iInformation, Communication & Society (2008), pp. 1111-1131./ibr /br /The increasing use of Internet-based dating services as a means to meet strangers online to potentially form intimate relationships offline, raises concerns about trust and identity. The established social practices of introductions or meeting with stranger's offline are supported by a set of social rules and rituals that have been described as courtship. There is an absence of such courting rules or guidelines for interaction in mediated dating environments. This means that individuals have to understand for themselves the rules that shape how they should behave. On the basis of the analysis of Internet newsgroups discussions this article puts forward an ideal type continuum about eDating expectations and experiences. The continuum leads discussion about how men and women eDaters are seeking to comprehend the rules for interaction that establish a reciprocated communication with other online strangers.br /iMariann Hardey/i

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/78946?ns=guardianpageName=Music%3A+Under+the+radar%2C+over+the+topch=Musicc3=The+Guardianc4=Electronic+music%2CAlexis+Petridis+on+pop%2CCulture+section%2CClubbing+%28Music%29%2CMusicc5=Pop+Music%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CElectronic+and+Dancec6=Alexis+Petridisc7=2008_12_05c8=1128673c9=articlec10=GUc11=Musicc12=Electronic+musicc13=c14=h2=GU%2FMusic%2FElectronic+music" width="1" height="1" //divpChristine looks about 15. She is wearing a pair of vertiginously heeled ankle boots that make her both tall and a little wobbly and which form the basis of a pretty remarkable ensemble. She is also wearing fluorescent tights, a clashing fluorescent tutu, a T-shirt that she appears to have accessorised by snapping a glowstick in two and splashing its luminous contents over herself, a pair of lens-less glasses that also glow in the dark, and an expression of profound suspicion. The suspicion is aimed in my direction. "You," she says, narrowing her eyes, "don't look like a raver. What are you doing here?"/ppThis is a question I started asking myself the moment I walked into Aberdeen's AECC Exhibition Centre, where the second Clubland Live arena tour of 2008 is in full swing. Ignored or derided as the apotheosis of cheesy, worthless pop by the mainstream media, Clubland is nevertheless Britain's "biggest-selling dance brand" - Clubland and its parent label, All Around the World, have spawned 21 No 1 albums, millions of record sales, sellout tours, and their own TV channel - and the place is accordingly thronged with kids: primary school children accompanied by parents wearing weary expressions, gangs of adolescent girls striding around arm in arm, boys playfighting and getting each other in headlocks, and older teenagers whose unsteady gait suggests Grampian police's rigorous attempts to stop underage drinking before the event have met with only partial success. /ppRegardless of age, everyone is going berserk. The uproar is continuous. Everyone screams at everything all the time - the performers onstage who do their 20 minutes and scuttle off; the DJs who fill in between them playing thumping hardcore remixes of Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl, the Sugababes' About You Now and, most startling of all, Cascada's unlikely cover version of Patti Smith's Because the Night. At one point, an announcement about the venue's regulations regarding flash photography comes over the PA, and goes down like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. When the fans really like something, they express their approval by pelting the stage and each other with glowsticks. The really big acts appear to be performing under a kind of neon hailstorm./ppIf Clubland's audience isn't discombobulating enough to an outsider, there are Clubland's stars to contend with. If you're over 21, it seems highly unlikely that any of their names will ring much of a bell, unless you've been paying very close attention to the album charts or glued to Clubland TV: Kelly Llorenna, September, Eyeopener, Cascada, N-Force, Darren Styles. You won't have heard them on Radio 1 - the station will have little to do with them. Clubland's architects, Matt Cadman and Cris Nuttall of All Around the World, claim that at one juncture they were told by a station representative that they weren't interested because All Around the World released "music for kids who live on council estates". "That was one of our favourites," Cadman says. "In fairness, the people at Radio 1 have changed since then, so you can't really pin that one on them, but I think that statement still has an underlying truth to it. It's perceived Clubland doesn't reach the kind of people Radio 1 wants to attract." Clubland TV, meanwhile, was