Just another day in Hollywood.

There are a few things amazing about living here – too many to write about; sometimes it's like being in a movie. All the things we have seen over the years we kind of see: yellow cabs, short muscular Irish cops and men with guns.

Today I met my wife for lunch and we went to the Sunset Grill on Sunset Boulevard – yes that Sunset Grill in the famous song; before they re-modelled the building they had the disc on the wall by Joe Walsh.

So today after my chicken quasadilles (not as good as the ones in the late lamented Last America Hamburger) I leave Margaret and head north on Gardner; Gardner, as locals will know, crosses Hollywood Boulevard and when I reached the traffic lights there the traffic along Hollywood Boulevard was being controlled by a man with a rifle.

His car was parked in the middle of the Boulevard and he was not exactly dressed as a cop – or even a gangster.

He was wearing a greenish colour baseball type of cap and was not looking for a game of baseball.

After a few minutes he called the Boulevard traffic on and left me stuck at the lights with a few cars behind me. As far as I knew the third world war could have been happening down there as there was a fat tree blocking my view; the traffic going east was non existent but as he was calling west bound traffic on I figured that whatever had happened there had happened!

After what seemed like an eternity the lights changed to green and we could cross; looking left, as I crossed Hollywood Boulevard, I could see many other men with guns, loads of cars with their lights on and . . . nothing else!

I came home and put the news on, checked Twitter and nothing.

So I sent a tweet on Twitter and as one of the people I follow is West Hollywood Daily I sent it to him. He has just replied saying Man Armed with a Rifle at Hollywood and Gardner wearing camouflage was an ATF agent serving a warrant – wow some warrant!

I don't know anywhere in Britain where you would see such an incident – it looked like a SWAT incident!!

Going on I have decided to change the title of my novel; there are just too many novels called The Storyteller. Alan Sillitoe died the other day and even he wrote one with that title – together with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; a great writer and I am proud to say I was in one of the films adapted from one of his novels The Ragman's Daughter.

I'll leave this blog as the same title though.

My novel is for sale in quite a few places including Smashwords and Kindle in electronic books; Smashwords was easy to change, I am working on Kindle but I think it will take a bit of arranging with Amazon.com.

The new title My Friend Alfredo Hunter. I was thinking of My Friend Alfredo Hunter; genius but I have opted for the former; however nothing is final so if you have a preference let me know.

The paper back hasn't been selling too much but it sells on Kindle and Smashwords – mainly to American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mrs Gandhi and Totectors follow up.

I had a couple of e-mails asking me if I still had the picture taken with Mrs Gandhi – well there it is above; me with the white shoes - and I still had black hair in those days.

There is Mrs Gandhi with the two girls either side of her and my daughter Rebecca is the one with the dark hair; she was only fourteen going on fifteen and because of her dark looks she was 'eyed' by a few of the locals and that's what I meant when my wife said she would need her father with her in India - and she was right.

The fella beside me is Louis from Air India who came to see me in my show, A Bit of Irish, in London last year; behind him is the bodyguard who was trying to get into the picture (the shadow os him more like) and the young fella to the right of the picture is the son of the white haired weather man; the rose between the two thorns there is the teacher of the other girl who was a wonderful woman, Kate.

The last time I heard from Kate was a Christmas card which said 'I dreamt that once, long ago, I met you in India' – and nothing else! Nothing happened between us, of course, and after the trip I took my daughter to visit her and her husband in Bristol.

Her husband was from Glasgow and was very much like me; I think he had something to do with MI5 or one of the other security services and in the couple of days I spent there we must have drunk the place dry and played guitars way into the night.

After a very late night, in which Kate came down from bed to quieten us down, we went to bed and as we parted he shook my hand and said “it's a draw” - he had been trying to drink me under the table! Not that I knew this at the time.

She was obviously attracted by drinkers and revellers which is why we got on so well. The husband kind of eyed me suspiciously, when I first arrived, but by the time we left he was sure there was nothing between me and his wife; he told me this as he saw us off on the coach after another lunch time drinking session at the pub.

I don't drink to that extent any more - let's say I saw the folly of getting drunk. Don't get me wrong I still drink but not so much and just whiskey and beer these days.

I went through my stat counter the other day for this blog and I still get hits from posts I wrote 6 months ago and one in particular was about the company I worked for – Totectors – and I noticed a comment in the comments section from Robert Green who must think me very ignorant for not replying. Well I'm sorry Robert I just didn't see it.

Robert told me that Totectors went broke but 12 months or so ago a new owner brought it back to life and now Robert works for a company that retails Totectors.

After Totectors, Robert, I struggled for a bit and then I got a role in a movie called Lifeforce which helped me buy another house closer to civilisation and a few TV shows and series put me on my feet.

Now I'm in Los Angeles and, as they used to say, I'm still ducking and diving and as soon as I get everything up and running I'll be writing on here again.

Mrs Gandhi and an Englishman Abroad.

I once met Mrs Gandhi; now if you knew me you would wonder how some bum of an actor with only one TV credit in the year of 1983 could get to meet the leader of the world’s largest democracy

It had, indeed, started off as a bad year which I had inherited from the year before; in February I was offered one episode of The Angels – a BBC hospital soap – playing the role of a cop in one scene; I jumped at it; we had three kids to feed.

On the first day of rehearsals I bumped into a BBC producer, Innes Lloyd, in the lift at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton – fondly known as the North Acton Hilton because of its size - and he told me that he had tried to get me for his John Schlessinger film An Englishman Abroad, with Alan Bates, but that my agent had told him I was unavailable.

As I was a big fan of John Schlessinger’s films I wasn’t very pleased; surely we could have come to some arrangement after all I was only in one scene in ‘The Angels’ and we could have…..oh it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I did my one scene – filmed at some hospital in Coventry and started to look for another agent.

When I got home one day my wife was buzzing with excitement; I couldn’t calm her down.

She had received a telephone call from The Guardian newspaper: our fourteen year old daughter, Rebecca, had won an essay writing competition and the prize was a couple of weeks in India for two.

The trip would include staying in New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Bombay and Lonavala staying in the best hotels and included £250 spending money - each.

The essay compared life in The Himalayas to life in England; of course Rebecca had never been to The Himalayas and her observations were taken from her geography lessons and her reading of Victor Zorza’s Indian columns in The Guardian under the title The Village Voice – which was about a village north of New Delhi and not The Himalayas at all.

I have to take the credit for pointing out the columns to her and telling her about the competition.

My wife was adamant that I should accompany Rebecca to India; it was a world away in those days – it’s a world away these days but we have seen live cricket from there – and she felt Rebecca needed her father; as it happened she was right but that’s another story.

So we set off for India: the trip was sponsored by Air India and The Guardian and judged by the editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston and my favourite Guardian columnist James Cameron – no not the Titanic/Avatar creator.

There were two other winners: a fourteen year old girl from Bristol and a nineteen year old boy from somewhere in the home counties; his father accompanied him and the girl from Bristol was accompanied by her female English teacher.

We had to have injections for cholera, typhoid and polio and took pills for malaria.

The evening before we were due to fly out to New Delhi we met and were entertained by the Indian High Commissioner and his family at his London residence; they gave us tea with warm milk and samosas; the High Commissioner and his family were charming – as it turned out it was a taste of what was to come – and when they spoke to us they shook their heads, Peter Sellers style, which was something else we saw a lot of in India.

