Went with Owen tonight to see Christopher Hampton's fifth play TREATS at the Garrick.

Backdrop: In 1971 Hampton adapted Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE for a Broadway production starring Claire Bloom. It nightly inspired bravos and applause from the Women's Lib-friendly audiences at the scene where Nora walked out on her marriage at the end of the play. This set him thinking about a recent experience concerning the director of his previous plays Robert Kidd and his then partner Jane Asher. Kidd had been directing MACBETH in America and realised how bad he had been to her and on his return made up his mind to propose. When he arrived home he found she had already moved in with Gerald Scarfe. Hampton then thought but what if the woman couldn't leave the bad relationship? Five years later TREATS opened at the Royal Court Theatre (before transferring to the west end) with Stephen Moore as the new lover, James Bolam as the ex.... and Jane Asher directed by Robert Kidd! How civilised theatre people can be.

As with TOTAL ECLIPSE last week, TREATS was a play I had only ever read before so was keen to see it live (read that however you wish) on stage. While not as badly staged as ECLIPSE Laurence Boswell is not my most favourite of directors so again I was left feeling that the full worth of the text wasn't mined - oh and Billie Piper was off tonight so the usual dynamic of this three-hander was slightly off-kilter. About 10 minutes in I started to feel for Owen, he was being subjected to another play about unsympathetic people!

Ann and Patrick's quiet evening at home is shattered by the arrival of Dave her ex who breaks in, punches Patrick and refuses to leave until Ann explains why he has been replaced by Patrick while away working as a reporter in Iraq. He turns up the next morning and convinces Patrick to invite him round to dinner that night. A miserable evening is had by all as Dave continues to belittle Patrick and Ann in each other's eyes. The next morning Patrick apologises to Ann for his wimpish behaviour but she has her own admission: he was a rebound romance and she wants him out. A week later Dave turns up again to return the rug Ann had let him have and Dave suggests they make love one last time. She agrees only for Dave to physically attack her and tell her to call once she makes her mind up what she wants. After a night of anguish she calls the number. Two weeks later in a mirror image of the first scene Patrick breaks in and demands to know what is going on only this time Ann turns on him and violently orders him out of her life. He leaves but Ann runs after him. Dave is left alone staring at the door. The door opens and Ann returns, they sit on the couch in silence and Dave withdraws from her when she attempts to touch him.

It's always good when the rug is pulled totally from under the audience and the scene where Dave attacks Ann as you think he's about to make love to her certainly did that - the shock was audible. After that the witty barbed comedy you thought was playing out turns icy cold and the unsettling unresolved ending leaves a bitter taste.

The trouble is that Hampton always invests his darker characters with the better lines so Kris Marshall as Dave has no trouble making the evening his as the manipulative Dave. His is a swaggering performance which really makes the outcome of the tussle never in doubt. Interestingly Hampton had wanted the unknown Jonathan Pryce to play this role in the '76 production but he lost out to the more bankable James Bolam who Hampton thought never managed Pryce's feel of lurking danger.

Laurence Fox certainly shines as Patrick in his scenes of gormlessness as Dave runs verbal rings around him and is genuinely touching in the scene when told by Ann she wants to end the relationship, his painstaking attempts to return the front-door key lengthening the torture. But where is his voice? Father Edward should really give him the secrets of his cut-glass Windsor diction as his son's croaky delivery here made a lot of his lines hard to make out - and we were in the centre halfway back!

Antonina Lewis was on for the absent Piper and though okay was a little too stagey in her delivery which stood out against Marshall's on-the-nose delivery and Fox's croaky mumbling. It doesn't help that the character of Ann in the first scenes has only a handful of lines and ultimately is never a character you fully understand the psychology of. At one point after the dinner party she erupts in anger that the men assume she would want to be with either one or the other of them. But Hampton drops this strand and that is exactly the situation.

