SIMON WOODROFFE: HOW I GOT MY YO! The Yo! Sushi supremo and raconteur extraordinaire reveals a mere five reasons why it's cool to be a millionaire. And the five ‘downsides’.
1 People return your phone calls. It always drove me crazy when they didn't and I wrote a song about it with Chaz Jankel which is on my album Howl Got My Yo!
2 You can spoil your friends. Just being able to buy a bottle of champagne or extra big bunch of flowers and to see people's smiles is a treat.
3 You can press the balance button at the cash machine without dread. I did this when I made my first million and had the funds wired from the lawyers to my current account. There was a guy behind me in the queue and I said, ‘here, cop a look at this.’ I've still got the print out.
4 You go to work because you want to. This has made my decision-making much stronger too because I don't need the results so badly.
5 There are more girls that would like to go out with you. Money may not buy you love but it buys you a nice yacht to draw up alongside love.
and the downsides . . .
1 You get more phone calls. I want to leave people feeling good so I have learned how to do lots of shortish calls.
2 You are expected to pay for everyone at every meal. I had a coffee with the guy who started Subway when I was in New York and he left me to buy my own; maybe he'd learned something.
3 You still suffer from the delusion that you haven't got enough. My brother's father-in-law used to say ‘you can be rich if you don't want too much' and I reckon he had a point.
4 It's a lot further to fall. I never understood this before but you get used to travelling at the front of the plane and you think that's normal.
5 The more girls that would like to go out with you don't all just want your mind. You learn after a while but schucks, it's fun along the way.
I Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, 7—30 Aug (not 70, 77), 2.50pm, 8950—21150 (EB—£70). Previews 586 Aug, £5.
If YOU LIKE THIS. YOU MIGHI ALSO LIKE
Rob Brydon lf advice on how to make a cool million isn't your bag, maybe being told where you're going wrong in your relationship will be a laugh. P/easance Courtyard, 7—30 Aug (not 10, 16), 7.15pm, £11.50—E7350 (270-212).
28 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 5—12 Aug 2004
Beyond the pail
SIMON MUNNERY has been a left-wing urban warrior and a Nietzschean techno-freak. Jay Richardson wonders why he is now sitting on the fence waiting for a helicopter to pick him up. Aren’t we all?
Munnery’s show Buckethead. Best do as
he says. Because Munnery’s characters have a history of intimidating introductions (‘Attention scuml’) and the former Cluub Zarathustra compere is a true intellectual maverick. At Cambridge he attempted to change the Footlights’ name to Arse-Bum. So when one of the Fringe’s true one-liner maestros wishes to perform with a bucket on his head, one way or another, you give him some room.
‘You can put them on your head,’ he confirms. ‘You shouldn’t, but you know you want to. You know you must. You know some day you will.’ But the bucket-wearing Ned Kelly was an outlaw. ‘We are all outside the law,’ he counters. ‘Apart from those within it: politicians, lawyers, judges, clerks of court, detectives, tea ladies. It’s a veritable industry. With a vested interest in maintaining high crime levels. Down with everything!’
You’re not anti-Ned then? ‘Not anti but apres. Compris?’ Not quite. So I ask what his other Fringe show, the intriguingly titled Simon Munnery’s AGM, is about. ‘Minutes of previous meeting, a song, a poem, presentation of the agenda, selection of officials. Or it may be a long and pointless anecdote about my mother. I haven’t decided and am deliberately learning the deliciousness of indecision. I find I do nothing without a deadline. And with a deadline I do nothing until the deadline has passed. and then I panic. Which is like doing nothing but more stressful.’
After the electronic trickery of the League Against Tedium, with its big screen projections, Sword of Truth and Shield of Irony, will this be another technically ambitious show? With lots of slides? Are the audience like shareholders with a say in how he runs himself? What’s the point? ‘No slides, just quill and parchment; there lies true ambition. To somehow, so late in the day, against all the odds, beat Shakespeare. The audience hold the stakes and I hold the garlic. I’m sure we’ll be fine. The show has twin-fold aims. One: start a democracy. Two: have fun. These may prove mutually exclusive, we shall
I udge not,’ proclaims the poster for Simon
‘STEWART LEE SPRAYS HIMSELF IN THE FACE WHEN HE URINATES; SOMETHING TO DO WITH HIS RELIGION, I IMAGINE'
And the harmonica playing? ‘We need to clear the venue quickly at the end.’
Despite a one-series cancellation of his otherwise well-received television show of 2001, Attention Scum.’, the former Perrier nominee has been a regular fixture on radio, both as the League and in his other guise, cod-revolutionary Alan Parker: Urban Warrior. He will return to the airwaves shortly with a second series of Where Did It All Go Wrong? for Radio 4 and is contemplating a comeback for Parker: ‘an autumn offensive in the offing’.
With the Nietzschean, self-deifying League and ultra left-wing Parker operating at different ends of the political spectrum, which is he personally closer to? ‘I like to stand on the fence wobbling my legs and hoping for a helicopter. Like most people really, I expect.’ A comedian’s comedian, he rarely gets recognised in the street, though it depends on the street: “In my own, it happens all the time.’
But you won’t find former Zarathustra collaborators like Nighty Night’s Kevin Eldon or fellow Fringe highlight Stewart Lee with anything but praise and protective concern for a comic who baffles while he entertains. This seems gracious, especially when Munnery reveals that Lee ‘sprays himself in the face when he urinates; deliberately. Something to do with his religion, I imagine.’
Munnery has no idea which other Fringe acts he will have time to see around his own punishing schedule, but cites original inspirations as Arnold Brown, Andrew Bailey. Jerry Sadowitz, Malcolm Hardee and John Hegley, recently appearing alongside the potato poet in Melbourne. So has he always been a performer?
‘No. Only since I started performing. Before that I expect I was a spectator of some kind.’
Simon Munnery’s AGM, Stand, 558 7272, 7-30 Aug (not 16), 4pm, £7.50 (£6.50). Previews 4 Aug, 7pm and 6 Aug, 3.30pm, £6 (£5); Buckethead, Assembly Rooms, 226 2428, 6-30 Aug (not 10, 17), 6.30pm, £10—21 1 (29-210).