Podcasts about Joe Orton

Love is in the air at Severin and this month is proof that romance comes in all shapes and sizes. Join us and special guest Kier-La Janisee as we break down this very romantic slate of titles coming out this February. We celebrate the much anticipated volume 2 of HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN (BUTTERFLY KISS, MORGIANA, THE SAVAGE EYE, and THE GLASS CEILING), IN MY SKIN making it's UHD debut, and the most unconventional love story of them all... Joe Orton's iconic ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE. As always, DJ Alfonso provides a playlist of songs inspired by this months drop! Hope you're ready for this!   Timecodes for the Episode: 02:47 - ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE 18:37 - HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN V2 19:55 - BUTTERFLY KISS 38:02 - MORGIANA 47:08 - THE SAVAGE EYE 59:55 - THE GLASS CEILING 1:14:24 - IN MY SKIN 1:37:00 - HOPW Board Game 1:44:50 - Rendezvous After Hours

If you like this trailer, come and join us @ www.patreon.com/talkmedia for the price of a cuppa coffee each month. A lively show today with our pal David who brings us up to date on Ukraine and Gaza, then it's off to the business of "propaganda"....... Enjoy! Recommendations: David Tangier: City of the Dream (Paperback) 'A dream concealed in stone...sky supersonic, orgone blue, warm wind...Such beauty, but more than that, it's like the dream is breaking through.' William Burroughs No city in the world has quite the exotic allure of Tangier. From the 17th century, it has been a place on the edge, beyond the normal disciplines of government, a city of refuge and excitements where sex is cheap, drugs are plentiful and where the outcasts of the world can breathe easily. The golden years of Tangier began after World War I and barely survived World War II. Among those who sought sanctuary in or inspiration from this legendary city were Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul and Jane Bowles, Ronnie Kray, the unhappy Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton, Tennessee Williams, Joe Orton, Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote. It is this 'last resort of the living dead, alive but not madly kicking' which Iain Finlayson explores in his witty, enthralling book. Eamonn Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (Hardback) For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of ageing that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late, prolonging lifespan at the expense of quality of life. Dr Peter Attia, the world's top longevity expert who is featured on Chris Hemsworth's National Geographic documentary LIMITLESS, believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity. This isn't 'biohacking,' it's science: a well-founded strategic approach to extending lifespan while improving our physical, cognitive and emotional health, making each decade better than the one before. With Outlive's practical advice and roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before. Stuart Monsters, Inc. Lovable Sulley (John Goodman) and his wisecracking sidekick Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) are the top scare team at MONSTERS, INC., the scream-processing factory in Monstropolis. When a little girl named Boo wanders into their world, it's the monsters who are scared silly, and it's up to Sulley and Mike to keep her out of sight and get her back home.

In 1996, a frustrated screenwriter got a fellowship in Italy. Twenty years later, Beyoncé released "Lemonade." Content warning: This episode includes a mention of suicide.Support us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: TwitterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Rebecca Solnit's “A Paradise Built in Hell”Kelly Link's "White Cat, Black Dog"The Half-Century in Bullshit: On Peter Bogdanovich's “Paper Moon” and Robert Greene's “The 48 Laws of Power”A Book of Anecdotes, 1957The Little Brown Book Of AnecdotesFear Nothing: Self-Fashioning and Social Mobility in 50 Cent's The 50th LawThe fear of conflict leads people to systematically avoid potentially valuable zero-sum situationsThe Immigration DilemmaYou Can Win But I Can't LoseIf you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groupsZero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political DividesA Genesis of Conflict: The Zero-Sum MindsetForbes Winslow's Physic and PhysiciansThe role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review The Strange, Sad Story of Joe Orton, His Lover, and 72 Stolen Library Books A Failure Of InitiativeNew Orleans reaches settlements for police shootings after Hurricane KatrinaPost-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Do you have any authors in your life? They may be hiding a dark secret in some of their work, and it just might mean murder! Episode 84 is all about writers involved in the deaths of themselves or others. First, Benton tells the tale of Syndrome author Blake Leibel's murder of Iana Kasian. Then, Anna relays the tragic story of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton's murder-suicide. Lastly, the two watch an episode of World's Most Evil Killers, profiling the serial killer Jack Unterweger.Our TV doc this week is Season 2: Episode 9 of World's Most Evil Killers, "Jack Unterweger".

Host Aaron Odom (@TridentTheatre) visits with comedian and podcast host Keb Pound of The Stupid History Minute podcast to conclude their discussion about the life and death of the promising British playwright Joe Orton, and the strange circumstances of his death. Pre-order The Stupid History Book, Vol. 1 Mary E. Kennedy - Official Website Mary E. Kennedy - IMDb Page  

Host Aaron Odom (@TridentTheatre) visits with comedian and podcast host Keb Pound of The Stupid History Minute podcast to discuss the life and death of the promising British playwright Joe Orton, and the strange circumstances of his death. Pre-order The Stupid History Book, Vol. 1

This episode features a writer who would be familiar not only to Hull residents but also to keen telly watchers, radio listeners and theatre goers across the country. Alan Plater was born in Jarrow in 1935  but having moved to Hull when he was just three years old, the city was pleased to adopt him and he lived there for much of his life. His most famous writing credit was probably Z Cars. Alan Plater was also a huge fan of jazz music and his ITV comedy drama The Beiderbecke Affair staring James Bolam and Barbara Flynn in the mid 1980s was a massive success. He went on to win countless awards and accolades for his wonderful writing. Alan Plater was enormously generous with his time, and made a huge contribution to the Hull arts scene of the 1960s and 70s, developing a gentle friendship with Philip Larkin along the way. This speech was recorded on 28th November 1998,  and was given at that year's PLS AGM.   Thank you so much to Alexandra Cann who is the agent for the Alan Plater Literary Estate Ltd for giving us the initial approval to use this recording, and to Steve Plater and John Rubinstein who are the joint Directors of the Lit Estate. If you are interested in seeing an Alan Plater play this summer, then the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough is putting on a production of the Blonde Bombshells of 1943 which is full of swing and jazz, from 2-26th August 2023. https://sjt.uk.com/events/blonde-bombshells-of-1943 References: Alfred Bradley https://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/about/successes/alfred-bradley-award/ ·         The Occasional Smell of Fish (poem) ·         Waiting for Gladys (Becket parody) ·         Bete Noire (Hull poetry journal) ·         Z Cars One Day In Spring Street ·         Jazz Notes- BBC radio programme ·         On Sunday January 4th I had Mild Constipation ·         Names (poem written for Three Trawlers fundraising) ‘my only grown up poem' ·         Swallows on the Water (play) ·         The Fosdyke Saga sonnet ( BBC radio tripe themed -parody of The Forsyth Saga,)- sent a copy to Larkin who responded with a signed copy of the High Windows calling him ‘sonnetteer extraordinaire' ·         Sweet Sorrow (1990) Plater's play about Larkin Matthew Arnold, Ogden Nash, Dylan Thomas, Alan Bleasdale, Ted Hughes, Barry Hines, Vera Wise, Henry Livings, Alex Glasgow, Carla Lane, Adrian Mitchell, Allan Ginsburg, Carole Mills (rude songs and low down blues), Robin Kay (flamenco guitarist), Max Boylett (jazz pianist), Ian Clarke and Chris Rowe, Sid and Norm (artists without category), Joe Orton, The Beatles, John Ford (director of westerns), Roger McGough, Jimmy James (music hall performer),Ken Wagstaff- (footballing hero), Fleur Adcock, Jeff Nuttall (had a pee in a bucket on stage), Roni Scott, Suzi Quatro, Mike Bradwell (theatre director), Jess Stacy (jazz pianist), Shakespeare, Max Wall, Peter Brooke (director),  and many more Hull poets listed by Plater. Pubs mentioned – (in Leeds and Hull) The Bluebell, The Bull, The Fenton, the Hayworth Arms, Philip Larkin judging poetry competition for the Hull Arts Centre at Spring Street in 1970 which eventually became Hull Truck Theatre. The loss of the three Hull trawlers in winter of 1967, 59 trawlerman died- the poets organised a reading and Plater wrote ‘Names'. Produced by Lyn Lockwood and Gavin Hogg PLS Membership and information: The Philip Larkin Society – Philip Larkin Theme music: 'The Horns Of The Morning' by The Mechanicals Band. Buy 'The Righteous Jazz' at their Bandcamp page: https://themechanicalsband.bandcamp.com/album/the-righteous-jazz

