Foiled Role:
Student With Sheep, Foil Man (in the original cast) Behind The Scenes:
Co-producer, Internet Publicity
Here are some facts about Howell:
He comes from a small town in South Wales
called Ebbw Vale, where the main industry is the
steelworks
there. He left there at age 18 for the bright lights of
Manchester,
and has lived there ever since.
He made his acting debut in the leading role in a school nativity
musical, "The Christmas Dove and the Woodcutter". Howell played the
woodcutter, and sang 3 songs by himself in front of a packed-out church
for 2 nights.
While at secondary school, he starred in various school plays. His
most memorable performances were when he played a bishop (who married a
gypsy to a prince) and when he played Wishee Washee in a pantomime of Aladdin. He worked on this with a local amateur dramatic society, and
didn't tell anyone at school he was doing it. Imagine the surprise of
all his teachers and classmates when he appeared (dressed as Wishee Washee)
on the front page of the local newspaper!!!!
He loves photography, and especially loves dressing up and taking
weird
photographs. A few years ago, he lived with
Adam Ahmad
(Bob in Foiled) and
Steven McCombe
(Green Man in Foiled),
and they
regularly used stage makeup, fake blood, knives, weird clothes, and took lots of bizarre photos.
Staying with the subject of dressing up, he donned a basque etc. when
he went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show in October 1995. Needless to say, the evening was captured on his camera.
The
Kermit The Frog song "Rainbow Connection" from
"The
Muppet Movie" is one of his all-time favourite songs.
He's Welsh. Yes, it's true. And being Welsh, he's got this thing
about sheep. As a result, he keeps getting bought fluffy sheep, and
now has quite a collection, one of which ("Woolie") was his co-star in
the Foiled Productions film
"Sheep Man".
He has the most amazing ability to fall asleep anywhere. Two
of the most bizarre places where this occurred were while standing up
next to a French motorway at 1am in the middle of Winter, and in a curry!
He came up with the concept of Foil Man after a heavy-drinking night
out in a pub with Henry Burrows.
In the early 1990s, while at
Manchester University,
he did a sponsored hitch-hike every November. It
was very cold, and very
hard work, but he had the most amazing adventures, and visited Paris,
Frankfurt, Ostend, Lille, Hamburg, Bremen, amongst other places.
1995 was his year of travel. During this year, he spent a weekend in
New York, spent a few days in Prague with his workmate (and slept in a hammock in a Bohemian forest!!!!!! - and woke up soaked to the skin),
spent a weekend at a pig farm near Boulogne, went interrailing and
visited Prague, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Florence,
Vienna, Toulouse, Nice, Cap D'Ail, and Monte Carlo (in 2 weeks!). Since then, he's been off travelling every year, visiting places like Hong Kong, Canada and Japan.
While in Florence, he learned that it was the
ice
cream capital of
the world, and decided that since they were to spend just 2 days there
that he would have to try all the flavours. He spent over 150
pounds on ice cream in just 2 days - but he enjoyed it. His travelling
partners were frequently heard asking each other, "Where's Howell?" -
and they'd look over and see him queueing up at another ice cream shop.
He loves tacky things, and this includes karaoke. Apart from the occasional impromptu drunken karaoke session, he's sung at lots of karaoke bars while in Japan.
He is afraid of
spiders.
When he was 3 years old, he drank a huge can of paraffin that his
Dad had left in a cupboard. He was rushed to hospital (some say he
drove himself!), and had his stomach pumped.
He appeared on the kids TV programme "Get Fresh" in 1986, when it was
filmed at
Cardiff
Castle. He met Gian Sammarco (Adrian Mole), Charlotte
Hindle and Gaz Top.
He claims to be a good driver, even though it took him 4 attempts to
pass his driving test. He failed it three times in a quiet town in South
Wales, but passed it on the first occasion he did it in a busy area of
Manchester. Thirty seconds (!) into his second test, his examiner was
heard yelling "F***", and slammed on his dual-control brakes when the
car was about to go hurtling onto a main road, into a car travelling at
over 40mph. At this point, Howell was too busy looking down at the gear
stick! For the rest of the test, the examiner was heard mumbling things
like "B******", "B*******", "S***", "C***" under his breath - he was a
nervous wreck!
