TIM MYERS
Tim Myers is an actor who has lived in Upton Park since 1984. Unfortunately, having been born in 'Arrer' and grown up in deepest Middlesex he has never been asked to appear in Eastenders - the accent's wrong. He has been in 2 films though, several other television shows including "London's Burning", and done theatre tours of Britain and Europe. He has always written for his own pleasure, and some years ago made money from writing Trade Show presentations - usually with a humourous slant, since he mostly had to deliver them himself and a bit of comedy helped to keep him awake while trying to tell people why Joe Bloggs' computer was better than Fred Bloggs' identical one on the next stand. His ambition is to write something as popular as Freddie Forsyth, as funny as P.G. Wodehouse and as durable as William Golding. Some ambition, huh?
SHOOTING STARS
(Gents toilet of pub. Pub noise off. PETER enters, looks around. Exits. MIKE enters. Stands at urinal. Peter re-enters. Stands beside him.)
PETER: You're...you're...aren't you? Don't tell me...I'm a big fan of yours. I watch it all the time. Well, quite regularly. My wife loves it. Never misses an episode...Rog! Rog Folder!
MIKE: Holder.
PETER: Rog Folder! Fancy that! Rog Folder himself! In the flesh. In my local!
MIKE: Holder.
PETER: What?
MIKE: It's Holder. Not Folder.
PETER: What?
MIKE: The character...the one I play... He's called Holder...not Folder.
PETER: Whatever. Well, well well! 'Randy Rog'...Here in my local. Having a piss. Actually having a piss in my local. In the pisser. My wife will be thrilled when I tell her. She won't believe it...(he looks sideways and down)...when I tell her I've seen Rog Folder. Holder... In the flesh.
MIKE: Well, nice to know I have one fan.
PETER: Oh yes! One at least. More than one I'm sure. Lots more. But certainly one in our house. At least one.
MIKE: Well...I...(He turns to the basin)
PETER: Course, that's not your name though, is it? That's just acting. You're...no, no...don't tell me...Steve Maggot!
MIKE: That's 'Gammage' in Emmerdale.
PETER: What?
MIKE: You've got me confused with the actor who plays Gammage...in Emmerdale. I'm-
PETER: I don't think so. I hardly think so. My wife's got your picture. Signed. On her dressing-table. In our bed-room. I don't think I'd make a mistake like that now, would I?
MIKE: Mike Moloney.
PETER: Well, well, well. Mike Moloney. In here. 'Dirty Rog'. In the pisser at the Lion and Unicorn. Let me shake you by the hand. So I can tell the wife...I shook hands with the wife's best friend.
MIKE: Pardon?
PETER: You know...the old expression... 'shaking hands with the wife's best friend'. The old pecker. The chopper. The Terminator. I shook hands with the wife's best friend. Yours of course. Not mine. I shook hands with the hands that shook hands with Mike Moloney's wife's best friend. Get it?
MIKE: Er...yes...(He moves across to basin)
PETER: Normally I would join you there. I'm very clean about that sort of thing. Glad to see you are too. Not everyone is - probably not old 'Randy Rog' eh? But the wife would be furious. Probably won't let me wash that hand for a week when I tell her. She'll probably want me to rub it all over her. You know, all over her. Every night for a week. When she knows where it's been.
MIKE: Get a lot of autographs like that, does she?
PETER: Did I ask for your autograph? Did I?
MIKE: I was just...I just meant...
PETER: I didn't, did I? I bet you hate that, people coming up to you. Total strangers. Asking you to sign this or that like they own you. Girls. Asking you to sign their underwear. Stuff like that. I bet you get sick of it, don't you? I mean, it's an invasion, isn't it. Just because you're on the telly. That's not much, is it? But I suppose it goes with the territory - 'the price of fame' eh? But I wouldn't do that. I'm not one of those idiots who goes round drooling after someone just because they were once on the telly. Still I suppose without your fans, where are you, eh?
MIKE: Yes
PETER: Without people like my wife where are you, eh? Nowhere. That's where you are, isn't it? I'm right, aren't I, Mike? Without my wife you're nowhere.
MIKE: Yes. Without your...without people like your wife I'm nowhere.
PETER: And no-one. Here, that episode was brilliant! I mean, it was fabulous! So real!
MIKE: Thank you...well, I've got to be running along...got some friends-
PETER: Where's the fire? Don't rush off. Got a minute, haven't you? For the husband of one of your biggest fans. No, that episode was triffic! Seriously. Seriously good, that was. How do you do it? Make it look so real?
