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I like it when the year rhymes with an adjective that I hope to describe the year with. 2008 was great, and I went around telling everyone oh nine would be fine. Now, history will take a pretty dim view of my ‘fine’ prediction, with the world’s financial axis spinning violently off course and more importantly, the Steve Show coming to an abrupt end.

I can’t think of an adjective that rhymes with ten, or eleven or twelve. Or thirteen, come to think of it. I’ll level with you and assert that the next one I have up my sleeve is that 2021 will be ‘fun’.

So, in no particular order then. Some highlights, mainly cultural, of 2009

10. Cricket. The Duckworth Lewis Method and their terrific album in praise of cricket. And England winning the Ashes in extraordinary and edge of seat style. And, I got good at cricket again, having not played since school, with The Thunderers. I even had a moment of cricketing and social pride that made me think I was living in colonial Kenya (I’m ironically pronouncing this Keen-ya) in 1925. On meeting the new chief theatre critic for the Evening Standard in a drinking club in London, we realised we had been at school together when we were 7, and he recalled that I’d taken a pretty memorable 9 for 14 against the villainous St Piran’s Under 11 team. My socks rolled up and down my legs with pride.

9. Barack Obama’s presidency. And Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat. The facebook group celebrating this hat was one I was proud to join. Although news on the group page has been a little slow recently.

8. Two films I wasn’t sure I was going to like as much as I did: The new Star Trek movie. And The Damned United. Both DVD essentials for 2010 if you haven’t seen them yet.

7. Great Britain. Yes, an odd choice- but this has been the first year I’ve ever been A Tourist in My Own Land (the potential title of the first book in my Bill Bryson style travel memoirs). Following my wife around the country as she embarked on a mammoth theatre tour meant that I saw and enjoyed the sights of, amongst others: Belfast, Glasgow, Torquay, Nottingham, Leeds, Northampton, Southend, Peterborough and Darlington. We live in a really crackin old country and I’m too London centred.

6. The Chap magazine goes from strength to strength. The shortlived but enormously popular Guide to Chivalry that I did on the radio show was closely allied to the Chappist way of life. The magazine itself is terrific, and an oasis of gentle gentlemanly humour and observation in a world where Society has become sick with some nameless malady of the soul. As an editorial stated in a previous issue:

“We have become the playthings of corporations intent on converting our world into a gargantuan shopping precinct. Pleasantness and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age – an age when men doffed their hats to the ladies, and small children could be counted upon to mind one’s Jack Russell while one took a mild and bitter in the local hostelry.

Instead, we live in a world where children are huge hooded creatures lurking in the shadows; the local hostelry has been taken over by a large chain that spe……es in chilled lager, whose principal function is to aggravate the nervous system. Needless to say, the Jack Russell is no longer there upon one’s return.

The Chap proposes to take a stand against this culture of vulgarity. We must show our children that the things worth fighting for are not the latest plastic plimsolls but a shiny pair of brogues. We must wean them off their alcopops and teach them how to mix martinis. Let the young not be ashamed of their flabby paunches, which they try to hide in their nylon tracksuits – we shall show them how a well-tailored suit can disguise the most ruined of bodies. Finally, let us capitalise on youth’s love of peculiar argot- only replace their pidgin ghetto-speak with fruity bons mots and dry witticisms.

It is time for Chaps and Chapettes from all walks of life to stand up and be counted. But fear not, ye languid and ye plain idle: ours is a revolution based not on getting up early and exerting oneself – but a revolution that can be achieved by a single raised eyebrow over a monocle; the ordering of a glass of port in All Bar One; the wearing of a particularly fetching cardigan upon a visit to one’s bookmaker. In other words: a revolution of panache. We shall bewilder the masses with seams in our trousers that could cut paper, trilbies angled so rakishly that traffic comes to a standstill; and by refusing the bland, watery substances that are foisted upon us by faceless corporations, we shall bring the establishment to its knees, begging for sartorial advice and a nip from our hip flasks.”

5 Spitalfields market in East London I ran a stall here for a while in the early ‘noughties’ (won’t miss that come the 2020s. But what are we going to call the next ten years? The ‘teens’? I hope not…) and it was permanently threatened with closure, the roof leaked and it was Freezing Cold. Now it’s a sprawling mass of stalls, it’s heated, there are loos and cashpoints (but just those weird charging ones, which are the only ones around when you really need one), and, aside from the fact that about 2 in 5 of the stalls are currently selling either cupcakes or charm necklaces, it’s really really good. And the variety of cooked food is the best I’ve seen- I’ll say it- anywhere in the world. Anything you could want.

4 My favourite author is William Boyd. Any Human Heart is a book I frequently go back to. And Ordinary Thunderstorms, which came out this year, is really good.

