A Reader Writes...

Dear sir/madam

I’m a huge admirer of the brave boys (and lovely girls) in blue and, give or take the odd wrongly imprisoned Irishman here and there, I think they do a jolly decent job.

I would suggest, however, that if they wish to catch these new terrorist chappies they should spend more time looking around the area and watching the travelling public and less time congregating in groups and staring at young ladies in short skirts. Just a thought...

Many thanks

Colonel Dwight Micklewight
The Pall Mall Club
Londonium

Staring At Goats...

Jon Ronson is a very funny journalist, writer and documentary-maker and I read his book Them: Adventures With Extremists earlier this year. This chronicles Ronson meeting various fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists around the world and it’s both funny and frightening as he travels around the world poking the underbelly of various right-wing loonies and other nutjobs.

I’ve recently just finished reading his other book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, and this is also pretty fabulous. It chronicles the US military’s attempts to harness psychic powers and other types of extra-sensory capabilities to compliment its arsenal of more traditional weapons. It also ends with a lot of these people who were first brought into the US military in the 1970s and 1980s being reactivated for use in the War on Terror.

The obvious weapon the US military have failed to utilise so far, though, is Donald Trump’s hair. This must surely count as a paranormal phenomena and could probably hypnotise and stun a cell of terrorists by its appearance alone.

The Trumpster’s hair was back on telly last night in The Apprentice US and the fellas team actually lost to the bicker-tastic backbiting women and dim John was booted out.

The blokes were, of course, onto a loser as soon as the task was announced as it focused on launching a new line in women’s clothes and they clearly had no idea what they were looking for or at half of the time. Well, apart from the models who they invited down to measure their vital statistics when they should have been concentrating on the job in hand. Blokes. Love ’em...

I also must correct an earlier blog entry, too. In my diatribe against Rock Around the Block I stated that it was a Sunday morning show on ITV 1. But I have since learnt it is actually a prime-time show on Saturday evening which is repeated on Sunday. As far as I’m concerned this makes the imminent demise of ITV in an even more advanced state than I feared. Expect Massacre! A Musical About Somalia or Famine: The Game Show very soon...

Reasons To Be Cheerful...

I took the boy to see The Fantastic Four movie on Saturday. It’s now a major point of bonding between us that we go see CGI-laden comic-book-based movies together without the missus. This means we can pig out on popcorn, sweets and nachos without having to face my good lady wife’s chilling line in disapproving looks and sighs when the crunch factor gets too loud.

Sadly it does rob us of the potential for sarcastic question and answer sessions:
Missus: ‘Are you really going to eat all that popcorn?’
Me: ‘No I’m going to save some of it to fashion a length of popcorn rope that I intend to secrete about my person and escape from the bedroom when you’re not looking later tonight.’
Missus: ‘Well make sure it doesn’t snap or you’ll get injured which means I’ll have to nurse you back to health. And that’s quite dull...’
Me: ‘Sod it. I’ll fashion a noose instead...’

But the upside of me and the boy heading off on our own is that I get to watch as many superhero pictures as I want without sitting in the cinema on my own looking like a kiddy-fiddler on reconnaissance.

Good as The Fantastic Four was, though, it provided nowhere near the amount of entertainment that BBC3 offered last night with the return of two of my favourite comedy series.

The first of these was The Smoking Room. This, as its title suggests, is set in the smoking room of a company where various members of staff come to bitch, gossip, moan and generally waste time in pointless chatter rather than go back to work. It’s a one-set sitcom and it uses the same eight or nine characters with odd guests dropping in from time to time so it could easily become quite staid. But the writing by Brian Dooley is razor-sharp and the mundane dialogue and offbeat gags are bang on the button. It’s good to see a standard of writing that you can aspire on telly every now and then.

The highlight of the night, though, was the return of The Mighty Boosh. This is a totally surreal comedy about two zookeepers and their off-the-wall adventures. Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are the double-act behind this unmitigated piece of genius and last night’s adventure saw the duo and their shaman chum Naboo and his gorilla familiar Bolo go to a shack in the woods and escape a gang of sex-mad Yetis. Think Morecambe and Wise doing Ernie’s ‘plays wot he wrote’ on crack and you’ll get the idea. It’s the most inventive comedy on TV at present and if it doesn’t win a major award soon the world’s gone seriously wrong.

