What’s In A Name?

I’ve recently signed up to AOL so I now have internet access in my office at home and don’t have to keep heading downstairs to use the boy’s computer whenever I want to go online. But this turned out to be a real baptism of fire when I tried to create a user name using my own name only to discover that my name and several other variations of it were already in use.

This was quite depressing because it made me realise that I am not the only version of me. I then followed this idea to its logical conclusion and did a quick Google search on my name to discover that there are not only many more versions of me but many of them are much more successful. Bastards…

To bypass this problem I then started inventing names surrounding some of my interests such as writing, pool, comics and hapkido that I thought were quite sweet. But these also failed as they were already in use so I started using ones which were less sweet…

By doing this I discovered that fellow AOL members have already signed up to the service as Adolf Hitler and several other members of the Third Reich and most serial killers including Fred and Rose West and Peter Sutcliffe.

This would not have greatly bothered me until I hit on the name that I eventually chose (Gooleboy).

This means that people would rather be known as either members of the Nazi Party or infamous murderers rather than be named after a small town in East Yorkshire. The world’s an odd place…

Fashion…

Regular readers of this blog (if such wonderful people indeed exist) will already know that the entire concept of men’s fashion is something that escapes me and has done for most of my life.

I try to keep abreast of female fashion (the ‘gypsy’ look, the shrug, the wrap-around dress, the chicken brick, etc) so I don’t feel entirely lost when the missus goes clothes shopping, but all things related to male attire remain a foreign country. In fact they remain another planet that will stay unexplored and unchartered. For ever.

This idea of male fashion as a personal no-go area was reinforced by a trip into Kensington today where I stood and stared at a pair of trousers for several minutes in a high-street shop. Passers-by thought I was a piece of performance art until the missus arrived to move me along.

The trousers were actually a normal enough pair of jeans but they had what I can only describe as tan leather chaps sewn into the inner-thigh area, prompting me to assume that the rodeo look is obviously the next big thing.

So if that does happen you read it here first. And I obviously want a prize of some description…

Money, Money, Money…

Want money? And I don’t mean a few quid here and there. I am talking major bucks. The sort of dignity-stripping amount of money that would make a basque-clad Donald Trump bugger livestock to death in front of an arena of snapping paparazzi. Yes. That much…

Then look no further because I am now seeking fellow investors for a sure-fire money-making venture. The plan is to launch a new TV channel called TNT (Thick Northerner Television) and populate the screen with programmes full of idiotic northerners who are either grotesquely fat, laughably unfashionable, living in pigsty-style homes or badly in debt. Then we simply have a bunch of lifestyle gurus (obviously non-northern but southern and Celtic is OK) come in and sort them out.

The less media-savvy among you may think this is a non-starter but take a look through the TV schedules and you’ll see it’s already happening in shows like How Clean Is Your House, You Are What You Eat and 10 Years Younger. So the great beauty of TNT is that it’s cashing in on something that’s already with us so there’s no development money needed.

All myself and the other shareholders do is make TV shows like these and at the same time create a talent agency and sign up all the stupid, fat, untidy, unfashionable and lazy northerners everywhere and, bingo, TNT suddenly has a monopoly on both the shows and their subjects.

Then if the TV companies want to play ball they’ll have to submit to our demands. These will obviously include cake and cocaine besides cold, hard cash but then, and this is the real beauty of it, we’ll have a whole new raft of shows for TNT like When Northern TV Moguls Go Bad And Get Addicted To Cocaine And Cake.

It’s genius and one of the first shows on the TNT hit-list is undoubtedly Moneyspinners on BBC 1. As I’m now on holiday I am enjoying the delights of daytime TV and this, or possibly the utterly dreadful chat show Loose Women (or Out-of-work Actresses Talk Shit For 60 Minutes as the missus calls it) on ITV 1, is my highlight so far.

Moneyspinners really is in a class of its own. Today’s show featured a family from Newcastle who had financial problems as they were basically spending more money than was coming in to the household. So enter presenter Lorne Spicer who gave them astounding advice along the lines of ‘Spend less money and keep the bit you don’t spend so you have savings…’ And that was basically it – stretched over a whole painful hour…

So really, how hard can making a telly programme be? Considering Lorne Spicer’s got a TV show out of a premise this simple I reckon TNT is a sure-fire winner.

So any takers?

Holiday!

Me and the boy have had a few days together and we’ve done the usual comic-shopping and movie-going ritual and during this we both decided Batman Begins was quite cool and a distinct improvement on the shite-awful but camp-tastic Batman And Robin.

