Paul Atherton - SimpleTV: 2021

Friday 31 December 2021

Happy New Year - A 2021 Update....

Happy New Year Everyone!

So here we are again, another end to another year and as ever, I always love to share what I achieved over the past 12 months, especially as sometimes I completely forget what I've done until I go back over diaries and posts.

Often I barely believe I've done anything at all through out the year then I begin writing and researching and discover that 365 days of life I've been gifted again did indeed get filled with some amazing moments and good news, when often it's just the failures I'll recall.

January 2021

The year started brilliantly, we were still in lockdown and I pretty much had London all to myself, a far cry from the end of the year, this year, with hacking tourist jammed into tube trains and buses cheek by jowl... Ew!

But January 2021 I'm centre attention for the campaign to save the Crobar in Central London as I appear in the documentary film alongside rock legends like, but it's the trailer that gets everyone excited... as it's just me!

https://totalrock.com/documentary-to-save-soho-venue-crobar-announced/

My first appearance on Eddie Nestor's Drivetime Radio Show on BBC London discussing why Westminster Housing is utterly failing at it's job.
https://twitter.com/londonerslondon/status/1354016320963174401?lang=bg

February 2021

The Kings Fund Podcast comes out with me, Dame Louise Casey former Government Tsar for Rough Sleeping discussing what went wrong with the Everyone In Scheme and how the Government are both the cause of the problem and the block to solving it.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/audio-video/podcast/sleeping-rough-covid-19-public-health

March 2021

My first ever virtual Birthday Party which meant I could unite friends from all over the world including dear friend Patrcik Savage, from London first violinist for the Musical Hamilton who gave me the absolute pleasure of watching the show sat next to him in the pit last year. Rob Schwimmer who played the Theramin for Paul Simon in New York and Logan Sparks in Los Angeles, who co-wrote the last script for Harry Dean-Stanton's last ever film, the best send off an actor could ever ask before shaking off their mortal coils â€“ Lucky. All hosted in a virtual Phoenix Artist's Club built in SpatialChat.

It was also awards month. I was part of the pitching team that secured the Museum of Homelessness the Gulbenkian Prize for Civic Arts Organisation.
https://gulbenkian.pt/uk-branch/recipients-announced-for-the-first-150000-award-for-civic-arts-organisations/

My performance, along with Peter Tatchell & others was nominated for an Offie (Off West End) Award as part of Jeremy Goldstein's Truth To Power Cafe at Conway Hall and achieved a commendation.
https://offies.london/oncomm-awardees-2020/

April 2021

Make my 4th appearance on Men's Radio this time with Russ Kane & the fabulous Phil Dave having already been selected as their Emotional Well Being Champion in 2019.
https://mensradiostation.com/november-2019-paul-atherton/

May 2021

My & Private Eye Cartoonist Mike Stokoe unveil our first collaboration and my first ever cartoon strip with the 2 part serial of The Best of Times... The Worst of Times... a Hogarthian inspired journey to what really happened during Everyone In against what should have happened.

https://thecartoonmuseum.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/best-of-times-worst-of-times-an-interview-with-paul-atherton/

Outside In, the Theatre piece by the Malvern Reaction Theatre company that I was commissioned to write a workshop play for and that was inspired by my story, is premiered to sell out audiences in the Malvern Cube.

https://www.slapmag.co.uk/theatre-review-outside-in-at-malvern-cube/

Make the 5^th of our 10 subjects for my and Chris Harvey's Paul Atherton's Greatest Londoners, Black Female Talent now scheduled to take place in 2022. The follow up to the show we did at the Oxo Gallery last year.
https://coinstreet.org/whats-on/paul-athertons-greatest-londoners

https://twitter.com/LondonersLondon/status/1398195387274563584?s=20

My Arts Council England grant funding was issued for the first round for Displaced, but because of bureaucratic incompetence it remains unpaid.
https://www.thersa.org/blog/2019/09/a-societal-shift-in-thinking-to-solve-homelessness

Planet Radio â€“ my 1^st appearance, this one talking about the rise in homelessness expected later in the year.
https://planetradio.co.uk/hits-radio/london/news/calls-for-law-which-criminalises-homelessness-to-be-scrapped/

