Arithmophobia Is All Around.

 I've just finished watching Don't F*** With Cats on Netflix. It wasn't what I expected, and I think I might have hated watching it. This is not a recommendation. But I wanted to see how it ended, and as someone who's worked with both Jack the Ripper and Shakespeare I felt maybe I should keep abreast of contemporary developments in self-mythologising monstrousness. One of the problems of course is that everyone always joins in with the mythologising, and this documentary confesses to being as guilty of that as the next ghoul, but in its adoption of horror tropes it brought to my attention one I'd never considered before, even though I as a writer have also used the trope (and I can't find it on tvtropes.org either), namely that of the Scary Number.

 A camera cranes in onto the "19" on the door of an apartment in Paris for example, or an internet café owner in Berlin will point to a stall and say "This is it. Number 25."  The cliché is that certain numbers have a power, but they all seem to, just the fact of them - the factiness even. 10 Rillington Place. Room 237. Inside Number 9. Arithmobia is a fear not of specific numbers, but of numbers in general. And that's what I can't work out - whether the Scary Number is simply a horror trope borne of True Crime, or whether it speaks to something more primal... The Matrix.... The Prisoner... Like shadows, snakes and skeletons, have we always just, secretly, found numbers inherently evil?
 Because if we have, I can see that becoming a problem.

Jimmy Fallon has all the best ideas.

Or his writers do, I don't know, however it works. Obviously looking up old US talk-show clips on youtube isn't all I've been doing with my evenings (and afternoons*) but - you know how it is - the mind gets into a groove, you work evenings, mostly, and you've moved again so there's loads of conveniently out-of-the-way stuff in boxes to once again find less convenient places for and you feel at home finally but you've become so used to feeling displaced and so YES... I have been watching quite a bit of Jimmy Fallon AS IT HAPPENS.

The scope for unchecked, sloppy fun paradoxically afforded by the industrial-scale demands of a nightly American talk-show (as opposed to its weekly UK counterpart) is a contradiction I first fell for back watching The Larry Sanders Show nearly twenty years ago, long before youtube gave me access to the less fictional snippets of Conan, Jay, Letterman, Kimmell and Craig Ferguson (Craig Ferguson?!) which I now sort-of-I-guess-enjoy, but my enthusiasm for the theatrical and even pastoral responsibilities of the nightly hour-long telly treadmill has remained  undimmed and chipper. John Oliver has of course just taken over hosting duties on The Daily Show, I know, and yay! - but the political focus and consequence of that particular gig make it a bad example of what I'm trying to talk about here. This is what I'm talking about:

This is Jimmy Fallon. Until recently I knew him only as the corpsing drummer in that Will Ferrell sketch where Christopher Walken says "More Cow Bell" (good luck finding that online) but the more familiar I become with Fallon's talent the more convinced I am it's really Fallon's frivolity which turned More Cow Bell into something loved enough to gets its own T-shirt. His attention to the whole is seemingly instinctive, his care over detail is on a par with CERN's, and he has an ear and an eye unmatched by anyone else I can think of working in studio-based television. Take the sketch above: two boards are wheeled on, a filter's applied and suddenly we're in a movie - that's your joke, that's Love, that's Art. Seriously. Or when he plays Neil Young singing the them tune to "Fresh Prince" and is absolutely in it, it's the shadow cast by the hat over his eyes that means someone somewhere involved in this is a meticulous genius...

Or Steve Martin punching Death in the face, here...

Or the decision not to prerecord these twenties inserts, here...

Or everything about this even though I've no idea who Michael McDonald is...

I'm reminded of The Muppet Show, but with better jokes, or what Adam Buxton might make if he was given his own talk show, or indeed anything. Have you half an hour still spare? Join me.

Excellent idea.

 "Who's on first?" extended edition. Excellent idea.

 PeeWee Herman's "Dark Knight Rises". Excellent idea.

Spoofing this. Foolhardy, but an excellent idea.

Naming guys. Excellent idea.

Not raising interest rates on student loans. Excellent idea. And if Jeffrey Tambor, formerly of "Larry Sanders", happens to be a guest on your show, well this idea is...

Also excellent. To say nothing of "Let Us Play With Your Look", "At the bar with Roger Federer", Real Stars of "Guess Who?", "Mom Dancing with Michelle Obama", "Rap Histories", "True Facts of Truth", "Real People, Fake Arms" basically I've watched the whole damn channel.
I love him.

* and days.

