Authors Electric

First of all, I must emphasise that I don't see the Christmas season through rose-coloured spectacles at all. I've had some bad experiences in past Decembers, including family members being taken ill, dogs biting people and trains home being seriously delayed. Christmas Day itself is often an ordeal, mostly because of the pressure of trying to make everything perfect, or at least bearable, for everyone. This top five is an attempt to remember the good aspects of the festivities by challenging myself to dredge up five jewels out of the surrounding sludge. Top of the pops (or the season's diamond, for any Bridgerton viewers who might be reading this) is an event from many years ago. This was a children's party organised at my father's workplace, a college of technology, for the children of the staff. I am not really a party person generally, but I do have fond memories of this one - in my recollection we went to at least three of them over the years, so we had the cha...

Traditional pantomime: Joyfully strewn with terrible puns   The first day of December dawns and, abracadabra , we’re in pantomime season.  For those who’ve never had to sit in a British theatre among a deafening audience of 6 year-olds, dodging penny sweets being hurled from the stage, while gamely shouting ‘He’s behind you!’ to Snow-White, or Aladdin, or Little Red Riding Hood, some explanation is needed.   And my goodness, have I tried to explain this particular loud, brash, clunkily scripted, outrageously overacted, joyfully strewn with terrible puns and altogether much-loved piece of our Christmas tradition to bemused visitors from other countries down the years… never with the slightest success, unfortunately. You just have to be there, really.  And none more surprising than his appearance in a pantomime Or not. But it only struck me a couple of weeks ago (slow, that’s me) what an odd collection of stories makes up the pantomime r...

  Christmas Day 2017. Joy to all women, children and men in this season of pantomimes and circuses. We seem to be living through a seven-ringed conflation of the two.  Ho, ho, ho ho.  Overseeing it all we have our very own grey Mother Goose and what a gigantic goose she is. Off she goes to church, the Vicar's daughter, in her Dolce and Gabbana shoes costing £600 while her government cheerfully cuts and delays benefits to the disabled and barely-managing across the land. Ho ho ho.   Behind her, the stage is filled with mugging, smirking, prat-falling clowns tumbling from Stage Right and, as ever, these clowns aren't remotely funny... But they are bigly sleazy, scary and sinister. You have to appreciate the sheer audacity of the humour. Shiny, smarmy 'Calm down, dear,' Clown Cameron completely misjudges his referendum, trips over it and falls smack on his face. But up he skips, to announce that he will see the negotiations with the EU throug...

  From BBC archive Churchill Theatre's Cinderella. When I was a child my grandmother would take me to the  panto in Cardiff each Christmas. I would squirm with embarrassment at the audience participation, but I adored the transformation  scenes when the lights would change to flood the stage with magic; a pumpkin became a coach, a servant girl  a princess, and the beast  the handsome prince. I’ll be honest Panto is not a great preparation for life - don’t get me started on frog kissing, or on lying around on a bed of thorns waiting to be rescued -  but it fed my imagination as a writer.  Everyone knows that writing is all about transformation. Words on a page transform into story, the story transforms into a book and the humble scribe, by dint of performing a set of obscure magical tasks, is, with publication, transformed into a real writer just as surely as Pinoccio becomes a real boy. Once I accepted the logic of this, as I accepted that a...

A facetious, totally unreliable glimpse into academia PROFESSOR DEELEY: About the rehearsal schedule … DR MCBRIDE: Can’t it wait until later? I really need to finish this critical analysis of that late Beethoven quartet which… PD: We don’t have time, McBride. You know the date, I take it? DM: Of course. it’s the 7th. Why? PD: Yes, the 7th of December. They’ll be here in a couple of weeks. DM: But this Beethoven score – I’m so close to finalising it. That b minor viola shift… PD: I know the feeling only too well, McBride. I felt exactly the same about what was to be my definitive article on Tolstoy’s debt to Victor Hugo. But there are other considerations. We must be realistic. We need to get ready. DM: Damn. Every year it’s the same. Every year I vow I’ll move to some respectable provincial university. But I never do. PD: And why would you? There’s Oxbridge, us, and the rest are nowhere. DM: I know that. But every Christmas, with all the damned tourists, the ca...