Lyons Tea Shops.

The front of a J. Lyons Corner Shop.

When I was courting my wife – that word courting has gone out now, I suppose, but the word, the same as many other words which have disappeared from the vernacular, is the only one to describe the activity which we were up to; dating?

I remember seeing the movie Elizabeth; Cate Blanchard played Elizabeth I in a very dark looking piece, and I saw it in Los Angeles. On the way out of the cinema I heard someone trying to explain who everyone was in the movie and I heard 'So Elizabeth was dating . . . .. ' Dating? An historical character dating?
Anyway back to the opening sentence – when I was courting my wife we would meet up, on some of our dates, and go to Lyons Restaurant in Birmingham. It might have been called Lyons Tea Rooms or Lyons Tea Shop (always in the plural); we would meet there and order hot blackcurrant drinks. These were served in a glass which had a metal holder with a handle so you could pick it up. Maybe in the modern idiom it would be called a sleeve; they have paper ones at Starbucks – what is the world coming to; or The Planet as they say these days. The Planet!!! I ask you!
Can you imagine a modern Shakespeare? All the Planet's a Stage and all . . etc.
But back to Lyons Tea Shops (which we shall call them); these were in most big cities; there were a number of them in London in places like Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue and, the one I used later in life, The Strand.
The Lyons Tea Shop we used in Birmingham was in either Corporation Street or New Street – I can't remember which – and we would stay in there for some time; maybe even ordering more hot blackcurrant drinks as we gazed into each others eyes.
I remember meeting a friend in the 70s at the Lyons Tea Shop in The Strand and for some reason I don't remember it disappearing – together with the rest of them they faded away; like old soldiers and actors.
Lots of Lyons Tea Shops started to close in the 60s so I was fortunate to have witnessed the one in The Strand at such a late time. They have all disappeared now.

The image that floods into my mind, is piping hot chromium water holders and steam. For our blackcurrant drinks we would watch as the woman behind the counter put about one third of blackcurrant cordial into the glass and then fill it with boiling water. I think I figured out that the metal sleeve would prevent the glass cracking because of the heat although I have noticed in pubs these days hot drinks are poured directly into drinking glasses.

It's a pity that such places don't exist any more; they were more comfortable than Starbucks or the dreaded Kosta – no I'm not going to go on about Americano again (but at least you can get proper filter coffee in Starbucks) – and they were so well designed.

Above the entrance to a J. Lyons Restaurant.

 The shops had a distinctive art deco style and the waitresses, I hear, were called Nippies; a Nippy was a waitress who would nip in and out of the tables to serve customers. By the time I frequented Lyons Tea Shops the Nippies were a thing of the past and the Lyons Tea Shops were converted into a cafeteria style.
They had an artistic director who would design the shops and the name Lyons Tea Shops came from the first man to run the company, Joseph Nathanial Lyons, who was appointed by the tobacco company, who owned it, Salmon and Gluckstein.

Nippy Uniform.                                                                                                                                                             

The Nippies wore these kind of uniforms (above) and when I went to America first I was amazed at the waitresses in the diners who wore similar attire. Of course they don't call them waitresses any more – they're called 'servers' just as the postman or mailman, post woman or mail woman are called carriers!! Makes life so simple doesn't it to invent bland asexual words!! Heaven forbid if we should identify people by their sex!
All the Planet's a Stage and all the carriers and servers merely players!
A few years ago I remember reading that Lyons Tea Shops style was making a come back under a different banner Cadbury Cocoa House; their aim was to bring back the elegance of Lyons Tea Houses.

The concept, and I quote “ will challenge the dominance of the bland US coffee shop culture with its foreign mix of paninis and ciabatta, capuccinos and lattes”

The team behind it was headed by a former operations chief at Starbucks UK and I will quote again “The restaurants, which are more upmarket than existing coffee shops, will offer a 'Ritz-style' tea for two served on a tiered silver stand.
It includes a collection of finger sandwiches, such as cucumber, cream cheese and garden mint, and oak smoked salmon and lemon butter.
These come with freshly baked scones, served with Devon cream and raspberry preserve, together with a collection of pastries and Twinings tea.”
Preserve??? Don't they mean jam?
Back to the quotes -

“The price for this teatime feast comes in at £12.50 each for two or £14.50 for one.”