But a new family ritual has also entered the bonding fray over the past year and this involves me, the missus and the not-so-little fella going to stand-up comedy gigs, which are probably better for his general well-being than the CGI-fests me and him now enjoy.

The three of us have so far seen the brilliant Bill Bailey, the fabulous Omad Dahjili and most recently this week we saw Andy Kindler. He’s an American comedian and comedy actor and he arrived on a wave of astoundingly good previews and publicity. Sadly Soho Theatre was only half-full and his routine was very hit and miss as he dabbled with new material of varied quality. The audience generally couldn’t quite decide if the poor sod was just dying on his arse or if he wasn’t all that bothered which was a shame as some of his material was quite good. He’s obviously quite a funny man but he just wasn’t on that night…

Thankfully I’d already got my comedy quota for the day by tuning into Radio 4 to listen to The Bearded Ladies for the first time. A friend of mine is one quarter of this four-woman comedy troupe who were a big hit at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago but this was the first time I’d actually listened to the show, now in its second series, and it was pretty good.

It’s basically a sketch show and it’s more quirky and gentle than biting and vicious humour but it’s well worth a listen if you’re kicking your heels on Tuesday at 6.30pm. I particularly liked the short sketch about the wife text messaging the drunken husband and the woman on the sinking boat refusing the lifejacket on the grounds that it wasn’t fashionable.

Alan Partridge, Goodness Gracious Me, The League Of Gentlemen, Dead Ringers and the wonderful Mighty Boosh all started off in similar slots on Radio 4 so see it as a chance to grab an earful of something that could well be on your telly screens quite soon.

One bit of advice, though… Do be careful what you search for if you look up The Bearded Ladies on the internet. I typed in beardedladies.com instead of their actual address of beardedladies.co.uk and it definitely was not my friend in the pictures…

Baby Blues...

I am a little stunned after this weekend. In fact scrub that. I am downright bloody annoyed. There I was clutching my copy of The Independent On Saturday as me and the missus returned from our big shop at the supermarket and I opened up the page where the Prize Super Soduko was located and was my name among the winners? Was it buggery.

I fully appreciated that the Saturday Indy has a readership that is comprised of more than just me but I could not believe that more than ten of them would be as sad as me and actually complete the bloody thing and then go to the trouble of sending it in to win one of the ten prizes on offer. But there’s an important lesson to be learnt there. Never underestimate the amount of sad buggers like yourself who do these things as the world’s obviously full of ‘em!

The boy returned from three weeks at his dad’s on Sunday and he has grown yet again so he is practically the same size as me. He’s nearly 15 and he’s now 6ft. This may be a useful tactic, though, as we now have a week together while we’re both on holiday and one of the films he wants to see has an 18 rating. Dare I risk the potential embarrassment of us going to the pictures and hoodied-up him getting in and baby-faced and clean-shaven me getting thrown out? Could happen…

Me and the missus did actually venture to the cinema a few times while the not-to-little fella was away. We saw Crash last week which was a pretty good. It’s basically several inter-connected stories about race in the US and Don Cheadle is rather excellent as a cop with a wise-cracking robber brother and a crack addict mum. It’s a bit self-righteous but that’s no bad thing and its heart and intentions are certainly in the right place.

The real highlight for me, though, was Me And You And Everyone We Know. This is an uplifting indie film about a shoe salesman and an artist finding love. It’s a perfect date movie so get a date before you go and see it. Or start an affair. Or have a row with your partner and then let it melt you back into lurve... It is that funny quirky and sweet.

Which is more than can be said for the BBC’s new Saturday night flagship show He’s Having A Baby. The premise here is that the cameras follow several dads-to-be and their expectant partners. The ubiquitous Davina MacCall hosts and it sounded quite sweet and promising – but then there came Danny Wallace, a man I’ve previously liked as Dave Gorman’s speccy mate, and it all started to fall to bits...

You see Wallace’s job was to provide the dads-to-be with ‘challenges’ to make the show more entertaining. And, oh, how we laughed as some of them held babies for the first time and swore. Then one went off to learn how to be a stand-up comic for toddlers. Hilarious…

It’s quite sad that the Beeb obviously felt what could have been an interesting and fascinating show about real people and real emotions (as opposed to the manufactured rucks and rows on Big Brother and its ilk) needed gimmicking up. It didn’t but now it has expect all the babies to get mixed up at the end of the show and laugh as the parents scream when they fail to recognise their own kids and head off home with somebody else’s child.

