A compendium of administrative miscellanea dating back to 2003
Tim and his kick-ass band (Pete Clements and Brad Webb) will be heading to Knebworth, on the 7th July 2012, to blow the roof off the Saturn Stage at Sonisphere!
They’ll be joining a lineup that includes rock legends Queen (and Adam Lambert), KISS and Faith No More! Also appearing over the weekend will be glam favourites The Darkness, Marilyn Manson, Cypress Hill and Andrew WK.
Tickets for the festival go on sale Thursday, 23rd February, at 9am from the Sonisphere website!
Yesterday evening the 12th annual Whatsonstage.com Awards took place at the West End’s Prince of Wales Theatre. These UK theatre industry awards are nominated by and voted for purely by theatregoers and the ticket-buying public. Matilda The Musical had received an incredible nine nominations!
Matilda the Musical triumphed, winning Best New Musical – Tim Minchin & Dennis Kelly; Best Set Designer – Rob Howell and Best Choreographer – Peter Darling.
Tim won The London Newcomer of the Year for his work on Matilda.
“With 35% of the votes in his category, Australian comedian Tim Minchin, making his musical debut providing the show’s music and lyrics, was a commanding winner for London Newcomer of the Year.” Whatsonstage.com
Tim: “I’ve been around for a bit but newcomer implies that I like doing new stuff and that the industry expects me to keep doing stuff in the London theatre world, which I really hope I can do.”
Many congratulations to Tim, the creative team, cast and everyone involved with Matilda the Musical!
The Larmer Tree Festival have announced that their comedy headliner is to be none other than Tim! He’ll be ripping up the Main Stage – the first comedian ever to do so, may I add – on Thursday, 12th July, accompanied only by his grand piano.
Other acts confirmed to be on at the festival, which takes place in Wiltshire, include Jools Holland and The Levellers, with plenty more acts, including comedians, still to be announced.
You can check the latest news and find out further information about the festival on their website and it’s the place to go to grab your tickets too.
Due to high demand sublime on stage chemistry the 2012 Telegraph Hay Festival has added another date for Tim with the delectable B[rad]&P[ete] band: Thursday 31st May at 8pm in the Barclays Pavillion.
Tickets are already on general sale. The festival box office number is 01497 822629 and online ticket sales can be found here.
The Hay Festival is celebrating its 25th year with ten days of music, comedy, literature and more, all taking place from 31th May to the 10th June. Other acts and the programme of events will be announced on the festival website on the 14th February.
Head for the [Malvern] hills! Tim will be performing at the Malvern Piano Festival on Saturday 2nd June at 8.30pm. He’ll be joined on stage by a piano reinforced for his zestful exuberance, some natty attire and his aesthetically pleasing and talented band, Brad and Pete, who toured with him and the Heritage Orchestra last year.
Tickets are £25 and £22.50 and available from the Box Office: 01684 892277 and online here.
The Malvern Piano Festival runs from the 1st June to the 3rd June 2012, if you fancy some additional pianist action.
Tickets for Tim’s shows have been selling out very quickly so if you want to catch this show get a w[r]iggle on!
UPDATE: We were informed that the tickets would be on general sale today but an error occurred. They are rectifying the situation. You will be able to buy the tickets shortly.
UPDATE: 18:15 GMT They are back on general sale now – you do not have to be a member to purchase.
Did you miss out on tickets to see Tim play in an intimate, purple upside-down cow when they first went on sale? It’s not surprising if you answered, ‘yes,’ as the initial allocation was sold out before we got a chance to announce the show! Fortunately, a second allocation of tickets are now available, however, to make things fair, there’s a bit of a twist.
There are 150 tickets available for the show on the 8th July at the Udderbelly at the Southbank Centre in London, but, to ensure that they’re bought by fans, and not touts that’ll sell them on for extortionate prices, the folk at Udderbelly Festival have decided to run a “ballot” system for them.
Between now and 5pm on the 8th February, you can apply for either one or two tickets to the show (only your first entry will be accepted so don’t you go trying to cheat…) and you’ll be notified as to whether you’ve been successful or not shortly after the ballot closes.
There are various other terms and conditions, like you need to pick the tickets up on the day with the card with which you paid for them, and it’s only open to UK residents, and the age restriction for the show is 16+. You can and should read all the small print here on their Terms and Conditions page.
Now then, with that all out of the way (you are still with us, right?) here’s the link to the page where you can apply!
Good luck!
UPDATE: the Underbelly site is temporarily down from too many eager fans! Don’t forget, there’s no rush to get your application in as the ballot is open until Wednesday 8th February.
UPDATE: To address the queries about ticket prices if you win the ballot:
This gig has unreserved seating for the standard ticket price. Sirloin priority seating allows a very limited number of customers per performance to sit near the front. No one is under any obligation to choose a sirloin seat upgrade. The ballot is for the standard £30 ticket. If a customer wishes to upgrade this ticket to a sirloin seat, should they be available, then they have that option.
