Goodbye, Ponds: Top 5 Doctor Who Farewells

So, it’s goodbye to the Ponds in this week’s The Angels Take Manhattan – But what other farewells have there been in history of Doctor Who? Which are the best? What’s the worst? And why do the companions who travel with Colin Baker end up with hairy loud misogynists?


5) Rose Tyler (Doomsday, 2006)

Massively diluted due to subsequent returns and being married off to a human Doctor on a wet beach, the emotional impact of England’s Rose Tyler being dragged into an (allegedly) inescapable other dimension was shocking and unpredictable, not least because it flew directly in the face of David Tennant’s solve-everything-attitude incarnation of the Doctor. It was a glorious end for Billie Piper, who only a few years previously, had been dismissed by fans as ‘stunt casting’.


4) Jo Grant (The Green Death, 1973)

Forget the revisionist viewings of whether or not Pertwee’s Doc is being side-lined romantically for a younger, hippier, and more human model, this departure scene sticks with the lonely Time Lord, rather than the departing companion played by Katy Manning, as we witness the Doctor hesitating outside the pub before driving on; a stark reminder that even if these people are his friends, their lives move swiftly on without him. Of course, the scene is given added poignancy when you consider the classic Barry Letts production team was dismantling.

3) Sarah Jane Smith (The Hand Of Fear, 1976)

The archetypal tacked-on, bundled-out-of-the-TARDIS scene, but also the template of how to do such a scene absolutely correctly. Elisabeth Sladen plays the scene as if she’s never given any consideration to the possibility that her travels with The Doctor might end - even in the story that’s just happened, on present-day Earth, she doesn’t take time to catch up with friends. That belief was likely to have been shared by the millions of fans who adored her. Her unexpected return to the series thirty years later was one of the show’s emotional high-points.

2) Adric (Earthshock, 1982)

Infamously, not the most popular of companions, but it’s that simple fact that makes Adric’s noble sacrifice all the more affecting. It’s in a story that begins with Matthew Waterhouse’s character bickering with the rest of the TARDIS crew about the lack of respect he’s afforded, and that he’s side-lined in favour of comparatively less intelligent companions – a sort of proto-Sheldon Cooper. He’s even responsible for saving the Doctor in his absence – via the use of his gold-edged award in the shape of a star. One thinks that even now, the Doctor carries the gilt of Adric’s death but, like the closing credits of this story, in silence.

1) Susan Foreman (The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, 1965)

It’s the very first departure of a series regular, and as such, is milked for everything it’s got. There’s David’s awkward flirting as he realises that Susan’s loyalties lie with her grandfather (witness Ian being completely oblivious to the situation, and Barbra almost having to forcibly drag him away to give the couple a bit of privacy), and William Hartnell’s subtle bit of business as he darts into the TARDIS – it’s clear that he’s decided to leave Susan behind long before David brings it up. And, of course, there’s the Doctor’s final speech to his grand-daughter, a almost-coda for the series, certainly iconic enough to serve as a prologue to the 20th anniversary adventure, The Five Doctors: “One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine …. “

And The Worst :

Perpugillium Brown (Mindwarp, 1986)

Oh, we know. In a fair world, this would easily be the best, by a country light-year – it’s a shocking, violent, and cruel. Surprisingly, it’s even casual and unfeeling (as far as villain Kiv is concerned, Peri is just a body – perhaps reflecting some dad’s views) and it strikes home as the murder of a well-loved companion – made all the more unbearable because the Doctor might’ve been able to help if the Valeyard hadn’t dragged him off to the Trial Of A Timelord. We’re pretty sure it’s the way Nicola Bryant would’ve wanted to go. But then, a few episodes later, the OXO mum arrives to kiss it all better in a clumsy bit of retro fitting that even Bobby Ewing wouldn’t have dared come out of the shower for. It makes about as much sense as Melanie Bush suddenly deciding that she wants to stay on a ice-cube planet with an intergalactic Del Boy. Which, admittedly, also happened.

