On visiting brain doctors in Chester and @MartinRowson in Sale

Chester just isn't built for big people. I realised this about the time I demolished a display of Jonathan Dimbleby books in the city's cramped Waterstones. The destruction didn't bother me too much. Richard & Judy's blurb for the book says 'fascinating', which is a whole word more than I got for the book written by the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike... Besides, Jonathan is only my fourth favourite Dimbleby (after David, Richard, and Alphonsus (no relation)). I did, however, feel bad for the young toddler whose mother scolded him for toppling the pile. I wasn't about to disillusion her and admit that my right elbow was the guilty party but I think I had good intentions. That child will grow up with a lifelong phobia of Jonathan Dimbleby and that's not a bad phobia to have. Hell of a lot better than an old friend of mine who had a phobia of tomatoes. Not sure if there's a tomato-based form of Tourettes but he would scream 'c**t' every time he saw a red vegetable in a sandwich.

But I digress...

I was in Chester because my sister had an appointment with a neurologist for her condition which continues to baffle medical science but could well be some magnificent fuckup with her sympathetic chain. The NHS have taken 20 years to spot what might be this magnificent fuckup in her sympathetic chain hence our travelling to Chester for expert advice. I've taken to joking that her sympathetic chain ends somewhere around me but that's clearly not true. My middle name is 'Sympathy' which also, quite possibly, is the name of one of the minor Dimblebys.

I joke but it's been a hell of a week, most of which has been spent accompanying my nearest and dearest as they have had hospital appointments of one kind or another.

The oddest day was Thursday, which is saying something given that I spent this morning sitting in a hospital reading Christopher Hitchens's account of having his balls waxed. Yet Thursday was one of those surprising and wonderful days that defined my week, month, year, and decade, depending on how you view the day I spent in London meeting a publisher who agreed to publish my book. That day was a sublimely good day but not a surprise. It also subsequently become tinged by the sadness of what happened to poor Stan Madeley. The status of 'best day of my life' was up for grabs and Thursday definitely grabbed it by its ears and rode it like an incontinent pig.

I went to Sale to attend Martin Rowson's cartoon workshop and lecture and it all turned out rather amazing. I'm trying to finish a proper full length review of the talk but, as you know, I rate Rowson as one of the best cartoonists in the country. Dare I say the best? Well, sod it. Some people rate Shelley higher than Byron but I prefer my poets madder and badder rather than happy, clappy, or all skippy through the dandylions. Rowson has a dark vituperative edge which elevates him higher than the rest. He's Byronic in his anger, satire, and wit. Byronic too in his kindness when it comes to treating a humble writer/cartoonist to a curry. Yes, that's right: I felt a bit John Cam Hobhouse as I had a curry with Martin Rowson. One day I might actually be able to put that experience into words and explain how much it meant. What I'll say is that he taught me a lesson in how to say 'fuck you' to the world and 'fuck you' to critics. No longer will I be plagued by the words of the 'Welsh Rockweiller' who greeted my book with possibly the shittiest review that Amazon has ever seen. Fuck you, Welsh Rockweiller! Fuck you!

The actual workshop also gave me a new way of approaching caricature and I intend to get at least one cartoon finished this weekend. Sadly, the use-by date has passed on a nice little drawing I'd started of Julian Assange pissing on the head of Philip Hammond so it will be something new I work on tonight as I try to stay awake for the Republican debate. I might not. I'm spectacularly knackered.

This coming week, I also have to try to write some new articles and attempt to 'place' them which means hope that somebody will buy them. I've had real strangers write to me in the past week saying how much they've enjoyed the pieces I've been writing. Short of getting paid for what you love to do, praise is possibly the best part of being a writer and/or cartoonist. That and being able to sleep late on a Tuesday...

 

Macramé is my passion

Well, that's me finished with politics. Washed my hands of the stinking business. I've learned one important lesson from this election and it's that no bugger cares. I've done some pretty unpopular things in my day (held a Twitter yoga class, wrote a book as Richard Madeley's number one lookalike, pretended to be Steven Martin's gogo dancers, tried to pass myself off as London's only midget gigolo, wrote a book of pornographic short stories, drew 101 cartoons about why I hate Man United, wrote an Android shuffleboard game including the best version of Dutch shuffleboard on the market, built a Gag Machine for Windows)* but nothing comes quite as close to an unmitigated disaster as my election podcasts. I recorded eight in total and they've probably not had that number of listeners. Perhaps the majority of people are just completely shut off from politics. Perhaps they're just shut off to me, for whatever reason: my voice, my words, my thoughts, my attitude. The point is: I need to move on. Find something else to fill the blog.

I keep getting hits from an arts and crafts website, which makes me wonder if that's the route I should take. I have no idea how to do macramé but I think I should be talking about it, perhaps in the form of a 30 minute weekly podcast given a modern twist involving a beard I'll grow or possibly fashion using my developing macramé skills. Hipster Macramé? You might laugh (but more likely won't) but I think there's money in knotted string. I'll Kickstart it for ten grand and become the nation's macramé  uncle. I'd have five good years on ITV and then become involved in one highly publicised sex scandal involving a rubberised  Great Dane and a copy of Wisden. I'll have to appear on the Philip Schofield sofa and sob a little bit into his lilac scented lap but eventually the nation would forgive me and I'd go on to host a popular travel series on BBC1 in which I ride Claire Balding around the Baltic. Don't tell me you wouldn't watch that because I know damn well that it would be compulsive viewing.

