No sex please, we’re actors...
SNACK FOODS? I’m not a fan to be honest. I can live without Pringles, pork scratchings,twixes,wotsits and Quavers. I’ve never so much as considered a packet of Monster Munch or Percy Pigs. Doritos have never darkened my door. It’s true I have been know to consume a pack of Mini Cheddars. But they’re not essential to my happiness. But KP Cheese Footballs?that’s different.
For some years I’d accepted that they only surfaced in the supermarkets at Christmas.
If I couldn’t eat them all the year round that was probably a good thing – for my waistline. We must all ration our pleasures.
But this year! No cheese footballs to be had for love nor money. I tried to buy them online. And, tantalisingly, they seemed to be available from various outlets until you saw the small print which said “not in stock”.
Have they become extinct? Research revealed a short film onyoutube in which some fool identified cheese footballs as “The Worst Snack in theworld”. Nooo!!!
Like Brexit or wearing a face-mask the issue of cheese footballs clearly divides the nation. It’s time to speak out for what we believe in.
THEREWAS an interview with the great comedian Billy Connolly the other day. He has Parkinson’s and talked about it openly. “I don’t joke about it but I’m light about it,” he said. I like the idea of “being light” about serious things.we’re losing the ability to do that.we think you have to be solemn
to show you’re serious.we think being disapproving and censorious shows you’re a good person. Let’s wear our seriousness lightly rather than using it as a stick to beat others with. My resolution for 2022. And a very Happy Newyear to all my readers.
STAFFORDSHIRE University is offering a one-year Master’s Degree in panto. Oh no it isn’t! “Questions including ‘how do we address the gender issues, how do we tell the story of Aladdin in 2021, how do we get that balance of male/female roles?’ will be asked,” said Robert Marsden, Associate Professor of Acting and Directing. Sounds like an exercise in squeezing the fun out of one of our great theatrical traditions. Oh yes it is!
Which reminds me: A pantomime horse walks into a bar.the barman says “Would you like a pint?”the horse says “No, two halves.”
SNAPCHAT is a messaging app popular with the young.agony auntvictoria Richards claims to have identified a new dating trend: “Snapchat notifies you if someone is ‘typing’ even if they never send a message. So now people ‘type’ so you know they’re thinking about you, and you ‘type’ back and… that’s it, nobody actually says anything at all.”
Lots of people thought this was a deplorable trend among the young, but surely it’s rather sweet.and it’s always been like this – the need to show you’re interested in someone without looking too interested and risking rejection. It’s like “accidentally on purpose” turning up where the person you fancy happens to be. Or telling them you have a “spare ticket” for a show which you actually bought with them in mind. Or phoning and then saying you’d dialled their number by mistake.
Didn’t we all do these things long before social media existed?
THIS EVENING’S viewing is sorted. We’ll be watching BBC One’s A Very British Scandal with Claire Foy playing Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, whose 1963 divorce case from the Duke (played by Paul Bettany) featured interesting Polaroid photographs of her performing a sex act wearing nothing but a string of pearls in the luxurious mirrored bathroom of her Mayfair house.
The identity of the gentleman in question remains a mystery as the photo cuts him off above the shoulders.
For this reason he has always been referred to as “the headless man”. Names in the frame include the politician Duncan Sandys and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr.
The judge in the case said Marg of Arg was a “highly sexed woman” who was not “satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite”.
So it’s fair to say that this three-part drama will probably contain some sexual activity and will come with a health warning beforehand. But who can resist the philandering upper classes in the 1960s? Not me.
Claire Foy complained last week on Woman’s Hour that doing sex scenes is “the grimmest thing you can do” which is the sort of thing that actors always say.
Fielding questions from the media about doing sex scenes ought to be something actors are taught at RADA. Maybe they are. Because ask any actor about sex scenes and they always insist it’s pants (or perhaps no pants). Even now, when they have intimacy co-ordinators and special kit for ensuring that no sticky bits ever encounter other sticky bits.
FAIR ENOUGH. Especially in the middle of winter when you might want to keep your jumper on. Though there’s usually a clause in an actor’s contract about maintaining a temperature on set so everyone is nice and cosy. And while all filming takes far longer than you would ever imagine is possible, sex scenes take twice as long as that. “You’re there for 12 hours, it’s exhausting,” grumbled Justin Timberlake while making Friendswith Benefits.
When they were filming Netflix’s Bridgerton, which had more steamy scenes than a weekend in a sauna, the actors not only had to simulate passion, they had to do so without damaging the priceless furniture in the country houses where the series was filmed. “Room monitors” were present on closed sets and would, according to director Julie Ann Robinson, say: “Can you go easy on the bed? Go easy on the bedpost.”
But honestly is it really “the grimmest thing you can do” as Claire Foy insists? I can think of lots of things that are “grimmer”. Emptying bedpans for instance. Doing a shift as a night cleaner. Working in a Covid ward. Being a delivery driver. Keeping a business running for two years in the teeth of a pandemic. Being an out-of-work actor for years on end.
All much, much grimmer.