claytoncast

At the moment I'm in Yorkshire. I've driven up here to collect Mum to bring her back down to london so that she can spend Christmas with Rich and myself. This was not our original plan. She had tickets for the train tomorrow, but since her recent illness she has lost the confidence necessary to make the journey, so my Christmas has turned into a bit of a driving marathon. Having driven up here today, tomorrow I'll drive her back to London. If we can get her up. Depression has set in again over the last week and in the mornings all she wants to do is stay in bed. Once she's up she is absolutely fine and enjoys her day but then the next morning we're back to square one. Thanks to her wonderful carers who are my Christmas angels and her friend Pat, she has got up each day by lunchtime but it's proving harder and it raises all sorts of questions for her future care next year - questions I can't and indeed don't really want to answer at the moment. Suffi

I suppose at this time of year we all do more than our fair share of shopping. Having finished work on December 2 I've had quite a bit of time to get my plans in order to shop for Richards family and relatives and our friends. It's time of year when you see the best and worst of customer service. Regular readers of my blog will know it is something that I can all too easily clamber onto my soapbox to rant about. So let me highlight a couple of this year's winners and losers. Marks & Spencer seem to be well up there with trying to make it easier for the customer. They've got a new online delivery system whereby you can order the items online and if you don't want to wait in for delivery, or indeed pay for a delivery charge, you can have them delivered to a branch that you designate at the time of ordering and pick them up from there. I did that with a couple of items and there they were waiting for me in the Croydon Marks & Spencer yeste

So it's the party season and that time of year when everyone is looking forward to the days when they don't have to go into the office and the holidays are looming. Except of course if you're a freelancer. As a freelancer holidays can sometimes be forced upon us. I did what looks like my last piece of work until next year on Friday. A days filming down in Brighton. Uneventful enough within itself, and yet it was filled with an impending sense of doom that it will be over three weeks before I do any paid work again. It's early this year. Normally my last day at work before Christmas is sometimes in the week leading up to the 22nd or so, but this year my work schedule has brought an early bath and now the days are stretching out in front of me with the prospect of nothing much to do except Christmas shopping, house work, and planning for our production of "Green Forms" in January. I can hear some of you sighing and saying what a delicious prosp

So we finally made it. Mum's 90th birthday. I've been planning a surprise party for about the last five or six months. It's taken quite a bit of cunning and skill to get all the people I needed to be in one room on one night in November……….. in Rotherham! And yet we managed it. I drove up on Friday to check into the hotel, Rotherham's finest, and find out what our suite was like. Of course when I say Rotherham's finest, as Rich pointed out on Twitter last week, that's a little like saying the best table at a Harvester. It's all comparative. The room turned out to be a nice two room suite on the top floor, and mercifully Rotherham is so backward in the hospitality stakes that it was a smoking suite which meant that I was able to sit in the living room watching the television on Friday evening and indulge in a cigarette. Downstairs all hell broke loose as Friday night was the first night of the Rotherham Christmas party season, and the Carlton Park

It's been a busy busy week. Some aspects of which I have enjoyed enormously and others which have been an absolute nightmare. My mother seems to have picked up. A combination of a change in medication and several visits to hospital seems to have done the trick. I'm not going into all the details here because it will become boring, but suffice it to say we have had some truly horrendous experiences. Not in terms of the care we received, but in the way that care is managed and all the cliches that it's the managers in the NHS who are ruining things sadly would seem to be true. I'm not afraid of speaking up for myself and I'm certainly not afraid of speaking up on behalf of my mother, loudly and forcibly when necessary. I've had to do this on too many occasions. It becomes boring to me. I've spoken to directors of social services, directors of adult care, social workers, directors and social workers who don't turn up, directors of negligent social wo

I notice that next weekend, Friday night brings us the annual  conscience  salving marathon that is “Children in Need" Mercifully we'll be out of the country in Budapest. As individuals in this country we are great givers. We raise millions and that is to our credit. Yet as a nation from my recent experiences I can't but help think that we have ceased to care. I have spent a lot of time in Yorkshire recently. My mother as had two admissions to hospital. Both were nightmares in their own way. On one occasion she was discharged without anyone bothering to inform me, so she was sat by her bed fully dressed waiting to go home and yet no one knew she was expecting to be collected. On the second occasion although there was a bed waiting for her from 4.30 in the afternoon in the admissions ward, we were shunted into A&E  and delayed there for almost 3 hours.  Believe me they didn't get away with it quietly. And yet, as my other half pointed out in his ex