Tim will be appearing on the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards, tonight, 31st January 2012, on Channel Nine at 9.30pm – 11.30pm.
Formerly the AFI Awards, the AACTA Awards will be screened from the Sydney Opera House in a delayed broadcast. This year the television section of the awards marks 25 years of celebrating Australian television.
Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett and Red Dog starlet Rachael Taylor head a host of film and television stars who will present the inaugural Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards. Special guest Olivia Newton-John will be singing a medley from the soundtrack of her new film, A Few Best Men.
Tim will open the 2012 Telegraph Hay Festival this year with a concert on Friday 1st June at 9.30pm.
The Hay Festival is celebrating its 25th year with ten days of music, comedy, literature and more, all taking place from 31th May to the 10th June. Other acts and the programme of events will be announced on the festival website over the coming weeks.
Tickets are now on general sale. The festival box office number is 01497 822629 and online ticket sales can be found here.
29th Jan 2012
UPDATE: More tickets have been put on sale now – grab them while you can!
Hey you, Americans! Are you starting to suffer from withdrawal symptoms after Tim’s tours last year, and do you like secularism and skepticism? Then boy, should you be excited right about now!
Your favourite Golden Lion Tamarin descendant, Tim, is set to rock up to the Reason Rally at the National Mall in Washington D.C. on the 24th March 2012, bringing his silly songs about science and rationalism with him!
The event is free to attend, and will run from 10am to 4pm. In addition to Tim, Bad Religion and Jamie Kilstein will also be performing and there’ll be talks from Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and James Randi, amongst many others.
Additional information and the full line up can be found on the Reason Rally website.
I really like Jonathan Ross. I think he’s a funny, interesting, kind person, and an excellent interviewer. I also really like his wife… But let’s not get back into that.
Jonathan and his wonderful producer, Suzi, have been incredibly supportive of me and so when they asked me to write a song for their pre-Christmas show, I didn’t hesitate. It was the worst possible time to be writing a new song – I’ve been overworked and ill, was on tour, and was really feeling the stress. But I wasn’t going to say no… it’s Jonathan Ross! And my fellow guests were to be Tom Cruise, the divine actors from Downton Abbey, and the ace Inbetweeners boys.
So I got to writing. Being Christmas, I thought it would be fun to do a song about Jesus, but being TV, I knew it would have to be gentle. The idea was to compare him to Woody Allen (short, Jewish, philosophical, a bit hesitant), and expand into redefining his other alleged attributes using modern, popular-culture terminology.
It’s not a particularly original idea, I admit, but it’s quite cute. It’s certainly not very contentious, but even so, compliance people and producers and lawyers all checked my lyrics long before the cameras rolled. As always with these bespoke writing jobs, I was really stressed for about 3 days, and almost chucked it in the bin 5 times, and freaked out that it wasn’t funny and all that boring shit that people like me go through when we’re lucky enough to have with a big audience with high expectations. And if I’m honest, it ain’t a world-changing bit of comedy. Regardless…
On Tuesday night last week, we taped the show. I met Tom (he’s nice and quite laid-back off camera, and not very short) and the divine Downton ladies (swoon) and the lovely Inbetweeners chaps (yay) and I did my song and everyone laughed and Tom said it was great and when it was done I ran off set onto the back of a waiting motorbike, got from South Bank to the Hammersmith Apollo in 13 minutes, walked into the building, straight on to stage to sing White Wine in the Sun with Professor Brian Cox. Rock n roll.
Subsequently, Suzi and her team edited the show and everybody was happy. Suzi felt it had a nice balance of big-ticket celeb action, local talent, and a nice bit of that cheeky, iconoclastic spirit for which Jonathan is known and widely loved.
And then someone got nervous and sent the tape to ITV’s director of television, Peter Fincham.
And Peter Fincham demanded that I be cut from the show.
He did this because he’s scared of the ranty, shit-stirring, right-wing press, and of the small minority of Brits who believe they have a right to go through life protected from anything that challenges them in any way.
Yesterday I wrote a big rant about comedy and risk and conservatism; about the fact that my joke has no victim; about sacredness (oh God, not again!) and about the importance of laughing at dumb but pervasive ideas. But I trashed it because it’s boring and takes it all too seriously. It’s hardly the end of the world.
But I have to admit I’m really fucking disappointed.
It’s 2011. The appropriate reaction to people who think Jesus is a supernatural being is mild embarrassment, sighing tolerance and patient education.
And anger when they’re being bigots.
Oh, and satire. There’s always satire.
Anywaaaaaaaaaay… the fun news is that I already had the footage of the song when they cut it. Yay. And so you can decide for yourself how offensive it is! Yippee.
Oh, and although I can’t think why anyone would have a problem with me posting this (Peter has covered his arse, the protection of which he is rather nervous about) but I suppose you lovely tech-geeks might want to grab a copy or mirror it, just in case I get asked to take it down.