Later that day we were installed in a really nice hotel near Gloucester Road tube station and went out to eat at a posh Indian Restaurant close by; ‘Princess Margaret comes here often’ we were told and we felt really important.

The following morning we emerged for breakfast and it seemed the father and son, from the Home Counties, had never eaten Indian food before and were feeling a bit green around the gills; they hadn’t even tried it as an experiment when they heard they were going to spend a little time in the sub-continent; this was also a sign of things to come: on our second day in India they didn’t even make it out of their room and had to postpone their trip to the Taj Mahal so we went ahead without them; I had wondered about the title of the John Schlessinger film An Englishman Abroad but in India it was slowly starting to make sense.

Their Delhi Belly, or whatever it was, deprived them of one of the greatest train journeys I have ever taken also the wonderful experience at Delhi Railway Station; it was such a huge exciting culture shock that I can still smell and taste it now: everything out of the story and picture books came to life; porters with four or five suit cases on their heads, a blind beggar and a beggar with no hands; crowds of people asleep on the platforms; bikes, rickshaws and more bikes.

There was a certain smell about the place; a smell not unpleasant although it might have been to some; a smell I got to like even though it was probably a mixture of faeces, urine and spices; the father and son missed the first class travel on that train, and from New Delhi to Agra, we were extremely comfortable in individual reclining seats – I remember thinking ‘you don’t get this in Britain!’

The food was freshly cooked and the staff on the train was at our beck and call.

The lavatories on the train gave an introduction to the Indian way of life; there were two lavatories in each cubicle: one for the western way and one for the Asian way; the Asian way was just a hole in the floor as the Asians squat whilst we, the westerners, sit on the loo.

As we looked through the windows on the train we saw plenty of evidence of this as it was early in the morning and people were going about their daily ablutions – in public; they were standing under stand pipes washing their bodies and if we saw one man squatting for a crap we saw a hundred.

I still have the image now of men in the distance squatting with a tail going from their bottoms to the ground.

We learned that they wiped their arses with the paper in their left hands and ate with their right.

Rebecca had never flown before and the journey from Heathrow to New Delhi was a good way of getting used to it. I don’t know how long the flight was but I remember eating, drinking, sleeping, eating again and still being in the air; the flight wasn’t very full and I appeared in the ‘in flight’ movie on that flight and also on the way back; an embarrassingly small role, I have to add, and nobody noticed me in the movie but they all saw my name in the end credits.

Stepping off the plane the heat and humidity hit our ankles even though it was April and dark. It was something like five in the morning UK time but we were raring to go.

We lived in Northampton at the time – maybe that was why my acting career was going south – and whenever we told anybody in India where we lived in England, their eyebrows would lift in confusion and then they would give that charming shake of the head we had seen at the High Commissioner’s Residence; they had never heard of Northampton so we would quickly add ‘sixty miles north of London.’

Even though it was late we needed to rise very early the following morning as an extra trip had been arranged; so at five fifteen I had my first Indian breakfast: masala omelette, toast and tea with hot milk.

Two Ambassador type cars picked us up at the front of our hotel and we were whisked off to Mrs Gandhi’s residence.

Yes we were going to meet the formidable Mrs ‘G’; her official residence seemed to be in a residential area, and we were led into a huge garden; there must have been two or three hundred other people there as there was some rule in India that anyone could show up to meet the Prime Minister; whether she actually met any of them I don’t know.

After the cold and dark of Britain, we were suddenly in a heat wave and hit by extreme brightness from the early morning sun; I had my white jacket on and even wore a tie; the local inhabitants wore very loose clothes, huge bell-bottom trousers or flairs and nearly all wore hats.

Parakeets and monkeys roamed freely as we followed a smiling official towards the main building; there didn’t seem to be a lot of noise but a kind of hum about the place accompanied by the whirls of cameras, the odd call from a human in the distance and then lots of squawking from the parakeets.

Over one side of the garden was a party of people huddled together; I got the impression that this was a whole organisation that had shown up to see the premier and not just their duly elected representatives.

We were shown into a kind of outer room and the others waiting in there seemed very nervous.

I suppose as an actor I had worked, and have worked since, with well known people; well known people in show business world, that is, not world leaders who go down in history; well known people so full of themselves, sometimes, that they are very unpleasant and sometimes when these well known people suddenly become unknown people it’s a bit of a relief.

After about five minutes or so we were called and led into another room; the room didn’t seem to have any aesthetic qualities at all, the furniture was functional: a sofa, an occasional table and a few chairs; behind the table was an open French window, which led to a quiet part of the garden, and another doorway was covered by a curtain.

When Mrs Gandhi entered she did the full theatrical bit through that curtain; she walked in as if she was the leader of the biggest democracy in the world, she walked in like a world leader, an important member of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and a figure of history.

She was accompanied by a few bodyguards; I have often thought about those body guards as it was her private bodyguard that turned and killed her eighteen months later in the grounds of that very building.

Everybody stood up when she entered and she sat down between the two girls on the sofa; Rebecca and the other fourteen year old girl.

Straight away it was obvious she was very comfortable with them; she started to chat informally but I noticed she didn’t have any small talk at all; she asked them about their essays, how they liked India – even though we had only been there eight hours - and would they ever consider coming back again; then she asked them where they lived; when it was Rebecca’s turn she said she lived in Northampton sixty miles north of London: “I know where Northampton is” Mrs Gandhi snapped “I was at Oxford.”

At one point I noticed Mrs Gandhi ring a bell she had secreted in her hand; through the curtain came somebody and before we could see them she asked them to get a photographer; this was the cue for us to stand behind her but it was also the cue for the bodyguards to push and shove each other to try and get into the shot.

I was standing at the end so didn’t think I had a chance of being included because when the photographer got ready to take the photo he seemed to aim it over to the other side of the room; but one of the body guards tried to get his face in to the shot and gave me a little push; I shoved gently back and in the subsequent photo he disappeared totally behind the person standing next to me; serves him right.

After the photo Mrs Gandhi shook hands with a couple of us and swept out as sweepingly as she had swept in.

I often think about those body guards.

Record four shows at once on a single DVR

Record four shows at once on a single DVR; for those not living in the USA, and looking at the stats it seems that’s the majority, that is a commercial put out here on television by AT&T.

AT&T is the big Kahuna of telephone companies here in the good old US of A; the equivalent of British Telecom in Britain and whatever the big Kahuna is in your country; the phone company who rent the lines out to all the others; the company who have the i-Phone as they were the only company who accepted it without changes from Apple.

It got me thinking as to who would want to record four shows at once on a single DV – not forgetting – the R. I can’t even begin to think of a situation where I would want to do such a thing; I mean what would I be doing whilst my DVD recorder records four shows from the TV shows available? And are there at least four shows anywhere on the networks, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, worth recording?

But I guess people will fall for it and order the service from the Big Kahuna; they will be buying something they will very rarely use as we have all done.

I have just cancelled our cable service mainly because I didn’t use hardly any of the hundreds of TV channels available. All we watch is KCET which is the PBS in Los Angeles and Jeopardy, of course, on ABC.

I watch Jeopardy to exercise my Random Access Memory; RAM to computer guys. Us computer guys, I have to say, as we are all users (victims). If there are answers I don’t know I don’t mind but I have to answer the ones I do know before the contestant and as I seem to have collected a lot of useless information over the years I do it loads of times; I can’t answer questions on calculus or other math(s) problems and I must try to have a look at Greek Mythology one of the days.

I’ve always collected useless information without knowing it; for instance somebody asked me, the other day, who was the first test tube baby and I answered immediately Louise Brown – not very clever just there in my brain.