The Wallpaper at Brady's

(originally posted on myspace here)

This is my twitter wallpaper. It comes from Brady's, in Brixton. Yes that's another thing that happened last month, I started tweeting. Because John Cleese does. Once I tweeted Tom Waits teetering, but it's not a page I particularly recommend you visiting. However if you get the chance to see inside the building I actually took it from, visit that. This is Brady's below. I'd see the clock face at eye level whenever I went swimming, but for my nine years living in Brixton I never actually saw inside Brady's. You didn't go inside Brady's:

I'm posting this between shows from the low-lit office of "Money" once again, dressed in my riot gear and balaclava. I can hear a woman's voice from the other side of the Venetian blinds go "No, it's a real person. That's fucked up!" Well them's the breaks, miss. By tomorrow I'll need to have written fifteen minutes of material for That Mitchell and Webb Look, from scratch, but I promised to post shots of a site that the Shunt Lounge (closing tomorrow - TOMORROW) had considered relocating to, and Friday the 13th's an apt a date as any. Because what Brady's looked like on the inside did not disappoint:

Okay but I bet that wasn't really a torture room. 

Okay but I bet there weren't really witches... This is three or so months ago. We'd taken a break from rehearsing Money to be shown around and it was probably the first time I'd returned to Brixton in daylight since the fire. I felt very at home. Very excited.

"Oh, Jimi Hendrix was born in this room, you say? Wow. We're all vampires anyway."

Ooh! And what's under the mattress in the corner? Actually forget that what's the other side of that window?

I see.

"Wow! Let's leave!"

And the view?

Oh I loved it. Imagine if we moved there! And then imagine if I moved back! We're not moving there though... BUT - Actually I'd better get my balloons, it's showtime. We shall continue this anon. Bye bye, Brady's. Hit it Dr. Buckles! Loveyoubye.

blah blah fawn and the 21 second Hamlet

The Future of Comedy, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay firstly, in the last post when I said "east" I meant "west" and vice versa. It was to confuse my enemies. Secondly, I read today on Adam Buxton's blog that Meebox won't be getting a commission - yes that's the word "won't" - which made me head off (ie stay exactly where I was: procrastinating at my laptop) in search of some form of webby channel through which to communicate to him both my fan's anger and my thanks for looking after the light at the end of the new media tunnel for all this time. There was no such channel however, so I did what his site asks and posted it to him on a Japanese postcard instead and that, I realized, was the first fan letter I have ever written. I don't have it now, but I did go and then vent my spleen all over Graham Linehan's blog which was having a bit of a BBC3 chat. Oh do I have that? Yes:

"I don't so much mind there being stuff on BBC3 I don't like, or stuff not working (The Wall is kind of despicable not because it doesn't "work", but because what it wants to do is so wretched)… But the news on Adam Buxton's blog that MeeBox won't be commissioned, and the reasons given, makes me almost ill and [blah blah what I wrote above...] Adam's work is so honest and original and smart and carefully created and just FUN that his lack of a commission seems almost like an act of spite on behalf of [blah blah...] I'm lucky enough now to be getting into writing comedy [blah blah plug for myself...] but it's frightening to step in and see so little rein given to a talent like him, at least on a channel that should surely be widening the brief [blah blah unkind stuff about Marek Larwood pretending to be handicapped...] I'm 33. When I was 23 working in television comedy seemed a creative dream [blah really no idea now where I'm going with this now...] Your work certainly encouraged that idea. First episode of Father Ted [blah blah fawn...] man, even the trailer had about five belly laughs, I remember [blah blah Black Books...] But it doesn't seem like that now. Now it seems like [blah blah moan...] And I'm unmotivated enough as it is. No wonder the perfectionist genius freaks are turning to music videos [blah fawn bye...]"

We CAN BUT HOPE someone sits up and takes notice.

All of which is, ah, a very unfortunate prelude to the totally unrelated news that David M and Rob W are trying out some material this Sunday at the Drill Hall, for which I have just received my very first television commission, so I should really be writing for that, which would be BRILLIANT if I were feeling sharper. But also I should be studying the tape Bishop, Peter and I made in the former's kitchen two weeks ago, and trying to knock together some share of a script for this half-hour "Hamlet" that we've been asked to present at the Camden Fringe for the end of the month. That's us up there at the top you see. The most cursorayrrarryohsoddit glance on youtube will show you what we're up against: There's 15-minute Hamlets. 2-minute Hamlets. 15-second Hamlets. 90-second, Bill-Cosby-voiced Hamlets. Fff... And I should sleep. Some passage in my abdomen appears to be logged with sweetbread and tonic.

Here's my favourite though: the 21-second Hamlet. I love it because it doesn't necessarily seem to be playing the idea for laughs, surprisingly, or else it's playing the idea for more than laughs, like the way the figures sort of unblossom as they die - a lovely fluke. Or else it's playing the idea for laughs but getting it wrong and ending up slightly beautiful, which is sometimes my favourite kind of comedy, which is why commissioning me to write any might not such a good idea right now. We'll see.
Hamlet in 21 seconds: 

 

Oh it's gone. Well, there's this.

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".