El último carromato de Alberto Conejero viene lleno de cadáveres exquisitos. Se despide el dramaturgo hablando de la muerte inesperada, prematura y trágica de personajes relevantes de la historia y del arte como Isadora Duncan, Costas Cariotakis, Joe Orton y Mary Santpere. Escuchar audio

The story doesn't end with Joe and Kenneth's deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton's story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic, and that the diaries are chockfull of what today would be called the sexual exploitation or assault of pubescent boys, this aspect of his life has always been obscured. Until now…Listener discretion is advised. 

In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city's cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal raised over ₤100,000 in a short time. But in 2020 statues of problematic historical figures were toppled throughout England and Leicester found itself embroiled in a controversy over whether or not to remove a statue of accused racist, and sexual predator Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhi statue was spared, but when word got out that Joe Orton was a sex tourist who made several trips to Morocco to sleep with pubescent boys, a debate erupted in the Leicester City Council. In this final episode of Season 2 we report what's going on in Leicester and contemplate the question: Must one have been ethically pure to be publicly commemorated in metal or stone?

One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father's dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father's suicide. Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton's mother dies, his response is to pick up an Irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house. Joe and Kenneth have different ways of coping with their parents' deaths, but as young men growing up in dreary industrial England, they both have the same dream: before either considers writing, they're both convinced that they belong on the stage. In 1951 they buy one-way tickets to London and begin a journey that will fail to bring them any success as actors but that will lead them to each other. Episode 1 chronicles the bleak childhoods that shape the pair inspiring one of them to become the most iconoclastic English dramatist of the 1960s, and the other to become a murderer…

In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life.  Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw. They also cover his sex tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. At one point in while Tangier, feeling great about his fame, his pocketbook and his sex life, Orton worries that he and Kenneth will soon be struck down by some disaster because they are, perhaps, too happy… 

Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton's work.  In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and taunts his enemies by putting sexual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, gays in the theater can''t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases. And while this brings Joe more hatred and censorship from the right, another group of people, namely those who're putting the swing into swinging London and leading England through a cultural revolution, absolutely adore him. Orton sells the screen rights to Loot for a near record-breaking £100,000 and 1967 begins with Joe Orton on top of the world…

At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don't have a copy of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves.  Eventually the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover agents and a sting operation in order to entrap them and Joe and Ken are sentenced to 6-month in jail. Ostensibly, its for their crimes against the library but really, as Joe puts it, “it was because we were queers.”  While inside, Orton is finally separated from Halliwell and from any remaining desire to fit in.  The result is liberating, particularly to his writing... 

San Francisco International pats down Chris and Charlotte to see if they're holding any information on Pernell Roberts, Lorne Green, Dan Blocker, Michael Landon, or the Ponderosa Ranch.SHOW NOTES.San Francisco International: IMDB. MST3K wiki.MST3K's Gamera vs. Jiger trailer.Chris talked about Airport in our episode on Avalanche.Pernell Roberts.Radar was played by Gary Burghoff.Pernell in Montgomery, Alabama.Gentle Ben's opening credits.The Mighty Casey.Our episode on Master Ninja II.Remembering Clu Gulager.Van Johnson as The Minstrel.Our episode on Girl in Gold Boots.Tab Hunter Confidential.Did You Hear the One about the Traveling Saleslady?The Feminist and the Fuzz.Our episode on Rocketship X-M.Dr. Seuss: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.“My doctor said Mylanta.”We discuss Joe Orton more in our episode on Parts: The Clonus Horror.“I ate all the Frusen Glädjé.”Fred Garvin…Pablo Casals: Bach Cello Suites.The Ponderosa Ranch.Get your own Ponderosa Ranch tin cup.Susan Raye: L.A. International Airport.Some of Chris's postcards of airports.Denver's baggage handling system.They Fight Crime!Support It's Just A Show on Patreon and neat stuff will come your way!

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

To kick off Pride month we're bringing together a collection of your favorite queer writers at the internet's hottest club!Featuring Franco Pedicini as Tennessee Williams, Kyle Marra doing Shakespeare's sonnet 29, Michael Iannucci as Oscar Wilde, Wynn Harmon as Truman Capote, Chris French doing Shakespeare's sonnet number 20, Alexandra Kopko as Patricia Highsmith, Larry Phillips as Joe Orton, Torian Brackett as James Baldwin and hosted by Angela Mansberry. Directed by Graydon Gund.

For Video Edition, Please Click and Subsribe Here: https://youtu.be/DP-DYnATa7E Tino Orsini was born in Italy and grew up in London where he started appearing in the school plays then trained in Los Angeles at the Stella Adler Conservatory as well as in the UK. He started acting professionally on stage and has appeared in a number of feature films , short films, TV shows such as ‘Berlin Station' with Richard Armitage and most recently on the multi-award winning ‘Ted Lasso' with Jason Sudeikis. As well as acting he has also directed and produced Theatre bringing a famous Neapolitan comedy ‘Filumena Marturano' to the London stage to critical acclaim. Tino hosted his own arts podcast interviewing a variety of creatives and arts practitioners from around the world which was nominated for ‘Best Arts Podcast' at The British Podcast Awards. One of his short films ‘Panettone' about a homeless man trying to reconcile with his daughter was screened at various film festivals and for which he won the ‘Best Performance' award along with the cast at the IL Film Festival. Most recently he was the face of the NHS ‘Stoptober' campaign and starred in a new play about Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell called ‘Joe and Ken' which I'd being proposed for a UK tour this year. He loves to travel and is a keen painter.  