By the way, if you were wondering... Yes, I'm in a slightly ticked off mood and you probably think: when is he ever not in a slightly ticked off mood? However, that's not always the case. Blogging usually puts me in a ticked off mood and my total inability to connect with the British people frustrates the hell out of me. It's why macramé is my passion or it will be once I can get the knot out of this piece of string I'll be fashioning this afternoon into a nut sling, a stylish cradle to suspend a few cashews or brazils over my desk and within easy reach. Some of you with filthier minds than mine will have imagined something different when I mentioned 'nut sling' but, there again, I don't connect with the current zeitgeist. However, that ends right now. This blog is either going to attack the shortage of serious macramé websites or it will join the back of the queue of websites offering free pornography and since I have more string in the shed that I have rutting Russians, macramé is the way to go.

It's a shame it's come to this. I thought my recent cartoons had been good but it feels like they're among the least popular that I've ever drawn. I'd hoped that colouring in my cartoons might have made them more popular but the reverse has been the case. I suspect if I went back to black and white and then completely omitted the black, they'd be even more popular. I tried that last night and here's my first attempt.




Oh, some people might say that it's a bit obscene but don't tell me that you've never fantasised about using a stick of licorice like that. Let me also point out how much skill was involved in drawing licorice with white ink.

However, I've digressed when I was intending on explaining the basics of macramé and I haven't even got to the stage of telling you about how much string you'll need in order to follow me as I work on our first project together: a macramé  Gillian Anderson, five foot two inches of sexy woven goodness, upper lip mole a cunningly deployed larks head knot sure to melt the heart.

However, we'll have to cover that in the next lesson. I've got into a slight tangle here and every time I cross my legs I manage to hoist the cat up the curtains.

Until anon, macramé fans.



* All things I actually did.

My Problems With Being Richard Madeley (Revisited)

I'm not a man much given to hero worship. I have people I admire and whose work has inspired me. I could rattle off a long list of people who I hold up so they catch the light and sit bathed in a slightly angelic glow. Does that make them my heroes? Perhaps it does, though I've never really seen myself as a person who has 'heroes'. When I see celebrity in the flesh, I've always been a person who tends to give a shrug my shoulders and walk on, even if they're people I like. I see them as just human beings and I'd never want to impose myself on them nor demean myself by being 'fan like' in my admiration. It was good to meet Steadman on that day when I'd travelled to London to see his exhibition not knowing he was going to be there. Yet I was so conflicted. I didn't want to stand in line to meet him because I don't do that kind of thing. Yet fate had placed him in the same room as me on the one day in about ten years that I was actually in London. How could I not meet him and make a bit of a fool of myself? So, it was good to meet him but I really didn't meet him. I was presented to him and, in that sense, I think I lost something that day.

The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...

It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.

I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.

That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.

This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.

The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.

Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.

The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I  stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.

Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.

The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.

The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.

'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.

It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.

The Tim Marshall Letter

Apropos of almost nothing: is there a more annoying song than 'Things Can Only Get Better' by D:Ream feat Professor Brian Cox? I didn't actually know Cox was in the band until he was talking about it in The Independent this morning. I'd forgot how annoying that song is, though not musically. I mean the lyric: 'things can only get better'. It's a terrible song for a political party to adopt as its anthem. It's like saying, 'we can't do much worse than the last lot', though, obviously, there's always room for things to get worse. I would have thought a professor of astrophysics would have realised. Unless we're talking about the complete heat death of the universe, there's always a 'worse' direction for entropy to go.

Right. Glad I got that off my chest. I was slightly reluctant to blog today simply because I didn't want to push my previous post down the page. I rarely look at anything I've done and think it particularly good. I don't believe a person can ever gets real satisfaction from their own work until enough time has passed for them to forget the process by which they arrived at the finished article. You write what you know about and therefore nothing you read back to yourself can be much of surprise. Yet having said that, my previous blog post is one of my favourites. I think I dug deep enough to find some genuine blood and spit.

It's been a week and I've still not heard back from James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka the honcho in the chief's poncho down at BBC News. It's a nervous wait though I can't separate that mild nervousness from a deeper dread since I'm waiting to go to the hospital where my sister has an appointment to see a consultant. I expect nothing from the appointment other than a sense of frustration. However, deep breath and hope for the best.

In the meantime, I might as well post my original James Harding letter here so as to keep my records in order. The story so far: Tim Marshall announced that he'd left Sky News and I was determined to do something about it so I dusted off my Stan Madeley mask and once again became my alter ego as the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike and cabaret chisel thrower to the stars.

A Rare Stan Hit

I rarely get hits from people Googling for 'Stan Madeley' so when I do send out a Stan letter, I keep an eye out for hits. It's usually a bad sign. It means that a letter has been read, questions raised, and then a web search has resulted in a letter going straight into the bin. Well, I tried my best, though on reflection, why Sky Broadband and not the usually BBC IP address? Perhaps there's still chance I'll get a reply...

The Tim Marshall Letter

Well, I found a stamp. My 'Tim Marshall' letter has gone. It's now on the long two hundred and six mile journey to London and BBC headquarters where I hope (but doubt) it will cross the desk of James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka BBC's Director of News and Current Affairs. I felt quite nostalgic writing the letter. Perhaps there are lots of crazy people out there who write letters. I've never considered myself one of the 'crazies', though no doubt some people have questioned (and will question) my sanity. The 'comedy' is merely the justification for writing otherwise serious letters which, in truth, it really would be mad to send to people in authority since, in reality, what are our opinions really worth to them?