It's All In The Timing

Today, I had an idea for a column. Nothing important or even intelligent, just a bit of fluff, a bit of filler, but it promised to be a mildly diverting read, the sort of thing you click on while wasting time on the internet. I write the occasional review and column for a website called CultBox, and this seemed an ideal place to send my bit of writing to.

It took about a hour, and was a fairly smooth bit of writing, presenting very few problems or challenges, bar a few checks of dates and spellings. After tidying up the prose a bit, I sent it off.

Less than a hour later, I got the inevitable reply: someone had already pitched, written, and sent a similar article. Very similar, in fact, apparently making many of the same points I'd made in my article. The only difference, really, was that they'd got there first. You see, kids, this is what happens when you don't send a speculative querying email first.

Obviously, I'll be reading with interest to see what I think if the article that beat me to the post, but overall, I'm reasonably ambivalent about the while thing. Despite having written things, on and off, for about twenty years or more, I feel like its only really now that I'm really getting to grips - nearly - with the various disciplines of being a writer. I'm not exactly saying that I've been lazy (not out loud, anyway), but I suspect that even earlier this year I would've had that idea for the column, written half of it in my head, not actually written any of it in real life, and missed the chance to get in published. I'm aware that I missed the chance anyway, but you get the point. It wasn't so much about acting on the idea more quickly, but having the idea itself more quickly.

Although someone else 'got my gig', I don't regret the time I spent writing the piece. It's quite some time away from anyone ever pays me for anything I write, and indeed, everything I read suggests that I'll spend at least a year or so having stuff published with absolutely no expectation of remuneration. But, the idea is that it's all good practice, and in any case, it's entirely likely that I'll be able to use the article (or some version of it) in the future, and adds to the mythical portfolio that may well help me get that first gig.

Well, that's the idea, anyway.

Laugh It Up

This week, I got the confirmation on the series of improv drop-in classes I'm going to be holding, starting later this year. They're going to be every Sunday evening, 7-9, at the Iron Duke in Hove. As we speak, a fringe style theatre is being built there, and it's set to have a launch/opening night in a couple of weeks time.

It's been a couple of years now since I was regularly involved in improv, and the time feels right to get back in the saddle again, particularly as I'm going to be directing the improvised play in May as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. It may well be a contributory factor that I don't really intend to be a participant, just a workshop leader.

I use improv a lot as a director, and it also forms the bulk of what I do in the drop in classes at the New Venture Theatre, but I'm hoping that the drop ins at the Iron Duke will be somewhat different. The classes at the NVT are exactly that - classes, meaning that there's an expectation that all manner of things might be covered for all manner of 'levels'. The drop ins at the Duke are likely to take a significantly more relaxed tone - more game playing, occasionally more emphasis on the 'fun'. Which is not to say that there won't often be a serious side to proceedings. They will be workshops that will change and evolve according to the needs and wants of those that turn up to them week after week.

The first workshop won't be until towards the end of October (the Sunday before Halloween), since I have Three Kinds Of Me to direct before that, but there's already been a pleasing amount of interest shown already. I'll stick the details up on the website pretty soon, but the basics are: Iron Duke, Hove, Sundays, 7-9, £5.

As I mentioned yesterday, we're about halfway through the text for Three Kinds Of Me. One of the most impressive things this week has been the laughing. There's a sequence in the play that requires Sarah to laugh - slightly hysterically - at events that are beyond her control. We were both mildly concerned about the scene, since actors having to laugh notoriously don't convince: it's painfully obvious to everyone that you're doing a fake laugh. I'm particularly bad at this kind of thing. My laugh sounds fake, even when it's genuine. I have this odd thing of phonetically laughing, actually vocalising the 'ha-ha-ha-ha!'. I'm not entirely sure why, although any cast I've ever worked with always knows when I'm in the audience. When Sarah and I were discussing how she would approach her fake laugh, our solution was simple: if it didn't convince, we'd just cut the laugh, or re-write the line. After all, Sarah's the writer, so it wasn't as if we would have to worry about worrying the copyright holders. As it turned out, it wasn't an issue: Sarah's fake laugh is remarkably convincing (so much so, that at first I thought she was corpsing. Of course, the possible upshoot of all this is that Sarah occasionally reads this blog, and if she reads that I've spoken well of her fake laugh, it's at least possible that she'll get overly self conscious, and end up doing a fake fake laugh after all.

