a mistake with the preacher.

BRIT 2:

She lurved him.

BRIT 1:

I think this is the Young Musician of the Year on the cello.

BRIT 2:

Oh dear. Mum has been having a cry. At least the 2 year old bridesmaid didn’t cause chaos. Probably sedated!

BRIT 1:

No need to. It must be exhausting. The carriage procession won’t be interesting.

BRIT 2:

The Long Walk will look good. Kiss coming up!

BRIT 1:

Nah. I can return to jealousy of wealth. Wait to see how crazy she is. I had thought she was going to be more women’s lib.

BRIT 2:

I think she will wear the trousers.

BRIT 1:

Dress was a bit dull.

BRIT 2:

He has the benefit of a peaked cap to protect his eyes from the sun. She doesn’t. I wonder if she has to do that question test to become a British citizen. The one Brits can never answer correctly. Is Windsor a real medieval castle or some fake? It always looks too neat to be real.

BRIT 1

I like Prince Philip. He said he wants to come back as a deadly virus as too many people ruining planet. Might have mentioned that before. Nice weather for procession; nice for people who were waiting there. Horses aren’t used to being so close to crowd.

BRIT 2:

Presumably they have done something to avoid mass horse shitting in the streets of Windsor. Maybe corks in the royal horses’ bottoms. I am going to wander off now.

A dog called Dylan and the fickle finger of fame

Last night I went to South East London to see Charmian Hughes’ try-out of her upcoming Brighton Fringe/Edinburgh Fringe show The Ten Charmandments at the equally charming and fascinating Living Room Theatre which is, indeed, just what it says on the label.

It’s a living room theatre.

I suppose I should have counted, but I think the full room had an audience of twelve, sitting in a U-shape. That’s ten or eleven more than some Edinburgh Fringe shows I’ve been to.

The Living Room Theatre allows performers to preview and try-out shows in an amiable, low-key atmosphere and is run by writer-performer Claire Dowie and Colin Watkeys who, among his other accomplishments was apparently the late, much-lamented Ken Campbell’s manager. Now THAT must have been a job and a half.

But, oddly, it was the theatre dog’s name that leapt to mind this morning and the fickle nature of fame. Yes, the Living Room Theatre has a dog. Dylan the dog, though missing from the performance itself, was an amiable and attentive addition to the over-all theatrical event.

It was the name “Dylan” that got to me, though.

People want their name to be remembered, but how that name is remembered is sometimes not what they might have hoped for.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wanted to be remembered as a serious mathematician, logician and academic; instead, he was remembered first as children’s author Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland and, more recently, as the taker of some rather dodgy photographs of young children; his reputation has started to transform into a sort-of Victorian wannabe Gary Glitter.

Thomas Crapper was a very admirable man whose hard work and professionalism changed the hygiene, health and social behaviour of the British nation – there are manhole covers with his company’s name proudly displayed in Westminster Abbey, scene of our recent glamorous Royal Wedding… but his surname has become synonymous with shit. He can’t be turning happily in his grave.

And pity poor Dylan Thomas, the verbose Welsh bard, who presumably wanted to be known for his literary art and womanising but people’s first thoughts of the name “Dylan” soon turned into a Jewish folk singer with incomprehensible lyrics and a terrible singing voice, then into an animated rabbit with acid-head drug fans in the Anglicised version of The Magic Roundabout and now, it seems, among cutting-edge theatre-goers in South East London, into a dog’s name. Though, admittedly, he is a very likeable dog. Probably more likeable than the verbose Welsh bard.

Oh – for the record – The Ten Charmandments is very well worth seeing, though God may disapprove of the name change.

I particularly recommend the sand dance.

Variety is not dead in Britain – not with the Royal wedding of William and Kate AND Pull The Other One

I saw a repeat of The Story of Variety with Michael Grade on BBC TV recently. The argument was that variety is dead. Michael Grade (unusually) was wrong. Two things yesterday proved this to me: the Royal Wedding and a monthly Pull The Other One comedy show in Peckham, home of Only Fools and Horses – no connection with the Royal Wedding.

At school, I took British Constitution for ‘A’ Level so i am a very strong supporter of the institution of a constitutional monarchy, but I have absolutely no interest at all in the soap opera of the Royal Family. If left to my own devices yesterday, I might have switched on BBC1 to see the RAF fly-past at the Royal Wedding and perhaps I would have watched the drive back from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace in case anyone got assassinated.

As it was, I was with a friend who is a feminist republican. (Note, if you are an American reader, a republican is almost the opposite of what you might think: more left wing than right wing).

Of course, like almost all British republicans, she is obsessed with reading about and watching the Royals and following the soap opera and I had to sit through the whole thing on TV.

We had recently sat through Lindsay Anderson’s surreal movie If…. together and yesterday, when it got to the marriage bit where camp-looking churchmen in kitsch golden dresses were intoning sleep-inducing words and the congregation was awash with politicians, Royals, the upper classes and Elton John, I half expected Malcolm McDowell to appear high up in the Abbey among the gargoyles desperately firing an AK-47 at the congregation who would flood out the doors of the Abbey into Parliament Square where mortar bombs would explode.

Perhaps my mind wandered a little.

But men intoning the word of God in funny costumes always stimulates the surreal nodes in my brain.