Here too were early signs of Hampton's awareness of the damage lovers can do each other verbally which later came to fruition in his masterpiece LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES where again the glitteringly evil characters of Valmont and Merteuil have the best lines and scenes but where again the rug is pulled from under the audience when they realise that the enjoyment had by them makes the audience complicit in their actions.

I am grateful for having seen these two early plays of Christopher Hampton - even TREATS was written when he was 29 - but on reflection my admiration for him is based on his later work such as TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD, LES LIAISONS, CARRINGTON, WHITE CHAMELEON which all have one thing these plays lack - a humanity.

Monday night is Morgan Mathews night.

Following on from the soap wasteland that is Emmerdale / Corrie I / Eastenders / Corrie II with it's cartoon characters and outlandish drama it has been a joy to find the documentaries of Morgan Mathews on Beeb2 for the past two Mondays. Usually involving cartoon characters and outlandish drama!

Last week's BLUE SUEDE JEW looked to be a simple one-joke film profiling Gilles Elmalih, Israel's premiere Elvis Presley impersonator. It could almost write itself yeah? Nope.

After meeting Elmalih at the 'European Elvis Impersonator' Championships in Blackpool (!) Mathews followed him back to his West Bank home and met his wife Liz and her two teenage sons by her first marriage. They claimed the eldest son was clairvoyant and, in a trance, was possessed by the spirit of Elvis who was urging the family to move to the USA where fame would be theirs. Oh and when the son wasn't in a trance Elvis communicated with them by letter in Hebrew, scrunched up pages lobbed onto the kitchen floor by an unseen hand. The sign that this would all take place would be a phone call from Uri Geller yet! As the self-imposed deadline looms for the call Mathews decides to get the BBC to contact Geller on the basis that he's grown to like the man and would hate for him to be disappointed - and to lengthen his documentary of course! Geller - never one to balk at a tv appearance - calls and invites them to his house in the US should they ever be in the area. Cue Elmalih and wife flying to America but not before Mathews tells them that Geller called because of him. They refuse to believe him, telling him that Elvis was obviously working through him. What followed of course was big dreams being shrivelled in the cold light of day.

This week's was HAIR WARS profiling two stories relating to the World Hairdressing Championships - again a subject easy for a few easy laffs. But again Mathews managed to penetrate the layer. One strand followed John Phelps a double World Champion hairdresser who in 1996, after having a rock n roll moment insulting the judges and trashing his hotel room, was banned from competition for five years. He has since married a fellow prize-winning hairdresser divorcee and they have set up an academy teaching under-privileged youngsters how to follow in their footsteps. His biggest challenge is to try and relate to his wife's twin daughters by her jailbird ex, one of whom made Vicky Pollard sound like Hermione Granger. Counter-pointing this story was Keith Broughton the team manager for the UK Team heading for the championships. At the start he and his wife Marcella are seen heading off to the Hairdressing Awards - "It's very exclusive, invitation only", by the time the championship comes round they are living apart due in no small measure to his leading stylist, a salon Lucretia Borgia who spits venom with every blow-dry over any of her competitors. In one priceless exchange at a competition we overhear him tell her she did a brilliant styling "you know me I wouldn't fanny you about" to which she responds "I'd fanny you about". I'm still trying to get my toes to uncurl.

Keep 'em coming Mr. Mathews!

Despite the best efforts, both above and below ground, of London Transport to delay me I saw Zhang Yimou's CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (Man Cheng Jin Dai Huang Jin Jia) with Owen on Saturday night. It is really quite a bizarre film, being sensational and ridiculous - usually within the same scene.