Tonight is this weeks Ghostwalk, which as ever meets outside the Druids Head in Brighton at 7.30. (£8 unless you're reasonably young or reasonably old) . There's quite a few in the next few weeks, as we get closer to Halloween (plus, a special 9.00 walk on the night of Halloween itself) and the list of dates can be found on the website. Last weeks Ghostwalk was particularly fun, with a good sized crowd who were really in the mood for a good time. If you're free, come along. You've been saying you will for, like, ages.

I'm fully aware that today's blog seems to be mainly an advert for upcoming features, much like before the trailers in a 1970s cinema. I did write another blog (about spoilers), but it seems like that might be a good piece to send off for the Prolitzer (not the Pulitzer, I think that's somewhat out of my league). Whether the spoilers piece ends up on the Prolitzer website or not, I'll post it up here eventually.

Half Way Mark

Lovely rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me tonight, which, as I was saying earlier, is just a month away. It's in very good shape. Tonight, we ran through the first half of the play, which is roughly forty minutes. I think once we get the tone and pace right, mess around a bit with sound fx and music, it will probably still come in around the forty mark. Already it's pacy enough to feel quicker.

We had a small audience in tonight, made up of our technical crew, which definitely helps with things like tone, and with blocking (we're performing it to three sides, and not just because of the title of the play). As a director, you can often become overwhelmed by the whole business of problem solving, and trying to get the whole thing to make sense. In that regard, I have every chance of becoming something of a control freak, but it's absolutely vital to have a fresh pair of eyes on the thing that you could possibly be becoming overly familiar with. It also gives you the elbow room and strength of mind not to be too concerned if there's a couple of scenes that you haven't quite solved yet. There was a sequence tonight that I was somewhat concerned about, but after being able to talk about it out loud for less than thirty seconds, we were able to spot that the solution was easy, accessible, and actually added another layer to the play. I love it when that happens.

There's not another rehearsal for Three Kinds now until Sunday, although the New Venture Theatre are having their AGM on Saturday, which is followed by a Social, a chance to meet members new and old (or just ageing). It promises to be a good night, which somewhat surprisingly, I'll be free for.

In other news, I have other news. About a new series of Improv Classes starting up next month, but I'll talk about that in the next blog, as well as the series of short stories that, contrary to every expectation I had, I appear to have a very good chance of actually finishing ...

Take A Joke. Just Don't Tweet It.

So, the other day, I responded to a tweet from Mock The Week. They were asking for gags, specifically Unlikely Complaints To A TV Channel. By the time I saw the tweet, it was about twenty hours old, but I threw a gag or two their way anyway, confident in the assumption that whatever I came up with would've been done already.

Initially, I tried to do a joke about Mock The Week itself, and it's notoriously low number of female comedians on the panel, but I couldn't see how to do it without coming across as overly combative. Not under 140 characters, anyway. I briefly considered some joke about Frankie Boyle being trapped in a car crash, but it just sounded like I wanted Frankie Boyle to be in a car crash (not actually true), and anyway, the man hasn't even been on the show for about three years.

In the end, then, I went for the second most obvious gag: suggesting that it was annoying that there was no TV channel to watch old episodes of Mock The Week. A weak joke, I know, but the only one that occurred to me at the time. After a couple of hours, however, Mock The Week re-tweeted the joke. It must have been a slow night.

