The third of March, 2011: Bernard Cribbins, and a massive media onslaught

It’s World Book Day. I’m not sure what that means. Am I supposed to be doing something? Hope not. In any case, World Book Day doesn’t seem to have reached Leeds (oh, except for the isolated enclave of St Mary’s Primary School in Horsforth, where Keith Charters will be hosting a literary event – good on him).

World Book Day seems to be mostly about doling out £1 book tokens to kids, which is surely a good thing. It’s also about gathering depressing statistics, such as: 12.7 per cent of teenage boys never read books at all.

Anyway, Bernard Cribbins is involved, so it must be a worthy cause. There are loads of World Book Day story-telling videos available here. All of them make me miss Jackanory.

(Speaking of storytelling, it’d be remiss of me not to link once more to the brilliant Liars’ League, and, specifically, this, this and this (declaration of interest: I wrote the last one)).

Tomorrow night is World Book Night. You’d think that World Book Night would immediately follow World Book Day, but it doesn’t. Apparently World Book Night will be “the focus of a massive media onslaught”, which sounds quite frightening.

I’d like to be positive about World Book Day, and I am, really – but I don’t think the people behind it have done a great job of talking it up.

I did like this, though.

It’s by Lane Smith. There’re more of his great drawings here (including illustrations for James And The Giant Peach, a book with an uncanny knack for worming its way into Clutterbucks).

The twentieth of January, 2011: I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales

It’s interesting, the way in which creative careers (or any careers that are figuratively or literally itinerant) create networks of unexpected links. One of the splendidnesses of the internet is that you can explore these links so speedily (one minor downside being that the awesome artistry of, say, Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees is rendered redundant).

It’s a six-degrees-of-separation sort of thing (or it’s along the lines of I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales) – except that the stops along the journey are as important as its endpoint.

I’ve just been googling the career of the actor Greg Page. What sort of a thing is that to be doing with your Thursday night?, you might well ask. The reason is that I’ve just been listening to Greg’s excellent rendition of my story on the 2010 Best of The Liars’ League CD.

And what happy googling it was. I learned, as I leapt from Greg Page-related hyperlink to Greg Page-related hyperlink, about the London Bubble Theatre Company and Fan Made Theatre. I found out that Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) wrote bedroom farces (although if I manage to live to my dying day without having seen one of Georges Feydeau’s bedroom farces, it will be all right with me).

And I watched this film, a selection at the 2010 Portobello Film Festival.  Then I watched the trailer for this film, which, unlike that film, won a prize at the 2010 Portobello Film Festival.

The nooks and crannies of actors’ CVs are full of interesting things upon which few people stumble. That is the moral of this story. The other moral of this story is that it’s high time I went to bed.