Random Thoughts - The Uncensored Parts

Okay, I ballsed this up. I originally wrote the piece called 'Random Thoughts' and included these two addition thoughts which I decided to delete before I posed the article. However, stupidly, I forgot that I'd already set the article to post itself. Hence, there are two posts called 'Random thoughts'. These two additional thoughts were just me being self-pitiful, and I apologise that they were published. It's true that I'm getting a little jaded by the web but this has been true for a very long time. I probably don't mean half of what I say here but I'll keep them to show that I can be a monumental prat.

• I’ve decided to stop leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Not out of any personal malice on my part but it’s bad enough leaving comments on a blog and it going completely ignored by the blog owner who can’t even be bothered to say, ‘Thanks for the comment.’ But, on four or five occasions now, I’ve written comments that the blogger just hasn’t bothered to publish. And they weren’t short comments. They were lengthy but positive comments that had taken time and effort to write. I’m not sure why this happens. I guess you can’t peer into another person’s heart and figure out their motives. Whatever their reason, they’ve accomplished one goal. They have one less reader and there’s now more cynicism in the world.

• On the subject of cynicism and comments, I’m also considering closing the comments on this blog. It’s becoming evident that few people ever wants to leave any feedback and the only comments that do arrive tend to be SPAM. Again, I find that my general faith in the world increases. Other than my Frank Lampard post which is very popular in Nigeria, most of my traffic comes from people looking for 'Warrington Prostitutes' or '3D Porn'. And here I was thinking there might be some intelligent beings on the other end of this blog; scientific types, studying DNA or the universe, who might enjoy what I do. I’m beginning to think my audience consists of penis stranglers clutching their Nintendo 3DS in the vague hope they’ll find something fleshy and peaked popping out of this blog to satisfy their sick bastard urges. Thoughts like that are the stuff of dark dreams that usually end up with me  closing the blog entirely and focussing my efforts elsewhere… I don't feel that bad yet but some days this whole enterprise feels very wasteful.

The Ralph Steadman Effect

Few things give me as much pleasure as Ralph Steadman’s books yet they can also awaken certain feelings of self-loathing in me.

When I was still signing my letters as Stan Madeley, the UK’s top Richard Madeley lookalike, back when I was still hoping to get a second volume of letters published, I would very occasionally write one to some personal hero whose work I genuinely admired. I once wrote to Robert Crumb and sent him a bad parody I’d drawn of one of his Amazonian girls. I walked down the stairs one morning about three weeks later to see a large white A4 envelope sitting on the doormat. The handwritten address was a work of art in itself and almost as good as the drawing Crumb had enclosed: his own version of my version of one of his Amazonians. Days like that made the failures worth it. And there were plenty of failures...

It generally didn't bother me when certain people didn't reply. I've bothered enough big names so that a rejection from Will Gompertz was never going to upset me too much, even if he did get one of my better cartoons. The exception is when a letter happens to be one of the few I've written which were special to me. Those were letters into which I’d usually put real effort, perhaps taken days to get the wording just right. I wrote to Ron Mael of Sparks who completely ignored me, as did Gerald Scarfe both of which were real disappointments. However, many others replied. I have letters from comedy greats such as Bob Newhart and Alan Alda, film greats such as Roman Polanski and Shirley MacLaine. John Landis sent me a CD and Martin Sheen a bag of whistles.

Yet nothing quite matches my Steadman reply. I wrote to him when I was feeling particularly down one day. It was probably after another of the endless rejection emails from ‘Private Eye’ and I was really considering… Well, I might say 'giving' up but I'm not sure that's right. I love to write comedy and I love to cartoon. The thought of doing anything else... Well, I don't go there. Unlike my usual spoof letters, the letter I wrote to Steadman mixed humour in with genuine sentiment. I also sent him a copy of my book which he probably used on his log stove. I didn't expect a reply so I was over the moon when I received a handwritten letter two months later. I felt all kinds of stupid when he told me to sort myself out. Slapped by Steadman! It should be the title of a book… I present the original letter and reply here for the first time. You see before you one of my most treasured possessions. Both pictures are clickable in case you'd like to read them...



But all that is back-story. I’m now sitting here wondering if I can make the STEADman@77 exhibition currently playing to lucky and no-doubt indifferent bastards at the Cartoon Museum in London. I’m itching to go but the small matter of a 400 mile round journey is getting in the way. The obvious answer is: if you really wanted to go, you’d find a way. Perhaps that’s true but the cost of travelling between any two points in this fine country of ours is getting out of hand. I don’t have a car and as much as I love cycling, I don’t think my old Raleigh X1 (and my even older legs) could make it to London and back. The train is pretty quick but it’s well outside the current finances of this humble pen scratcher. That leaves the coach...

My six foot two inch frame does not sit well on National Express coaches for a five hour journey. Leaving Warrington at 6.40AM, I’d apparently arrive in London at 11.40. Assuming the travel sickness hasn’t destroyed my insides by then, I’d have maybe five hours to find the museum, sob and drool over the Steadman exhibition, before I’d have to get the return coach that leaves at 6.30 and arrives home around 11.30. I feel nauseous just thinking about that trip. It was sheer hell the last time I travelled to London by coach but I’m beginning to feel like I’ll have to do it again or never see this exhibition…

When Londoners complain as they occasionally do on the rare occasion that an exhibition opens somewhere in the North, I wish they’d remember the thousands upon thousands of things we don’t get and never will get. Not that there isn’t adequate space to put on an exhibition. We have the damn Tate Liverpool which thrives on the abstracted junk they exhibit to American tourists and bored school kids. Last year they held an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ exhibition which ignored Steadman’s superior version in favour of some graphic design college nonsense. There is plenty of gallery space in Manchester when it’s not being used on some postmodern project that no bugger wants or visits. Would it be too much to hope that a collection by the UK’s most respected illustrators and cartoonists of the late 20th Century might actually travel this far north? I mean, Steadman was born in Wallasey, for Christ sake! A mere fifteen miles from my front door… Get a bloody blue plaque put up there or in in Abergele in North Wales which is where he was brought up and then bring his work up here. I can be in North Wales inside forty minutes...

However, it won't happen. I know I’ll have to overdose on Dramamine in order to pay homage in London. If I wanted to engage in pilgrimage, I’d have bloody well become a Catholic.