Arthur Smith's sober look at celebrity

Ten years ago at the Edinburgh fringe, a group of stand-ups and journalists were glumly discussing the imminent demise from alcoholism of the comedian Arthur Smith, when a strangely familiar cadaver walked into the bar.

“Arthur?” said a voice in disbelief. Smith held his thin arms wide and proclaimed to the disbelievers: “I have arisen, but the jokes remain the same.”

This year, alive, well and on the wagon, Smith returns to the Edinburgh for a new show - “maybe my 25th” - which is built around the drinking habit that nearly killed him. The title speaks for itself: Arthur Smith’s Pissed-up Chat Show.

The format will be familiar to television viewers of Parkinson, Wogan, Norton et al, but the rules will be radically different from mainstream on-the-couch entertainment. Smith, 56, the host, will be stone cold sober (as he must be, one drink could kill him). His interviewees will be breathalysed to make sure they are drunk.

The compere already has some of his guests lined up, and has been surprised at the very positive reaction he has received from his friends in comedy.

“It’s an excuse for them to be drunk I suppose,” said Smith. “People generally are quite drunk when they go on late night chat shows in Edinburgh. Normally they would try to be sensible. In this show, they’ve no need to be. In fact it would be disappointing if they were sensible.”

The show features stand-up mixed with with facts and figures about alcohol and its consequences, before Smith leads his audience into the main event: his celebrity drunk.

He said: “I figure that if someone starts on a long rambling drunken story I can interrupt and give a commentary: ‘You’ll notice the drunk here is doing the classic manooeuvre of embarking on a long-winded, boring story, repetitive and without any punchline...’ before turning back to the guest, and saying, ‘Please, carry on.’

“Drunk pople often say more interesting things than they do when they’re sober, or chained up by a PR girl. In vino veritas, I refer you to Pliny the Elder.”

After a lifetime on the razzle, Smith almost died of acute necrotising pancreatitis (“when you have the necrotising in the middle you are in real trouble - my pancreas was consuiming itself”). He was seriously ill for four months. Now a diabetic, he looks askance at his drunken past.

There’s a comic path running through all this, which appears to lead to the moral high ground. Smith admits as much.

“When I first quit,” said, “I thought, ‘how stupid is drinking?’ It’s such a dangerous thing, yet it's treated like our jolly friend. I used to go out at midnight and look at the drunks weaving up the road near my house, and thought ‘Jesus, they look so strange’. People absue it so badly. I’ve so many friends who have fallen foul of booze.

"But I wouldn’t want to adopt a moralistic tone. Everyone’s funnier when you've had a drink. If there was no drink there would be no stand up."

Not all of Smith’s fringe shows have been hits. Sod, the follow up to his hit show An Evening With Gary Lineker, caused at least part of his audience to fall asleep. Another production - the title eludes him - was meant to be staged halfway up the Pentland Hills, south of the city. The buses bringing the audience were unable to climb up the dirt track and the show had to be performed instead in a nearby beer garden.

This year’s offering at least has a certain commercial logic. Edinburgh boasts more bars and restaurant per head than city in Britain, and has a legendary drinking culture. With it’s broad-minded fringe audience the box office should be good, or at least that how it seems to the unbefuddled comedian.

"Edinburgh’s like a little cocoon during the festival - it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t matter,” he said. “Audiences are genuinely up for something, they’re a pretty sophisticated bunch."

They have to be sophisticated for this? “No. Yes. They’re sort of open, aren’t they? Goodness knows what the show will be like, to be honest. It might be terrible.”

* Arthur Smith’s Pissed-up Chat Show, Pleasance Somewhere

Her and her big mouth

The Scotsman, 5 August 2003

She's got big hands, bloody big feet and a great big voice. "Hurry up," she yells, "I'm freezing me tits off."

Janet Street Porter is sitting with her Olive Oyl legs dangling over the triangulation point on the top of Edinburgh's Blackford Hill. She's not being rude, unkind or unpleasant, she just's being, well, Janet Street Porter. Sort of stentorian.

Behind her, a huge panorama stretches away to Edinburgh Castle, Inchcolm and beyond to Fife, half of Scotland united in the sweep of an eye. But around her, opinion has quickly divided into love and hate, high on this hill. The photographer - the object of the tits remark - is in the former camp, he's lapping it up; in the latter, the birds have stopped singing.

