Whilst it’s good that they’ve adhered to a suitably letter-based system for naming the follow-up, I do think that fans of the first film are going to be disappointed by the absence of any of the original cast and characters.
The rest of us will probably be relieved.
Despite the fact that the word itself is almost irritatingly ubiquitous, I have to say that I like a good podcast. And, as you’ll see from the following, I may not be averse to the odd bad one either.
I’m pretty certain (read: I can’t be bothered to check the archives) that I’ve mentioned a few of my favoured podcasts before, but as it’s Friday and it’s been a stunningly busy week, I thought I’d do a semi-cheat post and collate a list of the ones I enjoy, and want to recommend. They’re all issued on a weekly basis (most of the time), and are speech-based (though a couple of them are effectively radio shows with the songs removed for what I guess are copyright and royalty-related reasons), and I find them a pretty good way to cheer up a commute or jog or similar block of time where you may not want to, or be able to, read.
Anyway, onto the list, with – inevitably – my thoughts on them:
Adam and Joe – not quite on a par with their XFM podcasts (which I’m pretty sure are available on iTunes, and are worth hunting down), but these BBC 6Music shows are nonetheless very funny indeed. The ‘Song Wars’ feature is impressive – they put a lot of effort into nonsense songs on a particular theme, and the songs are frequently as accomplished as anything that makes the charts. Their banter is relaxed and suitably idiotic, and they make often each other laugh in a deeply unprofessional fashion, which makes it feel all the more jolly. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Adam is apparently a friend of a friend of mine, but I’ve never met him, and used to watch their Channel 4 show before I knew of this, so I consider this recommendation to be fairly free of nepotism. The show goes out on Saturday, and the pod is usually cast by midday on Monday.
Word Magazine – a weekly podcast only tenuously related to my (current) favourite ‘music and stuff’ magazine, with a rotating cast of voices, though it’s usually chaired by publisher David Hepworth and/or editor Mark Ellen. Recent weeks have seen guests such as Supergrass, Chris Difford and Claire Grogan, which adds amusing variety, though it’s not really needed; the subjects vary wildly, and given that most of the people involved have worked in music magazines or TV or radio for a long time, a lot of silly behind-the-scene experiences get shared. The sound quality’s pretty variable – though they acknowledge that and recent weeks have seen it improve – but it’s worth trying to ignore that and have a listen, as it often feels like a virtual version of sitting in the pub with some interesting people. There’s usually one podcast a week, issued on Tuesday (occasionally) or Wednesday (more frequently).
Russell Brand – I’ve mentioned more than once before that I like Brand, and this podcast, the edited highlights of his weekly BBC Radio 2 show, pretty amply demonstrates why. Alternately egged on and held back by his friend and producer Matt Morgan (who’s known him long enough to remind him of embarrassing incidents in his life, and not to take any guff when Brand gets prima-donna-y), there are frequently insane flights of fancy and all sorts of quick-witted wordplay, much of which will, I suspect, come as a surprise to people who think that Brand spends all his time having sex, or trying to have sex, with women (though that aspect of his life is a recurrent theme). Noel Gallagher of Oasis frequently phones the show to provide an antidote to the dandified behaviour, and as Brand’s recently been in the USA shooting and promoting a film, he’s had guests such as Kristen Bell and Seth Rogan in the studio, for semi-interviews which are more playful and less riddled with plugs than the average radio or TV appearance. The show goes out on Saturday nights, and the podcast is usually available by Wednesday.
Collings and Herrin – or, to use their proper names, Andrew Collins and Richard Herring. This gloriously lo-fi podcast started a couple of months ago, as Collins and Herring realised they used to enjoy their stupid discussions of the news and newspapers when they were on BBC 6Music together. It’s recorded on a laptop, often with them eating as they go, and they cheerfully admit they don’t listen to it or re-edit it in any way. It sounds like it, to be honest, but Herring’s tendency to take an idea and run with it beyond any usual boundaries of taste (a hallmark of his recent stand-up shows) makes it all worthwhile, as he often ends up making ludicrous comments which somehow aren’t quite as ridiculous as they should be. Collins is a good writer and broadcaster, so is able to marshal this madness into some kind of coherent shape, and is also very good at pointing out the hypocrisies of the press (such as them pretending to be appalled at photos of starlets spilling out of their dresses whilst still printing the pictures). They record this (usually at one of their homes) on Friday, and it’s often available to download the very same day. The wonders of technology, eh ?