set up in response to the lack of interest other music channels showed in playing that kind of music./ppTellingly, Cadman says All Around the World began in the early 90s, releasing big northern rave anthems like Love Decade's Is This a Dream? and Control's Dance With Me (I'm Your Ecstasy) - "records that no one else understood, that were popular in the north-west, but no one knew about in London and that remains true to this day"./ppCertainly there's still a noticeable regional bias to Clubland's appeal (this tour goes no further south than Birmingham, although the cancellation of a date in Plymouth apparently had more to do with logistics than a lack of demand). And since the release of the first Clubland compilation album in 2002, Cadman and Nuttall do seem to have constructed a genuine youth phenomenon out of the most unlikely ingredients: a selection of thunderingly uncool sub-genres of dance music that seem to have a peculiar appeal to teenagers too young to go clubbing - bouncy scouse house, happy hardcore, pop trance - and a stable of artists that you suspect wouldn't get past reception at any other record company. /ppThere is Ultrabeat, two Liverpudlian DJs called Chris and Mike. Chris and Mike are funny, friendly and charming and have a string of hits to their name, notably the 2003 smash Pretty Green Eyes, but, with the best will in the world, more closely resemble plumbers than pop stars, a fact rather underlined by their videos. These usually feature Chris and Mike looking a bit lost while women in suspenders lasciviously gyrate around them. "We've had things before where channels have gone, 'Oh, we don't want to play the Ultrabeat video, I don't like the guy in it.' But I'm slightly bored with the celebrity thing where everybody's got to look a certain way," Cadman says. "We're going, 'This is the guy who made this record,' and I think people relate to that, rather than some good-looking faccedil;ade." As if to prove his point, no sooner do I sit down with Matt and Chris than a lady asks for their autographs for her teenage daughter. "Nice to be nice, innit?" says Chris when she departs. "We're all normal people, everyone's the same, aren't they?"/ppThen there is Blackout Crew, Bolton's faintly terrifying tracksuit- and hair-gel- heavy progenitors of a genre called donk, whose last video, Put a Donk On It, has thus far racked up more than 3m hits on YouTube. There is Darren Styles, a former happy hardcore producer who finds himself, at 34, a slightly baffled teeny pin-up, purveying music that, on the basis of his Clubland live set, often sounds not unlike a Coldplay piano ballad sung in an Essex accent and inexplicably retooled with thumping 160bpm beats. "It's a bit daunting for me, to be honest," he says. "I enjoy it, but you spend 12 years standing behind the decks then you're put out in front of a huge crowd in a spotlight with a microphone, and it's completely out of my comfort zone." /ppAnd, most successful of all, there is Scooter, a novelty German rave act who emerged in the early 90s and managed to spin out their expected 15 minutes of fame into 14 years. Imagine if the people who made Sesame's Treet had gone on to release 13 albums and sell more than 14m records worldwide, and you get some idea of the sheer improbability of Scooter's career, although to really grasp how bizarre it is, you need to be conversant with their oeuvre, which is nuts. Scooter have variously released rave versions of Soft Cell's Sex Dwarf, Marian by the Sisters of Mercy, Hava Nagila, and the theme tune to Miss Marple. /ppThey've also recorded a medley of Shut Up and Dance's 1991 hardcore hit Raving I'm Raving with a bagpipe rendition of Scotland the Brave, and not one but two songs inspired by the work of forgotten mid-80s John Peel favourites Stump. Their current big thing is jumpstyle, a sort of synchronised hopping dance popular in the Netherlands, which Scooter have promoted with singles called Jumping All Over the World and Jump That Rock, a collaboration with Status Quo. If you feel like sniggering at this as precisely the kind of thing that causes British music fans to feel vastly superior to their clueless continental counterparts, it's worth noting that, with minimal radio play or media coverage - though there was a video clip shown on Zane Lowe's MTV show Gonzo, which the excitable Kiwi claimed was evidence that "music is finally dead" - Scooter's last album entered the British charts at No 1, knocking Madonna off the top spot. /ppBackstage in Aberdeen, their dressing room features plenty of rock star trappings, including a cooler full of vodka, a watchful manager there to ensure I don't overrun my allotted 15 minutes of face time, an immense PA system that apparently forms part of their pre-gig ritual - "for one hour, very