At one time, I was writing three letters a day and I did that like a religion for about 18 months. It cost me a small fortune in stamps but I think I learned quite a bit about letter writing. I find writing them a wonderful outlet. In them, I become the person I wish I could be. Gone is the indecisive man who cares too much about his work yet questions himself to the point of impotent indecision. Instead, I adopt this strangely confident voice which isn't my own. I love calling people by their Christian names and being chatty and informal and terribly direct. My letters have a cocky swagger which isn't me but probably is me at some deep level where the id rages. I suppose in a way they're the expression of my rebelliousness. I refuse to address anybody other than as a fellow human being. In that respect, letters are wonderfully egalitarian and an expression of our simple shared humanity.

Perhaps I'll get an answer. Perhaps I won't. My success with the BBC has always been around 50/50. Some of them clearly enjoyed my letters. Others, by their silence, either didn't or never received them. I suspect quite a few of them suffer that terrible dullness of 'professionalism' which means they take what they do far too seriously to understand the serious edge to my apparently trivial letters.

Printing the letter has itself been quite the struggle. I haven't used my printer in a long time and I was disappointed to discover that I didn't have any yellow ink left. I use an old Canon printer for which I used to buy cheap cartridges without security chips. I had some reprogrammable security chips I could stick in them using a chip reprogrammer. It saved me a fortune over the years but now I find I have a draw full of yellow ink cartridges but no chips. Even if I had the chips, I think my reprogrammer has bust. Stan's head came out looking purple. It means I couldn't print my letter with the usual handsome face at the bottom right corner.



Strange looking at this face. I got such mileage from such a simple combination of a comb-over and Richard Madeley's face. I had such great hopes for those books. I still maintain my second book is even better than the first and the first was the best thing I've ever done. Poor Stan. Staring into those big bright optimistic eyes, it's hard to believe that so few people got the joke. Perhaps Jim Harding (or his PA) will. Perhaps he'll be on the phone to Tim Marshall over the weekend and he'll stop the world travelling even further down the road towards the banal and bland. Probably not. The point is: I tried my best and I can do no more.

Wish I could go back to letter writing. Of all the things I've done, it was the only one where I actually felt quite at home.

My @Itwitius Letter Campaign

Typical of the lull I experience between projects, I had trouble getting my mind working yesterday. I have a vague idea about writing some web-related software so I took my first steps in WPF programming. However, late last night, I eventually succumbed to the lure of Sergeant Bilko. There's something about American sitcoms of the 1950s that's unlike anything we've had since. My network hard drive has the entire Bilko, Car 54 Where Are You and, if I can handle the shouting (sometimes I can't) the 'classic 39' episodes of The Honeymooners. It's perfect stuff for doodling.

Not in the mood to draw gag cartoons, last night I attempted a couple of Sky News caricatures. Sky News was at the forefront of my thoughts. My sister had excitedly told me that she'd found this blog when she was herself looking for news about Tim Marshall. 'You're at the top of Google' she exclaimed. I shrugged. I'm at the top of Google for quite a few things but it means next to nothing. Type 'Ed Milliband cartoon' into Google and mine comes at the top of the page. What was stranger, however, was the same thing happened to me later in the evening. I wanted to start drawing a caricature of Anna Jones so I went to Google Images, my preferred source of reference material, and I typed 'Anna Jones Sky News'. I was shocked to see a very old cartoon I'd drawn appear near the top of the page. It means nothing, of course, except I'm probably the only unsuccessful cartoonist with a particular crush on Anna Jones.

Thinking about Anna Jones makes me realise that I was probably a bit too harsh in what I wrote about Sky News last night, though it has definitely slipped to second in my list of most watched channels. I suppose the writing on the wall was to be seen back when I was writing Book 2 of my Stan Madeley letters. I had two successes from Sky News. I had what I assume was a mass-produced letter of apology from Adam Boulton, explaining why he shouldn't have got angry with Alistair Campbell. It was a strange letter because I'd written to compliment him for his passion and I'd demanded more outbursts.

I know you’re not looking to open negotiations with a simple viewer and I suppose you’ll receive quite a bit of grief about your bust up with that toxic toad, Alistair Campbell. However, I wanted to write to say that not a word of criticism will you hear from me! In fact, I might send a note to my old mucker, Quentin Letts, at The Daily Mail. He’s the salt of the earth and knows it. I’m sure I could get him to say a few words in your defence.

My second 'success' was a signed photo of Jeremy Thompson, though I'd never asked for one. What I'd actually written was:

Dare I say that Sky News really misses Bob Friend? Now all the best talent is wasted. There's not a better foreign affairs editor than Tim Marshall and Adam Boulton is top of the political tree. So why the obsession with showbiz? And who is that gormless gnome poncing around film premieres? He talks to actors as though he shared a Jacuzzi with them only last night whilst supping champagne from their publicist's keister. I want news, Jeremy, not promotional guff about a 19 year old airhead struggling with the duel ownership of plastic nipples and a pink Ferrari. I'm surprised you don't choke every time you squeeze the words 'Paris', 'Hilton', 'Osbourne', 'Jordan' or 'Andre' past your epiglottis. And it's all well and good, slapping all of Sky News' resources on one big story each year to win some ruddy BAFTA so your lot can vulgarly push it into our faces at every commercial break. How about giving us more meat throughout the day? The only note of sanity in the whole operation is that you've not started to wear those ridiculous pins they have on Sky Sports News. It makes them look like members of a cult, which I'm not entirely sure they're not. Have you noticed that their female presenters look like Stepford Wives? And, what's worse, so do the men.

My biggest Sky News disappointment was never getting a reply from Anna Jones, though looking through the thousand plus letters I sent in the course of my Stan Madeley career, I can't seem to find the two Anna Jones originals. I'm beginning to wonder if I even sent them, though I'm sure I did. I seem to remember the premise of my letters being my sadness upon hear she was leaving Sky News for a newsreading job in Bolivia.

But I digress.

