Shapeshifting Vegetables

Speaking of "The Adventure Game", what should we give Uncle?

Series Three saw Charmian Gradwell get interactive with the kids, inviting them to call in with gift suggestions for "Uncle" - an alien despot who had, in a Douglas-Adamsian twist that seems to have gone over most callers' heads, adopted the form of a grumbling aspidistra steered around the studio floor by Kenny Baker inside a cardboard plinth. Nothing in "The Adventure Game" could be described as slick, by any decade's standards, but these call-ins from 1984 provide a particularly sweet illustration of just how few fucks could be given back in the day, not just on behalf of the show's Pebble Mill production-team, but nation-wide...

Now, both of these clips were posted to my instagram account a while ago. That's one of the places I've been hiding out these past months, playing with faces, not blogging. Dipping. I got an iphone before I went to Frankfurt back in May, downloaded some apps, and pretty much everything I feared might happen to my attention happened. Did we all read this brilliant article on the "silicon Valley refuseniks" who woke up to the addictiveness of the apps they helped create and, more specifically, updates - comparing them to the pull of a one-armed bandit? So yes I became a creature of appetite, fidgety and unblogging. But I did make these...

In short however, I'm going to resolve yet again not to shun boredom so much next year.
Oh and yeah, check out my instagram!

Here's my actual favourite moment of 2017

The day before it first snowed...

my sister got married...

to my brother-in-law...

in front of friends and family in Mayfair...

Dad tried out his selfie-stick...

and when the ring went on, the groom's mother looked like she'd just been shown a dinosaur egg.

It was a short, great service...

 it said marriage was about "about closeness and distance" I remember...

The speeches were also short, and great...

 

Zip forward to last week, my sister cooked her first Christmas Dinner for the three of us in their new flat and my brother-in-law made cocktails. We opened and played with presents, went to the pub, met friends, then dragged them back to watch "The Adventure Game" until two in the morning.

The night of the wedding however, the two stayed in a hotel overlooking Soho...

and woke, as I said, to snow.

Nearly there.

Nearly, nearly there. What were your favourite bits of this wonderful year?

Actually that's from this.

Odd to see something as old as Norden's "Alright On The Night" overlap a genre as not-as-old as a talking-heads time-filler. Was this the first of its kind? Who cares? And was this a wonderful year? In many ways of course it was as grim as a peeled cat in a pram, but let's not dwell, it's still December the 27th, John Finnemore wrote a sketch about that and it's in his Holiday Special from Series Six which was repeated on the radio today, and I'm in it too, and so of course are all those turkeys who voted for Christmas. I never blogged about that series I now realise, not even about the musical. Oh well. The producer did, including a number of photographs of us in Santa Hats, standing at a poignant distance. Series Seven starts on January the 4th. YES! PLUGGED SOMETHING BEFORE IT HAPPENED! Enjoy, my lovelies.

not this wonderful year

Update: I have just learnt from twitter that Margaret Cabourn-Smith calls this period, between Christmas and New Year's, the "Merry-neum". What did you learn from twitter today?

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 21

"I find it so much harder to tell when it's night since we moved to space," said Zarissa.
"We're fine for time, darling," said Zodney. "Can you go and get the wreath?"
Far above them Sirius did whatever the past tense of glint was.
Glunt?

Illustration by Anon.

(Apologies for the absence, readers! Details if not explanations to follow. Hope everyone got what they wanted in the meantime. Big love.)