Podcast Episode 1: Pants

We've recorded a podcast!  Yes, we're jumping on the bandwagon, following in the footsteps of better, funnier, sexier and much less lazy people than us, and we've taken the plunge into the realm of talking nonsense into a microphone while Naomi gets pissed.

The Little Epic Little Podcast

Episode 1: Pants

Recorded in Naomi’s back garden on a warm Monday night.  Strange and alarming things were happening in a nearby garden.  

We talk about superstitions, Elvis, sponsorship deals, pants, and we do very bad impressions of robots.  We also talk about where we are in the process of staging a comedy show in September.  And Naomi drinks some wine as Vince gets a phonecall.

Clip from Barbara & Jeffrey by Naomi Carter.  Starring John Lomas and Naomi Carter, directed by John Lomas.

Theme music: ‘Retro’ - Royalty Free.

Duration: 30 mins.

In the Planning

 Yes, it's been a while.  And yes, we missed you.

Our Indiegogo Campaign to fund a Workshop of the play

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/little-epic-comedy-play-workshop-new/x/17456291#/

• We want to workshop key moments from our latest play, an ambitious two act comedy with four interlinked stories and complicated slapstick sequences.
• Workshopping new writing is vital to the process because without seeing what the play looks like on its feet - with actors performing key moments - we have no real idea of what we've written, or how it can be staged.  We need to see bits of our play to understand it.  And perhaps to understand ourselves.  I mean, we wrote this thing.  What does it say aqbout us?  We urgently need to know.  Our Therapy depends on it. 
• Plus, filming/photographing the workshop is part of our pledge to share with the public every part of the process of writing and staging a play.

What We Need & What You Get

• We need £500 to pay actors, hire a space, feed our cast and film the workshop.  We have a cast of twelve, but for the workshop we'll need only seven or eight actors (there will be some doubling-up of roles).  We need these actors for two days - we're looking at a weekend in November - and we'll need to pay them for their time and feed them while they do what they do so brilliantly. We'll be looking to hire a space in central Bristol (at £50 per day), and we'll record everything on camera, including the tantrums that inevitably erupt when we run out of biscuits.
• We have unique perks to offer our backers!  We could have been lazy and just had a load of cheap mugs and t-shirts printed with the Little Epic logo, but we've gone that extra mile for you and we're creating unique items! (Plus, we couldn't get cheap mugs and t-shirts printed with the Little Epic logo). From sending you insulting letters, to singing songs about you, painting your portraits and remaking your favourite movies, we've got a personalised perks package tailored to our backers - you won't want to miss out!
• If we don't reach full funding, we'll film ourselves crying.  But we were going to do that anyway (crying with tears of joy and relief), so you might as well give us the full funding.  If we don't get it all, we'll put whatever we have reached towards the workshop, fulfil the pledges, and we'll look to other means of reaching the full amount. 

Process of Elimination

Monday.

14:00 (ish)

I finish the work I had to do, send it off via email, then I lean back in my chair stretching and yawning.  If I was a character in a film or a TV series I’d do that thing where I’d rub my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, or take off my glasses.  But I’m not a character in a film or in a TV series (that I know of) and I don’t wear glasses.  I think I should wear glasses.  I think I might look sexy in glasses, like a hot and interesting Economics Lecturer who is perhaps hiding something from his past.

This is how it feels to be lonely

Wrestling with the Devil

Hot on the heels of the first heatwave, a second blistering warm front engulfed Bristol over the weekend and my cats and kittens gathered in the living room to meow and mewl their displeasure.  I sympathised with the little fellows, but I am not a God (I don’t think) and I have no control over global atmospheric pressure systems.  I patiently explained this to the grumpy felines, using diagrams, flip charts, and a squeaky toy mouse, and then I tried to leave to get on with my day.  But the militant cat contingent had sneakily locked the door (or it had got stuck again – I’m open to all explanations) and I was stuck in there for hours, watching the tennis and printing off copies of the script.  The script is 136 pages.  I needed to print at least five copies.  It was a fierce battle between me and my Little Epic Theatre needs and my temperamental, aging HP Photosmart All-in-One Printer. That was Saturday.  I emerged on Sunday morning covered in cat scratches and ink, and with roughly 700 sheets of ripped and crumpled paper, printed on at all angles and colours with random bits of text from the script.  I have no idea who won the tennis.

