The Pink Green Room

It's Sunday night, the rain is beating heavily against the window-pane and I'm beyond bored and fed up, so nothing new there. At 6 o'clock I shake myself up, take myself upstairs and pour myself a deep bath (as hot as I can stand); pour myself a VERY large gin and tonic (as cold as I can stand), adapting Noel Coward's recipe for a Martini by pouring in the gin and waving the glass in the general direction of the Scheweppes factory in Hendon (NW London) rather than  towards Italy. Not as sophisticated or exotic, I know. Ablutions over, I slink downstairs, slump into a chair and begrudgingly switch the television on where, to my great joy and surprise, the BBC are re-airing Michael Palin's classic Around the World in 80 Days.  "What is this old fart on about?" I hear you cry in consternation and angst, "he promised us gay culture". Well, shut your face, as Frankie Howerd might have said, and read on, you might just learn something. During the progr...

'The Green Room at Drury Lane Theatre', by George and Robert Cruickshank It's October. It's cold. It's wet. It's boring. Four things that I have been saying to myself incessantly and we're only five days into the month! With the virus still prevailing over our social lives, and much else besides, I have been persuaded, by popular demand, to transpose the junk shop of historical camp gossip and theatrical tit-bits, that I have been boring my friends and family with for years, onto the web. What follows on this blog are random, and probably sporadic, jottings to keep me occupied and out of everyone's hair. The posts are likely to delve into the arts and culture, both high and low (and not forgetting the lowest of the low) of the LGBT community in the last one-hundred years or so. Sound any good? Well frankly, whether you enjoy reading this or not is something that neither concerns nor interests me particularly - as the late, great Kenneth Williams once sai...