… well, that wasn’t such a lazy-cheat post after all, was it ? As ever, I ended up running away at the mouth (well, keyboard). All of the above, by the way, are totally free of charge, and should work equally well on most mp3 players and iPods alike (the ‘pod’ bit of ‘podcast’ is rather misleading, I think), but I’m afraid I can’t offer any kind of techie advice or customer support, you download them at your own risk, and I will not be held liable. You must be *this* tall to go on the ride, please keep your hands inside the car at all times.
Now, I’ve shown you mine, you show me yours – am I missing out on any really good podcasts? Some people say that Mark Kermode’s film reviews are worth reviewing, and I’ve heard some good things (and some bad things too) about Ricky Gervais’s podcast, so point me in the right direction, I beg of you.
Ta!
Yesterday, I bought the paperback of Sir Ranulph Feinnes’s autobiography; he’s climbed Everest and been to at least one of the Poles, and the other year he ran seven marathons in as many days, or something equally insane-sounding, so I think he’s a chap whose life story will be an interesting one. And besides, it was half price in Books etc.
On the back cover, though, there are a number of quotes, including the following from the Daily Mail:
“Sir Ranulph has earned his place in the heroic roll call of Scott, Shackleton and the rest.”
… I get the idea that the Mail reviewer was struggling to find people to name-drop who were, y’know, British. Hillary and Norgay, Amundsen, and even Columbus spring to mind, and oddly enough I have no problem in doffing my hat (or at the very least touching the brim) to people who’ve achieved things but happen to have been born outside of this sceptred isle.
The Daily Mail, on the other hand…
A number of people, including m’colleague, have pointed to the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, and suggested it’s a bad thing, and that we who live in London should hang down our heads in shame.
As I think I’ve said before, I’m registered to vote, but find none of the candidates credible or worthy of my vote, and there’s no ‘None Of The Above’ option on the ballot paper for me to express that dissatisfaction; indeed, if you spoil your voting paper, not only do you slow the count down for people who have voted, but your spoiled paper is discounted from the final ‘adjusted’ figures as if it was never there. So, consider me disenfranchised.
And please don’t give me any of that ‘if you don’t vote you can’t complain’ piffle – I consider myself eminently placed to complain both about the system which excludes me, and the calibre of the candidates. As a vegetarian of many years standing, I compare it to a restaurant which doesn’t offer a veggie option. Am I allowed to say I think that restaurant’s limited in its offerings? I think that only the most rabid of carnivores would say no.
I think it was very much an election of personalities, with Londoners deciding that they’d rather see how the possibly racist candidate fared in office, as opposed to the present incumbent with his apparent tendency to compare people to nazis. Well, when I say ‘Londoners’, I mean less than half of those registered to vote, as the turnout was just under 50%. Hardly what you’d call a mandate.
Of course, the people who stand to lose the most from Johnson’s election to power are also those who are currently most happy about it – and by that, of course, I mean the Evening Standard newspaper. Even to my politically uninterested eye, they’ve been blatantly anti-Livingstone all the way (and yesterday’s front cover relegated the news that 20,000 people may be dead in Burma in favour of a large picture of Boris cycling to work), so they’re currently very pleased to have their candidate in office. But the way they’ve pimped him so shamelessly and built up expectations of enormous change sweeping through London has to be hopelessly unrealistic. Boris will, like all politicians, make mistakes and suffer setbacks to his plans and all the usual stuff which is wheeled out whenever election pledges aren’t met, and I think the staff of the Evening Standard are likely to have something of a rude awakening.