Unless they’re 6ft it’s a mistake I won’t be making…

The Fall Guy!

Some people say that ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger!’ But these people have obviously never taken a fall at a martial arts school where a lack of concentration on the part of the idiot faller (guess who?) means he ends up slamming into the mat on his shoulder. Remarkably I was relatively unscathed by this but I would change the old adage to something along the lines of ‘What doesn’t kill you can still hurt loads and make you want to swear quite a lot!’

My bruised shoulder aside my martial arts training has been pretty fabulous of late as the London school I attend has had an instructor from the main school in Chicago visiting for a week. This was great because it meant there were two instructors instead of one so everyone was under a bit more scrutiny than normal.

Our usual instructor is a woman and she’s a truly superb teacher but the guest was also a woman who was equally impressive. She even told me I was quite good at one point – then proceeded to correct faults in my stance and kicking and several other areas for the duration of the lesson. Bugger...

But one of the things I genuinely like about the martial art I do, namely hapkido, is that it relies on technique rather than brute force so correct technique is very important and that is one of several areas that both instructors are razor sharp on. I also adore the school because we rarely attract the type of macho lunatics I have encountered at other martial arts schools – and this is a major boon as a lot of the stuff we learn can be quite dangerous if applied correctly.

The final thing that was very refreshing on a personal note about our guest from the US was that she was articulate, thoughtful and considerate – and in these anti-American times it’s sometimes good to be reminded of the basic fact that George Bush and his gun-toting, world-domination-obsessed, greed-is-good, right-wing chums don’t represent everyone in the US. Thank God...

And that’s quite a timely reminder for me because, as an obsessed fan of The Apprentice US, I was in danger of losing sight of this obvious fact.

The latest outing for the remaining bunch of wannabe squillionaires on this highly watchable bit of car-crash telly saw the two teams, mainly comprised of utterly hateful American business types, have to renovate a house with a $20,000 budget to see who could add the most value to the property.

One side did a really good job and made a bundle of dosh while the side lead by Raj (a remarkably accurate name considering he acts and dresses like an anachronism from the days of English rule in India) were so hopeless that it was a major feat the house was still left standing after his hilarious attempts at ‘home improvement’. Official programme sacker Donald Trump (think Don King colliding with a truck of Brylcreem to get the full horror of the hair) eventually decided that the foppish Raj was next for the chop and booted him out. This was sad as professional gentleman and full-time buffoon Raj was always good value.

But there are still plenty more despicable people left in to enjoy loathing in the show... Misanthropy rules!

Pillow Talk...

‘That woman has big cat eyes. She looks like the bride of Wildenstein – or one of those vampires from Salem’s Lot.’
‘Honey, I’m watching the telly...’
‘But she look like a vampire. Is it a horror show about vampires?’
‘It’s a documentary about humanism.’
‘And not vampres?’
‘Please shut up...’
‘But she look like a vampire. Are you sure it’s not a programme about humanist vampires?’
‘Shut up – now...’

I’d been out all day and arrived home quite late to find the missus in bed watching the telly. My eyes – or several pints of bitter – may well have been playing tricks on me and I have since looked through the TV listings magazine to confirm it was indeed a show about humanism with not a mention of the undead in sight.

But I am offering a prize to anyone who saw this show at midnight on Sunday and can confirm that it had a woman who looked like a cat-cum-vampire in it.

Lost !

The survivors in C4’s new glossy and imported US uber-drama Lost can’t really be all that bright. They’re all wandering around a desert island desperate to find a means of contact with the outside world and they all consistently ignore the film crew chronicling their every move right under their nose. Must be post-traumatic stress disorder – or they’re just idiots...

The much-hyped Lost is basically a load of old hokum about a bunch of air crash survivors trying to cope with life on a mysterious desert island. The plot revolves around the group working out how to survive both the island and each other while the viewer is fed titbits of information about their lives pre-crash each week. In terms of giving Lost a multi-layered narrative this works OK but unless more starts happening I’ll be rooting for the giant polar bears that seem to inhabit the island eating all the survivors and curtailing the show so Channel 4 can put something more interesting on.

But bearing in mind Channel 4’s idea of interesting is the piss-poor Big Brother and several other equally woeful reality TV shows then sticking with Lost may be no bad thing.