In the 10th Century, an Emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) returns from a war to his enormous palace to celebrate the Feast of The Chrysanthemum with his Empress (Gong Li) and sons, Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye) from his first marriage and Princes Jai (Jay Chou) and Yu (Qin Junjie). Jai has also been fighting the war for three years and soon realises all is not well at home - he don't know the half! The Empress and her step-son are having an affair and the Emperor is slowly poisoning her with a drug that turns people insane within months. What the Empress doesn't know is the Crown Prince is also having a secret liaison with Chan (Li Man) the daughter of the Emperor's physician (Ni Dahong) the very man poisoning his mother. All plans are thrown off-balance when the Empress learns of the poisoning from a shadowy informant (Chen Jin) who is revealed first as the physician's wife and then, when brought before him, as the Emperor's first wife - secretly imprisoned when he married his present wife, the daughter of a neighbouring ruler. Soon events engulf these eight people into internecine plotting which culminates on the Feast night with bloody revenge and retribution.

The story is a strange Shakespearean mixture of Hamlet and Macbeth: a King fighting to maintain his crown, a son seeking revenge, a Queen being poisoned, an old courtier whose young daughter is in love with a prince, an advancing army and a high body count. Indeed it often betrays it's theatrical source - it is based on a 1930s play. Back in the early 1990s Zhang Yimou would have made this film with the eight main characters and a few extras on a simple set - such as in RAISE THE RED LANTERN - but as his films have been getting more and more epic CURSE is played out with what looks like the population of China drafted in as extras.

The film's opening scenes involve row after row of ladies-in-waiting going through a regimented choreographed early morning dressing ritual while the denouement of the film features hundreds of soldiers fighting in the palace grounds, the mounds of dead being quickly whisked away... enter a huge choir, musicians and hundreds of courtiers! I remember thinking: where were they when the battle was raging on their doorstep? Probably listening at the door saying "Ooo it's all kicking off out there" while the choir bitched about all those rehearsals wasted for it to be cancelled at the last minute by a blood bath. The sheer lavishness of it all finally overdoses on itself leaving the distinct impression that the revenge tragedy really cannot support the bewildering operatic production afforded it.

The cinematography, art direction and costume design give you sumptuous with extra-added sumpsh using a colour palate that leaves you woozy - reds, golds, pinks, purples, fuchsias, blues, greens - and that's just the wallpaper! There are also only sporadic martial arts scenes which will probably annoy punters expecting another CROUCHING HERO, HIDDEN GREEN DAGGERS but the Emperor's black-clad assassins who fly through mountain ravenes on ropes attached to grappling hooks - like an Emperor's 1st Airborne - will keep them watching the skies.

Occasionally the actors manage to break through the film's glittering carapace. Chow Yun-Fat seems muted as the Emperor. Half the time he looks rheumatic and doddery then suddenly springs to life to start knocking people about - he put me in mind of a Tang Dynasty Andy from "Little Britain". I did enjoy the performances of Jay Chou as Jai and Qin Junjie as the watchful younger son.

The women fair better - Li Man has a bit more fire to her than Zhang Ziyi who simpered through Zhang's last two films, Chen Jin is very good as the Emperor's first wife and then there is Gong Li.

Just as 2006 saw Almodovar reunited with his muse Carmen Maura in VOLVER so in this film Zhang is reunited with his ex-partner (on and off screen) for the first time in ten years. Although in no way equaling her stunning work in JE DOU, RAISE THE RED LANTERN and TO LIVE, here Gong Li again proves that she is one of the screen's most hypnotic actresses.

So Constant Reader... how do you round off a day when your second work computer died on you in as many weeks and your ma had her purse stolen out of her bag while shopping? Why you go and see a remarkably depressing play about French 19th Century poets of course you big silly.

TOTAL ECLIPSE was written by Christopher Hampton in 1968 , his second play, at the age of 22. It is based on the tortured relationship between the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud which strangely predestined the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas to say nothing of echoing stories like THE BLUE ANGEL, LULU or CARMEN where a seemingly ordinary man is reduced to the lowest of the low by his love for a mercurial, capricious lover.