Being the gullible dupe I am, of course, I’ve been taken in completely by their support and outrageous claims for Johnson, and firmly believe that there is nothing at all which will stand in Boris’s way. So by the time the Olympics come to London in 2012, I expect the city to be paved with crushed diamonds, the toilets to flush champagne, and for the skyline to have been transformed into something out of the Jetsons.
I mean, it’s not as if politicians and/or the media have ever lied to me before, is it ?
Those words, my friends, comprised the subject line of an e-mail I recently received from my friend Debs. Good attention-grabbing trick, I have to say.
Anyway, lest you should think it was a message mistakenly sent as a result of tipsy texting, fear not: Debs is taking part in this year’s Playtex Moonwalk here in London on 17 May. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, which does sound less like a charitable event and more like the wish-fulfilment of a hormonal teenage boy, a large number of women gather by night and walk 26.2 miles (yes, a marathon) to raise money for breast cancer research. And yes, they do all this with their bras on show.
I know that Debs usually prefers to walk back and forth between the bar and her seat in the pub, so I’m impressed by this charitable gesture, and yes, you guessed it, I’m asking you to sponsor her. It’s a good cause and a substantial challenge, so if you good people could find it in your hearts to donate a couple of quid, it’d be much appreciated. Debs is aiming to raise £500, and is about 80% of the way there, so any donation, no matter how small (or indeed large) would be smashing.
You can donate online by clicking here, and your donations are – unlike a GMTV phone-in – completely secure, and if you’re a UK Taxpayer, the magic of Gift Aid could bump up your donation by 28% at no extra charge to you. Debs will thank you, and so do I.
And if you’re the hormonal teenage boy I mentioned earlier, and have found this by Googling in some sauciness-seeking fashion, don’t be dismayed, there’s even a picture of some women in their bras if you follow the link. But if you do that, you’re legally obliged to make a donation, as Debs has friends who can track which computer IP addresses have been to the site to donate, and which ones visited solely to perv.
Oh yes, friends in high places. And low ones too, but that’s a story for another time.
At the Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh Q&A the other week, Kate Rowland of the BBC Writersroom said that they’d soon be kicking off a talent search called Sharps, and that people should keep their eyes on the website for further details.
So I did – and if you’re interested in writing, you should probably do the same, as there are often posts with details of writing competitions or other opportunities in a variety of bradcast media – and lo and behold, details of ‘Sharps’ have now been posted.
It seems pretty interesting to my mind – the brief is for a half-hour TV script on the topic of ‘the nation’s health’, which it seems you can interpret pretty broadly. After the entries have all been received and sorted, 20 writers will be selected for a workshop, and then eight of them will be asked to attend a week-long residential course with what sounds like a lot of mentoring, as well as £500. Loads of writing-based skills practice, and money? I suspect I won’t be the only one who’ll be sufficiently enticed to send something in.
I do wonder, though, if they may have made something of a rod for their own backs in regard to the period of time they’re allowing to complete the sifting process – the closing date is Monday 16 June, and people who’ve been shortlisted will be notified by the following Monday, 23 June. That would mean they’ll really have to churn through the submissions, especially as the workshop is currently scheduled for 28 June, the Saturday after that.
Still, that’s a logistical thing for the good people at the BBC to sort out, and certainly no reason not to enter, as far as I’m concerned. And given that known troublemaker Lucy has today sent a mass e-mail to those of us lucky enough to be listed in her virtual black book, drawing our attention to Sharps, I suspect that many other people who blog on such things may well be thinking of entering too.
Are you planning on having a go? Do feel free to post a comment, or e-mail me at john[at]johnsoanes.co.uk, I’d curious to know.
*I am very, VERY sorry about this.
These two book covers aren’t quite twins (more like half-siblings), though they have both been published recently.
More alarming, though, is the sentence which is created by reading their titles in sequence.
I’m going to advance a theory, but first of all I want to perform a little experiment. A thought experiment, if you will. Okay, here we go: how do you react when I tell you the following?
“I’ve got a present for you – but I’m not going to tell you what it is. It’s a secret. You’ll have to wait and see.”
