AlBarclay

This is cheapest room in Birmingham that you don’t have to share with anyone. It’s one of those houses where they’ve turned every upstairs room into a locked bedroom, and the only bathroom is downstairs through the kitchen, which ain’t ideal with my bladder but I’ve brought pajamas and I’m up early either way.

A lovely businesslike audition first, at Spotlight. First audition where I’ve worn shoes for ages. I’ve sent so many barefoot tapes. I’ve even done a few tapes in my pants and a smart jacket and tie. Comfort is key. What I liked about this one is that I had done the work, shot it, they did a redirect on the first and last short scenes and let me do the long one straight through just once. None of the second guessing of a self tape. What’s in the can is in the can and it’s clear I’ve done the work so now it’s just about how tall I am or the colour of my eyes or what have you.

Spotlight have moved from their office in Leicester Place. It must have taken them ages to get all the hoarded actor gold out of the basement. Now they have a very similar setup in Covent Garden. It felt both familiar and unfamiliar. I liked the team in my audition room. I’m already under NDA so you’re getting nowt. A spot of filming would be nice too thankyouplease universe. I’m still wobbling a little after the lovely one that died on me. I’ll always have the callsheets… HA ack yuk.

Complete sobriety is a surprising help in navigating the emotional rapids. It turns out if you push stuff away it just gets biggerer. If you look at it long enough you see the shape of it and after a while you know its name.

So yeah. Now I’m in Brum. More specifically I’m in Bromford. Just went for Balti in a place that was full of locals, many in traditional dress. The confused people in Southampton would have been climbing the walls in that place. Awful to see how many people are motivated by sheer idiocy propagated by obvious villains. It was a yummy balti and cheap for what I got. If I lived here I’d have got a doggie bag.

I’ll go to sleep early here in my strange little room. Blowing £40 of my fee for tomorrow so I don’t have to bang it up in the car from London at dawn. After petrol it’ll still be worth the day and I can go see Lou afterwards instead of squabbling back into London.

I need every penny I can eat right now to keep me in Baltis and petrol so I’m happy for tomorrow. Bergie is moaning about something. It’s electronic though and not crucial – it’s the Stop/Start thing, which I hate anyway as it makes you stall if you ride the clutch, which I do all the time. But it means he’ll have his engine light on for the rest of his life though I reckon.

I’m gonna switch mine off for the night. Zzz

Remember the days when we looked out the window to know what the weather was like before we left the house?

Dressed in smart chinos and a golf shirt, I put on a pink v neck sweater just in case the air con was freezing again. I didn’t look out the window.

I reserved a Lime Bike out front for half an hour – they let you do that when you have the monthly pass.

I had a coffee, grabbed my bits and walked out into the middle of a rainstorm. Everyone else had umbrellas. Idiot.

I jumped on the Lime. I was only going to Victoria. By the time I got there I was wet through. The producer saw me walking the bike to the parking area swearing to myself. Lime GPS is rubbish so it often thinks it’s in a restricted area. I’ll put up with that shit when I’m not drenched.

I got into the theatre. Thankfully had a change of trousers. Put on my pastel pink Uniqlo which usually only get used as festival trousers but are very good for playing a man my age trying to be cool and failing.

Last minute cuts. And then we were basically into it. Enough people to call it an audience. And off we went.

It went well from our point of view. I’m well cast in it. We all are. I get to do my comedy which is a good place for me. I’ve enjoyed this process and I’ve enjoyed working with these people. Feedback and pub after, and it was very hard for me not to drink but I pulled it off. Helps that I’ve got an audition tomorrow. I left the pub to bright sunlight and decided to get a Lime Scooter home which was a horrible mistake. Just as I was approaching home the sky turned to storm and then it turned out I had to go to Sloane Square to leave the scooter. On the way there the rain came and then I had to get a bike back home from the scooter parking area. By the time I was home again I was a drowned rat again and I have learnt never ever to get a Lime Scooter as they are extremely restricted about where they can be left. Which again is fine if its sunny, but not like that, a full on tropical rainstorm that could have been avoided if I’d only chosen a bike in the first place.

Looking at lines. Can’t face digging out clothes tonight. I’m gonna hit the hay and solve all that in the morning.

Semi staging this R&D today. We are sharing tomorrow (Tuesday 2nd June 2026) in the studio downstairs at The Other Palace at 2pm. I’ve definitely seen something down there, but what? And when? I will never remember.

Today was intensive. There’s been a rewrite and we basically only had today and a flash tomorrow morning to work out how we are going to present this piece to whoever cometh.