In dollars that would be around $18 to $20. Can we see that working? Let's see: they promised 50 locations but I can only see one in Bluewater near Dartford in Kent.

I used to take my wife to The Farmers' Market most days in Los Angeles for coffee and doughnuts and it cost about $3.50 – but I'm not counting my wife's Starbucks cappuccino.

Lyons Waitresses.

Who writes the scripts; the actors or the writers?

Amanda Redman, Dennis Waterman and Alun Armstrong.

Stars of New Tricks.

Well it's the writers of course; the writer writes the story, creates the characters and writes their dialogue; end of story.

But it's not so simple as that; most of the things I have been in on television, and when I say most I mean nearly all, have had the dialogue to the scenes I was in drastically changed.

This is because the dialogue just didn't work, it didn't flow and it didn't make sense. Most of the writers were educated and were very clever and the stories they wrote were good, but sometimes what works on paper doesn't sound right.

A lot of good writers organise work shops; this has nothing to do with arriving with your hammer and nails, this is a reading of the play with actors good enough to do it and a lot of the times you do more than read, you improvise: both with dialogue and movement.

Mike Leigh does this when 'devising' his scripts.

On the one thing where we were banned from changing the dialogue, Softly Softly – Task Force, a cop show for the BBC, one of the crooks had to say 'I can't wait to get back to the pub and a pint of apple fritter.' Apple Fritter??

No one had heard beer called that before.

I was in a series once where I played a businessman who was working all the hours under the sun and was suffering from some sort of by product of over work – ulcers or some kind of stomach problems – and I needed to have an operation to save my life. People were stopping me in the street and telling me to take the operation.

In the series I was admitted to hospital and then I went out of the series for two episodes and when I came back I was in a meeting with my doctor. One of his lines was 'You really need to come in to hospital.'

Well I had already been admitted to hospital in my last episode so I pointed this out to the director. He said 'Are you sure?'

I had to swear on my life that this was the case but as it was a Sunday there were no writers in the studios. So the director called the script editor at home, who had written the particular episode. He confirmed 'yes' I had been admitted to hospital but to leave it with him and he'll do a re-write.

I suggested that the doctor say 'you had no business checking yourself out.'

They all thought it a good idea so that's what we used; I don't think I 'wrote' that - it could have been improvised; there's a difference. The thing is it was an ongoing series and short cuts had to be taken both with acting and writing.

One line I did want to change one day was in Dixon of Dock Green when I had to say 'we got the skipper on ship shore sarge!' Yeh!! Try it. I did many many perfect takes and the person following me fluffed a line during the scene each time. The producer approached me afterwards and said 'Thank you; I won't forget you.'

He gave me a job later in an episode he directed.

I bring this subject up because there is a storm in a teacup happening in a highly rated television series called New Tricks.

There are three stars in it played by veteran actors. They play ex-detectives who are recruited by the police to work on cold cases; they are in their own little section supervised by a middle aged female detective who is also one of the stars of the show.

This week in the Radio Times, Britain's best selling magazine (I think) the show is profiled; one of the first things the piece says is 'it's clear that in this show, it's the stars who call the shots.'

Amanda Redman, who plays the female ranked detective, goes on to say in the interview, about the show 'It's bland now. The characters are not as anarchic as they used to be . . '

It also accuses the writers of being lazy and repeating themselves and Alun Armstrong, one of the three main characters, is quoted as saying 'We put a lot into making the scripts work. If we felt that a story didn't work, or that bits of a story could be improved, then – if the writer wasn't around – we would set about re-writing it ourselves.”

We know this is only the Radio Times talking to the fans and they might have misquoted but one of the writers has taken umbrage. Writer Julian Simpson hit back at the claims earlier this week, saying actors had never contributed to the script.