3 The fact that someone could be bothered to collect all the best one liners from The Edinburgh Festival and actually credited the comics that wrote them.
1) Dan Antopolski – “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?
2) Paddy Lennox – “I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting.’”
3) Sarah Millican – “I had my boobs measured and bought a new bra. Now I call them Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes because they’re up where they belong.”
4) Zoe Lyons – “I went on a girl’s night out recently. The invitation said ‘dress to kill.’ I went as Rose West.”
5) Jack Whitehall – “I’m sure wherever my dad is; he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”
6) Adam Hills – “Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you’re going to get it, but it’s going to be rough.”
7) Marcus Brigstocke – “To the people who’ve got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn’t invent it!”
8 ) Rhod Gilbert – “A spa hotel? It’s like a normal hotel, only in reception there’s a picture of a pebble”.
9) Dan Antopolski – “I’ve been reading the news about there being a civil war in Madagascar. Well, I’ve seen it six times and there isn’t.”
10) Simon Brodkin (as Lee Nelson) – “I started so many fights at my school – I had that attention-deficit disorder. So I didn’t finish a lot of them.”

2. The return of The Thick Of It on BBC2. A particularly strong turn by a spit and cough straight man in Episode 6 is worth taking a look at. I’m surprised they cut my favourite insult from the series. As it was never broadcast, Steve Show posse readers can enjoy an exclusive here: Malcolm: ‘You do that again, Ollie, and I’ll tear off your head, plant a palm tree in your neck, and fuck you tenderly in its shade’. (c) A. Iannucci.

1. Adam and Joe on 6Music are – if not the best thing of the whole year- a pretty good way to end the list. Their podcast and show – and the fact that George Lamb has been booted to the weekend and Lauren Laverne given the weekday slot- means our erstwhile employer is still a pretty good radio station.

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On Monday night I went to see some intimate comedy at a drinking club I’ve been going to for a few years called Black’s in Soho. It’s spread over 3 floors of a Georgian house, and rumour has it that Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson had traded ideas, blows and beers in the very room in which the comedy was taking place. Panelled walls, flickering candles and a roaring fire.

The comics were Tom Basden and Tim Key. Tim won this year’s Perrier aren’t sponsoring it anymore award at Edinburgh, and he and Tom have worked as a semi double act for years. Their tone captures a wonderful understated Englishness. Each gag apparently stumbled over and bashfully, accidentally delivered- belying the deftness and timing of it all. I suppose it’s generally acknowledged that Richard Pryor is the Greatest Ever Stand Up- and his act is the voice of angry Black America. Tim and Tom’s voices are those of If It’s Not Too Much Trouble England.

Tom performs comedy songs (which always slightly strikes fear into people- all Richard Digance and that song where someone sings Leprosy instead of Yesterday- but they’re really terrific- mainly because a) they’re really short- usually under a minute- and b) his singing voice is really really strong- so instead of that overenunciation that comic singers have to use- ‘LEP-Ro- SEE-’ to draw attention to how clever they’ve been, Tom just belts it out. I can’t do justice to any of them and won’t attempt to explain or spoil any of the jokes. He also read extracts from his novel. Bad writing done well is pretty good: his ambition to find success in each style of fiction- bad romance, bad comedy and bad crime fiction – all good. Find him on YouTube or go and see him.
 
Tim reads very short poems. It’s lucky he’s not from Hackney or he’d be known as the peddlar of the Hackney Haiku. Maybe he is. Maybe I’ve just saved some sub editor half an hour of pun based research. Tim’s delivery is very deadpan but occasionally he shouts a line as loudly has he can, which is a great choice. He can’t help himself from explaining what a poem is about half way through reading it- in a little aside- which constantly draws attention to his faux pomposity as a poet. He’s incredibly funny.
 
They also showed a 20 minute film they’d made a year or so ago, about a lottery winner who pays a top singer songwriter to perform a concert for him, alone on a remote island. Really affecting and very funny.

On Tuesday I went to see the new Roy Williams play Category B at the Tricycle in Kilburn. It’s the first of a trilogy of plays by black British writers- the other two by Kwame Kwei Armah and Bola Agbaje.  It’s set in a Category B prison- the first stop for all offenders in the prison system. A great deal of posturing and well observed status games and violence, and some terrific performances, notably from Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as a new prison officer and Karl Collins as long term inmate Errol.

My dissertation at university was about prison drama so I’m hyper critical. The theatre is a great place to show prison life because it’s small, you’re constantly aware of time, and no one’s going anywhere. What the play failed to do was to really get underneath the feeling of incarceration. Dialogue was hurried and snatched and there was no sense of the endless silences of prison life- the endless feeling of time passing. And there was quite of load of really bizarre shouting. It doesn’t really work to shout as loudly as you can ten seconds after coming on stage. It’s just weird.
 
