Emu's debut.

Something a bit different today - I've written a crossword. If you're in Britain, it's published in today's Times, on page 54 of the Saturday Review section. It's also available online here, although it may be behind the Times' paywall. And here's a picture of it.

As you can see from the extra instructions at the top, The Listener is a bit more complicated than most crosswords, with extra rules to follow, messages to find, and an overall theme to discover. Personally, I think that makes them far more rewarding, but they do take a bit of getting the hang of, so if you haven't tried cryptic crosswords at all before, this probably isn't a good one to learn on. If you do give it a try, bear in mind another thing that makes The Listener tricky is that the setter has license to use any word or abbreviation found in The Chambers Dictionary, however obscure; which makes the puzzle difficult, if not impossible, to solve without using that dictionary as well. On the plus side, if you use this site, then you can search for words using ?s as wildcards, so for instance typing ?R?S?W?R? will return 'crossword' (and indeed 'brushwork'). Some purists might call this cheating, but not me. I think it's fine.

If you do tackle it, let me know how you get on...

You're just in time to miss the last episode!

So... the fifth series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme has been going out!

Featuring this pile of idiots. 

That's... that's definitely the sort of thing I should have been posting about here. Oh dear. Well, the last one was broadcast yesterday, but that does mean that there is now a two day window - today and tomorrow - where all six episodes are simultaneously available on the BBC iPlayer.  On Sunday, the first one will drop off, then a week later the second, then... well, I'll leave you to work the rest of the system out for yourself. Anyway, sorry for being so rubbish at publicity, and hope you enjoy them.

24 Doodles - 16 to 24

What, did you think just because I started a series called '24 Doodles' on December 1st, it was some kind of advent thing? Well, I don't know where you got that idea. I'm sure I never said so. No, the idea was always to post one every one or two days for about a fortnight, and then the rest all in one splurge on New Year's Eve. So here, as part of the plan that was definitely the plan all along, are the other nine. Happy New Year!

16. First try at a young Ezra Pound, July, British Library, working on 'English For Pony-Lovers'.

17. Second shot. July, BL, E for P-L.

18. Tiny little doodle that I'm rather fond of, London, November, working on Souvenir Programme

19. Little girl looking for fish in a pond. With, as you see, some success. (It was a very low fence, by the way. She's not a giant little girl.) St Albans, September, working on Souvenir Cabin. 

20. Victorian gent in a photograph on a pub wall. Durham, February, working on the thing that later became Wysinnwyg.

21. Statue. Leros, Greece, April,  working on another element that later became Wysinnwyg. (Wysinnwyg gave me the most trouble of all the Double Acts.)

22. Man off the telly. London, February, working on an idea for a Double Act later abandoned.

23. Weather house people. London, November, during the recording of Hot Desk.

24. Your guess is as good as mine. But I wouldn't want to meet it on a dark night.  Dorset, December, working on Souvenir Programme. 

24 Doodles - 15

Two people who passed my window in November, while I was finishing The Goliath Window. (The woman was carrying a white bag, by the way; she's not dressed as a French maid...)

24 Doodles - 14

...and here's the more stylised version.

(The red stains on both come from a drop of candle wax, which fell on the second page, and then, next time I left the book in the sun, melted and seeped through to the first page as well. I rather like the way that, purely by chance, this makes the second stain look like a stylised version of the first.)

24 Doodles - 13

Here's my first attempt at the Edwardian paterfamilias in a photograph hanging in the room in which I was working on Hot Desk in August...

24 Doodles - 12

You know I said a while ago sometimes my doodling is extremely literal minded? Well, here's half a page of notes from Dorset in September on Red-Handed. Yeah. It's not exactly wild, creative, free association, is it?

(By the way... I would just like to make it clear that I'm not putting these - any of these - doodles up because I think they're good. They're all genuinely what I was doodling in the margins while I was working, and so most of them are rubbish- these hands certainly are. This is not 'Behold - pages from my sketchbook' it's 'Look what nonsense my hands got up to while my brain was trying to solve plot problems.')

24 Doodles - 11

Here is a marginal piglet from Tuttlingen in Germany in May, in a pleasant Gasthaus where I ended up doing so much useful plot work on English For Pony Lovers that I set the episode there in its honour.

24 Doodles - 10

More experimenting with repetition to achieve stylisation, this time from March, in a fish restaurant in Greece. By the end I got to something which I think would make quite a fun character design for a druid or something, but really has very little to do with the poor chap enjoying his calamari across the way. For one thing, he seemed to age twenty years with each iteration...

Meanwhile, the notes are the very first seed of what eventually became The Goliath Window, though as you can see nothing about the story beyond the first idea of 'portrait painter and sitter' emerged that evening, with the possible exception of the idea of a model's discomfort at having to pose upside down for St Peter, which arguably eventually turned into the 'holding the spear aloft' sequence. Though just as arguably, it didn't. 

(Incidentally, the French painter I was trying to remember was Géricault.  )

24 Doodles - 9

From August, in London. How are you feeling about those deadlines, John?

24 Doodles - 8

Back to the Souvenir Programme notebook, and back to a bloke who sat near me in a pub, this time in Hampstead. Poor blokes who sit near me in pubs. One day, one them's going to notice. That will be a bad day for me. (Though if it happens in Hampstead, I'll probably be ok.)