Another thing I have tried to do over the years is to remember as many people’s names as possible; David Frost was very good at it and look where it got him; it’s very disarming to meet someone famous and when you meet them again they’ve remembered your name.

I met the great comedian Les Dawson in a pub one time when I was working for ATV doing the soap Crossroads in Birmingham. I only did 13 episodes of it so I wasn’t really famous – even though people still come and mention it to me 39 years later. Two years later he came up to me in a pub (again) in Acton, London, and not only did he remember me from the pub, he remembered my first name; very impressive.

I was doing a film a few years ago, way before Frost and Nixon, and I mentioned to another actor, who was playing the leading role, the thing about David Frost being good at remembering names and he said “Who’s David Frost?” The film was called ‘Reeling in Reality’ but I’ve forgotten the other guy’s name!

Let’s get back to recording the four shows at once and people buying so many channels that they will never watch; isn’t it the same as all the people who buy a smart phone and never use any of the applications – or apps as they call them. By the way I went into a cafe the other day and instead of having ‘sides’ listed on the menu board they had put ‘apps.’

There I am (above) eating gumbo at the famous Farmer's Market here on 3rd Street with short hair.

Yesterday I was sitting at there at the Farmer’s Market looking at the amount of people staring at their smart phones.

Some of those people were writers and there was the odd actor and a few older people sitting around. There was a big man who is not right in the head who sometimes wears very funny hats – like a duck with a feather in it.

The place is full of characters like him getting their food from the various food stalls there; I buy my coffee at Bob’s Doughnuts, banter with the Latino girls who work there, practicing my Spanish, and indulge in the odd doughnut. And the creative people who have characters all around them to write about are staring into their phones as if they are crystal balls.

Twenty five years ago there was no such industry; between then and now a whole culture has built up and now we have many amateur photographers who think they are taking pictures like David Bailey or Ansell Adams and now they are using their ‘apps’ – or looking for them more than likely.

I had just returned from doing a little show at a residential home which I’ve been to before a couple of times. I usually sing them a few songs and sometimes they join in; the first time I went there I just sang some Irish songs and when I finished they shouted out " Hey! Where’s Danny Boy?"

I don’t really know it so I 'la la la’d' it and they seemed satisfied. Yesterday I sang a few more American ones and their favourite one was ‘All I Have to do is Dream’ which they sang along to; they know nothing about iPhones, cable stations or even what a DVR is – never mind recording 4 shows at once on a single DVR.

But I bet they would have loved to spend a day at 3rd Street at the Farmer’s Market – staring at the people staring at their smartphones!! Hey there's Bob's below.

Britain and the USA; the difference.

Have a look at that egg on toast above; succulent isn't it? The egg lies on that slice of toast waiting for the corner of another slice to be dipped into the yolk again and eaten; once in a while you might drip some of the yolk onto your chin and in that case you might want to take your knife and scrape it off and put it into your mouth; maybe scraping it onto your fork first.

My Grandad would eat the white of the egg and then put the yoke onto his knife and straight into his mouth. Some of it would go down his chin and he would do the inevitable thing with his knife; although not scraping it onto his fork first.

When I was working on the motorbikes all those many years ago there was a cafe on the corner of (I think) Winnie Road and Bristol Road South, in Birmingham, where I was introduced to egg on toast.

The egg is served on an uncut slice of hot buttered toast and then another slice of toast is cut in half and placed on either side of the plate. When you eat you dip the corners of the toast into the yolk and when all the yoke is eaten you eat the rest with your knife and fork.

And that is egg on toast - not an egg sandwich but egg on toast.

There are two kinds of egg sandwiches: one is a boiled egg sandwich and the other is a fried egg sandwich; with the boiled egg sandwich you boil the egg, peel it and mash it with salt and mayonnaise then put it between two slices of bread and butter; not toast!

With a fried egg sandwich you put the fried egg between two slices of bread without butter - not bloody toast.

Very hard to say that to an American waiter - bread NO TOAST!!

I know what you are asking - what has all this to do with the price of fish? - nothing.

So yesterday I went for my usual bike ride with my buddies along Venice Beach here in sunny old Los Angeles; it's a twelve mile jaunt and yesterday it was a bit heavy as there was a wind we had to ride into - it was exhilarating but I was glad when we finished.

We meet most weeks in the Fig Tree Cafe for breakfast and eat on the terrace outside; we have a view of the Pacific and the passing eccentric characters and the general wild people of Venice sporting their three hats (e.g.) at once; we hear the sounds of the lapping water and the rest of the terrace are privy to the sounds of us talking movies.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was eating my breakfast Quasadillas, I noticed that my friend Jim had ordered a couple of eggs - over easy. They looked really nice on his plate and I thought I would have some eggs - egg on toast - the next time which was yesterday.

Why did I bother to ask?

The time came to order; there is no egg on toast on the menu at the Fig tree so I had to ask for it specifically as follows:

'Can you put two eggs on top of a couple of slices of toast and do one extra slice of toast (so I could dip)?'

I thought that sounded quite simple and he didn't ask anything apart from how I'd like the eggs - 'over easy.'

Whilst waiting we chatted and drank our coffee for a while and eventually the food arrived; the Garden Omelette, Latkas and Eggs Benedict - but where was mine?

I looked around and then the waiter came over with a side plate of toast, cut in half, and a piece of foil wrapped butter. I put the butter between the two halves as it was frozen and I wanted to melt it so it would spread.

Then the waiter came back with my second slice of toast as before and as before I put the butter between the two halves again and said 'Where are the eggs?"

He went away and came back with yet another slice of toast as before and as before again I put the butter between the toast.

Then I had three side plates with a slice of toast on each; so I took the toast and put them all onto the one plate.

My friend Jim took a photo of it and here it is:



Next I went inside the cafe and enquired about my eggs - 'they're coming!'

A few minutes later the waiter brought the eggs on a plate so instead of having eggs on toast I had eggs on plate!!!

I asked the waiter what had happened and he told me that there are two different departments back there - one for the toast and one for the eggs!!!

Next week I'm going back to pancakes.

Earthquake and the shot heard round the range!!

Here in Southern California there is an earthquake industry; for instance a company specialises in a safety earthquake valve which automatically turns off the gas in your home in cases of earthquakes; we have the earthquake kit, carried in the car and at home we have the Moses box, tucked away in our wardrobe and other storage places with canned food and other supply essentials in case of an earthquake.

We see many television programmes telling us what to do in an earthquake and what to put in your emergency kit; up to about twelve months ago we were told that the best place to go in a quake would be to stand in a door frame but that has changed. The best place we are now told is under a table.

That may seem a bit silly to people who have never been in a quake and have only seen them on the movies, but it’s the most practical. In an earthquake you are more likely to get hurt or even killed by a can of beans flying across the room or your television crashing into you than falling down a crack in the road.

So our communal heart attack came yesterday in the form of an earthquake; the epicentre was a few hundred miles away in Baja but we certainly felt it here.

It was 7.2 on the Richter scale which is much bigger than the 7.0 quake in Haiti – a lot bigger as it get exponentially bigger the higher you go on the scale which is a logarithmic scale, meaning that the numbers on the scale measure factors of 10. So, for example, an earthquake that measures 4.0 on the Richter scale is 10 times larger than one that measures 3.0 and so on.

I think I read that the Chile quake at 8.8 was something like 5,000 times bigger than the Haiti quake.

