Bring Me The Publicist of Ay Carmela!

JAYSUS SUFFERING FRIG!

I have just spent the most wasted evening of my life since watching the talentless young things of Cheltenham Ladies College murder some Indian Folk Tale or other at the Edinburgh Fringe. And would I meant wasted as in inebriated off my tits. No, insobriety would have been a mercy.

Ay Carmela! Ay indeed. This show, at York Theatre Royal's Studio, was billed as some kind of musical comedy satire on the Spanish Civil War. Which sounded really rather good. Instead I have just sat through what felt like three and a half hours of an elderly woman in a black dress and a white bra singing badly and 'going mad' in a very cliched manner, while her wizened, mumbling co-star does the incredibly amusing and never before seen on stage trick of pretending to piss in a bucket and it goes on for ages and it's oh-so-F*****G-FUNNY. I waited for the first scene to be over. I thought, generously, that I've written a deliberately dull first scene in the past so as to heighten the impact of the brilliant second scene whch blasts away the audience's preconceptions.
I left the theatre three quarters of an hour ago. I don't think that first scene has ended yet.

Half the audience left in the interval. I wish to Minerva I had.

Want a taster of the show? There is a programme on CBeebies (the allegedly educational channel for under 5s and specifically my son Pooky) called Something Special. It is aimed at children with special needs, and is partly delivered in Makaton. A freakish clown called Mr Tumble teaches his bafflingly adoring audience new words in the following fashion:

"This is my FACE. What MR Tumble? Is that your FACE? YES, this is my FACE."

similarly, Ay Carmela:

"See those prisoners up there? PRISONERS? YES, PRISONERS. What prisoners? LOOK, PRISONERS!!"

Thank Odin we didn't waste a babysitter on this sh*t, that's all I can say. Incredibly and pathetically, we couldn't find anyone willing to sit on our sofa, eat our food and ignore our sleeping sprogs, so we had to go on alternate nights. And I went first. This means that my lovely spouse gets to skip out, as frankly, the £7.33 I wasted on his ticket due to a 'special' offer ("SPECIAL? YES MR TUMBLE! SPECIAL IN A BAD WAY!!!") would be better spent reclaiming the two and a half hours of his life that he would have expended yawning and cursing the day he ever met the woman who would ultimately buy him a ticket for this torture.

The only thing I liked about this production was the fact that halfway through the first half, I was so bored that I went into a trance and thought of a really really good idea for a teenage novel.

And whoever publicised this pile of w*nk, I'd love to know, because they make Alastair Campbell look like an amateur and quite honestly, I'd like to hire you for my next play. I think you could probably get me the Nobel prize.

p.s. When I'm cross, I type like an amputee, so now I'm going to go back and correct all my spelling.

Then I need a beer.

Thank you.