I'm afraid you will have to read the link in full to understand this. I should get photoshop again.
Okay. Good.
The hopeless, teeth-grinding paralysis logged in my last
post has lifted a little today.
And with genuine love and respect for
all who, by contrast, find themselves disquieted by Keir Starmer's
resignation, I do intend to pay my proper goodbyes to that feeble, purge-sanctioning pepperpot soon. But for now I just want to share this Unattended Article from nineteen years ago! I'd thought it prudent to start backing up the blog because who knows what's going to happen to the internet now it's literally being run by Nazis – sorry, "hard power" enthusiasts – and in doing so... well firstly, bloody hell if I say so myself, but this was a great read in its early days before I started just sharing stuff... and secondly, and more pertinently, having grown to believe my anxieties about the normalisation of the Far Right had only begun in 2008, with the shamelessly guff-spraying double whammy of Sarah Palin as Republican candidate for Vice President and an openly Islamophobic Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, I was genuinely taken aback to find in August 2007, when this blog had just begun and Gordon Brown just become Prime Minister:
I've noticed a number of angry
twenty-year-olds at work, angry and hopeless, robbed of any ideology.
And it occurred to me of course, any fellow thirty-somethings, that
these people have lived HALF THEIR LIVES under the present government…
so no wonder they're so scared and racist. It was alright for us because
we knew the Tories were baddies when they talked about "Preserving the
British Way of Life"… We grew up with images of gorgons smeared in blood
and cash and war… But "kids today", they've heard that same poppycock
from the good guys. Thatcher's not the baddie anymore, it's something
called the New World Order, and expect to hear immigration mentioned a
lot...
It occured to me yesterday, happily and suddenly, that my lack of engagement with the blog might not, in fact, be incontertible evidence of a waning enthusiam for things I see and do as I fall into my fifties, but simply the inevitable consequence of Non Disclosure Agreements. Most of the things from which the rest of my life now hangs are projects a digital signature on a PDF proscribe me from mentioning until the results go out, and by then it feels too late to send a postcard.
I suppose I could have mentioned I'd spent five beautiful afternoons towards the end of 2024 in a writers' room for Mitchell & Webb's new sketch show when the press release for it first went out back in February, but then I was probably nursing too much guilt for not having been able to mention I'd worked on the pilot script in 2023 (Mitchell and Webb Need Help it was called then. Can I even say that?) Maybe "beautiful" isn't exactly the right adjective, but I definitely want one of the good ones, because being invited aboard the writing team of a sketch show in 2023 felt like receiving a phonecall to say you'd won an Oscar when you didn't even know you'd made a film.
Here's me in the room, "established" according to Big Talk's press release.
There are many other reasons I'd want the good adjectives: I really enjoy pissing around with millenials for a start. I also don't think I've seen Robert Webb so happy. Watching him and David improvise material across a table in a way I had never witnessed before – perhaps having been away from each other so long – made sitting there, laughing, peeling tangerines, and asking if anyone wanted the window closed feel like contribution enough from me. I did contribute more though, in the end. I contributed The Goomb – a sketch first mentioned on this blog in 2022, and originally submitted to That Mitchell and Webb Look in Two-Thousand-and-Ten. Other sketches were bought, but none filmed. Still, fifteen years on, HERE'S HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS!...
TV Shows? Is it not clear HIGH SCHOOL FAUX PAS! is a movie?
Perhaps because the intervening years had been so full of Finnemore (the first series of Souvenir Programme went out in Two-Thousand-and-Eleven) the gap between shows never seemed that big to me, but then I realised fifteen years is also the interval between Sylvester McCoy's Doctor Who and Christopher Eccelston's, which is of course the longest amount of time betweeen two things there can be. It was gratifying to see how well the sketch went down with the new guys. I suppose dying inside while someone watches something you made on a laptop is what brought them here. I am proud. I'm so happy. I am such a fan of everyone involved. You see, this is the problem with not writing about something until it's out. What can you say? I miss them?
I'm still in France by the way.
Languedoc
Not all the sketches are viewable here. I don't know why. I think what links them is having a "Writers' Room" bit. And I want to share one of those, I just don't know if I'm posting the right one as I can't see it, but if this is the sketch I'm thinking of, Lara Ricote did indeed originally propose it as a car commercial...
Let me know if I'm right. (UPDATE: Back in the UK now. Yeah.)
