On Friday we went to the National Maritime Museum to see Book Slam in a unique setting.
Comedienne compere Felicity Ward introduced the acts in a Samuel Pepys Show Special.
I’d not realised that the famous diary of Pepys, a philandering naval administrator, had been so extensively censored over the centuries.
Ben Brandreth, who has written a novel about Shakespeare’s lost year, made a case for Pepys having invented a new genre.
He said that Claire Tomalin, Pepys’s best biographer, pointed out that his nine volumes of rapid, candid jottings through the 1660s allowed readers to see, for the first time ever, a writer’s inner life as well as his external life, to understand how an ordinary man did extraordinary things.
Pepys gave posterity an eye-witness account of the Great Fire of London in 1666.
After Ben a young rapper, Kareem Parkins-Brown, told us, sometimes wittily, about his family circumstances.
Alex Marshall, a political journalist, said that Pepys loved music but loved sex more. His book Republic or Death!: Travels in Search of National Anthems explores the circumstances in which various national anthems came into being
The Chaps Choir, 40 guys with braces, some beards and a few hats, persuaded us to sing along with them. That was good fun and something different.
Top of the bill was Will Self, a novelist of ideas, who did a specially commissioned piece about the Greenwich area, one of his favourite parts of London. I’d experienced Will twice before and reckon he’s the most theatrical novelist I’ve seen live.
He made us realise that 17th century London was a dirty, marshy place with chickens and livestock everywhere underfoot. The city’s population of over 300,000 had to find their way around with very few landmarks or large buildings, just an occasional church spire in the distance.
All things considered, a stimulating evening.
And it only took an hour to come home on the DLR and Jubilee Line.