loud music, a few drinks to get you in the mood" - and a certain bullishness about the derision their music attracts. They have, they tell me, recently been the subject of a series of paintings by a German artist called Albert Oehlen, who on his website claims to be "fascinated" by Scooter, "because they have no content, only form". Nevertheless, questions about Scooter's longevity are met with a shrug from frontman HP Baxxter, resplendent in skull rings and Black Sabbath T-shirt. "We never stop," he offers. "Nearly every year there is a new album. Maybe that's the reason why we've lasted so long." /ppThen again, bafflement at your own success is very much a Clubland trademark. Despite the success of the albums and the TV channel, Cadman and Nuttall managed to convince themselves the first Clubland tour would be a disaster: it sold out. Darren Styles says he thought his debut solo album would sell around 20,000 copies. It sold 22,000 in a week and entered the charts at No 4. "Coldplay were No 1, then Duffy, then Neil Diamond, then me. It was absolutely bizarre."/ppPerhaps their surprise stems from the fact that everything about Clubland seems somehow wrong: it's as if it exists in a hermetically sealed bubble, apart from the rest of the music industry, where all the usual rules are turned on their heads. The artists are clearly huge stars despite the media blackout. (Styles actually thinks they might be successful because of the media blackout: "Maybe the fact that it's not so in your face, it's not all over TV and radio accounts for it's appeal - it seems a bit underground, it's not something that your mum and dad are listening to.") The TV channel is a huge success, despite disobeying the most basic principles of a music channel. "If the video's a bit average, music channels in general go, we love the track, but video's a bit cheap, so we're not going to show it," says Nuttall. "We would have a completely different view from that because if the track's brilliant and the video's a bit average, not big budget, who cares? Kids don't sit there watching TV going, 'Oh, they must have only spent a hundred grand on the video, I'm not watching it.' They like the tune, pure and simple."/ppAnd the All Around the World label sells vast quantities of CDs to precisely the audience that everyone assumes never buys CDs. "If you're a 15-year-old and you can work a computer, you can go and get a track you want in 30 seconds, it's really not that difficult," Cadman says. "So singles have become less valuable because people just steal them or Bluetooth them to each other in the playground. The value then becomes in the album. If the album genuinely is good, if there's not one tune and nine fillers, if there's three or four singles on it, the pound;8.99 in Asda or Tesco starts to seem like a bargain. For pound;8.99, I'm not going to download it all, I might as well pay for it. You've just got to encourage the value for money, and then records will sell physically. Clubland compilations have 60 tracks on them, take us months to compile, and sell for 10 quid. People trust us, because me and Chris genuinely love the music. It's not cool or perceived to be cool, but it's what we love. We'll sail with it and no doubt we'll go down with it when it stops selling."/ppBut there's no sign of that happening for the foreseeable future. The crowd in Aberdeen don't look like they'll be changing their allegiances any time soon. As Scooter take the stage, the hail of glowsticks grows denser than ever: HP Baxxter never flinches or falters, despite the surprising number of them that hit him squarely in the face. They play their medley of Raving I'm Raving and Scotland the Brave, but no one other than me seems bemused. They play Jumping All Over the World, and a crowd of boys at the back of the hall break into a delighted synchronised jumpstyle routine. Christine wobbles past again on her high heels: "You still here?" I ask her if she's having a good time. "Are you kidding?" she grins. I start to ask her what she likes about Clubland, but but she doesn't hear - the screaming again -and she wobbles away into the crowd./ppa href="http://www.clubland.fm/"Clubland.fm/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/electronicmusic"Electronic music/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/alexispetridis"Alexis Petridis on pop/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/clubs"Clubbing/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/M0rCGLsKbCYwSjNC2am_vyeOyZI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/M0rCGLsKbCYwSjNC2am_vyeOyZI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

via Eurogamer


Lionhead has a title update for Fable II in testing and waiting for finalisation, and has said everything is "coming along nicely".

