Six degrees
Mark Peters
Bill Bailey, the absurdist British funnyman with a penchant for birdwatching, will bring his tales of off-kilter whimsy and musical mockery to Kitec, Kowloon Bay, on November 19, as part of his new show, Limboland. Bailey is a bona-fide comic genius and has a working moral compass. “There’s a culture of cruelty in comedy which I absolutely hate. People being ripped apart for someone else’s enjoyment. It’s not something I want to be part of,” he said, commenting on Sachsgate, the controversial prank phone calls made to actor Andrew Sachs by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand …
Actor, comedian and prolific womaniser, Brand launched his new booky wook, Revolution, last month, by joining the original Occupy protesters on New York’s Wall Street. In recent months, Brand has become the scourge of the United States’ Fox News, calling it out as a “fanatical terrorist propagandist organisation” in response to the network’s legal analyst Jeanine Pirro’s on-air rant against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Brand has also engaged in a seemingly endless war of words with the channel’s right-wing newscaster Sean Hannity …
The political commentator is so adamant that waterboarding is not a form of torture he once offered to subject himself to the process (which invokes the sensation of drowning) for charity and donate the proceeds to the families of American troops. Years later when questioned on his eponymous radio show about his unfulfilled promise, Hannity squirmed, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, I get to ask the questions on the programme.” In 2011, Hannity exclaimed outrage at Michelle Obama after the American first lady extended an invitation to perform at a White House poetry event to controversial rapper Common …
Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jnr, aka Common, once performed a poem titled A Letter to the Law, which criticised the police and former US president George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, making his Capitol Hill jaunt all the more noteworthy. Common was defended by White House spokesman Jay Carney, who claimed the media had “cherrypicked” negative phrases from the rapper’s overall positive work. In the song Gold, taken from the 2011 album “The Dreamer/ The Believer”, Common claims to be “writing my own scripts like I’m Tennessee Williams” …
Towards the end of his life, the tormented Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright characterised the 1960s as his “stoned age” – and it appears to have rolled over into the following decades. Suffering from depression and a variety of illnesses, some caused by his dependence on alcohol and drugs, Williams choked to death on a plastic bottle cap in 1983. One of his earliest plays, Stairs to the Roof, included the subtitle “A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That are Kept in Cages”. These words constitute one of the many tattoos inked onto the flesh of actress Angelina Jolie …
The Oscar-winning actress was recently made an honorary dame at a reception at London’s Buckingham Palace attended by Queen Elizabeth. The honour was in recognition of her campaign to end sexual violence against women and for services to British foreign policy. Jolie, who as a US citizen cannot be addressed as dame, attended the presentation with husband Brad Pitt and their brood of six children. In 2010, Jolie took the “star in a reasonably priced car” challenge on blokey British television show Top Gear. Only it wasn’t the real Jolie driving – the long locks (and scruffy goatee) belonged to Bill Bailey.