Verlaine (Daniel Evans), a relatively successful poet in his late twenties invites the teenage Rimbaud (Jamie Doyle) to his home after he is contacted by him for help. Already chafing at having to live with his pregnant young wife in her parent's house, Verlaine is delighted and excited by the anarchic teenager who revels in upsetting the bourgeois household, a relationship that soon becomes sexual under Rimbaud's tutelage. Soon they are living a peripatetic life, moving from France to Belgium to London, all the time their relationship turning sour with Rimbaud becoming more restive - at one point he stabs Verlaine's hands in a bar. When Rimbaud announces he is returning to Paris this time it's Verlaine who lashes out, firing a gun at Rimbaud wounding him in the hand. This results in his arrest and imprisonment for two years. He trails Rimbaud to Germany but his hoped-for reunion is violently rebuffed. They have now travelled far from each other emotionally - Rimbaud has stopped writing poems and Verlaine has become a Catholic. 16 years later, Verlaine now a down-at-heel teacher, is visited by Isabelle Rimbaud who tells him of her brother's death from cancer. She asks Verlaine to return her brother's letters to the family so they can better manage his legacy. On her departure he tears up the mother's address as Arthur appears before him and Verlaine persuades himself that they were happy together.

Christopher Hampton is one of my favourite playwrights - TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD and LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES easily making my favourite plays list - and I had never seen this play before. I must admit to being disappointed in the production. For some odd reason it was designed for a traverse stage which dictated that each scene invariably resulted in the dialogue being used like a tennis ball between the actors standing at either end of it. It also leads to awkward scene changes which take place against mood music broken through with the wail of an electric guitar - a lazy shorthand for "look, he's like a youth rebel"!

Hampton has re-worked the play four times over the years and it sometimes betrays his shifting emphasis - he has admitted that the spur for writing the play was his love of Rimbaud's poetry but while writing it he found Verlaine's emotional complexity more interesting. One can imagine Rimbaud being hugely appealing to the counter-culture of the late 1960s.

It has other problems - for a play about two male poet lovers there are none of their poems and no scene showing any physical affection between them (the play was written when the Lord Chamberlain still acted as a censor for British theatre). This would be less noticeable I think in a production with a surer hand and with performances of equal strength. Daniel Evans can't quite get to grips with Verlaine's shifts of character but he has some very effective moments towards the end of the play when his character is released from prison. The trouble is he is having to bounce his performance off Jamie Doyle's. Doyle speaks all his lines as if each word has a capital letter "I Am Leaving Whether You Like It Or Not" etc. with absolutely no variation in tone - he has a speech where he is explaining to Verlaine his reasons for writing his style of poetry and as he was saying it the thought crossed my mind he probably didn't understand a word but knew that it had to sound 'impassioned'. I suspect a better actor would have found more nuance in the role as there are obvious places in the script which suggest Rimbaud's own disguised frailty.

The supporting cast didn't impress much apart from Wendy Nottingham as Isabelle, Rimbaud's loving sister who will go to any lengths to keep her brother's reputation unsullied by scandal.

Life imitating art imitating life:
The first production of TOTAL ECLIPSE starred Victor Henry as Rimbaud and John Grillo as Verlaine. Victor Henry was one of the most exciting young theatre actors of late 1960s with a string of acclaimed performances at the Royal Court and west end. A fierce drinker, he could be notoriously difficult, arguing with directors and co-stars. Indeed he disliked Grillo so much that on particularly fractious nights the actor was scared of having to play the penultimate scene where Rimbaud beats up Verlaine.
Victor Henry at 29 was the victim of a hit-and-run driver in 1972 which left him in a vegetative state eventually dying 13 years later.

Er... so where was that War On Terror being waged Mr. Bush?

Happy birthday to me... yes April 12th usually signifies my launch onto an unsuspecting public and this year was no different. Thank you for all who sent me birthday cards, texts and e-mails... there were some noticeable absentees. No names no packdrill (no Guy Smith).Anyway had a fab surprise tonight when Owen lead me on a circular route to the Comedy Theatre to see the 1960s French farce BOEING BOEING. I couldn't understand why this was being revived when it was announced - especially as it was being directed by Matthew Warchus and the cast included such heavy-hitters as Frances de la Tour, Mark Rylance and Roger Allam - in a boulevard comedy from the 1960s which was turned into a Jerry Lewis/Tony Curtis film - like, what gives? Well what gives is a masterclass in how to stage a classic farce - not a form I particularly warm to.

