I'm cock-a-hoop that tonight the Doctor finally got to meet the inspiration for Professor Death. As one of the flesh-and-blood archetypes of the "Mad Professor" Tesla had always seemed to me an obvious subject for Doctor Who, and Nina Metivier's episode had it all: Wardenclyffe, the Current War, the signals from Mars, nothing from Tesla's mythos was left unused, Goran Višnjić was a beautiful Nikola, and while it's always been a bit too easy to paint the "inventor of inventing" as the baddie, Graham was just the right choice to finally tear a strip off Edison, but an additional thrill for me was the choice of ultimate villain: Armoured Scorpions of Death!
I mean it's an absolute coincidence I know, but I loved it. My own sketch complete with giant robot scorpion is underneath, and I've written more about it, and Tesla, and the runny logic of so much of the cult surrounding him (much of which would go on to inspire the mythology of "Time Spanner") here. It's back from when this blog was on myspace though so none of the links work now, sorry. Anyway, didn't they pull out all the stops on this one! I love it.
Well the Giant Death Ray sketch finally aired. My parents were over
from France and we perched in front of the telly - none of us dead -
with a Chinese takeaway just like the old days, only now it was Susy's
High-Definifitive Plasmaniscus Tellitron before which we sat and one of
the things on was mine. Maybe that's why I thought it was a particularly
good episode, because we were all there, but no there so many of my
favourite sketches from the recording there and to be sandwiched between
the Woman Ad/ Man Ad sketch and Remain Indoors felt amazing. Oh, and
Ben Fuller's scorpion was, well...
Sweeet
indeed. (I just wish my writing hadn't been so salad-y, so un-nailed. I
mean it's FINE, but everybody else's work on the sketch is SUPER SUPER
FINE). All in all it's been a good week for my inner geek. I would go
into details - mutant herons, finding a feral kid, comics, Yadda Yoda -
but someone's got a free ticket to Daniel Kitson in Regent's Park - I
have never seen him. Is he bucolic? - anyway I must skoot.
Meanwhile David and Rob and the excellent James Bachman are, among other
places, here.
So,
back to the Machine today, whose insides, after a week of uninterrupted
construction, have now been turned to stone, and whose outsides bizarrely
sport – in just the latest of a number of unconscious nods to "Synecdoche NY" – exactly the same lamps as my new place.
Was
progress made today in rehearsals? I don't know. So many elephants in
the room, so few of them earning their keep in the manner of the fall of
the Second Empire (being digested). I did raise the question "Are there
any plans to get an actor to play this part we know we have, but don't
yet have an actor for?" and I think it was generally agreed that that
might be a good idea. The part is that of a feral child. My
knee hurts. Nigel diagnosed that as being 34. I didn't ask our director
his opinion. He was in Portland Place cupping Robbie William's balls.
Thence
to the last recording of "That Mitchell and Webb Sound", where my unvoiced
plans for a sketch about a kid's show starring Christopher Hitchens
were startlingly upset by a sketch Rob performed about a kid's show
starring Christopher Hitchens. I felt I'd come home to an empty tub of
Strawberry Cheesecake unable to remember whether or not it was mine.
Well that's that anyway, no more sketch-writing for a while so Harrumble
(although actually this last session has been something of a blast,
still it will be nice to see what happens next). And for those who
missed it on Thursday, here's the gang in happier times:
Yeh momma,
I wrote that. And I admit to being smitten by absolutely every aspect
of it, so thanks to youtube illegalers "goldsaq" and
"felixulyssesmeritus" for getting it out there, although none of you seem
yet to have uploaded "Jan Hankl's Patent Flankpat" - oh no, HANG ON, oh
no what's this:
I have written no screenplay-he-dee-dee-doe. I have written no screenplay-he-dee. Done nothin all the livelong day but written this song And then whittled a fiddle out of whicker from a skip And stuck it up me bum-dee-doe.
Dear
Hollywood, I'm afraid I did not get round to writing "Fat Adolf" in the
end but here is a song I just done instead, can you make a film of
that? Yes? Excellent, phew that's a load off.
Writing isn't hard
you know. Graham Linehan said in an episode of Screenwipe I have left
it now too late to link to, it was like "doing a poo". Perhaps I should
get off the pot then. Certainly I'm not going to get anything written at
the British Library; people are distracting, and I've never written
anything in a library I now realize. When I write I tell myself a story
and take it down, and that means being on my own, maybe in bed, with
warm low lighting. Sounds nice enough but I'm still not doing it, I'm
simply filing these reports. Some excellent writers were interviewed for
that Screenwipe and the only thing, disappointingly, they had in common
was that they all dreaded writing. And willies. They all had willies in
common I mean, they didn't all dread willies. Russell T. Davies' one
piece of Advice To Writers was "Finish it", which is sterling.
