1. Much to my amusement, I remember this from comics I read when I was younger. At the time, I wanted to send off for the whole thing, but now… well, not so much.
  2. What’s that you say? Aside from startlingly regular updates to my blog, what am I writing at the moment? Well, I appreciate your interest, and since you asked, I’m currently working on a radio play, my second novel (slowly, granted), a one-off TV update of my favourite play (clue: big nose), and a ‘spec script’ for Frasier which is nothing of the sort given that the show’s been off the air for years, but is designed to show me using other people’s characters. And I have a couple of ideas for one-off film type things, which will probably have to wait until I can get people sufficiently interested in my ideas that they want to throw money my way. I mean, come on, I’ve got to be realistic here…
  3. You may have seen Ricky Gervais advertising his new tour on TV. Obviously expensive to buy prime time advert slots, which goes some way to explaining why the script appears to have had minimal attention paid to it. Woefully unfunny, in my opinion, and several months too late to be at all topical, but they do have the taste of the end drawing nigh, to my mind. Gervais, like everyone else, was terrific in The Office, but if you look at that show in the sequence of his career (The 11 O’Clock Show, his chat show, THEN The Office and Extras), then it looks more and more like an aberration, that the stuff since then is a return to his natural form, and that the limited material in that seam has been all but mined. He has the look of a man who’s painfully aware that his best work may well be behind him – which must be a terrible thing to suspect, but he does seem too content to hide behind irony whilst effectively trotting out the same old jokes at the expense of minorities and the disabled and the like. Still, with Bernard Manning now dead, Gervais has a clear run. Run, Ricky, Run!
  4. I’ve booked to have laser surgery on my eyes in a month or so, and no doubt that will have two side-effects; firstly, that I may go quiet for a few days while my eyes recover, and secondly, that I’ll probably go on and on and on about it, almost as much as I did about the Marathon. Consider this fair warning.
  5. Joss Whedon, like Alan Ball, Aaron Sorkin and a number of other folks, knows about writing. And when he wants to, he can write more than just quippy plots – see here for an example. All good points, I think.
  6. Concluding this linkfrenzy of a post, look at the Bat-Pod!