normal service resumed
Well, that's my bit done, we previewed my work to the great and the good of Suffolk, many glasses of tent temperature wine were served, as well as a beer from Greene King that has pretentions. Called 'the beer to dine for' it has a fancy bottle and label, and is plainly intended to take the beverage into the stratospheric heights of designer drinking. I'm sure it's very nice and wholesome, I was unable to try it as I was driving, but I did blag a bottle to try at home later. When later comes, I'll report back. I suppose that we should all be very grateful that what we are compelled to think of as the 'beer boffins' (although bean counters in suits probably created the bottle and then they had to think of something to put in it), opted to go down the exclusivity route rather than the trying to produce a drink with mass appeal (this means children, or as close to children as the marketting department thinks you can get away with).Thankfully belgian experiments to produce beers with fruit flavours have produced beers that still appeal mostly to an adult palate, even though many of them are quite revolting (vide: banana beer). I suspect that even a bubble-gum flavoured beer would fail, as the bitterness of the hops would be a turn off. What these drinks miss out on, is the 'lashings of sugar' or more commonly aspartame, which give alcopops their appeal. Many specialist beers are quite sweet, but they are a more complex drink than those pitched at the sunny delight generation.
Anyway, enough burbling about beer, I am more or less finished with Bury St Edmunds until January, when it all gets pulled out. The general reaction to my piece was very favourable; the sponsors liked it very much, which is always a good sign, and all in all, they seem very happy. I was called upon to make a speech, did my best to memorise the names of the sponsors and think of a few gags that hadn't been used before, and in the end was usurped (to my considerable relief) by a man in a suit who monologued about marketing enhancement opportunities for what seemed like a small portion of eternity, and he used the same gags I had thought of. Apart from the 'loitering within tent' one, which I offer to you as a small jewel fragment from the speech that never was.
I'll be travelling up again this week, to retrieve unused equipment, and to educate the technical staff in the arcane rituals of 'switching on' and 'switching off' , and next week I shall be attending the first night, generally speaking I hate first nights, if they are my own, but in this case, as I am already out of the picture, I shall simply let it all go by and hopefully enjoy the show. There is a genuinely visceral feeling you get the first time you open a panto, and there are 500 excited people out there, it's the reason performers keep coming back. Panto remains a genuinely popular form, and if done properly, is a very powerful cultural medium which has survived even dilution with no-talent soap stars and childrens TV presenters (I once did Panto with the bloke who flys over london for Capital Radio telling you what the traffic is doing, he was easy to frighten...). If you get the dame and the villains right, everything else will fall into line behind them (oh god, it really is that time of year!).
posted by Lampy @ 12/01/2005 11:46:00 am
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