It's been quite a week - incident packed and full of action. My mother who has been in one of her lows for the last two weeks and been fighting off a cold went into sudden decline over the weekend. While we were mixing with the heart of Middle England at the Watermill Theatre watching our friend Kazia Pelka being brilliant as Miss Havisham, Mum took a turn for the worse and started asking for me. Rich, made up with cold and feeling terrible, gave up his Sunday to accompany me on the drive up to Yorkshire where we found her very low indeed. She doesn't eat- or rather has the appetite of a bird. She has been told - and has now been told  in no uncertain terms - that she has to eat to stay alive. She just doesn't have the strength to fight off infections, and yet when not ill she remains remarkably active, fighting both arthritis and sciatica to get out most days for a bus journey and a walk to get a daily paper and have coffee with friends. But when this cycle of exh

I always find Autumn a strangely comforting time of year. Very nostalgic. A combination of the darkening nights, the smoky air and the falling leaves, it seems only natural to look back over the summer and further. Except that this Autumn keeps surprising us with late bursts of warmth and sun. Not time yet to put away the light trousers and the summer polo shirts. We spent the 1st of October with thousands of other people strolling along the front at Brighton in t shirt and shorts. We had a beautiful week of hot weather in Alicante last week, temperature in the eighties and we had lovely long days reading books on the beach. I suppose Autumn is full of the familiar. Halloween, Bonfire Night and the build up to Christmas. I surpassed myself the other day by buying a few Christmas presents while I was out shopping. Early even for me. The design of our Christmas cards (so longed for by so many!)is also praying on my mind and will probably be done this weekend. Work is quiet. Some i

I'm sitting at the back of a major conference that I've spent the last six days directing. It's a strange feeling. These shows are big logistic exercises. What music goes where? Which video to play in here? Where should the speakers stand? This uses all the technical skills I have garnered as a theatre director but one. At no point does it call on any ability to arouse or stir emotion. Why speak in public? These days when information can be disseminated at the touch of a button, why put ourselves through the terror of speaking in public at all. Why not just send a document? And terror it is for some. Part of my job here ( and as a director) is handholding. Giving the speakers a confidence to face their audience and deliver the message. For many it's just a data dump. Spewing out fact after fact, figure after figure for their audience and never once addressing the emotion. When we speak, we can change how people feel. Often by how we say something more than by what we sa

 I think the reason I gave up writing a diary as a teenager was the fact that  at the end of  some days  there just didn't seem to be anything worth writing about.  It wasn't that the day hadn't been full of things. It was just that none of them seemed special enough to put to paper.  That's what this week has seemed a little bit like.  The main thing about the past week is that Rich and I spent most of it apart!  I'm glad to see that after what will be 15 years together this Christmas, we still don't like that. Admittedly I'm sure there's a moment of joy  fame when he realises I'm not going to be at home that night and he can have an earplug free night and sprawl across the bed. Similarly for me, I can read on into the small hours not worrying that my bedside light might be disturbing him.  In the morning however, waking to an empty bed is never a joy for either of us and so after 3 nights apart last week we were very keen to see each other again o

It's not been the easiest of weeks. On Thursday morning I found out that I am to be killed off in "Coronation Street" without making any further appearances. This is not the place to go on about it, but suffice it to say I'm angry about it. Mainly with myself. There was no guarantee of further appearances but there was hope, and when you take away hope, in any situation, that is when it hits hardest. The rest of the week has been pretty laid back. A couple of nice lunches, and an afternoons training work. A mysterious leaky boiler on Saturday morning caused  disruption to the start of a relaxing weekend, but when Mr Howle created a Heath Robinson like device with a metal funnel and some cable ties to channel the leak into a bucket, it equally mysteriously dried up and has now gone back to functioning properly. Time for a boiler service methinks. A lucky win of £200 at bingo on Thursday afternoon with my friend Andy Spiegel. Andy, or Jewish as I call him for reason

It seems to me that the best way to keep work fresh when you get to my age is to do new things. Or rather perhaps package the things you do in a new way and do them with new people. This last week I had the chance to do both. A little bit of pod cast directing on Tuesday morning, followed by a visit to see the National youth Theatre in the Old Vic tunnels in “Our Days Of Rage" on Tuesday evening. For the most part excellently staged, it had a cast whose commitment and focus was second to none. The sort of thing that the National Youth Theatre does best of all. I have my doubts about the play itself, but thanks to some brilliant staging and the sheer energy of the performers it was an exciting evening in the theatre. Wednesday saw me up early,  out and at the Cafe De Paris to host “Voice of McDonald's 2011". This is McDonald's own version of “The X factor" and is open to all their crew members all over the world. On Wednesday morning we were having the UK finali

