So about three years ago now, I had COVID and while I’m sure others had it far worse than I did, I had it bad enough. For about ten days I couldn’t really move, couldn’t fully think, I felt like I was this tiny little presence in a body that didn’t want me moving around. And in a more practical side, I was also necessarily turning down work because there was no possibility that I was capable of doing it. Given that if I’m not working I am entirely clueless what to do with myself, it was not the happiest of times.

During which, the Alexandra Theatre here in Birmingham emailed, asking me to write a couple of articles for a programme. I think the total word count was under 1,500 words and the deadline was a good two weeks away at least, but, as I say, being able to put whole sentences together was a childhood memory and for now, I seriously doubted my ability to complete entire words.

Only.

The programme was for Fame. Finally, I could write down what I’ve always thought and quite often bored people with: the fact that Fame is really about failure, or at least it the original film is. I mean, there was also that I knew and liked the woman asking me to do it, I would ordinarily have been delighted and I still was, I just couldn’t spell the word. I think a strong factor in my saying yes was that I wasn’t able to put the letters o and n beside each other in the right order.

I wrote that article about the history of Fame on film, tv, stage, tv again, film again, and then stage again. And I also wrote one about this specific production. It was the Alex’s annual Stage Experience, where the whole cast and as many of the crew as possible are amateur and entirely new to theatre. It’s a thing where you learn to be part of something and to jointly make something bigger than all of you. It’s a deeply impressive production and they do it every year.

I don’t know how they do it, but then I also don’t know how I wrote 1,500 words.

But last night I was back at the Alex for the Stage Experience gala performance of its newest production, The Sound of Music. I wrote the programme again, or at least a lot of it. And I’m very pleased to have done that, I’m actually pleased with what I wrote — hang on, I imagine I can show you a bit of it. Here’s how my feature on the history and legacy of The Sound of Music begins:

You’re thinking of Julie Andrews on a hill, some cute kids saying hello and goodbye, and maybe that some day you should Google what “edelweiss” means. “The Sound of Music” is such a familiar show — and yet if every one of us knows it well, very few are aware of just what a complex, layered and sometimes even controversial musical it really is.

I like the edelweiss gag.

But I particularly like this. Right there in this year’s programme is a reprint of the same article I wrote for Fame back in COVIDland.

And it works.

Normally I don’t like something I’ve written twenty minutes ago — don’t even ask me about this, about my writing to you right now or I’ll ask for the chance to write it better.

But I liked rereading that article. True, I think it’s that Stage Experience is so good rather than my article about it being so, but nonetheless, there were words of mine on the page and I liked them.

Then later on there was someone sitting near me in the theatre, reading those words of mine in the programme, and that felt pretty special.

She didn’t have to drip ice cream over it, though.