2024 Roundup
February was a great month for me, I hadn’t long returned from doing some charity work in Guam the previous Christmas for a company that ensures no dog will die alone by also putting their owner down at the same time, so I was looking for a pick-me-up. I had seen in a newspaper someone was looking for a Stage Manager for an R&D exploring how late actors could turn up to rehearsals each day, which turned into quite an easy gig as by the end the actors stopped showing up altogether so myself and Richard Straightlemon, the director, ended up spending most of the week staring silently at the wall, taking occasional fifteen minute breaks and an hour for lunch. Richard had put my name forward for a job in March working on a new show called ‘I Didn’t Do It’, a show written by someone currently wanted by the police for running a very lucrative finance scam attempting to prove their innocence. Unfortunately, the message of the show was somewhat undermined by there being thirty five lighting designers and fifteen stage managers which as the capacity of the space was only forty it meant there wasn’t any space for the audience and quite often ten of the lighting designers had to work from home.
I had lost most of my earnings for the job in March by trying to hire a lawyer to see if I can patent my favourite joke so I wasn’t able to pay my rent for April. Luckily at the request of my landlord I was able to be put into a medically induced coma until June as a punishment and they gave me another month grace period to start paying rent again in July. Straightlemon sent me a letter asking if I was free to work on a two week festival ‘For Dogs, by Dogs’ a company trying to rival Crufts by making a space not only for dogs, but designed by them as well. They had initially drafted quite an intricate and complicated system to get the dogs to communicate their needs but it was deemed too much like human intervention, so in the end the festival turned into seven van loads of dogs being released into a field just outside Chester and as a lot of quite important paperwork was chewed up or illegible we were able to avoid any liability in the legal proceedings that followed. We were however impressed that some of the dogs had learned how to drive the vans.
Richard Straightlemon went into hiding in August after a newspaper exposé named him partially responsible for Barry Chuckle’s death in 2018, which meant I had to go back to looking for work for a while. Someone faxed me over a drawing of a job listing on LinkedIn looking for a technical manager for a funeral company called Wake Up that advertised themselves as the brand leaders in practical lighting design and immersive wakes. In my first job with them the client had asked us if we could make it look like their Nan was shining like an angel in the coffin and me and my manager had to spend five days working out how to make LED tape face the right direction whilst running it through a cadaver. Afterwards the client expressed that it was slightly excessive and he thought maybe an uplighter in the coffin would have been easier, which we hadn’t thought of. I was ultimately let go from this job in September after we ran a series of immersive events called Wake Yourself where you could attend your own wake, unfortunately it was a little too immersive and most of the times it ran the client would get so into it they’d end up passing away around two hours in, causing more business for the company, which meant I worked twenty three days straight and they couldn't afford my overtime so I was offered redundancy.
This worked out nicely as a friend of mine was producing a Christmas show called Chumbo the Christmas Man all about Santa’s cousin, Chumbo. It didn’t really make much sense and we had to replace the actor playing Chumbo four times in December as the dark content of the show kept causing the actors to have a psychotic break. It came to our attention pretty quickly that the director Dud Cuddley didn’t really know what Christmas was and hadn’t heard about it until a few hours before taking the job, and only took the role because his last job as a butcher had fired him for being too keen.
That’s it! Bring on 2025.
I have had a lovely year. I have made new friends. I have strengthened bonds with people I love and admire. I have felt very alive this year. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of it. I love you all.
