Nick's Blog
Bouncing Baby Blog
15/1/2008 @ 10:31
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Now that Wifey's 24 weeks pregnant, I get asked "how do you feel at the prospect of becoming a dad?" and I have to say it's a wonderful feeling. I've spread my seed, it has borne fruit and metaphor metaphor etc etc...
The baby's started kicking now, and I can feel tiny murmurs on Wifey's tummy and that experience is fantastic...I mean, feeling the kicking not doing the kicking: I have no memories of me kicking inside my mother's womb so I can't relate to what Junior is doing right now. But there is new life there and Wifey's cruising through it all like the Supermum she is. Other mothers are snarling at her because she's sailing through this all with no sickness, no violent mood swings, no headaches or strange cravings although she has manifested a strange bit of behaviour recently....
It's her inability to focus on the plot of a movie or TV show and instead focussing on the actor's shirts, furniture and hair styles. "That's a strange colour blue" she says at the moment when Jack Bauer has worked out there's a traitor in CTU....again.
"What's a strange colour blue?" I say, trying to work out what Jack's saying. Probably some obscure but meaningful bit of information that will become vitally important 3 episodes on.
"His shirt" says I
"Jack's shirt is grey" says she
"No, I mean the other guy"
"You mean the guy at the back? The guy who's an extra holding a folder....You numpty! He hasn't got a blue shirt on...that's a folder!"
Jack mentions some name of an important but not yet seen character who's significance I have now missed.
"Oh, I thought it was a funny shape for a shirt" she says.
"Hang on....you said it was a funny colour" says I.
"Yes, a funny colour and a funny shape which is why I thought it was funny for a shirt"
"Even though we've now established it wasn't a shirt but a folder."
6:57...6:58...6:59...7:00...and I've just missed the cliffhanger whilst trying play the brand new game Shirt or Folder. I will how have to go through the damn DVD menu (and you know what I think about them) to find half the scenes and the plot in the previous episode I had missed because we were establishing whether a shade of blue was funny for a shirt, whether it is a shirt or a folder, why don't people in TV shows ever lock their cars, how many glasses of water various characters drink and the ever popular "how old are they meant to be" guessing game that she loves playing and I don't.
"How old is she meant to be?" She'll ask of a character.
"Erm, early 40s I think" I say
"40! She looks 90!" says Wifey, rolling her eyes in disbelief.
"She doesn't look 90...you're exaggerating"
"She looks so plasticated and ancient! OK, how old is she meant to be?"
"The daughter? Late teens, 21 at the most"
"21! She looks older than her mother!"
"In your world that would make her at least 95"
"Can't you see it? She's so ancient!" She says, wobbling her head in a way that suggests that she's living among aliens and is struggling to understand our weirdigan ways. It gets to the point where I have to go to the IMDb and look up the ages of the actors just so I can prove to Wifey that they are all well younger than 90 and reasonably within the age bracket of the character they're playing. An analogy is that episode of "Father Ted" where Ted is holding up some toy cows to Dougal and says "now listen, Dougal, these cows are small...the ones in the field are far away". Poor Wifey, I suspect, suffers from a lack of age perception.
Sacred Blogs #1
07/1/2008 @ 10:31
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One of the things I want to try for the New Year is a series of blog entries based around the theme of things that are considered cultural sacred cows but which I don't personally like. People seem to like it when I get curmudgeonly and angry in my blog so why not give the people what they want!
SACRED COW #1: THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Simon Pegg said it best in an episode of "Spaced":
"I hate it. It's boil-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and first-year drama students with too many posters of Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, Big Blue and Blue Velvet on their blue bloody walls."
For years I've heard people telling me how brilliant The Rocky Horror Show is and every single weekend at university some club was showing it on the big screen or on video and everyone went dutifully off wearing goth make up, women's underwear and carrying bags of flour and for what? A fun evening? A sing-a-long with a great collection of songs? A soul affirming experience of a lifetime. Hardly.
Let's get one thing clear about The Rocky Horror Show: Apart from about 2 songs, the music is utter crap. In fact, after they've done "The Timewarp" and "Sweet Transvestite", the show goes rapidly downhill....and that's after the first 20 minutes! All the most quotable bits and the moments that the fans bang on about occur in the first 20 minutes which still leaves you with 1 hour and 10 minutes of the show left to negotiate in agony.
I blame Frank n' Furter myself. Instead of being an iconic character, he just kills the story and mangles the music pretty much as soon as he shows up. Somehow, he's supposed to be the anti-hero, the character who the audience is supposed to find the most fun and fascinating but I find him tedious at best and deserving of a far worse fate than what happens to him by the end of proceedings. Let us not forget that it is he who thinks Brad should be ass raped, or that Janet should have her brain totally screwed over. At least, that's what I think happens because I have to admit I struggle to follow the thing they call a plot for the last half of the show.
I mean, people randomly turned into statues, the hangers on in Frank's life, the guy in the wheelchair and who the hell is Rocky anyway? By the time Riff Raff sells out Frank to his alien overlords (yep, this is real quality stuff here guys) I've ceased to care.
