Shout, shout, let it all out...

Emailed over the latest and almost final draft of the play to the theatre. There's never a satisfactory sense of closure with email, as the minute you press send there's the distinct possibility that, within seconds, it will get snared up in an organisation's over-zealous spam software - and with a surname like mine that happens more often than not. So I arranged to hand deliver a hard copy, like wot I imagine was the norm but a few years ago before everything started to travel down telephone lines. Passing the brown envelope containing the necessary 110 pages of A4 over to the director, the handing over of a baton if you like, was a delightful moment of relief and release. And I know it's in safe hands. Rehearsals start on Wednesday. Although I've offloaded the paperwork, I'm now getting angsty about the start of that process and, as the days click down to January 24th and the play's first appearance in front of an audience, I'll get increasingly nervous, wondering how the paying customers will react. Only then will we know if it's any good. Funny old game I've got myself into - the only time I'm truly happy is when I'm belting out the first draft, when the magical moment of stuff appearing on the page seemingly out of the ether with my fingers just being a glass on a Ouija Board-style conduit happens. The rest, my, it's bloody hard, brain-boggling, madness-inducing work. Still, it's not like a big long shift down a mine shaft so I shouldn't complain. And it's a dream come true, so I shouldn't complain. And there's a part of me that loves the pain too, so I shouldn't complain. So I won't.

The Hull Daily Mail have been very kind to me and included On A Shout rather prominently in their "What We Rate For 2008" entertainment feature, which is blinking lovely and I'm very flattered. I don't take press coverage for granted - I mean, for starters, who the fuck am I? And I didn't exactly leave the paper clutching a folio of glowing references. So it was nice to find the play leaping off the page at me. Nerve wracking too - I read "expectation is high for the Hull playwright's latest work" and emitted a "shit!" then promptly nabbed the clipping from M's mum's newspaper for filing away.

The great war...1914-1925

My old friends at the Hull Daily Mail News Media Wow! still provide me with much amusement. Today there was a piece that mentioned the first Zeppelin raid over Hull in the First World War in, erm, 1925, a good seven years too late. Bless 'em, they can't be expected to know dates and stuff when faced with a constant barage of deadlines, declining sales and converging media. And then poor Jo Hunter, who I worked alongside for a while and possesses one of the loudest voices in the universe, looking quite dreadful in a frame of video that just happened to crop up on today's homepage and looks like someone's been busy in Photoshop with a 'gormless reporter' filter. Keep it up Hull Daily Mail News Media Wow! - these glorious moments are the reason I still loves you!

Tags: Hull Daily Mail

Salty sea dogs...

I am in Leeds, staring at the screen and looking forward to tonight's Hell's Kitchen finale. I have just penned my "official" On A Shout blog, which was a joy and kept me entertained in between manipulating images in Photoshop. In Hull I note that we have some new blogging competition - the HDM's Jane Harper is on-board a clipper (which is, to all intents and purposes, a yacht in all-but name, that name being a clipper) sailing from somewhere to somewhere else. Jane is, apparently, going to post lots of blog entries whilst hanging on to the clipper as if her life depended on it which, in many if not all ways, it does. No comment facility, which is rather disappointing for a blog, but Jane does chat away in a very pleasant conversational tone: "Whatever happens, at least it’ll give me a fresh batch of stories to tell in the pub. So it’s here where we start all the good bits, and bad bits, and bits we hadn’t even thought to expect.The clock is ticking and it’s time to set out into the unknown. Bring it on." Bring it on, of course, being street slang for needing the toilet and can I please get off the clipper now, please? I shuddered when I read that they are setting out into the unknown. Hasn't anyone thought to take a map and charts? Is there no radar equipment on board? Are there lands as yet uncharted that Jane plans to discover? The unknown? Does she mean Bransholme? No doubt, like me old sensible mucker David Clensy, Jane will turn her antics into a riveting book with pictures courtesy of the newspaper at the earliest opportunity and make herself a few quid to compensate for the sea-sickness (and here's me thinking I was hard done by the time they tried to ship me off to a district office on the east coast!).
Do excuse me, I have a train to catch. More tomorrow in the aftermath of Barry's victory!

Interpup v The Mighty Windass

The playwright David Eldridge has, for the second time, christened me The Mighty Windass. Which, coming from such an esteemed theatrical gent, is very nice indeed (and marketing will, I'm sure, be keen to use it on the posters come January). In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, of course, if he says it a third time I will indeed become The Mighty Windass and I shall rule, if not the Universe, the World or the country, then at least a couple of the dirtier streets in east Hull. I am assuming that David is, perhaps, a fan of the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind, a piece of work that I wish had existed during my school days as The Mighty Windass is certainly preferable to a lot of the utterly uncreative names I was called as a trembling, spotty member of Woggy (!) Hall's form with an oh-so-funny surname at the boys only Riley High - an establishment designed and run with the encouragement and training (but very rarely education) of thugs in mind. All of which, in a rather contrived way, brings me round to a conversation I overheard at the bus stop this afternoon. Someone was talking about being bullied. A bigger, older chap who should have known better offered the bullied some advice: "Yeah, bullies, they don't give a shit about you. So if you're gonna be punched you may as well give them a slap. Tell you what you need to do. Put some pool balls in a sock and whack the bastards across the head."

Actually, steering my thoughts back to the playwright David Eldridge, I've not given up on Big Brother. I'm there every night - even forcing M to endure the show on the nights when she feels indifferent to tuning in - and will be until the end. There's nowt so life-affirming as meaningless trash on telly, is there? But I've gotta say that I'm missing Russell Brand on Big Mouth enormously, and have yet to find a guest presenter that doesn't leave me wanting to throw one of the cats at the television or, say, whack Pete Burns across the head with some pool balls in a sock.

So, we we're in town - I had to drop a hard copy of the aformentioned half a script in at the theatre - and I walked past a newspaper bill board, announcing the staggering news Hull shops to open late. Which illustrates, I suppose, that we're in the middle of the silly season when nothing much happens but is hardly the earth-shattering stuff of your above-average front page. Keen, as ever, not to buy a copy of the paper I read the story online when I got home, amazed that mother-of-two Lynn Smith, 32, of Belvoir Street, west Hull, reckoned that "Late-night shopping will make life easier." Which makes it sound like shops being open until 7pm is on a par with the invention of the wheel, the availability of food and peace in all corners of the globe. But never mind late night shopping, you want stuff that makes life easier, you read what the clever Newsround kids have to say. I especially like 10-year-old Lauren's: "I would invent a robot dog called Interpup. On his belly would be a screen and you could play games or surf the web. You could teach him to speak and sing by telling him through the speaker!" The Mighty Windass would certainly buy one of those.