Is Twitch of Fun as Good as Shakespeare?

Warming Up

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How could I claim that AI hasn't captured me yet. Look at the latest selection from Rich "Favus" Smith. Weirdly, as a couple of people pointed out, I look like Cheddar Man in one of them.

Cheddar Man (based on my old history teacher Adrian Targett - distant relative)

Livestreaming has got a bit tricky of late. In spite of me packing it away with great care, battling my aversion to the sound of squeaking polystyrene, the new show desk top computer must have taken a bump and is not working (we're hopefully getting it fixed next week) and we have had to revert to using the creaking laptop that we began this live streaming journey with.

It is no longer up to the job and doesn't seem to be able to cope with the OBS system we use to record and stream our livestreams. I wanted to do a Me1 vs Me2 Snooker yesterday afternoon, but the computer kept freezing and spluttering and the appointed time of 4pm (I am trying to stream in the day time as the night time is too busy with putting kids to bed or gigging and as the equipment is now technically in a different building I can't broadcast if Catie is out of the house in case the kids wake up and need me). At the last possibly second the heroic Chris Evans (not that one, or the heroic one) somehow found his way through and an amazing frame of snooker got to exist in the world, to be ignored by nearly everyone who lives here.

I wanted to do a Twitch of Fun this afternoon, but again, the laptop was having none of it. I'd done my minimal prep and chosen some news stories to riff about, with the help of my puppets, who I was relying on to think of some jokes on the spur of the moment. Luckily the theme of this art work is of man, lost and confused, struggling to achieve something pointless that he isn't really able to do and having to cope with the humiliation. It's a Hell of his own making where he is tormented by ghouls that he has dredged up from his own psyche. He wants to create something groundbreaking but is dragged back into the dirt by his one-track mind mind. Ironically unbeknownst to him, because of this additional layer he is actually creating something groundbreaking, but there's then an additional layer on top of that, that means no one really notices that (or watches what he is doing at all) and thus his genius is scattered into the wind and goes unheralded. He is doomed to mow and chatter alone until his early death. He can only hope that the voices of the puppets that sabotage him will be silenced then too, but what if they haunt him into the afterlife? Or through his death become mainstream popular, too late for him to reap any of the rewards.

You may only see a hippo saying "Big wobbling boobies" but that's just due to your lack of respect for the performer and not knowing what art is.

Oh come on.

So in the end, rather than waste my minimal research, I decided to do the show on my macbook, without an audience. This would be the first time I did the show with zero people watching. The distinction might seem academic, as for nearly all of them (there were one or two live ones) I have done the show online, to all intents and purposes alone, but there has been some feedback via the chat function (always slightly delayed due to the live stream being seconds behind the actual action) and just the psychological reassurance that I wasn't just a man in an attic (usually) talking to myself for nobody (though even with an audience it was close to being nobody).

The first time I did this show I had to fight against self-consciousness as a part of me was aware that what I was doing was insane, not just because I was talking to myself, but mostly because I was broadcasting an entirely improvised hour of comedy and didn't have anyone else to rely on to be funny if I wasn't. But quickly I realised I did have someone else to rely on. The puppets were that person. They would say stuff that I couldn't think of and would mock me when I was rubbish (on the rare occasions). And those watching (largely) understood the parameters.

But doing one without an audience at all, was weirdly relaxing and comforting. It felt different (though the difference was academic) and it felt fine. I knew there would be an audience in the future (unless my tech let me down) but I wasn't thinking of them. I just did the show for its own sake, for me and my fellow performers and I liked it.

It wasn't any better or worse than usual. It was what it is. I am not ready for episode 100 yet, it's just too much pressure. So this is episode 99b. You can enjoy/endure it here and my technical team have magically made it appear like I had access to all my buttons and pictures!

That image is actually me. Not AI. Look how handsome I am… oh.

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I am not only doing my podcasts during the daylight hours, but trying to do my socialising and dating then too. Just don't tell the wife.

