Two weeks to go to the panto. It's fingers out and start doing some work time. For me this means learning my lines. There are so many of them. Hundreds of them. All long, or complicated, or both. If I hadn't written or co-written so many of them I would be hunting the author down with a big stick right now. It was all so easy when it went down on paper. I keep forgetting when I'm writing that people have to actually learn this stuff. I keep forgetting I have to learn this stuff.
So, apart from the million and one other things I will be expected to do* for this show (and which I will try to refuse to do because if I do do them I will totally fall apart at the seams) all I have to do over the next two weeks is learn all this overly-complex bilge - though I am looking forward to the part where I rise from the dead wearing Noel Edmunds' beard and declaim "I Have The Power!" in my best He-Man voice. (Mike and I write very strange pantos - if the Mighty Boosh did a village panto it would probably end up looking something like this - though Ilona would probably make them put in songs, and 'romantic bits', and bunches of kids as well.)


* Ferrinstance: I spent four hours today going over the script with Mike and a fine-toothed comb writing down every prop and sound effect we could find, and then spent tonight chopping small bits out of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor to fill some of them.