Before my script came along, and I really had no idea about this when I wrote it, and I’m not sure my script even counts as ‘official,’ the last traceable Nottinghamshire Robin Hood mummers script appears to have been recorded by a chap called Dean S. Reynolds Hole in 1901. And Mr Hole’s just recording it, in a book called Then And Now, which suggests the script was probably written before 1901.
The script is here if you want to have a butcher’s. I must admit, my script includes a lot more winky jokes.
So have I really, and entirely inadvertently, written the first Nottinghamshire Robin Hood mummers script in at least 122 years? Surely I can’t claim this. Surely there must have been another one, maybe written in 1972, scribbled in a notebook by some fella called Brian or Big Ken, performed only once at Bobbers Mill, or Long Clawson, or on the bus, by the Papplewick Obby Orse Players (POOPS) to an audience of nine men and three ducks.
Surely someone remembers something Robin Hoody and mummery taking place between 1901 and 2023 in Nottinghamshire. Not just at Long Clawson. Is there a Short Clawson? Must remember to check. Surely this can’t be a massive piece of history we’re creating in Sherwood next week.
And … if I claim that my script is the first official Nottinghamshire mummers play about Robin Hood to be a) written and b) performed in this county in more than a century, will I be in trouble with the mummers mafia?
Is there a mummers mafia? Surely there can’t be a mummers mafia. Will they come out to arrest me for making lofty claims? Will I ever be seen again if they do?
Anyway. We’re on next week (Sunday 15 October) performing the Calverton Robin Hood Play. Free performances take place at 1.00 pm and 3.00 pm.
All of us here at CRAPPPS shall make no lofty claims about our script unless we are (far too easily) persuaded to drink too much and let such lofty claims blurt out, at which point the law enforcement wing of the mummers mafia will surely come out to decry us and demand we cease and desist. I imagine this law enforcement wing will be called The Cidermen.
Either way, it’s been really good knowing you, and you haven’t seen me. Right?
I WAS A STAND-UP COMIC in the 1990s. I started out in Manchester, where I was a drama degree student for three years (1993-1996), and then moved to London where I avoided starving for four years (1997-2000) by temping in offices for not much money in the daytime and telling jokes for even less money at night-time.
There were highlights and lowlights. In Manchester, after months of doing open spots, I did a great show at the Frog and Bucket with Johnny Vegas compering. On the back of that show, Johnny got the management to book me as a billed support act in my own right. This meant some proper cash and (gasp!) my name on the poster, which made me think I’d arrived.
I became a regular at the now demolished Hardy’s Well pub in Fallowfield / Rusholme, which was Manchester’s main student area. At the time it was a regular haunt of Caroline Aherne and Dave Gorman, both already established comedy names, and a then virtually unknown Lucy Porter, who I gigged with many times. Some of the best gigs of my life took place there, which made me think I’d arrived.
Down in London, my first open spot at The Comedy Store in Leicester Square went splendidly, as did my first open spot at Jongleurs in Battersea. This was back in the days before those godawful gong show style gigs became the entry level offering at the big clubs for newcomer comics like me. I did some of those gong shows. They were hideous.
But I did get the odd decent booking. I got to be on a bill with Jo Brand and Harry Hill (somewhere in Clapham, if memory serves) and a before-he-was-famous Jimmy Carr at a club in Aldgate which was called the Arts Café when I was resident compere there, and Fur Coat No Knickers when I wasn’t resident compere there anymore.
I also ran a club with my pal Steve Keyworth at Kentish Town’s Lion and Unicorn pub, which attracted headliners like Al Murray, Ross Noble and Noel Fielding, with Steve and I sharing the compering.
But London, I have to say, was mostly hell on toast for me as a comic, and the bad gigs outnumbered the good ones. I often received abuse at some awful Firkin pub in God knows where (I forget the name of the pub and which bit of the city, but let’s just call it the Frick Off and Firkin in London’s Arse End) for the dubious prospect of £30 cash in hand a week to compere. They made us do the comedy in the main pub, interrupting people who were eating. We had to shout at people all night because the radio mic never worked properly. This was very bad, and because I was the compere, I had to keep coming on to introduce other acts who’d run away and leave me to suffer alone when they’d done their time. There was very little solidarity among comics at Firkin gigs back then.
I did the Edinburgh Fringe twice. The first time was 1996, when I reached the live heats of Channel 4’s So You Think You’re Funny stand-up competition at The Gilded Balloon, having previously won the Manchester qualifier at a club run by a fella called Cuddly Dudley (true story).
Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon clearly didn’t think I was funny after I bounded onto the stage during my heat, yanked the mic out of its stand and watched it fall apart in my hands. It was awful. I couldn’t recover from this mishap and stumbled through my act, just wanting to go home because I knew I’d blown my big chance. I had to stay in the city for two more weeks to do other shows. People would point at me (other acts mainly, which was cruel) and ask: ‘Isn’t that Broken Mic Guy?’
By 1998, when I appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe for the second time, my confidence had been shot from bombing in front of London audiences. By then, I’d discovered I was much better at writing plays and scripts for radio, so it was starting to dawn on me how much easier it would be for me to do those things instead.
The swansong gig might have been at Club Fandango in Plymouth. There’s no point asking me. Most of that period in my life I’ve deleted from my brain. But I remember that the fire alarm went off in the hotel next door to the club while I was sat in the bath, and they made me troop out into the street naked save for a towel. I had to stay in Plymouth one more night to do my show. People would point at me (other acts mainly, which was cruel) and ask: ‘Isn’t that Soggy Towel Guy?’
So, it may have been in the car home from Plymouth that I quit stand-up comedy, with no evidence to record my having been entirely inconsistent at it, with social media and YouTube not invented at the time for me to check back on now. A lucky reprieve, I think.
So that was the 1990s. In the current millennium, I have come out of retirement only once for a gig at a big club (Comedy Store in Leeds – counselling has since helped) and a few compere slots locally in Nottingham to support my mate Ash who organises comedy and cabaret events. I’ve never fully explained to Ash why I’ve tried to avoid doing actual stand-up at his comedy nights, and why I get twitchy around microphones. If he reads this he’ll finally understand, and not put me in charge of any more technical rehearsals.
I’ve never fully committed any of the above genuine traumas to writing, until now.
And I’ve pretty much avoided stand-up ever since.
Until now.
I guess there’s always been a part of me that’s wanted to lay some personal demons to rest. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved as a writer and performer since the bad old days as an occasionally adequate stand-up comic. I’ve written and performed in some critically acclaimed stuff, picked up an award or two, and had one of my plays (PHYS ED) go down a storm at Edinburgh. Queuing up to watch my actor mate Nick Osmond perform this show to a sell-out crowd at the Assembly Rooms was one especially proud moment.
But I can’t help myself. I’ve always fancied another pop at stand-up, on my terms, for old time’s sake.
There’s eight weeks of training with a professional stand-up comic, which is sweet. Boot camp with other L-plate comedians (*1) starts mid-September, with a proper gig at the end of it at Nottingham’s Pryzm venue on Sunday 12 November.
This gig will be around a week after my 50th birthday and something like 28 years since my first ever gig as the spotty student comedian in Manchester you see pictured above. I’ve just remembered my first gig was at a pub called The Thirsty Scholar. I’ve googled the pub, and it doesn’t look like it’s been demolished yet.
If you’ve not seen it, it’s me onstage on my tod for 75 minutes wearing a 1970s school uniform pretending to be ten years old. For the avoidance of doubt, ten years old is 38 years younger than my actual age.
Boy, the show hurts. It’s physically and mentally draining. There have been times when I’ve come off feeling like I’m experiencing shock or something, and that there must be easier ways of spending my spare time.
CHALK is about a man desperately trying to cling to his memories in the face of dementia. He experiences bewildering highs as the music he hears unlocks things in him long since buried and crushing lows as the illness shuts these memories down in stages. The world in Richard’s head begins as a sanctuary, finishes as a battleground. Some scenes are light, whimsical. Others are brutal. Somewhere in the middle of it there’s a message of hopefulness without mawkishness because I think that’s how the loved ones I’ve lost to dementia would have wanted me to tackle this.
I’m so proud of the show and the feedback I’ve been given but I never know how audiences are taking it as I’m up there in the middle of it. It’s exhilarating and terrifying all at once.
So, these words from Mike (c/o Arundel’s Big House band) who saw CHALK on Friday 25 February fair took the wind out of my sails.
Thanks so much for this, Mike.
‘Friday went to see the production titled “Chalk” which ran for three nights at the Victoria Institute. It was written and performed by Simon Carter and dealt with the subject of dementia, a challenging topic to say the least. I am in no way qualified to offer a critique of the evening, all I can really say is how it resonated with me. At a performance level it was an incredible outpouring of emotional and physical energy that surpasses anything I’ve ever seen on the stage. I’m normally knackered after a gig; the nerves, the tension and the act of creating all make a demand on you energetically. But Simon should have been allowed to lie down for a week to recover from one performance, let alone get up and do it all again the next night!