Brit TV drama may be pretty rubbish at present but the comedy’s coming thick and fast. Hurrah!

Opera-tunity Knocks!

When I was writing my since-aborted Ph’d on community theatre in the late 1990s I researched facts and figures about opera and it pretty much confirmed my already jaundiced view that it was a very heavily subsidised art form in the UK that took up a disproportionate amount of public money and offered little in return apart from piece-meal cut-price tickets and a bit of community outreach work. Then, as if by magic, one of the major London opera houses got a whacking multi-million pound Lottery grant for major refurbishment work – and two days later announced it was cancelling its theatre-in-education service.

I took this as a sign that my prejudices and research were bang on the money as I also worked out that the Lottery grant the opera house got would have funded something like 100 theatre-in-education companies for four years reaching more than 10million schoolkids in total. That’s a lot of art for a lot of people who may not otherwise have access to it, people whose money is now ensuring London opera lovers have convivial surroundings and comfy seats. Arts subsidy. Great, eh?

So it was with some trepidation that I plonked my arse in the posh rows at the Bregenz Opera Festival, a massive event where the stage floats on Lake Constance with the seats tiered up the river bank to form probably the most beautiful open-air auditorium in the world.

Unlikely opera-lover me had, of course, got on this trip because the missus had been invited to Austria on a press beano. Partners were also invited and, once several other people had turned her down, she decided to ask me if I wanted to go. I accepted and on Thursday morning off we went...

We landed in Zurich airport and, before the bus ride to Austria, I needed the loo. On shutting the door I was greeted with a hard-core porn magazine on the cubicle floor. I was impressed with this but my trips to further loos proved that this was a one-off and not part of some sort of continental service.

The missus did have to work on the trip so I also trolled around a few factories discovering things about kitchens that I never knew and we were also taken to several fabulous restaurants. It made me realise that I’m obviously in the wrong job as the only press trips I’ve ever had while writing about telly have been to Liverpool and Birmingham. And they’re not glamorous. At all.

The opera, though, was the highlight and it was truly spectacular and epic and, although it hasn’t changed any of my preconceptions about the accessibility and validity of the art form, I can now see the appeal and accept that it can be a very seductive and amazing thing to see.

Sadly a compartive event in the UK (as I don’t know about Bregenz arts funding) still doesn’t outweigh 10million UK schoolchildren getting the chance to see live theatre. But Austria was bloody lovely.

Living In A Box!

Poor Nick! There he was doing his job and before he could say ‘I haven’t checked the blood splatter patterns yet...’ he found himself interred in a perspex box with only a limited amount of time before his air ran out and his buddies could save him.

I am latecomer to Five’s US crime drama series CSI and, ironically, I also only caught the second half of last night’s double-bill directed by Quentin Tarantino. The missus and the boy have been long-time fans but I’ve only really started getting to grips with it in the last few months and it’s bloody good stuff.

Five, of course, used to be the channel of the three ‘f’s (football, films and fucking) but it’s had a major rebranding over the past three years and it now has three of the best shows on TV in CSI and its various offshoots in Miami and New York, The Shield (which returns on Saturday) and Law And Order.

There was a time, of course, when Channel 4 would have immediately snapped up quality shows like these to add to The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives but these days they’re too busy providing wall-to-wall coverage of Big Brother to bother about anything so trite as gripping drama. So it’s left to Five to carry the flag and thank god it does.

Nick made it in the end thanks to Grisham and an ant thus foiling the revenge of a loony former gardener whose dad was none too happy that his daughter was jailed on dodgy evidence. But you have to wonder what British drama series would make a big name like Tarantino want to direct or write a few episodes. Midsomer Murders, Frost, Murder In Suburbia, Casualty, Holby?

