The nocturnal diddleys

This usually happens to me when I'm doing a show. Occasionally I'm obliged to do a show I hate, like The Sound of Music. Rodgers and Hammerstein lovingly crafted a raft of songs which are syrupy, trite, and complete and utter earworms - once they enter your head they will not leave. There is nothing worse than going to bed with that ghastly 'Goodnight, farewell, auf wiedershen, goodbye' tune stuck in your head, and waking up in the morning with it still there, having taken over your dreams for the past eight hours!

I think Cabaret was the worst. That's a brilliant show with wonderful music, but there's a non-stop Germanic jazz-oompah rhythm to a lot of the songs that takes over the mind completely. Bom tikka bom bom, bom tikka bom bom, bom tikka bom bom, bom tikka bom bom (repeat for a month or until severely medicated).

I'm actually in a show at the moment. Oliver is playing at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings right now - it started on Wednesday and the last night is tomorrow. I'm mainly in the chorus for this one, though I do have a short character part in act two as Doctor Grimwig, the pompous doctor who gives Oliver a checkover while he staying at the Brownlow's house. Yes, once again the tunes are all earworms, but they're good ones.You can't beat a bit of Lionel Bart.

Millie Week 5, 4-6 Oct 1990

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Strip 1: Soundtrack: Kylie. If you live on planet Earth you know that one.

Strip 2: Soundtrack: 'Where are you Baby' by Betty Boo. If the main art of dance music is in choosing the best samples, she chose the best. In particular she applied the hook from 'Captain of Your Ship' into her song better than Reparta and the Delrons did in the original.

Strip three got pulled apart at the eleventh hour just before publication. You'll notice that the handwriting changes in the last speech balloon. The original words in the speech balloon were "It's like trying to share a house with Jodrell Bank around here..." (Jodrell Bank is a radio telescope just outside Manchester, once the largest in the world - in other words a big dish hoovering up sound like Richard in frame 2) It was deemed better by the Mirror to underline the subtext to the cartoon in big black marker pen rather than just allude to it. I think it killed whatever joke that was lurking in there stone dead.

Oh - and I have no idea where 'Dracular' came from. It's Dracula in my original script.

Millie week 5 pt 1, Oct 1-3 1990

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Twenty years ago the idea of the first window display of Christmas happening at the beginning of October was still an exaggeration. Now we're in an age of all year round hot cross buns and my coffee table is groaning under the weight of the Christmas catalogues that have already arrived. The Xmas puds sit arranged in serried rows in Sainsburys.

Can you guess what the big pop culture event of 1990 was? A few months later I was to share the comics page of the Daily Mirror with them...

The second cartoon heralds that Autumn's big storyline - one that if repeated nowadays would be considered a rip-off of Disney's High School Musical. Yes, Crippen comprehensive is doing a school play - and it's a self penned musical...

I'll admit it. I do musicals. I toured around Kent with the West Kent Youth Theatre while I was at school, doing shows like "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (Bud Frump) and "Cabaret" (Chorus - too much dancing and sex appeal required for a real part), so I know of what I speak here. I still appear in them now.

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Here's what I'm currently doing. In this case I'm in the chorus again, but that's mainly because The Sound of Music is like a compendium of everything I hate in musicals (sickly sentimentality, glutinous songs you hate but can't get out of your head, ponderous plotting, but thankfully no 'interpretive ballet' that lasts three hours), so I'm limiting my exposure to it. If you like the Sound of Music, come and see the show if you're around Hastings between the 19th and 22nd of October - Hastleons productions are always excellent. If you don't like the Sound of Music, then keep away - it's the Sound of Music.

My idea of a good musical? 'The Full Monty', 'How to Succeed..', 'City of Angels' - something with content as well as tunes, a sense of mischief, and with sentimentality kept to a minimum.