I really hope that there’s a further life for this project, for the simple reason that I like the people involved. Katia is fun and gets me. Guy similar… I haven’t seen Guy since what I think must have been my thirty first birthday and Tassos and I got swept into a big long night in Dalston that had no end and no beginning but the bottom of glass after glass and the loud sound of voices and bright lights in the dark and how did I get home or where did I sleep? Back then there was always so much going on, the shared houses, the parties. I’d wake in an unfamiliar room full of empty glasses on a sofa, I’d let myself out onto unknown streets with no mobile phone to map me home, just the local bus stop always there to offer a clue, and my hangover as motive.

Those two are writer and director, with myself and three other actors across two generations. It’s about love and ambition and money and life. It’s about the things we wanted against the things we have. It’s about the way we pretend.

It’s an unusual piece to come from the pen of Katia, whose last piece was political. This is a human comedy. She has written my character in a voice I know. There’s a healthy slice of my brother Rupert, a chunk of John Cleese and a few squeezes of Hugh Grant mixed up with all the Al Barclay. The others are distinct as well, and it feels like a good professional company of clever dedicated practitioners honouring a smart piece of text. And that is knackering because in a room like that you absolutely have to show up.

I’m trying to learn my lines for this lovely audition on Wednesday around this work. I tried for a Friday slot knowing I’d be flooded but no dice. So I’m just gonna be flooded right now and that’s ok cos it’s what I wanted.

I’m supposed to be inviting friends and family to the R&D at 2pm at The Other Palace, so there’s a home crowd and so we can examine it and know if it works for people that aren’t us. If you fit that brief just warn me by text so I can add your name to the list, or you might be turned away. I’ll have time to check my phone and would love some friendly faces.

A hot night in London and Boo is so thrilled to see me she won’t leave me alone. I just had the most comprehensive bath I’ve had for weeks and she was hanging out watching. I must be about a stone lighter now. I’ve been trying to embed lines and thoughts from all over the place while she rolls on me. The next few days need to be carefully partitioned in order to make sure I can keep myself in peaceful equilibrium. I’m happy I’m not drinking as I’m gonna be needing to get up earlier than I’m used to just to make sure there are enough hours in the day to do all the things.

Tonight though it is just about hitting the hay. I woke up in Brighton, brushed the cat forever, got on the train to more cats. A lot of my spare time was spent feeding things into Claude to the extent that it has a website all coded now. It won’t be perfect or complete, nothing ever is, and it will be very text heavy at the mo, but over time once it is live I can start to bulk it up and make it look sexy and try and make a calling card that in some way matches the mildly disobedient and deeply chaotic lifeform that I sometimes think of myself as inhabiting.

My injured foot has responded to the bath by peeling skin, but it doesn’t really hurt so I reckon it is just part of the healing process. The medic at Soul Revolution did a fine job with cleaning the thing. So prompt and so efficient. Who would have thought a festival was a good place to be injured.

I am feeling absolutely flooded at the moment. Can barely think from moment to moment. Not enough room in my head for it all and I keep saying yes to more. I’m still working on the basis that if it is physically possible to do the thing I’ll do the thing whatever the thing might be. There are some potential spanners in the works with filming stuff, but frankly I don’t think it’ll come in, the one that is asking for my heart and soul and my first born in exchange for a possible single day of filming. I’m on pencil for it but I reckon every actor that auditioned is on pencil for it. People do that all too often. It’s not ethical but I’ve learned not to put my life on hold. I’ll react when they give me an offer. Up until that moment it’s just noise.

I’ve put a load of bets on the world cup. I’ve put one outsider bet on for every group. It’ll keep me interested in the tournament but I’ll have to be careful. My hope is that most of them will clear the group stage, at which point I’ll cash them out but for a few. I often do this for the world cup as a way of ensuring that I have some sort of skin in the game, because we are all going to be bombarded by it no matter what. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I say.

Lots of zooming around again. I’ve been taking the train to Brighton which is easy in theory but in practice it is an absolute minefield. My rationale was that I could learn lines in the nice peaceful carriages. The reality is that one in three trains gets cancelled and the rest are delayed cos this is Southern Rail. So every train is filled to the brim.

Panda today and a few lovely conversations despite a bit of a muck up with the billing of it all. The people who came were brilliant, which makes all the difference. I’ll sit around all day if there’s just one person who comes in like Rachel came in with her son Nico today. Another thing we did was get a load of good quality footage. Tommo is in town. Over the years he’s filmed me so much. He’s got me as a robot on the streets, a superhero also on the streets, a ringmaster with two giraffes, Mister Kirkaldy… Probably loads more, I lose track. Now he’s got the panda, thanks to Camellia who was happy to be an audience member who signs a release. I guess one day I should try and dig up the footage and feed it into the website my overenthusiastic cyber buddy Claude is apparently helping me build.