I can't really write anything better than last night's response to the news that Tim Marshall is leaving Sky News. These things happen. There is a news cycle which cycles not just the news but also the presenters. Yet something about this just doesn't feel right. I don't know the reason for Marshall's departure but in a world where genuine talent stands out, the loss of Marshall is a big one.

Reading around his twitter account this morning, there was little hint about his future. He's talking about a new website but every fool has a website and where does that gets us? He jokingly asks one follower to 'Write to the newspapers, demand that I appear as an analyst.  Pitchforks, burning torches etc.' That suggests that the BBC aren't hammering at his door offering him a place in the foreign affairs department. That in itself is madness. Like I said last night: no journalist so obviously follows in the footsteps of John Simpson.

So, I'm now tempted to write to newspapers (and the BBC) and demand that he appears as an analyst. I'd do it too but I can no longer afford the stamps. If I could sell a few Gag Machines, then Stan Madeley might return for a proper letter campaign. For the moment, he might have to satisfy himself with one or two. I reckon I should begin with James Harding (Harding the Hack), aka the Director of News and Current Affairs at the BBC. It will probably come to nothing but watch this space. It will at least get my brain going on this cold day when a brutal snow is falling outside the window and I can't bring myself to face the thought of two more months of computer programming for zero reward.

Random Thoughts on Simon Hoggart and Ronald Searle

Among friends and family, I always jokingly referred to Simon Hoggart as ‘that swine Hoggart’ but I never really meant any of that. It was comedy anger directed towards a man I enjoyed posing as my nemesis in the field of satire and publishing. I am a big fan of political sketch writers and Hoggart was clearly one of the best. It was why he was one of the first people to receive a letter when I started out on my adventure as Stan Madeley, the UK’s top Richard Madeley lookalike. I’d hoped for a knuckleball response along the lines of Quentin Letts who entered into the joke with his open-eyed gosh-oh-blimey Herefordshire élan. Hoggart’s response was the first to make me doubt myself. He returned my letter having scribbled ‘Oh do we really need another book of spoof letters’ across the bottom. I used that as the blurb on the cover of my very first draft manuscript I’d sent to the publishers.

It was a funny response in a way, though Hoggart had also stuck a hot knife in the sensitive spot where I felt hurt as an unpublished writer. At the time I wondered why anybody could respond to something so innocuous with such miserly contempt. Yet I suppose in the long term, Hoggart was right. He clearly knew the market. The world didn’t need another book of spoof letters or, at least, the world didn’t want mine. Yet with even greater hindsight, I wonder if he’d known about his illness when I’d written to him. It makes me feel slightly ashamed that I’d thought as I’d done. It’s easy to forget the real lives behind all the public facades. My letter might have arrived at a bad time. Feeling this shame, I voiced this thought today. I suppose I might feel more miserly had a friend not replied that I shouldn’t feel bad because all I’d ever done was try to make him laugh as he’d often made me laugh. That might be true.

[caption id="attachment_3610" align="alignright" width="306"] Click to enlarge[/caption]

Yet it’s strange that I think back on that letter today. In Chester on Saturday, I’d spent five minutes walking around The Works after we were done at the hospital. We were wasting time until our train home and I was feeling so justified in my finding a specialist for my sister via Doctoralia that I was in the mood to treat myself. My eyes opened a little wider as I spotted a small pile of books on the shelf. They marked the last publication of the great Ronald Searle. Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole is a series of illustrations that Searle drew for his wife as she underwent prolonged medical treatment. It’s a poignant but ultimately sad little book and I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, despite my loving all of Ronald Searle’s work. I’d written to Searle back in 2010 and I had got a reply, much to the disgust of my friend Stu who never had much success getting replies when he wrote to great illustrators. As I thumbed through the Mrs Mole book, I thought of Searle’s postcard, sitting in my fat file of replies. He’d generously taken time to write a response in his distinctive spidery scrawl, despite his wife’s battle with illness, yet his reply was perhaps tinged with a certain weariness when he wrote: ‘The best of luck in the world of illustration but from long experience I can say it’s a good thing you have your chisel-throwing to fall back on!’

Only a fool would disregard the advice when the greatest illustrator/cartoonist in the world tells you to give up but I’ve always been a fool and I continue to scrawl my cartoons that remain unpublished and, I think it’s fair to say, unwanted. In a way, I suppose in both cases, my letters had arrived in much feted lives but troubled by real concerns. It makes me wonder if the world every really needs spoof letters, tricksters, and men of shallow delights. I begin to wonder how much I might have intruded in a way that really was unwelcome and a just little bit wrong.

I don’t know… I do know that I miss Searle enormously and I’ll miss that swine Hoggart too. He brought some rare humour into British politics. And if he clearly thought my book a rat of an idea, I like to think that he had honour of being the first to tell me so.

Flirting With Jacqueline Bisset

I very rarely search for my real self on the internet. The last time I did it was probably three or four years ago when a search for my actual birth name thankfully came back largely empty. At the time, I thought I should perhaps grab ‘my’ domain name, just in case publishing fame should come knocking, but I never did. I searched today and discovered that not only is my name (but not me) quite prevalent across the web, there are two or three characters going by my name, one of whom has taken out the domain name, another with the Twitter account and then pretty much anything to which you could connect my name. One is a British somewhat dauby painter who lives not a hundred miles away. The other is brash American around whom the world apparently rotates.