In a rant on twitter, he said: ''I was going to be writing today, instead I'm just going to hand the actors a pad and pen. I wish I'd learned this 15 years ago.
Then he says ''A New Tricks I wrote and directed airs on Monday. I can tell you EXACTLY how much of it the actors wrote: not a f**king comma. (sic)
I wonder what the atmosphere will be like on set next time he has to work with them?
Before the piece went into the Radio Times Amanda Redman had already quit and now we hear that Alun Armstrong is on his way too. He said it's nothing to do with the recent comments but of the four leading stars there is only one left.
This sort of thing never made the press in years gone by; loads of leading actors changed their dialogue in the old Hollywood movies. Robert Shaw wrote the Indianapolis dialogue in Jaws but then he was a great writer; also Richard Widmark would arrive with all his scenes re-written in his films and it is said that Orson Welles wrote the cuckoo clock lines in The Third Man – but he didn't write the film; the writer did; a certain Graham Greene.

Old actors never die - they just fade away . . .

The late Tony Scott with Denzel Washington.

Do you know I have been an actor for over 40 years; amazing really when I am only 39 years of age!!!!

So in that time I have worked with more actors than I could count; they are generally nice people and lack something they need more of – confidence; the rest is an act.

It's usually a basic shyness which brings people into acting and a need for – who knows? Attention?

There may be some need for artistic expression too but I think a lot of that is just bullshit; they (we) want to act because we like it; nothing more nothing less. Conversations with actors can be both stimulating and boring. In fact those things can happen in the same conversation within seconds.

A lot of actors when they become famous say in interviews that they don't mix with other actors and keep aloof – well they read that Montgomery Clift was aloof as he didn't really want to be an actor at all; he was forced into it by his 'stage mother' and felt unhappy.

He was part of the rebel actor that came in the fifties; it's supposed to have started with John Garfield then spread to James Dean, Marlon Brando and Clift but Humphrey Bogart was a rebel too – and don't forget James Cagney. A great actor, Cagney, an actor who didn't mix much with other actors and would go back to his pad in Martha's Vineyard instead of mixing with other actors – aloof!! Where have I heard that before?

Since then a lot of actors have played the 'rebel card' – I don't have to point them out to you but it's all been done before.

I remember how rebellious Russell Crowe was when he came to Hollywood. A friend of mine did a film with him – LA Confidential – and she said he was one of the most protective people she had worked with, always courteous and caring.

When he won the Academy Award the emotion hit him and the rebelliousness dropped for a bit – but he went on to be a bit of a bully grabbing a TV director for cutting an acceptance speech and some trouble in a New York Hotel for which he was arrested; but I'm sure he's a nice man. Good actor and didn't really deserve the drubbing he got when he played Robin Hood; I thought the accent he chose to use on that was fine, I mean who knew how people spoke at the time of Robin Hood.

But as I've said before about accents – it's a British thing; they have this thing about accents. Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart using different accents in each film like Meryl Streep?

Usually when a group of actors get together on a film or a TV job they never tell each other how much they are getting paid – and if they do they usually inflate it. I'm talking in the 'they' again when I do mean 'we.'

If you are acting with a big star they wouldn't dream of telling you what they get but if you are 3 or 4 crooks, for example with the same sized roles, in a cop show the bullshit is high. The reason for this? Who knows – maybe a touch of the bravado or being scared of admitting you would work for so little or that your status is not as high as you would like to think it is.

There is also the game of telling the tale of how much they wanted you for this role and that you initially turned it down.

All that is natural but in this little post I want to pay tribute to the director; I have worked with a lot fewer directors than I have actors and the difference between actors and directors is that directors, no matter what their age, will try anything.

Look at the older directors – great directors – Sydney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood and Robert Altman; only Clint left now, unfortunately.

They are great directors; I know there are loads of great directors, and Hitchcock seems to get all the plaudits but people who work with Clint Eastwood say 'he's the man.'

I mean look at his work.

Then you have a director like Tony Scott, who has just died. He was at it all the time; an old fashioned Hollywood type director who would go from job to job and always coming in under budget and producing a good movie.

Actors on the other hand, older actors, don't like to try anything new. Let me say here that I am not referring to any of my friends – which I hope will save any emails!!