55 years after the murder of Joe Orton, the Seven Dials Playhouse is preparing to revive John Lahr's Diary of a Somebody, a play adapted verbatim from Orton's diaries. It's also been 35 years since the show was first premiered at the National Theatre and George Kemp was kind enough to sit down to discuss the upcoming production with us. In the mid 1960s, Joe Orton was one of the most influential playwrights of his time, creating popular works such as Loot and  Entertaining Mr Sloane. Diary of a Somebody takes audiences into the mind of Joe Orton and his meteoric rise to success as well as into his relationship with his long-time partner and eventual murderer: Kenneth Halliwell. George Kemp is getting ready to take on the role of Joe Orton alongside a stellar cast including Toby Osmond as Halliwell, and also reuniting with director Nico Rao Pimparé who he co-starred alongside in Rope at the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch. In this special interview, George talks about his experience working with the company and exploring the complex dynamic that existed between Orton and Halliwell. We look at the legacy of Joe Orton and how his story still remains relevant today. The interview also highlights the importance of being able to tell stories that represent modern society at a time where more stories about gay men are being told on stage. George also tells us about his initial meeting with John Lahr at the first reading of the play, and how enjoyable it has been getting to work with Nico Rao Pimparé again. He remains ever humbled throughout the conversation about his work as an actor though as we also glaze over working on hit Netflix series Bridgerton  as well as his return to the National Theatre later this year in Jack Absolute Flies Again. There's been much speculation around Diary of a Somebody, especially after the enormous success around the Seven Dials Playhouse's premiere of Steve earlier on in the year, so it seems that we can expect this new revival of Lahr's text to be a highlight of the season. Diary of a Somebody runs at the Seven Dials Playhouse from 22 March - 30 April and tickets are available from the theatre's website NOW!

For Video Edition, Please Click and Subscribe Here: https://youtu.be/_ftG3os0yko Guy Stroman has directed acclaimed productions of The Glass Menagerie, Driving Miss Daisy and Love Letters, all starring Sandy Duncan; The King and I, starring Lou Diamond Phillips (Best Production – Ft. Worth Star Telegram); Twelfth Night – Cleveland Playhouse; Man of La Mancha (Audience Favorite – California Musical Theatre); Steel Magnolias, with June Squibb and Sally Struthers; 1776 (Best Director – Dallas-Ft. Worth Theatre Critics Forum). He has also directed: Art, The Lion in Winter, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Joe Orton's Loot (Top Ten Production – Pittsburgh Post Gazette), Boeing, Boeing, The 39 Steps The Gin Game, Ray Cooney farces Caught in the Net and Funny Money, and most recently, Lewis Black's One Slight Hitch. Guy's musical productions include Mame, Oliver, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, Murder for Two, Smoke on the Mountain, and directing/choreographing numerous long- running productions of Forever Plaid and it's Christmas version, Plaid Tidings, including the opening productions of new theatres in Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Charlotte and Schenectady.  Guy originated the role of Frankie in the original production of Forever Plaid in New York, London's West End, and Los Angeles, where he won best acting awards from the L.A. Drama Critics and Drama-Logue. He can be heard on that original cast album, as well as on the recordings Unsung Sondheim, Girl Crazy, The Busby Berkley Album, the London recording of The Most Happy Fella, and the Disney DVD of Aladdin and the King of Thieves. His latest projects include the musical production of Just Laugh, for the new Ken Davenport Festival, and David Dean Bottrell Makes Love-A One Man Show.

Career Q&A with Gary Oldman. Moderated by Jenelle Riley, Back Stage. ABOUT GARY OLDMAN: Earlier this year, at the 2011 Empire Awards, Gary Oldman was honored with the Icon Award for Achievement. An acclaimed presence in motion pictures for 25 years, he is regarded as one of the foremost actors of his generation. Mr. Oldman is known to millions the world over for playing Sirius Black (Harry Potter's godfather), Commissioner Jim Gordon (Batman/Bruce Wayne's crime-fighting partner), Dracula, Beethoven, Pontius Pilate, Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Orton, and Sid Vicious, to name just a few of his iconic characterizations whose ranks George Smiley now joins. Over the past 18 years, the U.K. native has appeared in 11 movies that have opened in the #1 position at the box office. As part of the two most successful franchises in movie history, he has appeared in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates, respectively; and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises (opening in 2012).

Ahead of Loot going on stage at Hampton Hill Theatre, Christine Wayman interviews the director, Nigel Cole who sets the scene for this glorious black farce from one of Britain's finest and filthiest playwrights!Teddington Theatre Club's production of Loot takes to the stage at Hampton Hill Theatre on 7-11th December 2021.   

Slovensko mladinsko gledališče sezono začenja s farsično uprizoritvijo Norišnica d.o.o. Po besedilu Joeja Ortona jo je režiral Vito Taufer, ki je v premišljenem zasledovanju totalnosti gledališča zbližal oder in gledalce. foto: Ivian Kan Mujezinović

Literarne, gledališke, filmske ocene.

After celebrating “The Hi-Lo Country” we couldn't help ourselves, and we fell into the deep well of Stephen Frears' filmography. You have nothing to Frear but Frears himself. How is the world wrong about this artist? From Andras: I thought I knew Stephen Frears as a director but after bingeing most of his films I realized I've been viewing him through an American lens. No doubt he made some solid Hollywood movies but it's the UK work that reveals his true quality. Find all of our episodes at www.theworldiswrongpodcast.com Follow us on Instagram @theworldiswrongpodcast Check out: The Director's Wall with Bryan Connolly & AJ Gonzalez & The Radio8Ball Show hosted by Andras Jones See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of The Audio Drama Writers' Independent Toolkit, Sarah Golding and Lindsay Harris Friel continue their discussion of plot, scheme, structure, etc., with writing exercises you can use to enhance your writing. They also get really excited about WandaVision, Joe Orton, Dan Harmon, and heist stories. Warning or Bonus! This episode includes spoilers for: Wooden Overcoats Season 3 Episode 7 Loot by Joe OrtonCan You Help Me Find My Mom? from The Truth podcastSubscribe, so you can be sure to hear all future episodes.Tell us what you think, on Twitter, at @ADWITpodcast.Like what you heard? Write a review at Podchaser or Apple Podcasts.Or, write to us, at writersadwit@gmail.com. Submit your short audio drama script to the Dashingly Quirky Script Competition. Deadline: 20 March 2021. Want more audio fiction in your life? Subscribe to The Fiction Podcast Weekly. 

Prick up your ears, and listen to Rob's (℅ Marquis de Sade) homage to Joe Orton's notorious library-book defacing...