My friend did make the interesting point that, apart from Kate Middleton, the colourful service was an entirely male affair apart from two nuns sitting to one side dressed in drab grey among the men in bright colours and the presumably-repeatedly-buggered choirboys in white surplices. It looked to me like the two nuns had been hired from Central Casting. One was unnecessarily tall and the other was unnecessarily small. It was like watching that classic comedy sketch where John Cleese is upper class and Ronnie Corbett is working class.

I am Sister Superior; I am taller than her and nearer to God… and I am Sister Inferior; I know my place.

Even when they sat down, the tall one was twice the height as the small one – that never normally happens. I began to fantasise about special effects and trapdoors in the pews.

The real pisser for me, though, was that the BBC TV director managed to miss the shot of the Lancaster, Spitfire and Hurricane flying down the length of The Mall. That was the only reason I was watching the thing – other than the possibility of visually interesting assassinations – and it was almost as bad as ITN missing the Royal Kiss on the balcony when Charles married Di.

Everything else was so impeccably stage-managed, I couldn’t understand why they missed the shot. I particularly loved the trees and random greenery inside Westminster Abbey though I found the chandeliers distracting. I don’t remember chandeliers inside the Abbey. Did they come with the trees as part of a special offer from B&Q?

The Royal Wedding guests included Elton John, an invisible Posh & Becks and the distractingly visible two nuns.

In the evening, I went to the monthly Pull The Other One comedy show in Peckham, which similarly attracts performers who come along to see the show but not to participate. This month it was writer Mark Kelly, actor Stephen Frost and surreal performer Chris Lynam. As I have said before, you know it is a good venue if other performers come to see the shows.

Pull The Other One is not a normal comedy show in that its performers are almost entirely speciality acts not stand-up comedians. If you need a break from reality, I recommend Pull The Other One as a good place to go. And the compering is usually as odd as the acts.

With Vivienne Soan on tour in Holland, the always energetic Holly Burn – the Miss Marmite of Comedy as I like to think of her – compered with Charmian Hughes and the latter performed an Egyptian sand dance in honour of the Royal wedding. Don’t ask, I don’t know, but it was very funny.

Martin Soan, Holly Burn and massed wind-up puppets performed Riverdance.

The extraordinarily larger-than-life Bob Slayer surprisingly did balloon modelling and unsurprisingly drank a pint of beer in one gulp.

Juggler Mat Ricardo (to be seen at the Edinburgh Fringe this August in the Malcolm Hardee Awards Show) still has some of the best spesh act patter around.

Magician David Don’t – who had variable success last month when he used blind-folded members of the audience throwing darts at each other – unusually succeeded in an escapology act involving a giant Royal Mail bag, although it’s the last time I want to see a banker with no clothes on and a Union flag coming out of his groin.

Earl Okin did wonderful musical things with his mouth.

And, to round off the evening Matthew Robins, with ukulele and accordion accompaniment, performed a shadow puppet story about murder and mutilation and a visit to the zoo. It is rare to see a shadow puppet show about someone getting his fingers cut off with pliers, his sister hanging from a rope and the audience spontaneously singing along to “I wanted you to love me, but a snake bit my hand…”

But it is more interesting than watching the Archbishop of Canterbury with his grey wild-man-of-the-desert hair wearing a gold dress and a funny pointy party hat in Westminster Abbey.

Pull the Other One – on the last Friday of every month – is never ever predictable and Stephen Frost, keen to appear, lamented to me the fact it is fully booked with performers until November.

Most interesting line of the evening – of the whole day, in fact – came from Earl Okin, who pointed out what a historic Wedding Day this was…

Because it was exactly 66 years ago to the day when Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun.

“It doesn’t bode well,” Earl said.

Spunky Prince William and the marketing opportunity of a lifetime

“You have to feel sorry for him,” I said to my friend last night.

“No I don’t,” she said.

“But when Prince William was 19 or whatever,” I persisted. “He couldn’t really bonk around indiscriminately like any other airhead student. If he had a one-night stand with someone he didn’t know the background of, she might be more than likely to sell her story to the News of the World or the Sun… You can see the headlines – My Night of Doggie Sex with Wee Prince Willie… There’s some slight chance the British press might not publish it. But she would still get money from American or Italian or German magazines.”

“I suppose so,” my friend agreed grudgingly. “But the problem of Royal sperm is worse.”

“Eh?”

“Royal bastards,” my friend said.

“Ah,” I said. “Yes. I suppose if some one-night stand got pregnant, you couldn’t really suggest an abortion and the birth of a FitzWindsor might get to be a PR problem later on.”

“Then there’s the DNA,” my friend added.

“You could bottle it,” I suggested. “Bottled Royal spunk. I suppose if Monica Lewinsky kept the sperm-stained dress from her President Clinton moment, anyone who had a one-night bonk with a Royal might keep the actual sperm if they could get their hands on the Royal used Durex.”

“You pooh-poohed the whole idea of selling bottled semen last time I suggested it,” my friend complained.

“But that was as a health drink,” I said. “Royal semen would sell in the US.”

“But it’s only 10cc,” my friend said.

“The rarity value would increase the price.”

“How do you get your hands on a Royal willie, though?” my friend asked.

“Indeed,” I sighed. “We’re not going to make our million with this, are we?”

“And it’s not really funny enough for a blog, is it?” my friend said.

“I guess not,” I agreed.