An earthquake is a huge adrenalin rush; you don’t know how long it’s going to last, how serious it’s going to be or even if this is your last moment on earth.

I was adding a bass line to a song I was recording a couple of years ago when one came. I was doing this at home as I do all my recordings here; I have a limited musical talent but I can play a few instruments up to a mediocre standard and in any case I can’t afford to hire musicians so I play all the instruments myself. By the way it’s great fun.

As I was recording in the morning I hadn’t bothered to get dressed before starting work – in fact most of the time I write wearing my dressing gown – and when the quake started I was just wearing shorts with nothing on my feet.

When the quake stopped I had visions of being rescued in my underpants if it had been bigger so from then on, for a little while anyway, I was up and dressed before starting work.

Yesterday’s quake was different; I was at the market. Once a month I take a day off from being an actor, or a writer or even organising my show in Edinburgh and sell at Fairfax High School Outdoor Flea Market; it goes a long way towards our rent but it’s a great atmosphere and great fun.

I was sitting behind my stall when I felt the first shake – yes the earth moving – and of course you are never sure if it is, in fact, moving or if you’re dizzy or even imagining things but the shake got bigger and bigger till I was sure. I looked around and heard the word ‘quake’ from the girl in the stall next to me and then the guy from the stall the other side of me said ‘did you feel that?’ and the girl said ‘it’s still happening.’ Which, indeed, it was!

I looked around and all the people that had been walking and talking a moment earlier were standing still; not a word was spoken and the market place was completely silent. The shaking was still shaking, the adrenalin was going higher, the silence was quieter and suddenly it stopped. It seemed like half an hour but in truth was a matter of minutes and then everybody started to move again and talk.

At that precise moment we didn’t know whether the rest of Southern California had been completely obliterated from the face of the earth or what had happened. A few figures were banded about – 7.2, 6.5 – from some of the experts there and then we called our loved ones to see if they were all right.

I called my wife who had gone to Starbucks for a frappuccino at the Hollywood/Highland Centre where the eyes of the world were focused a few weeks ago on the Academy Awards; she said she wasn’t sure she felt the shaking – she wondered what it was – but she was ok. As a rule you don’t feel much if you are walking or driving.

It kind of reminded me of something that happened to me many years ago when I was in the army cadets.

I wrote of my experience in the SAS a few weeks ago and the reason I was quite good at being a soldier when I joined was that I was in the army cadets for four years beforehand. I was good at marching, playing the drum, shooting, map reading and all the rest of the stuff and at the age of sixteen I was teaching map reading, battlefield tactics, weapon training and even the military drum.

After a couple of years I passed all the exams and tests and I was promoted to sergeant.

I taught the little fellas the first thing about a Bren gun that the tiniest part had the longest name – the Body Locking Nut Retainer Plunger – and how to take the thing apart in less than half a minute and in map reading I would tell them what a map is; a piece of land drawn to scale on a piece of paper or parchment.

We would go to the range and fire the .303 Lee Enfield rifle; it weighed ten pounds and when you fired it the rifle would give you an almighty kick in the shoulder if you didn’t hold it properly; I’ve seen many a bruised shoulder and sometimes a black eye when it wasn’t held properly.

At the range we would be split into two groups; those that did the firing and those that did the scoring.

When you fired the rifle it made a hug noise and the firing line always created the most god awful din that you could imagine. The one thing you were not allowed to wear on the range was ear plugs and it was a wonder we didn’t all go deaf. The reason for this is that we needed to hear orders.

The real scary part was the scoring; the scorers had to go to a place called the butts. This was a place dug into the ground beneath the targets. There was a bench to sit on and there were two targets at each post; when one target was up you pulled the other one down on a pulley system.

When a bullet hit the target the scorer would mark where on the target the bullet had hit. We would do this with a marker on a long stick with a board attached to the top. If a firer hit the bull we would show the white side and touch the target in the top left hand corner and then touch the bull. There were four rings on the target; bull, inner, outer and magpie. We touched another corner for the inner showing the dark side of the marker and so on.

The reason why it was so scary is that we could see the bullets landing behind the targets in the sandy hill and it was like being fired at; with that and the sound of ricochets and banging from the firing line it was like being at war; we had to yell at each other to be heard and when the firing stopped we had to paste up the holes in the target. The bull’s eye was two tones – black and white – and the idea was to aim at the corner of the bull to make a good group.

After we pasted over where the bullets had hit the target off it would go again.

One day the heart attack or the earthquake for that day happened; the kid next to me, John Bethal, suddenly shouted out “Fuck me – I’ve been shot!”

I turned around and he had his hand over his forehead with blood pouring down his arms and onto the floor.

I don’t know who did it but someone called the firing line and told the officer in charge - a Lt Leonard - who covered the 100 yards from the line to the butts in one second flat – or that’s what it seemed like.

What had happened was a bullet had hit the bank behind the targets, ricocheted back and scraped across John’s hairline – figuratively parting his hair!!

When the Lieutenant arrived he sorted everything out and they carried John away for treatment; he eventually turned out to be okay and there was a lot of talk as to whether it was an actual bullet or a piece of grit but it was generally considered a bullet as the sand was quite soft – but you never know.

Another cadet, who was very posh, sat in John’s seat and said “Lightening never strikes in the same place twice.”

Moseley Road Swimming Baths

There was something that happened at Moseley Road Swimming Baths when I was about eight years old which, I suppose, I will remember for the rest of my life.

It is as clear to me today as when it happened all those many years ago; sounds like ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier doesn’t it but let’s proceed.

Someone posted some photos on the Internet from a book about Balsall Heath and Highgate; both neighbourhoods of Birmingham, UK.

I bought the book they were in from Amazon; Amazon.co.uk, that is, and there was a photo of Moseley Road Swimming Baths in it; it looked exactly as I remember with dressing rooms surrounding the pool.

So before telling you this little story I looked up to see if the place is still there and in fact the building is being rescued by the Birmingham City Council.

Moseley Road Swimming Baths sounds a strange title and of course there is no such thing; the correct expression would be Moseley Road Baths and if you look above you will see the massive Edwardian Building that is situated on Moseley Road, Birmingham; looking at it from this perspective it looks like some Russian Government Building which I suppose a lot of Edwardian buildings in the do UK look like.

For instance a very good film about Guy Burgess, the spy, called An Englishman Abroad was filmed in Dundee for Moscow.

But back to the baths; the building was built in 1907 about ten years or so after the Public Library, which is a similar looking building, next door.

At the front of the building there are three entrances: one for the first class facilities for men, another for second class facilities for men again and the third was the women’s entrance for all classes.

England was more obsessed with the class system back then than it is these days.

The first class facilities included a slipper bath and a swimming Pool; next to the pool there were cubicles for the men to change and the baths would supply swimming trunks and a towel; a slipper bath, by the way, was a hot bath and the bathtub, itself, was called a slipper bath because when it was upside down it looked like the underside of a slipper.

The second class men’s facilities included a slipper bath and a swimming pool but the pool didn’t have changing cubicles; the men had to change from a bench on the side and the water, which was used in the first class pool, was decanted into the second class pool every week; now there’s a thought!

The women’s facility was just a facility – the slipper bath.

The place has closed down now but in its latter days the homeless and the elderly would go there for a bath; the elderly because it was a safe place to take a bath and the homeless for obvious reasons.

When I started to go there to swim there was only one pool being used; the first class one and you can see a picture of it below.