Now, if you’re anything like me – and if what follows is going to make any kind of sense whatsoever – you’ll have thought vaguely along the lines of ‘oooh, wonder what it is?’; which is, I think, perfectly natural and reasonable (if you didn’t react like that at all, the rest of this post will make me sound like a lunatic, which isn’t new, but it will undermine the point I’m trying to make, so you might want to bail out now before you start getting annoyed by what I have to say).
If someone tells you they’ve got you a present, I think it naturally triggers a number of questions in the mind: what is it? Where did they get it? Is it something I’ve mentioned I’d like? And so on. Arguably, receiving the present and opening it, and thus having it reduced from ‘potentially anything’ to ‘what it actually is’ can seem disappointing, as if all the possibilities have been swept away, and the present itself (no matter how exciting it is) something of a letdown. In my typically pretentious way, I think it’s rather like the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox with the various probabilities waves (or, for the purposes of my comparison, possibilities) collapsing to reveal the true state of things.
I genuinely believe that the human brain has an almost inbuilt tendency towards constructing some kind of narrative, or speculating on possible events; in the same way as we see shapes in clouds or faces in patterns on the curtains, I think that if you present people with a scenario or a set of circumstances, they’ll almost immediately start to wonder what came before or what happened afterwards. I think a lot of art relies on this – we wonder what La Giaconda is smiling at, or why she’d rather sink than call Brad for help, and even if the picture is specifically titled to let us know it’s The Lady of Shallott, the picture acts as a snapshot, a moment frozen in time from a longer narrative.
In his long-form essay Writing for Comics, Alan Moore does this brilliantly with William Holman Hunt’s painting The Hireling Shepherd, throwing out a number of ideas as to what might happen next, as if it were a frame in a film which might suddenly start rolling again. I doubt this theory could be applied to abstract art – it’s hard to imagine ‘what happens next’ in a Jackson Pollock painting – but I think that in representational art it holds true, probably due to the fact that anything depicted on a canvas is purportedly happening somewhere at some time, which inevitably leads the mind to wonder what preceded or what follows it.
Why am I thinking all this, you might wonder? Well, it’s for a typically mundane reason – I was watching Doctor Who the other night (blissfully unaware as I sat down to do so of Mr Arnopp’s cameo role) and when it got to the end of the episode, there was a ‘Next Week…’ snippet. Now, I don’t like these pseudo-trailers anyway – they seem to be fairly insulting to the writer of the episode that’s just finished as they imply that the episode hasn’t been of a sufficiently high quality to draw you back – but when the episode closes on a cliffhanger, it’s all the more daft to sneak-peek at the next episode; if you end the episode with large numbers of people in peril (as happened in DW on Saturday) and then show various people running around and shouting and so on, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not all going to die in the first ten seconds of the show, no matter what the cliffhanger suggested. It’s often called false peril, but I’d say that this is more like defused peril – and defused because someone, probably in branding and/or marketing, thinks that people need to know a bit of what’s coming next, that it’s the only way to draw them back. I disagree.
This isn’t entirely confined to fiction, as news programmes seem all too keen to tell us the key aspects of a story before going to their reporter live at the scene, who reiterates the key notes again before (if you’re lucky) adding in a detail or two and handing back to the studio. It feels like spoon-feeding, and more annoyingly it’s a waste of airtime (which may, unfortunately, be the reason for it – there are after all many minutes to fill for as little money as possible).
So, given my theory about an innate narrative tendency in the human brain, I think that the folks who ‘package’ and ‘brand’ TV shows in this way (all too often a very different job from actually making programmes) are missing the point quite dramatically. I feel people have a natural tendency to want to know what happens next, or (if they come in partway through a story) to invent ‘the story so far’ so as to catch up on what they’ve missed – if (and this is key) they’re sufficiently drawn in. Constantly reminding the viewer of what’s happened in the last few minutes (as seen in the moronic voice-overs in Dragon’s Den) or trying to keep us interested with ‘Coming Up’ stuff (especially in BBC shows where there are no ad breaks to encourage channel-hopping) actually undermines the content of the programme itself, and detracts from that which might actually attract viewers in the first place.