I thought the play was really cleverly constructed, alternating between moments of hysteria and disorientation, to vivid flashbacks from childhood and adolescence. The increasing blur between reality and memory world and the frustrations in communicating what was being experienced were all palpable. The disease itself was personified as an evil that no matter how successful can never claim the heart and soul of its victim, and most interestingly for me, an observation that I have encountered several times before, how successful music is in connecting directly to that heart and soul, serving as the trigger for moments of serenity and comfort. I have very little direct exposure to dementia, unlike Simon who had seen it work its evil through two relatives, but I felt from the play a sense of how it might be being experienced and how important are the sensory triggers, music in particular, in penetrating the veil it draws over the individual.
It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t without a message of hope and dignity.’
As live theatre returns to the United Kingdom, my brand new play CHALK is one of the first out of the blocks in the East Midlands. It’s being staged at the Robin Hood Theatre in Averham, Nottinghamshire, Wednesday 23 – Saturday 26 June 2021. The show aims to raise dementia awareness and funds for Alzheimer’s Society.It’s also a world premiere, so I’m posting my programme notes for posterity!
“IT’S MY ABSOLUTE PLEASURE to be performing CHALK for you at the Robin Hood Theatre. It’s the first time the play has been staged in front of a live audience (which means it’s both thrilling and terrifying for me all at once) and I couldn’t have wished for a better experience in the lead up. Geoff Morgan’s done a terrific job as director and the gusto with which the team has tackled the many technical challenges (I think CHALK now holds unofficial venue record for most single sound and lighting cues in a one act production) has been so impressive. They’ve even built me a giant desk.
The run has been COVID-delayed. We were due to go in November 2020, and then January 2021, now here we are in June. But I remind myself that if it hadn’t been for lockdown I may never have finished the script. This had been sitting around about 75% complete for several years. I finished it initially to be performed by a professional actor chum called Dan Fearn, with an opportunity of getting CHALK into development at the National, where it may still end up.
‘I’ll send it to the Robin Hood Theatre for read-through and feedback at the writer’s group,’ I thought in a moment of rare lockdown proactivity.
A few weeks later I found myself staring down the barrel of actually performing the thing. Geoff can be very persuasive, and he was keen to get a live piece of theatre up on the stage as quickly and safely as possible. The way things have worked out, it’ll be first production on after official re-opening. Gulp.
It’s for Edith (my grandmother) and Alan (my uncle), both lost to dementia. Alongside other close family, these glorious people were written all over major parts of my childhood.
You may have had, or may have, an Edith or an Alan close to you if you’ve been affected by dementia. What took them in the end was something terrible and devastating, but there were sparks, flashes, in the midst of it. Moments which, when triggered by a familiar voice, a familiar smell, a familiar song, caused them to rise from the darkness and light up the place with a smile, a giggle. In people with dementia, longer-term memory can be prolonged through the hearing of familiar music. An old song can transport you back. It can bring back places, people, occasions.
I never knew for certain what went on behind the eyes, but I did see glimpses. The last time I saw Edith she said to me, in an all too fleeting moment of recall: ‘Oh! Simon! Hello, Simon! Where have you been?’
I don’t think she saw me as the adult grandchild in front of her. I think, in her mind, I was the five-year-old grandchild again, running around her kitchen with that infernal saucepan on his head, making noises like a motorbike, crisps and crumbs tumbling down his chin. I’m sure this was the version of me nanna clinged to because she’d spoken of it so often before. Forever a child for her, now.
Dementia is a tough subject to write about and I don’t take the responsibility of doing so lightly. I’m hopeful that I can capture of sense of what life might be like behind the eyes of an Edith, or an Alan. I’m hopeful that I can raise some awareness (and some donations) for Alzheimer’s Society, an amazing organisation which does amazing work.
Above all, I’d like to show that for all the distress that dementia causes it surely will not, cannot, ever truly claim a person’s heart, soul and smiles. Who they were, and all they meant to us, stays with us long afterwards. I’m sorry – I don’t want to sugar coat this. Really I don’t. It’s just that I saw this to be true, and twinkling, in the eyes of a loved one as a song, as a voice, took them back somewhere only they knew. Bringing them joy. Release. Dignity in the darkness.
I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you for the opportunity to do it.
And, of course, welcome back to live theatre.”
Donate to Alzheimer’s Society via our JustGiving page here.
Simon Carter 
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