Le Nouveau Vieux (+horrible love story)

The trick, I'd say, is this: Don't try and come up with something new that nobody's seen before. Try and come up with something INCREDIBLY OLD that nobody's seen before.

That's why I wanted "Jonah Non Grata" to feel a bit like stumbling into a church. And it's why I'm excited about Dr. David Rosenberg's plans for a new monthly comedy night at the Vaults. If anyone's interested do please get in touch. It will be called "The Information" and will put all of Shunt's technology at the disposal of invited comics. There will be no compering, just captions (probably) and every month a different "big idea" will be "pounded into shit-sized nuggets that we can carry around with us": War, Gods, Crime, Space, Witchcraft... and one as-yet unnamed topic that will cover both Love and Pornography. David's stuff's is rude, of course. It is obsessed with tyranny. It is also always depressingly prescient. Three examples:

It was in the middle of rehearsals for "Dance Bear Dance" - a show based on the gunpowder plot - that the Twin Towers fell. And our curtain call...

... was decided upon months before Guantanamo Bay chose the same bags-on-the-head motif for its own publicity.

And it was in the middle of rehearsals for "Amato Saltone" - a show about sitting next to a killer - that the bombs went off in Tavistock Square. I argued at the time that nothing would change, that London was used to bombs. But I was wrong and the show was right, and now you have to pass through an X-ray machine and a metal detector just to get into a recording at Broadcasting House (No scissors are allowed for example, presumably in case you intend to hijack the building and fly it into a plane)...

And most recently: Why were two pages of the "Contains Violence" programme given over to this?

 

Well that's nobody's business but David's. However one month into the run Boris Johnson did become Mayor of London (and yet at the time of the programme going to print that seemed insane). Oh dear fuck, the first Tory victory my adult life has ever seen and it clearly won't be the last. "Well he can't be worse than Ken" said a new girl at work, but it turns out her godfather's head of the British National Party.

I suppose one of the less crappy things about this crappy present is how much access it gives me to the past, at least. Youtube has been shoring up all manner of extraordinary new old things for example, like the work of Ladislaw Starewicz (sp?):

Talk about "That's all folks!"

And my apologies to those of you without broadband, but from now on I'm just going to assume everyone has it - Ah, while I think of it, quickly, check out Adam Buxton's Meebox, a fine example of something non-crappy fashioned from the present crap, although you've only got five hours left! (After that there'll still be bits of it here.) Adam Buxton really is an example to us all (well, me anyway) a prolific amateur in the best sense. He and Joe Cornish should definitely take over from Wogan next Eurovision. I, meanwhile, have yet to produce even one page of comedy... At two in the afternoon John Cusack (of all people) was still trying to frame me for a series of axe murders so that I'd get thrown off the board of directors of the Natural History Museum. Maybe in future I just won't bother with the snooze button.

And lay off staying up to watch "The Camomile Lawn".

(originally posted on myspace here)