June 2021

Over the moon to be able announce that I'd secured the British Library as producer for Amy Kingsmill's fabulous memorial and performance piece Lighstource, to host an entire day's event as the finale to 12 months of lectures.
http://www.light-source.co.uk/contact/

July 2021

My Letter from Lockdown is accompanied by Paul McCartney's, Ed Sheeran, Nicola Adam's in a compilation by former news anchor, Natascha Kaplinsky's bbok, published to raise funds for Barnardo's Children'ts charity.
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/natasha-kaplinsky/letters-from-lockdown/9781526364555/

My film review of Nick Broomfileds latest documentary Last Man Standing is published in Tortoise Media's Sensemaker.

And I make my second appearance in Nouvara Media talking about the time I was given the choice between having my disability benefits stopped or going to my mother's funeral.
https://novaramedia.com/2021/07/13/jobcentre-staff-were-taught-to-inflict-psychological-harm-on-the-unemployed/

Meet Bianca Nugent-Smith.

August 2021

September 2021

I'm invited to be one of the main speakers the Museum of The Home's first ever Festival Of Home having only been open for (this used to the Geffrye Museum and exploted the history of the room before closing in 2018 for a majoy refit.
https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/explore/museum-in-action/festival-of-home-2021-all-about-belonging/

October 2021

Massively overjoyed to be asked to be a part of the Museum of Homelessness, immersive, verbatim theatre, the Secret Museum an event that last just 11 days, with 3 shows each day and reached an audience of over 1,200 we also made Time Out's Top Ten Things To Do in London that week.
https://tinctureofmuseum.wordpress.com/2021/11/08/the-secret-museum-museum-of-homelessness-nov-2021/

November 2021

My first ever academic work gets published by Oxford University Press in the British Academy's â€œRepresenting Homelessnessâ€ index, a 10,000 word chapter entitled The Power of One: The media and homeless stereotypes.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/representing-homelessness-9780197267240?lang=en&cc=us

I was incredibly fortuitous to be the only person able to collect my copy from the venerable British Academy building

December 2021

On the 1^st December I premiered my & Owain Aistle's documentary 90 Days of Hope: Why Britain Chose NOT To End Homelessness at the Genesis Cinema on the Mile End Road in London. This was a fundraiser for the Museum of Homelessness and as ever we surrounded it wtth an afterparty where friends Paul Wiffen played keyboard and Julia Sterland painted Prima Verta portraits to all raise money.

The coverage came in The Big Issue Magazine & Times Radio and we were even listed on the online Radio Times.
https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/this-man-was-sleeping-at-heathrows-terminal-5-when-covid-hit-now-hes-made-a-film-about-it/

https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-3rbxkn/90-days-of-hope-why-britain-chose-not-to-end-homelessness/

This was followed up by some local coverage when the National Lottery talked about its successes and included the Museum of Homelessness,

So by no means great, but by no means a disaster.

Happy New Year Everyone.

Much Love.

P.

Friday 9 April 2021

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils - Could change everything for me... but probably won't!

I've never been this nervous... possibly the minutes before my first professional theatre performance a few years ago, acting in Human Mating dance, came close, or maybe my driving test in Cardiff in 1986 where my nerves couldn't be placated with alcohol.... but they only come close to the tension waiting for the Long List announcement of the Orwell Prize on Twitter in 15 minutes.

As ever, something massive always happens on a day I'm waiting for life changing news.

A person was mauled at London Zoo when the press were carrying a big news story about my newly launched Lingerie delivery company A Touch of Silk when I was twenty one in 1990 & my story got pushed from page 2 to 13.

When I won the case to be finally legally recognised as my son's father, my barrister was surprised I wasn't overjoyed, but I had an overwhelming sense of unease and rushed to phone my mother... she didnt answer... the answerphone didn't pick up... rationality usurped intuition and I put it down, unreasonably to a catalogue of coincidences.

I left the court uncomfortably, met friends in the pub to celebrate, then I get a call from the hospital... Mum had, had the stroke that would end her independent life for good.

As it is too today, stomach churning, breathless, eager to rush to the toilet repeatedly, constantly checking the clock... waiting for the tweet that could my impending eviction back to the streets, national news breaks on my twitter stream

The Queen's husband, Prince Phillip, had died.

