TCW has once again heard from the UK’s leading crisis thespian, Erasmus Demosthenes Hepplewhite. He tells us of his role in exacerbating concerns about events in the Middle East.
I HAVE to admit that the crisis acting profession has been somewhat in the doldrums in recent months. As a result, I have spent more time than I would wish delivering sustenance to young men who have fled their families and homelands to make the perilous journey a few miles into the Channel to rendezvous with the Royal Navy or an RNLI vessel. No doubt most of them are highly talented engineers or doctors who will be a great asset to the nation.
However, last week my agent Irene called me with an urgent request to report to the BBC’s studio in Elstree. On arrival, I was quickly briefed on my role. I was to play the part of a haggard gentleman who had spent several years entombed in a rat-infested Syrian prison. It was explained to me that a journalist and her camera crew were to discover my plight and free me from the grasp of some barbaric bearded ruffians and released into the hands of another group of barbaric bearded ruffians. Seemingly, the second group of barbaric ruffians were ones whom His Majesty’s Government regarded as marginally less brutal and thereby worthy of a gift of £50million.
On my release from the hellhole, I was told to display a mixture of emotions of which misery and despair were to be uppermost. Having had several supporting roles in EastEnders and Casualty, and being a longstanding Queens Park Rangers fan, misery and despair are emotions with which I am very familiar. Indeed the agony I displayed in Casualty as a traffic warden with a strangulated hernia and ruptured spleen brought tears to the eyes of even the most hardened members of the lighting crew. Indeed, many thought it worthy of a BAFTA.
In my latest performance, as I emerged blinking, bruised and bewildered from the rat-infested dungeon, I was handed a bottle of Coca-Cola, a bag of McDonald’s chicken nuggets and a clean T-shirt emblazoned with the word BlackRock. I was instructed to display these prominently as my face expressed the horrors of my years buried in the bowels of the Earth. I must say I was a little disappointed by the work of the makeup department. Rather than looking as though I had been dragged through a hedge backwards I thought I looked quite dapper.
It is of course the lot of the crisis actor to excel in desperation. As dear, dear Dame Judi said to me when she came to RADA to present the Sir Paul McCartney Award for Impersonation, ‘My dear boy, we are but playthings of Thespis. We must embrace misery and despair as if they were our long-lost friends. Be a darling and fetch me a pint of mild and some black-pudding-flavoured crisps.’
Rest assured! be it pandemic, alien invasion, Russian terror, or Middle Eastern atrocities, Erasmus Demosthenes Hepplewhite stands ready to assist the powers-that-be in propelling fear deep into the hearts and minds of the great British public.
