A Knight Knows The Weekly: Maintaining Britain's Standards
DANGEROUS BEDFELLOWS
The Mr Pillowhead smothering slipcase

Apple-pie sheet prank topped by a giant plug of concrete slamming down out of the ceiling

Alarmingly grotesque teddy bear

Hot water bottle that's really a disguised lion
Performance Artist
Embryo
The stage is bare and in darkness. A single spotlight fires up and follows me as I enter, from the left, limping alternately on the left and right leg. I am carrying a Nike holdall, its reverse side decorated seemingly erratically with newspaper clippings of naval disasters. I stop, centre-stage, and stare unblinking at the audience until two people accidentally let out simultaneous nervous coughs. Immediately, I plunge my right arm in the bag and snatch out a masonry hammer. The audience sees it was made in Chechnya. Screaming obscenities, I begin pounding my naked feet with it.
(Duration - 2 hours 15 minutes.)

I Am George Sanders's Sleeves
The audience is admitted by a bag lady wearing a wedding dress dyed in Mussolini's favourite colour. I am among them, having queued for eight minutes after arriving from a second-floor flat above a laundrette two streets away. They do not know me. We shuffle to our seats, and I too ignore the six foldaway plastic chairs placed in a crescent nearer the stage, on which is a child's paddling pool covered with an enormously blown-up photograph of a woman's weeping face. She has just slapped her fiancé for revealing he is not Welsh, but only Welsh-like. I take a seat two away from my nearest neighbour. There is an expectant buzz of talk. I suck on a mint. The lights are drawn down to a migraine glimmer over a period of 12 minutes, and it is announced via the PA at bawling volume that I have been struck by a taxi on the way to the theatre, and the performance is cancelled. I leave with the audience, copying the expressions of a couple who were a row in front of me, and return alone to a different flat, this one directly facing a Mothercare. Here I prepare a roast in silence until someone buys a Winnie the Pooh bedspread, at which point I hurl all kitchenware to the floor and attempt to tear off my clothes. We see the clothes are glued to my skin.
(Duration - 48 minutes.)

Lunch in Elysium
A small square is marked out on the playing field of a primary school. In it Mikael, naked and hairless, masturbates furiously until he passes out from dehydration while I look on motionless. As he loses consciousness, I turn and spit in the direction of the jungle gym.
(Duration - 55 minutes to 4 days, depending on the humidity.)

Eleemosynary Jealousy Ballet
I crouch in a cage of dogs, each whelped on a Tuesday. A sack crudely adorned to resemble Guy Fawkes with an angel's wings is pulled on in a wheelchair. The sack is labelled "Potatoes" but it does not contain potatoes; it contains a sack containing potatoes. The potatoes are rotten, but the odour is concealed by a full can of Glade dangerously pierced and spilled across the hessian weave. The cage is opened and the dogs bound out towards a giant papier-mache vagina. I pull the door closed from the inside. Which of my ballet is now free? The answer is written on a balloon I release through the bars while shouting the names of the actors playing the Magnificent Seven in every Magnificent Seven film except The Magnificent Seven itself. I have never seen my brother's face.
(Duration - 17 seconds.)

Conditioning
Suspended by my feet from the ceiling, I declare "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with... T." The audience shouts out suggestions. I reject them all.
(Duration - 92 minutes, or until someone says "Give us a clue.")

The Stork
(One-off performance - its uniqueness defining its totality - July 3-4 1987, Staatsgalerie der Kunst und Freikörperkultur, Berlin.)
In a space defined by the onlookers, I squat naked and gorge myself on lard until, bloated and gagging, I slip into a blackout induced by excess and self-loathing. I defy asphyxiation. While I lie on the edge of coma, my distended stomach moves against the flawless, smooth, white flooring in angry peristaltic waves. After some hours, the audience leaves, but I remain, my body temperature dropping and my skin developing an eerily waxy, yellowish sheen. The lights flicker out as the gallery closes. I remain. In the distance a security guard watches a World Cup qualifier on a portable television in his small room. I remain.

I remain.

The next day there is a sudden judder. But it is not me. It is the gallery's heating system lurching into life. Not my life. Its life. But no one is there to see, so what is its life and what is mine remains ill-defined, free from any viewer-imposed gestalt. The cleaners find me and telephone the police. The police cannot come, because Mikael has stapled his eyelids to the double doors at the entrance of the nearest police station, one each side, preventing egress. He alternately sobs, laughs and rages against cutlery in a torrent of blasphemy and innuendo.

A woman shrieks. It is my mother.

The cleaners throw water on my face to revive me, because the gallery opens in 20 minutes and they have to get on. I stagger out of the door, wrapped in dust sheets, just as the people are arriving. But they are not the same people who came yesterday, and they know it.
(Duration - 18 hours 4 minutes.)
WORD ON THE STREET
A40

Look Right

Slow

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No Left Turn
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