And it doesn’t work. I say this with a hearty chunk of confidence, because more and more of these tacky little tricks are in evidence on our TV screens all the time, and the prevalence of them is the clue; if they were drawing in and holding an audience, they wouldn’t be slapping these ‘coming up’ bits and ‘next time…’ trailers on the shows. The only programmes that I can think of which are thankfully devoid of this kind of nonsense are… any ideas? Yes, the soap operas.
Say what you like about the soaps – and after seeing last night’s episode I’d once again point to EastEnders’ enormous flaw in not having even one vaguely sympathetic character (or at least not one with a storyline at present) – they are absolutely brilliant at providing ‘the story so far’ as they go along. Sure, there are sometimes slightly clunky lines of dialogue like ‘So, how are you doing since your wife ran off with the milkman, Terry?’, but most of the time the necessary exposition is woven into the dialogue so seamlessly that it’s invisible, which is exactly as it should be. Stan Lee, co-creator of super-heroes such as Spider-Man and The X-Men, once said that every issue of a comic book is someone’s first issue, and this is true across most media; all episodes of soaps or dramas are someone’s first episode, and so the story so far, and the characters’ names and relationships, need to be established as quickly but discreetly as possible. Watch an episode of any long-running soap opera and watch out for how they do it, it’s quite instructive.
The soaps, which attract vast numbers of viewers, seem to be immune from this ‘previously on’/’coming up’-type nonsense, and yet in their attempts to attract the kind of audience share the soaps consistently command, the people who package programmes seem to think the best way is to market shows in a way that actually detracts from the content. I’m guessing the soaps don’t mess with their format on the grounds that isn’t broken so it doesn’t need fixing, but all too many other shows seem to try to fix it by breaking it even more.
The soaps, and many other forms of entertainment media, are based on the fact that, suitably lured in, people want to know what’s going to happen next. JJ Abrams, the creator of Alias and co-creator of Lost, is obviously a man who knows something about getting the viewers and keeping them interested, and talks about the effect ‘mystery’ can have in an interview which you can view via this page. Abrams says “maybe there are times where mystery is more important than knowledge,” and I’d not only agree with that, but I’d go further and say that people are more drawn to mysteries than they are to knowledge.
Who killed Laura Palmer? Who shot JR? Will Maddie and David / Sam and Diane/ Lois and Clark/ Ross and Rachel/ Smithy and Nessa get together? Questions, and mysteries, are often the aspects of stories and entertainment which draw us in and then draw us back for more. By constantly stating what happened before what you’re seeing now, reiterating what you’ve just seen, and giving you glimpses of what’s yet to come, the experience of not knowing what’s to come is as good as lost. It’s not that I don’t want to know the answer to the questions posed in the story, it’s just that I don’t necessarily want to know them quite yet. It’s slightly perverse, perhaps, but isn’t it more perverse that, as a species, we create stories of things that never happened to people who never were in places and times which weren’t as depicted, and then break these stories (writerly pun intended) into sections deliberately designed to keep people paying attention?
Well no, I don’t think it’s perverse at all. I believe – as I’ve said above – that it’s absolutely natural. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman’s introduction to one of his Sandman volumes, being alive is very much a case of trying to catch up on what’s gone before, and as we’ll leave long before the story comes to its end, the tendency to speculate and wonder about events (be they real or imaginary) is, as good as innate in humankind; and the stories which hold our attention best are those which know how to play on this tendency and then go on to provide a satisfying resolution.
Oh, and that present I mentioned I have for you? I think you’ll like it, but I’m out of space now – I’ll have to tell you about it another time.
Spotted on a Jubilee Line train here in London the other day.
All fairly standard religious stuff, but then you reach the last line, and … well, I presume all the folks involved in producing the tube card decided one preposition was as good as another.
I guess a person ‘believes on’ Jesus in much the same way that cheetahs ‘pray on’ the slowest wildebeest in the herd.
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