Drop the Dead Donkey stage reunion is an utter joy

When I first saw that Drop the Dead Donkey was going to be produced as a stage production, I had serious doubts. How often do such revivals generate huge, nostalgic excitement, yet then disappoint?

But after heading to Brighton last Sunday for a much-needed break, Facebook algorithms decided to show me posts from the city’s Theatre Royal, revealing that the play was on tour there this week.

Enthusiasm took over and I booked for last night (Brighton might not be very far from London, but it’s light years away in terms of ticket prices, which also helped overcome any doubts about shelling out).

Decades on from the demise of GlobeLink News, most of the central figures from that TV newsroom are recruited by an anonymous source to start a GB News-like TV news channel, called Truth News, where facts will come second to what The Great Algorithm says will pull in the viewers – and the advertisers.

This is one reunion that is an absolute delight.

Much of that is down to Andy Hamilton and Guy Carver, the writers behind the original TV series between 1990 and 1998, who have written this stage version. The tone is absolutely spot on. It’s as though the dialogue – and the performances – have come from a sort of creative muscle memory. They’ve lost none of their satirical bite.

To add to the fun, Hamilton and Carver are continuing to change the script to add topical comments in order that the satire is fresh. This week, these included snipes at the scandal over F1 Red Bull boss Christian Horner, plus plenty of digs at Sunak, Trump and Putin. And yes, in a spirit of even-handedness, Starmer too.

Of course, a huge part of the fun here is seeing so many of the original cast back in their famous roles – and this time, live. Sadly, David Swift, who played grouchy co-news anchor Henry Davenport, and Haydn Gwynne, assistant editor Alex Pates for the first two TV seasons, are no longer with us – it’s lovely that they are remembered at the end.

But Robert Duncan as inept CEO Gus Hedges, Jeff Rawle as accident-prone, hypochondriac news editor George Dent, Ingrid Lacey as assistant editor (from season three) and lesbian Helen Cooper, Victoria Wicks as far-right, empty-headed, posh co-news anchor Sally Smedley, Stephen Tompkinson as unethical field reporter Damien Day, Neil Pearson as deputy sub-editor and general dogsbody Dave Charnley, and Susannah Doyle as vindictive and cynical personal assistant Joy Merryweather are all still very much with us.

They come on stage one by one, with the audience rapturously applauding each arrival. This gives the writers the opportunity to give us some backstory about what has happened to them all since GlobeLink’s collapse. These are hilarious.

For instance, George has done a series of jobs – all short-lived – such as working for Liz Truss during her (short-lived) premiership, while Sally hosted a TV show about revealing what your underwear was.

And Sally is still as gloriously, magnificently stupid as she ever was. There’s a moment during the first live broadcast from Truth News where she’s reading a cue about Chinese president Xi Jinping and says it as “President eleven…” before going on to fabulously and serially libel national treasure Sir David Attenborough.

In terms of national treasures, Trevor McDonald also features – but I’m saying no more.

Hamilton and Carver have done a wonderful job here. The gag count is probably highest in the first act, while in the second, the point about fake news, algorithms and deep fakes is hammered home. Just when it risks getting a bit po-faced, what follows is a very clever and very, very funny indeed. The satire is no less effective than it was all those years ago.

There’s great set design from Peter McKintosh and direction from Derek Bond. And big plaudits to Julia Hills and Kerena Jagpal as new characters Mairead, an award-winning investigative reporter, and Rita, an unpaid intern who is the station’s weather presenter. It must be tough coming into such a nostalgia situation but both are excellent.

The late OH and I loved the TV series. We both worked in newsrooms (print, not TV), but we certainly knew a George Dent.

It’s not the most youthful audience: the writers clearly knew this would be the case and acknowledge it delightfully when Gus is stressing the importance of getting young people to watch Truth News – and the cast respond by briefly breaking the fourth wall to look directly at the audience and raising a collective eyebrow.

An utter joy.