My suspicion as to why it's remained popular is down to two things: The Timewarp and the stockings. Girls generally want to stomp around to that song and guys want to let off some steam by wearing them. That's it. You can achieve the same effect by cross dressing at home or at a party and listening to an Abba greatest hits album and at least you'll be spared 1 hour and 10 minutes of barely comprehensible drivel to sit through.
If I feel sorry for anyone in the cast, it's Brad and Janet. In the same way that people support and sympathise with political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, I work to support Nerds who are victimised in the movies. For too long geeky, non-confrontational and nervous people have been the butt of jokes and ridicule or else violently ripped apart for not being cool or alternative enough. So this nice if nervous and indecisive couple get screwed over and ass raped by alien hedonists and for why? Why was it important to show normal people being subverted? Just leave them alone, they'll work things out...now you've debauched them and turned them into sluts and what's that going to do to their self esteem and relationship? Thank you Frank N. Furter. Thank you Richard O'Brien. Brad an Janet now face a future of increasingly meaningless sex fantasies which have been projected onto them by a deviant sub-culture, underpinned by huge sexual identity problems completely devoid of love and affection. They'll be in therapy for years with all that! Oh, and the Timewarp gets really annoying after hearing it 578 times in one night!
Blog Review of the Comedy Year: 2007
02/1/2008 @ 16:47
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If 2006 was a nadir in British TV comedy, and let's face it it wasn't a brilliant year when you look back on it with "Broken News", the lacklustre "Hyperdrive" and the inexplicable continuation of "My Family" and "Two Pints of Lager...", then 2007 saw life blossoming once again, like green shoots after a massive volcanic eruption covering the earth in ash and crap.
The year started with being weighed down by an increasingly disappointing series three of "Little Britain", where Matt Lucas' comedy talent seemed to be stuck in a rut of catchphrases and old favourites ("I want that one" becoming his comedy equivalent of an old but comfortable pair of slippers) and David Walliams showed that he seems to have only one comedy voice at his disposal: The fat tongued slightly retarded sounding naieve idiot.
The BBC, seeing that if one formula works well enough then you flog it again but with a woman instead, gave us more of the same with "The Catherine Tate Show". She has quite a lot of talent, and was underused in "Big Train" but again, her characters merely seemed to be the same person but at different stages of their life and the director clearly feared yelling "cut" when a sketch long ago ran out of steam.
So at the start of 2007 and going into the Spring, all British comedy hopes were pinned on the latest series of "Peep Show" to keep us going and boy, it didn't disappoint either. Few who saw it can forget the episode that features a dog called "Mummy" and the interesting BBQ treat on offer.
Mitchell and Webb were the superstars of 2007, getting their own BBC sketch show which consistently hit a high standard. Apart from "That's Numberwang", hardly any of the sketches involved Komic Karacters uttering interminble catchphrases. Could we have witnessed the return of concept driven sketch comedy of the kind that Britain has consistently put out over the last 50 or so years? Out of the two, David Mitchell's star has risen considerably and now he's prime panel show material. Sometimes I feel I channel his spirit when I go on insecure rants.
The summer's best British comedy was not on TV but at the movies. Pegg and Frost were back with "Hot Fuzz" and although it's not a gag fest like "Shaun of the Dead", it has come pure comedy gold in it plus ultra cool action and violence as well. Jolly good stuff!
So, going into autumn, we got a mixed bag with "Hyperdrive" returning with very little fanfare and the hard work that is "Tittybangbang" on BBC 3. I have no doubt that Lucy Montgomery is a great talent (and her Tom Cruise impression is the best ever), but for me there was a lot of incomprehensible shouting instead of jokes which made me invariable reach for the remote control...
BBC 3 gave us endless amounts of "Two Pints of Lager" as well. Does anyone actually watch this show and like it? Apparently so because it's now become like "The Last of the Summer Wine" for urbanites but without the charm.
2007 saved the best for last. In late August we got series two of "The IT Crowd" which boasted the best ever episode in the first of the run: Moss and Roy ending up at a gay musical (called "Gay!"), pretending to be disabled and Moss ending up working behind the theatre bar.
Then we got a good double dose of sketch comedy from the masters of the genre: Peter Serafinowicz finally got his own show and showed what he can really do in a series of brilliant impressions (remember the Alan Alda?), great parodies of shopping channels and the wonderful Darth Vader in Love sketches.
To see out the year, it was the turn of two veterans...titans you might say: Armstrong and Miller. From the chav talking RAF pilots through to my personal favourite, "Kill Them!", they seemed to hit gold every time and well deserved a prime time BBC 1 slot.
So what for 2008? No idea although I suspect more from Mitchell and Webb and Armstrong and Miller. It was clear what worked really well...classic sketch shows that didn't bombard us with endless catchphrases and dull, self indulgent camera mugging characters...and I hope that British TV can rediscover what it does really best and ditch the attempts to make things "yoof" or media savvy.
