The comedy of errors

Like Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and the Veneration of the Reserved Host, Holiday Club is an annual rite. At least, it is where I come from.

It's really quite a feat. For four days in August, a couple of hundred primary school age children flock to our church for a programme of fun and silly games, all managed by CRB-registered volunteers and teenagers of the parish in a truly professional manner. And yes, we try to get a Christian message across, but it's in a church, you know, so join the dots.

Oh, and don't forget the songs. Some really quite fun, some truly, truly, horribly, awful. You grit your teeth, stick your hands in your pockets (in case you feel drawn into doing the actions) and remind yourself that this is the faith that gave the world Verdi's Requiem and the Missa Solemnis, so clearly God has a sense of humour. Anyway. Kids get out of the home, the parents get some hours to themselves, everyone's happy.

And the highlight - for me, because it's my sole involvement and doesn't even involve having to turn up, though I like to if I can - is the drama. A scene each day, humourous and light hearted yet embodying that day's themes. These are great fun to write and to watch and as far as I can see to perform, usually by talented teenage actors who get a little taller and deeper voiced each year.

For the first couple of years I wrote these from scratch. Lately the organisers have got off-the-peg ones from Scripture Union or somesuch that require some adapting. Sometimes the adaptation is very light - say, there's five scenes that have to be condensed into four, as Holiday Club only runs for four days. Sometimes the work is heavier because the drama was written by someone who once had "funny" described to him by a bloke he met in the pub, but as neither of them had much sense of humour to start with it hasn't really worked.

This year's tended towards that end of the spectrum. The basic plot was the rivalry between two airlines at Kingdom (of Heaven) Airport. In the original version one of the airlines was called FAG, which really had to go, whether you subscribe to the US or UK interpretation of the word, so it became RASH - the Reliable Airline Syndicate of High Flyers, which wasn't called RASH-fuh because that would sound silly, and which opened the door to all kinds of jokes about "my RASH is still growing" and the like.

And the last scene, get this, revolved around a briefcase exploding. The organisers felt that the subtext of airport terrorism, and the King of Heaven blowing up his loyal subjects, was a little outré for a drama aimed at children, so my revised and somewhat more lighthearted version involved an actor being convinced the briefcase would explode, and trying to stop another actor from opening it, and the latter actor opening it anyway and finding a bit of paper marked BANG.

It would all have been so much more effective if the poor boy had been able to open the briefcase at all ... Memo to stagehands: don't supply as props briefcases with combination locks for which no one on stage has the combination.

Still, the young actors improvised their way through it with great aplomb - the net effect was still that it didn't actually explode, which was all that was really needed - and the comedy was heightened.

My favourite of all the Holiday Club dramas still has to be one I wrote from scratch some years ago, about the adventures of Paul Saint, the demon traffic cop who has a change of heart and becomes a rally driver. Can you spot the symbolism? Can you, I ask? Anyway, I've decided to make it available here.