PAST

Journeys into yesteryear

Successes and failures from the wonderful land of yore

Fairburn
1979-1982

$Pontefract 1989$

THE PAST
IN LINK FORM

Origins of the Universe
Find out where it all came from!

Dinosaurs
What are they and where can I buy one?

Cavemen
These funny little men lived in caves! Bloody idiots!

Ancient Egypt
Explore the spooky world of the Pharaohs!

Roman Britain
Transport yourself back to Roman times!

The Black Death
Find out how to avoid dying of this irritating disease!

The Tudors
Kings and Queens and all that shit!

1979
When the Green Cross Code Man ruled supreme!

World War 2
Blimey! World War 2 looks ruddy awful!

The Noughties
The decade that time forgot!

The Rediscovered Country
To most people who know me now, I am the comedian who created Gary Le Strange, but that didn’t happen till I was 30. To those who don’t know me, I’m even more obscure. But if you’re me (which you probably are because I’m the only person I can imagine who would have the patience to read this rubbish, and at the time of writing I’m not even convinced I will ever get around to posting this on the internet as I originally intended - I mean, I’ve been writing this site for a year and it still isn’t done), then you’ll know very well that I’ve done lots of stuff. Not necessarily lots of cool stuff or great stuff, just stuff. Work, mainly. Creative work, I mean. You know, writing, drawing, music and things like that. Trouble is, unless you’re me (which we’ve already established you almost definitely are), you’ve probably never seen/read/heard/experienced any of that stuff. And since you are me, the bit I’m going to tell you next will be old news. But I’m going to do it anyway.

This website came alive as an idea in my murky, troubled mind some time around the beginning of 2009. I was moving house and, as is customary in such situations, ended up having to pack things in bags and boxes. Inevitably I came across lots of old stuff I hadn’t looked at for years - theatre programmes, used chequebooks, old bus tickets, scribbled messages, half-finished letters, forgotten photos, terrible doodles I did while I was bored at work, old schoolbooks, tapes I recorded when I was twelve, press clippings, scripts for TV shows which never got made, treatments for scripts that never got written and ideas for treatments which never even got past the “idle thought” stage. In short, I realised I had piles and piles of old stuff, things I’d written and drawn and recorded and thought and felt - which no one had ever seen but me. Things I should probably have thrown away long ago, but didn’t, mainly because I thought that one day, I might be happy I kept them.

Each time I pulled a new thing out of a bag or a drawer, I found a new idea which I should have turned into something bigger and better but didn’t, either because I was too shy, too stupid, too busy, too forgetful or just too rubbish at turning ideas into something more than ideas. And each time I came across one of these old ideas, I instantly wanted to develop it into something more. And then I thought about how I’m nearly 40 now, and how life isn’t infinite, and how I simply didn’t have time to expand every single one of these ideas into something new and brilliant. Especially since I’m an over-ambitious perfectionist control freak who hasn’t finished a self-driven project for four years because my self-imposed standards are way too high and, by the time I’m halfway through developing something, I’m already bored of it and have moved onto some other newer, better idea, which in turn becomes yet another unfinished project, creating an eternal cycle of undeveloped ideas, like an Ouroboros eating its own tail - but it can’t swallow it because it forgot to grow a mouth. Or something.

The dismal truth - or at least it seemed to be the truth - was that, in all likelihood, no one would ever see this stuff, no one would ever have the opportunity to care or condemn, and it would all end up being a load of meaningless rubbish that gathers dust in a cupboard for the next 25 years until I die and some council employee throws it all in a skip.

But then I thought, what if I don’t finish that stuff? What if I don’t turn it into something bigger and better? But what if I show it to people anyway? And what if I use that there new-fangled internet thingy to put it all out there, bit by bit, day by day, year by year, so maybe someone will be able to see it or read it and say “It’s OK Waen, you didn’t screw up, you were absolutely right to keep this stuff to yourself for all those years. It wouldn’t have changed a thing”?

As you can imagine, this is both scary and liberating. Scary because I’m about to open my vast archive of creative rubbish to the public - an audience I don’t even know exists - in the full realisation that there was probably a very good reason no one ever saw this stuff before, whether that be because it really is rubbish or simply that no one gives a shit. Liberating because finally, I might be able to overcome my attachment to this stuff, accept it will never be finished, realise it’s OK to let people see things I’ve done even if they’re irredeemably awful, and finally get on with something new.

The wonderful irony of course is that, having decided to start this website, it’s already become yet another unfinished project which I daren’t show anyone. My eagerness to set an intelligible context for all this stuff I’ve done means this site has become one of the biggest writing jobs of my life. But enough of this self-defeating talk! And more of this instead.