Recap: 2021, The Year of Moviemaking
Artwork © Jigsaw
There’s no denying that Frisky and I are a live act. Down to our bones. And if that wasn't clear, people repeatedly confirmed it by coming up to us after gigs and saying, “I saw one of your clips online and thought, ‘Meh, not my thing to be honest,’ but then my friend dragged me along and I actually enjoyed it!” We made a few budget music videos early on, with the impulsive audacity of 22-year-old nobodies, but as for properly transitioning to the small screen…? It just didn’t happen, and after a few years of development purgatory, we were let go with a rueful shrug and a reiteration of the recurring sentiment: “Guys, we can’t work out how to capture the experience of your shows on camera – so if you could just hand in your passes to the front desk when you leave…” (See below for one of said passes, which led me to wonder, “how poshly do I say my name?”)
This makes more sense if you know that I was famous at school for my Penelope Keith impression
The point of all that preamble is to say that we hadn’t been entertaining the idea of an F&M TV show, much less a film, since at least 2013… And then there was a worldwide pandemic. Which wiped our live slate clean. And led to the temporarily-enforced digitalisation of performance. And somehow, we were back in a screen-based conversation!
The person inviting us to make cinema history was Henry Filloux-Bennett at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield, who’d found considerable success capturing and streaming theatrical content during lockdown. We’d last seen him in 2008 when we played a set at the press night after-party of the West End production of Well.
[This was actually an infamous early gig experience for us, as somehow there was only one mic that we had to share, no extension lead so we were stuck by the only plug socket, and no keyboard stand (could we not afford one at that point?!) so I seem to remember I was cross-legged on a table and Frisky was crouched beside me (I can still picture Natalie Casey heroically encouraging other people to pay attention and clap for us, even though she must have been completely bemused) – not to mention, our entire fee went on cabbing our keyboard there and back.]
And here he was again, 13 years later, to produce a film written by and starring us. It would feature filmed stage content captured during live performances at the theatre, strung together by a complicated narrative filmed on location in Yorkshire. Basically ‘Frisky & Mannish do movie music within a movie’. The stage parts were handled by me and Laura, Tour Manager Barry, our co-director Olivia Race and the LBT, whereas the filmed parts were overseen by Stuart & Lucie Warrington at superla.tv and co-directed by James Cook & Tom Lyon.
Putting it together was one of the most surreal months of my life, and turned into a kind of exquisite nightmare, capped off by the woman who ran the gift shop in the arcade opposite the cafe we bought out for an afternoon’s location shooting, who made her feelings known, despite our attempts to placate her by buying a bundle of trinkets. If we had kept all the out-takes, at this point I would upload the immortal raw footage of her walking through one of our final shots, loudly intoning to her co-cashier, “They’ve been ‘ere allllllllll fuckin’ day…”
But then of course, this is the sort of thing she and her business had not consented to:
A few years later, I’m kind of on her side…
By way of explanation, our script borrowed everything from Singin’ in the Rain to Black Swan to My Best Friend’s Wedding to Frozen. Frisky & Mannish reunited to put on a show, but the stress of the undertaking turned M into a crazed tap-dancing hoofer “gee whizzing” about the place, whilst F started bleeding through her pointe shoes and seeing shadowy figures in corners. On their way from first rehearsal to opening night, they encountered various residents of Huddersfield, including a cleaner with a pet kestrel, a couple of mean girls, and of course an evil corporate villain played to perfection by the fabulous Dickie Hand.
The songs covered literally everything else… We revealed the existential horror of “The Circle of Life.” We got the Spice Girls and Shaggy doing Bond themes. We reminded everyone that Leonardo DiCaprio’s heart did not, in fact, go on and that he was now, in fact, barnacle juice. We bastardised “I Dreamed a Dream” to explain the story of Inception; ditto “Summer Loving” and Mrs Doubtfire. We identified a zombie invasion in modern musical adaptations, spearheaded by Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett and Emma Watson as Belle. We heavily implied that the voice on the phone in the opening scene of Scream was Bette Midler. And we finished with a barnstorming medley called Hobag Rouge, that I won’t explain because it was so stupid but sounded so good.
We filmed all the constituent parts, including two fantastic live shows attended by North Yorkshire’s finest, and then cut it all together into something vaguely streamable. And then… it streamed. It was very surreal not to know who was watching it when and where. I’m not sure if I liked that part. But it was so much fun.
I can’t post all my favourite bits here, because of web hosting limitations, but here’s a one-minute edit of perhaps the silliest stock side character, the “truly dizguzting” Rupert-Tom Charlton:
(I say “You’re truly dizguzting” on average once a day.)
There hasn’t been a new F&M show since PopCorn. In fact, except for one ludicrously louche wedding party in Venice—where 42 florists were hired to redesign the garden of the Hotel Ciprani for one night—there hasn’t even been a new gig. It’s probably obvious to our followers that we’re on indefinite hiatus, which has nothing at all to do with how much fun this was to make up, or how much I love Laura. I just couldn’t shake the feeling during the assembling and editing process that I no longer fit into my own act, and that continuing to try to embody whoever “Mannish” is supposed to be felt increasingly at odds with who I think I actually am. That sounds extremely dramatic, but it was actually a very serene realisation, and even though it breaks my heart not to be still working so regularly with one of my best friends, I think it’s for the best…
…for the moment, anyway…
……(BUT NEVER SAY NEVER)…….
…………………….(cos what if we need money?)