Dr Who was great and Shameless pretty entertaining but it’s pretty bleak in tellyland at the moment really. And you have have to wonder where the next big homegrown drama series is coming from and where, if your name is not Paul Abbott or Russell T Davies (both fine writers I hasten to add), it will actually get shown in a sea of reality TV and makeover shows.

As a jobbing journalist and writer I learnt early on that the amount of titles who will quite happily buy the same-old lowest-common-denominator shit from you are many while the ones who want to print interesting and well thought-through features are few. I think TV is pretty much the same and I worry about these things because it’s an industry I have ambitions to work in but so much of it is utter shite too...

So thank god The Mighty Boosh is back next week on BBC3. It will hopefully give me something to laugh about and I’ll forget my fears that like Nick we’re all trapped in a doomed box with no hope of escape.

On a separate note me and the missus are heading to Austria on a three-day press beano tomorrow. If anyone cares I’ll report back next week...

Sight Seer

Pocket-sized pop god Prince said ‘I’ve seen the future and it will be. I’ve seen the future and it works!’ Well I’ve seen the future and it bloody well doesn’t...

My moment of prescience came on Sunday morning when I was in bed with the missus. We had a weekend sans boy so we were enjoying a lazy morning lounging around and one of us flicked the TV on.

On Saturday mornings this can be quite entertaining as it can throw up various kids shows on BBC1 or ITV1 with some C List celeb getting gunked or we can even catch the cookery strand with Anthony Worrall-Thompson on BBC2.

The latter is a particular joy if you’re feeling tired or hungover as it’s a real pick-me-up to see someone that ugly on TV and you suddenly feel much better about yourself. I also read an erotic but very sad story once about a red-headed and well-hung bearded dwarf who travelled to rich-but-sexually-unfulfilled ladies in 19th-century Eastern Europe and sated their needs, and it was a squashed-up version of Thompson I always pictured in this role so he also acts as something of an aphrodisiac as far as I’m concerned too. Only on Saturdays, though...

But Sunday morning TV has none of these pleasures and you really are taking you life in your hands if you have a dabble. There are trendied-up religious shows and the talent-free zone that is Hollyoaks. But my latest discovery made even the Chester-set soap look like one of Chekhov’s finest moments...

The ITV website tells us the basic premise of Rock Around The Block is that ‘two families are transformed into pop heroes in just 48 hours by a team of experts from the world of hip-hop, dance and fashion. The kids are left cringing as parents practice their moves in a bid to win the £5,000 cash prize.’ But even the best wordsmiths at ITV really can’t do it justice...

Yesterday’s show saw one family learn the words and dance routine to the B-52s’ Love Shack while another boogied along to the sounds of Sir Mix-a-Lot, who is a rapper of some description. The show lasted for an hour. I lasted five minutes before running from the bedroom screaming, although I did return 20 minutes later to make sure I really did see it and it wasn’t part of some bad dream or waking nightmare.

But it wasn’t. Instead it was a part of the ITV1 Sunday schedule. I thought this channel had hit rock bottom with Celebrity Love Island and Celebrity Wrestling but this show is a new low. If all the TV executives in the world pooled their worst-ever ideas (Dachau: The Musical, Tsunami: The Sitcom, etc) and moulded them together it would not be anywhere near as bad as this.

ITV celebrates 50 years of broadcasting this year and you’d have thought someone somewhere would have the sense to can certain bottom-of-the-barrel ideas like this. Even if only for a year...

But the channel that brought us World In Action, First Tuesday, Corrie and Prime Suspect is heading downhill so fast that stopping the decline seems unavoidable, and when it crashes and burns as it obviously must wreck investigators will find a schedule full of shows with ‘ordinary folk’ living their dreams and getting their 15 minutes of fame.

I’ve seen the future and it will be. God help us...

Sister Act!

It was the early morning shows that got me. I don’t watch any of the wall-to-wall live coverage on E4 and I am sometimes out or watching something else when the evening shows are on. But the morning shows caught me off-guard and half-asleep when it was my turn to get the boy up for school and that’s how it started.