That's according to the community website, which has also supplied a list of bugs being addressed in the patch.

The Ritual/Monk's quest no longer presents an unresponsive Abbot if you run out of the region before he finishes talking, which is quite a rude thing to do. Still, part of the main quest and that, so even those with no manners ought to be able to continue.

Rescuing Charlie shouldn't prevent interactivity with objects any more, and the Guild Cave Chest should properly reward Limited Collector's Edition, website or Chicken Kickin' items.

The second part of the Spire quest should present a talkative ship's captain, and there will be less getting stuck during Bloodstone quests The Hero of Skill (Pirate King) and T.O.B.Y./Trouble in Bloodstone.

Brilliantly, your children are no longer chosen as assassination targets, and the Furniture Shop in Bowerstone now always has something for sale. In addition, there are a number of unspecified nips and tucks.

Lionhead recently unveiled a whole new island of content for Fable II, which will be here in just over a week, on 12th December.

Knothole Island will add lots more things to do and cost 800 Microsoft Points (GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.60).

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/24710?ns=guardianpageName=Environment%3A+Oh+Christmas+tree%2C+oh+Christmas+treech=Environmentc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Ethical+living+%28Environment%29%2CGreen+Christmas+%28Environment%29%2CEnvironment%2CChristmas+%28Life+and+style%29%2CLife+and+stylec5=Not+commercially+useful%2CEthical+Living%2CChristmasc6=Leo+Hickmanc7=2008_12_04c8=1128849c9=articlec10=GUc11=Environmentc12=blogc13=c14=Ethical+Living+blogh2=GU%2FEnvironment%2Fblog%2FEthical+Living+blog" width="1" height="1" //divpIt's at this point each December where I begin to feel as if I'm being haunted by the ghost of Christmas dilemmas past. Every year most of us go through the ritual of worrying about which Christmas tree to buy, or indeed whether to buy one at all./ppAren't they just a colossal waste of money? Can such a decadent waste of resources be justified in our (supposedly) eco-aware times? (Such cries have been heard for centuries – Oliver Cromwell banged on about the "heathen tradition" of decorated trees, but he had his own all-together-different reasons.)/ppAnd then we buckle and relent as the children at our feet whimper and plead with us to get one. So what are the options for those of us who still want to follow this once-pagan yuletide tradition?/ph2Buy a real tree/h2pThis is still considered the only true option by most tradition-loving followers of Proper Christmas. There's something magical, they say, about the aroma of those pine needles and the presence of a just-felled, real tree in their home. Christmas just wouldn't be the same without one. /ppThe reality is a little less romantic: the vast majority of the trees we buy from garden centres and garage forecourts are intensively farmed on an industrial scale, sometimes beyond these shores. /ppAs with most monocrops, Christmas trees are typically sprayed with potent fertilisers and herbicides such as Monsanto's Roundup (glyphosate). Just how much Christmas cheer does that spread to local biodiversity and the a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/is_6_16/ai_n15895166"seasonal workers hired to harvest the trees/a? Erase from your head any idyllic notion that these trees are carefully scythed from a snow-laden forest floor ready for your home. /ppIn many ways, though, this is a positive. If Christmas trees were gathered this way they would be responsible for deforestation on an epic scale considering that we get through millions of things each year. They also offer some farmers a profitable harvest for otherwise unproductive fields positioned on steep hills./ppThere are some basic things to look out for, though, when sourcing a real tree. The a href="http://www.soilassociation.org/christmas"Soil Association/a has details of retailers selling organic Christmas trees. And the a href="http://www.fsc-uk.org/"Forest Stewardship Council/a has a list showing you how to get hold of an FSC-approved tree. Between them, these standards offer a guarantee that your tree has been farmed sustainably. /ppAnd try to find a tree that's been grown as close to your home as possible – for anyone living outside a large conurbation this usually isn't too tricky as it's usually easy to find a local farmer who sells Christmas trees. Whether they are grown sustainably or not is another matter that only your questioning will uncover./ppIt is also worth considering getting a potted tree, rather than one that has been felled, so that you can use it again, following a wee trim, in subsequent years. The problem, of course, is