Post Panda I drove home. DPD have a habit of leaving things on the doorstep. Brian had some packages. The guy left my laptop outside my door when I was home once. I reckon it’s the same guy and I want to wring his neck. I took all the packages up – some had been opened but they didn’t want the contents so they left them. Plants, cat litter and window gauze.

I watered everything including Misty and Boo, topped up their food, and got a Lime to Victoria. Those cats are much better at self managing than this little fluffpot here. And it is hot tonight. I’ve brushed her as comprehensively as I can to try and get dead weight off her and now we are both settling in for a sweltering night by the seaside. One more train tomorrow. I still have lots of lines to learn…

In between clients today, Mister Panda tried to get better at the internet.

I’m using this Claude. The first thing to observe is that, like every AI I’ve encountered, it blows a load of smoke up your arse. I’m using it to do the HTML for a website. I’ve owned a domain for years and want to finally put it to use to host a website and perhaps my blog. It’ll take at least a year to migrate fully, but doing so will get me out from under the £96 a year fee for wordpress pro, which is actually quite gate-keepered. You can’t have plugins for a start. They’re trying to push people to the Business plan which is £25 a year which is basically insanity for a small scale blog like this. I have my ads switched off. My annual payment comes up in a week. So… I’m gonna bite back my disgust for this coming AI wave, and work with it to vibe code a website, and see whether or not what we arrive at is a pile of horseshit.

It keeps trying to offer to write copy for me, and sometimes it just writes stuff anyway, and it’s universally godawful. I’m hoping it’s better at coding. That’s where I can get use out of it. I’ve seen that with decent prompting it can make copy that doesn’t read like a school assignment demo by the teacher. But largely I dislike the creative output.

I’ve been remembering my credits into Claude today and it has been fawning over me in response. Ooh that’s a great director, wow what an incredible theatre, gosh and golly you have such a huge great big swinging career. I can see how these incels get attached to it and start to think they have a relationship with it. If you’re lonely and badly socialised you could easily get attached to something that keeps blithering on about how great everything you say and do is. By the end of the day I was longing for it to say “Why are you sharing that pile of shit? I bet you were terrible in it.” But no, fawn fawn fawn. Excruciating.

But… it taught me how to work around the plug-in thing. And now I have embedded a ko-fi link that should be easy-ish for people to find. Just in case you’re running around with some spare beans. I have a dream that in a year’s time, somehow, I will no longer be paying to write this. So it’s either donations, loads of ads, or “Hey wow guys I just wiped some DonkeyCrem™ on my Elbow and it Feels Like Fun in Box! Buy it here! DonkeyCrem™ – the mucky delight for men and women. Dogs love it too!”

Here’s the ko-fi link so you can prevent that happening kids. Get on out there and donate donate donate! Page is still pretty basic. I actually made it four years ago and then got disillusioned when WP wouldn’t let me use plugins.

This blog is genuinely helpful for me, no question about it, money or no money. I put it out there and sometimes things come back. I got lovely messages from unexpected places when I was spiralling a few weeks ago. Thank you!

Now I’m back solid and sober (for now?) and I know that these paragraphs can help make me accountable to myself via you, oh constant reader, via the very act of scribbling.

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There’s nobody booked for Panda tomorrow. Some sort of fuck up with the booking system. Anyone who fancies something a little odd between noon and six, if you’re near Latimer Road give me a text and I’ll send you a location and walk you in. Maybe you’ll be shopping in Westfield?

Bedtime now in Brighton. I’m commuting for the cat again. “Your life seems so rich and varied,” says Claude, or words to that effect. I guess Claude is just an entity of code. Once you’ve given it too much “context” it floods and has to reset. I wonder if that’s a safeguard against it eventually gaining something that looks like consciousness. I flooded it already today and it is my first day of hard use. It is an interesting tech. More to explore for sure.

It must be twenty years since I went to The Hen and Chickens. A little pub theatre at Highbury and Islington, right opposite the tube, Victoria Line among others. Easier than many pub theatres to get people to come and see the show. But the thing with pub theatres is it is very hit and miss. People put on plays for all sorts of reasons. God I’ve seen some bollocks over the years in these spaces. Back in the day I was IN plenty of bollocks. But I’ve also seen some of the best, most honest, most felt, most intimate and truthful bits of live story in these places. And I’ve been in some of those too, or so I believe.