Production tour dates and more

Jojo Rabbit – savaging propaganda and bigotry

Have you ever noticed how, at the cinema when the certificate is shown on screen, it will include keywords about the film’s content: ‘moderate violence’ or ‘mild swearing,’ it will tell you, for instance.

It’s difficult to know why this happens, since people have already made the decision to shell out their hard-earned and take their seat.

Does anyone ever leave on seeing this ‘guidance’?

Before Jojo Rabbit, the first word that pops up with the certificate – and which I’ve not personally noticed before – is “discrimination”. Which is amazing really, given that this is a film about the Nazis, propaganda and bigotry.

As the opening titles make clear, it’s “an anti-hate satire”.

But if you survive such a warning, then Johannes ‘Jojo’ Betzler is a 10-year-old boy living with his mother in Nazi Germany in the latter stages of the second world war.

Jojo has fallen hook, line and sinker for all the nationalism and bigotry with which he’s been pumped by the system – in spite of his mother clearly not agreeing with any of it. But his invisible friend, a childish Hitler, eggs him on.

A member of the Hitler Youth, he earns the sobriquet Jojo Rabbit after he finds himself unable to kill a rabbit as ordered at a youth camp.

But then Jojo finds out that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their home – and slowly he finds that the propaganda he’s been fed is being challenged.

Taika Waititi had wanted to bring the story, based on Christine Leunens’s novel, Caging Skies, to the screen for years. Now he’s done it and the wait has been worthwhile.

In spite of having written the screenplay, directed and co-produced it – and played Hitler – Waititi (whose maternal grandfather is of Russian-Jewish heritage) never lets himself get in the way.

It’s frequently very, very funny, but never loses sight of the main aims: to throw a spotlight on the utter crassness of intolerance, the real dangers of nationalism, fake news and propaganda – and the impact of all these on children.

A little aside here.

A German friend, himself born in 1946, once told me how, in 1945, a 16-year-old cousin was on the front line to defend his home town against the allies.

Fully indoctrinated, he waited in a trench, his gun sights trained on the advancing US forces. Then he realised that a young American soldier was looking down his own sights at him.

Clarity cut through the propaganda and he realised that, just as he did, the American probably only wanted to go home to his mother. The teenage German threw down his weapon and threw up his hands.

Tragically, many more boys – and girls – did not reach such a conclusion. And perhaps it needs noting that a 16-year-old in 1945 had been just four when Hitler had come to power.

It was an anecdote that I remembered forcefully when watching Waititi’s film. Today, we’d know that what happened to my friend’s cousin and what happens to Jojo and his friends is ‘grooming’.

There are plenty of laughs, but it’s never at the expense of the humane message and indeed, I suggest taking tissues, because there are a couple of real couple of kicks to the gut that bring home the importance of the message.

It’s an excellent cast. Scarlett Johansson is a revelation as Jojo’s mother. Thomasin McKenzie as Jewish teenager Elsa is vulnerable yet strong – and (importantly) never plays the character as a ‘victim’.

Sam Rockwell gives a very nice performance as Wehrmacht officer Captain Klenzendorf, who has been ‘demoted’ to running Hitler Youth camps after losing an eye in the war.

Stephen Merchant has a cameo as a suitably sinister comic book Gestapo officer, while Rebel Wilson turns in a similarly fine cameo as Fräulein Rahm, a Hitler Youth camp instructor who spouts the most ridiculously extreme anti-Semitic propaganda.

Waititi’s own turn as Hitler is also very good – as is that of Archie Yates as Jojo’s friend Yorkie.

But to a large extent, the film rests on the 12-year-old shoulders of Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo himself – and it is a remarkable performance of enormous nuance.

And just a brief mention for the incredibly clever weaving in of pop culture references – keep your eyes peeled – which are not gratuitous but add to the whole.

Waititi has done something remarkable with Jojo Rabbit: in so many ways, you tell yourself it shouldn’t work. But in its irreverence and it’s sense of fun, it is perhaps one of the most deeply serious movies of our times and its message could hardly be more important.

Superbly entertaining – and with a deeply significant message.

