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Thanks a lot to mean Ian Greenwich-Mean for picking around with the clocks. Babies don’t understand clocks or time and wake up when they think they’re ready. So a lovely 5am start today gave us a very full day that seemed to go on forever. But we fitted plenty in, so maybe they should take an hour off every day and then everyone with kids would get loads done.
I started looking at my Relativity sitcom, which mainly involved reading through the previous versions of this idea, but I was impressed with how sweet and funny both the televised 2007 version and the never broadcast 2008 sitcom script version were and had quite a few ideas of what to do next. I seem to be excited by the prospect of writing again, which is lucky as if all goes well there’s going to be a lot of it to do.
And then after lunch (where I slightly mistimed things because the oven clock was still on old time- thanks a lot Ian Greenwich-Mean) we drove over to Finchley Road to see Bec and Tom’s Awesome Laundry Show. Although Phoebe is a little bit too young for the sophisticated poo and pant jokes, she was engaged by the show and so was I (and I got all the poo and pant jokes and a couple of the ruder jokes for adults too). It was brilliant fun and performed with energy and exuberance particularly by Bec, who plays her part as an over-excited woman-child with utter glee. Tom is the more sensible and straighter one, who is constantly and hilariously undermined by his hyperactive friend. It’s a terrific double act and a properly good kids show, with the right amount of audience interaction, a willingness to incorporate the unrequested interjections from kids who are really getting into it and some really impressive set pieces, not least Bec’s amazing living cartoons (she does these in her grown-up shows too -they are awesome and slightly magical)
It’s a great show for kids of 4 or over, but Phoebe stayed engaged for most of it and liked being part of the audience. I am no doubt projecting but she does seem to enjoy and be fascinated by the theatre shows she’s been to. She won’t sit still in Little Gym or football, but she’s more or less happy to stay still for an hour in the theatre (though she needed some chocolate coated cranberries to get through the last 20). Actually thinking about it, my daughter is obsessed with our washing machine and dryer and putting things in and out of them, so her keenness might actually have been down to her dream of owning a laundromat.
We had a lot of fun as a family having an afternoon out. And the humour was all at about my level. It reminded me of the first Edinburgh Fringe I did, a student production of “Old King Cole” by Ken Campbell, which was similarly pant and poo obsessed and got lovely interaction from the audience who totally bought into it. I am not sure I’ve had as enjoyable audience in the 30 years that have passed since then.
The only slightly chilling thing about the experience was that the theatre was in the Jewish Centre and we had to have our bags checked by security on the way in. What a fucking awful world we live in.
