Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Anglia News

"...and the goose has finished being fat..."

In February nineteen ninety-eight, two weeks before the first performance of what got mewled and puked into being Anything For A Tenor/Madame Galina New Forces’ Sweetheart, I got a photo and some useful column inches in the East Anglian Times.

Researchers for Anglia News saw it and rang saying they wanted to cover me. Me prize heifer, them randy bull, but bring it on every time if it gets me on TV, I say.

It was still dark when we started filming. And freezing. I had on thermal knickers, four pairs of tights and a purple baby grow over my tutu. I had already done my make up to save time. It didn’t: Louise, the director, who had one green eye and one blue one, wanted a sequence of me getting tutu’d, knicker’d and masacara’d up, so I had to take everything off and start again.

“And while you’re doing that – obviously we won’t show the nuts and bolts bit of you changing – but while you’re putting the make up on, if it’s not going to affect your concentration, could you be answering the question, starting by repeating the question as I’m sure you know how to do: how and why you created Galina?”

“That’s fine” I said. “It’s quite interesting to explore that side of it - what creation of something is bound up with”.

See, I need to concentrate on doing my make-up. On the finished news item, I talk total bollocks.

“My mum’s been a. Thing. She had quite. Hang on, this line under the eye always stumps me. She’s been. Come on: how about you give it to me first time for a change? Mum’s always been. At home. Where I was brought up. Influencing. And in my late teens my mate Marcus did these. Things while we were at the. Place. And parody, parody, parody. Of Blue Peter. Ever since he’d been on that course, Paul who played Simon, we all worked front of house at Covent Garden together except when we weren’t. There. He was in them, and he and I used to tease Marcus saying that, that I just said: Marcus, ever since you’ve been on that course. Except he hadn’t been by then, because the films we made (I played Janet Ellis) were for him to take to the course as. A thing. Not exhibit. And for some reason if you watch them, you’ll see that for some reason I play Janet as frosty and imperious, not wanting to make things like the Easter Egg or the Santa’s Hat. But there is a serious side in that I try to have my ballet arms in the right place and my legs. Not just boinging about. Them. As accurate. As I can get them. And Jean Laurent Dreyer-Dufer. Never liked me. Oh, bum, why can’t they make special non-falling-all-over-the-floor Kirby grips? Saw me do a private party. For himself, actually, I’d forgotten that it was his party, and said I must have a proper tutu because back then I had one made out of a body from M and S with feathers we practically found in the park stuck on and Jean Laurent, who makes them in Paris now, said it was too simplistic. I got it caught over the metal lippy thing on the ladder-on-wheels off-stage on my first ever Swan Lake, but that was the dress rehearsal so it was the safe opposite of the theatrical bromide good dress rehearsal, bad opening night. It was all right on the night, actually, except that Peter Snipp, playing Prince Siegfried, had got the stage management to make him a lake as a joke, so when I mimed for him to look upstage, he looked down at the floor at a piece of tin foil, and I wanted to know what he was looking at so looked down too, and corpsed slightly bourreeing back downstage (slower than when you’re trying to simulate flight when they must be really fast) into my mother’s tears. And going back to playing Janet opposite Paul as Simon or Mark Curry – I had to have a mask when I played Caron Keating – he really kept you up to the mark with the standard of his ad-libbing. When we did the Christmas Special. Did Janet get killed by her stalker with the knitting needles and the ball of wool in that one? Can’t remember. But in that one Janet dead or alive, Paul said totally off the cuff:

“And we’ll be showing you how to recycle all those Christmas cards, on thirteenth night, when you’re giving the Halls a hand up again forgiving and forgetting, and the goose has finished being fat.”

"And it's all led to. Cabaret cabaret cabaret. All along like that, really."

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Though content more appropriate to the other end.

Posted by Madame Galina2 at November 8, 2006 02:22 PM