storage. Not everyone can host a living Christmas tree at home throughout the year even if they are blessed with some outside space. /ppIf you do have to buy a cut tree it is worth finding out first from your local authority whether it offers a Christmas tree collection service whereby it chips up all the trees into mulch. Many local authorities still do not offer such a service which could leave you with the headache of working out what to do with the tree come the twelfth day. Streets strewn with naked trees in early January is usually a good sign you do not live within a progressive local authority./ph2Buy a plastic tree/h2pThis option is often presented as the eco alternative to buying a real tree, but such claims fail to stack up in my view. First, there's the canard that a plastic tree is "for life", whereas most plastic trees are used little more than a handful of years before being discarded. /ppThere's also the claim that a plastic tree prevents a real tree from being cut down, whereas, as has already been mentioned above, Christmas trees are no different from any other farmed crop and are only planted with harvesting in mind./ppAnd do we really want to encourage the production of yet another piece of plastic tat being produced thousands of miles away and shipped around the planet for our seasonal gratification?/ph2Decorate an existing tree/plant/h2pYou may well get a nasty neighbour shouting "Scrooge!" at you through your front window, but some families just decorate a large house plant instead of buying in a cut conifer, as tradition dictates. Decorating a tree in the garden is also an option, although this could leave the presents underneath a tad soggy./ph2Do nothing/h2pHow about just foregoing the whole tradition altogether? (Granted, this is probably a little easier to pull off in child-free homes.) Some charities try to exploit – in the nicest sense – the fact that some of us just don't like to suffer the guilt of excess that comes with Christmas. The Woodland Trust, for example, offers its a href="http://www.woodland-trust.org.uk/christmas/plantatree/"Plant a Tree for Christmas/a gift. For £25, the price of a modest Christmas tree, you will be able to dedicate three trees in a wood of your choice./ppAnd if you want a valid excuse to supply to exasperated family members that explains to them why you have not bought a Christmas tree this year, show them this frankly quite scary clip of a a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mpQRJD5wU"Christmas tree fire/a:/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethicalliving"Ethical living/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/greenchristmas"Green Christmas/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/christmas"Christmas/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/FNEn8kHD6WgPQoIXfHJh0VB-0pY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/FNEn8kHD6WgPQoIXfHJh0VB-0pY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

centerembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dSCLBG9KeX4amp;hl=enamp;fs=1" width="425" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"/embed/centerbr / pAmazing - we never thought the day would come so soon where a new generation of cyborg insects are able to be remote controlled, thanks to implants wired into their nerves. These insects will definitely find a place in any reconnaisance mission, and this technology has already been extended to include a variety of other animals including rats, pigeons and sharks. The whole idea behind this is not to reinvent the wheel - instead, find a way to manipulate what is already in its most optimized form out here. Pretty chilling though, knowing that such technology could possibly be transported and applied onto humans in the future. The zombies of the 21st century, so to speak, without having to resort to voodoo rituals./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/cyborg_animal_could_spy_on_you.html"Cyborg Animal Could Spy On You/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203191957" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203191957?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203191957" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203191957amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fcyborg_animal_could_spy_on_you.