I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Catie and me went to London as soon as I'd dropped the kids off at school (blimey the trains charge you commuters way more than the daytime travellers - the cunts). We went for another fab breakfast at Dishoom in Kings Cross (I think I'd happily eat here or at Sticks n Sushi for every meal) and then went to the Barbican to see the matinee of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It started at 1.30pm so I thought we'd be back to take over from a babysitter who had the kids til 6pm, but then found out the show was two and a half hours long (including interval) which added a bit of jeopardy. It was only when we got to the theatre that we found out the show was in fact now two hours fifty (mainly due to Mat Baynton's mugging, I assume) which added more jeopardy. Luckily the theatre sent us an urgent text and email about this time change. Unluckily it arrived fifteen minutes after the performance was over and we were at the tube station. But still.

We made it home with half an hour to spare.

It's fucking great living five minutes walk from the station.

We mooched round the Barbican shop before the show (and weren't criticised for mooching, though Catie did buy a book) and sat and looked at our phones by a stand selling drinks and sweets. The very patient young woman serving there had to deal with a lot of patrons asking very basic questions about where they had to go, even though things were quite well sign posted. The audience that go to see Shakespeare at the Barbican definitely give off the air that they consider themselves to be clever, yet hearing them fail to understand how a theatre works over and over again made me suspect they aren't clever at all.

It's one thing to laugh loudly at a Shakesperian joke that you've previously looked up in a book, but quite another to just navigate your way through life.

Luckily though this wasn't a clever/clever version of Shakespeare. I was reminded of school trips to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch impenetrable plays that I barely remember now apart from one of the cast of Blake's Seven played a witch in Macbeth and you could get the opera glasses for free, despite their maybe 50p fee (possibly 10p), by putting your watch strap into the coin slot.

I was reminded of this stuff partly because there were a few school kids in the audience and it was reassuring that even though the world has changed in the last forty or so years, their reaction to Shakespeare is the same today as back then. There were nervous laughs and a noticeable thrill coming from those areas of the audience when there was a rude bit of business and at once point when the audience applauded, a game of "Who can applaud last" broke out with some brave children doing a single clap maybe a minute or so after the applause had died down.

But the point I am making is that I had sometimes struggled to follow Shakespeare plays, even when I was studying the text, but this very impressive cast and backstage team really made this play make perfect sense. Which is even more admirable because MSND as the cool kids call it, is a load of fucking nonsense.

The Mechanicals were excellent, and Baynton was a star whilst still being a team player and the comedy (often additional to the text, but not entirely) was properly funny. Everything looked like it was pretty much wrapped up 30 minutes before the supposed end time, but Shakespeare, like a total fucking idiot, added a massive and unnecessary scene on at the end, which did indeed take half an hour. It's entirely superfluous and quite self-indulgent, but also the best thing in it (especially in this production) and I like the fact that it seems to be a pretty sharp parody of Romeo and Juliet. That the same playwright (allegedly) can in quite quick order play the same story for tragedy and laughs is pretty cool. That the whole thing is just tacked on once the proper (fairly flimsy, but still fun) story is done and feels a bit like something your teachers might do at an end of term concern makes it even better.

It's really fabulous - and the staging and direction is beautiful and actually genuinely magical. It's the best Shakespeare production I've seen (including the Kings of Wessex production of the Tempest from about 1983 in which I played what has been called the best Trinculo ever, by my mum) and even the kinds of idiots who don't know how to find a toilet or the stalls of the theatre liked it. And I fancy that even the school kids had a fun experience and didn't need to temporarily steal binoculars to make it enjoyable (why didn't we keep the binoculars, I wonder? We just took them illegally and then meekly put them back in the holders. We could have had free red binoculars. Did we really think the theatre would track down who had been in those seats and travel to Cheddar to recover them? Even if they did work out who'd been sitting there that didn't prove we'd taken them. What kind of idiot am I? I could be looking through those binoculars right now.

I'd never have dreamed back then that I'd one day go and see some Shakespeare, understand it all, pay £65 for a ticket (half price by the way) and still have a good time. But fuck you 16 year old Richard Herring. You were an idiot and you couldn't even win the clapping game.

You'd also have liked this one too.

As an additional bit I'd just like to say that in spite of having a job where I am my own boss I have pretty consistently failed to take advantage of that fact in my life, the work ethic that I guess I got from my parents making me feel bad if I don't at least try to work in the daytime. It's good that I now (occasionally) take advantage of my freedom to do stuff like this, but fuck me I should have done it when I was younger. I am glad I am doing it now though.

And if you missed the newsletter- Paul Whitehouse is doing RHLSTP on 24th March. Don’t miss it.