It occurred to me then, of course, that a lot more people would now see my tweet than would normally be the case if it had just turned up in the feeds of my 'followers'. I assumed that the worst that would happen would be that a few thousand people would see my joke, tut, think 'that's not funny', and go about their day. Perhaps a few of them would feel compelled to tweet me personally to tell me that my joke was not in any way amusing. Or maybe I was being too hard on myself: maybe one or two people would actually find the gag at least mildly amusing. What I didn't expect, however, is what actually happened.

Over the next few hours, I got a reasonable amount of unreasonable tweets. Some derisive (you could say mocking), some actually angry. But all of them linked by a common thread: they all seemed to genuinely believe that I hadn't heard of the TV channel Dave. Even though that was the point of the joke.

I tried to remain open-minded about it all. Possibly, as naivety was the foundation of my joke, perhaps my respondents were playing along in the same spirit: pretending to honestly believe that I was hunting furiously for year old repeats of MTW, but didn't know about Dave. But the tweets were too bitchy, too teasing, too ready to take the mick. Even the ones who were nice clearly thought that I was being sincere, including the lovely lady who pointed out that the previous weeks episode often appeared on YouTube (but, as she pointed out, in two parts). I guess I was just startled that so many viewers of Mock The Week were unable to understand what a joke was. (insert your own punchline).

In other news, there's now about four weeks to go until the performances of Three Kinds Of Me. In an ideal world, we'd be rehearsing every day of the next month. As it is, time and constraints limit us to a few evenings and some Sunday afternoons. We have a kind of technical meeting tonight, where our lighting & sound designers and operators are going to want to joe exactly what it is I want. And I, like the most annoying and unprofessional director ever, am going to have to declare that as yet, I'm not entirely sure. I'm very lucky in that I have a designer that can be both pedantic and patient (usually, you have to settle for one or the other, and the combination of both is a startlingly valuable commodity), and who can usually decipher what ill-formed (and ill-conceived) ideas I'm struggling to come up with. We're halfway through the play now (in terms of pages rehearsed), and I'm hopeful that we will pick up pace even further in the next week or so, giving us a comfortable amount of time to run the whole thing over a few times. Anyway, that's the plan. As I've mentioned, it'll be on next month at the New Venture Theatre in Bedford Place, Hove, and tickets (already selling) can be booked via http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/newventuretheatre/ .

Heading To Hedda

Hoping to get up to see the Old Vic production of Hedda Gabler soon. It won't be that easy, as I have a very full schedule over the next few weeks, what with rehearsals for Three Kinds Of Me, extra Ghostwalks (October being the month of Halloween) and, of course, the NVT Acting Classes (two down, four to go). But I don't see nearly enough London theatre, and I want to start remedying that. Two factors contribute to me wanting to see this particular production - the first being that lastminute.com have this 'theatre fortnight' deal going on at the moment, so that some tickets are just fifteen quid. Since my usual excuse for not going to see more theatre is that it's priced well out of my range (as long as I'm going to remain adamant that I'm not going to sell a kidney, or anything), that's obviously a compelling argument, even if the tickets turn out to be shunted behind a pillar.

The second factor is that I was in a production of Hedda Gabler myself this year, and it's always interesting to see how different companies interpret the same show, even if it is, literally, a different interpretation, by which I mean a different translation. I know that I read through several different versions of Medea before choosing the Tom Paulin one to direct, a move that my cast and audiences certainly appreciated.

I think that Hedda is a deceptively difficult show to put on, and to pull off. It can be a bit of an old warhorse of a text for am-dram companies to pull out of the bag, and I know from various conversations that some audiences find it difficult to get a handle on why (and indeed if) its relevant today. I suspect that people can get hung up on the belief that it's a play about class. Obviously, that's a major factor, but I think it's significantly more visceral than that, that it can be a very relevant, vital, and indeed a more sensual and sexy play that its sometimes dusty reputation suggests. Hell, it's a play about blistering frustration, clearly it should be delivered with all the energy of a powderkeg set to blow.