They are not alone. Wrapped in their raincoats and cowering under flat hats, the Calvinist residents of Edinburgh's villa quarters linger warily below the summit, their morning constitutionals on hold. Even their mutts know instinctively to avoid this woman. The bravest scamper up, slobbering, but quickly retire with a whimper. "I hate dogs," Street Porter calls after a Labrador as it dives down the slope to its owner, both of them now sharing a gloomy kind of look.

Street Porter is a real walker, out and proud, the former president of the Ramblers' Association who has trodden the pathways with the rich and famous on a television show, As the Crow Flies, and ambled more discreetly with local groups, like the Selkirk Plodders.

She lives in London, but has a house by the sea at Whitstable and another in Niddersdale in Yorkshire's West Riding, two hideaways which help her make the most of the landscapes she loves. Her ideal is to get on the top of the moors and walk for miles in a "huge expanse of emptiness" or to tramp round the marshes in a Kentish sort of way.

So much for likes. But in the manner of dedicated walkers everywhere, Street Porter tends to dislike a sizeable array of things. Those joggers you meet on mountain tops? "Oh fing hell, them. Or people on bikes," she shrieks.

"Just for a bit, I started running again along canal towpaths and not only have you got dogs, you have people cycling with dogs on leads. Stupid. Mind you, I looked a sight - I was like an octopus having an epileptic fit, a lot of wobbly bits and tentacles flying about."

Before the image can burn itself into your brain, she's off again: "And what about when you're out walking and you get the mountain bikers coming up behind you and they've got no bell? But then they just couldn't have a bell, could they? It wouldn't be macho enough. Hate them.

"They come up beside you and you don't hear them coming if it's windy. They make you jump. You say: 'Why don't you have a bell?' And basically they tell you to f off."

Which is unfortunate, because Street Porter is, she confides, very thin-skinned. That's why she's turned her life into her solo show, All the Rage, which is already playing to rave reviews on the Fringe: it's all just one helluva cathartic experience for her. Often patronised in the media, she is content to let her achievements speak up for her, both on stage and in conversation. She has been the editor of the Independent on Sunday, a successful television executive and she has won prizes for her programmes.

"What I haven't won awards for is being a big woman with big tits and funny glasses," she says. "I can't control what people write. There's no point in moaning about it ..." and for once she slows down "... it's - just - the - way - it - is." Isn't it simply sexism? "I couldn't care less."

She can at least vent her spleen on her mother - she, by Street Porter's account, was a nightmare. On stage she calls her bitch and worse. She says: "I remember wishing after she had her thyroid operation on her neck that they'd cut her head right off."

Here on the hill, she sounds less strident but just as bitter. "My mother was Welsh, and we spent all our summer holidays in Wales. We did a lot of walking then. But you weren't allowed to do the kind of walking where you actually enjoyed it - it always had to be allied to something, collecting firewood or bilberries or blackberries. You had to learn to have fun yourself."

The rest of the year her childhood was spent in a working-class district of Fulham, where she says she spent a kind of schizophrenic existence. She was a fashion-conscious mod who made her own clothes but at the same time she was isolated and withdrawn. "It sounds bad, but I lived in my head, and walking was just something I did. I felt very different from everyone else and I don't know why."

By now Street Porter has clambered down from this morning's peak of achievement and we're dropping away from the Blackford summit. Tramp, tramp, tramp. She could go on for hours.

"A lot of people are surprised that I like walking by myself. They say things like: 'Is it dangerous?' And that's never even crossed my mind.

"I like walking alone, or with one other person, that's the best. I did Hadrian's Wall the other week with a friend, and it was funny. A cab driver said: 'There's a really famous tree you're going to pass,' and he said something about a movie with Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner; he was going on about the most famous tree in the north of England.

"We were doing that bit of the wall coming out of Housesteads, it's fantastic, like being on a switchback. We were walking along the top and it was really windy, and we were wittering on about face cream and sun block and stuff, and suddenly she shouted: 'Where's that tree?' We'd walked right past the north's most famous tree, and we hadn't even noticed it. It's like that isn't it?"

She reckons the most hopeless person to walk with is another woman who is having a relationship crisis. You can have a five-hour discussion about why she should leave her husband, but she'll just go meekly back to him.

