After all the work that went into the previous two week’s strips, it’s good to return to some simple cat and a background drawings for a short break before the next big storyline with complicated backgrounds begins next week…
Category / Smith
Flutter flutter flutter
This took a fair amount of post-processing once it was in Photoshop. The flights of starlings were created by taking a photo of a close up of a flock of starlings, removing the background, posterising the photo to make it simpler, and then superimposing it onto a pre-drawn background of Smith, Jones, railings and sea. Then the sound effects were drawn on top of that and outlined with a Photoshop stroke filter.
Actually, the starlings have left the pier – the removal of the burned out skeleton of the ballroom at the end of the pier means they no longer have anywhere to roost, so they’ve moved back to their old haunts on the remains of Brighton’s West Pier.
Miss Jones! Miss Jones!
One of the things you have to watch out for on the pier is little kids kneeling down on the deck, peering through the gaps in the planking at the sea roiling directly below.
And the reason for the post title? Remember the show Rising Damp? Miss Jones is on the left.
Prohibition
Also published by the Independent. And by the time it was published on GoComics the powers that be had revised their bylaws after a group of dog owners staged a wag-in on the pier, and dogs were allowed on the pier under suffrance.
Look, it’s a guest apperance by my own cats, Billy and Bella. Ginger’s just a generic.
Incidentally, that seat Bella’s sitting on is rather neat. They’re custom built and are all over the pier…
Madness
The pier officially opened on Saturday 21st May 2016 with a concert by Madness. Over the pond, they’re that band that popped up with a jaunty little number called ‘Our House’ in the early 80s and then disappeared again. Back here in Britain, they’re one of those evergreen bands like the Pet Shop Boys that have been going on seemingly forever, and still producing new albums that are worth listening to. Despite being a decidedly North London band, they do have a Hastings connection, as Suggs was born here.
The gig sold out five minutes after the tickets went on sale. I missed out on getting any as I was stuck in a traffic jam in Tunbridge Wells during those all important 300 seconds. Instead, I settled for listening to the concert from the balcony of my flat, about a mile and a half away. Even from that distance, it sounded really good.
Others took to watching the concert from their drones. Or just sitting on the beach next to the pier and having a picnic.
So why is the saxophonist in the air. Because that’s what he does.
On a whim, I posted this strip to a facebook group specifically about Hastings, and was amazed by the positive response it got. Not only that, but the local alternative newspaper, the Hastings Independent, got in touch with me and asked if they could reprint it. I like the Independent, it reflects the creative yet ornery character of Hastings in a way that the ‘official’ newspaper the Observer could never do. Of course I said yes. So they’ve published a Smith strip in every issue since. And, goodness, they do a good job of it. Each strip is published in perfect colour, to a standard I could never have dreamed of in my Daily Mirror years. And they print them BIG.
This strip also got to be a Sherpa Choice selection on GoComics. Not bad going for one strip.
We’re only here for the pier
OK, let’s start catching up with all this. I’ve taken a week off from work, have completed all my Hastleons and drawing obligations for the week, and can spend an evening making a dent in the backlog of posts I have to make here. I’ll be posting this as if it had been put up on its GoComics publication date, but it’s actually going up here two months late. I know. Sorry.
Still, aside from all the political madness that’s been going on here, there have been a few developments happening in Smith towers too. This strip is what started it all…
Hastings Pier was a tatty hulk by the time it burned down in a suspected arson attack in 2010. It’s taken six years to compulsorily purchase the pier back from Ravenclaw, the shadowy Panamainian company that owned it, strip the pier down to its shell and then rebuild it again. And this was the week on which it finally reopened.
Find out more about the pier here.
Before the fire…
During the fire…
After the fire…
Now.
Decisions, decisions
At this point in the campaign I hadn’t made my mind up which way I was going to vote. After a few weeks in which the Remain campaign spent most of their energy exaggerating the apocalyptic scenarios that would happen if we left the EU, while the Leave campaign just flat out lied about everything, I ended up plumping for the Remain side.
Eurovision
Written and drawn in the run-up to both the referendum about whether we stay inside the EU or not, and the completely unrelated Eurovision Song contest.