Because I have a relatively unusual real name (I’m not a John Smith) it is relatively rare that I see it in print. There was a stalker, I remember, who had my name and it worried me that people might think I was into stalking. But other than that, my real name has remained out of the public eye, which makes it disconcerting to read people boasting of their accomplishments using my name. It feels like I’m looking into a parallel universe where I didn’t have qualms about working as the real me. ‘Welcome to the Derek Smiles website’ is the way these other me’s are doing it and had our name been Derek Smiles. ‘Read the Derek Smiles Newsletter’ was the another I saw done by the American me. Subscribers: 7, which means he’s also about as successful as me.

I can’t decide if they’re wrong or I’ve been wrong all these years. I hate all that ego culture where the name is more important than the work. I suppose I hate it because it has become the predominant cultural force over the last twenty years. On the occasional times I have to visit Superdrug or Boots, it shocks me how often a celebrity name is attached to a perfume or aftershave. I really don’t want to smell like David Beckham’s armpits but it’s even worse when you’re wearing an aftershave named after a fictional character such as 007 who never actually had real armpits. It’s why I admired the Baconface project so much and why, with a few reservations, I like reading about Banksy.

Yet perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the only things that matter are the names. Was I any better or more noble when I wrote a book of letters boasting of the celebrities contained within?

Yesterday, I wrote a long rambling email about my experiences writing under a pseudonym. A few years ago, I thought it was the right thing to do. William Donaldson had done it when writing his Henry Root letters and there is no finer spoof letter writer than the mighty Donaldson. In America, the great Ted L Nancy did it to the point that most people though he was Jerry Seinfeld until he was revealed to be a Seinfeld friend and stand-up, Barry Marder. Now I think it was probably the wrong thing to do. It means that nobody knows me or can even attach my name to all of my very disparate body of work.

Yet a pseudonym takes you away from yourself and allows you to create a slightly better world. As Stan I could be a very different person: bold, confident, cheeky, sly, and flirtatious. Very flirtacious. As myself, I could never flirt with a woman. As Stan, I could try to seduce Jacqueline Bisset.

Jacqueline would have featured in Volume 2 of Stan’s letters had I been more determined searching for an agent or publisher. I think they’re the better and funnier letters, written after volume 1 was published. Fearing that the UK might associate my name with a book in the bookshops (how naively optimistic), I wrote mainly to Americans, so the majority of the book are letters to and from Hollywood stars. Bisset was Stan at his randiest, which is perhaps unsurprising because I was the kind of youth moved deeply by The Deep. Not that I was a particularly big fan of nautical adventures of the 1970s, you understand, but because I am a very big fan of nautical adventures starring Jacqueline Bisset circa 1977 and shown repeated on ITV throughout the 1980s.

[caption id="attachment_3266" align="alignright" width="468"] Click to enbiggen[/caption]
If you've not seen the film (and, these unenlightened days, that’s more than likely), let me give you a quick précis. Basically, the plot goes like this: Jacqueline wears a white t-shirt in deep waters before climbing up onto the deck of her yacht whist it bobs around in a cooling wind offshore wind. There’s a certain perkiness about the scene which I won’t dwell on in this family friendly environment and other things happen during the film, even if they don’t really matter so much as the lovely Jacqueline wearing her white t-shirt and bobbing around on the deck of her yacht.

My letter to Jacqueline Bisset was one of my better letters. Jacqueline certainly understood Stan’s humour and wrote a very seductive reply on a nice glossy eight by ten which I now keep sealed in an airtight bag along with her hand-written envelope. Would it sound terribly weird to admit that on days when I feel very low, I unseal the bag and inhale deeply? There are not many men who can tell you what Jacqueline Bisset smelt like on one day in May 2010? I’d try to describe if for you but it’s a bit like pears but with a hint of pomegranate and then some mysterious something that I can only assume is ambrosia… And that’s the heavenly stuff not the tinned rice pudding.

However, I digress. As result of yesterday’s email, I’ve recompiled a new PDF of the entire Volume 2 as it sits in manuscript form. I intend to spend today reading it to see if it’s worth finishing it up with the extra letters I’ve received since I last edited it. I might then try it again with agents or publishers. Sometimes I’m too self-defeating. Here I have a finished book that’s both very funny and filled with big star names. Surely that has to be worth something. Doesn’t it? And perhaps I might even try to get it published under my real name...

Stan Madeley Came Back

As I write this, it's the close of a surprising day. I hadn’t opened a copy of Stan’s book in such a long time but today I signed one to send off as a thank you. I like giving my books away. It somehow feels right. I wish I could do it all the time and that I could earn money a different way, perhaps by donations or simple osmosis. It always seemed wrong that money got in the way of people enjoy what I’d written. I wrote spoof letter as Stan because I simply wanted to make strangers laugh and cheer up their dull days. When it turned into a book, I was as surprised as anybody. I’d long since given up hoping that I’d ever be published. That book broke my duck so I can now feel that I’ll never be published again… Such a shame. Stan Volume 2 was so much funnier than the first…

So I signed my book and biked to the Post Office and thought no more about it. Then tonight: a total coincidence. I had an email from out of the blue. Somebody had found me via the ‘Damn United’ website I wrote briefly. More remarkable was that they had read ‘Second Class Male’ from ‘cover to cover and really enjoyed it’.

Oh, isn’t that what people say when they want to get on your good side? Well, perhaps it is but I’m allowing myself a moment to wallow in that praise because that is only the second time a reader has written to me about that book. In fact, before tonight, my entire ‘artistic’ career can be summed up like this: I’ve only ever had one fan but I made two enemies.

The one fan was called ‘George’ and he sent me a Christmas card after my book was published. I replied, sending him a funny letter and a handmade ‘Stan & Sandra’ Christmas card. I never heard from him again. I often wonder who George was, what kind of life he led and why he felt possessed to send Stan a Christmas card.