In episode two Ben Miller uncovers the story behind a unique collage from the Islington Museum in London. 'World of Cats' by Kenneth Halliwell was made in the mid-Sixties while Halliwell was living with his partner, the renowned playwright Joe Orton. Arrange up on a folding screen, it’s a great example of the many subversive collages the pair created around this time, but its playful humour cannot but be seen in the context of the horrific end to their relationship.You can see the World of Cats screen by visiting https://www.artfund.org/artandstuff See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A Todd Rundgren album can vary between pure pop to bossa nova, guitar rock to wild experimentation; like the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get with the next Rundgren album. Released in 1989, the Nearly Human album is Todd at his best, a pop masterpiece of well-crafted songs performed impeccably, live-in-the-studio. "Parallel Lines" is one of the strongest cuts, initially written for an off-Broadway musical based on the script for a never-produced 3rd Beatles movie."Parallel Lines" (Todd Rundgren) Copyright 1989 Fiction Music, Inc./Todd Rundgren BMI If you enjoyed this show, please check out these related episodes:https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/utopia-the-road-to-utopiahttps://lovethatsongpodcast.com/todd-rundgren-clichehttps://lovethatsongpodcast.com/utopia-winston-smith-takes-it-on-the-jawhttps://lovethatsongpodcast.com/xtc-thats-really-super-supergirl-- This show is one of many great podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Check 'em all out!

Our Amplify Producer, Craig Gilbert, has been holed up in his makeshift bedroom studio talking to a host of exciting artists of national and international renown. Â These conversations cover career and process as well as offering a few exciting ideas to explore from home during this time of Social Distancing.Nikolai was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, grew up in North Yorkshire and trained at Drama Centre London and at the Crucible, Sheffield.His work has been seen in many of the UK’s leading regional theatres, touring houses and internationally. Nikolai has been director on attachment at the Sheffield Crucible, the Royal Court Theatre and National Theatre Studio and served as an Associate Director at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.Nikolai is currently the Artistic Director of Leicester Curve where he has directed Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, the world-premiere of Dougal Irvine’s adaptation of Riaz Khan’s Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, nominated for Best Regional Production at the WhatsOnStage Awards 2019, An Officer and a Gentleman – the Musical (& UK tour), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard (& UK tour), Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw(with Theatre Royal Bath), Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease (& Dubai World Trade Centre), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (with Birmingham Rep), the Broadway musical Spring Awakening (with NYMT), Legally Blonde (Opera Garnier, Monaco & Daegu Opera Festival, South Korea – Winner Best Musical – Daegu International Musical Festival Awards), Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (& Haymarket Theatre, London & UK tour), Roald Dahl’s The Witches(with Rose Theatre Kingston, Lyric Theatre, Hong Kong, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds & UK tour), Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and a performance to celebrate the reveal of the tomb of King Richard III at Leicester Cathedral.https://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/support/curtain-up-appeal/

The best British band from the '60's that never hit the bigtime in America-- Small Faces. Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenny Jones and Ian McLagan would become rock legends due to their future projects (Humble Pie, The Who, The Faces, etc) , but it all started for them here. Small Faces recorded a number of psychedelic pop gems, but "Tin Soldier" may be the pinnacle. Shall we have a listen?Small Faces - "Tin Soldier" (Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane) Copyright 1967 EMI United Partnership Limited -- This show is part of the Pantheon network of music-related podcasts. Check out their other shows!

Pictured: Dr Bill Frankland Julian Worricker on: Dr Bill Frankland, who survived three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, studied under Alexander Fleming, and brought the pollen count into the public arena…. The radio drama producer, John Tydeman, whose work contributed to the success of Joe Orton and Sue Townsend…. Alexander Thynne, better known as the Marquess of Bath, an artist and aristocrat, whose home was the Longleat estate in Wiltshire…. And the actress, Honor Blackman, remembered most for her portrayals of Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. Interviewed guest: Paul Watkins Interviewed guest: Sir John Tusa Interviewed guest: Enyd Williams Interviewed guest: Nesta Wyn Ellis Interviewed guest: Dr Josephine Botting Producer: Neil George Archive clips from: Desert Island Discs: Bill Frankland, Radio 4 09/08/2015; See You Sunday, BBC One Wales 17/03/1991; BBC Oral Histories: John Tydeman; The Mole Truth, Radio 4 20/12/2008; Desert Island Discs: The Marquess of Bath, Radio 4 07/01/2001; The Thynne Blue Line, BBC TV 11/07/1971; Jools Holland, Radio 2 16/05/2011; The Avengers, ABC 1961. Interviews in this programme with John Tydeman were taken from his contribution to the BBC Oral History Collection, an archive of more than 600 interviews with former BBC staff. For more information see: https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/

Danny Scheie, Dean Linnard, and Susan Lynskey join Josh, Dawn, and Amanda to discuss our recently suspended production of Loot by Joe Orton. Theatre is all about connection. While the measures we're all taking in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are necessary to save lives, they're also leaving us isolated at a time when we need human connection more than ever. At Aurora, there's not much we can do to directly address the pandemic, but even with our stage dark it remains our role to make connections between artists and audiences.AURORA CONNECTS is our new weekly live broadcast, an online salon and virtual happy hour. We'll stream AURORA CONNECTS live on our YouTube channel, allowing you to react, comment, ask questions, and engage in real time.We'll share updates about Aurora's upcoming shows and season, interviews and Q&As with actors and designers, roundtable discussions with directors, and more. Have suggestions for AURORA CONNECTS? Let us know what you want to see. Watch last week's inaugural episode, and join us this and every Friday at 4 p.m. for #AURORACONNECTS.

Part two of the WTWF look at Beatles film projects, both real and imaginary.    Queen of all Beatles media Kit O'Toole and Antony Rotunno return as we travel through "Shades of a Personality", "Up Against It", "Lord of the Rings" and "Herman's Head" (one of these things is not like the others...).     We close with some of our own thoughts what might have made a good third film for the Fab Four given their interests and acting abilities.

Playwright Joe Orton’s ‘malicious damage’, salvaged cardboard and roller derby. This month we hear stories of libraries as sites of creative rebellion. Contains some explicit language and imagery.

Books about the Beatles are the subject of this special episode recorded at Cornwall's Port Eliot festival on July 27th 2019. Joining John and Andy for this celebration of all things fab are lifelong Beatles fans, journalists and authors David Hepworth and Mark Ellen. Titles discussed include '"Love Me Do!": The Beatles' Progress' by Michael Braun; 'The Beatles Anthology'; 'Revolution in the Head' by Ian MacDonald; 'Up Against It' by Joe Orton, and more.