In 1975 I was in a play; it was set in a country house and Scotland Yard and I played a London working class detective. One day the director couldn't come in to rehearsals so he let a younger man take over the directing for the day; well it was only a morning as it was a Saturday when there was a matinée of the current play (I was in rep).

The new replacement director started the rehearsals and gave us a few pointers. I was in a scene with an old actor and this was probably the first time in his life that he had received proper direction.

It was a scene between me, the older actor (who played a cockney criminal) and the Detective Inspector who was posh.

The director pointed out that there were class differences between each of us in the scene; two of us were working class and the other fairly middle class and this might cause an interesting dynamic.

The older actor, playing the cockney, didn't like this kind of direction. The director wasn't giving him line readings – telling him how to say the lines – so he shouldn't really have been offended. He complained to me at the coffee break but he wouldn't say anything to the director.

The other actor, by the way, the middle class one, didn't complain at all even though he was an old boy; but he was also a director.

He knew that actors in the theatre in those days were just told to move here or there and we would mark our script, in pencil, with the moves; we would use pencil as the moves would invariably change. For example d/s/r – meaning 'move downstage right' – and you would put a little x on the line or word where you were supposed start the move.

Directors on the other hand accept the latest technology and go with it.

Look at Clint Eastwood's movie Letters from Iwo Jima – most of the film is in Japanese, the technological 'know how' and the logistical headaches this kind of film would give even the most skilled director, would put younger directors off the task (including Spielberg who was one of the producers). There were 35 people on sound, more on technical effects and over 30 doing stunts.

(However they got one thing wrong - the motor vehicles in the movie have the steering wheel on the left. Japanese vehicles, like the British, have the steering wheel on the right, as they keep to the left side of the road); I read that on the dreaded IMDb.

The same goes with the other directors mentioned above; all did movies out of their usual genre later in life and all worked well in to their 80s.

Actors and writers tell you how long they have been at it, how many things they have done and that the young are no good 'we did it all years ago' they say and in doing so miss the benefit of knowledge. I wonder how better that scene would have been if the older guy had listened – maybe not much but it would have filled us, or me, with a bit more ammunition.

The film director, Tony Scott, who killed himself yesterday in San Pedro at the age of 68 directed one of my favourite films True Romance. It was written by Quentin Tarantino and it was Tarantino's best script.

Tony Scott, who was the younger brother of Ridley Scott, had 10 movies on the go in various stages of completion at the time of his death.

Miming, Lip Syncing and the like.

I Love Lucy title card.

Someone – well it was Julien Temple (and spelled that way) – said the closing ceremony for the Olympics was like a 'bad night at the Brits' – well I don't believe entirely with that opinion, but the show certainly came and went in places.

There was a wonderful moment when the familiar chords starting with 'C' on the piano to the great John Lennon song Imagine oozed into the arena; chords that we all know so well and obviously played by Lennon himself, but when the lyrics were sung by a children's choir, we kind of thought again about who the piano player was, until the face and voice of John Lennon was revealed on a large screen; then the crowd went silent taking a deep tearful breath before gently joining in.
At that moment we realised that this was the only way John Lennon would ever appear in a show like this and a time like this unlike his former band mate who closed the opening ceremony a couple of weeks earlier; we knew that if Lennon had survived he wouldn't be there in person.
To be fair to Paul McCartney, he was probably asked to sing Hey Jude as he must be getting fed up of it himself. Some singers have committed suicide rather than sing 'that damn song again' – Del Shannon with Runaway for example.

I would have liked to have heard the Ralph McTell song The Streets of London as this was supposed to be a celebration of British pop music and that is the most famous of modern London songs and they were the London Olympics – not the British ones.

There was a fault at the Opening Ceremony with McCartney's first song; the sound 'went funny.' That, to me, sounded like the sound filtering through from the stadium rather like the bad sound you hear at the winter Olympics, when the musical track is played straight from the skating arena through the microphones and on to your TV. It has a kind of hollow compressed sound and can be achieved when recording – to make a song sound as if it's being sung live – by allowing the playback on the speakers to be 'bounced' through the microphone, picking up ambiance on the way.

