The Pink Suit

1995 The Pirates of Penzance Samuel

1993 The Gondoliers The Duke of Plaza-Toro

1992 The Mikado Pooh-Bah

Alex began his MUGSS career in 1992, playing Pooh-bah in The Mikado. Thanks to acres of padding and an absurd Fu Manchu moustache, he just about got away with it. The following year, however, his dramatic limitations were cruelly exposed when, playing the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers, he gave, save for the gut and the 'tache, an identically mannered and overblown performance.

This time the critics were not so kind, and the next season the producers, unable to stomach the prospect of a third inept hybrid of Basil Fawlty and Michael Barrymore, cast him into the wilderness. The period which followed would later become known as "the sherry years", during which Alex staggered about in a moldering overcoat, swigging from a bottle of "Nobility" British sherry and shouting. His aggressive assertion (delivered to those who failed to get out of the way quick enough and accompanied by a heady perfume of Special Brew and gum disease) that "I'm gonna be a fuckin' star" seemed then, as it does now, pathetically wide of the mark.

In 1995 came the chance of a kind of redemption. Denied the part of the Pirate King owing to his being taller than he is wide, he was offered as a sop the hitherto under-examined role of the Pink Suit. Taking as his theatrical inspiration the work of Charles Hawtree and John Inman, he delivered a performance so mind-blowingly incongruous that many in the audience believed they had come to the wrong show and left. The Kirkby Lonsdale show was a masterclass in total and wilful misunderstanding of an audience's frame of reference.

Mercifully, Alex was never seen on the MUGSS stage again. Having alienated those few people who had any time for him in the first place he announced his intention to move to London to "take my singing seriously". He was recently seen at a Soho "talent" night, offering an off-key Wagnerian interpretation, over a lurching bossanova beat, of Lou Reed's exquisite ballad "Perfect Day".

The twenty drunks present, who had shown only bolshy uninterest towards the other acts, became increasingly aggressive and Alex was forcibly removed from the stage.