I attended Clifton Road Junior School and when I was around eight years old we would go there once a week to for swimming lessons; I used to love to go in those days although I was never any good at swimming and spent most of my time in the shallow end which was around three feet deep; the middle of the pool was five feet and the deep end with the diving boards was six feet three inches.

Freddie Bishop, a friend of mine, never came swimming and no matter how hard I tried he would refuse.

His excuse was that he had no swimming trunks and I told him that he could get a slip; a slip is all it was as it was just a piece of thin cloth you tied around your waist with a piece of string which was attached; it looked a bit like a baby's bib; unlike the swimming trunks of the old days of first class service.

We would walk from Clifton Road School, up Clifton Road itself and onto Moseley Road and to the swimming baths building which was situated on the west side of the street; so it took a lot of supervision by the teachers getting us across busy streets and the walk must have taken about fifteen minutes or so.

After our swim I think we were allowed to buy Wagon Wheels or other pieces of chocolate of the day.

After a lot of nagging from me Freddie Bishop finally decided to come and we trotted on our usual route; I was delighted that my friend was coming.

When we got there I shared the dressing room with Fred; the cubicles went the length of the pool with the boys changing rooms on the left and the girls on the right, in the picture.

Our cubicle was by the deep end and I quickly got changed and ran to the shallow end to join everybody else; we would start with the same exercises every week which consisted of holding on to the bar, which encircled the pool, and kicking our legs out at the back to simulate swimming; we did this for quite some time and soon everybody was in the pool; except Freddie.

So I got out of the pool and went to the dressing room to sort him out.

He still had his socks on, when I got there, but couldn't sort out the slip. I think he couldn’t undo the previous knots, or something, and after I tried to help him for a while I left and went back to the pool.

The teacher looked at me and wondered where I had been but I just got back into the water and continued splashing.

A few minutes later I saw Fred leave the dressing room and jump into the deep end; he had his hands in a kind of dive position with his palms flat and as he hit the water they caused an enormous splash; I wondered what was going on and when I didn't see him come up I shouted to the teacher “Freddie Bishop has jumped in the deep end.”

“Don't be silly” the teacher said and started to supervise some children at the other end of the line telling them to kick harder.

I looked back up to the deep end and saw his head bob up and then disappear again.

“Look sir! Look!” I shouted.

The teacher looked up as Freddie’s head came up again – then disappeared.

We were ordered out of the pool and the teacher ran towards the deep end; we kind of wandered up there too.

Thinking back I can't understand why the teacher or a member of the baths staff didn't just get in and pull him out; Freddie kept coming to the surface and then he would go back down and it was obvious to us, even then, that he was drowning – but nobody got in.

A grown up found a big hook on the side and tried to hook him but he went back down again under the six feet of water; the next time he came up he reached with his hand outstretched; thinking back now he might have seen the hook but all I saw at the time was his hand and then we saw it go down to the depths of the deep end again and I thought it was for the last time as there was a look of finality about it – then we were kind of shooed away.

They did get him out but I never saw it happen.

I got back to the cubicle and his clothes lay there; I kind of thought it was my fault for persuading him to come swimming when he could have been back in the safe warm school.

When we were dressed and ready to go back to school I saw Freddie sitting behind a desk near the slipper baths entrance with towels and blankets wrapped around him; he was breathing very deeply and I could see his very frightened brown eyes staring ahead like a wounded fawn that had been rescued.

The missing fourteen hundred and thirty nine words.

Well this has been a bad week for computers in our house; I had some kind of bug or adware or whatever and it was called ‘Security Tool’ which was a great nuisance. I looked it up on the Internet and on You Tube there was a demonstration as to how to get rid of it but their computer wasn’t like mine so I had to buy a spy ware doctor.

I won’t go into chapter and verse on the removal but suffice it to say whatever ‘Security tool’ did was to mess up my machine and I had to do a ‘system restore’ which meant I had to download everything again which I had put on to the computer over the years like my photo shop and the pass words to the recording facilities I have.

I am driven towards asking the following question: who benefits from sending viruses around the Internet apart from snotty nosed kids who live with their parents and spend all the time in their rooms? The people who make the spy ware, I suppose.

So here I am almost back to normal; my head shots are on an external hard drive (LaCie) which has become corrupted.

I think it’s because there is a lot of footage on there from the filming I did in Ireland last year which was put on there from a MAC computer. I couldn’t access it from my PC so had to use a MAC drive – which wasn’t very good but I kept my head shots and other photos on there too and I think the mixture of the two systems has corrupted the drive; that’s only my theory.
I went to Kinko’s the other day to see if I could access it and they don’t have MAC computers there any more so I am lost.

It means of course that I haven’t been able to write anything lately; I was getting on so well with my novel but then I had the computer trouble; funny thing I just noticed – I write with Microsoft word but find Open Office a bit more ‘book’ or ‘novel’ friendly but what I find strange is that on ‘word’ I have written 47,103 words and in Open Office I have written 48,542 which means that fourteen hundred and thirty nine words are missing – now isn’t that strange?

So that’s all for now as I have to get on with it – toodleoo!

British Teeth and Food.

There I am above and those are my choppers; they're not that brilliant but at least they're mine.

I have had work on them some times through necessity and sometimes for cosmetic reasons and for actors dental work is usually tax deductible.

Once when I had no money our union, Equity, paid for some treatment so when other members of Equity who have lapsed ask me what Equity has done for me I tell them about my dental bills.

So the first thing that happens to you when you come to America – well to be more precise Los Angeles – is that people look at your teeth.

You wonder why they do this and then when you put the TV on the late night comedians crack jokes all the time about British teeth and British food. Jay Leno being the number one pain in the arse on both subjects; Jay Leno whose teeth you cannot see and who eats nothing but pizza.

There was a joke about the police identifying murder victims by their teeth x-rays which cannot be done on Britain due to the lack of dentists there; he's about as good as a British dentist; some joke about the British not knowing what tooth floss is. Loads of jokes and if they were funny it might not be so bad.

They laugh at Hugh Grant's teeth which, to me, look okay. They function, they're probably stronger than the average American's teeth but I think one or two at the front kind of touch each other, or are crooked or something equally as silly.

There is a TV show here called The Bachelor where one man has to choose a wife from 25 beautiful model type girls. One of the bachelors was an Englishman, some time ago, who they liked, but before they put him on the show ABC spent $20,000 on his teeth. I don't know if he chose a girl or if he got married but I hope he can still eat nuts.

I was watching Luciano Pavarotti on TV the other night singing duets and he sung 'It's a Man's World' with James Brown. It was absolutely fantastic but I couldn't help noticing James Brown's teeth. They were as white as – I have to say it – the driven snow; and they were all there and perfect and I thought I bet he didn't eat many nuts in his lifetime. The thing is he probably paid many thousands of dollars to get them like that but no matter they didn't look real.

By the way is driven snow whiter than ordinary snow?

I haven't been able to watch too many variety shows on TV here, not proper variety shows, in any case, but I have never seen a man pulling a steam roller with his teeth. I have never heard if such an event either; in Britain it happens all the time and when you see those people close up their teeth are not like James Brown's.

So are English teeth worse than American teeth? Well if you travel to the boonies of America there are some families who only have one tooth between them and that one is full of decay. It's the tooth they share when they're having nuts for tea; the person with the tooth chews the nut then passes it to their relations to suck and swallow. I should imagine it's quite a spectacle.