But my daughter told me it was his 'backing track;' I don't know how true this is but I wouldn't have thought that something as big as the opening ceremony with the money it cost to produce and the meticulous care Danny Boyle demands, would resort to the Saturday Night Live/Top of the Pops lip syncing technique.

Lip syncing, of course, is what we called 'miming' when we were kids and it means moving your lips to a recorded voice – either your own or someone else's.

We all remember Danni Minogue on Saturday Night Live when she just sat there as her song was played when she couldn't hear the playback and the unprofessionalism of some of the rock bands and performers on Top of the Pops in the 70s; they came on to Top of the Pops and made it quite clear they were lip syncing and what they were doing was going back on something that has been a very important technique ever since movies began.

I had a terrible time trying to tell my parents that all music in film is mimed to playback; there is no other way it can technically be done; films are usually shot with one camera unlike multi camera TV which adopted the format from I Love Lucy in the 50s.

I Love Lucy was on film, of course, which is why the quality is so good. When they started to shoot and/or record shows on video tape they used the same multi-camera technique and it is only with multi-cameras that you can perform live music without miming to playback.

It's quite simple: for music to be performed live with one camera the performance would have to be exact on every take – every take exactly the same from every angle or it couldn't be edited. The tempo would have to be the same and still it wouldn't sound right,

Paul McCartney tried it in Give My Regards to Broad Street; a terrible movie by the way and the live singing must have tripled the budget.

In all those old musicals, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor - the lot – lip synced to playback.

Then they had to add the dancing track if they were tap dancing – they weren't even wearing tap shoes!!

That was called a tap over, by the way! They were so professional the general public didn't notice and it wasn't till the aforementioned on Top of the Pops and the like came along that it became an issue.

I think the general public know too much these days and want to know too much about how things are made then they are shocked to find that a David Attenborough programme on the BBC didn't actually point a long camera lens into a load of snow to witness a giant polar bear giving birth to cubs.

I have had a few instances of being present when pop groups have mimed and when they have sung live.

When I was a student we would go to a cathedral near Christmas for a service which went out on TV as Songs of Praise. I was working at the time backstage on a Panto at a theatre and one of the pop groups (60s talk for band) in the show, The Kingsmen, sang their latest song. We, in the cathedral, could only hear the musical backing as the singers were singing into microphones which were going straight into the broadcast. It sounded great, when it was broadcast a week later.

Another time a great English blues singer (there are some) Jimmy Powell was in a drama and he sang live to a backing track. As the sound department wanted to control the sound we couldn't hear him – just like the church service.

I also had an occasion to be in the Top of the Pops studio when they recorded and even though they mimed it sounded live in there – that's why it sounded so good as they only had to mix the audience.

Oh this is boring you isn't it – here's me miming to a rock song I wrote and in order to film it I had to shoot it about 20 times:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCYcHnzWW6k

London: Riots to Olympics.

There are a lot of people who read this blog; I am amazed by the amount of countries it goes to – well it goes to every country, of course, but I'm amazed by the amount of countries where people read it.

For some reason, within minutes of it being published the post is read in Iowa by somebody; I know the IP address and the city and I would love to hear from them - in fact I can see where every post is read.

I never know by whom, of course; I have two counters and the one where I have all the details has the blog receiving about 40,000 hits since I started and the one which comes with the package has it nearer 50,000 hits.

This is nothing compared with Matt Drudge's blog, of course, but the post I wrote about Julian Assange has had over 5,000 hits and still attracts them even though I wrote it in December 2010.

I would like to tell all those people that no matter what you may hear or read elsewhere, London is really the place to be at the moment. There were a lot of naysayers about The Olympic Games but they are here, they are successful and they are making a lot of people happy.

It's such a friendly place to be with Britons believing they could be winners at last.

This time last year, on August 8^th in London, my daughter and her boy friend/partner/esposo were out having dinner and celebrating his birthday. His name is Chris too; no not Chris 2, Chris too – so happy birthday Chris.

As they sat there the London riots, which had broken out on August 6^th, arrived at the leafy suburb of Ealing where they were eating. My daughter was four months pregnant at the time so they cut their evening short and managed to get home safely.