It’s a play with five women. Thankfully I know some of these women. They are just brilliant.

Hanna the director has been a part of my life now for decades, sometimes overlapping more, sometimes less, always present. I remember her parents, got on very well with her brother for a while, went out with her best friend… She introduced me to Sarah, the writer, who also acts in it. Sarah is 27ish but somehow we understand one another. Similar neurodivergencies. I am trying to work out how to help boost her at this early stage in her career for the simple reason that to my ear she’s brilliant. Her writing is deft, witty but full of heart – a light touch into deep topics, and she has got to where she can be in it and be direct and grounded and clean in her delivery, which a lot of people still can’t do at my age. She’s written this play, Our Mother’s Daughters, a self aware piece of human life looking at things from the perspectives of five very different young women. It flies along under Hanna’s direction, and every one of the actors shines out when the play needs them to. I’m more than twice the age of the characters and male, and there was still plenty for me to empathise with, care about, laugh about, feel about. I can’t help but trust that Sarah has got a brilliant career ahead of her, but the shit bit about being first generation in the industry is that the only people you have to give you a leg up are the friends you make. And I know from too many very dear friends that, for all my complaints about how hard it is for little old me, this middle class white dude with a flat, it is still still still much much much harder for women. Despite 50/50, despite Me Too.

In The Hen and Chickens last night we all saw a brilliantly staged brilliantly written play about friendship and being a woman.  A reviewer put it better than I could.

There are further opportunities to see it. It’s at the Hen until the 30th, then it comes back to Playhouse East in mid June. Ticket link here.

Actors can’t really help actors. But I can send them audience which butters the toast, and I can try to introduce them to people who have been in the struggle longer than them, one of whom might have an insight for them. Many of the best moments of my career have arrived through recommendation. It’s a lovely thing we can do for one another. Go see this play.

Brian often works from home and he is very frequently on zoom meetings with lots of voices. From time to time these meetings start to get a bit heated and I listen to him as he tries to mediate them. I must have picked something up vicariously, as I am very rarely in such meetings but found myself in one this morning.

AI is changing the landscape, but still I was surprised to receive a clearly AI generated document ahead of a creative meeting for theatre. I smelt it right away. It was classically structured, with lots of good points being made – too pat to be human, and also, crucially, not written from knowledge, written by an aggregator of information old and new. It is hard to know what was a hallucination and what was not in all the lists it put before us.

The meeting appeared to be about going through it point by point, and annotating it so it could then be fed back into the AI. I have to admit my heart sank when I realised this was what we were going to be doing, but I also think such diligence is helpful. The man insisting on it was the money man, and he is older than I am. You don’t get to be the money man without being good at money. Even just a week ago I would have been resistant to this whole damn process. I would have used one of the obvious errors in the document to throw the whole thing out as slop.

But this festival I’ve just been to, and the company I was in, they both gave me pause.

I often say, in terms of tech, that we choose the hill on which we die. My parents generation mostly died on the mobile phone hill. Crypto kinda beat me – I’ve been horribly resistant to Bitcoin etc for decades, to my detriment, having thrown away a piece of paper once, and ignored a mining screensaver someone set up for me in the early days of it all.

This AI stuff is here whether we like it or not. So I was willing to go with the process and see where it took us. Others in the meeting were not so willing. And then there were some frustratingly wayward comments and assumptions being made about potential collaborators to the extent that I’m gonna check every (probably AI) document I get from this company (probably using AI) to make damn sure I’m not being made financially liable in some sneaky way.

Suddenly they were having a great big old zoom argument. I found myself having to mediate, and was very glad of all the times I’ve listened to Brian. This shit is common in the creative process, particularly when money butts up against ideas. I think I resolved it but for a moment it was like having two teenagers, both of whom are older than I am.

It ended cordially. “If you weren’t my dear old friend, that meeting would absolutely be the last I would want to ever have with this whole project,” I told him. For an earlyprocess meeting it better not be the shape of things to come.

After the meeting I downloaded Claude AI. I’m gonna see what use I can get out of it. Not gonna die on the AI hill, even if it turns out to be the top of a bubble.

It’s a hell of a tool. Stolen from creatives, forever a plagiarism, forever a disingenuous heist of almost impossible proportions, automatic, pat, tedious, overstructured. It will never have an original thought in a million years. But… Those of us who are small fry, we can’t afford to employ proofreaders or financial advisers or lawyers or what have you so we can get something better than nothing by going towards the semi hallucinated wanderings of this watersucking nightmare of processors all controlled by some hairless billionaire techbro with the social skills of a lamprey and the empathy of a rock.