And what about the food? When I first came here it was as if I'd landed on the island where The Lord of the Flies was set. If you remember it was about a load of boys who were suddenly on an island looking after themselves and making up their own rules and suddenly I'm in America and they are eating a bacon and egg breakfast with syrup poured over it. They also put jam on their toast and eat it at the same time as their bacon and eggs; in other words they are barmy.

It's a great treat when you get here with the pizzas – has to be a New York or a Chicago pizza - their In-n-Out burgers and the rest of the novelty foods, which are usually full of fructose corn syrup, but when you've had your fill of the fillet Mignon steaks and the rest of the stuff you long for a decent leg of lamb with mint sauce and the trimmings.

Maybe a sandwich of Marmite – which I never ate in Britain - or some cheese. Any cheese!! All the cheese here is processed. Sometimes the Brie or the Camembert cheeses are okay as they have to be processed but by and large the quality of cheese, milk, fresh cream or anything dairy is really piss poor.

So the jokes about British food as well as the ones about British teeth fall on deaf ears in this house and what am I cooking for dinner tonight: liver and onions with bacon and mashed potatoes – yum yum.

Gullane and the Academy Awards.

Well it's been over a week since I made a contribution to the blog with a post but here I am back and ready.

There are a lot of other things I have to do; I have to write my novel, organise my one man show for the Edinburgh Festival and do my taxes.

What appears to be taking a lot of time is the one man show; I did the classic thing of registering my show on the Edinburgh Fringe web site and then forgetting what user name and password I had chosen.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem as all you do in that case is click on 'reminder of password' and it gets e-mailed to you automatically but there is one snag.

AT&T in the form of SBCGlobal are my servers and they put a block on foreign domain names they do not recognise. So when the reminder came to me from the web site in question it was blocked and sent back. The name of the domain where the e-mails were coming from was edfringe and edfringe might look a bit shifty to a computer.

So I have made many a phone call to Scotland over the past week and it still isn't sorted out. The big problem with calling them is that they finish work at 6:00 pm so all the calls have to be made before 10:00 am Los Angeles time. If the person I want is in a meeting they never get out of it before the end of their day.

So it's a bit of a bind.

There is a place called Gullane which is a small town – or more like a village -on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland. It's about twenty to thirty miles from Edinburgh and in it there is a village hall which I want to use for a few rehearsals before the show; there it is above.

I know of the hall, and Gullane, because my uncle used to live there. He had half a Dublin accent and half a Scottish one and my dad couldn't understand a word he said.

When I was staying there with my brother, many years ago, we took a job in Gullane at the fair ground collecting the fares on the Dodgem Cars.

The first thing we were taught to do was to give incorrect change to the punters. It's something I never did but our boss, who was a little fella who wore a hat with a feather in it, would show us how to let the customer see the change in our hand and then as we put it into their hand we would somehow keep a coin in the folds of our fingers; I don't think I could have done it even if I'd wanted to.

We collected the fare when the cars started to move and we had to jump between them and kind of flatter and chat up the girls to try to keep them in for another ride; I liked doing that.

The thing you couldn't do was to touch two cars at the same time as the electricity would go through you and give you a nasty shock. I can still feel the pain from trying it once – it wasn't touching cars exactly, but the bar that was on the back which would reach the ceiling of the rink to give power to each car.

There was that, of course, and trying to avoid being hit by the cars.

I remember it took us some time to get paid too as the people running the dodgems tried to get away with it.

My cousin, who still lives in Gullane, always reminds me of the time my brother Pat and me worked at the fair ground.

So I think a nice little drive out to Gullane each time I rehearse would be nice and pleasant when I am there and I can get some fish and chips with my wife and wander along the beach.

When I go there I have another blog which I will be posting so I hope you will be able to follow me there.

It's been over a week since the Academy Awards and I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome. I'm glad Hurt Locker won but I would have liked to have seen Up in the Air win. It was a brilliant script and well performed and was about a man who thought he had everything but he didn't and it was a really good satire on America. Try and see it if you can; it's not a rip roaring comedy or a thriller but well worth a watch.

I asked a friend of mine if he enjoyed the Academy Awards and he said that they were a load of shit; a blatant publicity stunt.

Well you know who am I to argue with that; but people enjoy them. I always do and loved last year with Hugh Jackman; I didn't expect Stave Martin and Alec Baldwin to be like that but they were good in their own way.

I know it's a publicity thing but at least members of the academy get to vote – so it's real as far as that's concerned but it's only their opinion. There is never a degree of difficulty point like in the diving at the Olympic games so it really is very hard to say whose performance is better than anyone else's?

Is it harder to play a country 'n' western singer than a company executive? It depends doesn't it – I mean it would be harder for me to play a country n' western singer than Jeff bridges as he is almost there.

And what about directing? What about it I hear you say.

There was one scene in The Hurt Locker when the chap – the protagonist – was trying to defuse a bomb in a car; that scene was almost perfect and it was made up of good acting, good placement of the camera shots and – most importantly – good editing.

What kind of direction went into that scene? We will never know, of course, but the director's job is to get the performance from the actor; a discussion with the Director of Photography about the camera angles too but the main job is to make it believable and if the actor is not believable – over the top, playing it too small or just plain unbelievable – the whole thing is ruined.

The director has to tell the actor, if he doesn't know, what the character wants, what he has just been through and then has to tell him, using the correct words, how he is doing.

If the director tells the actor he is a load of shit where is that going to get him? If the director tells the actor how good he is that could be counterproductive too – the correct words need to be used I repeat.

That is why I am glad Avatar didn't win; I haven't seen the film but every time someone tells me about it they tell me of the 3D effects and the magic but I have yet to hear anyone tell me about the acting.

With regards to how important and correct the awards are I will say one of the greatest actors never recaived an Academy Award for any of his performances; I'm talking of Charlie Chaplin.

The Academy Awards

Well there's the view (above) from our apartment of Runyon Canyon; you can see what the weather is like here and it's the same ten minutes walk away to the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood where today they are holding the Academy Awards.

So the whole world can see what the weather is like here – our kids in England can see as they bask in the cold there.

At the moment the red carpet is on wall to wall television and each star is being interviewed by all the TV stations. As I sit here typing this at 5.22 pm I can hear the multitude of helicopters hovering above sending pictures out to the rest of the world.

Elsewhere in Hollywood streets are blocked off as thousands of limos – some stretch and some not – are welcomed to the show; a lot of them are arriving in SUVs and to try and negotiate the streets just to get home is a pain; but I can stand it as it's only once a year.

The limos have been 'on the road' for many hours as they have to be guided to Hollywood and each has to arrive at a certain time. Then they go through a security system but before he went through the system George Clooney jumped out of his limo and walked along Hollywood to meet the fans and I'm sure they were delighted. He didn't just give them a quick hello he really stayed. There was so much fencing between him and the fans it reminded me of when I was in Belfast 35 years ago.

I've only known one person who actually went to the awards in a limo and she had to start out at 11.00 am and wait in the limo line on Beverly Boulevard; in the limo they had drinks and snacks.

The other person I knew who went was Julian Fellowes who won the Academy Award for writing Gosford Park and he told me he was surprised when he won as he thought the winners were, somehow, informed.

There are only two people who actually know the results at the moment and if it ever leaked out everybody would know where the information came from.

This is the one big event in America that the rest of the world take notice of; the super bowl, the basket ball play games, the so called World Series, The Golden Globes or whatever you can think of mean nothing to the rest of the world but the occasion today does.

On Thursday night The Roosevelt Hotel held a roof top party and today we have a notice on the front door of our building to tell us where we can complain about the noise – which I didn't hear by the way – and it seems to me that the people who would complain would be those who didn't get an invitation.

