The Whingers Awards 2009 – the very worst and the not so bad

With another year rapidly drawing to a close it is time for the Whingers to reflect and indulge themselves in a little more navel gazing – not our own navels, as that would be even duller than usual for you – but the innies and outies of the sometimes fluffy navels of London’s artistic directors, producers, players and theatres and award The Whingies to the most outstanding ones.

But first our own navels: 2009 has been a year of heady excitement for the Whingers. It was a year that saw them inadvertently whip up controversy and heated debate again and again and again.

It was also a year in which artistic differences reared their ugly heads threatening the very fabric of the West End Whingers, a tear in the polyester bed-sheet of their existence so delicate that a clumsily clipped toenail might have been all it took to rent it from headboard to toe straight down the middle.

The Whingers were courted by the British Broadcasting Company, libelled as “muckrakers” in the National Press, lampooned in song and Phil had his pithiest aphorism to date quoted (yet mainly without attribution) by national critics. There was an evening of confusion in which Phil was mistaken for Michael Grandage and the Whingers finally received an award for their artistic endeavours.

And we finally got the opportunity to choose between the Merlot and the Marlowe.

So, without further do, here are the results of the Kentish Town and Vauxhall juries:

Review – Public Property, Trafalgar Studios

A person whose life is spent hovering on the edges of the business of show and whose own name occasionally appears on the sides of buses (and who really should know better) recently, and in all seriousness, asked a Whinger “Do you have a PR?”

How we chortled.

The Whingers may be getting a little grand these days (even grander since being invited to the press night of Public Property and grand enough to turn up a day late to it) but they don’t yet have the resources to employ “people”.

If they were able to engage a publicist it certainly wouldn’t be all-round slimeball Larry De Vries, portrayed in Sam Peter Jackson‘s comedy Public Property by the rather comely Nigel Harman. But well-known newsreader Geoffrey Hammond (Robert Daws) has been caught in a compromising position in a car in a lay-by with a 16 year old boy (Steven Webb**). And unlike Gillian Taylforth he wasn’t just relieving his abdominal pain. So Geoffrey really, really needs Larry’s help if he is to have any chance of saving his career.