JACK RAYMOND

Apart from that I have played the piano on cruise ships, including a voyage 500 miles down the Amazon river, ridden a donkey up a mountain in Haiti, got food poisoning in Madeira, got food poisoning in Casablanca.

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Driven a Jeep from Los Angeles to Chicago, an Alfa Romeo through Texas and also a 1963 Pontiac Catalina (not as glamorous as it sounds) from Maine down to Florida with one arm in a sling.

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Sang one of my songs on Capital Radio. Spent a few months going into BBC London Studios late at night accompanying people on the piano live on air, people whom I didn’t know and couldn’t see, not all of them sober, who phoned in to the radio station and sang songs I didn’t know. Lost a week’s salary at a casino in Curaçao. Went back several weeks later and won most of it back and lost all interest in gambling.

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I ran London’s top cabaret room for two years, completed a 4-year honours degree in languages, trained and qualified as an electrician, completed an 18-month mime and physical theatre course, had a song I wrote played on the radio, worked in the theatre in Canada for 5 months, studied in Poland for 3 months when it was under martial law, hitch-hiked around America and from Texas down to Mexico City, cooked a shark casserole, had my cameo acting role used in the trailer for the original Johnny English movie, had one of my eyes laser-corrected on BBC television, slept through an earthquake in India at the age of 4, and was paid to play the accordion at a wedding in Hull.

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I was joint winner of a stand-up comedy heat at the Newbury Comedy Festival and as a result was selected to compete at the Edinburgh Festival. I have worked on amusement rides at the seaside, was suspected of being a KGB officer while acting in a movie in Moscow, worked in a pie factory for a week before being fired, worked in a medical doll factory for a week before being fired, and worked as a Christmas postman without being fired.

I have been paid to translate for a Siberian shaman and made safety announcements in Spanish. I have missed a couple of flights as well as a cruise ship I was working on and acted in a popular television series as a sailor who died of toxic waste poisoning in the sea off Jersey. I have sunk in a small boat in Cornwall, been bitten by a macaw and nearly been killed on a motorcycle in Surrey and in a car in Ohio. 

Leaving all that aside, it’s been a fairly quiet life.