(I’d arrived after the matinee and still remember an autograph hunter at the stagedoor asking me, ‘Are you anybody?’ I was tempted to answer him onto… - John Cleese

and we were started, and I fainted. Metaphorically, that is, because at this point my mind stopped and I switched one hundred per cent on to automatic, as had happened before on opening nights: you do all the things you’ve practised, like soldiers attacking a machine-gun nest, you switch your mind off and something takes over and does it all for you, provided – PROVIDED – you don’t think. Or even think about thinking. So when I was cued for my first line, the something did it for me. I was then taken to stand on my next mark, and when it was time for me to speak, it did my line for me again. At which point I was taken and put in front of another camera, and told my headmaster monologue was coming up in ten seconds and ‘Just look into the lens,’ and I stared at the Cyclops-like eye of this weird pile of ironwork, and the first line popped into my head, and the floor manager waved to cue me, and whatever it was started doing my lines for me.

creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn.

It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat — a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God.