Wry Rye literature and a dose of history

Mermaid Street, Rye – genuinely Olde Worlde

As I said in my previous post, our long weekend in Rye was both the best of England and the worst of England.

But the food and the public transport were far from being the only aspects of the break, and there was plenty to relish.

High up in that category came history and, over the four days, we began to gain an understanding not only of the story of Rye itself, but more generally of that part of the south coast and, indeed, all of the medieval confederation of the Cinque Ports.

This included learning just how much the area had changed physically, with what are now the salt marshes adding a stretch of land between the previous coastline and the edge of the sea today.

St Mary's, Rye

The border area between East Sussex and Kent, upon which Rye pretty much sits, has long been associated with the sea, from providing ships for the king in time of war to being involved with smuggling in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It’s only just down the coast to the west that we find Hastings, looked down on by the ruins of one of William I’s first trio of castles in England.

Rebuilt in stone in 1070 on William’s orders, it was slated for demolition by King John, re-fortified by Henry III in 1220 and then battered by the storms of 1287, to the extent that part of it collapsed into the sea with the soft, sandstone cliffs beneath.

It suffered during French attacks in 1339 and 1377, was hardly helped by Henry VIII’s destruction of monasteries, then became overgrown and forgotten as the land around was used for farming, before being hit by the Luftwaffe in WWII.

Finally, in 1951, the Hastings Corporation purchased it and turned it into a tourist site, but this potted history of just one building gives an idea of the area’s story.

Stanton shelter

And it’s even in worse condition than Camber Castle, Henry VIII’s low fortification on the marshes. Walking out to that, we came across a small, concrete building, which turned out to be Stanton shelter, a decoy bombing site that was built in 1942 to deflect Luftwaffe raids.

It was what was known as a ‘starfish decoy’, which operated by lighting a series of controlled fire during an air raid, to replicate an urban area being targeted by bombs.

The hut with the shelf in the photograph is the shelter itself; the wall with three holes is the remains of the generator building.

Back in Rye, and in terms of all things nautical, there’s a reason that local resident, John Ryan, set his cartoon stories of Captain Pugwash in ‘Sinkport’, which was actually a fairly recognisable Rye. Today, you’ll find Pugwash references throughout the little town.

Ryan also penned a short, illustrated book about the notorious 1742 murder of deputy mayor Allen Grebell by local butcher John Breads in St Mary’s churchchard, Rye.

Ready for tea in the garden at Lamb House

Breads had been intending to kill the mayor, James Lamb – who subsequently tried and convicted him – after he had been fined by Lamb for selling short weights.

Readily admitting the killing and his intended victim, Breads was later hanged, and his corpse gibbeted and left on display in an iron cage for some years.

Which cage is now on display in the town’s Ypres Tower, of which more later.

The Lambs of Rye were a particularly wealthy family, who built Lamb House as a statement of their prosperity and power, and then bought out nearby properties to create the biggest garden in the town.

Occupied rather later by American author Henry James, it also provided a home for EF Benson, the prodigious author who remains most famous for his Mapp and Lucia novels.

Flowers in the garden at Lamb House

These delightfully bitchy satires on social one upmanship filled six novels between 1920 and 1939. There have been two television adaptations: first, 10 episodes for Channel 4 in 1985 and 1986, starring Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan as the eponymous battlers, with Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie.

I watched it at the time, but was never quite caught up in it.

However, last Christmas, the BBC screened a three-part version, adapted by Steve Pemberton, with Miranda Richardson and Anna Chancellor as Mapp and Lucia, and Pemberton himself as Georgie.

This, I adored – and crucially, it made me want to read the books. Indeed, the BBC’s use of Rye itself as the location was what inspired me to suggest we take a break there – and how I came to be carrying a copy of Mapp and Lucia, the third novel in Benson’s series.

Benson set many of the stories in a place he named Tilling, which is a barely-disguised Rye. Mapp’s house, Mallards, is in fact Lamb House.