More years ago than I would care to remember I had the good fortune to do a television programme called "Jigsaw". It had been running for three series when I joined it in late 1982. I was to do the voices of all the puppets and play a huge gallimaufry of characters in the various sketches in each weeks programme. It was my first regular television job and I loved it. It was there I met Janet Ellis.  We've now had a friendship that has lasted nearly thirty years. She is one of my closest friends and one of the most loyal a person could have. A great supporter, a bastion of common sense and no nonsense attitude, she's been there for me through thick and thin and I hope in some small way I've managed to return the favour. Before the days in which she became a national icon for a generation in "Blue Peter" and indeed before "Jigsaw" she trained as an actress. She quickly amassed some classy credits - opposite Tom Courtenay, and some more populist

One of the first fan letters I ever wrote was to Batman.  As far as I was concerned he lived at the studios of ATV,  the television company whose logo appeared after his adventures each Saturday and Sunday night in the 1960s. In those days you could rely on the Royal mail and a letter addressed to “Batman, ATV television" brought me a signed photograph of the Caped Crusader and his sidekick the Boy Wonder. It was a cherished possession. I'm talking about the 1960s television version of the comic book heroes adventures. I can't remember what “stirrings" the tights clad legs of our hero Bruce Wayne  may or may not have produced but I do remember being terribly worried in the episode when Bruce Wayne turned “bad" and for almost 20 min Batman was working in conjunction with the Penguin and the Joker against the sole efforts of Robin. As there was a cliff hanger from Saturday night to Sunday, one small Yorkshire boy had a disturbed sleep that night. I'm not sur

This week I am blogging from the comfort of my in laws sofa down here in Exmouth. A few days respite from London, and today, Sunday, a bit of nice weather too. I do love having weeks when I get days at home in order to catch up. Too many and I get bored but just enough and I feel in control of my life. The last week gave me three good half days at home to potter, answer e mails and achieve small victories on the domestic front that gave me an inner satisfaction. Top that off with a weekend away, even if it did take a six hour drive through torrential rain to get here, and it’s a nice Sunday feeling. More theatre last week. The divine Harriet Thorpe in “Crazy For You” in a damp yet still magical Regents Park, and “Mack and Mabel” at the Greenwich theatre presented by The Company - a peripatetic outfit of young people who come together each summer with professionals to do a musical. Choreographed by my good friend and very talented boy, Lee Crowley, it was a good stab at what is a dif

 The last time I was at the Edinburgh Festival was 21 years ago. I was only there for a week and I spent the evenings wearing Victorian female dress.  I was doing a show, although it is by no means essential to be appearing in a theatre to don strange garb during the month of August in Edinburgh. As regular readers of my blog will know this year I've had the joy of directing “Wedding Band" a play by the comedian Charlie Baker.  I paid a very quick visit to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month in order to get the play on, but this weekend Richard and I had the joy of returning for a weekend at the festival to see the play and lots of other things besides. A hugely enjoyable time. Arriving on Friday evening around 8 o'clock we dumped our bags at the hotel (a quick phone call to reception  got us a much better room than the one they bundled us into on the 4th floor to begin with) and we were off. 1st stop was the Gilded balloon, in the same venue that my own show is play

There are some weeks when I sit down  in front of my computer and try to decide what to write in my blog when the news, both national and personal, might seem a little light. Indeed Richard made this the subject of his blog only last week “The silly season" - that time of year when new stories are very thin on the ground and we have to result to featuring Paul Daniels and Sooty in news bulletins.  It seemed that several thousand other people thought that the  summer lacked news interest, though I doubt whether that was the real reason that they took to the streets with such vehement force to commit such appalling acts of criminality as we saw in areas of the country earlier this week. I'm not going into my thoughts on this. I am known for sometimes being slightly to the right of Attila the Hun and I was appalled at what I saw on the television. The nearest it came to us here in leafy Sydenham  were a couple of youths throwing a stop and go sign from some roadworks through th

So this week we finally made it up to Edinburgh.  After 8 days of rehearsal in the rural idylls of Oxfordshire  we all headed up to Edinburgh and met up at our venue the Gilded balloon at 11 PM on Tuesday night ready to do a late-night technical and dress rehearsal. I haven't been up to the festival for 21 years and the atmosphere as I wandered round on a damp Tuesday was heady and exciting. It's a great thing to be part of. “Wedding Band" opened on Wednesday afternoon to a small but appreciative audience and judging from the tweets I've had from the cast since then it's been going from strength to strength. I'm really looking forward to the weekend up there with Rich in 2 weeks time to see it again and to catch the other 6 shows that we booked for. There was a whole load of news on the Internet on Friday about the arrival of Frank's parents in Coronation Street. Gwen Taylor and I still don't really have any idea of how long we're doing, but it