past

I started writing poetry and lyrics when I came out as a disabled person, and much of my early material reflected the anger and pent up vitriol, apparent on my rap CD’s,  “Survival Of The Shittest”, “Perfectly Deformed”, and “Genetically Modified...Just For You” ( all of which are still available on www.PHOCOMEDIA.com), but, by the last one, the humour that I love to use was beginning to surface too.
Then I bit the bullet and finally started writing drama, stuff I felt needed to be said on stage and screen and wasn’t being, of disabled voices and the reality of our experiences, and I co wrote about 4 screenplays with Rik Lander (see links), none of which got commissioned to be produced (One almost did, a great little heist short called “Manifesto”, but Annie Delin fucked it up for us, by saying it shouldn’t be funded).

 After Rik moved to Bristol, I started on my own, and wrote my first play, a one man one act piece, called “Sealboy:Freak”, about Sealo the Sealboy AKA Stanley Berent, a real Freak show performer  in the USA, and fictional character called Tam Shrafer, loosely based on myself. It was a re assessment of freak shows and a look at the perception of disabled performers on stage then and now. It had reasonable success, I did Edinburgh Festival 2001 with it, where it featured in the documentary I was making at the time with co-writer and director/producer Paul Sapin (see links) called “Born Freak”, and subsequently Nationally toured it twice. I’ve performed it in Australia, New Zealand, America, and Malta since. (I was going to do a film of it and even started home made filming...but no budget stuff, I can’t do it anymore, it looks too shit, so I cancelled that project). I also wrote another one man show, mostly a comedy, that had parts of my poetry and previous prose in it, called “From Freak To Clique”, but I was unhappy with it’s structure so pout it to sleep for a while until I can return to it and improve it enough to take it out on tour, maybe.

Over all this time of the last few years, I’ve been writing and presenting more and more talks and speeches about various aspects of either my life or experience of Disability, and have collected over the last 10 years a big archive of material, some of which is included in my forthcoming book, “Short Armed And Dangerous”, which mostly features my poetry and prose from 2000 to 2005 ( go to www.phocomedia.com to buy this)
Then I realised a life time ambition of mine, by writing my my own musical. They say “write what you know” don’t they, so I wrote “Thalidomide!! A Musical”, which totally consumed me for two years. Produced by Natalie Steed ( see links), with her assistant Fiona O’Mahoney (see links) and supported and encouraged by the Battersea Arts Centre (see links), myself, Bill Bankes Jones ( see links)  my dramaturg and director along with my co performer the one and only Anna Winslet (see links), we made this comedy horror pastiche musical that 90% of audiences loved, and 10% hated. The reviews observed the same ratio. Lyn Gardner totally didn’t get it, whereas Charles Spencer did...go figure, I can’t.