That's not the actual writers' room of course. Ours was a lot fuller: essentially a sandwich of walls, old fashioned shash windows and the sound of drilling, sideboards covered with awards, a big table on the inside spotted with varying systems of discarded tangerine peel, and a meaty, seated talent filling in between the two. I was there the morning Trump was reelected. I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world. Stevie Martin wrote a great post about writers' rooms here, by the way, on her substack. And while I'm plugging stuff I have nothing to do with, Lara's comedy special "GRL/LATNX/DEF" is on youtube here, and diamond sharp.
One of my favourite things about seeing Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping finally go out in August was seeing all the accompanying Sketch Show Opining. Honestly. Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian defined the form's importance pretty succintly, I think, as "an important mechanism for digesting the world", but she also descibed them as "hit and miss" whereas the truth is – as the Radio Times wrote in its preview – that they're "tapas": different people like different bits. Pete Paphides' observation in his interview with David and Rob in the same magazine, that "sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other" was another lovely summing up. I do think if there were more sketch shows on the telly, people might be better at getting stuff off their chest and differences might not be so likely to become divisions, and I enjoyed self-identifying youtuber video essayist
Stubagful's savvy theory below, as to why telly stopped making them: not economics, as is normally suggested, but snobbery: "The sketch show died because the TV
industry wants to think it's better than the internet... Nobody wants
to be just another content creator." All of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping should be available to enjoy on Channel 4 HERE, and I think it's glorious.
To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...
Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type.
In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...
The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...
I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...
There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...
I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...
At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend.
With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...
But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.
(Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.
Those
old explanations of ghosts – echoes of a trauma baked into place –
is it only human trauma that has that power? Might parks be crawling with
the ghosts of worms? Is this river haunted by fish, fish ghosts targeted by heron, more than a millenia-worth? I'm trying to get into the Hallowe'en spirit now that the weather is proper October.
Unfinished business – that
was another explanation. Do only humans get to have that then? Wait, is that all a soul is? Business? Is it? I haven't been
busy this year. Maybe. Have I felt like a ghost? A bit. And it hasn't all been unenjoyable, but I watched a youtube essay last week about the films of the Beatles
which reminded me that being A CREATIVE FORCE is, you know, an option,
and initially may require nothing more than just thinking to yourself "I'm
going to be A CREATIVE FORCE" and then seeing what happens, and it's really picked me up. (Here's that video essay.)
In this case
a bit of what happened appears to be me going for a walk and
then posting shit phone pictures of it here. Well, good. You'll have to take my word for it that there were joggers. It's odd to
me, by the way, that that that's what it's called: "jogging". That's definitely what it
looks like, but it's not the aspect you'd think they'd want to
advertise. Jogging's normally something you want to avoid, in case you
scratch the record or spill your drink. How can I make running forward feel more like running into something? Jog!
Are these pavement demarcations a hangover from the pandemic, or permanent now? And has anyone studied their effect on a pedestrian's mental health? I think I hate them. They just seem like another thing to get on the wrong side of. It's nice to have somewhere to record that though. It's nice to be A CREATIVE FORCE. The next paragraph contains swearing.
I also hate seeing so many people right now take the side of a side, rather than siding with people – to see so many call for an end to Netanyahu's response to the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holoocaust while not also calling - seeing as we're calling for things - for the safe return of Israeli hostages, as though we've finally run out of internet and there was just was no room for the Landaus. Well fuck that and fuck the war and fuck taking sides unless that side is Peace. Fuck Bibi. And fuck Hamas; buoyed by their actions, the Iranian Government announced last week it would be targeting Persian journalists working in Britain like my friend Faren. And, parenthetically (do go on, Simon) coming up to a year after the murder of Mahsa Ahmini by Iranian police for having loose hair I decided to search Xitter for any more news of protests, and found myself enaged in the following fun coversation about... let me check... yes, apartheid. Stick with it.
"NO! THIS IS ENOUGH! I DON'T WANT ANY MORE OF THIS, NO! NO! STOP!"
Good. I look less surprising at the age of forty-eight than Little Nemo here, but that's still no excuse for not getting on with things – not that I haven't been entirely okay with not getting on with things this past year, and not that I'm not entirely supportive of the absence of resolutions for the coming year. But while 2022 saw me comfortably protected from most of the year's crises by jobs and a nice big bedroom, I've no guarantee 2023 will do the same, so some kind of "project" might be an idea, as fortune at least favours a moving target.