1960s Paris, Bernard (Allam), a successful architect, has a swanky flat in Paris and a love life to match, he's engaged simultaneously to three air stewardesses who provide an ever-changing variety of fun thanks to their rigid work timetables. When an old schoolfriend appears, the wide-eyed and shy Robert (Rylance), Bernard happily shows his plan in operation with the departure of American Gloria (Tamzin Outhwaite) at breakfast and the arrival at lunch of Alitalia's Gabriella (Daisy Beaumont). As his plans are helped by his sardonic and sceptical housekeeper Berthe (de la Tour) what can possibly go wrong?

Yes you guessed.... thanks to delays and weather conditions all three mistresses turn up at the flat one after the other and the hapless Robert is press-ganged into the escalating comedy of errors - particularly when he is attracted to the Teutonic Gretchen (Michelle Gomez). Believe me it plays better than it reads.

Tightly directed by Warchus and with eye-popping design by Rob Howell, the production just shows that what could have been hackneyed in other hands is a comic gem when entrusted to a focused cast of actors. Mark Rylance is a riot, almost Stan Laurel-like at times in his baffled movements and facial expressions - horror, joy and confusion chasing themselves across his face at any given time. His panicked improvisations when confronted by yet another angry female are a joy. Frances de la Tour once again gives a masterclass in comic timing which is pure genius. Each line mined for it's comic potential, each word weighed up for just the right emphasis. Rylance and de la Tour share a scene together where she toys coquettishly with him which is the funniest thing I have seen on stage for ages.

The three stewardesses are a formidable trio - no dumb dollybirds these - and indeed it is the women who get exactly what they want at the end of the show. They are played marvellously by Tamsin Outhwaite as Gloria from TWA and Sally Beaumont as Gabriella from Alitalia while Michelle Gomez as Gretchen from Lufthansa turns in one of the most outrageous comic performances I think I have ever seen. Gimlet-eyed and with the cheekbones of death you cannot take your eyes off her on stage. As good as Roger Allam is as Bernard, the script does not afford him as many moments to shine as his co-stars.

Thank God Owen booked this week to see it - I've just seen that Frances de la Tour leaves the show on Saturday to be replaced by Patricia Hodge.

Tonight for the first time in ages I went to see a straight play - and they don't come much straighter than Ibsen's JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN which I saw with Owen at the Donmar.

I have seen the play twice before at the National Theatre with to-die-for casts.

The first time was Peter Hall’s 1975 Old Vic production which my English class were taken to see a mid-week matinee of with the lead roles being played by Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft and Wendy Hiller. I won't pretend I understood everything that was said on the stage but I remember being hooked on the melodramatic turns of the plot and also being aware I was in the presence of great actors - no more so than when Richardson turned and stared at the talkative school kids in the circle and shouted WILL YOU BLOODY WELL SHUT UP during his first scene. There wasn't a peep out of them after that as I recall.

Then in 1996 I saw Richard Eyre’s production at the Lyttleton with the equally amazing cast of Paul Schofield, Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins – Schofield’s final speech was one of the greatest theatrical moments I have experienced, him standing at the edge of the stage almost whispering to us the visions of a dying man. So Michael Grandage’s production had a lot to live up to, and although it didn’t quite scale the heights it still proved to be a rewarding night.

In this version by David Eldridge – who did an excellent version of Ibsen’s THE WILD DUCK at the Donmar two years ago – Ian McDiarmid plays Borkman, the disgraced financier who 13 years before the play’s opening, had been sentenced to five years in prison for his swindling of the bank he ran. Since his release he has lived as a recluse on the first floor of his house only visited by one of his former employees and the man’s teenage daughter who, to assuage his guilt over ruining the family, Borkman has helped to educate. Deborah Findlay plays his bitter wife Gunhild who, despite living in the same house, has refused to speak or see her husband for the eight years since his release from prison. She has devoted her life to getting their son Erhart to one day make the family name respectable again. Penelope Wilton plays Gunhild’s estranged spinster sister Ella Rentheim who had, during Borkman’s trial and imprisonment, taken in and cared for the young Erhart and who appears out of the blue at the start of the play and sets in motion a series of revelations that rock the foundations of the household.