That’s Boris Johnson on the telly in the last frame, figurehead of the Leave campaign at the time. OK, get your head round this if you can. I’m writing this from the perspective of early July – we’ve voted to leave the EU. Boris joined the Leave campaign, expecting to lose by a slim amount, calculating that he could take over the Prime Minister David Cameron’s job when he resigned, having lost his authority. However, Britain voted to leave, which he didn’t expect. Cue immediate backpedalling during his victory speech. Cameron resigned, Boris announced his candidacy, and then had to throw in the towel when he was stabbed in the back by his ally, Michael Gove, who announced his own candidacy as someone who actually believed in what he was saying. Gove himself is currently floundering, as he’s now established himself as someone who can’t be trusted, having insisted for all of his career that he didn’t want the Primeminister’s job. So now it looks like we’ve got a contest between a third Leave supporter, Andrea Leadsome, who noone had heard of outside of her constituency until a week ago, and Theresa May, a Home Secretary, despised of by the Police force she is supposedly in charge of. Anyway, that’s the story as of July 4th 2016. Expect everything to change again tomorrow.
As for Eurovision, the UK came 24th out of a field of 26 entries into the final. A few of the national juries voted for us, but none of the phone voters in the real world did. Bland doesn’t work, it turns out. Cocking a snook at your powerful neighbours does, though, as Ukraine won with a protest song about the treatment of the minory populations of the Crimea during the Second World War – something that they insited had no parallels with any more recent events between Ukraine and Russia. Russia came third, and Putin had an enormous (but very manly) huff the day afterwards.
Beating about the bush
90 years of the Hastleons
(Press release for The Hastleons, written by myself and published unedited, including the mysterious extra ‘the’ in the fourth Paragraph by the Hastings Observer who obviously just copied and pasted it into place without reading it.)
The Hastleons, Hastings and St Leonards’ premier amateur musical theatre group are celebrating a milestone in their existence this week.
They have been putting on shows now for 90 years.
This weekend sees ‘The Hastleons at 90‘, a variety show celebrating the past 90 years, being staged at the Stables Theatre in Hastings.
Songs and routines from previous productions will be presented, using the original cast members from the when the shows were originally staged by the group. They will be aided and abetted by an ensemble chorus of current members.
The Hastleons will be delving back to shows they put on as far back as the 1970s, like ‘Oklahoma‘ and ‘South Pacific‘ plus more recent shows put in the last decade such as ‘Beauty and the Beast‘ and ‘Bugsy Malone‘.
Many old names will be returning to grace the stage, such as Steve Corke, now putting on shows at St Mary’s in the Castle with the Renaissance theatre company, and Lucy Andrews, who first played Belle from Beauty and the Beast with the Hastleons, and has just returned from a year in a theme park in Japan where her job was essentially to be Belle.
Devised by the Hastleon’s Chorus Mistress, Clare Adams and choreographed by Chloe Hurst, the show will be compered by veteran Hastleon, Michael Woodhams.
The Hastleons first show was the 1989 piece ‘Veronique’, staged at the Gaiety Theatre on 10th May 1926. The Gaiety was the Hastleons’ home until 1932 when it was converted in to the cinema that is now known as the Odeon. Their production of The Desert Song was the last live show performed at the theatre.
The Hastleons then moved on to the Cinema DeLuxe (now DeLuxe Bingo) on the seafront until 1935. Since 1936, their home has been the White Rock Theatre, apart from a break between 1940 and 1946 when the war interrupted proceedings. Those Hastleons not on active duty abroad spent the war as a concert party entertaining the troops.
For a numbers of years the Hastleons have rehearsed at a number of venues such as the Adelphi and Castle Hotels before moving to Newgate Road in 1971 for nine years. They arrived at their current home, the Hastleon Hall in Bexhill Road, St Leonards, in 1980.
The Hastleons’ next show after this is planned to be ‘Annie’ in October 2016. Audition and rehearsal details will be released shortly.
The main picture is based on the curtain call for Beauty and the Beast, and the proscenium arch and surrounds are based on that of the Hastleons’ usual home at the White Rock Theatre. I’m in the front row, third from the right.
Photo by Peter Mould