Adeel Akhtar, who stars in the new BBC1 series Back to Life, talks about his acting career – from Four Lions to becoming the first non-white male to win a Best Actor BAFTA for the TV drama Murdered By My Father. Doris Hatt (1890-1969) was a painter, feminist, socialist and pioneer of British Modernism. Her work spanning five decades is the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton near where she lived. Curator Sarah Cox and historian Denys Wilcox discuss the life and art of Doris Hatt. It's fifty years since Joe Orton's play What the Butler Saw shocked audiences with its black comedy. Orton cultivated his image as a doyen of 60s counterculture but new research into his record collection reveals a surprising taste in music. Emma Parker has been listening to Orton's LPs. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Timothy Prosser

This week, William Cook discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. The plays of Joe Orton www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/09/24/changeling/ The stories of Charles Bukowski www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/smashed The beach resorts of the Baltic Coast www.roughguides.com/article/the-10-best-baltic-beach-resorts/ The paintings of Robert Colquhoun & Robert MacBryde, aka The Two Roberts www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2hscrfQSYK2BrFvHXbNhW5b/the-two-roberts-love-paint-and-poverty The journalism of Auberon Waugh www.lrb.co.uk/v07/n21/ian-hamilton/the-waugh-between-the-diaries The music of Dudley Moore www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-VL6cNeEz8 This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Olivier Award-winning actor Kenneth Cranham wraps his RADA-trained vocal cords around Visions of Johanna and never stops. "You’ve got to go and see this guy Bob Dylan at the Royal Festival Hall,” he remembers being told in 1964. “He smokes joints all the time." So he bought four tickets - for a pound. Get ready for countless stories including Sam Shepard’s unique directing technique, a fond remembrance of Roger Lloyd Pack and blowing the minds of the Salvation Army with Dylan on his side.  West End and Broadway veteran Kenneth Cranham was in Joe Orton’s Loot and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. He played the title role in ITV’s Shine On, Harvey Moon and has appeared in countless films, stretching from Oliver! through Hellbound: Hellraiser II to Layer Cake, Valkyrie and Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool. Trailer Spotify playlist Recorded 12th September 2018

I caught up with Joe Orton to talk about door slamming and a bunch of killer new releases from HEXDEBT, Graace, Oh Pep!, King IV, David Western & Huntly.With thanks to Yamaha Home Entertainment Australia!Intro & outro music is 'Coffee' by RKDA. For information regarding your data privacy, visit Acast.com/privacy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This time around I explain the funding changes with Podbean, then the interesting stuff. I look at a 1942 American portmanteau film, TALES OF MANHATTAN with an enormous cast of stars and a very interesting concept. From there, to celebrate the legalisation of Same Sex Marriage in this brown, unpleasant land, I look at the 1970 adaptation of Joe Orton's 1964 play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane starring Beryl Reid, Harry Andrews and Peter McEnerey.  You can support the podcast at patreon.com/paleocinema but please be aware of service charges of 2.9% plus $US0.35 per monthly donation.

A new play by Anders Lustgarten, The Secret Theatre opens at London's Sam Wannamker Playhouse and is about Sir Frances Walsingham- Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster Paul Theroux's latest novel Mother Land is comic work about a ghastly matriarch exerting a poisonous influence on her grown-up children 20th century designer Erte worked in fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor. An exhibition of his work at London's Grosvenor Gallery includes his exquisite alphabet. "What's your idea of romance"? American indie film Beach Rats explores the story of a young man discovering his sexuality and confused by what's on offer. BBC documentary Joe Orton Laid Bare looks at the life of the playwright who died 50 years ago. Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Adam Mars Jones, Ellen E Jones and Louise Doughty. The producer is Oliver Jones.

Frances Fisher began by apprenticing at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. She spent 14 years based in New York City, playing leads in over 30 productions of plays by such noted writers as John Arden, Noël Coward, Emily Mann, Joe Orton, Sam Shepard, William Shakespeare, Jean Claude Van Italie, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams. She won a Drama Logue Award - Best Ensemble for the American Premier of Caryl Churchill's "Three More Sleepless Nights", played in the American premier of Judith Thompson's "The Crackwalker" and originated roles in Elia Kazan's "The Chain" and Arthur Miller's last play "Finishing the Picture". Besides working with Kazan and Miller, some of Ms. Fisher's more interesting theater experiences were creating roles from two great works of literature: George Orwell's "1984" and Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Ms. Fisher worked at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles alongside Annette Bening and Alfred Molina in Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard". Fisher starred in "Sexy Laundry" with Paul Ben-Victor at the Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles. She studied with Stella Adler and became a lifetime member of the Actors Studio by actually "walking up the stairs" and auditioning for legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg. Ms. Fisher recently completed The Host (2013), Love on the Run (2016), Red Wing (2013) and will work with Catherine Hardwicke in her new film Plush (2013) in August 2012. Ms. Fisher was honored for a Lifetime Achievement Award 2011 in her old hometown of the Pacific Palisades, California.

This episode is all about giving a brief history of some of my favourite gay playwrights. People that have inspired me - as an actor, director or just an audience member. Starting at 'Torch Song Trilogy' and going right through to 'My Night With Reg' A bit of history about the likes of Noel Coward and Joe Orton. My thoughts on how they have affected me personally and the legacy that these playwrights have left us. I have some great recommendations this week and we delve into my thoughts on the film 'Handsome Devil' Enjoy and share. Thanks for listening!! Details of my fundraising walk next week if you can help us meet our target. https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/matt-kelly4 and My website mattiankelly.com

A special edition exploring the life and legacy of the playwright Joe OrtonLeonie Orton, Joe Orton's youngest sister, has written a memoir of her life, I Had It In Me, in which she describes the childhood in Leicester she shared with Joe Orton and how his death led her to question and change her life. She meets Samira at the Pork Pie Library which she and Joe used to regularly visit. Dr Emma Parker has co-curated two exhibitions inspired by Joe Orton: What the Artist Saw: Art Inspired by the Life and Work of Joe Orton, is on at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester until 22 October and Crimes of Passion: The Story of Joe Orton is on at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham until 1 OctoberSally Norman, co-founder and co-director of Soft Touch Arts in Leicester, and her assistant Jenna Forbes, discuss their new community arts exhibition Breaking Boundaries: Joe Orton and Me which is on at Soft Touch Arts until 8 September.Theatre critic John Lahr, author of the acclaimed Joe Orton biography, Prick Up Your Ears, discusses Orton's skill and significance as a playwright.The actor Sheila Hancock shares her memories of performing in Joe Orton's first stage play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, during its first Broadway run in 1965.The artistic director of Curve theatre, Nikolai Foster, talks about his experience of staging Joe Orton's final play, What The Butler Saw, at Curve earlier this year.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ekene Akalawu.