Town gate, Rye

Now in the care of the National Trust, we pottered along to see it on the Saturday. There’s not a great deal to look at – just three rooms – although they’ve added to the displays with props, costumes and hats from the BBC production, which also used Lamb House itself.

The garden, however, is a joy – as was being able to sit in the shade of the trees and sip elderflower cordial. We had never tasted elderflower cordial before, but it felt appropriately Tilling.

For all the literary clout of James, the locals are far fonder of Mapp, Lucia and Pugwash. And why wouldn’t they be? All are, in effect, set within the town itself and all are typically English in their satire or comedy.

The town also has a volunteer-run museum – a tiny affair, but nonetheless with enough to see that you will learn something. It too includes these literary icons – plus a small, 2D ‘flat’ metal model that was labeled as being German and showing the Kaiser in WWI.

Ypres Tower

This allowed me the joyful opportunity to show off my pedantic credentials (to the Other Half, at least), pointing out that it was actually showing the Kaiser and Bismarck, which put it as 1871 or so, rather than the following century.

On the Sunday, on a rather greyer day, we visited the previously-mentioned Ypres Tower, which offered more insights into the local history, including the chance to view a remarkably large cell that was built for female prisoners after a visit to the area by prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.

I’m not one who is necessarily convinced by ‘interactive’ exhibits, but this had a set up where you could pick up a trio of weapons and feel just how heavy they were, and also try a construction that allowed you to see just how much strength was required to use a longbow.

We managed to get to the aforementioned Hastings, on Monday, in the damp and wind.

Fishing boat, Hastings

At first, I think we were both close to turning back: as mentioned in the previous post, some of the new architecture, for instance, was stultifyingly bland, while the promenade has been damned by running a dual carriageway along it.

But with nothing else in mind to occupy the day, we persisted. And thank goodness we did, because shortly thereafter, reached the fabulously-named Rock-A-Nore Road, while the A259 turns north north east.

This is where the Jerwood Gallery stands – unfortunately closed when we were there. But it’s also where the Fisherman’s Museum has been set up, in an old chapel at the back of the shingle beach.

This is where the biggest fleet of trawlers to still be launched from a beach in the whole of Europe is based. And where the fishermen sell much of their catches in small cabins.

It’s an old area, as the tall net huts near the museum attest.

Net huts, Hastings

And in their unflinching black attire, with old boats, a two-ton Napoleonic anchor and an old harbor light scattered alongside on the shingle, they offer a deeply atmospheric window into the town’s past.

They make a fascinating photographic subject, even in the inclement conditions – perhaps particularly in those conditions – and I got absorbed in the business of trying to capture something of the place.

One over-arching thing did hit us about the trip. Many is the time that, when looking around old places on the Continent, we have bemoaned how little of our own built medieval and Elizabethan past still exists.

It was a great pleasure to find a town where that is still very much a living place, but which actually gives a glimpse of several centuries of English history.

And with that, it’s time to bid you all ‘au reservoir’ from this post, as I raise – in genteel fashion, of course – a glass of elderflower cordial.

#EpicToryFail – when social media goes bad

If you needed more evidence that satire is is on its last pegs, it came late yesterday in the form of yet another bungled attempt at doing social media by the Conservative Party.

After the Budget earlier in the day, party chairman Grant Shapps used Twitter to spread the good news.

In a graphic, under the hashtag #Budget2014, was a series of colourful balls bearing the legend: ‘Bingo!’ followed by the news: “cutting the bingo tax & beer duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy. Conservatives”.

Oh. Dear. Me.

Or in social media parlance: find me that Jean Luc Picard facepalm picture.

Where does one start?

“The things they enjoy”? [My italics]

And who might “they” be, Grant?

We’re rather left to assume that that is his idea of what “hardworking people” like doing. It does rather reek of ‘them and us’.

Today, George Osborne has spent time fending off questions about this single tweet and attempting to get the discussion back on topic – in other words, onto his Budget.

That would have been interesting, since such an august body as the Institute for Fiscal Studies is currently somewhat confused about the Chancellor’s sums.