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/5fMklXsOyzoh6BVGU6vLBkIq7YE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/5fMklXsOyzoh6BVGU6vLBkIq7YE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=TXug6Vzp"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=hh8ok2s4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=hh8ok2s4" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=RyzG9mTA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=MOXog54f"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=MOXog54f" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=l5b60PxJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=l5b60PxJ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/RaHTGs70NJk" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/69710?ns=guardianpageName=Stage%3A+%27My+whole+life+has+been+a+black+comedy%27ch=Stagec3=The+Guardianc4=Theatre%2CCulture+section%2CJoe+Orton+%28Playwright%29%2CStage%2CTelevision+%28Culture%29c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CTelevision+Media%2CTheatrec6=Catherine+Shoardc7=2008_12_04c8=1128305c9=articlec10=GUc11=Stagec12=Theatrec13=c14=h2=GU%2FStage%2FTheatre" width="1" height="1" //divpIt has been a while since Doon Mackichan was last hung, drawn and quartered for laughing at the suffering of children. There was a week in August 2001 when you couldn't pass a newsstand without seeing her handsome, sparrowhawk face, forehead partially obscured by the word "evil" or "depraved"./ppThe Brass Eye paedophile special is now mostly remembered as virtuoso satire, so it's easy to forget what a stink it caused at the time. And it was Mackichan, who played TV presenter Swanchita Haze, who bore the brunt of it. People expected that sort of thing from Chris Morris, but Doon was a woman with - gulp - children of her own. "[Mackichan] had seen herself as a major comedy force in the making," wrote the Mail. "She even dreamt of becoming a film star. But with the Brass Eye disaster as her epitaph, all those plans lie in tatters."/ppLooking back, it's hard to say her career didn't suffer. There were two more seasons of Smack the Pony, the girly Channel 4 sketch show with Sally Phillips and Fiona Allen, but to diminishing returns. There were wifely roles in ropey sitcoms. There was theatre. Then came a two-year break for unhappier reasons (of which more later). And now she's back, in a play that, well, laughs at the suffering of children. Adults, too. Especially those six feet under. /ppJoe Orton's Loot, like Brass Eye, is comedy that sets out to shock. Don't be fooled by its age; although the play was first performed in 1965, Loot has weathered better than, say, a TV parody of late-90s news shows. Death doesn't date as a cultural taboo; likewise religion. Rereading Loot is like having a shower when you hadn't realised the boiler's broken: unexpectedly shocking./pp"Yep, it's full on," says Mackichan, eating a tuna sandwich between rehearsals in London. "There's this one line about a really great brothel run by Pakistanis who pimp out their kids for Mars bars." She smiles: an attractive smile, heavy on the lippy. "I'm like, 'Oh we'll cut that, won't we?' Well, no, we can't, because what about all the other things people might find offensive? Cut them all and you won't have much of a play left."/ppOther lines trouble her. Orton's gleeful description of a sexual assault, complete with tooth-breaking detail. "That specific image is just really horrible. Do you lose a portion of your audience when you leave that in? Do people stop thinking it's a great play? Or as my mum would say, 'Ooh, Orton's so kinky; yes, I love all that.' " /ppDoon plays Fay, an Irish Catholic home nurse and a prolific serial killer (87 in one week alone). She has lately buried her seventh husband and has her eighth in her crosshairs, having just dispatched his wife with a syringe of poison. Loot takes place on the day of the wife's funeral, and charts the power struggle between Fay, Hal (whose mother is being buried), Dennis, Hal's boyfriend, with whom he has robbed a bank and put the money in mum's coffin, and Detective Truscott, the sinister inspector who comes calling. /ppOrton's stage instructions put Kay in her late 20s; other than that Mackichan, 46, is a good fit. She is Celtic, by nurture at least. She grew up in Surrey but moved to Fife with her family when she was nine. She survived the transition, she says, by acting, specialising in "posh bitches". This is something she still does: she is a natural authoritarian, physically pneumatic, temperamentally tough - a few years back she swam the English channel with a team of paratroopers. /pp"Yes, I could kill someone," she says, without thinking too hard about it. "It must be so easy to just nip a needle in, or hold a pillow over an old person's face. The power and the buzz you'd get." She has been boning up on True Crime magazine to further understand her character's homicidal motivation. "But I just can't read the books. There's such an orgasm about they way they're written. 'Women who kill! Viciously!' When it comes to sex and violence, we're an island of obsessives. I mean, how does it help people to know the details of how someone was physically tortured?"