… the Ghost of Christmas Fast Food, perhaps?
The idea of being in McDonald’s on Christmas Day is one I find strangely troubling, I have to say. And not because I’m a vegetarian.
Category: Uncategorized Page 15 of 122
Now available to download for free, the final episode (of the current run, anyway) of comedian Richard Herring’s podcast series As It Occurs To Me.
In case you’re not familiar with it, or Mr Herring generally, it’s quite an interesting set up – or, if you prefer, ‘business model’ for a show. It’s recorded live in London before an audience who’ve paid the nominalish amount of £10, and then released, without editing, the next day to download for free.
Herring’s been on TV and radio sporadically over the years, but he’s kept working steadily in a variety of areas since his TV shows have failed to be recommissioned, and in the last couple of years he’s started doing podcasts for free – firstly with writer Andrew Collins and then the above-linked AIOTM (as he insists on calling it) – and he seems to be doing all right as a result; his stand-up tours sell well, and I think he was on Never Mind The Buzzcocks on BBC2 the other week. Which probably helps pay the bills, while he carries on doing a job he enjoys.
Anyway, whilst the final show – by Herring’s own admission – contains so many in-jokes as to be almost meaningless to a first-time listener, I’d recommend the series as a whole; it is, as I say, free, and whilst the unedited nature of it means it’s pretty rough round the edges a lot of the time, there are a lot of jokes in the show, as well as (warning) a lot of imaginative profanity.
Mrs Soanes and I were at the live recording on Monday night, and I’d say that, despite (perhaps even because of?) its shameless self-indulgence, it was probably the best of the run, as it contained so many payoffs and callbacks to previous episodes, all tied together in quite a clever way. And some turns of phrase which were both shockingly rude and impressively colourful.
Not one for granny, then, but I’d say it’s certainly worth the muscle involved in a bit of clicking and downloading.
… you may, like me, have been wondering who did the rather clever depictions of comedians as superheroes.
Wonder no more: Jon Haward did some of them, and jolly well too, I think you’ll agree.
More images, in the form of screengrabs, here.
In January, I asked if this poo level of service had been experienced by anyone else.
In December, a survey by Consumer Focus finds that 55% of people polled had suffered the same stupidity.
I’m actually more jealous than surprised or annoyed; I wish I got paid in advance for failing to provide a decent service, but unfortunately my day job expects me to actually do the work before handing over any money.
Perhaps performance-related pay for parcel deliveries is the way to go?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – himself no slouch in writing terms – once observed that “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius”, so with that in mind, I’d point you towards an opportunity to learn about writing, by learning from people who are … well, let’s say they’re doing pretty well at it.
Via this link, you can download a slew of PDFs for films which are tipped to win Oscars. For free. Yes, free.
So get clicking and right-clicking, and you can see how it was done in films like Moon, Coraline and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Can’t hurt, after all…
You have to be careful if you’re marketing a product overseas; we’ve all seen articles about funny-named foodstuffs from overseas which have names like Krappi, Bumm and Peroneum.
Take, for example, this current advert for a fine fragrance:
Leaving the whole Catwoman similarities thing, I’d say the name’s a bit of a misfire for international use; in the USA and many other countries, the Name Ricci Ricci will make many people think of the Harvey comics character portrayed on the big screen by Macauley Culkin…
…which at least has the cachet of wealth, if not necessarily glamour, but in the UK people are probably more likely to hear “Ricci Ricci” and think of –
– Rik Mayall as Richard Richard from Bottom.
And whilst I’m no marketing guru, I’d guess that kind of association is probably not what sells fancy perfume.
A lot of people don’t care for the work of comedian Michael McIntyre; I’ve heard complaints that he’s too lightweight, that he’s too slick, and even (more strangely) that he laughs too much at his own material.
Anyway, I like his stuff – it reminds me, in a way, of Bob Monkhouse, in that it’s very slick and polished, which can be slightly offputting, but lurking beneath it is a lot of work and comedy knowledge. It’s a funny convention of comedy performance that a lot of the time comedians are expected to deliver lines as if they’ve just occurred to them, I always think.
All that aside, whether you like or loathe Mr McIntyre, I think that very few people won’t see their estimation of him raised by this news report from earlier this week.
As we cool kids say whilst bumping knuckles*, respect is due.
*Not like that, you filthy sort.
A smudge under 18 months ago, I suggested that book designers were being rather unimaginative by putting ‘a shadowy figure in a corridor’ on the covers of thrillers.
I have to report that the trend doesn’t seem to be on the wane…
In the classic TV series The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter, there’s a scene where the main character, Philip Marlow, is talking with his psychiatrist.
By trade, Marlow is a writer of detective novels which are more hard- than soft-boiled, but his doctor notes that there’s a section about sex in one of his novels which seems out of place; when pressed, Marlow is forced to admit – even if only to himself – that it reflects his own deeper feelings about the subject.
It’s not any kind of insight, I know, that people who make things often reveal a lot about themselves in their work – whether intentionally or otherwise – and so I offer an excerpt from my own writing, so you can play ‘spot the author lurking within the text’.
It’s from a novel called Coming Back To Haunt You (which is unpublished, because it’s unfinished – I was forced to abandon it when I realised it bore a shocking similarity to a film which I genuinely hadn’t seen until I was about a third of the way into writing it).
The novel is about Nick Peters, a seemingly normal chap who suddenly finds himself the target of what looks like a revenge campaign, though he has no idea who’s behind it or why. In the following excerpt, Nick is looking online for any kind of hint as to why he’s now being hounded, and he starts to look for information about people from his past.
He went to friendsreunited, and browsed around it for a while, looking up details of the class he’d been in when he did his GCSEs, and then the class in the sixth form, for A-Levels. There were a few jolts at seeing names he’d long forgotten, and at uploaded photos showing fashions and haircuts which were best forgotten, but there was no-one there who he’d crossed in any way.
He’d never bullied anyone, or been bullied, never gone head-to-head with anyone in sports clubs or chess or debating or public speaking, and never denied anyone a prize or an award through a sudden show of academic ability; he’d never broken anyone’s heart – or even dented or vaguely bent one, as far as he knew – dished out a black eye or a brutal insult, never scratched a pencil case or broken a pair of glasses; he’d never stolen from anyone, never cheated in an exam or forged a signature on a permission slip or school report; he’d never gone to school drunk or high, even on the last day of his final term when all the A-levels were done and his college place almost certain.
[…] he trawled through the screens of names from the past, photos of buildings which he thought he’d forgotten but still occasionally dreamt of, and read reminiscences about teachers and end-of-year plays and school trips which made it sound as if these funny happenings had been the everyday and usual, and attending lessons or hurrying to hand in coursework on time or copying homework at lunchtime or revising or turning over an exam paper or hearing the words “Stop writing now, please” – all these things had been the exception, the distraction from the whole process of being a teenager, and he had the horrible feeling inside that he’d wasted the best years of his life, that all the best parties with the prettiest most fanciable girls had been taking place somewhere else, and that he wasn’t invited, never had been invited, and certainly hadn’t been missed.
Further comment seems unnecessary, really; I feel oddly exposed by that chunk of text.
Thinking about it, it may be for the best that it didn’t make it into print (though I’d imagine an editor would probably have asked me if this section couldn’t have been pruned, if not removed entirely).
Anyway: hmm.