They never learn, do they? "No. And then you think, that should have been a fantastic walk - but why have we expended all this energy on a second-rate person, the bloke, the source of all the trouble? He's probably lying in front of the telly asleep, completely unaware of the fact he's been analysed."

You might imagine with her rich experience - itemised with an accountant's care and attention in All the Rage - that Street Porter might have enjoyed the odd romantic stroll with one of her four husbands or other lovers. "I'm not a very romantic person," she says. What, not a single amble down lovers' lane? "Well, they've all walked," she says. "But walking's my thing anyway. I don't think of it like that."

Anyway, men bring their own problems to the hillside. "They think if they don't get to the top before you they have failed some kind of virility test. Myself, I'm a bit of a plodder."

And then there's worse: those Munro-baggers. It's simple. They're sad. "Why've you got to tick them all off?" she demands. "Why can't you just have mountains you enjoy? What is it about bagging Munros? Just tell me what happens." It has to be conceded: it's a male thing, just a bit anal.

"It is," Street Porter agrees. "Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me. At a big meeting at the BBC this bloke said to me: 'I'm going to put my dick on the table at this point...' I thought: 'No, not really.' What he meant was, 'I'm going to be perfectly honest.'"

A duck quacks. We've reached Blackford Pond, the end of our hike. Then she delivers the bombshell for ramblers everywhere. "Bagging Munros is a dick-on-table exercise."

Janet Street Porter - All The Rage is at Assembly, 5:10pm today, and until 24 August.

The bare facts of ageing

False teeth, sagging breasts and varicose veins might not combine in a conventional image of the body beautiful, but a 75-year-old stripper from San Francisco believes that she can storm the Edinburgh Fringe with a show that will explode society's obsession with youthful good looks.

Lynn Ruth Miller, a former journalist who has only been stripping for three years, said that she was “living the dream” in an act that celebrates every fold and crease of her body, “revelling in the disasters” that the ageing process wreaks.

“If you want to feel old and inadequate, that's up to you, but there is a choice. I look like an old lady, I know I do, but I never suffer pain, I never get tired and it is so exhilarating to communicate with people. When I'm on stage, I'm talking to the world, saying, ‘Don't sit in your rocking chair - get out there and live',” she said.

For her show, Ageing is Amazing, Ms Miller has devised an eye-catching opening sequence that echoes Samuel Goldwyn's dictum: start with an earthquake and build up to a climax.

Emerging to the tune of the Strip Polka, over the next four minutes she sheds a robe and several chemises, to be left standing in front of her audience clad in billowing underwear, elaborately decorated with a fringe, bells and feathers.

Those who have seen her performances are rarely left unmoved. “I swear the audience went completely bonkers when this crazy lady stripped down to her granny panties,” one admirer wrote.

To read more about the sensational Ms Miller, go to the Times online: Old age stripped bare.

Visa fee hits arts festivals

The Times, March 6, 2008

Organisers of the Edinburgh International Festival and fringe, the Promenade concerts and many of Britain’s best-loved and most celebrated arts festivals are staring into a financial black hole because of changes in immigration rules which are being brought in by the Home Office.

Under the government proposals which are due to take effect this autumn, many international performers will be required for the first time to purchase a visa, at an estimated cost of £99 each. Orchestras, ballet and theatre companies, travelling from countries outside Europe, such as the USA and Australia will be hit by charges which could amount to thousands of pounds.

The proposals have provoked outrage from leading figures in the arts, who accused the government of precipitating a financial crisis and in failing in its own agenda to promote multiculturalism.

“This is like a massive, unbudgeted tax on internationalism in the arts. It’s crazy,” said Graham Sheffield, the artistic director of the Barbican in London. “Take an orchestra like the Los Angeles Philharmonic – you are talking about thousands of pounds on your budget. The potential for catastrophe, for it being very much more expensive and bureaucratic, is high.”

Paul Hughes, the general manager for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, warned that the changes would take their toll on events such as the Proms.

“It is likely to bring fewer artists to the country. For people bringing in whole orchestras, it will have an enormous impact. Other than as a pure money-making exercise for whoever owns the department of visas, I can’t imagine what the benefit is to anybody,” he said.

