"ALL THIS... I SNIFF."

Isn't he great? He's so great. 

When producer Claire Broughton sent out a list of possible authors to spoof for the third series of Ian Leslie's Before They Were Famous I can't have been the only writer excited to see Alan Moore's name on it. How much of an overlap actually exists between fans of 2000AD (I smuggle John Wagner in there too) and Radio 4 comedy is another matter, but on a purely, selfishly personal level - considering this is the first time I've performed my own stuff on the radio, and probably the first time the great man's been impersonated on Radio 4 - I couldn't be happier with how "Alan Moore's scripts for Fred Basset" turned out. Hey, Dave Gibbons tweeted me today! The artist of Watchmen? Yeah, him: "really funny (and accurate!)" he said - JUST SAYIN'! Sorry... But this is exactly why I've left it so long to write this post - I can't write charmingly about it, I'm too obnoxiously happy! 

Anyway, it's available to listen to for another month, with great work too from Marc Haynes, Abi Burdess, Benet Brandreth and Alex Lowe as Alex Graham. 

 

 And here, for posterity and the deaf, is that bit in full:

- For one extraordinarily prolific period in the 1980’s, Northampton-based writer and cartoonist Alan Moore spearheaded a revolution in comics with such “graphic novels” as “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta”, both of which would later be turned into big budget films from which Moore immediately disassociated himself. His correspondence with artists often ran to hundreds of pages in length, providing evidence of a garrulous polymath with a flair for the esoteric, driven to push both collaborators and the boundaries of his chosen genre to their absolute limit. One of Moore’s first correspondents was the Daily Mail’s Alex Graham, who was looking for new blood to take over writing duties on his popular dog-based cartoon strip “Fred Bassett”. Moore’s strips were never published, but his scripts survive...

Hullo Alex! 

Great to hear you’re interested in running an eye, or preferably both, over my as yet pretty much let’s face it about-as-untested-as-a-chat-up-line-in-a-bordello efforts. Shall we crack on then? Fasten your seat belts, as the actress said to the aeroplane, and eyes down for a full house..

 Panel I: 

Our hero, Fred Bassett, dog, indoors, paws on windowsill, staring glumly out at a rainy day. Thought bubble: “IT'S RAINING OUTSIDE... COLD, FAT DROPS POUNDING DOWN UPON A HUNGRY EARTH, TURNING INTO VIOLENT, BRIEF AND RECIPROCATING SOUP THE MUSTY INSECT CARTRIDGES THAT LITTER THE GOLF COURSE. THE WIFE OF THE HUMAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF MY OWNER SWERVES IN THE RAIN TO AVOID AN OBLIVIOUS FOX AND, FOR A SECOND, IS REMINDED SHE TOO IS BURSTABLE. THREE DOORS DOWN, A SLEEPING CHILD BREAKS INTO A COLD SWEAT AS HE DREAMS OF A SCHOOL OF SHARKS, EACH WEARING THE FACE OF HIS FATHER. ALL THIS... I SNIFF. DOGS CAN SMELL FEAR. IT IS 10.37 AM.” 

 Panel 2 -

Dear Alan,

Thanks very much but I don’t think I’ll be able to get all that in the one bubble. Have you anything with fewer words? I like the idea of Fred looking out of the window though.          

Yours in anticipation, 

Alex Graham

Hullo Alex! 

Uncle Alan here. Point taken. Let’s go wordless. Comics are a visual medium, and the absence of thought bubbles frees us from having to pretend a dog thinks in sentences which, to my mind at least, seems marginally less likely than a human thinking in smells. If you’re sitting comfortably then - 

 Panel I: 

Fred looking out of the rain-swept window, his nose glistening. Behind him, a newspaper torn to shreds, the remnants of its headlines still visible. The word fragments "-UCLEAR" "-MEGEDDON" and "IMMIN-". 

 Panel 2: 

We pull back. Thirty feet above the house, Fred still visible in the window. Next door a barbecue is being rained off. 

 Panel 3: Pull back. We are above the clouds now but the weather is clearing, The Swan visible in the gaps, its drunken patrons searching their pockets for car keys. On one of the clouds: a lip-stick-tube-shaped shadow. 

 Panel 4: Pull back. The Earth -

Dear Alan,

I don’t really want to draw that.

For one thing it’s a hundred and twenty seven panels long, Fred Bassett traditionally runs to three or four. For another, we’re outside the known universe as early as panel thirteen, and I’m not comfortable drawing backgrounds on the best of days. Shall we give it another go?

Yours,
Alex Graham.

Hullo Alex! 

Message received. Onwards and upwards then, here’s the new script. Roll up your sleeves, gird your loins, send the ladies out of the room, pull up a chair, hoist the main brace, check your mirrors, press your trousers, pawn the silver, hide the vicar, declog the veeblefetzers, check down the back of the sofa, fire up the engines -

Alan, Alan…

That letter was four hundred pages long and I was still on the introduction by page 103. 
In happier news: The BBC has now said they’re interested in a television show with no less a talent than Lionel Jeffries providing the voice of Fred. I hope you’re as excited about this development as I am.
Looking forward to something a bit shorter,
Alex Graham.