You couldn't make it up.

Today of all days. He's been seriously ill for weeks. He came out of hospital last week. He's had a great innings almost making it to a century, but he picked today to die.

Then unbelievably, the owner of the residence, totally unexpectedly, comes to tell me, that he's not be paid the rent for the past 6 months by Westminster Council.

I've been residing in his residence since being picked up from Heathrow Airport where I'd been sleeping for the past two years, as part of the cohorts who were housed under Boris Johnson's "Everyone In" in hotel rooms (mine is a hotel apartment) since April 3rd 2020 and explaining he's going to have to evict me.

All this, ironically, would normally make me feel like I had a good chance of making the cut for the Orwell Prize, but learning this news didn't change the sense of forboding I had, that I had sensed for the past 3 days, that the news was not going to be good.

Why the nerves, I can feel you thinking, what difference does it make if a homeless person is given an acccolade for his writing.

Well to begin with it acknowledges the fight. Unlike paid journalists, citizen journalists write purely for the intent of change. Unlike their staffed counterparts doing their job the personal journalist exposes themsleves fully and unashamedly to public gaze, to be scrutinised for their every decision by complete starngers and indeed, those who do, or think they do, know them well.

Everything you write is about your own experience, your own emotions, you at your most vulnerable. You don't have the buffer of speaking on someone else's behalf as many other writers do.

It also acknowledges the struggle, being homeless, means you're not touch typing on manicured keyboards and reading your efforts on perfectly lit screens. Instead you're using finger and thumb on a cracked screen of an out of date Samsung Galaxy A6 Tablet, with intermittent copy & paste capabilities, writing in a notes app, that has a maximum word count that comes with no warning.

No nice MS Word or Apple Ink. If you have Wifi you may get access to Google Docs but more often you'll be using the body of an email to compose your work and hoping editors and others will understand, the lack of word counts, garmmar and the errors caused by a cracked screen, which makes typing almost impossible.

But the biggest reason for the nerves is the accolade of a homeless man being in the running to winning a writing prize is newsworthy. It would be talked about in reverant terms and with it the power of the media to assist my plight.

Being in the limelight forces politicians to listen, local Authorities to act, lawyers to engage, social services to be put on notice, MPs to engage where they haven't, the DWP to be investigated.

So the award isn't an ego thing, it's a survival thing... with days bedridden this past week due to my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome trapping me inside unable to move or speak, I need something to give me hope to keep me going to help me win my Kafkaesque battles...

Just making the shortlist could have done that...

But while I've been writing this...it's been announced... my intuition as ever was on the money...

I wasn't selected.

-------------------------------------

The articles that were submitted for consideration

My article for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism entitled, I've Gone From Homeless at Heathrow to a Hotel, Where Next? 26th June 2020

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2020-06-26/opinion-paul-atherton-from-homeless-at-heathrow-to-a-hotel-and-back-out-again

The Letter from Lockdown I wrote & audio record for Tortoise Media, My World, Now Yours. 13th May 2020

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/05/13/members-letters-from-lockdown-paul-atherton-audio/

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/05/13/members-letters-from-lockdown-paul-atherton-transcript/

https://twitter.com/tortoise/status/1264541817141370880?s=20

A commission for Bristol University Press, Transforming Society, Blog; Homelessness & Covid19. The Reality Behind The Promise. 20th April 2020.

https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2020/04/20/homelessness-and-covid-19-the-reality-behind-the-promises/

And my 7 day Twitter take over of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism account, with two twitter stories, one in the morning, one in the evening, expressing my feelings and emotion as I counted down the last 7 days to my impending eviction at the end of Boris Johnson's "Everyone In" initiative on 3rd July 2020, which housed those experiencing homelessness in hotel rooms for the duration of lockdown (which was supected to be three months and was never reinstated).

#PaulsStory #OffTheStreets

Introduction - 10:07am - 26th June 2021
https://twitter.com/bureaulocal/status/1276441989534420993?s=19

Paul Atherton - SimpleTV

Friday 31 December 2021

Happy New Year - A 2021 Update....

Friday 9 April 2021

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils - Could change everything for me... but probably won't!

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