So now I know that Science is a wannabe rapper from the hood in Leeds who can’t string two words together, there’s some skeletal Irish bird who looks like she could do with a month’s worth of good meals and there’s a black gay Tory who lets his chums call him ‘Golly’. How the winter evenings must simply fly by at Tory HQ... Then there’s a sexually confused fella, a Geordie hairdresser, a geek and several others.

The Big Brother lot are all equally hateful and making distinctions between them is a bit like deciding which form of terminal illness you want to be riddled with – the details are unimportant as it’s still painful and it’s still gonna get you...

There perhaps are not enough bullets in the world for these people but sadly my guns are still trained across the pond as The Apprentice lost another member of its would-be team of wannabe squillionaires last night. And there are only so many people you can hate at one time...

Last night’s task on The Apprentice saw the two teams have to launch competing restaurants in New York with task winners judged on decor, service and food by the customers. Mosaic, the fellas and one girl team, went about this in their usual methodical and relaxed way while Apex, the girl group, continued to bitch, fight and generally be as unpleasant as possible to each other.

Apex obviously lost and the night leading up to the boardroom meeting saw all the girls at their cattiest. Having last week decided to victimise and expel Stacie J (the only black member of the group and, rather hilariously, bearing in mind this week’s task a restaurateur) the WASP coven went for another minority in the shape of a vertically challenged Jew called Stacey.

But Stacey proved to be a tough little cookie and she was not having any of it and in the end it was the half-witted project leader Jennifer C, a woman who can’t stop talking with the added bonus that nothing she says makes any sense, who was fired.

The girls may now see the light and actually end up working together if they have any hope of winning the job with Trump that’s on offer to the series winner when this show ends, although part of me hopes they don’t as watching them squabble is great fun. Sisterhood, eh?

Make 'Em Laugh. Again...

The deadline for the Channel 4 Comedy Competition is nearly here and I’ve chanced my arm at sketch writing for the first time since I did a few routines for a sixth form show.

When I last wrote a comedy sketch I spent all my time collecting comics, playing pool, poncing about doing writing and wondering why all the hard blokes around town were dressing like George Michael (who even to my then untrained eye looked and sounded decidedly gay). Maybe the local psychos were experimenting with their sexuality or, more likely, maybe they were too stupid to realise. If it’s the latter I bet they feel utter twats when nostalgia strikes these days!

But now, of course, I’m a much more mature man who has a much wider range of interests such as collecting comics, playing pool, poncing about...

Writing sketches is actually a bit of a bugger. I suspect most writers bung down lots of rubbish then go through a process of editing out the crap until they get to the bit that should be there. One of my literary heroes, Charles Bukowski, used to return from working at whatever low-paid and exhausting job he’d been doing and not go to sleep until he’d written 500 words. He admits that a lot of these would be filed under bin but he sometimes got stuff he liked and kept that.

So I’ve adopted a similar principle with this competition and written loads of stuff and I’ve ended up with about six sketches and one monologue that I quite like. My current favourite is a man training for the cockney decathlon at the 2012 Olympics although I also quite like the Hitler lookalike chief sub who inserts Third Reich propaganda into all sections of the newspaper.

I’ll enter these tomorrow even though I happily admit sketch writing is not my strong suit. But it’s another hat thrown into another ring (although I’ve never really understood why people throw hats into rings) and we’ll see what happens.

On another note my never-punctual work colleague topped all previous excuses on Monday. Turning up at 11.50am he announced to the office that: ‘I had to go to the doctor. I thought I had cancer...’

The sheer chutzpah of this announcement tops even his ‘I had a violent dream and knocked myself out in my sleep’ excuse. He really is a fat lazy bull-shitting bastard of the first order...

Bonding...

Saturday evening was quality time with my stepson. We’re pretty close as I’ve been in his life for eight years now so he’s grown to quite like me even though our first meeting was a little bizarre when he wandered into his mother’s bedroom and said ‘Mummy. Who’s that strange man in your bed?’

But the ‘strange man’ gradually morphed into a regular part of his life, then moved in and on Saturday probably reached the high point of step-fatherdom with the handing-over-of-my-comics-collection ceremony. I’ve been a major comics fan for years and, although the boy has always liked comics, it’s only in the past few years that he’s really got into them in a big way under the auspices of my good self and his uncle. And it’s brilliant.