Under the current rules, visiting performers from “non visa national” countries such as the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who play at festivals designated as “permit free” do not require a visa to enter the United Kingdom. Costs are also held in check for visiting orchestras, ballets and theatres who are able to tour under a work permit which costs just £190 and applies to the whole group.

A Home Office consultation on the arts ends on March 10, but under “Tier 5” of the new points-based rules for immigration, costs are expected to rise exponentially. As well as visa expenses, it has been propsed that each organisation will require a “certificate of sponsorship”, effectively a guarantee of good behaviour from its British promoter.

Though the cost of this is likely to be set at just £400 per company, each member of a touring party will require a certificate. The amount of bureaucracy that this might entail was mind-boggling, said Mr Sheffield.

“We are already having to row extremely hard not to go backwards. This is going to be a nightmare. They will have to employ several thousand civil servants just to process everything,” he said.

The Home Office changes are being made as part of a five-tier points-based immigration system which came into effect at the end of last month and effects all incomers from outside the European Union. Based on the Australian immigration model it is designed to ensure that “only those with skills the country needs can come to work and study,” according to Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

However, arts organisations accuse the government of including the arts and entertainment industry only as an afterthought. The changes to the immigration system were a huge and important exercise for the counry, said Chloe Reddaway of the National Campaign for the Arts, but “the arts didn’t fit the model” she said.

“Instead of providing an arts and entertainment category that was specially set up, we are being squeezed into boxes that were never made for the arts sector. Everyone has been trying very hard to make that work but everyone keeps coming up with the fact that this is the wrong shape for the arts and entertainment. The sector is not generic, it rests on individual cases, and that is what the new system doesn’t accomodate,” said Ms Reddaway.

The Edinburgh Festival and fringe are vulnerable to the changes. The International Festival commissions work from a wide range of non-EU based companies and will be hit by a huge rise in costs under the proposals. Organisers of the Fringe, which last year hosted more than 2000 shows from all over the world, can expect a massive rise in bureaucracy – if performers are prepared to come to Scotland after costs go up.

A spokesman for the International Festival said the festival was “taking part in the consultation and taking a close interest in this issue."

What has bemused arts promoters is the government’s apparent abandonment of its ideal as Britain as a cultural hub.

Ms Reddaway said: “Think of the government’s creative industry policy, the Olympics, their interest in international trade and transferable skills, and the their diversity agenda. This policy runs completely contrary to all of that.”

The first changes to performer regulations were introduced last year and saw a rise in the cost of visas for countries including Russia, China, Cuba and India which have “visa national” status. Last night the Home Office said that no decision had been taken about whether to replace blanket visa covering groups such as orchestras with a system under which every group member must have a visa.

* Joint by-line with Dalya Alberge

Masekela blows up a storm

Cape Argus and others, August 2007


Greedy. Selfish. Corrupt. Sitting in his comfortable hotel room the legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela is counting out what the calls the “defining characteristics” of humanity. “Cruel,” he exclaims. He forgot cruel.

The defining characteristics? Masekela looks up and gives a throaty laugh. “They are,” he insists. “When I say that, it’s not a blanket statement. But the people who fight injustice, who do charitable work, or who have goodwill – they’re always regarded as oddballs.”

He thinks for a moment and then decides on another tack. “Look at what we have done to the water and the earth and the music. We destroy everything we come into contact with. I wake up many days feeling ashamed to be a human being.

“I would rather be a dog,” he says emphatically, “or a bird.”

Here in Cleveland, Ohio, Masekela, 68, should have everything to smile about. At the end of a triumphant US tour he’s looking forward to a few days of quality time with his three grown-up sons, who live in southern California.

Then in a week or so, he hopes to fly to the Edinburgh festival in Scotland, where Truth in Translation has opened a three-week run to ecstatic reviews. He wrote the music for Michael Lessac’s chilling drama about the lives of the young translators who revealed the barbaric crimes of the Apartheid regime to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The production has gripped British audiences as much as it transfixed people when it premiered in Johannesburg almost a year ago.

But Masekela is remorselessly downbeat. Partly it is the common cold which has brought him low. Throughout the conversation, he sucks noisily at a bit of ginger root – “it helps to break down the mucus” he says tetchily. But it is our discussion of Truth in Translation which has really ignited his ill humour.