It's the same with movie shoots; there is a campaign to try and bring movies and TV productions back to Hollywood as over the last few years run away production has taken them off to far away places with strange sounding names – like New Mexico which gives a really good tax incentive.

But can you blame them shooting movies elsewhere when people complain here if you shoot in their street – just like the people complaining about the noise from The Roosevelt Hotel and the fact that for one week in their miserable lives they have to make a few detours around the streets.

Anyway on with the Academy Awards which start at 5.30 – I have my Guinness ready and the oven is cooking dinner timed to be ready for when the awards end.

The Storyteller; The Man with the Pen (Prologue).

Hi folks,

I have been asked to put the prologue onto this blog to see if it can be done; I haven't done this before on here so let's see what happens.

It is the prologue (The Man with the Pen) to my novel The Storyteller and I hope you like it.

The Audition Process.

I'm just going to ramble on here about auditions; it's the process that every actor knows and a lot of us hate.

Let's face it there can't be many other jobs on earth where you have to audition all the way through your career; there's only one other job where it can be worse and that's a comedian playing to nobody at all just a producer sitting there demanding that you make him laugh.

I saw something similar once when I went to my very first audition – well it wasn't my very first as I had to audition for drama school: one piece of Shakespeare, one modern piece and a poem.

Every actor will recognize those three requirements and I think I explain quite well how I started as an actor in this 90 second clip from a talk show - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrGBnPB8IN0 - have a look and I'll wait for you.

Getting back to my first audition; I had been at drama school for three months and I saw in The Stage newspaper an advertisement for a pantomime at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester and I decided to give it a go; why not?

By the way I know people on the American continent will hardly know what a pantomime is and will confuse it with 'mime' so have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantomime which should fill you in.

I was living in Shropshire at the time so Leicester wasn't that many hours travel away and when you are at that stage of your career you will try anything; so off to Leicester I went and I can't tell you how I got there but it took a long time on many trains.

The De Montfort Hall has a capacity of two thousand and is a venue for the Leicester Philharmonic Choir and the Leicester Symphony Orchestra; acts like the Beatles played there and Buddy Holly when he came to the UK played there too and walking in that day I noticed how big the place was; an indoor stadium no less.

Most of the others there for the auditions were variety acts; I came as an actor even though I was only a drama student; trying to run before I could walk.

There was a really good double act auditioning made up of two brothers in suits who did a song and dance and many young girls with beautiful singing voices; one fella came on stage with a newspaper and started to sing 'Old Man River' then he said to the producers out front 'I also do lines.'

'Do you?' they said 'well let's hear some.'

That was where the newspaper came in; he unfolded it and started to read it out loud in a mock Shakespearian voice – 'The Prime Minister today met the cabinet at number 10 . . '

There was no hook to drag him off stage or loud 'thank you' - they just let him finish and thanked him.

Then came the comedian I mentioned earlier; he was obviously a bit like me – no experience.

He came on the stage and started telling a few jokes and of course because there was no audience – only us waiting to audition – there was nobody laughing and this threw him totally.

The more jokes he told and the more silent responses he heard the more confidence he lost till he was a quivering wreck.

I remember the last thing he did was to take a chair from the back of the stage and say 'For my next trick I am going to do a back flip from this chair and land on my head on the floor' and he stood on the chair; then he looked out front, got down off the chair and said 'no I'm not' and walked off.

It was very embarrassing and I was next; 'tell us your name' somebody said and I told them.

'What do you do?'

'I'm an actor.'

“What do you do – lines?'

'Yes I'm going to do a piece from Present Laughter by Noel Coward.'

So I did my piece, speaking to the chair, and when I walked off everybody gave me a round of applause; I suppose I was different from everybody else there but I didn't hear another word from them.

Now that has always made me laugh when an actor talks to a chair during an audition but maybe that's just my sense of humour.

Most of the other auditions I've been to over the years have been with just actors and there is a difference between auditions in London and those in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles you really do audition no matter who you are – I don't mean people like Brad Pitt or Jack Nicholson but you would be surprised at the well known faces that audition.

In London actors don't admit they have to audition at all even if they're a nobody – like me; they call them meetings and a lot of the time that's all they are.

You chat with the director for twenty minutes and they assess who you are and base their decision on that.

Lots of times you have to read the lines from one of the scenes; one actor I followed in London had writing next to his name which read 'will not read under any circumstances.' Big headed bastard!!

When you arrive at an audition – on both sides of the Atlantic - you are welcomed with the sight of nervous looking actors who look exactly the same as you; so you can see what type you are as soon as you arrive.

In Los Angeles the actors go dressed for the role; especially for commercials.

I went for the role of Santa Claus once and there in the waiting room when I arrived were three fully dressed Santas and they knew each other.

A bit like the singing Hitlers and the dancing Hitlers from 'The Producers.'

Actors in Los Angeles have their 'sides' with them which are the scenes the casting director wants you to read from the script.

Most actors learn those lines and have worked on it for maybe the last 24 hours.

Actors here are entitled to see the sides 24 hours before any audition – union (SAG) rules.

In London, when I was there, you don't get the sides till you arrive and one time, when I went to meet Ned Sherrin for a play he was directing, they didn't let me see the script till I met Ned Sherrin himself – this kind of process gives you the best sight readers and not necessarily the best actors.

It's a pity about that particular play as Ian Dury was in it and I would have loved to have worked with him.

In Los Angeles they want the best actor for each role and go out of their way to help you which is why you get the sides.

The draw back here is you very rarely meet the director on the first audition and sometimes you don't meet him at all.

The casting director 'reads' you and you will get a call back to meet the director at the second meeting.

If you go for a big movie they just put you on tape so you are at the mercy of the casting director who usually don't know how to direct you properly.

I've been to quite a few seminars, organised by SAG, where there have been agents (they get 10% and no more here unlike in London), managers (15%) and casting directors and you do pick up a lot of hints and tips.

Number one: at an audition when you are reading don't fix your eyes on the other person you are reading with; people don't normally look each other in the eye all the time when they speak to each other. Have a look around, if you don't believe me; so there is no need to do it with the casting director.

Also look at the American TV and movie productions and you will see the actors looking around being natural.

That doesn't mean to say you never look people in the eyes but it's unnerving if you do it all the time.

I also know actors who are quite well known and they don't see why they should go in and meet the director as they have worked with them before or they are friends.

Some directors here still want actors they know to come in for casting as they might want them to do something different from what they normally do; maybe you're well known as playing a killer or a heavy and the director wants to see if you could play something light or comedic.

Or the other way around – you do a lot of comedy and they want to see if you could play that nasty streak or even a bit of violence.

Directors have said, at these seminars, that the actors who don't or won't come in sometimes miss out.

What has been fairly consistent over the years at auditions is the seriousness of the Americans, who mean business, and the nonchalance of some of the English; sometimes the English arrive with the attitude that they have something else more important to do; now what could be more important than your next job?

Of course I haven't been to any auditions in London for over fifteen years as I've been here so things might have changed.

At the last couple of auditions I went to there were some young girls waiting, and I couldn't believe that they spent their whole waiting time sending texts on their smart phones – I refuse to use the word texting – but maybe that's natural too.

We are the world.