But as well as all that, it seems that modern audiences (and actors and directors, come to that) are only coming across the startling idea that Hedda Gabler can at times be funny. It's possible that this was one reason behind the casting of Sheridan Smith in the title role. Now, I'm not suggesting that the producers are expecting the fanbase of Two Pints Of Larger And A Packet Of Crisps to rock up to the Old Vic, although obviously that's the ideal when you cast someone from a popular show, and it can't hurt.

I'm not really aware of Sheridan Smith's work outside Two Pints, and so I was one of those who noted with interest her arrival as one of the most iconic female characters in drama, wondering briefly if it really was stunt casting. Somehow, I'd forgotten that, with a very few exceptions, that if an actor has made it to the main cast of a major television series, then it's very likely that they've done a great deal of varied work elsewhere before the avearge audience member has heard of them. You think of another Smith: Matt, who to many seemed far too young and far too inexperienced to be cast as Doctor Who, but had aleady been around impressing for a good few years previously.

Smith (Sheridan, not Matt) seems to be doing a great deal of spadework this year to ensure that Two Pints is but a footnote on her career, which is great, since it was very easily a role that could have seen her typecast for decades.

Three Kinds Of Rehearsal

A night off tonight. Earlier this week, we'd become terrifyingly aware of the concept of four weeks being actually quite a short amount of time. With that in mind, we went through diaries and plugged up any spare night going with an extra rehearsal. Turns out that there's not a great many spare nights between now and curtain up. Not that we're using a curtain, but you get the idea.

We had booked in a rehearsal for tonight, but we pulled it - giving ourselves a chance to gird our loins before things really kick in, and anyway, I suspect that Sarah's boyfriend would quite appreicate actually seeing her before Halloween. Because between now and then, the rehearsals get quite intense.

One of the reasons the rehearsals are now getting a bit intense (apart from the subject matter) is the method of rehearsal we're using. We're doing something called 'actioning', which is something I've tended to avoid as an actor. Very roughly speaking, you endow every single line - every one - with a seperate 'action', a word that describes what your intention is within that line alone. It doesn't have to be (and possibly sometimes shouldn't be) in the context of the lines that surrond it on either side. In terms of performance, it can make for something of a jolting, even unrealistic narrative, which is possibly why I've previously always been a little wary of it. In this sense, I suspect it's more of a director's tool than that of the actors, if only because it makes the director's life easier - they can simply engineer their actor to be in a particular place/postion/mood at a particular time.

Of course, the key word there is 'tool' - it's not the end, but a means to an end. Something I've become very aware of while directing Three Kinds Of Me is that while I might generally be the same kind of director whatever project I work on, I'll employ very different tools depending on what the show is - a one woman show about mental health, for instance, or a big cast Shakespeare. I've known a couple of directors who operate in exactly the same way no matter what they're directing - knockabout farce, or mid-80s AIDS drama. One director, in particular, I remember saying absolutely nothing in any rehearsals, but would spend the first five minutes of the following rehearsal passing around little notes (no bigger than a Rizla) before another wordless rehearsal. Incidentally, I seem to remember that my only note said something like 'Speak slower, speak louder'. To be fair, I'll concede he had a point.

Because we're doing this 'actioning', the intial bout of rehearsals are going slower than I'd expected - not too slow, but certainly not as quick as I'd first planned (to give you and idea, I'd hoped to do five pages on Tuesday. We didn't quite manage one). It means everything is very textured and toned, and as the subsequent rehearsals follow each other, our 'muscle memory' will kick in, and we'll start speaking in a shorthand. It's one of the most endlessly interesting projects I've had the pleasure to work on, and I'm looking forward to continuing the journey.

By the way, tickets went on sale this week, which means that we haven't just imagined it, or anything, and the play will actually happen. I think I mentioned before that it's a very limited run, (only two nights) and tickets are already selling. Pop along to the new venture theatre ticket page to relieve yourself of a few quid for the pleasure of a great one woman show.