Wednesday's
the half-point, yes? The half-point of the week? So I'm at the
half-point of my paid holiday now and that's five livelong days of
procrastination (ten day week, yup... You weren't told? You're in for a
big shock come Stansday)... five days in which I have written nothing,
and done very little else either because I know I'm meant to be writing.
Everything has been put off, even sleep. I mean I've been for walks.
And into second-hand bookshops, as should now be obvious (NICE FACT TO
STAVE OFF PANIC NECESSARY TO GET MY ARSE IN GEAR: Shunt have asked me to
be in their next show, which is based on "L'Argent" by Zola. I've been
looking for a copy). And I've been eating out a bit (SECOND
PROCRASTINATION-FRIENDLY FACT: The money came through from those
Mitchlook and Webbell sketches, the ones with this
in,
on the back of which I have now been invited to write for BBC 3's "The
Wrong Door" following a very friendly meeting with – I think – the
producer and receipt of a brief in which "Edgeyness" was misspelt.) I've
been swimming. I've been running baths. I've found an old sitcom of my Dad's
in its entirety on youtube, and been reminded yet again just how kind a
writer he is, and how glamorous ITV used to be back in the eighties:
that handover from Thames to LWT, those floodlit office blocks along the
South Bank promising such good times for the weekend (recalled to
perfect life in the opening credits of "Man To Man with Dean Lerner"),
and Richard O' Sullivan in a pastel blue track-suit toppling suavely
into Regent's Canal... I mean, yes, the BBC had the world for its logo,
but ITV had the South Bank! And the West End! AT NIGHT!
And
what am I going to see of that glamour, eh, in this day and age? Where
will I find all the magic bits in a W1 I now know like the back of my
tiny hand?... Anyway sitting in front of the laptop this morning looking
at – I don't know – this maybe –
- I received a text out of the blue from Dr. Meikle of
Foix: "Lazy bottom..shift and do something other than pretend you know
what its like ouside!scoot!i think you should go to....maida vale
today!why not." So I got up and headed out. I went to Maida Vale. I'd never been. It
was sunny. I had ciabatta on a barge. I picked up a leaflet called
"Little Venice Circular Walk". I hit Regent's Canal and attempted a run,
like Richard O' Sullivan. I felt queasy and slowed down. Ibis to the
left of me, dingoes to my right and up ahead moored to the Cumberland
Basin, the top-heavy Feng Shang Floating Restaurant just waiting to be
hijacked. I continued my way to the top of Primrose Hill and, similarly
buoyed, awaited further instructions.
Post one-hundred-and-one, a time to take stock. Average time spent
on one of these things: Four hours... which is daft. One hour of that's
just spent looking over punctuation for the love of - Enough. We can no
longer afford these fancy production numbers. There's a crunch
on, and papa needs to quit this tinkering, pick up a proper job hammer
and hit the coal- It's twelve past eight! I've got to have some breakf-
I've got a COLD, oh this is EXACTLY what I'm talking ab- Here:
Fully
qualified veterinarian Dr. Meikle and I said a second goodbye-of-sorts
to each other a number of Mondays back, up in Hampstead, the afternoon
before I visited the Death Ray set I think. I uncharacteristically
teared up over a hot chocolate and rather more characteristically bought
a rubber duck and took photos... But it was relaxing, and she gave me a
word of advice I shall pass on to you now, in this my hundredth post,
because it's a good word of advice, and to name something is to give
yourself a measure of control over it, so here it is:
Cockgoggles.
I
had been worrying to her in passing about a scheduled meeting coming up
with a former object of desire, and she said "You're empowered. You're
completely empowered. Just don't wear your cockgoggles."
It's
very important to be reminded that's an option. Yes, cockgoggles. Of
course. As a salutary reminder I took myself off a few days later to see
Elegy,
in which Ben Kingsley plays a public intellectual who meets, falls in
love with and then has to say goodbye to Penelope Cruz's breasts (the
title can only refer to her masectomy), and with the saddening clarity
now afforded by the good doctor's advice I could see that every decision
here weighed and every savvy pronouncement delivered in this movie was
just patently dotty: the sayings of a sap who'd thought he'd made sense
of this world at sixty, but had accidentally kept his cockgoggles on.
All this time. Like a sixty-year-old cucumber seed in your beard nobody
has thought to mention. Take 'em off, Philip Roth.
And I got a
call from Dr. Meikle this evening, well yesterday evening now, sounding
kind and happy. She's working 13-hour-days now at a veterinary practice
up in the Pyrenees. Yeah I wonder what she does... Here's today's death
ray:
Is
this - ? Why - What was the point of this blog again? Anyway Hamlet
(abridged) happened on Sunday again in front of four charming witnesses.
