The Liar's Quartet

by Mark Thomas

  23 After the accident, the third finger on his left hand came to a nailless point and the tip of the first finger bent over like a hook, which he used to clean his ears with.

  24 There are 13.5 million people in the UK living in poverty, over half of them from working families and 2.6 million of them children.

  25 You can buy the complete collection – fifty-two records, plus the bonus opera highlights (thirteen records) and a Christmas special on eBay. I have my dad’s entire set which also managed to survive the tour.

  26 This was the only artificial prop we used. The sleeve was real but the record wasn’t the original – I couldn’t risk it getting damaged.

  27 Since writing and performing this, it seems vinyl is having something of a renaissance – hurray! I am taking complete credit for this change in fortunes. It was me and nobody else.

  28 If cassettes ever make a comeback, I’m claiming the credit for that too.

  29 As kids, we never had pocket money and I always worked for my dad to earn cash. The first time I was eight and he paid me 10p an hour for filling skips with rubbish. The neighbours said it was slave labour. He told them to fuck off. I spent my wages on cream soda and comics.

  30 For the New Zealand tour, we changed this to the then PM, John Key, who’s a real knob. He’s nicknamed ‘Teflon John’ as no scandal could stick. I’ve forgotten who we did in Australia. If I was performing this now, I’d replace Galloway with Boris Johnson, who is currently the most shameless twat in the UK.

  31 The man in question is Colin Green. He still runs IMET2000 raising funds for medical training in Palestine. His work is so well known and respected that within days of the show opening, someone had recognised him, despite me not naming him, and grassed me up. He phoned and said, ‘I hear I’m in your show and you’ve made me out to be a bloody toff.’ We are still friends despite my impersonation.

  32 If you don’t know the reference, just Google ‘skinhead fashion’.

  33 It was by Rotherhithe tunnel and run by the late, great Malcolm Hardy, who compered the show. At some point in every performance he ever did he would play the harmonica after cleaning it in someone’s beer and expose his genitals with the words, ‘Oi oi nob out.’

  34 My brother-in-law kept his word. My sister came to see this show. She was spotted by my tour manager sitting in the back of the theatre with her son on one side and second husband on the other holding a box of tissues, giving a running commentary of, ‘that’s true … that happened’ throughout the show.

  35 It’s sometimes known as Steele-Richardson-Olszewski syndrome and is more often found in post-mortems than through diagnosis. Around one to six people in every 100,000 are estimated to have it. The average life expectancy after diagnosis is seven years. It’s the same disease Dudley Moore had as well as Dr Ann Turner, who ended her life in a clinic in Switzerland and whose story was told in the drama, A Short Stay in Switzerland, where Ann was played by Julie Walters.

  36 He still recognises us.

  37 Jimmy Carr is Britain’s premier tax dodging satirist. Gary Barlow was involved in a similar offshore scam but he is a Tory and a patriot so we expected it of him.

  38 Real name Paul Delaney.

  39 Zeeli. A golden retriever inherited from a family friend who couldn’t look after him any more.

  40 When the show returned to the Royal Opera House, the singers who performed in the bungalow performed this section of the show live with me sitting on the stool and one of them each side. Not a dry eye in the house.

  41 My dad died on the day the performance of Bravo Figaro! recorded at the Royal Opera House was due for broadcast on Radio 4. My mum wanted the broadcast to go ahead. As far as I was concerned Dad died as he lived, as an inveterate heckler.

  HANNAH’S STORY

  When Hannah Daykin’s father injured his thumb at work five years ago, little did she realise it was the start of a devastating disease which would rob her of the dad she knew and loved.

  Twenty-two-year-old Hannah was, by her own admission, a daddy’s girl. Over the past five years Hannah has watched her father David change from the funny, loving and caring man she knew, into someone she barely recognises.

  David, fifty-four, has the neurological condition progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a disease which robs people of the ability to walk, talk or communicate.

  ‘He was a very funny dad,’ recalls Hannah, from Nottingham. ‘And when he wasn’t funny we had to laugh at his jokes anyway!’

  ‘I remember him taking me to my first football match when I was seven. He is a huge Nottingham Forest fan and had followed them for years. My first match we won 6–1 but I cried all the way through. I didn’t like the noise.’

  Today Hannah’s experience of her father is very different. He is unable to walk or talk and relies on others to do everything for him.

  But despite his deteriorating condition, David managed to travel from his home in Nottingham to Sheffield this summer to watch Hannah carry the Olympic Torch, to help raise awareness of PSP.

  ‘It was an amazing experience,’ said Hannah, who is studying criminology at Sheffield University. ‘It was my moment of glory and I wanted to dedicate it to my dad. It was just wonderful that he made it to Sheffield to see me.’

  Hannah’s family first noticed changes in David after he dropped a radiator at work and tore a tendon in his arm. Looking back they now realise that accident was the first sign of the disease taking hold.

  ‘He was off work for six weeks and after that he started acting differently,’ said Hannah. ‘He became obsessive about things like time. He wanted his dinner cooked at a certain time and he would insist the TV volume was always at the same level.’