/ppTen years ago, Mackichan got her fingers burned over an Anglican sketch on her Radio 4 show, Doon Your Way, but it hasn't left her any more on-message when it comes to religion. "It's been extraordinary finding out what Catholics actually believe!" she says of the research process. "All the rituals and superstition. The whole voyeurism of talking to someone behind a little screen. The idea that you can think, OK, I'll be a bitch, then on Sunday I'll say, 'Oh, I was a bit of a bitch' and then feel great!"/ppShe is not religious herself, "but I don't think I'm in an atheistic universe. I do think there's a higher power". Has she ever prayed? "Oh, I've been down on my knees many times." She pauses and then roars with laughter - it's a genuine, accidental Orton-ism. /ppIt turns out that Mackichan has had an extremely tough few years. Her father recently died. She is in the process of getting divorced from her husband, Common As Muck actor Anthony Barclay, with whom she has three children, India, 11, Louis, 10, and Ella-Rose, four. And, three years ago, Louis contracted leukaemia. Much of the past three years has been spent with him in hospital. He is now in remission, but shadows still hollow out her face. She wells up frequently, and there is something frayed behind the raucous laugh and actorly tics. "I do find authority hard to deal with now," she growls, after an assistant gives us a 10-minute warning that she needs to get back to work. "I feel a bit of an anarchist. I don't think I could work for someone who was an arsehole any more." She gulps down some fruit juice. "I can't actually have confrontations with people. It's too much. I'm a single muvva with three kids and a show to do." She laughs but she's dead serious./ppWhen things were at their worst, she says, her monopoly on heartache was hard to handle. "People would tut behind me in a supermarket queue and I'd have to go, 'Please, go ahead of me, you've obviously got somewhere to go. I'm just going back to the children's cancer ward.' I once had an actress telling me her hair was falling out because of her new kitchen and I thought, I'm not going to say anything, because this is quite interesting, because I remember how I was before it all." And how was she before it all? "Quite selfish, neurotic. Up my own arse. It's made me very tough. I do think I have endurance beyond the pale." /ppWhen Louis was well enough, Mackichan took her children with her to Africa to shoot a BBC2 series, Taking the Flak, loosely based on John Simpson's reporting from poverty-stricken, war-ravaged places. After such harrowing experiences, how she can cope with her relatively comfortable existence? "You walk into your house and you go: I'm a millionaire. I'm a princess; I live in a palace. And you think: I don't have a lot of shoes, but I do have too many shoes. You look at yourself and think: Party's over, mate. Time to be useful."/ppAnd yet she is not an aid worker in Africa. She is in north London, rehearsing a play. "I did think, I can't go back to acting. It's too vain, too ridiculous. I was going to retrain as a play specialist in Louis' cancer ward. But this is what I've done for 20 years. It's what I do." /ppShe's right. Mackichan is a natural born thesp, right down to her floaty black blouse and stripy woollen leg-warmers. Slice her in half and you would see "actor" written right through the middle of her. "I have a real mission now to be in work that will be cathartic for people. [Work] that's really honest about just how fucking hard it is to stay afloat."/ppLoot isn't exactly what she had in mind, she admits, but its no-nonsense attitude to tragedy has been cathartic. "My whole life lately has been a bit of a black comedy." She snorts. Might she consider turning it into one? "There's a lot of mileage in a children's cancer-ward comedy. All the opening curtains and waving at people being sick into bowls. You could set it in the tiny coffin-like kitchen where only the adults are allowed. You see these little bald children running past the window. It was like suddenly being in a war."/ppCould she really bear to return there, even imaginatively? "I don't know. They haunt me, those nighttime corridors. The characters, too: the carers and nurses and staff and the petty quarrels. And getting high on Quality Street till 3am. But I would like to." /ppstrongmiddot; /strongLoot is at the Tricycle, London NW6, from December 11. Box office: 020-7328 1000./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatre"Theatre/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/orton"Joe Orton/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/television"Television/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/lAQCNb9eC0BbtenHfBz0jZUDjxo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/lAQCNb9eC0BbtenHfBz0jZUDjxo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p