Findlay and Wilton’s scenes together crackled with tension and anger as both strove to claim Erhart as their own and Wilton’s Act Two scene with McDiarmid was wonderfully anguished as she reveals the real reason behind her visit while also exploding in rage at him for cynically spurning her love when they were younger as a business colleague offered him the promotion to running the bank if he passed her on to the colleague.

Unfortunately Ian McDiarmid didn’t quite manage to conquer the role. No one can do withering put-downs and cutting, sarcastic posturing like him – one reason why his performance as Bertolt Brecht was so memorable in Christopher Hampton’s TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD at the National – but the ultimate redemptive, poetic side of Borkman seemed to allude him which was a real shame. The two best supporting performances were the ever-reliable David Burke as Foldal, Borkman’s faithful old employee and Lolita Chakrabati as Mrs. Wilton (bet they had fun with that at rehearsal), the worldy, divorced woman who lays claim to Erhart along with the sisters.

With a sinking heart I have noticed the trailers for competing shows ANY DREAM WILL DO on the BBC and GREASE IS THE WORD on ITV.

As you can guess the first is to find a 'Joseph' for an upcoming revival of you know what and the second is upping the ante in locating both 'Danny' and 'Sandy' for the production due to open at the Piccadilly Theatre in July.

All this on the back of the news last week that Connie Fisher - The People's Maria - is now utilising a click-track to 'augment' her vocals after shagging her vocal chords attempting to sing with a throat infection.

Does the West End REALLY need these two shows revived again? Or is it that these musicals are perfect for the bozoids who will be watching these?

On a better note...Two nights ago Vanessa Redgrave opened on Broadway to excellent personal reviews in a one-woman show THE YEAR OF WISHFUL THINKING written by Joan Didion adapting her best-selling memoir. Vanessa is looking great and was supported on her opening night by sister Lynn, daughter Joely, son Carlo, neice Daisy and among the star-studded audience was her activist friend and co-star Jane Fonda.

I would dearly love to see this - especially as HECUBA, the last production I saw her in was so woeful. Her last appearance on Broadway with Brian Dennehy in LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT never made it to the West End despite them both winning Tony Awards.

I am praying this will transfer... providing there is a theatre not occupied by cynically-revived crap musicals.

May I just say I am beginning to tire of the woolly liberal blanket coverage of the 200th anniversary of the Abolition Of The Slave Trade Act? Apologise my arse.

How's about Tony Blair and the Archbeardy of Canterbury offering an apology to the people of Ireland for being complicit in the Irish Famine a mere 162 years ago?

A previous famine in 1782 was alleviated somewhat by the closure of ports to Irish food exports to England, this did not happen in the disasterous 1845-1849 one and indeed the food exports increased during it under armed guard. Figures for deaths related to this famine range from 50,000 to over a million and the knock-on immigration of Irish refugees numbered 2 million.

Okay your turn... pick your own human injustice. First Nation Americans anyone?

I type this as the ITV spews out Elton John's 60th birthday concert filmed at Madison Square Garden. Sweet Jesu... I cannot abide it. The assembled talking heads - the usual oxygen-thieves: Kylie Minogue, Paul 'thumbzup' Macca, Rod Stewart, Michael Parkinson, the vile Osbourns, Billy Connolly are yakking on about how timeless he is... they obviously were not at the concert. He was huffing his way through his back catalogue like Vic Reeves' Pub Singer.

Michelle Pfeiffer recently photographed at a screening of the film of HAIRSPRAY: THE MUSICAL - yep the film of the stage show of the film - in which she plays Mrs. Van Tussle.

