Sunday, July 02, 2006

3 Fights at Soho and Beyond!...

Well all the shows went well, I did enjoy doing the Jenny Éclair radio show and the Loose Ends piece, all of which you can hear on my website and Livedigital.
Saturday morning I was up at 7am to get the cab to Jenny’s show. I was so fucked and tired, that’s what I get for staying out late at Groucho…when will I learn?
I showered, and ran downstairs of the fancy apartment block and got into cab. Then after that show I got a car to take me to BBC Broadcasting house and even this early 10am the sun was BEATING down and it was really really hot.
I love Ned Sherrin and Loose ends show on BBC Radio 4. It is so good to be involved in that show.
So I left the pub that Ned has his drink/lunch in and decided to walk it back to Chelsea. What a fucking mistake.
The sun was beating on my skin and I could feel the burn start.
So I headed for Piccadilly to get on the tube and walked straight into Gay Pride march…it was awesomely beautiful but there were 400 flumpty million gay people dancing and on floats and marching blowing whistles and I couldn’t cross the road to get to the tube and I was dying in the burny heat, so I decided to run through them and they all screamed and shouted at me….fuck I have upset the only group of people who actually ever accepted me BUT I had to get home! I love the gay community and support them totally! Now they were mad at me! So that was fight number one for that day.
I managed to get to the other side only to find the tube was blocked, so I decided to follow the march down near Trafalgar Square and make my way home on foot as a taxi was out of the question as the roads were blocked off.
I had now turned into Laurence of Arabia in the fucking 90 degree heat. My skin was prickly – my hay fever was nipping my eyes and I was dehydrated. The dynamics of London was interesting as there was thousands of England World Cup fans mixing with the biggest Gay march in UK and that was funny, but lovely as the gay guys were all dancing and cheering the topless fit and fat boys who were wearing their England football tops (not usually a group that would normally mix and be friendly in that many numbers!) the gay Pride march transvestites were shouting ‘England for the World Cup’ – the football guys laughed and cheered back! (Bless).
Anyway I as walked down the road I was stuck in front of the Protesting Christian Group (don’t they do anything else?).
The Christian protestors were penned in behind a barricade and strangely all dressed in woolly cardigans (in that heat?) and one man had a wee megaphone shouting ‘You will all go to hell’ this was drowned out by the sound of thousand of gay folks dancing to loud disco music blowing whistles. The police were standing round the Christians, in case nay trouble started, like as if the gay people would stop dancing and go argue? Fuck off!
I watched the protestors watching the crowds and I leaned over and asked one of the scary God Botherers “Don’t you feel like dancing?” The man in the hot Fair Isle woolly sweater snarled at me and shouted “No”.
“You know dancing wouldn’t make you gay” I added with a laugh.
The man lifted his megaphone and shouted at me “You are a lesbian and will die in hell”
I looked at him and shouted back “No I am not and you will go to hell for lying about me ya scary mad person.
A policeman stepped forward and said to me “Please stop harassing the protestors”
“I am not harassing them, he called me a lesbian, I have nothing against gay people but that is wrong and I can sue him for slander, I asked him he felt like dancing, that isn’t an accusation”
So I walked away, called husband to let him know where I am and then walked straight into flumpty million England supporters who were red and sticky and drunk all waiting for the England versus Portugal match to happen (well we know now how that turned out!...poor fuckers)…they heard me talking with my broad Scottish accent on my mobile and they started shouting “Scottish bastard” at me….I managed to get away from that fucking situation and ran down into St. James’s park. The sun was now burning my arms and neck, I tried to get shade in the trees, I was dying here.
Finally I got a cab to the flat.
So last night husband got backstage VIP tickets to see Roger Waters play Pink Floyd hits in Hyde Park! He is a huge fan and to get those tickets was amazing, we have a friend who works in the industry and she was generous. Ashley my daughter and my husband LOVE Pink Floyd and she was so upset she was missing this concert! She called me from Glasgow to tell me this, but as Pink Floyd sung her daddy held up his mobile phone from the lovely seated VIP area and let her share the moment with him.

I sloped off back into mental Soho hell to do my last night of Janey Godley blog Live! At Soho theatre…..by 9pm the place looked fucking trashed…there were millions of broken bottles, plastic cups, heaps of trash, drunken people and squillions of glittery sprayed pink flamingoed drag queens, tottering drunkenly over the cobbled stones of the ancient London street.
Gay Pride culminated in the same street as my theatre…..great!
All in all I got a really good audience and had a really nice show. I am lucky, loads of comedy clubs shut last night as we all know England got booted out of the world cup and people were so despondent and sad….but I made some of them laugh.

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