He may go to the footy with his dad and he and his mum may have CSI time together, but once a month me and the now not-so-little fella head into town to raid the comic shops. This, of course is quite expensive for my good self but such is the price of encouraging an interest.

It’s really cool watching him get his own take on things and deciding what he likes and doesn’t like. And this very much became apparent when I rescued my several thousand issue comics collection from its place of safe harbour on Saturday night.

We went through eight boxes and decided what I wanted to keep and what he wanted and what neither of us wanted and deserved a place in the bin. In the end I’ve kept most of my favourite titles and my Comics Bought For Investment Box remains pretty much untouched but he’s now got an extra four boxes containing some quite cool stuff.

I’ve also told him he gets the rest and my comic art collection if anything should happen to me. So if anything DOES happen he remains the number one suspect. Or it’s the missus for the insurance money. Or both of them.

But hopefully if they read this it may scupper any temptation to cash me in...

Girl Power!

Stacie J was a loose cannon and if there’s one thing Donald Trump doesn’t want in his organisation it’s a loose cannon. So he fired her...

Yes last week’s episode of The Apprentice saw the two competing firms of would-be business squillionaires have $50,000 each to ‘create a buzz’ about a new toothpaste flavour. The boy team did a sort of carnival funfair and a win $15,000 event while the girls hired some bearded baseball star to do a public appearance, thus proving that both teams and all the New Yorkers in attendance still worshipped at the twin altars of celebrity and money.

The boys won the task and so the girls had to go into the boardroom where one of them would be fired. And this was where the fun really started as Stacie J was the victim of what can only be described as a sorority witch hunt where lots of nice WASP girls brutally ganged up on the only black girl in their group. The girls were vicious and pretty much branded her mentally unstable and, even worse, Trump agreed and booted Stacie J out.

My only hope for this set of harpies is that they win the next task and are treated to a self-catering holiday in a landmined area of the Gaza strip. Compared to this evil, back-stabbing bitch-fest the boy group are absolute pussycats and I’m now rooting for the fellas.

Apart from Donald Trump who I hope implodes on the vacuum where his personality and humanity should be...

Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner...

It’s been an odd past few days. Wednesday was the 10th anniversary of my father’s death. That was sad and I’d been dreading the day for about a week – until it finally arrived and it wasn’t too bad as something at work reminded me of one of my favourite father stories.

He was the best man at a pal’s wedding and he and the groom were stood outside the church having a cigarette after greeting all the guests. The bride’s car drew up and her father got out, followed by the bridesmaids and finally the bride. The groom and my dad walked into the church and took up their positions before the altar and a few minutes later the Here Comes The Bride music started. The groom turned round to see the full church and the bride and her dad and the bridesmaids walking down the aisle. It was at this point that my father turned to the groom and said: ‘It’s still not too late to back out, you know…’

The day then got much better when we won the Olympics. That was a really fabulous feeling as, even though I am a professional Yorkshireman by birth, I can claim dual nationality and call myself a Londoner after living here for the past five and a bit years. I may not quite be at the Pearly King regalia stage but I do feel I belong.

But I actually felt more pride in my adopted cock-er-nee status yesterday.

The terrorist bombs went off and the place ground to a standstill but there was just a stoical acceptance and a total lack of panic or surprise from most of the people I saw around Edgware Road at 9.30am. There was something very civilised and very British about it. Nil desperandum and spirit of the Blitz and all that. It was almost a collective sigh of ‘Terrorists. Balls to the lot of you!’

As the death toll started to rise a visibly shaken Blair gave a speech on TV and was good value, although Bush talking about human rights was pretty rich. But Livingstone hit the nail on the head for me when he basically said that this was an attack on normal people of every race and religion and not the power-brokers or war-mongers.

Myself and the missus got out of Edgware Road pretty quickly as the emergency services started doing their thing and going about their business with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of effectiveness.

And today the city is starting to get back to normal. Tube trains are getting full again and the people are moving about freely. Shame the people who planned and executed this still are, though...

