Author: catherinedoveyroche

In this lockdown year of virtual church attendance, my singing chum Niall Weir, rector of St Paul’s West Hackney, asked for musical input to his Christmas service.

Tonight Have Yourself a Stokey Little Christmas will be shown at 6.00pm ( swph.org.uk ) and will remain on YouTube. It’s an hour of festive sung and spoken material, a mix of religious and secular, and not especially Stoke Newington-oriented despite the title. I’m under the secular banner, accompanying him, his daughter Phoebe, myself singing Michael Flanders’s The Wassail of Figgy Duff, and reading a section of A Christmas Carol. Penny reads from Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.

I recently played for a couple more silent films for Kennington Bioscope, and I’m quite pleased with them. They’re also contrasting in genre.

Mme Robinet, a socio-sexual comedy which you can view here and the rather sentimental Ida’s Christmas which you can view here.

Kennington Bioscope has managed to continue online throughout the pandemic and intends continuing in 2021. 

Current projects are a solo online show for Denville Hall, the home for retired people from the entertainment industry. Titled Colin’s Christmas Cracker, it’ll be half an hour of festive fun, including carols, readings, anecdotes and general good cheer.

I’m also working with local rector and long-time singing buddy Niall Weir, compiling another seasonal online effort for use after church services and also for the company Duckie, which provides entertainment for the elderly. This will be called Have Yourself a Stokey Little Christmas, part carol service, part popular song potpourri, and again with readings, this time from local Stoke Newington residents.

Last week I was asked by my friend Jeremy Mortimer, a radio drama producer and sometime colleague from East 15 Drama School, to record a piano backing track for a song in a serialisation of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I also coached the actor, Isabelle Inchbald, who played Rosa, the character forced to sing by the evil John Jasper. It went well, the backing track and vocals sounding good, including the recordings of me opening and closing the piano lid: not just anyone could have done that.

The next series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue started recording in March. We’d only had one date, March 15th, in Huddersfield, before lockdown hit us.

But at the end of October the series was completed, with all of us, performers and audience, recording remotely from our homes. The audience was a couple of hundred people, in household groups of 4 or 5. (Is anyone else curious about the selection process?)

Despite the technical difficulties caused by delay over wifi, I think I managed to stay with the singers. Or they with me. Time will tell.

Such a sad loss that Tim Brooke-Taylor wasn’t with us…