Shahidha Bari discusses LGBTQ in the history of philosophy.As part of the BBC's Queer Icons series Philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell discusses Plato's Symposium, and novelist Adam Mars-Jones talks about Bruce Bagemihl's book Biological Exuberance which explored homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Plus, we hear from the winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. Queer Icons is a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures choose an LGBTQ artwork that is special to them. You can find more details on the Front Row website on BBC Radio 4. You can find the BBC's Gay Britannia season of programmes on radio and tv collected on the website. They include documentaries, Drama on 3 from Joe Orton and exploring Victim the 1961 film starring Dirk Bogarde, episodes of Words and Music and more editions of Free Thinking including Philip Hoare on Cecil Beaton, Jake Arnott on Joe Orton and Peggy Reynolds on Sappho. Producer: Luke Mulhall

The Punjabi "Romeo and Juliet" is explored at Bradford Lit Fest plus New Generation Thinker Catherine Fletcher talks to Jonathan Dollimore about his memoir and the influence of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence which he set up at Sussex University. The Greek poet Sappho is championed by Professor Margaret Reynolds as part of Queer Icons - a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures choose an LGBT artwork that is special to them. And Rohit Dasgupta from Loughborough University talks about his research published in Digital Queer Cultures in India. Jonathan Dollimore's Memoir is called Desire. Waris Shah's Heer Ranja is discussed at Bradford Lit Fest by Mahmood Awan, Avaes Mohammad and Pritpal Singh on Saturday, 8th July 2017 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm at Bradford College - ATC. One of the definitive works of the Sufiana tradition it's an epic love poem set in 18th-century undivided Punjab. You can find more information about Queer Icons on the Front Row website. You can hear Catherine Fletcher chairing a Free Thinking discussion about Women's Voices in the Classical World recorded with Bettany Hughes, Paul Cartledge and Colm Toibin at the Hay Festival on the Free Thinking website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08rsrlt You can find the BBC's Gay Britannia season of programmes on radio and tv collected on the website. They include documentaries, Drama on 3, episodes of Words and Music and more editions of Free Thinking including Philip Hoare on Cecil Beaton, Jake Arnott on Joe Orton and Sophie-Grace Chappell on Plato. Producer Craig Smith

Matthew Sweet talks to Philip Hoare about literary history and the ocean. Poet Elizabeth Jane Burnett performs snippets from her collection, Swims. Writer Jake Arnott reassesses the film Prick Up Your Ears as it's re-released in cinemas. Continuing the 'Queer Icon' series, Philip Hoare plumps for Cecil Beaton's image of Stephen Tennant. Philip Hoare's new book is called RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTARQueer Icons is a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in which 50 leading figures choose an LGBTQ artwork that is special to them. You can find more details on the Front Row website on BBC Radio 4 and in the Gay Britannia collection of programmes from radio and television. The BFI is holding a series of Joe Orton events: Obscentities in Suburbia through August when Prick Up Your Ears is re-released in cinemas along with a Gross Indecency Season focusing on television and film made after the 1968 Act which partially decriminalised homosexuality. Drama on 3 - a Joe Orton double bill: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wn0lm Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

The Dudes watch 1987's "Prick Up Your Ears", directed by Stephen Frears. Both Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina give knock-out performances in this British biopic about the controversial English playwright, Joe Orton, and his longtime lover and assistant, Kenneth Halliwell. Other Movies Discussed Chud (1984) – Directed by Douglas Cheek The Red Turtle (2016) – Directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit QUESTION OF THE WEEK What is your favorite Gary Oldman performance? Contact us below! And don't forget to tell us what YOU'VE been watching! www.dudesonmovies.com www.facebook.com/dudesonmovies www.twitter.com/dudesonmovies www.instagram.com/dudesonmovies www.soundcloud.com/dudesonmovies dudesonmovies@gmail.com

In Minute 31 of The Whole Shebang, Mike and Jenny are joined by Amy Mugglestone for a special sixth-day guest encore, covering the topics of Polari, its Cockney and Roma linguistic roots repurposed for as a secret cant for gay men, Polari's and camp's penetration into mainstream postwar British culture on Coronation Street, Round the Horne, and even Doctor Who, a bit on the genius of Kenneth Williams and his correspondence with Joe Orton as Edna Welthorpe, and back in the movie itself, Cecil's luvvie friends and his desire for Brian as a client... and as a lover. Find us on the web at thewholeshebangpodcast.com, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon at wholeshebangpod.

In Minute 24 of The Whole Shebang, Jenny, Mike, and Brant talk about the character of Cecil, Brian Slade's manager, the meaning of Cecil's hospital stay in the context of the 1980s, AIDS, conversion therapy, and gay-bashing, Cecil's real-life inspirations in the forms of Noel Coward and Ken Pitt, gay mentorship, young David Bowie's propensity for walking around naked, Bobby Beausoleil and Joe Orton, and Velvet Goldmine's desire to show us its characters' origins and whether or not they're truly important. Find us on the web at thewholeshebangpodcast.com, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon at wholeshebangpod.

John Lahr talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for the American Songbook, his award-winning biographies of Tennessee Williams and Joe Orton, and his father, the actor Bert Lahr, who was the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Described by the playwright Edward Albee as 'the greatest drama critic of my generation', John was for 22 years chief critic and profile writer for the New Yorker. Then, in 2002, John Lahr the drama critic became John Lahr the dramatist - and the first drama critic ever to win a Tony Award when he wrote actress Elaine Stritch's one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty. He chooses music from that show, a song sung by his father, a Theolonious Monk track which reminds him of his wife Connie Booth, and he ends with the joy of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 3.

In 1965 the young working class playwright burst onto the British theatre scene. But within 2 years he was dead - killed by his lover. Hear from Joe Orton's sister Leonie Orton Barnett, and the actor Kenneth Cranham who knew him well. Photo: Joe Orton at home in Islington. Credit: Evening Standard/Getty Images.

Bob Wilcox and Gerry Kowarsky review CABARET, by Joe Masteroff, John Kander & Fred Ebb, at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, MY FAIR LADY, by Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe, at Stages St. Louis, OUR TOWN, by Thornton Wilder, at Insight Theatre Co., ENTERTAINING MR. SLOAN, by Joe Orton, at HotCity Theatre, THE PURPOSE PROJECT: THAO'S LIBRARY, by Elizabeth Van Meter, at Mustard Seed Theatre, EMERGENCY, by Daniel Beaty, at The Black Rep, PARADE, by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, at R-S Theatrics, and THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO, by Alfred Uhry, at the Theatre Guild of Webster Groves.

With Mark Lawson Billie Piper stars in The Effect, a new play by Lucy Prebble about drugs trials and mental health. It's Prebble's first major new work since her success with ENRON, her play about the American financial scandal. Senior consultant neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reviews. The Heresy of Dr Dee is the latest in a series of novels about the Tudor astrologer and magician Dr John Dee by writer Phil Rickman. The novel explores the mysterious death of Amy Dudley, wife of Elizabeth I's favourite Lord Robert Dudley. Phil Rickman explains his fascination with Dee and why self-publishing is a temptation he's keen to resist. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart star in Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, the final instalment in the globally successful vampire film franchise. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh gives her verdict. Death: A Self Portrait is a new exhibition with more than 300 works - from images by Rembrandt and Goya to a chandelier made from 3000 plaster-cast bones - which confront our mortality. Dr Sarah Jarvis considers how attitudes have changed over the centuries. And we mark 90 years of BBC radio by remembering the moment when playwright Joe Orton was discovered by a young drama producer. Producer Penny Murphy.