My two enemies are as memorable as George was mysterious. I always consider Simon Hoggart at The Guardian to be the first enemy of my project. He was definitely the first, rudest and least funny person to reply. He simply returned my letter with a scribbled message: 'not another book of spoof letters'. I should have replied 'not another book of round robin letters' but I felt better than that. My bigger enemy went by the name ‘the Welsh Rottweiler’. He wrote possibly the vilest review in the history of vile Amazon book reviews. It was vicious, snarling, and utterly hateful. It’s as though he’d found a book which offended every particle of his DNA and he’d made it his mission in life to destroy me. He hoped that my book would fail and promised that it would be pulped by January. There was more to it (lots more) but I don’t want to remember it. I don’t know why he did what he did but the review was so painful that it made me numb. If you like horror stories, go click the cover of my book in the sidebar and read the Rottweiler’s review under my book on Amazon. It’s one of the reviews that give me one star. I never did read another review after that and deep down I’m not sure that I’ve ever really recovered. The Rottweiler was the kind of guy that makes you lose faith in humanity.

The thing is: I never understood why this stranger hated me as much as he did. My book wasn’t one of those exploitative pieces of crap written in order to exploit a momentary fad. Perhaps it might have done better if it was. That Christmas I was competing with (and losing to) the Merecat book. Beaten by Martin Amis is one thing but a bloody rat? And I’d worked so hard on my book, trying to make everything in it raise a chuckle from the first page right down the fake photo accreditation on the back. Most writers will tell you their biggest expenditure is ink and paper. Mine was stamps. Hundreds of pounds spent on second class stamps and that was long before I knew I’d get a book advance out of it.

So, this might sound mawkish of me but tonight's email cheered me up when I’ve been feeling particularly down. I’ve been worrying because I fear that my blogging, writing, and cartooning will soon come to an end. It probably will but for one night I can at least feel like a real writer and, really, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

An Apology For My Previous Post About Yam Smuggling

I want to apologise for last night’s post. 2000 words on yams, lesbians, and the youthful Béatrice Dalle... What was I thinking? I sounded like a man ruled by his sex glands, a bush creeping pervert lusting after every newsreader. That’s far from the truth. I can’t say I lust after any newsreader with the exception of George Alagiah. Also, I was only semi-serious about entering into a life of crime. In the cold light of day (actually, the dim light of a torrential October morning) I realise that I stand about as much chance of becoming a successful male gigolo as I do becoming a successful writer or cartoonist.

Today I feel little better (writing that out last night helped) but also a touch more frustrated. I’m walking around with the phone in my back pocket in case the competition people ring to tell me that I’ve won, thereby justifying the years of struggle and poverty in the eyes of my family, friends and the postman who will no longer sneer as he hands me letters for ‘Stan Madeley’. Perhaps I overstate the importance of this phone call but not the problem of the phone in my pocket. It’s a wired-in landline and I’m trailing a cord wherever I go. I think the government should clamp down on these competitions and bring in a rule that they have to ring everybody who entered, just to stop them fretting or accidentally sitting on a full-sized BT handset as I’ve done twice this morning, bruising one buttock (the right) quite severely. Thankfully the left buttock is still looking pretty good so if any work does come in for a male gigolo, I’ll have to work listing slightly leftwards. Now there's an interesting question that's never been asked before in the history of the world: how much work is there out there for a leftward listing male gigalo?

Of course I could go and look at the website where the winners of the competition are to be announced but, for the moment, I prefer to live with the slim chance that I placed in the competition rather than knowing that my effort was consigned to the scrap big alongside every finger painted story about fairies and psychotic rants from the criminally insane. Mine was neither of those. Well, okay, it was a psychotic rant about fairies but I’m not criminal for the reasons I outlined last night: a lack of opportunities and a shortage of sexual charisma.

I don’t have much confidence in my entry, which given all this talk about sex makes it sound mildly obscene. I mean my competition entry rather than the climax of my gigolo work. It was too misanthropic for the happy clappy types who usually get to judge these things. It was also a bit wordy and not that well drawn, as you’ll see in the coming days when I publish it here. You’ll then be able to sit there and shake your heads silently thinking: ‘He thought this stood a chance? He’s closer to that mental edge than I ever suspected. I must remember to visit his blog more often in case I miss his imminent nervous breakdown…’

But listen to me rationalising why I won’t have won. I’ve never won a thing in my life…

I tell a lie. I once won Cricketer of the Year at my school. I won a Martin Scorsese biography from a national newspaper. I also won tickets to a computer fair but I think everybody who entered probably won those. But that’s everything I’ve ever won in my time on this planet. Pretty depressing don't you think?

Yet here I am, in such a negative frame of mind, when I also know there are people out there reading this. It’s particularly good to see that I’m picking up new readers all across the globe. I’m hoping I’m connecting with an intelligent but slightly angry demographic who understand what I’m about. That said, it’s a bit disappointing when a man offers to send a free signed book to anybody that wants one – and not any of that vanity published crap either, I meant a proper book – and he also offers to personalise it with a cartoon. And not a single person takes him up on the deal. Perhaps you all thought I was joking. Well, I wasn’t. I never joke. Except about lusting after George Alagiah. That was a joke. I meant Tim Marshall on Sky News…

Thank You, Mystery Visitor From Colchester

To the person who came to this blog after searching for ‘Stan Madeley’ via Google, can I just say ‘thank you’… I don’t know who you are or why you looked for my nom de plume but it always delights me when people are interested in the man I played every day for about two years.