Nearby a 68 year old man, well known to the locals of Ealing, tried to stamp some of the fires out and was killed by one of the participants of the so called riot. I know the perpetrator probably didn't mean to kill him but the exponential affect of a growing mob when it gets out of control can lead to anything.

Four cars were set on fire, shops and buildings in a street nearby were smashed and set on fire too. These shops were small businesses; some set up by young people who had raised the money for a deposit and borrowed the rest. There were about 150 rioters, so they say, and they also looted a branch of Tesco's for alcohol and cash. I remember seeing them on TV smashing a bookies' window.

15 of them jumped on to a bus, forced the driver out and crashed it.

We were in Edinburgh at the time and the young people of that city didn't riot at all; there was too much to do with the festival and things.

Some people from other countries, likened the riots here to the Arab Spring. It's sad when people don't know the history of the place and give wrong opinions. Two years after the Conservatives were elected last time there were riots in Toxteth, Liverpool. Police had a bad reputation there with their treatment of blacks and the sus law; the sus law allowed police to pull in anybody for questioning if they 'looked' suspicious. It was bound to happen just as it happened in Tottenham last year and spread to other boroughs and other inner cities.

Last year's riots were started after the police shot someone – I'm not going to comment on that but if you want to read more just put Tottenham Riots on Google.

But there were other young people last year who were doing something else. The rioters last year were a minority of the younger generation – to use an old phrase – but there were thousands of others who were getting ready for this year – the Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games were always criticised by somebody – I remember years ago asking someone if they'd seen so and so and they said they didn't like the Olympics as they were all supposed to be amateur. Well that was okay for rich posh boys and girls who could afford to take time off to train or if you were from a country in the Communist Block who fed their athletes performance enhancing drugs and gave them time off to train.

Isn't it good to see that since there is now a real crack down on drugs and more sophisticated equipment is available to detect the cheats, that the Russians and Germans don't seem to be winning much.

And I know about the IOC and the old men who run it and take advantage of the youth the games are meant for, but those corrupt old men send people to take part in sport and not to get killed in wars.

The Opening Ceremony was wonderful and the crowds attending the games are supporting the athletes. The British are as partisan as the rest of the world, for a change, but support the rest of the world's athletes too; especially Usain Bolt; the 100 metres final was watched by one third of the total population.

The final of the 100 metres almost coincided with the 50^th Anniversary of Jamaica's Independence and plenty of Jamaican Celebrations took place in the capital.

London won the Olympics on July 6^th 2005; people celebrated it was a great day. The place was on such a high. People were actually dancing in the streets and the next day the bombers attacked.

Whether it had anything to do with the Olympic announcement I don't know. They had planned the attacks and made their pathetic videos well beforehand; got themselves out of bed that morning and could probably see the happiness and the celebrations taking place and still placed their bombs killing 52 innocent people.

Seven years later the Olympics are up and running and are successful and they are great!

And then there was Morrisey.

He says 'I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event' and he criticises the U.K. public for the outpouring of support which has been seen since the Olympics kicked off.

The former 'Smiths' singer has cited a spirit of 1939 Germany in Britain this summer. A headline on the Internet says 'Former Smiths singer Morrissey has caused controversy by citing a “spirit of 1939 Germany” in Britain this summer.'

I hate jingoism and I agree with Samuel Johnson when he said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel but these people are cheering their team on; they appreciate good sport and applaud the other teams too.

I know it takes people's minds off the troubles of the world and kind of brainwashes them (us) but people need to feel good at the moment with politicians seemingly not knowing what they are doing and the bankers steaming forward into their new world order with their single currency ambitions and the worship of greed, but Britons are, for the first time, believing they are winners and maybe this will inspire youth to go to sport instead of rioting – who knows?

Morrisey lives in Los Angeles so he should know a little bit about jingoism and patriotism and in a business where he is almost worshiped by acolytes I think it sounds a bit rich.

Poor old Morrisey.

Swatting Flies with the Psychic!