Libby Purves is joined by actor and comedian Omid Djalili, former girl gang member, Chyna, travel journalist and writer Brian Jackman and folk musician Tim Edey. Omid Djalili is an award-winning British-Iranian actor and comedian. He is currently starring in Joe Orton's play 'What the Butler Saw'. Omid has appeared in films including The Mummy, Gladiator, and The Infidel and on stage played the role of Fagin in Oliver! What the Butler Saw is at London's Vaudeville Theatre. Writing under the pseudonym 'Chyna', the author gives a graphic account of life in a girl gang which she joined at the age of 12. Her gang of ten members operated in the estates of south London fighting, stealing and dealing drugs. Now 24, Chyna has turned her life around and works for the community charity 'foundation4 life' which helps young people extricate themselves from the grip of local gangs. 'How I escaped a Girl Gang' is published by Coronet. Brian Jackman is a travel journalist and writer. He is the author, with Jonathan and Angie Scott, of 'The Marsh Lions,' which was originally published thirty years ago and has just been reissued. For five years the authors followed the Marsh pride of lions of the Masai Mara, painstakingly recording the daily drama of life and death on the African plains. The Marsh Lions - The Story of an African Pride is published by Bradt. Tim Edey is a folk musician who started playing Irish folk music at the age of four. At this year's Radio 2 Folk Awards Tim won Musician of the Year and Best Duo (with Brendon Power) and is touring with the Chieftains later this year. Producer: Paula McGinley.

With John Wilson. Novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair reviews Turner and the Elements, a new exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in the artist's old stomping ground of Margate. Alice Coote is one of the world's most acclaimed mezzo-sopranos, famous for taking on the male parts or "trouser roles" in opera. She talks to John about assuming the gait of a man, the demands of being jet-setting soloist, and how a car crash made her realise the importance of music. In 1962 the playwright Joe Orton was sent to prison for six months for defacing books in Islington Public Library. Fifty years later, barrister Greg Foxsmith is staging a re-trial to examine what sentence Orton might have received today. He tells John why. Singer Lana Del Rey releases her debut album on Monday. Although her song Video Games was one of the most acclaimed tracks of 2011, her decadent image has provoked debates about her authenticity and her recent live performances have drawn criticism. Kitty Empire gives her verdict. Producer Ellie Bury.