- Complying with Graham’s request, Alan Moore’s next letter ran to just one sentence…

Burn what we have wrought, Alex, burn it to the ground and we can but hope from the resultant scorched earth a purer form may bloom.

- Graham turned next to a fellow Scotsman famous for the terseness of his scripts. A colleague of Moore’s, John Wagner would later create the ultra-violent, twenty-second century lawman "Judge Dredd"...                              

Fred Bassett. 

Panel I: 

Owner to dog: “SAY WOOF, BOY. SAY WOOF.” Dog: “SHAN'T.”
Panels 2-4: 

Owner shoots dog in head with a complicated gun. 

Pours petrol on dog. 

Lights match. Caption: ”WOOF!”

                                 You’re welcome.

  

 And of course Moore was actually a wiz at the animal-based comic strip. Of course he was...

(From Philip Sandifier's exhaustive and ongoing history of Moore: The Last War in Albion.)

Chris Grayling Rejohnfinnemembored

So farewell then, this guy. Not John. Chris Grayling.

It's been a bit of a weekend for Greatest Hits: old policy announcements and fire station closures reposted on Facebook, protests in Whitehall, complaints about a media blackout, again on Facebook, think-pieces warning against a drift to the left (of Labour's pledge to spend even less on the NHS than the Tories, presumably) - even the resurrection of the Hipster Cop meme from 2011's Occupy Wall Street (although our Hipster Cop is far more hip), so I make no apology for posting this classic from 2013 to mark the change of Lord Chancellor. It's alright though, he's being replaced by Michael Go-*sets fire to self beneath a placard that says "Past Caring"*.

Oh and I've started following Louise Mensch on twitter: Man... that's opening the door to a bathroom that's had the plumbing ripped out. I tried to counter her retweets about the protests in a civilized and enquiring manner, but ended up just relaying details about the Ben Stiller film "Flirting With Disaster" that was on Film4.

Well, whatever gets you through, as Mensch herself has written.

Have fun. Continue.

 

Fun Fox Facts

- This is one of the first sketches I wrote. It stars David Mitchell, Robert Webb and James Bachman.

- The seed of the sketch was not in fact the fox-hunting ban, but the case of Armin Miewes and Bernd Jurgen Armand Brandes.

- I wasn't alone in finding the idea of somebody voluntarily turning up to someone else's house to be eaten funny. My friend Will's favourite detail of the case is Miewes accidentally letting Brandes' severed penis burn on the stove in pepper, wine and garlic because he was so engrossed in a Star Trek novel. Will liked this thwarted attempt at Hannibal Lecterish sophistication. (Ironically, the casting of Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal probably has more to do with the Miewes case than it does any previous incarnation of Lecter. I haven't seen it. Is he into Star Trek?)

- The fox is named "Grace" after the Jeff Buckley album. This line was cut. Also cut was the line "Drop the cheese", fox slang for "Show me the money". As I say this was one of my first sketches.

- According to Wikipedia, Miewes has since become a vegetarian.

Post-Mortem

Morning!

 

This clip has fascinated me for a while. Who was right? Tony with his theory that the mountain was just too high, or Ken with his theory that nobody trusted Labour's sums? Or secret Tony with his secret theory that Labour weren't centrist enough? 

Well, we know Tony got it right in 1997 because he was elected Prime Minister by a landslide. But then we also know Ken got it right because he was elected Mayor of London by an even bigger landslide in 2000.

But maybe that's just London.

Watching the results come in this morning in 2015 I witnessed Labour - which I've recently joined - lose no time in blaming the electorate. Neil Kinnock stood there in a strangely brown, smoke-filled room, essentially accusing the voters of being cowed into compliance by a campaign of fear. But blaming the electorate didn't work for him in 1992 and it won't work now. Blaming me won't work either. Okay, I never went leafleting, but who likes leaflets? Not putting people off is a very important part of campaigning. No, for all Miliband's achievements in opposition, Labour had five years to campaign and did next to nothing apparently in the belief that Conservatives are just people conned by the media into believing they're Conservative, and that if you take on the media the spell will lift. That's not how fear works. "How to be radical and still get elected" - that was the plan, but you do have to get the electorate on board, and in hindsight Miliband's biggest mistake was most concisely illustrated by what he said to Russell Brand six minutes and fifty seconds into that second game-changing "Trews" (game-changing in London, I mean):

"Tories are a sort of Virtual Party these days, so they sort of exist with advertising and money but they don't have people."

Do you see where he went wrong? It turned out they do, Ed. Lots of people. All over.

 

I like London.

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 14

 

"Wait! Wait, Z'dan! Z'DAN! She'll need this!!!"       

   from They Weren't Very Good At Rescuing

Election Break

 Here's five plus cracking minutes of German rap and lo-fi jumper backwardcam happily brought to my attention by Jeremy Hardingham. Hallo.

 Let's all have fun tomorrow, and thereafter.