There was one big difference I noticed between Los Angeles and London; no one else noticed this and I even wrote to The Guardian's Notes and Queries column to see if there was a reason for it. I found it hard to catch flies in LA.
In London I was always good at it; I could catch a fly in mid flight. One day I was in someone's house and did it; a big blue bottle of a fly buzzed in to their kitchen, I caught it lightly in my hand, threw it at the wall and when it landed I put my foot on it; simple.
The person, whose kitchen it was, said she had never seen anything like it before.
In Los Angeles there was no chance. I wonder if it had anything to do with humidity getting on to the fly's wings in London and in Los Angeles, where there is little or no humidity most of the time, they fly freely.
I would often see them coming in to the living room from our balcony; coming in to wipe their feet on our food. The feet that they had been getting dirty by walking in the soft and smelly – yes the shit.
They must be the cleanest creatures on earth as they do not like having anything sticking to their feet so they wipe them wherever they can.
I found a way I could get rid of some of them by shooting them with rubber bands. It was amazing, really, as I could fire at them and miss by a fraction of an inch and they wouldn't notice. So I would always get a second shot.
Most of the time the way I would catch flies would be this way:

I can't remember who took that shot but someone called it Dead Elvis – cruel.

One Sunday morning, in Los Angeles, the phone rang and it was a friend of mine from London saying he was in MacDonald's on Hollywood Boulevard and could I come down and pick 'us' up – I asked who 'us' were and he told me he had brought along his psychic; a kind of 'magic woman.'
I went down to pick them up and she was a Columbian woman in her late fifties and I took them back to our apartment where they stayed for a few days. They were on some kind of spiritual journey and he wanted her to meet me as he reckoned we had met before in another life.
Over the period of the next few days she said I had been an Indian Chief in a former life and my friend was an Indian Brave. I laughed at this and he said 'look at you; you have feathers on the wall and you shoot flies with elastic bands.'
I said 'I pick my nose but that doesn't make me a monkey!'
By the way the Indians I met in America preferred to be called just that – Indian not native American; that's what the white professors call them.
One night the magic woman asked if she could use the phone and after she was talking for a few minutes she got up and went to the balcony in some kind of rush; I said 'where are you going?' and she said 'Israel; it's an emergency!'
I said 'Well, you're going the wrong way.'
We lived five floors up.
What was my wife doing whilst this was going on, I hear you ask – she was in London with the kids for a few weeks.
I looked out on to the balcony, after a while, and there she was sitting with her head buried in her hands and her eyes closed.
I asked my pal what was going on and he shrugged and carried on reading.
She had been reaching someone in Israel with her magic powers of psyche and later she called him again and the poor sap said he had felt her all that way!!
Eventually I dropped them at Grand Central railway station in Los Angeles and they made their way to Big Bear National Park; she said her sister lived near there and she wanted to tell her sister that she (her sister) was ill but didn't know it yet; she knew this through her psychic powers.
She said she could cure cancer, Parkinsons, MS and a superabundance of other diseases.
They only stayed with me for a few days and she could see that I was a skeptic and one day she told me to lie on the floor. I asked why and she told me she would prove to me that she was for real.
I wondered what she meant so I lay down and when I was down there she kind of sprawled across me – not in any kind of missionary position for sex – but across me, I think, as I had my eyes closed.
I opened them and looked at my pal and he took his book out on to the balcony to read. After a few minutes she got off me and asked me if I experienced anything – I said 'no – not really!!'
One day she said she should vacuum the apartment as my wife was away and another time when I cooked something for them she added a lot of balsamic vinegar and ruined the meal – I told her it was still acetic acid and didn't go with pasta.
Of course when she vacuumed she threw a lot of my notes away.
When they left that day I said goodbye and she said she would be in touch spiritually but I didn't hear another word and carried on shooting flies – oh I did hear from her once: about three-o-clock in the morning a month later she called to ask where my pal was and that he'd used the phone at her sister's house and didn't pay for the call. I told her it was three-o-clock in the morning and that she didn't pay me for her calls to Israel either!!
Oh by the way – before I go; I won something; my play, The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone, won 'Best Play' in the solo festival I did at the Lord Stanley recently – how about that?