Well this week is a bit empty, I should have been going to an audition today in Liverpool but it's been moved to May 9th. Last friday night was fun I was team leader on another Avant Garde Murder mystery dinner. This time we were at Dunsley hall

 a rather charming hotel in Staffordshire. The Murder mystery was based around Jack the Ripper so I spent quite some time in the loft digging out some Victorian esque costume and combining a few different hair pieces and moustaches to come up with this  as a look for my character Wilberforce Bentley.

The journey was awful, torrential rain had slowed down the M6 and it took me all of the 2 and a half hours I'd allowed to do the 57 mile journey. The evening went well and the diners seemed to enjoy it and we've already had enquiries about doing another there.

I was working with three actors I'd not worked with before, Allie Garside, Carissa Wagner and Michael Dacre.

Allie Garside

Carissa Wagner

Michael Dacre

Yesterday I was up in the attic again sorting out the costume store. I've bought 40 plastic boxes to try and make some sense of the jumble. So I need to get back up there today and do some more.

There might be an audition for a commercial tomorrow fingers crossed! and tonight? well Pip and I are off to stoke rep to see their production of Fawlty Towers. Pip does reviews for the local paper so we get in free :-)

I have just had a couple of days in London, first I went to an audition for a summer panto, well it was really for musical theatre people not my kind of panto performer at all, you know singing, dancing, being young! not really my particular panto skills, I'm not a dancer, I'm not really a singer, and I'm certainly not young! I'm just a mature comic panto villain and not even a dame either really so to get there and be told I was auditioning for dame and then put through what for me was a very complicated dance routine was just a waste of their time and mine. Right from the moment I walked through the door and saw a room full of 18-20 year old musical theatre graduates in black lycra and just me a solitary ancient fossil in comparison who is going to be 50 next year I was just thrown completely off balance and felt so "in the wrong place", A couple of other older guys arrived one had the guts to walk out when he found out we were there for the wrong part, you see we'd all been told Abanazar and only later found out it was for a an ugly sister type character, it was hopeless. So learned a lesson there. I think in future I'm going to have to say no to these dance things, these "we just want to see if you can move" I can't, I'm too old end of!

After that I went to see my friend Francesca Anderson from the Phileas Fogg Theatre company in a play she has been working hard on for the last 8 or 9 months I think, it started at a pub theatre in the autumn and has just transferred to the Pleasance Theatre. Not a theatre I've been to before it's a converted carpenters factory warehouse type place, very nice and the play was well performed and very moving with 11 great parts for actresses, no guys at all. Set in a 1950's boarding house for unmarried mothers it was genuinely moving and I even shed a few tears myself at the end. It was directed by Jonathan Rigby who has also been represented by Infinite artists for a while so we compared a few notes.

Fran and her partner Andy let me stay the night in her lovely flat in Crystal Palace  and I came back today, I feel absolutely knackered though. Now I'm sorting stuff out for friday night's Murder Mystery.

Confirmation has come through about an audition on Tuesday in Liverpool but we can blog about that another day.   

Suddenly realised I'd not used my blog in ages so thought I'd better get going again and take advantage another publicity tool.
So Since I last blogged lots has happened, very proud of the four talking books that I've recorded in the last 12 Months

England's Lane by Joseph Connolly in which I shared the reading with Brigit Forsyth from the Dr Who story Evil of the Daleks

2 books in The Agent of Rome series written by Nick Brown The Siege and The Far Shore

and most recently The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson.

Panto last Xmas was at The Towngate Theatre in Basildon

in which I played Rapunzel's dad The King

My other big news this week is a change of agent, sadly the time had come to leave my last agent and look for new representation. I went to an interview last Thursday 17th April 2014 with Guy Thomas Howe at 7 casting. So all the paperwork has been filled in and we'll just have to see what happens.

Anyway now I've found this thing again I'll try harder and hopefully blog a little more often, well more than once every two years or more.