Car Passes MoT

I'm somewhat relived that the car, my beloved Renault Captur, has passed it's MoT. I took it to Bleak Hall Motors in good time, arriving at 12.45, a good 15 minutes before the time it was booked in for. I sat and read my book, Breaking The Code, Gyles Brandreth's Westminster Diaries, from the early 1990's until well into the 2000s. It's actually a signed copy which I bought, I think, from Postscript, an on-line and catalogue bookseller which has good discounts on the books it sells. I have always liked Mr Brandreth, a good presenter of a range of television programmes such as 'The One Show,' and he's into subjects that I like, such as words, literature and being on Radio Four panel shows such as 'Just A Minute.'  I was told that the brakes on the Captur will need work doing, so I think I will book it in sometime next month, although the timing belt needs replacing.

I've just finished reading 'Zippy and Me,' by Ronnie Le Drew.  The book was crowd-funded and published by a company called Unbound.  I payed £30 and part of this went into the fund to produce and publish the book and all the ancillary work that would be needed to get it produced and I got my own, signed, copy, which arrived in the post about two weeks ago. I have a passing connection with Mr Le Drew, because in 1971, after I worked as an A.S.M. at Liverpool Playhouse, I needed work and eventually went to work as a technician, not exactly stage management, but near enough, working for the puppet company run by John Blundell, at the Midlands Arts Centre at Canon Hill Park, Birmingham. Ronnie was one of the puppeteers and it was from that job, operating a follow-spot on one of the shows, it might have been their production of Pinocchio or Peter and The Wolf, that I got interested in puppetry and my career (such as it was) took off in a slightly different direction. It's quite a difficult job, operating a lime (follow-spot), purched up high above the auditorium in the Studio Theatre at the Arts Centre, and attempting to follow various puppets with the light. It was a 'black theatre' production, which means the puppeteers are swathed from head to toe in black, even their faces are covered by black gauze, so that the audience can't see them, but the puppets are lit in such a way that they stand out clearly. I had to be able, at various points in the play, to turn off the follow-spot, and at another point, put it back on and accurately manage to pick out a specific puppet a bit later on, but do it in such a way so as not to illuminate the operator, no mean feat. Staring with concentration on a circle of light for any length of light tends to have a quite bad effect on your eyesight and you soon have blobs of light in your eyes for quite some time afterwards, which makes accuracy with a hot followspot, which needs to be kept at the correct angle otherwise it can tilt down, although you have handles on the back and sides to hold on to and knurled knobs which allow you to screw them up to make the thing stable.

I might have been a  trainee lighting assistant (I don't think I was exactly) and the man in charge of the lighting was a bit of a prankster. I was no more than 20, and what you would call 'green.' He would clamber up a ladder or onto one of those platforms that wheel about the stage, I think it's called a cherry picker, for he purpose of adjusting the lighting above he stage, or to take out the bulbs in several of the lights. I was detailed to stand below, presumably to steady the ladder, and he would undo a bulb and then throw it down to me below, where I was supposed to catch it. Much larger bulbs than your average domestic bulb and probably a good deal more expensive, so if I dropped the bulb, heaven forbid, I was in real trouble, but this never happened, fortunately. I also helped with the making of some of the puppets, which were going to be used in the next production which was a show based on two Hans Christian Andersen stories, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The other puppeteer who went on to become well known was called David Claridge. I seem to remember it was he who designed the sets and puppets for the Hans Andersen double bill. He was responsible for creating and operating Roland Rat, saviour of TV-AM and the character went on himself to have his own television series in the 1980s.

I would have liked to have become a puppeteer there and then, but, first, there were no vacancies in the company, and, secondly, I wasn't a trained actor, because of learning lines and having some sort of experience of performance (apart from a few 'walk-on' bits-and-pieces when I was a Student A.S.M. at the Everyman, but certainly nothing concrete. So, if I wanted to become a puppeteer I would need to work for a company which used a pre-recorded soundtrack of the dialogue and work the puppets to that tape. Not always a particularly good way to work puppets, because once a recording is made it is 'fixed,' which means you can't vary each performance for the different audiences you would be playing to. In a 'live' performance, as with any play, the actors can vary the speed of their delivery when there is an audience reaction, for example, if they laught at a specific line, and would vary from performance to performance.

Learning To Drive, Lorries and First Cars

I was learning to drive at the time I went off to work as a Student A.S.M. at the Everyman Theatre in 1969 (details of which are described fairly fully in an earlier blog post.) During the season break I returned home and did my driving test in Bedford but failed miserably. Not keeping up with the traffic and failing to turn either right or left when I should have done were the reasons for the failure. On returning to Cheltenham I continued with some more driving lessons and then passed successfully. My parents bought me my first car, a Ford Anglia which came in two shades of green and cost the princely sum of £75. Amazing when you think about it, but I suppose in 1969 with amount people earned per week, that was probably quite a lot of money. I think my first proper wage was somewhere in the region of £10 per week. The cost of a gallon of petrol would probably have been in the region of 30p. That little Anglia, christened Henrietta, got me about quite successfully. It had one peculiarity. When it rained and you needed to use the windscreen wipers, they went fast when you drove slowly and slowed down whenever you drove fast. Don't ask me why. Just the way the car operated. So, if it was raining and you were driving up a hill and in a low gear, the wipers sped up. Going down the other side of the hill and you went a good deal faster, they slowed down. 

It took me a good deal of time to pluck up courage to go off and drive on my own, probably because when you learn to drive you always have someone in the driving seat next to you. When you first learn to drive on the public highway, it takes some time to get used to having cars coming towards you, even if they are on he opposite side of the road. When I did eventually get used to driving myself then there was no problem. That little car lasted a few years. I had it when I worked at Colchester Rep, then Midlands Arts Centre and drove me up to Liverpool. I think that was the first time I'd driven on a motorway. At that time you had to drive through Birmingham because Spaghetti Junction hadn't been opened then so to get from the M1 to the M6 you had to negotiate the centre of Birmingham. It seems so simple now when driving north. When I went to work at Greenwich I had to drive into the centre of London, after one of the shows we did, because I had my own car, it was decided that I could use it to return some props to the suppliers around Covent Garden. I'd never driven into the centre of London before and had to go round Marble Arch during rush-hour which was not something I had ever contemplated doing before (and, frankly, don't really want to do now, as it happens.) I think I just more or less shut my eyes and just went for it (metaphorically, not really, you understand.) I do remember once when I worked at the theatre in Watford having to drive a large lorry into central London with a load of furniture on the back, including a piano. Unfortunately this lorry had a fault. You could only turn off the engine by stalling it. I went with another A.S.M. in pouring rain and we got lost in Covent Garden and went the wrong way down a one-way street and ended up having to reverse out, which wasn't something I wouldn't wish to repeat.