  The Daykins had no idea that David was becoming ill with PSP. By the time he was diagnosed in 2008 he had started to lose his balance and had fallen down the stairs on several occasions.

  ‘He couldn’t lift his head up anymore,’ recalls Hannah. ‘I remember being at the top of the stairs talking to him. He was at the bottom of the stairs and he couldn’t look up at me.’

  David’s diagnosis hit the family hard as they were catapulted into an unknown world in which they had to adapt very quickly to rapidly changing circumstances, while at the same time come to terms with the fact they were losing their loved one.

  ‘The diagnosis didn’t feel real,’ recalled Hannah. ‘We didn’t know what the disease was. If you are diagnosed with something like cancer people have heard it and understand it. We had to research PSP and then tell other people what it was.

  ‘He is so different now,’ she added. ‘His speech is next to nothing and even though his brain will tell him not to do something his body still does it. It’s heartbreaking to watch. I miss the person he was and I find it hard to see him. He’s just not my dad any more.’

  Hannah and her fifteen-year-old brother have been undergoing counselling to help them come to terms with the loss of their dad. Hannah has also been actively raising awareness of PSP through the media, Facebook and blogs and most recently carrying the Olympic Torch through Sheffield.

  As they prepare for the future, Hannah and her family know David’s death is inevitable and her mum has helped David to plan his funeral.

  For Hannah, the future means working hard to ensure more people gain a better understanding of PSP, its causes and hopefully a cure.

  ‘I know it will take a lot to find a cure. But we need to get a better understanding of PSP. That’s the only way anything will change,’ she added.

  WHAT IS PSP?

  PSP is a degenerative brain disease which affects eye movement, balance, mobility, speech and swallowing. Over time it can rob people of the ability to walk, talk, feed themselves or communicate effectively, though they usually remain mentally alert. The average life expectancy for someone with PSP is seven years.

  PSP involves the progressive death of neurons (nerve endings) in the brain. It affects people in their forties, fifties, sixties and above, the average age of onse
t being sixty-two. Like other neurodegenerative diseases, PSP gets worse over time.

  The PSP Association is the UK’s only national charity providing advice and support to people living with PSP and the related condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD), and to those who care for them.

  The charity funds research into the causes of the disease, and into finding ways to develop better diagnosis and treatments. It also supports people living with PSP, their families, carers and health and social care professionals across the UK.

  For more information about the PSP Association or to make a donation visit www.pspassociation.org.uk or call 01327 322410.

  CREDIT: RICHARD DAVENPORT

  FOREWORD

  When people hear about others being spied upon, be it by police or corporate infiltrators, the most common reaction is minor disbelief. There is a faint whiff of discomfort in the air, that the person talking about being spied upon is either a conspiracy theorist or a fantasist over-inflating their sense of importance and radicalism, either David Icke or Rick from The Young Ones.

  There are variations to those reactions, a notable one being, ‘Well you would be gutted if you weren’t.’ An assertion that implies that deep down those of us who are spied upon crave the attention to justify their sense of worth, a sort of, ‘I am spied upon, therefore I am.’

  My favourite reaction so far regards the Construction Blacklist, a database of workers in the construction industry who have been involved in trade union activity or voiced concerns over health and safety.

  However, data was also collected about environmental and social justice activists. In 2013 the Information Commissioner’s Office confirmed that my name is on the Construction Blacklist. I told a friend and he said, ‘Oh that’s a shame, I was going to ask you to do my patio.’

  Mindful of the general disbelief and regarding the show you are about to see let me tell you this, BAE Systems (Britain’s biggest arms company) have admitted to spying on Campaign Against Arms Trade (a relatively small campaigning group with an office budget of under £250,000).1

  In court documents BAE Systems not only admit to spying on CAAT they also signed a legal undertaking not to do it again.

  One of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world has in effect been forced to apologise to a group of Guardian reading peaceniks.

  Mark Thomas

  July 2014

  CUCKOOED

  Onstage filings cabinets left and right facing inwards. Off centre between the cabinets a desk with an anglepoise lamp and a chair. Around the filing cabinets arch lever files, box files, leaflets, pamphlets and general activist archive debris. Back of the stage is a large projection screen. Exterior of a social club projected on screen as audience enter.

  SFX: CARS PASSING IN SUBURBAN STREET

  Projection changes to the interior of the social club and an audience assembling. Projection shows lights going down in club and a BAE Systems promo video2 begins playing in the club then grows to fill the whole screen as MT enters the stage.

  MT sits down facing the projector image then as film ends turns to face audience.

  House lights go up.

  PROLOGUE

  I am a very good liar, but everything I tell you in this next hour is true.

  I will tell one lie and it involves the number twelve, so now you know you’ll spot it.

  On the 23rd May of this year I wrote a friend a letter.

  MT WALKS SR, OPENS MIDDLE DRAWER OF FILING CABINET TAKES OUT A LETTER AND READS

  Dear Martin,

  Hope you and your family are well.

  If you have your old mobile number you will have seen that I texted you.

  I am doing a new show and it is about our relationship. It would be good to talk to you, at the very least so you can put forward your position.

  It would also be good to talk because I think at some point you were my friend and I need to know what you did and didn’t do with our friendship.