Mind The Gap

Found myself in a conversation last night about that thing where you entirely misread something. You know, you glance at a newspaper headline, or see a poster, and you think 'No! Wait, that can't be right ...' before looking back at the not-so offending words, and working out that, no, that can't be right, and what you thought was a mildly offensive comment outside your local church was just a reference about your ship coming in to dock.

Occasionally, the mis-read can make you think that you've seen words that, on further investigation, look nothing like the words you thought they were. But, sometimes, you can see where the connect was. I mentioned that every time I'm at the train station, I get briefly confused by a sign above the locked up bikes that says 'bicycle facilities'. For some reason, I keep reading it as 'bicycle fatalities'. As my friend pointed out, that's the sort of thing that tends to happen in a Final Destination movie when fate is attempting to give a heads up to the next victim that death is gearing up to dispatch them in a violent, grisly, and bizarrely amusing manner.

So, anyway, this morning I was cycling on my way to the train station with the future portending poster. I turned right. Well, I did, and my handlebars did, but my front wheel decided that this would be an ideal time to investigate all the possibilities that Left had to offer. The traffic on all sides was fairly singularly adamant that right was the way to go, but my handlebars, clearly offended at my wheel's new found independence, decided to now see if going in the opposite direction was an option. I've always wanted a folding bike, but I've not wanted the bike I'm already riding to become one while I'm travelling with morning traffic. It was like Transformers, if filmed by the Children's Film Foundation.

All this happened in a matter of seconds, and was somewhat unexpected. Well, I say unexpected. I clearly wasn't paying enough attention to the sign at the train station.

Another Short Note About Acting Class

Had another Acting Class at the NVT tonight, which went well, and got a lot of good responses. However, all I could focus on was the faces of those that appeared not to be getting a kick out of it.

It's the same as when I'm doing stand up, or the GhostWalk. It doesn't matter if everyone's having a good time, my attention is drawn, briar patch like, to the individual who seems not to be having quite as good a time as everyone else. It's a stupid logic, of course: it's not possible for everyone to be enjoying it all at the same level as everyone else. But the perfectionist performer (or tutor) in me refuses to accept this logic. From conversations with other performers, and reading memoirs and the like, I know it's an universal problem: that one person who has cracked less smiles than everyone else becomes both your target and your albatross.

In a way, what made it complicated tonight was a lack of complication: in tonight's workshop we were looking at moments of 'nothing's'. It's all too easy for many actors to fill up their time on stage with lots of 'business', for instance huffing and puffing and constantly looking at their watch to signal to the audience that they're waiting for someone or something that's late, in a way that they simply wouldn't do in real life. Of course, we feel the need to communicate something to a watching audience, but we don't often have the courage to do 'nothing': but the problem challenges those who aren't even on stage - even as audience members, it seems we need instant gratification, to have our stories told to us, almost spoonfed, without making too much effort ourselves. This shouldn't be the case: audiences are not passive, they become part of the piece. They themselves have to engage, whatever is on stage, we bring our own experience and baggage to it, and write our own stories on the scene, until dialogue and action tells us otherwise.

Of course, I'm talking about all of this reacting to just a couple of members of the class who seemed not to be having as good a time as I thought they should have had. It's the same sort of pep talk any performer has to give themselves when a gig hasn't gone as perfectly as s/he feels that it should've.

But here's something that I honestly think is worth considering: the possibly that those couple of people might be entirely correct. You're an extraordinarily complacent performer or workshop leader if you think that your way is the best way. If someone disagrees, their opinion is worthy of merit, even if they are indeed only one.

Of course, you can tie yourself up on knots trying to please all of the people all of the time: it's a fools errand. Ignoring the fact that I've just managed to crowbar three cliches into two sentences, it's my job to do the best again, while always acknowledging that the job could be done even better.