"Let's film a trailer next," thought our producer aloud, "With better
costumes and lighting - Just set two days aside and -" Back to the
lab... That night I was up with a cold watching "Have I Got News For
You?" on iplayer, answering everything and realizing that I get most of
my news now from youtube. I'm THAT bored. Clips isn't really news
though, is it. Clips is just clips, they'll never tell you what's really
going on. Unlike THIS!
Here's
an exciting interview with author, Doctor Judy Wood: Could the collapse
of the Twin Towers be the work of a Giant Death Ray? What exactly IS
the "dustification" point of steel?... I'm sorry but Sarah Palin's
clearly given me a real taste for watching dumb lies squirm under
scrutiny, how about you? Dr. Judy's haggard appearance admittedly skews
one's schadefreude a tad, but still:
Oh listen no actually that's not important. What I
really want to draw to your attention is this. This is what actually
happens when you point a Laser at a building in Manhattan. This is what a
Graffiti Research Lab actually gets up to. I'm going to build one for Morgan:
James helps to design robots on Mars. James wears a hood. James rules.
The following short is a favourite at my Dad's film evenings in
Puisallicon and features one of the dirtiest women ever to appear in
cartoons (and the thirties were full of them). "Whopper" here I think
means fib:
In other news, the wedding of Hannah Lou to Trevor Moss
in Wandsworth Town Hall yesterday was a paragon, a paean, a peach. We
all sat in the Council Chamber playing with our flip out desks, enjoying
the soft, Godless strains of Salt and Blue,
and when Hannah walked she looking so young. They both looked so young.
They are young. They fell in love young. Trevor's moustache (a lot of
us had moustaches) only made him look younger, and his father was the
best man and even he looked young. The best man speech at the Ivy House
would later make me break my pledge.
And soon they'll be off to honeymoon in Finland (where the finals of the Mad Scientist's Laugh Competition
are held). Bishop had begun to plan for his own wedding. Hiring a fake
groom seemed like a good idea, then Bish could make a dramatic entrance
through a window when the time came to ask if anyone knew of any lawful
impediment. Heidi C. Mace said she actually knew someone who hires
herself out daily as a shotgun-wielding, pregnant wedding-crasher. There
is a market.
I found a payslip in my trouser pocket walking
home that night through Peckham Rye. I'm finding payslips all over the
place these days. That's the really insidious thing about a regular job,
I realized: waiting for the payslip. You shouldn't be waiting for the
end of the week. Time should not pass quickly. Good for Hannah and Trev.
Every
show I work on with Shunt they always say they're going to make it
rain, but this week someone finally has. I put 10p in the tin after work
and helped myself to tea, a biscuit and a bunk. It looked great... But
listen I should really go to bed as there's a wedding
on tomorrow and I have to get up and wash and shave and generally get
my head round that (I have slept already, but I should give it another
go now I've taken my coat off) so here meanwhile is today's DEATH RAY
which may well contain the finest opening credits to anything ever... I
mean: Who ARE all these people? Do THEY even know? (Why can't I use
italics on this blog? Block caps are so needy. You're supposed to use
asterisks or something, aren't you, I know, but then it just looks - And
this bit ideally should be written up the side, next to the address,
under the stamp.)
Here's
a little shot from the
far-more-impressive-than-any-evidence-I-could-bring-back set of the
"Giant Death Ray" sketch I visited last Wednesday, a military hanger
filled with all manner of eccentric machinery from the 1930's... back
when machines were REAL machines, and had levers and hand-painted gauges
and head-rests. Under that sheet is... well, a spoiler, but certainly
something I had never really expected to see undertaken when I first
wrote the sketch. In fact the producer asked me to write it out of the
last draft entirely (I suppose just in case) and it was only when I
bumped into David M beaming at a barbecue that I got the good news: "No -
No. NO! The sketch has GOT to have a gxxnt rxbxt scxxxxxn, and it HAS
GOT to be HUGE". I can probably show you this though, a detail from the
proposed design the director made on the back of a story-board. Yes,
story-board. Mwa-ha-ha:
And did I say how impressed I was by the Doom Melon?
I've just tried to relight a cigarette butt and set fire to the hairs
on the end of my nose. Right, Mad Scientists... "You'd think you'd know
his name," begins one documentary about the early twentieth century
inventor Nikola Tesla.
Even now, very little is allowed to be known about his work, and a
little knowledge being if not a dangerous thing then at least a very
creepy thing the usual speculation has accrued... (I'm back from looking
up "accrued". Yes, it has accrued). Writes one nut: "The godfather of
all modern electrical conviniences. crushed by the zionist devil elite.
we could of been like the jettsons or a nice version of 5th element.
instead we have been held back probably 500 years by the evil new world
order. damn them in hell."