My mind creates all kinds of imaginary scenarios as to why ‘Stan Madeley’ has just come into somebody’s life and why he came back into mine. Did you discover the book of the ‘UK’s Top Richard Madeley lookalike’ in some second-hand bookshop and wondered if you can get your 50p back? Did you receive one of Stan’s recent letters and you wonder if it’s safe to reply? (It is. The worst thing I’d ever do it write back or send you a pair of new socks). Or perhaps you’re looking for a different ‘Stan Madeley’ and found my Stan Madeley by accident, in which case, I have to withdraw my offer of free socks.

Whatever the truth, that one search cheered me up on a blistering hot and difficult day, which I’ll soon be writing about in glorious detail complete with a photograph of the shed I’ve just built…

Yes. That’s right. I spent my day building a shed.

Dear Argos

You have to give credit where the good stuff is due. I shot this email off this afternoon and the matter was sorted in less than an hour. British industry might yet hold off Amazon. If only every company was as considerate. I should point out that apparently there isn't a company-wide policy about removing the seating in all Argos stores. It seems that this is specific to my local Argos.

However, for the record, this is the letter that turned wheels.

To: John Waldren, Managing Director, Argos UK.
From: Stan Madeley

Dear John,

You don’t know me from Adam but, unlike Adam, I am your bread and butter. I am your typical Argos shopper and would wear your tattoo with pride if such things were compulsory and not indicative of the hoi polloi.

But enough with my being polite… I have serious business to discuss and you need to hammer down on this issue before you haemorrhage sales. These observations will help save your company.

The reason I’m writing to the top is to inform you that somewhere down the executive ladder, some halfwit is making decisions from off half a rung. Which staple-brained executive decided to remove the seating from all branches of Argos? Don’t your people even understand your core business?

I was in my local Argos yesterday (a new Amazon eReader and some spoons) and I was told by incredulous staff (they quietly mumbled ‘dumb policy’) that ‘head office’ (i.e. your lot) had ordered the removal of all seating because we (i.e. ordinary punters) were ‘lingering too long’. Members of staff are also on shorter chains and have been told to process orders more quickly so the seating won’t be required or missed.

Don’t you understand that the seating was the very reason why many people shop at Argos? Do you know how many times I’ve heard older relatives say: ‘Let’s go and buy it from Argos. At least we can have a sit down…’

Removing the seating from Argos is like Costa removing the coffee, Boots removing the ointments, or WH Smith removing the tragically silent women with eyes hiding years of untold suffering and hurt from behind the tills. Sitting down is an important part of the Argos retail experience and some might even say THE most important part. My wife, Sandra (56), has very fragile ankles and she swore by Argos simply because of your seating. Was it harming your store that people were lingering longer among your promotional material?

I suppose this idea was dreamed up by some strong-thighed youth with a fashionable beard and a Saxo GTi parked outside. But what about those of us stuck shifting wife and luggage on the buses and trains? What about people who walk across town to Argos thinking we can have a breather before taking our place in queue B? Not all of us are equipped to live the life of a Jamaican sprinter.

Look, John, we’re all in a tight financial squeeze and you should be doing everything you can to make us linger a little longer. Don’t take away the chairs. Install some sofas and a coffee bar! Think laterally. It will be the secret of businesses going forwards. Encourage people to put their feet us as you subject them to clever marketing. You’re lucky to have people lingering. Some poor bastards can’t even sell sunlight in the current retail environment.

All levity aside: between myself, my friends and my family, we spend a hell of a lot of money with Argos but you’re about to lose all that to Amazon because of this insane short-sighted policy.

Hope you see the light and, indeed, see this email before it intercepted by the anti-seating cabal clearly operating at the highest levels of Argos.

Yours,

Stan Madeley

The Weather Forecast

With quite a few cartoons still ‘out there’ to be rejected (or who knows, perhaps even accepted!), I find myself running a little short. I should really try to learn to blog more economically, perhaps with brief rants about things in the news instead of trying to post a cartoon every single day. But that’s the ambition I set myself and, looking through my PC, I realise that I still have the occasional scrap left over from other projects. For example, I found this which I sent to BBC arts editor Will Gompertz quite some time ago with a letter from my alter ego, Stan Madeley. I never got a reply but a weather forecast is perhaps the perfect way to celebrate the first day of summer.

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.

Dead Cartoons

The man who redefines the meaning of sexy balloon-based cabaret is now updating his 'dead letter' blog with some of his 'dead cartoons', Today Stan Madeley also shares his letter to boxing promoter, Barry Hearn, in which Stan outlines his plan for the future of televised sport. I think it's worth the read. More after the link so please click.

Just Don’t Call It Spoof

There come days when you just have to shrug your shoulders and accept that you’re having a crisis of confidence.

Today was one such day. Another happened a few weeks ago when that poor troubled nurse killed herself and the media blamed the two Australian hoaxers who had pretended (rather badly) to be The Queen and Prince Charles when they rang the London hospital where the nurse had been working on the switchboard. Not that I believed for one moment that anybody would have killed themselves because they’d been hoaxed. As I’ve always said: there was something else going on and a system that had failed. However, I did (and do) understand the anger and when the spotlight was on the business of hoaxing, I definitely found myself thinking about everything I’d ever done.

And the thing is: I don’t consider myself a hoaxer and I've never considered what I do to be hoax. Yet, even as I say that, I know it’s not an easy distinction to make. This is the first time I've even tried to put into words what I've been doing for these past few years.

My letters are sometimes called ‘spoof’ but that’s actually a lazy description, an easy way to sell them. I’m not even a fan of hoax letters and even the best, by Henry Root and Ted L. Nancy, probably never did enough (in my view) to reveal their true nature. Root was all about a certain sharp but pompous tone and Nancy too often plays a simpleton, with very bad English making his targets sympathetic towards him. And that’s the thing with spoof letters: they are genuinely too easy to write because they tend towards the bland and the simplistic. I won’t deny that I’ve written the occasional 'spoof' on rare occasions. I've had my weak moments when I was so desperate for a reply but my blandest letters have always been to people in positions where they wouldn't reply is they sensed that there was any kind of foolishness afoot. The dullest letter I ever wrote was to General Noriega. He sent me a postcard and I don’t feel too guilty about it.