My state-of-the-art printer.

A few weeks earlier Naomi and I had posted on Theatre Bristol a call out for actors to come along to the read through.  Well, first we had bulk emailed just about every actor we know, but just about every single one of them said they were busy rehearsing for their shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, which is nice for them but a bit inconsiderate for us.  Fine, we wrote back, we’ll make do without you.  Fine, they replied, you do that.  We will, we responded.  Good, they said.  Fine, we said.  Okay then, they said.  I think they just wanted to have the last word.  A few excellent actors were available and they came along and they were much much much much much better than the selfish actors who selfishly couldn’t make it for selfish reasons.  We have a Byzantine complicated arrangement with the Cross Hands pub in Fishponds to use their rather amazing upstairs room for readthroughs and rehearsals (and our debut performances) but we found out on the Friday that we couldn’t use the room until an hour later than we’d told everybody to assemble because the room was being used by amateur wrestlers and/or Satanists.  Hey, everybody’s got to have a hobby.  I fired off a quick email to let everyone know the time change because I’m so on top of things and I have now finally mastered using the email app on my Windows phone… which is surely one for the plus column on the “Is Vince a Living Deity?” list.  Unfortunately, half the people didn’t receive the email because I’m rubbish at this kind of thing, and they got there an hour early and they sat in the baking sun, cursing my name.  I think some of them may have wandered upstairs to watch the Satanist wrestling match.  I think some of them may have actually joined in.

Two young people were in the room when I finally got there, looking rugged and intelligent, struggling to carry 700 sheets of crumpled script and a variety box of biscuits.  These young actors had been there since 2pm, and they had responded to the Theatre Bristol advert that we’d completely forgotten about.  Oops. The actors are named Owen and Sam and they are terrific.  Owen found that he didn’t have page four of the script (I’ve just looked, and he definitely needed page four, which is one of the best pages of the script), and that he could barely read the printing on many of the other pages.  Sorry, Owen.  Sam and Owen left after reading Scene Three, which they assured us was no judgement on the play.  They appeared out of nowhere and then they left suddenly, like brilliant comets blazing through the dark skies. I like to imagine they do this often, turning up out of the blue at random script reads across the lands.  Phantom actors who haunt hot rooms.  Perhaps they had been conjured up by the wrestling Satanists.

The script read went well, with lots of laughter.  We were lucky to have a talented group of actors including Jasmine, Pameli, Dan (invaluable as always), Janet and Yvette who had popped in from Canada.  We timed the read through - It came in at two hours twenty-six minutes.  That’s longer than The Godfather. And I can’t sit through The Godfather in one go without needing spaghetti.  We need to cut, said a worried looking Naomi.  Yeah, I said, but let’s give that job to a director who can look at the material dispassionately – we’re too close to it.  Every single director in the room loudly and firmly disagreed with me, saying that was a terrible idea – we have to cut the script by at least twenty-six minutes, and then give it to a director.  Everybody stared at me.  I’ll get my coat, I said, and left.  I fancied some spaghetti.

Duck Life

After the oppressive summer heat comes the cooling summer rains, and Bristol recaptures its fresh and pleasant vibe.  The muddy waters in ponds and rivers rise once more to habitable levels and happy ducks splash about and quack their approval. As I crossed Totterdown Bridge over the River Avon I swear I saw a paddling of ducks (correct collective noun, look it up) form a happy face emoji just for me.  But that might just be my medication.  The other day I thought the Asda delivery man was Elvis. And yes I might have been a bit too insistent (asking to see his birth certificate was a Donald Trump-sized mistake, I now admit), but he really did look a lot like an elderly King of Rock and Roll, albeit with a rasping cough, a Bristolian accent and severe shrinkage.

