A podcast about speaking and performance. It's ADEQUATE, because I can't do perfect.
The presenter is John-Paul Flintoff (me, the chap typing this sentence), author of seven books, published in 16 languages.
One of them, A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech, was written after a mental health crisis - and I might talk about that sometimes.
Find me at https://flintoff.org/
A therapist once told me about the Integrated Self - a vast room of chairs for every version of a person - and warned that you can never assemble the whole.
The idea has kept coming back. It surfaced in an improvisation scene with Keith Johnstone, where Steve Chapman played me at sixteen and asked what lay ahead.
It surfaced again in psychiatric hospital, where I made hundreds of pictures of myself trying to work out what was happening.
And it turned into a way of drawing other people beside their younger selves - Ben Akers with the boy his father once touched on the shoulder, Salwa Emerson sitting close to her thirteen-year-old, NJ’s father appearing three times on a single page, and a drawing after Saul Steinberg, who cut out a life-sized boyhood photograph of himself and stood holding its hand.
Not multitudes across a room. Multitudes across a life.
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Contain Multitudes Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead NW3 1LT, 18-23 August 2026. Entry free. Private view (evening of 18 Aug) is a thank-you to backers of A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown.
Links
Read the piece: https://flintoff.org/multitudes-across-a-life (https://flintoff.org/multitudes-across-a-life)
Show homepage, unfolding one portrait at a time: https://flintoff.org/contain-multitudes (https://flintoff.org/contain-multitudes)
Ben Akers: https://flintoff.org/ben-akers (https://flintoff.org/ben-akers)
Salwa Emerson: https://flintoff.org/salwa-emerson (https://flintoff.org/salwa-emerson)
NJ’s father: https://flintoff.org/nj-father (https://flintoff.org/nj-father)
After Steinberg: https://flintoff.org/after-steinberg (https://flintoff.org/after-steinberg)
Jo Wood and Steve Chapman: https://flintoff.org/jo-wood-and-steve-chapman (https://flintoff.org/jo-wood-and-steve-chapman)
A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown: https://flintoff.org/speccy-breakdown (https://flintoff.org/speccy-breakdown)
13 Aug 2026
How a reporter's notebook gave way to a sketch pad: the arc behind this show
The story behind Contain Multitudes, my portrait show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026. It begins with a drawing exercise at The School of Life, then a commission from a priest in Hampstead, then Zoom portraits during lockdown (including Olivia Colman), then a run of visits to independent publishers, lawyers, teachers and writers in the rooms where they work. In January 2024 I drew The Times’s obituary page for Camila Batmanghelidjh. That felt like a hinge - the journalist and the portrait-maker meeting on the same page.
Contain Multitudes
Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead NW3 1LT 18-23 August 2026.
Entry free.
Private view (evening of 18 Aug) is a thank-you to backers of A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown.
Links
Read the piece: https://flintoff.org/the-arc-behind-this-show (https://flintoff.org/the-arc-behind-this-show)
Show homepage, unfolding one portrait at a time: https://flintoff.org/contain-multitudes (https://flintoff.org/contain-multitudes)
Be Drawn: https://flintoff.org/be-drawn (https://flintoff.org/be-drawn)
Sort Of artist in residence: https://flintoff.org/sort-of-artist-in-residence (https://flintoff.org/sort-of-artist-in-residence)
The party you never leave: https://flintoff.org/the-party-you-never-leave (https://flintoff.org/the-party-you-never-leave)
A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown: https://flintoff.org/speccy-breakdown (https://flintoff.org/speccy-breakdown)
10 Aug 2026
The jumper she knitted herself – Mary Ann Sieghart, journalist and author
Portrait of Mary Ann Sieghart, journalist, broadcaster and author of The Authority Gap, in her Wiltshire office, from Contain Multitudes (https://flintoff.org/contain-multitudes) at Burgh House.
The pictures in the show come from a run of visits I’ve made over the past few years to people in the places where they work: writers at their desks, lawyers in their offices, publishers among the books they’ve made, a priest in the room where she thinks. Some of the sitters are old friends. Some I met for the first time on the day.
Reach and audience
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YouTube views
233,860
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Podcast Authority Score: 36 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
27
Social presence
0
YouTube
82
Engagement
30
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