But no, we’re still caught up in the giggles over BingoGate. Simon Blackwell, one of the scriptwriters of The Thick of It, noted via Twitter, had such a plot line been suggested at a script meeting, it would have been dismissed as being “too far-fetched”.

And well into the afternoon, it was still trending on Twitter, while all that Mr Shapps had managed during the intervening hours was one really rather lame effort at condemning Labour for a weak response to the Budget itself.

Not that the Tories are strangers to epic social media fails.

Last summer, Mr Osborne tweeted a picture of himself eating a burger while finishing off a spending review that slashed services – the burger just happened to be a ‘posh’ one from Byron, which would have cost around £7, and had had to be delivered.

Then, after the under-attack Chancellor labeled him the “model of lean government” in the Commons, the rotund secretary of state for communities and local government Eric Pickles tweeted a picture of himself preparing a speech and eating a salad – which must have made a change from the (alleged) £10,000 increase in his department’s biscuit budget for 2012. 

Funnily enough, that particular tweet actually worked – excluding the question of whether you think that government ministers should be playing such games.

But then again, here’s a little point that might be worth remembering: Pickles was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Meanwhile, over at @toryeducation, one or other of secretary of state Michael Gove’s resident gophers has, on more than one occasion, used the account to tweet exasperated and even abusive responses whenever someone seems to be getting the better of their lord and master.

Just one example is detailed here by Tim Fenton – he’s covered many more in the same place.

'I'm being serious – really'

And let us really not forget the Prime Minister’s own glorious moment a week or so ago, when he tweeted a picture of himself, on the phone, wearing his best Serious Face, to show just how Seriously he was taking his trans-Atlantic discussion about the Ukraine with Barack Obama.

Parodied mercilessly by the Twitteratti – including, amongst others, Sir Patrick Stewart – he responded in a huff with a picture of himself sitting listening to Bill Clinton, directing the message at Sir Pat and saying: “Talking to another US President, this time face to face, not on the phone.”

Now remember, this is the Prime Minister of the UK and not a petulant child, right?

Mind, after photobombing ‘that’ selfie at the Mandela memorial gig, you might wonder.

As only a sight aside, if you’re a well-known figure who’s going to do a photobomb, then do something like Benedict Cumberbatch pricking the pomposity of Bono at the Oscars.

Oh, Benedict – I love you!

But back to our central subject.

You can argue all you want about the appropriateness of senior, national politicians and parties using social media, but it’s here to stay.

In which case, you’d think the Conservative Party would have the sense to get someone in who actually knew what they were doing.

And for goodness sake, if I can do social media without any training, and the likes of the wonderful Sir Jean Luc Picard can make it look effortless and joyful, then you would not think it beyond the wit of the Tories to work out how to do it effectively.

But herein lies the problem.

They really think that they understand social media and that they can do it – but what they appear not to understand is that every time they do something like this, they increase the sense that they’re a bunch of toffs who are, at best, completely ignorant of how the majority live and love and die, and at worst, they really do consider all the rest of us to be mere plebs and themselves to be our born masters.

It is, as The Other Half suggested with a graphic tweet himself last night (see left), akin to Marie Antoinette’s approach to the hoi polloi.

But until they finally get this – if ever they are able – we can carry on laughing at something akin to an episode of The Thick of It, and wonder just when the next gaffe will emerge and from whom.

How many books can I pack?

Gore Vidal – purveyor of light fiction?

It's the time of the year of The Book. Or rather, The Books. How many? What sort? Light? Heavy? Fiction? Non-fiction?

This year, the great debate about holiday reading matter has only begun earnestly far later than usual.

An initially rather ambitious list had been sketched out in my mind for some time, but the ensuing weeks had seen it redrafting itself in less literary terms.

It was the moment, I'd decided, for Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The chance to spend pretty much entire days reading is the perfect time to get into such a book.

But with a certain rueful sadness, I've been pushing that idea toward touch. Frankly, I'm just too tired.

I had also been contemplating Lewis Lockwood's Beethoven: The music and the life, but have abandoned that in favour of the first volume of Paul O'Grady's autobiography, At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, which has been recommended as a damned good – and very funny – read.