At the end of my workshops, I end with a line which I picked up when I first starred learning improv, at drop-in classes with The Maydays. The idea is that if, during the class, you witnessed something that you liked or enjoyed, then you go up to the person involved, and you tell them so. That's not the important bit, though. The important bit is for whoever you're delivering your compliment to. It's vitally important that when someone takes the time to tell you how much they liked what you did, that you accept what they're saying at face value: you don't attempt to qualify or quantify what you did, or refer to the twenty other things you did tht weren't quite as good, or admit that the great thing your flatterer is referring to was actually a mistake ... You simply breath in, accept the compliment, and say nothing other than, 'thank you'.

Well, you'd be proud. As the class ended, and I fretted about those people I hadn't really been able to communicate my ideas to, as I morosely wondered if this weeks workshop had worked as well as last weeks, I had a few of the people come up to me, thanking me for the workshop, saying that they'd enjoyed it, and that they'd be back next week. It wasn't easy, but I did it: I breathed in. I accepted the compliment, and I said thank you.

Thank you.

Drawing A Blank

I'm running a series of Acting Classes at the NVT at the moment, and the second one is tonight (Monday). The main umbrella theme of this series of classes is giving people the licence to make mistakes, to get things wrong, to go for broke, actually break things, and start all over.

Because that's the great fear that a lot of us have about acting, that there's a 'right' and a 'wrong' way to do it, and if you get it wrong, everyone around you is going to call you on it, and maybe even point and laugh. And people pointing and laughing is almost never good for the ego. In my acting classes, and also in the improv workshops I occasionally run, I subscribe fully to the idea that was thrust upon me when I first started learning improv, and I now deliver towards anyone in my classes: you can't get this wrong.

Of course, as a tutor or workshop leader, you might just be making a rod for your own back when you state to your students that you can't get it wrong. What you're trying to engender, obviously, is an atmosphere of, if not exactly fearlessness, certainly a group who have the willingness not to five a damn. Of course it's true that there are always going to be performers who are less obviously skilled than others: maybe they find it more challenging to be realistic, or perhaps they can't switch off the internal joker. Maybe, simply, they're just not that charismatic onstage. Whatever the reason, the secret code of 'You can't get this wrong' will solve those problems for a surprising amount of people.

It can backfire, however. I remember running an improv workshop a while back with a noticeable number of people who were clearly a little nervous at the whole concept of turning up on stage with no plan or preconception of what they were going to do. So I spoke even more than I usually do about this whole idea of not being able to get stuff wrong ('You can try, but you still won't get it wrong'), and in addition, I put forward quite a few simplified improv games that had a limited amount of outcomes. Much like a magician forcing an audience member's hand, if the nervous actors in the class only had a limited amount of choices available to them, then it was much less likely that they'd be able to get things 'wrong'.

That was the theory, anyway. There was one particular chap in the class who wasn't in any way nervous. And he made every attempt to systematically sabotage the acting class. He'd rehearse a scene with a partner, and then when sharing it with the rest of the class, he'd riff in an entirely different direction, leaving his poor acting partner nonplussed and confused. During a warm up exercise, which involved the group passing a long broom handle to one another in a circle, he snatched the stick off someone, and twirled it around himself, screaming like a samurai. After each incident, he would fix me with a baleful gaze, and, smiling softly, would say: 'well, you did say we couldn't get it wrong'.

Tonight's Acting Class will mostly be about the removal of choice. It's something that began to get discussed towards the end of last week's class: if, as an actor (or indeed, writer, or whatever) you are given access to a blank canvas, and told you can do whatever you want, chances are your mind will soon be as blank as that canvas. But if you're told that your story can only feature women, and has to be set before 1930, and most involve a secret revealed, well, chances are that your problem solving mind will already be hard at work creating a dialogue. Well, that's the theory, anyway. If you're in Brighton tonight, you may want to put the theory to the test.

In other news, I went to see Total Recall last night. There have been countless poor reviews, so I was able to go in with low expectations. These expectations were largely met. At the top of the film, when the various studio idents appear, the words 'Original Film' appeared, which, considering it was a remake, an' all, seemed a tad unfortunate. Turned out it was the wittiest moment in the movie, even if it didn't intend to be.