Lessac has told the British media that the show demonstrates South Africa’s ability “to forgive the past, to survive the future”. Masekela, who first began to workshop the music for the show back in 2005, takes the opposite view and believes passionately that neither the play nor the political reality in South Africa has achieved any such reconciliation.

“At the end of the play you still wonder whether reconciliation is going to work,” he says. “What is amazing is how the perpetrators almost reluctantly apologised – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ – because a deal was there. It’s the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn’t find anybody who supported Nazism. It’s the same thing in South Africa. You can’t find anyone who supported apartheid.

“The thing is that apartheid is there, even now it is still there. You can’t disconnect with it. That is like asking someone in Northern Ireland ‘have you ever disconnected with the Troubles’. Because the after effects and structures and the damage it did will take ages to heal.”

There are plenty of ironies in the situation, says Masekela who fled the country after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. For a time it was people like his own mentor Archbishop Trevor Huddleston who led the fight against apartheid. But eventually music came to the fore, a “ major catalyst” in regime change, he believes. “By 1985 there was nobody recording without having a song on their CD which said either ‘Free Nelson Mandela,’ ‘Free South Africa’ or ‘down with Apartheid’.”

His own song Bring Him Back Home became an anthem for Mandela’s release, and the musician himself returned to South Africa in the early 1990s ready to let the good times roll. Fifteen years later he sees only mediocrity in the arts, a few opportunities for corporate gigs and perhaps a handful of one night stands on home soil.

“The administration today are terrified of music,” he growls. “They deny it. They know that a musical commentary can put them at a disadvantage. They are not afraid of print and journalists, that is considered freedom of speech, but they are very comfortable with the absence of music.

“I am not bitter. I am disgusted. And I am lucky – I can work all over the world. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim, they spend most of their time abroad, because they can hardly play at home. What about those other musicians in South Africa? How do they make a living?”

For decades he has been an itinerant, though his home base is Johannesburg where he lives with his wife Elinam. Masekela owns his own entertainment group, publishing and recording music, which he runs with his 29-year-old daughter Pula Twala. Any commercial success puts him in a tiny minority among the black population.

“We ended up with less than 2% of the economy, less than 5% of the land. We are a free but poor people, he says. “Amnesia always sets in after freedom. People go from discrimination and oppression to dictatorship. It has happened in Angola, the Congo, it is happening now in Darfur, in Somalia, in Zimbabwe. It’s human nature. People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people. There are people in South Africa who have abandoned their communities.”

But surely he has felt elation, at least when apartheid crumbled? On the day of the 1994 election archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked by the BBC to describe his feelings and his response was “Yippee!” Didn’t Masekela have a yippee moment?

He takes a mighty suck on his ginger root. “I had that sense of it. But it was momentary. Because ‘yippee’ doesn’t change the way the way that bastards feel.” The settlement he says was “an agreement , a hard compromise”. There has been “no charity, no trickle down.” Even Mandela – whom he lists among his heroes – ultimately couldn’t change things in the ways he wanted.

“Mandela was bad for business because he was too interested in the quality of life for the poor and that wasn’t good for economics. It threatened all those people who had big properties,” says Masekela. “I’m not saying he made a deal to only stay five years but he might have felt that the visions he had were not going to be realised and it was better for him to resign at a timely moment. He definitely he didn’t get what he had hoped for.”

Are there any grounds at all for optimism? Well he has his heroes, Masekela replies. He admires Tutu’s ability to “ call the shots” of the government in South Africa. In the wider world he is drawn to the imperturbable dignity of the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. “At one time I used to admire Mugabe,” he muses. “When I meet him, if he will talk to me I’m going to ask him ‘What the f*** happened to you man?’

“But I describe myself as a pragmatist. I look at what is happening on the ground and how people are behaving. And usually what people say and do are completely different things. Because human beings, we are a bunch of hypocrites.”

He pauses, weighing up another list, the great musicians who can still lighten his gloom. He counts them out on his fingers: Makeba. Belefonte. Dylan. Marley. “I admired Miles Davis very much because he never bit his tongue - he always said what he felt. These are all figures who are not universally popular with powerful people. I admire the people the establishment hate. And I am not a favourite of the establishment.”

Is that a good sign?

“I hope so,” he says, standing. He has one more gig to prepare for and no more time to talk. “Sorry to bring you down.”