Every one of my typical letters takes many hours to write and rewrite. They're like small short stories, 700-1000 words long, which are really invitations:  broad, often bawdy invitations to play the fool with somebody willing to take the hits. The ultimate target of my letters is always Stan Madeley; his pretensions, ambitions, and his many failures which are generally indistinguishable from my own. I’m not embarrassed to send my best attempts at poetry, my cartoons, and even copies of my book to people even though it will invite ridicule. In fact, I embrace ridicule! The question of fake or real isn't even a question. I pretty much shout 'Of course it's fake' in every letter I write. My primary goal in any letter is to make the recipient laugh. I remember listening to the great Clive James about about there always being  a moral purpose in  art and the moral purpose of my art, if it’s even an art, is in the laughter which I hope brightens a bad day. Of course, there is always a chance that the recipient of the letter will think: ‘this is a spoof and I’m not playing’. There’s also an ever worse likelihood that the person takes my words seriously and plays along inadvertently. In the latter instances, I feel terrible because, as I say, I lack the hoaxing gene and I always want to make the person aware of the nature of my letters.

The somewhat more complicated truth is that I’m seeking a partner for a dance. I put a face bold and proud in the bottom corner of the letter in the hope they see it for what it is. I want it to be obvious from the very first word that I’m playing it for laughs and I want them to laugh along and respond in kind. And, in that respect, I’ve been very lucky that so many people have done just that. They had the humour and wits to understand the game. In fact, one of the harshest (and, I'd say, unfair) criticisms I’ve had is that there must have been some amount of complicity between me and the recipients of my letters; that they’ve already agreed to return with a silly reply. Well there never has been except for that big ‘wink’ implicit in the letters.

Yet on bad days, I’m still haunted by the words ‘spoof’ and ‘hoax’. It’s something quite different to anything I do. The hoax is the meaning that’s concealed from the reader but apparent to an elite audience who are ‘in the know’. It’s like the prank phone call: ‘okay, listeners, this is what we’re going to do so laugh along as our target makes a fool of himself.’ I really don’t see the point in that. I don’t see the point in humiliating the weak and vulnerable. My motives are very different. It’s about a sense of our shared humanity, all people laughing together and of proving that we can laugh together.

I worked very hard over Christmas sending off about 25 letters, written and rewritten until I could get them more compact or funnier. In many I included original hand-drawn cartoons (they might be worth nothing but they are the product of my imagination, my hand, my labour) and some had copies of my book, inscribed to the recipient. One, to a very public figure for whom I’d been lucky enough to find an excellent address (office addresses mean PAs who filter everything), had a good letter, a book, a A4 comic strip which took me about two days to finish, as well as a hand drawn Christmas card.

As of today: Twenty five letters out and one reply in return.

Friends tell me that it’s still early but I do wonder what happened to all that hard work. Was it discarded because people were too bored, busy, indifferent, or thought themselves too important to play my game? I think I’d rather have any of those just so long as they didn’t simply think it was a ‘hoax’.

Top Ten Ways to Excite An 86 Year Old Billionaire

Ah, 2013! So this is what it feels like. More rain and not enough coffee to get me going.

If, like me, you emerged from your festive season a little groggy about the details but suddenly aware that you've married an 86 year old billionaire, you might be wondering what to do next. Well, wonder no longer. Stan Madeley helpfully treats us to his top ten ways to excite an 86 year old billionaire and if anybody should know how, it's definitely Stan who has certainly entertained a few elderly billionaires in his time.

For more goodness follow the link. Oh yes... Happy New Year. I think this is the year that the Iranians will definitely come out to play...

A New Blog About Plywood Sex

Just an update to say that there’s a new blog in town and today it's dealing with the very interesting matter of plywood fetishes. That's right: my very close friend and chief plywood fetishist, Mr. Stan Madeley, has just emailed me to say that he has returned to the blogging stage with his brand new, never before seen, morally questionable, highly enlightening blog called ‘Stan Madeley’s Dead Letter Box’.



The blog contains a collection of letters that Stan has written over the years which never made it into book form, primarily because he never received a reply. However, as with most spoof letters, you read them for the original letters, not the dull replies which usually amount to a ‘no thank you’ or worse. So, please head on over and follow Stan daily. He reckons he has enough letters to print one a day for well over a year, so the blog should be around for a while providing he can find readers and get that arts grant funding he’s been after all these years…

As for me, I'm just busy rehashing old ideas until I come up with something new.

Interview

I’ll be on Radio 4’s ‘Saturday Live’ tomorrow morning, sometime between 9 and 10AM, talking about Richard Madeley, Stan Madeley, comedy and spoofing. I did the interview yesterday afternoon with the wonderfully funny JP Devlin in the familiar surroundings of Nero, Warrington, so although it’s my first radio interview, I was probably more relaxed than I would have been sitting in a studio in Manchester or Liverpool. That much said, I’ll be hiding throughout the show, mainly because I'll probably come across as a babbling idiot but also because Richard Madeley will also be in the studio and responding to my last few years pretending to be him. After the show, I’ll be changing my name, my sex, my fingerprints, and my shoe size, and moving to Paris where I’ll be Mrs. Gloriana Sparburst dancing nightly in an erotic revue. Regular punters here just ask at the door for Lulu and I’ll give you a free dance.