exapme from the blog click links to read more from Neil. AUDIO from the bbc local radio - suplied from the internet/other podcasts and provided here simply incase you missed it. With the Wife with the Wife in Space Nuffink in ze world can stop us now! Except this story, obviously... A couple of hours before we settled down to watch The Underwater Menace, Sue and I appeared as guests on Bob Fischer's BBC Tees radio show to shamelessly plug this blog. You can listen to the edited highlights below (and Sue's PVC Dalek-suit anecdote was news to me!): Episode One Sue: That's just great. This story is going to star that ****ing hat. I hate that ****ing hat. We both enjoy the opening TARDIS scene, especially Jamie's reactions to the insanity he has walked into. There's a playful edge to the proceedings and a warmth we haven't really felt since the glory days of Ian, Susan and Barbara. We chuckle when Ben sarcastically hopes for the Daleks ("I bet the kids wouldn't have complained") while the Doctor's desire to encounter prehistoric monsters is dismissed out of hand ("not on this budget, love"). Me: Where do you hope they'll end up this time? Sue: Somewhere with decent carpentry. The TARDIS arrives on a beach and when Polly guesses at their whereabouts, Sue declares, in perfect harmony: Sue: Cornwall! It's always ****ing Cornwall! It doesn't take very long for our heroes to find themselves in danger: a platform they have been standing on is actually a lift, and as they hurtle beneath the sea, the TARDIS crew succumb to the bends. Sue: That's very interesting. Ben just asked Polly to get them out of there. He didn't ask the Doctor and he's standing right next to him. I don't blame Ben though; this Doctor is still pretty useless. When they regain consciousness, Polly finds some pottery with the logo for the 1968 Mexico Olympiad emblazoned on it, and then our heroes are confronted by a race of people dressed in clam shells and seaweed. Sue believes she has it sussed: Sue: Are they rehearsing for the Opening Ceremony? Their high priest even sports a fish on his head: Sue: Please tell me the Doctor doesn't get a hat like that. Just as Sue believes she has a handle on events, our heroes are strapped to some slabs and sadistically lowered toward a mad man's pet sharks. Sue: Is this a Bond movie now? Me: Yes. You Only Live 13 Times. Sue: Has this got anything to do with the Olympics? Anything at all? When the Doctor signs his name 'Dr. W', he reignites an old debate: Sue: You can't really argue with that, can you? That settles it: his name is Dr. Who. You'll just have to accept it, love. Me: Unless his real name begins with a W - Sue: Like Doctor Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey? Would that make you feel any better? And does it really matter? I call him Dr. Who all the time - Me: Yes, I know. And every time you do it, part of me dies. When Professor Zaroff reveals that they are currently hanging out on the lost continent of Atlantis, Sue doesn't even flinch: Sue: Atlantis. Of course it's Atlantis. Where else would they be in this ****-ed up programme? So, it's James Bond on Atlantis? Gotcha. Thanks to those fainthearted Australians, the cliffhanger moves, although we find ourselves sympathising with the censor as Polly is strapped to a table and threatened with a large hypodermic needle by some evil scientists who want to turn her into a fish. Yes, a fish. Sue: I don't know what Polly is moaning about; I'd love to breathe underwater indefinitely. She could stick around and enter the 1972 Olympics. Mark Spitz would have nothing on her. Episode Two Me: How short is Polly's surgical gown - Sue: Trust you to notice that, love. The hot topic of conversation during this episode is Zaroff. Who else? Sue: He reminds me of that mad scientist from that show you love: Comedy Theater 2000 - Me: Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Sue: That's it. He reminds me of the mad scientist from that: an over-the-top pantomime villain. Me: Believe it or not, the guy playing him is actually a very fine actor - Sue: Oh, I don't doubt it. He's just having a laugh with the part. And who can blame him? How else would you play this character? His plan is completely pointless; there's no clever reason for him to do any of this, he just wants to blow up the world. There's no benefit or motive at all. Me: He's insane. Sue: It's lazy. With no motivation or backstory you have to play him as a larger-than-life lunatic. I like him; he's committed. He's definitely the funniest villain we've had in the series so far. When Ben and Jamie are taken to the mines of Atlantis, a high pitched whining cuts through the scene. We assume it represents the sound of the drilling but whatever it is, it's making our teeth itch. Sue: If we were 16 years old, we would hear that sound whenever we went near an off-license - Me: Have you warmed to Troughton yet? He's basically playing his version of the Doctor now. More or less. Sue: He reminds me of Ken Dodd in some of these stills. That one in particular (see right). The music doesn't help. It's atrocious. It sounds like they've let a small child loose on a Bontempi organ. This is the worst music that I've heard in the series so far. Who's responsible for it? Me: An Australian called Dudley Simpson - Sue: Sack him. He's rubbish. Episode Three Finally, after enduring thirteen consecutive recons (count them! thirteen!), we are reunited with a real bona fide episode. I never thought I'd ever hear myself say this but thank Amdo for The Underwater Menace Episode 3. Sue: Even though the story is still a complete mess, it's a thousand times easier to follow it when it exists. I don't want to state the bleedin' obvious but even the very worst story improves when you can actually see it. The recons I gave good scores to must have been incredible - The highlight of the episode for Sue is, of course, the sight of Jamie and Ben in tight-fitting rubber: Sue: Given the state of some of their costumes, they should have called this story The Underwear Menace. Me: I think the playwright Joe Orton mentioned this story in his diary. Or was it in Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses? No, it must have been Joe Orton; he fancied Jamie in his rubber suit, I think. Or maybe it was Kenneth Williams. My memory is almost as bad as yours. Sue: Jamie and Ben wouldn't look out of place at that nightclub, Heaven. As if to accentuate this observation, Jamie and Ben suddenly launch themselves into the campest salute this side of 'Allo 'Allo. Sue: I'll say no more. Sue: Does Troughton ever go through a story where he doesn't play that bloody recorder? And are there any stories where he doesn't dress up at the drop of a hat (which he'll probably pick up and put on)? He's a borderline transvestite. Me: You might want to hold onto something during the next scene. We're about to meet the Fish People. Sue: They look like a second-rate dance troupe who are waiting to audition for Britain's Got Talent. They're probably going to do a up-tempo version of Yellow Submarine. A miner called Jacko attempts to turn the Fish People into striking militants. He does this by winding them up a bit. At one point he cries, "Are you not men?" and, quick as a flash, Sue replies: Sue: No! We're fish! What are you, blind? Hang on, is that Polly in a snorkel? Me: No, it's a Fish Person. Sue: They're having a laugh. And then it happens. Impossible to describe. Impossible to watch. Sue: This is the lowest point in Doctor Who yet. By some considerable margin. Please make it stop. Me: Is this worse than ? Sue: Oh yes, this is even more half-arsed. Me: It's like a perverse joke: you wait 13 episodes for a real episode and then you get this. Sue: I take it all back - this would have been much better as a recon. Something that really niggles at us is the Fish People's economic impact on Atlantis, which is based on the assumption that the food they farm must be consumed immediately: Sue: OK, let me get this straight: Zaroff has a nuclear reactor but he hasn't got a fridge - or, better still, a fridge freezer - to put any food in? That makes no sense at all. Me: This is your first proper look at Patrick Troughton. Have you formed an opinion yet? Sue: I feel a little more comfortable with him now that I've seen him in action. He's far more animated than I expected and he's definitely got charisma. There's something about him. Sadly, the director isn't doing him any favours so I'll have to reserve judgement until I've seen some more. And then we reach the moment The Underwater Menace is probably best known for. But immediately before it arrives - and I'd completely forgotten this - Zaroff stabs someone with a spear, he shoots someone at point-blank range and then he has two others killed off-screen. It's horrific! But it's completely eclipsed by what follows: Sue: Wow. It's so mesmerising, we have to watch it again. And again. And again. Sue: He's having a whale of a time. Me: I'm glad someone is. Episode Four Sue: I still can't believe he didn't bring some fridges with him. Still, I guess if you are planning to blow up the world you can't think of everything. You know, I think every episode of Doctor Who could be improved with a Zaroff. The only thing missing is a scene of him tearing his hair out as he screams, "Why am I surrounded by idiots!". Me: There's still twenty minutes to go. I wouldn't rule anything out. Sue: I like the way the show has kept to its educational remit. Me: What? Sue: Jamie is from the past and therefore he doesn't understand what radioactivity is. Some of the children watching this wouldn't know either - Me: Yeah, that's great. There's just one tiny problem: they don't explain it. Polly says she can't be bothered! Polly and Jamie are struggling to escape the rising waters of Atlantis: Sue: It's turned into a disaster movie now. Me: Oh, it's a disaster all right. Sue: Why is Polly wearing a fireplace corbel on her head? Me: I don't even know what that means. Thanks to those Aussie wimps, we get to see Professor Zaroff drown. Well, I say drown... Sue: That's not drowning! Zaroff has hours left before the water rises above his head! Maybe he was bored and he decided to commit suicide? The world saved, the Doctor and his companions leave the Atlantans to it. Sue: Why are they bothering to rebuild Atlantis anyway? Why don't they just move up to the surface? They've got fridges up there. And while they missed the 1968 Olympics, Mexico have got the World Cup in 1970. It would be a shame if they missed it. The Final Score Sue: That was bonkers. And a little bit shit. 2/10 Sue: Zaroff was excellent, though. I could watch him all day. I'm not convinced that he's dead either; I think he was just wetting his hair a bit. He should definitely return in the new series. The League of Gentlemen could play him. Me: What, all of them? The experiment continues. Tags: , , , , Click to share this

Bob Wilcox and Gerry Kowarsky review (1) BLACK PEARL SINGS, by Frank Higgins, at The Black Rep, (2) AWAKE AND SING!, by Clifford Odets, at the New Jewish Theatre, (3) AGNES OF GOD, by John Pielmeier, at Avalon Theatre Co., (4) WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, by Joe Orton, at Forest Park Community College, (5) INTELLIGENT LIFE, by Lauren Dusek Albonico, at HotCity Theatre, (6) THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR, by Nikolai Gogol, at Webster Univ., Conservatory, (7) CURTAINS, by Rupert Holmes, John Kander & Fred Ebb, at Kirkwood Theatre Guild, (8) DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE, by Sarah Ruhl, at Saint Louis University, and (9) BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, by Neil Simon, at Clayton Community Theatre

Bob Wilcox and Gerry Kowarsky review (1) BLACK PEARL SINGS, by Frank Higgins, at The Black Rep, (2) AWAKE AND SING!, by Clifford Odets, at the New Jewish Theatre, (3) AGNES OF GOD, by John Pielmeier, at Avalon Theatre Co., (4) WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, by Joe Orton, at Forest Park Community College, (5) INTELLIGENT LIFE, by Lauren Dusek Albonico, at HotCity Theatre, (6) THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR, by Nikolai Gogol, at Webster Univ., Conservatory, (7) CURTAINS, by Rupert Holmes, John Kander & Fred Ebb, at Kirkwood Theatre Guild, (8) DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE, by Sarah Ruhl, at Saint Louis University, and (9) BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, by Neil Simon, at Clayton Community Theatre.

The tangled history of the papers of the playwright Joe Orton is unwoven by Dr Matt Cook. Here he reveals the extraordinary sources that survive on the writer's life, and the perhaps even more extraordinary ones that remain stubbornly missing. Warning: the following material may not be suitable for all listeners.