Rejection Theory!

My missus is convinced that I have an ego the size of a house (think a big house like the White House) and I readily admit that I am the possessor of a self-confidence that can sometimes border on arrogance were it not for my ability to also self-deprecate at most opportunities.

For example:
Wife: ‘You’re so arrogant!’
Me: ‘That’s because I’m great!’
Wife: ‘You’ve got a small cock though!’
Me: ‘Well thank god it never works so I don’t have to worry about it!’

Sadly, though, even my bullet-proof ego does have weaknesses and the fear of rejection is one of them and this is a fear I’ve had to face in the past few days as my dream job went somewhere else instead of in my back pocket.

My first reaction was to mutter ‘Arse biscuits’ in a depressed manner but then my trusty ego kicked in and it was a case ‘Sod ‘em. Their loss!’ Now I have convinced myself that I wouldn’t have wanted to work there any way. I am even considering a protest outside their building to dissuade anyone else from ever wanting to work for them. Ever. So I’m not bitter about it. At all.

The main problem, of course, with trying to work my way in the worlds of journalism and theatre and TV writing is that rejection is a constant feature. And even worse than that there is quite often a wait of several months until the thanks-but-no-thanks letter lands on the carpet. To add insult to injury it now seems everyone I meet has a TV show or a drama script to hawk around so their ambition coupled with an obvious selfishness and lack of thought for me increases my chances of rejection too.

Fortunately I have a theory that everyone has a finite number of bad things that can happen to them and rejections are included in this finite number. One of my cousins with the delightful soubriquet ‘Mamba’ operated on this principle and he figured that if he asked out 100 women one of them would be desperate enough to eventually say ‘Yes!’ because he couldn’t be rejected 100 times out of 100.

So taking this idea on board I now plan to apply for a variety of hugely salaried and totally unsuitable jobs and send out blank scripts to any prospective takers. These will obviously be rejected out of hand but, and here’s the clever bit, I figure that by doing this I will use up my allocated number of rejections sooner and so get onto the acceptance letters quicker.

It’s a plan, Stan!

Sky’s The Limit...

One of my closest friends became a dad a few years ago and, as he and his wife don’t have any more trustworthy and mature friends nearby, I was asked to look after his child at his house for the day on Saturday while they went out. Part of the unspoken proviso to this deal, obviously, was that there was a responsible adult present with his child and the slightly older bespectacled child who was supposed to be doing the looking after so the missus also came along to supervise proceedings.

Fortunately the child was an absolute angel and he kept me and the missus merrily entertained all day and, even better, when he had an afternoon nap I got to watch the World Nineball Pool Championships on Sky Sports.

Sadly this was a guilty pleasure because our household if a non-Murdoch zone and we refuse to have anything tainted by a Murdoch hand in the house, be it Sky TV, The Sun, The Times or any of his other reprehensible publications. The bigot-tastic Daily Mail would get into our house quicker than any of Murdoch’s rags and that really is a damning indictment on how we generally view the evil Aussie one and his tawdry and ubiquitous works.

Our decision not to have Sky in our house did, of course, meet with some resistance from the boy who likes US TV series and a lot of the stuff on Sky One. I also had doubts about missing potential reruns of the Robin Askwith sitcom Bottle Boys on UK Gold but both myself and the boy agreed it was a noble cause and it isn’t an issue any more.

Or it wasn’t until Saturday when I felt myself wanting to backtrack after watching the nineball. Fortunately I realised that it was the start of a slippery slope and I would eventually become a couch potato of epic proportions if we ever gave in and got a dish installed.

There’s eightball pool, nineball pool, snooker, football, darts, boxing... I may even find myself watching golf which would be the point when I’d realise enough was enough. And they are just the sports I actually like without venturing into the territory of films and imported drama serials.

So I figure out that we are better off without Murdoch and his zillion TV channels. In terms of a protest it may only be a piss in the ocean but it’s our piss in the ocean. The nineball final’s next Sunday, though, so I may well be offering my babysitting services to several with-dish households around that time... Any takers?