Going orange for the weekend

As it's last thing on a Friday afternoon, I thought I'd provide you with some highly topical weekend entertainment. You may remember a few weeks back that Marieke did her best to shoe horn a story about the world cup onto our blog. Some may have called it a form of 'ambush blogging'!

What neither Marieke or I knew at the time was that we had a highly legitimate Hoipolloi / World Cup story to share with you!

And here it is...

Some of you may remember Ben Frimston from his appearances in our shows (including The Doubtful Guest) and also an ongoing series of entries on this blog highlighting a variety of adverts that he's appeared in, from Burger King to the now infamous Rowntree's Randoms advert.

He's actually currently appearing in a new advert, but you'd be forgiven for not having seen it unless you live in the Netherlands.

So this is where this post finally gets highly topical. First off, let's actually see the advert we're talking about:



And now you'll begin to understand the topicality.

Those of you following the World Cup may remember a story a few weeks back where a group of young ladies were ejected from a stadium and subsequently arrested for a cunning piece of ambush marketing whilst dressed in bright orange dresses. They were basically advertising a Dutch beer called Bavaria. And this is the same company that Ben is advertising in the advert above! In fact, I believe this advert is the first appearance of the infamous orange dress the girls were wearing.

I'm sure you all know that Holland have reached the final and as Marieke and I both have Dutch heritage (although Marieke can actually speak the language), we'll be cheering for them on Sunday.

Who do you want to win?

I was slightly disheartened to hear that Paul, the score-predicting Octopus, had plumped for a Spanish victory although I'm also reliably informed that there's a parrot in Singapore who's put his money on the Dutch.

So will it be the octopus or the parrot who gets it right?

Posted by Simon Bedford (Producer, Hoipolloi)
And thanks to TwicePix for the image

Theatre and Football

In what is my penultimate blog post (sniffle, sob) Simon has set me a challenge which should definitely earn me an 'advanced blogging' certificate (if this doesn't exist yet, it should) before I leave next week. I have been instructed to write a blog post about the World Cup. Although this may seem relatively easy considering the fact that the World Cup is happening now and everyone is talking about it, my knowledge of the Beautiful Game is limited (although at least I know that it is called the Beautiful Game, so it's not totally disasterous) and finding a way of fusing theatre and football into one beautiful combination like peanut butter and jam is not a well trodden path I fear.

Typing 'theatre and football' into Google came up with lots about football but very little about its relationship to theatre. Oh Google, you are usually so reliable but you have failed me miserably. However, I did find one little thing: a prediction that West End ticket sales will plummet by 20% during the World Cup. So clearly a fifth of people who go to West End shows are also hardcore footie fans. Who knew?

In order to increase my chances of a successful search I then tried 'plays about football'. This was even less successful than the first attempt, which let's face it wasn't successful at all, thus making this one pretty much catastrophic. This time round I was just given many instructions on how to play football. I don't really want to learn how to play thank you. After an embarrassing few years of team sports at school (turns out I can only manage solitary sporting pursuits like cross country running and swimming) I am loathe to revisit that particular kind of humiliation linked to netball skirts, muddy hockey pitches, brightly coloured airtex shirts and the like.

So on my search went and it bore very little fruit until I found out that...

The Albany theatre in Deptford - which is clearly ahead of the time - in spite of an apparent lack of enthusaism for 'theatreandfootball' across the rest of the country, is trying to bridge the gap between theatre and sport and will be screening many of the matches in the theatre. Plus they have commissioned performance poets Charlie Dark, Scroobius Pop, Kat Francois and Polarbear to present pre-match football stories. Wow.

So there you have it, at last a successful result. Let's hope England fare better in their matches than I have done in my quest...

Thanks to katie@! for the photo