They use subliminal imagery and a series of quacks to control your mind.

 

Menace to Society

Naomi says that every time we meet to write, something appalling has happened in the world. And lately we’ve been meeting twice weekly, so at this rate we might bring about the apocalypse before we finish writing the play.  I’m not saying that’s definitely going to happen, but I’ve not renewed my monthly Netflix subscription, just in case.

Post-Brexit England, during a heatwave.

Time Travel for Cats and Kittens

The world just keeps on doing what it’s doing, and there’s no rewind or pause or stop or fast-forward…at least until time-travellers get their act together, in which case this bit will already have been re-written without anybody knowing.  Perhaps it already has.  Perhaps time has been changed.  My cat Fergal is looking a bit different.  For one thing, I swear until a few moments ago I didn’t have a cat named Fergal.  Are cats time-travellers?  It could explain a lot of things.

I'd genuinely love one of these.

Love Me Tinder

Painted gold with wet leaves, the streets of Bristol look like runways to enchanted lands, and my weekly walk to the Llandoger Trow takes on an air of unreality as the rains and dark nights of November unclutters the city of its people. I pass no-one as I reach the river, and see no life in the pubs and restaurants in the centre.  I half-glimpse hurried figures in doorways and distant avenues, like hunted spies in haunted spaces. Taxis roam the dark lonely streets, looking for fares.  Ghostly double-deckers pass by the empty bus stops. Nobody is here.  Everybody is home, in the warm, with Netflix and uncertainty about what we’ve all become now in this Brexit-Trump cold new world.

Follow the yellow brick road.

Mad Dreams

Naomi tells me that she is often murdered in her dreams, like a doomed femme fatale from some long-forgotten film noir B movie. Freud says that dreams are weird and twisted wish fulfilment fantasies, but I’ve seen enough David Lynch films to know that dreams are just meaningless scenes of dwarfs dancing and talking backwards.  I reassure Naomi that dreams don’t mean anything, and then as the conversation shifts onto our shared anxiety about the US Presidential Election I also reassure her that there is just no way Trump can win the White House.  Then the world goes mad and suddenly everything is wrong, and I too now dream of being murdered.  By Freud and his dancing dwarves.

".dne lliw dlrow eht dna tnediserP eb lliw pmurT .mees yeht tahw ton era slwo ehT"

The Heat is On

We sit opposite each other in our usual spot of the long table by the window and drink tea or pineapple juice or coke or lime and soda or sometimes a beer, and we start by talking to each other about life, like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat.

Staggering Coincidences

It was dark and cold and windy. Heavy rain soaked me to the bones.  The full moon was swallowed by Wagnerian storm clouds as I hurried through the night, wishing I had taken the bus, or that I had the foresight to wear an overcoat, or that I lived with a harem of the world's most beautiful and brilliant women in a chateau near a sun-kissed beach in the south of France, and that my aimable fiancée was perfectly happy with such an arrangement.  There is a hole in the bottom of my shoe, and my back hurts.

Euphemism City

At dusk, golden light spills onto the river as the galleries and bars switch on their night illumination, and Bristol is lent a soft romanticism.  I stand on the bridge, briefly, pausing my journey to watch rowers pull their little boat through the water; they are perfectly in sync, each oar cutting down and pulling up at precisely the same time.  A thin cloud crosses the bright moon like a tentative brushstroke, and the first stars flicker in the ultramarine night.  Then someone violently throws up a lamb Donner kebab, someone else starts shouting drunk obscenities at a defiant bouncer guarding a cheap pub, and urgent police sirens pierce the air, mingling with the cries of angry gulls.  Ah, Bristol, at 7pm on a Monday.  It never loses its charm.