MIKE: Which one?
PETER: That's more like it. Here, I ought to be a journalist or something. 'My exclusive interview with Mike Moloney and his wife's best friend in the pisser of the Lion and Unicorn.' Make a great story. The one where you got shot...by the river...next to the river, by the hitman. It just looked so real, so convincing. I thought you must be dead.
MIKE: Thank you. It's just tricks of the trade really. Special effects mostly. All I had to do was fall down really. The special effects are what make it look so real.
PETER: Is that so? Is that so? Well, try telling that to the wife. Just try telling that to her. She wouldn't say that. She thought you were brilliant in that one. Just brilliant! And she should know. She saw that episode.
MIKE: Well, if she watches them all I'd be very sad to hear she'd missed my last one on the show.
PETER: No. no, I mean she saw it. In the studio. She was in the studio audience when it was being filmed. Not that part of course, that was on location. They shot that on location. You got shot on location, haha. But she saw it on the monitor. And we've got it on tape of course.
MIKE: Look, I must be-
PETER: How do you do that though? Something like that? I mean, it's not like eating a cake or something. How do you act something like that...that you've never actually done? I mean, how can you practice dying? Not been in the army, have you?
MIKE: No.
PETER: Didn't murder anyone on the sly, so you could see what it looks like?
MIKE: Hardly.
PETER: No..haha. Wouldn't do, would it? Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis would have to be mass-murderers, wouldn't they? So how d'you do that? Only the wife and I were talking about it only yesterday, funnily enough. I said to her, I said: "Sandra, how does that bloke make it seem so real when he's never done it?"
MIKE: ...Sandra?...
PETER: Yes, I was saying to Sandra only yesterday, asking her what someone like you knows about dying.
MIKE: You're Sandra's husband?
PETER: Yes. And she said, "Well, he's got imagination, which is more than you have." She's a comedian is Sandra. Bit of a comedian on the sly is my wife. But she's wrong, you know. Dead wrong. I have got imagination too. I bet I've got as much as you. I can imagine what dying looks like.
MIKE: ...Peter...don't...
PETER: It looks like this. (He pulls out gun and shoots Mike twice. Mike stares at himself and the blood. He starts to tremble. He falls slowly to the floor. He tries to say something. Blood comes from his mouth.) See? That's exactly how I imagined it. It's not a bit like you looked on the telly...But Sandra loved you...
(He leaves. Mike dies.)
Some People
Some people are like snares,
Snapping and snarling at your heels
With feral teeth
In search of meat
Some, like bears,
Encircle you in warm strong arms of love
Each time you meet
Some are more like tares,
Catching at your flesh,
Ripping a thousand small discrete
Chunks from your skin
Often those you love the most
But that is quite another affair.
I can't go into that here;
This poem is now there.
Fortunately This Poem Deals With The Same Subject Matter As
The One That Just Ended
My love is like a red red rose:
Each time I handle her carelessly or too roughly
My hands run red,
Thorn-slashed and smarting
As once again I curse my own stupidity.
Yet when I smell the Chinese fragrance of her scent,
See her carefully dry her thick dark hair,
Feel her velvet lips,
Crimson petals brushing my skin
I think of new-born blooms
On early Summer days.
ARE WE NOT MEN?
Are we not men
In this brave neon dawn?
Arrows of decision, purpose, intent,
Knowing our ends,
Not needing razors of uncertainly,
split infinitives of ambiguity,
Or pinhead-angel numbers to fifteen.
Decimal points
Hunters of prey
(Merchandisable prey - of course.)
Hunter-gatherers of ripe berries of information
In the shiny Web of this New Wonderworld,
Searching out its soul
Music
To market.
Our DNA flows like a river, I'm told.
Not the gentle splash of water
From a mother's hands onto her child's,
A Ganges of possibilities, a Mississippi of mutations
Ripping and carving out the stone to reach the Sea.
Each molecule separate, distinct, unique.
Yet all bound to each other in the onward rush
And all carrying forever the pattern of the first
Ancestor of water.
Get the suit on, Boris; make a buck!
Learn new tricks. The Old Order's gone.
No simple rules for Us
And Them anymore.
Get a Merc, a mobile phone.
Beatings-up are out of fashion now;
Networking's where it's at.
Think Global!
"You fret about the insecurity -
These kids don't feel it!
It's all they know.
Why should they fear falling from the tree
Instead of being plucked
And sent to market?"
Are we not men
In this New Eden
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