The only thing potentially more scary than the giant polar bears or the prospect of another series of Big Brother is Donald Trump’s hair. The astoundingly coifffured one was back in The Apprentice US last night as both teams of wannabe business moguls had to present an advertising campaign designed to recruit cadets to the New York Police Department. An utter halfwit named Elizabeth was fired at the end of last night’s show after deciding potential police officers would be impressed if they were portrayed as the guardians of a police state. But have no fear as there are still of plenty of dopes to choose from and buffoons to despise.

The appeal of the show, though, is becoming more about Carolyn Kepcher for me. Carolyn is the tiny-mouthed acid queen who works alongside Trump and helps judge the contestants. She’s the sort of woman who could impersonate an iceberg and she has a stare that could petrify (as in turn to stone rather than just scare a bit) the combined might of the Green Berets and the SAS. Whenever she opens her mouth to pass judgement I can feel the temperature in our living room drop several degrees. She’s truly wonderful to behold.

If I wasn’t already married (and if I had a huge streak of sado-masochism) this could be love...

The End... Not!

The best words any would-be literary genius can write are ‘The end’. Although that is probably an exaggeration because writing the words ‘Pay self’ on a cheque for several zillion squid are also very good words to write too. But ‘The end’ comes quite close.

So it was with a real sense of satisfaction that I added my favourite two words to the finale of my latest play, Trust, yesterday evening. As soon as I’d typed these words down a little party began in my head where I was quaffing champagne (which I don’t like) and disco dancing with the missus on a Caribbean beach while Kid Creole and the Coconuts played some happening tune. In my head I was even high-fiving my stepson (and I generally consider people who do high fives only fit for chemical castration).

Sadly this image only lasted for about two minutes because I then started thinking about ways to improve the play and working out which bits needed cutting. I then realised that adding my favourite two words actually meant the job was only half-done because I’ll now spend the next four weeks redrafting it and adding bits to it and making sure the narrative makes sense and the characters are fully developed.

Then when I think it’s done I’ll give it to my two unofficial script editors (wife and wife’s writer father) to rip to bits and I’ll probably wish I hadn’t while secretly being quite glad I had because they are usually right about these things. Then I’ll do some more rewrites and send it off to my hit list of theatres and wait...

Anyway, to cut a long story short I thought I’d finished my play but I probably haven’t...

Here’s Johnny!

The boy is with his dad for three weeks so me and the missus are doing a passable impression of being young and fancy-free. This involves us not having to get up at 7.30am to ensure the not-so-little fella gets up for school and it means we don’t have to head back home at a reasonable hour post-work to ensure he doesn’t starve to death.

In fact it means we can do pretty much what we want without having to worry about the welfare of our favourite teenager. We can eat food he doesn’t like, watch telly he doesn’t like and dance around the living room without snorts of derision coming from under the hoody on the sofa. I can even crawl around the house naked pretending to be a dog bothering the cats should I wish. I don’t, of course, but I could.

Typically, of course, as soon as he’s away it turns out he’s needed as on Sunday I took the missus to see Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. As I’ve expressed in previous blog entries the boy is very useful when there’s a kids’ picture me and the missus both fancy seeing as we can persuade (bribe) him to go see it and we don’t look like the oddest people in the cinema.

But my wife’s craving to see Johnny Depp in action over-rode our usual need for subterfuge and we arrived at Kensington Odeon on Sunday without the aforementioned boy. Fortunately the place was pretty empty although I did pretend the supplies I bought at the kiosk were for my kids (I decided to invent a few) when the guy asked me if the huge tub of popcorn and the sweets I was cradling were all for me.

Surprisingly the film itself is fabulous but Tim Burton and Depp always do good work so this should come as no surprise. Depp, though, should get the Oscar he was robbed of for his role in Pirates Of The Caribbean. His Willy Wonka is a cross between Michael Jackson (minus the kiddy-fiddling rumours) and Marilyn Manson and is very funny. I can nearly see why the wife likes him so much. I’d shag him and I don’t even do fellas.

We also got out to the National Theatre on Saturday to see a play by Simon Stephens called On The Shores Of The Big Wide World. I bought the tickets for this in a hurry on Friday night and didn’t notice until we about to take our seats that the tickets were for a performance in two weeks time. Oops… Fortunately they exchanged the tickets and we went in to see the play. This was fortunate as the consequences of dragging the missus all the way to the National Theatre only to discover we were two weeks early were simply to horrible to ponder…

I’d never seen Stephens’ work before but the play was an engaging story about three generations of a Stockport family who have to come to terms with a tragedy, and with each other, in a six-month period. There was a real spark and tenderness about the writing and, going against the trend of a lot of modern theatre, the ending was quite upbeat and optimistic. It’s always good to find new writers you like – even if you realise it means you have to up your game at the same time...