No
actually sorry, to call the speculation surrounding Tesla's work
"usual" does it an immense disservice. "Researching" him on youtube for
what became the Giant Death Ray sketch I found myself flung slack-jawed
into a giddy, batty forum of holistic conspiracy theories concerning
perpetual motion, time travel, the Philadelphia Experiment and something
called a Montauk
Chair, which if sat upon will instantly transport you to the surface of
Mars. I suppose it's in the provision of access to exactly this kind of
"wrong book" lore that the internet comes into its own. And why it
takes me so long to write sketches.
But
for this week let's not judge a man by his nuts, and focus instead on
this genius' influence upon TRASHY OLD SCIENCE FICTION... beginning with
the classiest of said trash: the Fleischer Brothers' Superman. He may
have a coil named after him, but the teaming of mad scientist and giant
laser is, after all, the larger of Tesla's legacies to the public
imagination. Unfortunately. For him. And probably us. Punching! That's Superman's answer to everything, isn't
it. Beautiful cartoon though. Okay, I'm going to get into that bath I
ran an hour ago and see if any of those centimetre-long baby slugs have
reappeared around the taps. TOMORROW: SAM BAKER AS HUGO
So
last night saw sketches being tried out at the Drill Hall, where all
the radio shows used to take place. I think Bleak Expectations was the
last thing I'd seen there or maybe it was Zombie Poppins. Nowadays of
course everything's recorded in front of the wrought-iron griffins at
Portland Place, behind catch-phrases etched into bullet-proof glass. The
Drill Hall meanwhile was having to take a collection for itself. I
don't think it's going to survive, which is odd.
My Linden Tree sketch went down well. I had been hoping
to see David play Queen Victoria, but was otherwise very pleased as the
idea had only come to me in the bath at 2am the previous morning, once
I'd finally got round to the sleep-defeating, procrastinated re-writes
of that Tesla sketch and something called "Hankl's Flank-pat". The warm
response to "Linden Trees" rather confirms my suspicion however that
when I do manage to run off something useful in an evening, it's only
ever as the coda to a ream of joyless, week-long sessions staring at
stuff that's muddy, overwritten and unusable. It is in fact this
suspicion that leads to my initial and then self-perpetuating
procrastination, because what's the point in sitting down and trying to
write something that's going to be Work? If it's going to be Work it
probably isn't going to be funny. Hence the baths and the walks.
A lot of stuff's felt like Work recently, which given
the tiny amount of actual work I'm doing is shattering. And shattered I
headed back after the try-outs last night and made the mistake of
settling down in front of youtube. It was only at four in the morning,
eighty minutes into The Unknown Tony Hancock (I think it was called, it's excellent)
that I finally thought "No hang on this won't do" and went looking for a
warm goodnight instead. And see, I then found all these lovely people
to set beside my bed:
Okay that last one was a bit weird. Of course it was,
it was the BBC. Here's Tom Edwards filling another thirty seconds. It's
good to see Tom's face again. And his tiny tiny body:
And then I dreamt this...
(Alright I didn't.
It's somebody's silent home movies of the BBC at Alexandra Palace in
1938, just before the War, which makes the sudden unambiguous show of
military strength about four minutes in particularly interesting. The
overall effect is sort of hypnotically horrible, at least when set
against the Hollywood here being imitated, but a fitting accompaniment
perhaps to Des O'Connor's cover of "Drive"):[Since I posted this on myspace that video's been taken down, so here's something else. Gah.]
I got back from the Wambam Club about an hour ago and I'm having
second thoughts now about not having a compere for "The Information".
Not doubts. Just thoughts. But that's not why I'm blogging. I just
phoned my imaginary girlfriend and I need to come here and hide. I need
to post my two days 'orth. I need to buy myself some time before
finally, definitely knuckling down to that sketch about Tesla- I've said
too much... So yes, I got round to unpacking and boxing all the stuff
my parents left for me and one of the last items to turn up was this,
from the earliest comic of mine that I can find. The other strips were
all Leo Baxendale
knock-offs like the stuff I've already posted. I called them "Willy The
Kid Books" because that's basically what they were, except for this
one. Here, for once, the 5-year-old me decides to do away with the usual
stumpy-heads-have-accidents-at-the-fun-fair-or-museum structure and go
for something a bit more epic, Peer Gyntish even, involving a bride, a
groom, a baby, a tramp and a harpy. The more I look at this story, the
more I like it. And I don't think you're supposed to understand what the
harpy's saying. We'll speak in a couple of days. Night night.