There they all were down on La Brea the other day at the ex-Charlie Chaplin studios-ex-AM Studios doing their bit of getting out of their chauffeur driven cars and limos, being filmed as they walked the few steps towards the front gate for it to be shown on the video for their new recording of the famous song.Quincey Jones was inside waiting for them in the same studio as last time; Snoop Dog came in his limo and the rest in theirs; all too well known on their world and unknown in mine; one black man with a beard had the audacity to arrive at the back entrance in his jeep and was told by the guys in the suits and the bald heads and sun glasses that he had to go to the front; just another day in Hollywood as I went to the post office.Plenty of cops around as a young thug tried his luck on the corner with a street crime; he was cuffed and standing by the wall at the back as the world was watching the front.
Just a short post today - let's see if you click on to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glny4jSciVI&feature=channel

My brother.

It seems my last post about abortion and advertising was a bit of a rant; this is according to my brother; he said I lost him at the beginning.

This is my younger brother so I don't suppose it was the first time I lost him in our lives, I mean figuratively of course.

I remember when we were two little boys in an outer area of Dublin called Finglas climbing trees; in fact I think it was closer to Cabra, and my brother fell as we were climbing. We were wearing short trousers in those days, not big enough or old enough to go into longers yet, and as we climbed he slipped and came falling down.

I remember seeing the bits of twigs or sharp bits scratching his legs but he didn't have to worry as he had quite a soft landing; he landed on me!

He nearly knocked me off my branch and we would have both fallen to the ground if I'd have let go.

One day we climbed to the top of Nelson's Pillar in Dublin; it was wearing our poor mother out as it was a long climb up those spiral stairs and my brother didn't like the fact that we were going higher and higher; he had a problem with the height, so he said, but if you shoot forward about twenty years he would climb to the top of a thirty foot A-Frame ladder.

The A-Frame ladder is really supposed to be for a two man operation; one man holding the ladder the other man at the top, unless you are against a wall as in the picture, above, but in the theatre we were in the middle of the stage.

I went to the top of it a few times as we were working at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham setting the lights thirty feet above the stage; the height didn't worry me but the seemingly rickety ladder did.

I wasn't sure whether someone would come walking across the stage, as they worked on their part of assembling the set, and kick the ladder out from under me as we were up there by ourselves sometimes; not always a two man job when we were under pressure to get the set ready.

I would stand there when my brother was at the top, and think of the day he fell down the tree and, as he leaned forward to change the angle of a light that the lighting guy would tell him to move, I half expected him to land on me again; only this time it wouldn't be much of a soft landing from that height.

I also remember around about that time playing football (soccer) with him for some made up team or other; he played in defence and I played somewhere out of the way; as long as I didn't do too much damage I was okay. In fact I remember scoring a few goals just farting about.

About ten minutes into the match, or the game as they say here, my brother went in for a tackle and a few people landed on top of him - so what happened? They had to carry him off; he was the soft landing on that particular day.

He was okay as he came back on to a round of applause after a few minutes of touching his toes and a wipe with the magic sponge.

But football wasn't his game; he went on to play rugby for Birmingham and played representative rugby too and one day he ended up in hospital; I don't know whether he broke his ribs or bent them or what but one of them pierced one of his lungs.

I went to see him in hospital and he lay there in bed with a painful look on his face; what could I say to him?

I had come to cheer him up and, as he looked quite stressed, I tried to make him laugh; when he laughed a terrible look came on his face as it was hurting him to laugh - Sorry Pat.

Freedom of Speech and Abortion.

I haven't posted for a week!!! I was busy doing some proper writing and also entering my novel,
The Storyteller, into a writing competition which meant writing an outline of 300 words, then the first 5000 words of the novel and finally the novel itself.

Now:
I am of the opinion that sports and politics shouldn't mix and living in the UK for so many years we have obviously had a lot of experience; South Africa was banned from international cricket and rugby and then, eventually, the Olympic Games; I wouldn't appear in a TV production which would be sold to South Africa and it cost us Equity members a lot of money.

When apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela said the fact that South Africa was banned from sports helped a lot with apartheid's demise – so which way is right? Who knows?

But back to politics and sport; I really believe they should not be mixed because most of the time sports figures are the biggest arseholes under the sun and they know nothing about anything; case in point is Tim Tebow, famous for being a college footballer, who is doing an anti abortion commercial to be shown during the super bowl on Sunday and should be seen by the many millions watching the event.

Tebow was born in the Philippines the son of Christian Missionaries and he was 'home schooled' by them.

I don't know whether he was a good or bad footballer as I don't have the slightest interest in the game and think it a bit of an oxymoron that the game is called football in the first place when they hardly ever kick the ball but I wonder why they think he is qualified to do such a commercial; I have done a few commercials in my time including one for Brylcreem; I wouldn't have got that commercial if I was bald so what does a home schooled son of missionaries American footballer know about abortions?

Now what do I think of abortion? I am not for it as Mr Tebow's backers would have everybody believe - I am not for abortion and I don't know anybody who is.

However I am pro-choice and I strongly believe in the law as it is in Britain; abortion is freely available on the national health service and it is free.

If you are a married woman you have to have a signature from your husband, in case he would use it as a reason for divorce, and the abortion has to be carried out during the first few months of pregnancy.

There are no maniacs with guns roaming in search of so called abortion doctors and it appears to be an accepted way of life; however that doesn't mean to say that there are no people in Britain who are not pro-choice.

I think I have made my opinion clear on this but let me ask another question; by stopping this commercial, or banning it, what happens to freedom of speech?

Let me switch slightly; over the next few months Gordon Brown, when he thinks the time is right, will call for a general election in Britain; then there will be a three week election campaign.

On the day he calls the election television programmes will be monitored; they will be monitored to show fair play to all the political parties who have a certain amount of candidates standing.

Representatives of the parties will literally have stop watches to see how long each candidate is exposed for and if a news item is about a particular constituency and the news anchor mentions one of the candidates he has to make a mention of the others too.

Political commercials are against the law; they can use billboards but no commercials.

Commercials are replaced by Party Political Broadcasts which are free – when I lived there they appeared on all the main channels at the same time and they would last about 10 minutes or so; which always appeared like a lifetime!!

Another thing that happens there is a ban on political jokes on television; there would be no such thing as impersonators taking off leading politicians of the day – you might say this is against free speech; but what is free speech?

There's no such thing.

We're not allowed to speak when we go to the theatre or the cinema; if you went up the street shouting and cussing you would probably be arrested – so where's free speech?

Somebody was ejected from one of the halls when Tony Blair was making a speech for heckling; isn't that an infringement of freedom of speech?

On television in Britain anything goes; after 9.00 pm (the so called watershed) anything goes as regards so called bad language; words that you are not allowed to say on American television no matter what time it is unless it's on cable.

In Britain, last year, a right wing politician won a seat in the European Parliament and the BBC allowed him to be on Question Time; it cause a controversy but what could they do? They could have banned him, I suppose, but he was very careful on the show not to say anything racial.

The BBC allowed him on in the interests of freedom of speech but you have to ask yourself the question; is he dangerous? Would his appearance on the show and his charisma influence the young?

Fortunately he had no charisma and wasn't very pleasant to look at – but neither was Hitler.

You can look up Tim Tebow to see if he is attractive or not; he just looks like a load of well scrubbed muscle to me and I think his commercial will back fire.

However I think the decision by the supreme court in the Citizens United v. FEC case here a few weeks ago which will allow corporations to spend as much money as they want at the time of an election on hate films is wrong.

It's complicated so here is a smattering from the NYT: Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

Freedom of Speech – yes if you can match the corporations funds.