24 Doodles - 7

Here's a little bit of research I diligently did into stained glass terminology for The Goliath Window at the British Library in October... none of which ended up in the script. But then, you never know what will be useful until you do it.

That 'Why's it funny?' question was one I had to keep reminding myself to ask whilst writing Double Acts - it was easy to get seduced by the story-telling aspects, and then realise later a page had gone by without any jokes. The answers I came up with here are largely not the answers I ended up with, but at least it reminded me to bear in mind it was a comedy.

24 Doodles - 6

This is from August, when I was working on Hot Desk. There was a photo of a girl on a horse lying around on the table I was working on. I like the horse's legs in this, but not much of the rest of it.

(Incidentally, the 'Aesop version' actually turned out to be The Tortoise That Fell In Love With A Hare. But the rabbit and the lion were useful staging posts to getting me there.)

24 Doodles - 5

Changing notebooks, here's a quick and scrappy doodle of a sphinx from a page of my Souvenir Programme notebook where I was trying to work out a sketch about the riddle of the Sphinx. Sometimes my doodling can be quite literal-minded.

24 Doodles - 4

They haven't been all that doodle-y yet, have they? Here's a properly doodle-y one, from May, when I was working on Wysinnwyg in Dorset. It started off entirely abstract, but I think at the last minute the middle section sort of morphed into a picture of one of the characters...

24 Doodles - 3

This chap was sitting along from me in the British Library in June, while I was working on what became English For Pony Lovers. I've been trying to learn to be more stylistic with my drawing, which I only seem to be able to do by doing the same drawing repeatedly, only more so each time.

24 Doodles - 2

A quick sketch of Evelyn Waugh, drawn in March, on the island of Kos, whilst listening to an interview with him which contained the seed from which A Flock of Tigers grew. The man from whom Edmund Willard got his initials, and some of his opinions. (Though Edmund is fundamentally nicer than I fear Evelyn was, at least by this age.)

24 Doodles - 1

This chap sat over the way from me in the Union Jack pub in Waterloo this February, while I was working on the plot that eventually became Wysinnwyg. You might be able to read the note that says 'Is the problem that the Sues and Adele come from different sitcoms?' The answer to this was... yes. 

Stairway to heaven

When I was little, one of my grandmothers lived in a bungalow, and the other lived in a house, with a staircase. And one day, I remember one of my parents - I don't remember which - casually saying that this was sensible on the part of bungalow-Gran, as it meant she would be able to carry on living there even when she was very old. (It must, by the way, be one of the strange hazards of being a parent that, while the vast majority of everything you say to your kids, especially concerning teeth-brushing and room-tidying, is instantly forgotten; every so often you'll say something utterly unremarkable which your kid will NEVER FORGET.)

In this case, I think the reason it made such a big hit with me was it was the first time it had ever occurred to me that old people could get even older. I knew about death, of course, and I knew, without really believing it, that I would be a grown up one day, and my parents would get old. But this idea that either of my grans were not yet as old as they were ever going to be - as old, indeed, as it was possible to get - was completely new.

And I remember having two distinct reactions to the stairs thing: on the one hand, following my parent's lead, I too solemnly commended bungalow-Gran's foresight and good sense. But, at the same time, I secretly rather admired stairs-Gran's daredevil recklessness - her apparent refusal, not that I would have put it this way at the time, to go gentle into that good night...

Stairs-Gran would at the time, I think, have been about 65.

John Finnemore's Souvenir Cabin

Hello! I am very excited to announce that this autumn I will be doing a live stage show for two weeks only at the Shaw Theatre in London. Here's the poster, and tickets are on sale here.

The show will be a mixture of favourite sketches from John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme; brand new sketches; a 'Since You Ask Me' adventure; quite possibly a song or two… and a specially written new monologue by Mr. Arthur Shappey, making his first live stage appearance. He's very excited. Well, obviously he always is, but I mean specifically about this.

Each show will feature one of five guest stars, as shown in the poster: the four cast members of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, plus Kevin Baker, the 'Kevin' out of John and Kevin's Sunday Papers. The selection of sketches will be slightly different for each performer… and on the two Sundays, Kevin and I will do a live 'Sunday Papers'.

Here's who's on when:

30th September, 1st and 2nd October: Simon Kane.
3rd October: Margaret Cabourn-Smith
4th October: Kevin Baker
6th October: Margaret Cabourn-Smith
7th and 8th October: Lawry Lewin
9th and 10th October: Carrie Quinlan
11th October: Kevin Baker.


LINKS AND MISCELLANEOUS INFO

Tickets, as I say, can be bought here. 

The show has a Facebook page (which is more than I do.) It's a good place to ask any questions not answered here.

It also has a Twitter account. Why not.

The show begins at 7.30, and will be about two hours long, including an interval.

It is suitable for children. We've put over twelve as a guide, but this will not be rigidly enforced. If you have a well-behaved ten year old, bring them along. Come to that, I suppose, if you have a badly behaved fourteen year old, keep them away.

The Shaw Theatre is on Euston Road, next to the British Library, midway between Euston and King's Cross St Pancras stations.

…And I think that's it. Any questions, ask in the comment section, or on the Facebook page. Hope to see you there!