I hope you enjoy my silly, harmless, accurate song of praise, “Woody Allen Jesus”.
And I hope you all have wonderful Christmases.
BONUS MATERIAL IF YOU’RE NOT BORED OF ME BEING OPINIONATED YET
Below is a column I wrote for the latest edition of the New Statesman, which was guest edited by our greatest living evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. It is about my daughter and Santa and belief. I hope you enjoy.
In the lead-up to last Christmas, when my daughter Violet had just turned four, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Is Father Christmas real?”
This was a problem for me. I had up until this point convinced myself that telling my kid a lie about the origins of her scooter was part and parcel of parenting – that denying a child the idea of Santa would be Scroogian in the extreme.
The trouble is, I have no memory of believing in the physics-defying fatty myself. One of our classic Minchin family tales is of Christmas eve 1978, when I was 3 myself, and my mum asked me in an excited voice, “Who’s coming down the chimney tonight?!” To which I replied, after a brow-creased pause, “Gran?”
(It is also part of Minchin lore that I was a very boring and quite dim kid.)
Regardless, our Violet had seemed quite excited the previous year when we had left a mince pie and a beer by the blocked-up chimney (Violet: But there’s no hole, how will he get down? Me: That’s the least of his worries…), and I’d felt great when she’d squealed with glee at five in the (fucking) morning upon discovering the comestibles had been consumed and that a reindeer had left hoof-prints in the icing sugar by the piano.
But now something in the assertion of the existence of this bearded philanthropist had given her pause, so she’d come to me for clarification. I wasn’t surprised – earlier in the year I’d overheard a conversation she’d had with her friend Alice as they sat by a lake in a playground in Melbourne:
Violet: If you fell in there, you’d die.
Alice: Someone would come and pull you out.
Violet: Yeah, but if the grown-ups weren’t around, you’d die.
Alice: (Pause) When you die, you go somewhere lovely.
Violet: But how would you know it’s lovely? You wouldn’t have your eyes and ears.
… an incomplete but still pretty damning analysis of the infantile idea that we (to quote my editor) survive our own deaths.
She’s always been obsessed by what is “real”. Figuring out what truly exists seems to be the way she deals with her fears. Most of the time when she asks if something is real, she’s hoping it’s not; trolls, dragons, witches have all been happily relegated to the fiction bin, and she sleeps pretty well in the knowledge that they’re not going to crawl back out and attack her in her bed.
And so I face a dilemma: I had sold her the myth of Father Christmas in the spirit of allowing a child her sense of wonderment, but I felt that lying to her face when she asked me point blank about the veracity of my claims was a step too far. I fumbled around a bit before opting for:
“Father Christmas is real… in the imaginary world.”
This didn’t really satisfy her, and nor should it have. Like so much language in theology and philosophy, that sentence has the odour of wisdom, but is a load of old bollocks. Quite nice as a phrase, but pure sophistry, like a lot of the stuff I say on stage, and like nearly everything religious apologists have ever said. It is the stuff of obfuscation – words to divert, like the passive hand of the magician – not the clarification Vi was seeking.
But I think it was the right answer. She went along with the story last year and I reckon she will again this year. By offering her the paradoxical notion of a non-real real, I allowed her the opportunity to just “go with it”, and hopefully she’ll happily do so until her friends find out it’s a myth, at which point she can quietly slip back into knowing what she suspected all along. There’ll be no crushing blow of revelation seven.
Weirdly, I have felt no compulsion to obscure answers to the more serious questions. Vi was very young when she asked what happens when you die, and I told her, “You just stop”. I see no problem at all with that answer. Not only is it demonstrably true, but it also has the wondrous quality of not eliciting a whole lot of further annoying questions.
I was asked recently how I reconcile my reputation for promoting a naturalistic world-view with the fact that I have co-written “Matilda” – a musical based on a Roald Dahl story about a girl who is preternaturally gifted and, eventually, telekinetic.
What an odd question. Do people really think that living a life unencumbered by superstition necessitates the rejection of fiction?
I adore stories. Our version of “Matilda”, even more so than the original Dahl, is a story about stories. About the importance of imagination, and of fiction’s ability not only to educate and enlighten us, but to free us; to set our minds soaring beyond reality.
My daughter will grow up reading stories, and I hope she will have a rich and lifelong relationship with the imaginary. But I will not try to train her out of her clear instinct to define for herself what is real.
I adore Christmas. The fact that I know that Christianity’s origins lie more in Paul of Tarsus’s mental illness and Emperor Constantine’s political savvy than in the existence of the divine has no bearing on my ability to enjoy this age-old festival of giving, family, and feasting.
Our lives would be empty without stories, and the story of this Jesus character is quite a nice one. One that – in theory, and sometimes even in practise – promotes compassion and humility and wisdom and peace.
Jesus is real… in the imaginary world. A five year old could tell you that.