Lookin' good Miss Thing.

Last night I did the WHO'S IN YOUR RECORD BAG for the first time in a squillion years... so long in fact that there has been a regime change and Rob is no longer Mein Host.
Anyhoo Owen and I got there at 7.30pm and the place was Heaving with punter. Apart from a few bar-hangers I didn't know anyone out of the suits, girlies and straight couples. Go figure. Indeed it was so jammed that Mein Host couldn't keep a place for Don - who of course showed 3 minutes later.

I had been totally stumped as to a setlist until Owen suggested why not 5 tracks by MY Supremes - Jean Terrell, Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong. Why not I thought? I picked their 5 best remembered songs UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF, STONED LOVE, NATHAN JONES, FLOY JOY and AUTOMATICALLY SUNSHINE and they sounded great booming out over the endless chatter.

It started badly though... Mein Host started telling me the right-hand cd tray had been playing up - just as I put my first cd in. Needless to say after 15 seconds of Jean Terrell hiccupping through the opening verse to UP THE LADDER... I switched to the next track. That Leston woman needs to upgrade and NOW...

Thank you to whoever has made my walk to the office much more enjoyable...

May I take a few seconds to say Big Up The Ray Stubbs?

Ray - that most delightful of sports presenters - has made it into the last 5 of the Comic Relief version of FAME ACADEMY with such awesome musical talents as Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, Shaun 'Eastenders' Williamson, Tricia 'Heartbeat' Penrose and Colin 'Radio 1 DJ' Murray (seen below).
His singing is usually in the key of yale and his movement skills seem to be restricted to bouncing up and down on the spot but he seems a genuinely nice chap, is obviously having the time of his life and it's obviously not some grand publicist's scheme to have him accepted into a wider career.

Mind you.. having written this he'll probably be voted off tomorrow.

I look forward to seeing him be offered the part of 'Amos' in CHICAGO in a few weeks.

Last week I had to go back to Silver Place to collect the phone as the BT redirection service was working fine. It was WELL spooky.

For everyone who ever visited the shop here are two photos to show you what was underneath all that stock...

Finally this evening I got to see PAN'S LABYRINTH [EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO] - just in time as it's dvd release is this Monday! How's that for timing? Luckily it's constant appearance in film awards over the new year has kept it on the big screen and no doubt it's still running thanks to it's deserved 3 Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction and make-up.

After dinner with Owen at the Song Que Vietnamese restaurant across from the office which was filling but not all that, we 242'd it into the west end and saw the film at the Odeon Covent Garden - always will be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue to me. Remarkably for such a high profile film I knew next to nothing about it apart from the general premise. Usually after a 3 month wait you are aware of certain scenes or set pieces from reviews or friends but not with this film which indeed might not have made it so involving.

1944. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a loving but lonely girl, still grieving her father's death and not reconciled to the remarriage of her mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) to the domineering and brutal Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco's victorious Fascist army. At his insistence, the heavily pregnant Carmen along with Ofelia travel to the lonely village outpost where Vidal is attempting to rout the final straggling leftist guerrillas in the overlooking hill forest. Stopping in the forest near the final destination Ofelia restores a broken piece of gargoyle to it's rightful place. Later that night a fairy appears to her and leads her to an overgrown labyrinth close by and to a stone staircase spiralling down into the earth. An avid reader of fairy tales the girl descends to the bottom to discover an enormous Faun (Doug Jones) waiting for her to tell her she is in fact the long-lost daughter of the King of The Underworld and all she has to do is complete three dangerous tasks to be able to return to her life as a Princess.