Now I’m off to see a play. More on that tomorrow. Need an early bed so getting this done before.

Back at home, in my hot city flat with the cats and Brian and Maddy. There’s a fan running and a shitty air con unit, one of the cheap ones you put an ice pack into. It won’t make much difference but it sure is summer in the city tonight. At the festival at least it had the good grace to be fucking freezing at night. Makes for some variety. That said I would always rather be too hot than too cold and on balance it’s been a great temperature to get shit done. My body and my mind tend to work better when warm.

Revolutions happen in spring, when people can get back out on the streets in numbers after a winter stewing in their own heads. I’m having my own mini spring revolution, pulling myself back out of the hole I dug for myself with a short bout of the old malaise. The first trick is noticing. The second trick is consistency.

My foot looks like absolute shit but I got lucky as it isn’t on a weight bearing bit so mostly it doesn’t hurt me as much as it looks like it ought to. Still I’ve been sitting on my arse most of the day, doing loaf after load of laundry, chasing down things that might make my life a bit less or a bit more complicated, and making up my cue script for Maccers at Chalke Festival.

Here are my two rolls next to one another. The top one is Fluellen from Henry V – I can’t do a Welsh accent, I honestly can’t, there are many accents I can pull off flawlessly but I’m only ever gonna be “doing” Welsh and at that, not very well. So I’m happy to be good old Banquo this year. I think I can remember most of it already so it won’t be such a hot bitch of a learn, but to complicate it I’m going to really try and be a purist and work it in the company style. Hence the roll. It’s how they did it in the day. You only got your cues and lines, rolled up like this. It is the origin of the word “role”. OED.

So there it is, my roll again and I’m gonna make damn sure I’m fluent so I can enjoy Chalke as best I can without worrying about lines all the time. It’s a wonderful geeky festival and I want to learn all about flint napping and trench warfare and scrofula and whatever they have on offer – I haven’t read the programme.

It’s nice to be home. One more load of laundry and I’ll sleep. Might even make the chamomile tea now…

A beautiful festival. It has left me hungry to hold space. I kind of do anyway when I’m running my workshops, be they Shakespeare or Public Speaking or Voice or Science. I do in a one on one capacity when I’m part of an art installation giving people an otherly and joyful experience. But building a brand takes time and people trust brands more. My acting needs to be primary, always, otherwise I will implode into a singularity with a tiny pop. But in my vast collection of things I’m meaning to do loads of at some point it is the one that has bubbled up to the top.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to London though and get swept up in that. But yeah…

I walked out of a couple of workshops, not because I was bored, but because they felt unsafe. There was one guy, a pound shop Russell Brand with a dress on. He immediately opened by making everyone uncomfortable, patronised people when they asked for clarity. Then he gave his credentials which were basically that he had dropped out in Ibiza for a decade and walked the Inca Trail in his gap year. “Can you speak up please?” someone called, and he paused for a moment before continuing at exactly the same volume.

We all got a thimble of his Cacao – “it’s my cacao they sell at the drinks stand” he tells us and I make a note not to go there. Then he started playing with his shaky toy and we both couldn’t stand a second longer.  “Is it me or are British men generally just worse at holding space?” I asked this just now of Helen. They’re great at “This is how you build a fire,” and “Here’s how to operate this machine,” but “Come into this room and let’s look at your grief?” Nah. Lou reckons it’s cos men come from the head and women come from the heart. She went on to say “that’s a massive generalisation,” which it is, but where there’s smoke there’s fire. All four of the sessions I walked out of were run by men. This isn’t professional jealousy, I’m not far enough down that track or invested enough. But as a man who is interested in this sector with a highly developed skillset towards it and a sensitivity, am I able to transcend the ego that makes such a statement enough to run a safe space? I’m a helpful soul and if I think there’s a need I like to try and meet it. From where I’m sitting we need more good men holding space for people, be it about confidence, be it ceremonial, be it teaching fun things, be it dealing with hard things… The women are fantastic at it, but as a man I sometimes want to respond to a male energy. There are definitely ways to hold great male ceremonies. Aho Rob. Aho the Yawanawa I met this weekend. Aho Jamie Catto.

Anyway. The festival is done. I’m going back to be part of the art and to bring my new thinking into my work with the mystic Panda. Sorry guys, it has all been a bit woo woo recently. I’ll get back to shouting about stuff before long I’m sure.

I’m with Lou. A flying visit. Gonna sign off.