Quote Of The Day...

'A mind is like a parachute. It can't work properly if it's not open.'
Frank Zappa

Train-in Day...

Me and the Missus are walking to catch the train to get into work. This is pretty much our daily routine, although she insists on arriving at the platform a good 20 minutes before the train actually leaves. 

Fortunately, she has successfully applied for voluntary redundancy so her working days travelling in with me are coming to an end.

‘I won’t miss this when you’re no longer working,’ I comment.

‘What? Getting to the station on time?’ she asks.

‘It’s not on time. We’re ridiculously early every single morning.’

‘It amazes me that for somebody who is so obviously OCD that you seem to have a blind spot when it comes to punctuality. You are Mr Last Minute…’

‘It’s not ‘last minute’. It’s finely honed and perfectly scheduled.’

‘I just like to get there early so I get a seat and I don’t end sitting next to an idiot.’

‘Well I end up sitting next to an idiot every morning and it doesn’t upset me…’

She glares. I suspect that comment may mean no ‘relations’ for a few days…

Romance...

It is Sunday morning. Me and the Missus are laid in bed discussing a mutual friend.
'Has he got a girlfriend yet?' I ask.
'Don't think so...' replies the Missus.
'That's a bit sad.'
'Yes. Good people shouldn't be lonely,' ponders the Missus in a moment of compassion, before adding: 'He'll never know what it's like to see passion turn to painful irritation and ongoing annoyance.'
'You make our relationship sound like thrush...'
'What? Putting up with an annoying cunt for long periods? I couldn't possibly comment. Cup of tea?'

Love is sometimes like this...

Fact Of The Day...

Wigan = one trophy in eight years.
Arsenal = zero trophies in eight years.

Discuss...

Found Drowned...

Me and the Missus went to the Watts Gallery just outside Guildford at the weekend.

GF Watts was a celebrated Victorian artist who worked mainly as a symbolist painter but also dabbled in social realism and sculpture and even had a few paintings that were almost impressionistic.

His second wife Mary was a potter, who was very much part of the arts and crafts movement, and the Watts Gallery with the Watts Chapel just down the road was fab.

I also saw the original of Found Drowned by GF Watts, a picture of a prostitute who committed suicide in London. I'm trying to get permission to use this painting as the key image for the project I'm working on about the Contagious Diseases Act, which will be the launch project for my new theatre company.

The company is called Public House Theatre and will be launched later this year. More details on this to follow...

All Change...

I'm moving into new territories and things are changing again.
Both at work and, more importantly, outside work.
But it's sometimes good to shake things up.

And I think I like Jay-Z. It may be a midlife crisis...

ITV Comedies…

ITV has been a wasteland for decent comedy ever since Rising Damp wowed a nation in the 1980s. Since then it’s been pretty awful fayre. Only the hit-and-miss-and-not-really-very-funny vulgar-thon Benidorm has offered any sign that comedy may yet have a life on ITV…

But recently there’s been a glut of new comedy shows on ITV with two big-profile shows and one lesser-heralded vehicle.

Vicious is the flag-bearer for the new ITV comedy renaissance. It stars Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi as two ageing gay lovers, with Frances De La Tour as their sex-mad fag hag chum. There’s also the hunky, young neighbour upstairs that the elderly trio want to ride like a Blackpool donkey.

The main gag in Vicious seems to be that the two old gays and De La Tour’s character are ‘vicious’ and catty and the laughs presumably are meant to come from the outrageous things they say to each other. But the problem with this premise is that the exchanges need to be more ‘vicious’ for this to work. And they’re not. Instead they’re gags that are so telegraphed I had time to leave the room, make a cup of tea then come back into the room and stroke the cat (not a euphemism) and beat the protagonist to the punchline before they delivered it. It’s that laboured.

Vicious is a really bizarre show. The acting talent attached is astonishing but it’s like the last 30 years of comedy have never happened and we’re in the land of comedy ‘pooftahs’… but without the genuine warmth of a John Inman in Are You Being Served. I genuinely wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a guest spot from a Black And White Minstrel. It felt that hackneyed and that dated…

The Job Lot is a sitcom set in a Job Centre with Russell Tovey as a disillusioned member of staff, Sarah Hadland of Miranda fame as his quirky, insecure and eager-to-please-and-be-accepted boss, and Jo Enright of Life’s Too Short fame as a monotonal, deskbound autocrat who takes great delight in belittling everyone around her, both staff and jobseekers.

It’s not terrible in the same way that Vicious is and there are some nice moments in it but it’s not either really funny or really clever. One scene saw Tovey quit his job then change his mind when he left the building and realised the new temp arriving for work was a stunner. The exit of Tovey’s character wasn’t painful enough or farcical enough... and the introduction of a Benny Hill soundtrack would not have surprised me at the moment he saw the new office temp. There’s a genuinely funny idea here along the lines of the BBC2 sleeper hit The Smoking Room but I’m not sure this is it.

Plebs is the third of the new ITV shows I’ve seen and it’s a sort of Inbetweeners set in Ancient Rome and it’s actually the best of the three, even though it doesn’t boast the prime-time slot of the other two shows and is tucked away at 10pm.

It’s a bit bawdy and a bit raw and not particularly subtle but the script is much sharper than the other two shows. Tom Rosenthal is also very good as the unlucky-in-love Marcus and Ryan Sampson is excellent as his put-upon slave Grumio

The distancing effect of setting it in Ancient Rome works well and allows the writers not only the chance to mine the seam of historical anachronism but it also lends the whole enterprise a certain charm along the lines of Up Pompei.

It’s the best show of the three and it deserves a wider audience. And while Vicious may be pretty poor and The Job Lot sort of OK, at least ITV is back investing in new comedy shows. So that’s good news even if the quality of the output is a bit questionable.