Wednesday I went to The Bush Theatre to see If There Is, I Haven’t Found It Yet. Written by a 25 year old, Nick Payne, who still has a day job at the National Theatre Box Office. It was a mesmerising play, incredibly well performed by a cast of four, including Rafe Spall and Pandora Colin. Spall’s Uncle Terry arrives unannounced at his brother’s house with a track record of fucking things up, and starts to fuck things up, particularly his 15 year old overweight niece- an incredibly good Ailish O’Connor. Spall’s brother, played by Colin Begley, is an environmentalist trying to work out whether Man’s ridiculous capacity for fucking up the planet means he is worth saving or not. Meanwhile his family is collapsing. The conclusion of the play sees him realise that his love for his family actually means that yes- there’s hope for humankind. I think. I realise this sounds pretty crass but it reduced the mother next to me (not my mother, that would be a weird way to refer to her) to tears for about half an hour. It’s a brilliant play. It’s running for about three more weeks. See it.

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The brilliant Harry has been keeping the site alive for the past few months, and my absence can partly be explained by my parents both spending some time in hospital. Both thankfully home and recovering now, but it’s been a long summer.
 
When I told my friend Michael about my father’s recent spate of illness, he said ‘welcome to Middle Age’. Which I first thought was a reference to the Middle Ages. Except it was like some sort of corporate paid-for experience of The Middle Ages- all indolent students in lurid tabards, all tankards and chicken legs. But no- to my surprise, he meant my own middle age. At 35 I feel too young to have a dad who’s seriously ill through old age. But The General has been through the mill.

 It’s strange having a Dad who’s a General. I even feel that Dad has to be a Proper Name. He’s usually referred to by people who half-know him as The General, which I’ve always quite liked. It got me into trouble on Facebook recently, when I decided to let people tacitly know that his heart bypass surgery was over, and had been successful, and decided on the cryptic status update ‘The General is out of the woods’. To which someone quickly added a smart alec comment about whether that was some sort of smutty innuendo. It was only after 5 or 6 others had written supportive comments about Dad, that the poor smart alec wrote me a babbling text apologising.
 
The problem was, he wasn’t out of the woods completely, and spent 10 days suffering badly from the effects of morphine on his system. Conversations in ICU would vary from the mundane and real to the Dali-esque with no warning at all. And as he began to breezily refer to films he was appearing in and parties he couldn’t be bothered to go to, I wondered whether he thought he was occupying my life, or what his subconscious thought my life was. I’d gently remind him that he wasn’t doing a film, but his conviction was sincere, and complete. I kept thinking it would start being funny, that we’d joke about it later, but something of his conviction- of the cruel trick that morphine played on him (his medi-vac information now forbids the use of morphine on him) made it seem too soon. And now we don’t want to talk about it to avoid taking him back there.
 
My father’s name is Dick, but he can’t stand being called Dick by people who don’t know him. A generational thing that I don’t entirely understand. The only time I come close is when assistants, particularly in banks, call me ‘mate’, and I find myself thinking, I don’t mind being ‘mate’ to the person who gives me a smoothie or sells me a pair of trainers, but can’t the man with whom I’ve just invested my life savings give it a bit of ‘sir’? So all the nursing staff were under instruction to call him Richard. That way, he’d know they meant him, but it saved him the indignity of being called his real name by strangers. I think this added to his confusion in the end. Several of his hallucinations involved the nursing staff becoming terribly malevolent and sinister: he developed irrational loathing of one or two. Their calling him Richard must have fitted into this alternate reality seamlessly. I really wanted them to call him Dick, or General. But they didn’t. The name General would somehow seem to stitch epaulettes and medals onto the crumpled striped pyjamas he wore for three weeks in hospital. It’s a title which implies years of diligence and dignity, and commands the huge respect of strangers, which would have been useful when he was at his most withdrawn and small.
 
He suffered a stroke just after recovering from his bypass, but transferred to a stroke unit and was home within a week. His resolve to get better is extraordinary. His new best friend is an Air Vice-Marshal, which is a much sexier sounding name than the simple ‘General’- but would roll off the lips of a Midlands nurse even more awkwardly.
 
The NHS staff were simply brilliant. At the worst times in ICU he had a dedicated nurse at the end of his bed for every minute of every day and night. Their treatment was exceptional. And at a time when Obama’s opponents are using terrible manipulation and lies to badmouth our system, I could only be grateful it’s been in place for fifty one years.
 
So now I hope to be a more regular contributor to the steve show posse forum- probably more likely to be theatre reviews- but we shall see….