act 6 scene 1

Last night I had the joy of helping out at a benefit event for Bletchley Park - dreamt up and written by James Cary - who also writes Hut 33 on radio 4.

The big ole script

It was actually a pretty fun day.  I’d been working with the director for a few days putting together graphics and cleaning up various images of Bletchley Park.  On the day itself I was sitting backstage in my role as a glorified keynote monkey.

Here I am working backstage - probably just before I miss a cue

I’m reasonably pleased to say that I only screwed up once during the evening when I thought something I’d fired hadn’t fired so I tried again.  Other than that it was exceptionally smooth.  The talent at the evening was amazingly good - it seems that the code breaking effort at Bletchley Park is something that many people are keen to support.  Jam managed to squeeze them into a tweet:

Robin Ince,Dave Gorman,Punt&Dennis,Richard Herring,Rob Llewellyn, Simon Singh,Laurence&Gus,John Finnemore,Johnny Ball&Maggie Philbin. Snug.

Johnny Ball was a star of the night pulling out various party pieces about how to calculate square roots and count in binary as only he could.  Dave Gorman was also quality - and certainly had the loudest laugh standing next to us back stage! Punt and Dennis did two amazing sketches written for the night - it was a bit surreal listening to them back stage, almost like radio. Simon Singh was on first but I mention him last due to his amazing history and explanation of the enigma machine, with an actual enigma machine.

All in all a good night.  Audio podcast bits are meant to be hitting the Bletchley Park website sometime soon.  Here are a few of my favourite pictures from the night:

Hugh Dennis does a SFX for a woman fainting and falling to the floor. By throwing himself onto the floor.