The Med, from which I'm now back.
That project probably won't be this blog though. It's
not just the holiday that's caused my contributions to thin. I thought
about doing a big New Year's Dump of my favourite unposted
photographs from 2022, but could never get beyond trying to caption the photo from January below, simply because I couldn't think of anything to say about it.
It's only now that I realise that's probably exactly what I had to say about it: that this photo represented a cycle of me going outside,
into Kensington, and coming back with absolutely nothing to say, and realisations like that are what this blog is great for – coming up with ideas as I'm writing. But putting the time into a post which an idea might deserve is ungaugeable when you've decided to turn out one a day. And it's the not coming up with ideas that takes up so much, well, everything.
Also, I've finally worked out how to download Word onto this old laptop. So if I like something now I'll just share it on twitter (as long as that's around,) and if I have some pictures I have nothing to add to I'll share them on instagram (oh, if my new, even worse phone's memory lets me, I've just remembered.) Otherwise I'll take notes a bit more privately in 2023, and try to find some other blank pages to stare at. And maybe this is just the January talking. But it's January's turn. Let's hear it out.
I thought about going through my unposted photos from earlier in the year, when I wasn't blogging, and putting some up throughout December like I'd do at the end of every month, but looking through January's, it struck me that a more honest recap of the year might be, just to honour that lack of intention. Why catch up?
I had also forgotten how widescreen old photos from my good phone were, but here are four.
I'd never noticed this collonade before. These are from January, and the earlier setting sun had now made it unignorable. I'd been living in Kensington for three months, and had finally decided to revisit the enormous museums along Exhibition Road as a resident, wanting to feel I was exploring my new environment, with an emphasis on the "my" rather than on the "new." I'd known this area all my life.
During Boris Johnson's Mayorship – although he may have had no more to
do with this than he had with the Boris Bikes – this road had become a
"shared space" to "honour the area's cultural importance," meaning it
stopped being a road for cars to drive down, and became instead a pavement for
cars to drive down. This apparently resolved "the long stand-off between pedestrians and cars," until ten people got hit by a taxi in 2017.
This whole campus is called "Albertopolis" I found out today. It suits it. I keep discovering new ways in which, over a hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen Victoria's husband, the landscape of London still orbits his absence.
Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, I decided today to actually rewatch Citizen Kane which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now, in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out – initially I wrote "frighteningly timely", but if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...
Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world
maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money and the media that money buys to remake reality itself, and the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.
Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor. In reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay, but as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. And I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:
In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into... to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and his Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box... lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu, that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, I suppose this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.
The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles.
Welles by Welles
In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums.
Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do.
And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."
Mork blogs well. At the end of every episode of "Mork and Mindy" he concisely reports back to Orson what he's learnt from the day's activities. I wish this blog was the same, but sometimes it's just going to be a link to some videos. Here's Alexei Sayle explaining how influential the show was to the British Alternative Comedy scene...
"It felt like being kicked down the stairs laughing."
When I heard the episode below – in which Mindy tries to interview successful comedian Robin Williams – mentioned on a podcast on my way to the Rosemary Branch theatre last night, I immediately looked it up on my phone, sat down on the closest bench and watched the whole thing. It opens strongly, with a surprise reference to Rula Lenska and almost exactly the same joke that opens Triangle Of Sadness(highly recommended), and closes with a scene of onscreen soul-spelunking to rival Peter Sellers on "The Muppet Show" telling Kermit he had his self surgically removed: Williams confesses to Mindy how difficult he finds it to say no. When Mork relays this predicament to Orson, the celestial overlord's having none of it.... "I thought all stars were rich, live in mansions, and drive big eggs..." Mork responds with a list of the dead, ending with John Lennon, to the low howling of wind and a slow fade to black.
This isn't me saying I'm leaving something as a placeholder and then going on to write a whole post about it accidentally, this will be a placeholder pure and simple, represented by a photograph I took of a bare, beutifully clean, uselessly lit premise that I walked past heading home from seeing Margaret Cabourn-Smith be one of the brilliant things in Spike at the Richmond Theatre. I've more than one actually. I don't even have time to choose the best.
I'm finding more and more of these on my phone – photos of uselessly lit, bare premises passed while walking home after rmidnight. I find them when I get home. I don't always remember taking them.