  It doesn’t have to be a recorded interview or anything like that. It would just be good to grab a cuppa and natter. Take care

  Mark

  Martin was my friend for seven years. He was Campaign Co-ordinator for Campaign Against Arms Trade.

  PUTS LETTER BACK IN DRAWER3

  SCENE 1

  2003.

  It is a beautiful late summer morning and the sun unfolds along the Thames from the east like a golden arrow. I am outside a hotel at Tower Bridge, inside are arms dealers here for the London arms fair.4

  Activists have arrived from all across the UK. We will demonstrate against the arms fair, we will protest it, march against it, hold vigils, sing, parade, blockade and lock on against it.

  This is our Ascot.5 Dresscode army surplus, somewhat ironically.

  8.15am. I send in two women friends in corporate black dresses, they stand in the lobby and hold up laminated signs reading,

  ‘Complimentary bus shuttle service to the arms fair, please enquire here.’

  Arms dealers start to stream across the lobby towards them.

  ‘Free ride?’

  Yes.

  ‘Outside?’

  Yes.

  ‘When does it leave?’

  Ten minutes.

  ‘Great.’

  Outside I have a hired bus now laden with arms dealers. In the planning stages one of the ideas was if the arms dealers got on the bus we should hire a Saddam Hussein impersonator to be the driver.

  Beret, moustache.

  ‘Next stop Baghdad!’

  I stick with the plan that was settled on and two miles from the fair a friend stands on the front seat points a camera down the length of the bus and I get on the tannoy system.

  STANDS ON A BOX DSR

  SFX: TO SOUND LIKE A TANNOY

  ‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome aboard the complimentary bus shuttle service to the arms fair. We are traveling at a height of about one metre off the ground and a speed of eight miles an hour, reducing to three in traffic. As members of the arms industry, you are responsible for the creation of Iraq’s national debt, your companies sold weapons to Saddam Hussein,6 got your governments to underwrite the deal and when Saddam defaulted on the payments, the taxpayer paid out so you were not out of pocket and then that debt gets transferred on to the Iraqi people who are still paying for the bullets of their own oppression. We know you feel very guilty, we’re here to help, we’re passing round a collection to help cancel Iraq’s debt put as much money in as you can.’

  £10.50 and an Italian arms dealer said, ‘I would give you money but your tactics are Mafiosi.’

  One mile away from the fair we stop.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen you’ll have to leave now as we do not have the necessary passes to get through the police security cordon.’

  ‘But you said you would get us to the arms fair.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So we will have to walk about a mile?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Past all the protestors?’

  ‘It would appear to be the case.’

  BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest arms manufacturer, are not on our bus, they have their own complimentary bus, so if they will not get on our bus, we will get on theirs.

  Day two. It is a beautiful late summer day and I am running in a hotel car park with Martin and Gid, Quakers, students and hippies towards the BAE Systems bus. We stand in front of it, arms raised and the bus screeches to a halt.

  I duck under it and start to attach my neck to the axle of the vehicle with a bicycle D lock.

  Under the bus my brain is moving faster than my body. The U of the lock goes over the axle but gets stuck on my neck and I panic and think, ‘Oh fuck my neck is too fat for activism. No wonder so many of this lot are vegans. You have to be skinny for this. You never see a fat boy dangling on a Greenpeace abseil.’

  PUTS D LOCK AROUND NECK AND LOCKS IT. ADDRESSES MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

  Ready to catch this? THROWS KEY Thanks.

  I pass the key out
to an activist, so I don’t have the key, the police won’t find it and unlock me and it buys some time.

  You have to trust the person you are working with. That they will look after the key, not wander to the loo, and pass it back when you require it later.

  The underside of the bus is shaded and cool, the voices outside are muffled. The chill of the concrete starts to creep into my back and the smell of oil and dust reminds me of my dad’s workshop and is strangely calming.

  Bobby slides in next to me.

  ‘What are you doing, you are supposed to be doing legal observations?!?’

  ‘I know but this looks like fun and I’ve brought my chain. So I’m joining in.’

  Then he locks on.

  ON PHONE ‘Alright I’ve locked on, I know predictable. No, will definitely be a nick. Will miss tea. Love you.’

  Compared to Bobby’s calm I am a rank amateur and this is the first time I have ever been arrested. After an hour the police escort the arms dealers off the bus and tell us that the arms dealers are taking the rest of the day off because they have been traumatised.

  We decide to come out.

  HOPEFULLY AUDIENCE MEMBER THROWS KEY ONSTAGE AND MT UNLOCKS D LOCK

  I come out from under the bus into the sunlight. There is a helicopter, four vans, twenty officers and a motor launch in the Thames. I am led past a crowd of onlookers to the police van – past tourists, bystanders, the curious on their way to work, the hippies and the students and pushing to the front is Martin, holding a camera,

  ‘Oi Thommo clenched fist, photo for the paper. Clenched fist.’

  I occasionally wonder what happened to that photo and if it passed over the desk of a security officer and what they saw in that picture of a man getting into a police van.

  POSES WITH A NERVOUS THUMBS UP