The other highlight of the weekend was my second attempt at The Independent On Saturday’s Super Soduko Puzzle. God help me but I fear this may be a new addiction. I’ve even started coveting the BlackBerry 7100 I could win and imagining how much it could improve my life. Bizarrely I don’t know what a Blackberry 7100 does but I do know that I now want to win one. I can feel my hands stroking its plastic keys now. This could be serious…

Family Values...

My little brother, our Nobby, visited this week. I call him little brother but he’s actually not very little any more. In fact he’s quite big and it would be fair to say that he’s ‘filled out a bit’ as people more polite than myself would say.

He’s now aged 30 and is the father of two kids and he got the ‘Nobby’ nickname when he was seven after he visited the birthday party of a girl up the street who had the unfortunate surname of Nobbs. In northern parlance this is the same as being called Fuchs or Bangs (insert christian name for full effect of joke) and it greatly amused me for many years. In fact it still does... Anyway little brother came back late from the party and myself and my older brother ribbed him mercilessly about this until the ‘Nobby’ nickname evolved.

Sadly for our kid this nickname stuck and his closest friends still use it some 23 years later. Even more amusing I have heard past girlfriends and his wife use it when they’re annoyed with him.

Nicknames, of course, are horrible things and I’ve had several stinkers throughout my life but my favourite of these was ‘Ghandi’ which I was christened because I had similar glasses to the famed man of peace. One cousin was also nicknamed ‘Mamba’ because of the length of one part of his anatomy. I often thought ‘Mamba’ was a better nickname than ‘Ghandi’ when I was a teen hoping to impress women but ‘Mamba’ was also quite jealous of my nickname as he was interested in peace studies and wanted to bring about reform by non-violent means then be shot and martyred. That last bit may be a lie...

Nobby was down to play in a big-money poker tournament. He’d won a seat at this prestigious event by winning several internet events and the two grand expenses he’s pocketed to go along with his entrance money seemed like a decent prize should he get hammered by all the big guns present at the main event. In the end he did OK and finished a creditable fourth on a table with two professional players. Who knows, it could even be a new career! Good luck to him.

Sadly he’s got to lose a few pounds before we can call him Amarillo Slim...

Hyde And Seek...

I’ve been doing martial arts for a while now and as part of my studies I do a bit of ki meditation. This involves me adopting the lotus position and focusing on my breathing until I clear my head and zone out.

It’s good stuff and, even though various visiting family and friends have found this hilarious when they’ve chanced on me meditating in the garden, it is something that is good for my equilibrium as it makes me want to assault people less than I once used to. The flip side of this, though, is that if I drop out of the ki habit I can turn from Jekyll to Hyde in a matter of weeks...

This transformation is currently under way and the first signs manifested themselves at the weekend at a pool tournament. The ongoing decline of my once-aggressive eightball game has been a matter of concern for some time but it hit rock bottom on Saturday with a performance so abject that Stevie Wonder would have beaten me on the baize. It was then the twitch started...

The twitch occurs when I’m really hacked off and it feels as if all the muscles in my neck are trying to slant and turn my head 180 degrees to the right. My eyes also start to go dead and my mouth starts to snarl. Imagine Jim Bowen having a stroke and you’re about there.

I managed to control the twitch by the time I got home on Saturday but I have chanced upon Big Brother twice over the past few days and it sent the twitch into spasm mode. I also saw adverts for Rock Around The Block on ITV1 and this triggered the twitch too.

I was getting worried about this until I saw the potential for life as a telly critic on GMTV (twitch, twitch, twitch...) where I’d sit on the sofa next to Kate Garraway and John Stapleton (twitch, twitch, twitch, neck spasm, neck spasm...) and they’d show me various shows and gauge their popularity from my body language.

So the currently excellent Corrie would get no response and be deemed a hit while EastEnders with its Supermarionation-style actor Nigel Harman would send me into total body spasm mode.

It make sound a tad distasteful but it’s no sicker than the House Of Obsessive Compulsives (twitch, twitch, twitch, neck spasm, neck spasm...) on Channel 4. I’d actually like to review this on the GMTV sofa while sat next to simpering telly hack Richard Arnold and start with a few twitches then have my head explode all over his suit. I'd like to see him quip his way out of that.

Time for some meditation methinks...