She accepts the creepy challenge but is slowly made aware that the real horrors of the world lie in the evil that men do namely her sadistic stepfather who is happy to kill anyone he thinks is aiding the guerrillas. Will he discover that his stoic housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) and the doctor treating his wife (Alex Angulo) are smuggling aid to the leftists - Mercedes' brother being the leader of the group. Torn between her knowledge of Mercedes' secret and her mother's waning health Ofelia puts all her trust in the Faun... but is he as dangerous as her stepfather?
I was gripped by the film from the start and was an emotional wreck by the end of it. The disturbing fantasy images are hard to shake off - notably the second of Ofelia's challenges where she meets a horrific creature that looks like Francis Bacon's Pope portrait come to life - and the bone-crunching violence dealt out by the evil Vidal nearly had me watching through latticed fingers.

The performances are excellent - Ivana Barquero's grave presence as the girl makes her very sympathetic, Sergi Lopez makes his Fascist stepfather the stuff of nightmares and Maribel Verdu's quietly powerful Mercedes was the real heart of the film - her confrontation with Lopez after he discovers her real identity was definitely edge-of-the-seat viewing. The supporting cast are also solid through and through with Angulo particularly fine as the principled doctor.

I am so glad I saw this first at the cinema - I think it's overall hypnotic power would have been dissipated on the small screen if I had seen it there first.

Guillermo del Toro's LABERINTO.., like his earlier film of Franco vs. the spirit world THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, haunts the memory for hours afterwards.

It's true... it ain't what ya know it's who you know....

Tonight (Wednesday) at 6pm at Virgin Records there was a signing session for the HOT FUZZ soundtrack with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Forest - so of course I had to be there.

it was fairly busy with the usual strange-looking sorts that make up the SPACED/SHAUN demographic... mostly late 20s-early 30s blokes who look strangely lost in the bright lights of the megastore. I had got there about 50 minutes before the start, had purchased 3 cds to get signed - one for me, one for Owen and one for Boss Richard - and stood gawping about myself in the queue until a mighty cheer was heard from the front and we started moving. I also had in my bag the video sleeve for Edgar's first film FISTFUL OF FINGERS that Richard asked me to try and get signed.

When I got near the table a security woman looked at the three cd booklets in my hand and said "They are only signing one cd per person". I said there was no mention of that when I bought them but she still said it was still only one cd. A big and gurly security bloke then took one of the booklets and placed it in front of Nick F who was yabbiting away to a guy standing beside the table so I never got to tell him how great I thought his performance was but got a smile off him when he handed me back the booklet. Edgar was next to him and as I handed him the booklet I said "So where are the posters you promised the shop then?" - he looked up and recognising me laughed and said that what with the film's hugely successful opening the office hadn't had a chance to send them out but he would make sure his assistant was onto it. The Divine Pegg was earwigging all this and asked Edgar who I was and he said "This is the guy from Flashbacks where I bought all the cop movie posters for the office" - imagine my delight mixed with sadness when My Simon said "Oh I've been meaning to visit your shop"!!! I told them the shop was now closed but quick as a flash pulled out the new comp slip and gave it to Edgar. He saw what I had in the unzipped bag and said "You've got a FISTFUL OF FINGERS cover". I said "Yes but they won't let me give it to you to sign" - to which he said "No I'll be happy to sign it" so while he was doing that I slipped the unsigned cd covers to His Dreaminess The Pegg and said "Could you sign these please?" - "Sure no problem" says he. I think I gabbled a thanks to them both as I felt the security bloke giving me evils so sped away sharpish!

Now I understand that for a popular event such as this - although it wasn't as jammed as the SHAUN OF THE DEAD dvd signing - they need to keep the queue moving as well as allowing the chance for everyone to get something signed but nowhere did it mention anything about the one item only rule - there were no staff working the queue informing us and the guy who sold me the 3 cds certainly didn't - even after I enquired where the signing was taking place. Surely if the punters are buying what you are there to promote then it should be no problem to sign, within reason, a number of items. The best experience of that I had was Mary Wilson at Borders when she was signing copies of her autobiography. A guy had some Supremes lps and the Borders person said "Miss Wilson is only signing the book", Mary W overheard this and said "Honey if I'm on it I'll sign it".

Now where did I put my free HOT FUZZ badge....