The Art of the Arse

Just about everything was different.  It was a different day, at a different time, in a different place.  But for all that was different, we immediately got into the writing groove and set to work on the tricky bit of the big thing. It might be that it doesn't really matter where we write, or at what time, or in whatever language.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say somewhere different.  I have absolutely no idea what it means, but it sounds good.

Advanced Post-Structuralist Scriptwriting Theory with Elvis Presley

When it reaches Bristol, the River Avon courses through the deep Avon Gorge, spanned by Brunel's wonderous Clifton Suspension Bridge, and then snakes its way seductively through the great city.  Along the riverbanks, harbours, locks, and beaches there live thousands of creatures, from ducks, gulls and other seabirds, and rare dragonflies and hundreds of other insects, to voles and badgers and squirrels and mice, foxes, beavers and bats.  And every week as I casually stroll along the river to our usual meeting place, every single bloody one of these bastard creatures tries to kill me.

The secret sex lives of skeletons

Naomi was telling me about her days at University.  In Biology class, Naomi led a cabal of michief-makers who would routinely muck around with the full size human anatomical model skeletons, positioning them into rude or silly poses.  It was a waiting game to see how long it would take the lecturer to notice, possibly when they became very suspicious of all the sniggering.  As the term progressed, the skeleton poses would get more and more outlandish (props such as cigars, wigs, or vegetables might be introduced), and the sniggering would get louder and longer. The lecturers, of course, have over the long years learned to expect a certain amount of ribbing.  Education is a wonderful thing.

Digging it

"You know in films where men who are about to be killed are made to dig their own graves?" asked Naomi, as I looked around nervously.  We were in our usual spot in our usual place, and it was a warm and happy night, seemingly tailor-made for writing a very silly play.  A breeze was drifting in from the river, carrying with it the sound of excited gulls and cool jazz music.  Naomi had spent the day with her fellow, digging a hole.  He was now exhausted, apparently, after doing all the spade work in the blistering sun.  He was at home, relaxing his aching bones and watching Martin Scorsese films.  Or at least I hoped he was.  I thought about sending him a text message, just to see if he was actually still alive.  "Do you think," she continued, sipping thoughtfully on her beer, "Do you think they know they're about to die when they dig their graves?  And do you think it really happened, or is it made up for films?"  I wondered if we could add a scene into the script in which New York wiseguys are whacked at night in the lonely LA desert after being forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves by a rival set of mobsters. Fogeddaboudit.

X marks the spot for Dr Frankenstein and friend.

We talked a bit about hangovers, childhoods in Wiltshire, the costs of weddings, anxiety attacks, and street parties.  But mostly we ploughed through with the script, and laughed a lot.  We're making excellent progress.  Then my laptop died at precisely 10pm, and as angry gulls started attacking the jazz musicians, we called it a night.

Death to Hipsters

For the second time, someone had taken our usual seat at the table in the corner by the window.  A young man nursing a pint and fiddling with his phone.  He looked like a hipster.  I briefly considered killing him and dumping his body in the river.

Dr Who (William Hartnell) reads the welcolming sign for London's East End

We talked about astonishing acts of valour in WW2, epic doomed love affairs from the 1990s, Whistler's Mother, how to cook a perfectly edible lasagne in a slow cooker, and decapitation.  At least one of those things made its way into the script.

We are now into the second part of the Thing We're Doing, and it was really good fun setting up characters, repeated gags and situations.  At one point Naomi weirdly started acting out a complicated stage direction but it looked to me like she'd dropped something on the floor and was trying to cover up for it.  Then I dropped my notebook on the floor but Naomi had gone to the bar so she didn't see it.  I think the hipster who had stolen our seat saw me drop my notebook, which gave me another reason to kill him. 

We made good progress and laughed a lot and nobody died. You couldn't ask for much more from a writing session.