But then something rather unusual happened – unusual, that is, because in general, I'm a rather slow reader and because, right now, I'm spectacularly knackered.

Yet in successive weekends, I've swept through The Lady in the Lake and The High Window, with Simenon's Maigret and the Black Sheep (poorly translated, since you ask) in between, so it struck me that a full-blown Raymond Chandler binge seems to be on the cards.

In which case, my Book Club 1979 omnibus, containing Playback, The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister, looks set to travel. It was one of my first real adult books, and it's got Bogart on the cover.

St one time or another, I've read all the Philip Marlowe novels, but with the exception of The Big Sleep, none of them for a good 20 years or more.

No extra Maigret will travel, because they're so short that I've had to take a shed load to make it worth while.

It did raise the point in my mind, though, of the snobbery that still surrounds genre fiction. Chandler's novels are superbly written – there's a poetic quality to the prose – with both intelligence and an understanding of the universal human condition.

I'd suggest that they have far more to say to us (and are a vastly better read) than much of what I've read in recent years that passes as modern English 'literature' (it's a wonder how Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend, for instance – a book that I was handed to review when a positive review was demanded – has ever received plaudits: it has so much less subtlety than anything Chandler wrote, yet it's 'literature').

Jean Gabin: 'Maigret needs you!'

Simenon may not be in quite the same class – although that may not be helped by translation matters – but the Maigret novels are still stylish and tight, with an underlying empathy for the ordinary man and woman in the street.

Only a short while ago, Iain Banks died. Hailed for his literary works such as The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, but less so for his sci-fi novels, which were even published under the ever-so-slightly different name of Iain M Banks.

Literature and genre fiction, it seems to say, can never quite meet.

But Banks's Culture novels are not simply great yarns -–and they are most certainly that – but they also have depth, and use the world he created to explore some fascinating ideas.

And Consider Phlebas is, for me, that very rare beast: a sci-fi novel that I've read more than once - a stonkingly good space opera that goes beyond any confinements of (sub) genre and into being a good piece of literature.

Terry Pratchett is another who suffers from this snobbery about the divide between genre fiction and Literature, although the volume and overall consistency of the quality of his satire has, to an extent, forced the naysayers' backs against the wall.

Admittedly, that's partly because satire is a very English form of literature, with a long and glistening tradition - even if some people seem to have forgotten that Pride and Prejudice is essentially a satire and not an 18th-century rom-com.

Tom Sharpe – another who has lately departed this life – was a particularly savage example of the species and, as a satirist, his work was never subject to stuck-up-nose syndrome.

Incidentally, if you haven't read them, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two novels, which are an assault (and battery) on apartheid in South Africa, are well worth a read. Having visited Pietermaritzburg, where both novels are set, it's almost frightening real. Indeed, I'll swear blind I've actually met one of his characters there.

Personally, I think Pratchett is better: where Sharpe most often seems just to be rage, with Sir Terry, there's a deep underlying humanity, and his characters are far more rounded than Sharpe – or, for that matter, PG Wodehouse.

Finally – the light fiction.

Samuel Vimes, for instance, who appears in a number of the Discworld novels, is a delightful and enormously believable creation.

And Pratchett too is the one author I can think of who has made me howl with laughter on one page and shed a tear just a turn of the page later.

If the difference between literature and popular fiction is that, at core, the former makes you think, then Pratchett does that. As does Iain M Banks.

But back to the books list. After such a sudden spurt of reading, I'm back in the mood for some more serious stuff.

So the pile – and it does exist as a real, actual pile – is now made up of a collection of Mann's short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan, plus Gore Vidal's Julian and Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark.

Then there's the O'Grady, plus the second installment of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula alternative history/horror/steampunk/fantasy series, The Bloody Red Baron (I read the first part in Collioure last summer and it was very good).

And some more crime fiction in Involuntary Witness, a police procedural from Italy's Gianrico Carofiglio.

Now remind me: this is the easy reading selection, right?