The Real Black Book

Launching a book is not like launching a ship. Not quite. Drink is involved in both cases, certainly. With the ship the bottle gets smashed over the bows. With a book the bottle’s contents get drunk. But there are similarities. Books, like ships, can be slow moving when they start and fine words get said as they slide down the ramp. Then everyone cheers and the builder relaxes. Just a bit.

So too with Real Cardiff. I’ve been on the circuit recently doing my best to promote. This has involved standing up in crowded shops, reading sections to milling crowds, visiting hotels and talking to assembled audiences of the great and the good, signing copies in hallways, on small tables, and in the street. Always smiling. Never stop.

At the Park Hotel big launch someone wanted to know if the HMS Tonypandy I referred to in the section on nuclear submarines visiting Cardiff actually existed. Jonathan Adams had already back-projected a shot of a WW2 sub with the name Tonypandy photoshopped onto its side so I said yes. And if it never existed then it should. Although Wales’s status as a nuclear free zone might mitigate against that.

At the Waterloo Gardens Teashop, recently and somewhat perversely voted Britain’s best coffee shop, I read the section that dealt with Cardiff’s thespian past. I told of Ray Smith and Ray Handy and how it once was with actors and directors and the National Theatre that has taken thirty years to arrive. I told also of Dedwydd Jones’s 1985 Black Book on the Welsh Theatre, a diatribe against state subsidy (or non-subsidy) and the way the establishment had allegedly held the whole theatrical world back. It was a ghost from a long past.

Grahame Davies, an enthusiastic Real Cardiff supporter (and author of the well received Real Wrexham) then went home to find an envelope waiting for him. Inside was a copy of that same 1985 Black Book, no letter, no explanation. Photos of Roger Tomlinson, Welsh Arts Council drama department head inside. The tired twenty-five year old arguments featuring a cast of characters largely now moved on to other pastures restated as if they were of today. Similar envelopes had apparently been sent to other literary and theatre figures across the country.

In Real Cardiff Three I discuss the fracture in time that runs right across the Oval Basin where Torchwood have their base. Fiction, of course. But seeing Dedwydd’s book winging through the mails again I’m now not so sure.

Back on the launch trail I sell four copies of the shrink-wrapped sets of the reprinted trilogy and sign another shed of the new vol. Will there be a fourth, someone asks? Maybe. Let’s see how this one shapes up first.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 30th January, 2010