Are you hungry?

Do you feast upon ‘the Human condition’…?

Shakespeare wrote, “All the worlds a stage!”

Eyes turn to Hollywood… Is it a crumbling empire or is this magical
culture simply treating us to the tastiest movie of all – real life!?

“The slap”

“The trial”

“The attack”

Is it just me-or does it all seem a little too contrived?

It raises you up and it kicks you down, but is it now eating itself!?!
…And why??

I wonder, as we collectively enter the dawn of the metaverse and awaken to the promise of new stars being born, so the energy shifts and transfers, are we witnessing the death of celebrity and the stars of our ‘reality’?

One things for sure, nothing is off the menu in this world of peculiar

theatre! Especially when the media machine is head chef!

If someone is a celebrity because they can do something really well, even if this is just to gossip and capitalise on their own 15 mins of fame, we need to remember that under the microscope of life, they are all just human beings like you and me. Made up of good AND bad, hopeful AND scared in life, exactly like the rest of us.

It seems everything and anything is entertainment nowadays, right?

That’s the tricky thing, the cause and effect playing out, because if it wasn’t in our nature to be voyeurs hungry for drama then, ‘the show’ just wouldn’t exist.

We welcome the distractions too, distract us from the pandemic, which is still ongoing and of course, distract us from the war in Ukraine!

Which in itself is, “stealing the spotlight” from other atrocities occurring in the world such as Myanmar or Palestine, places where the outcomes, “aren’t really our problem”!

Disgusted? Me too… 10/10!

Transfixed? Yeah, me too!

Deep seated within our nature, ingrained in us all at a cellular level, is our need for survival. To dodge dinosaurs and forage for food, that simple switch we have locked into our DNA, the one we call fight or flight is somehow activated and satiated by these spectacles…

Drama makes us feel alive because that very instinct I mentioned is designed to keep us alive!

This is how we react to all entertainment and in many ways it explains why that switch was created in the first place. To teach us lessons and to keep

us ticking. Who wants to be dino dinner!? Not me!

Like the Romans who loved the thrill, the drama, the blood sweat and tears in that amphitheatre, the infamous roman colosseum, we have in the very palm of our hands a smorgasbord of fuel for the feast.

I’ll say it again, I think the reason we are fascinated by this kind of voyeuristic gratuity it’s because it directly feeds our fight or flight response that is ingrained in us for survival.

Back when we were cave-people we had to run-away to avoid being dinner for dinosaurs or physically ‘fight’ in order to acquire food to feed ourselves.

But for those of us today privileged with Instagram and relatively clean living we don’t have to survive in the same way.

Yet this attraction to entertainment feeds the deep-rooted instinct which is there to keep us alive, so in actual fact the feeding of this nature actually helps us to ‘feel’ alive! Of course the irony lies in the fact that this world where consumerism would have us fixed to our mobile devices 24/7 is actually draining the life from us, thus feeding the vicious cycle.

I think it’s impossible for us to ever be truly evolved beyond those primordial facets! Because it’s in the very make up of our DNA.

And whether or not you like or dislike THIS entertainment OR THAT entertainment it doesn’t really matter-what is fundamentally crucial to human survival is ‘finding your tribe’.

So rightly or wrongly, entertainment exists at every level, so we sit comfortably into camps that have clear preferences to our own.

Drama is, after all, a very old method of telling tales to help further our understanding of the world around us as well as help us to grow our understanding of one-another.

But life and the world is complex, everyone and everything is both that crazy mixture of good AND bad.

No one needs the twisted judgements of another tribe, edited dependant upon the desired outcome of that person or group of people, to reshape their journey.

We are all equally good and bad in our active and passive behaviours. So throwing stones, jeering and waving our fists in disgust at another can only mean we’re in that amphitheatre along side them and at some point find ourselves having to fend of the lion or gladiator’s trident.

We lose compassion for people every time we immediately judge others, and I think that will reflect back upon us the more we do it.

…In fact, this might have already tipped too far, which could explain the circus we are living in right now.

If you ask yourself just one question today, let it be this, ‘What is the function of the media?’

Initially it’s function has to be to inform, of course, but on who’s authority? Edited by them-on what grounds?

To brainwash!?

To influence!?

Or just to keep us hungry for more!?

The saddening thing about the human fight or flight reaction is that it is a stress on the body. So by feeding it, even with simple constant entertainment, we are actually weakening ourselves to it, the chemicals we need our body to release run dry and yet our need for more of those chemicals increases. Unbalance is chaos ruling in nature. Which is unnatural.

As a performer I have to really keep a close eye on what I do because the addiction to that adrenaline is all too real! Speaking of which…

I have a gig on 3rd June 2022 – 19:30 gmt – at The Hope & Anchor (Islington, London, UK)