I've adored John Oliver on here before, but never been able to squeeze in how much I've grown to love and really value Seth Meyers. When he first took over the orange and teal chat show Late Night, all he really wanted to do it seemed was talk about Saturday Night Live, where he'd hosted "Weekend Update". But somewhere along the line, a second topical segment was introduced on top of the opening run of one-liners, "A Closer Look", and by the time Trump took office, this segment had grown from a four-minute bit, to a nightly monologue running sometimes to a quarter of an hour, more topical material than even Jon Stewart's Daily Show. "Closer Look" became how I get my news from America. It kept up, and backed by extraordinary research, it still rings with the clarity of a closing argument, while the real News seems oddly committed to propitiating contextless insanity. I don't think Britain has anything like it, it is all up on youtube, and it's a frankly invaluable resource.
When the pandemic hit, my admiration for Meyers grew even more.
I'd always thought he'd had the best writers – who, like Fallon in the seat before him, he seemed happy to foreground – but no late-night host adjusted better to performing in isolation: Meyers moved to his attic, and then to his in-laws, populating both new workplaces with a background head canon of talking portraits, mysterious small doors, and self-replicating copies of Colleen McCullough's "The Thorn Birds". More crucially, he didn't wait for laughs that never came. His entire delivery changed to please only himself, and you can still see this change now he's back in the studio performing to a crew of ten. "A Closer Look", whose punchlines Meyers now powers through, is as great as ever, if not greater. Here's last night's on Matt Gaetz, featuring gorgeous footage of Trump repeatedly calling him "Rick", but included below is the chat Meyers had afterwards with John Oliver, about what might happen next, and how empty the rooms were when they started out – two comedians who've kept track having an absolute blast. I was howling.
Tottenham Court Road's east side is now completely unblocked. They've finished the outside of whatever that is. This was last Friday.
My straight line's walk continued through Trafalgar Square, and past Parliament. There weren't many people around; there were possibly more police, but dotted around in twos and threes.
What the outside's currently meant to look like feels unsettled. In a ground floor window in Pimlico, I noticed a naked couple enjoying their heating, I suppose, just pottering. Not these windows. Older windows.
I realised at this point I hadn't seen Vauxhall in over a year, so turned back and crossed the bridge. Vauxhall was looking a lot more finished now than it had in 2018, when I had the heroes of Time Spanner brought here at gunpoint.
Of course it was. However, 2020's emptier streets, and clashes between police and the bone-stupid private militia of a reality TV star, might have made now an even better setting.
Or whatever year this is. It's impossible to photograph the moon with a phone, isn't it?
I didn't take many pictures of the waterfront. The finished flats were almost entirely glass, and while it didn't seem impermissable to photograph their interiors, and nobody inside was naked, it still felt a bit like a mistake. Maybe I just wanted to photograph stillness.
This flag was a nightmare. How has anyone ever photographed a flag?
I'd known they were going to build an American Embassy in Vauxhall ever since David Byrne posted something about it in 2006 or so, on a blog that's now impossible to find. He'd expressed pertinent concern at the growing demand for castles, and queried its need for a moat.
It's a post that's stayed with me, but this was actually my first visit. The embassy had quite a bubbly, Barbarella-ish approachability up close, for a fortress. In Los Angeles, it was now coming up to one o'clock in the afternoon. I was aware of this because one of my favourite people in the world would be preparing her first ever appearance on "The Tonight Show".
I sent her wind-chapped salutations from the base of a building we'd pretended to escape three years ago – oh yeah, we still totally text – and returned home via the south bank. As two girls overtook me on roller blades, keeping warm somehow, and bearing music too mellow to blare, I thought how alright all this was, and how much it resembled a 2021 I might have looked forward to long ago. I wouldn't be wearing a parka though. I'd be in a long woolen coat or something. Maybe I should buy a long woolen coat.
Here's London Hughes in Los Angeles on Late Night.
Holy moly, this is late! As I'm guessing pretty much everyone who reads this blog already knows, series five of "John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme" has gone out now and is (nearly) all up on Her Britannic Majesty's extant iplayer for further study. (Alright, a couple of episodes have dropped out of earshot, but at least I plugged it in advance so I'm not a total idiot). Among other things, this series must have marked the most perilously concentrated period of writing I've seen the great man yet subject himself to, written as it was in Goodies-style trandem with both "Double Acts" and the live show. The fact that everything turned out totally fine is a little worrying: He's not going to try and do all that again this year, is he? (On the Finnemore scale, "fine" of course means "won an award". Yes! "Double Acts" won best sitcom. Elsewhere, Cabin Pressure was nominated for best drama. John's producing so much that his work has literally spilt over into the wrong genres.)
The other thing this series marked was our first recordings post "Souvenir Cabin". A bit off book, with a nod to costume and another nod to banter, it was the first live sketch show I'd ever done, and I loved doing it. By the third of my three nights I felt pretty justified loving doing it too, but I'm not sure what I picked up helped me in Series 5. I'm talking about the grunting. I'm talking about the weird unscripted grunting before you even realise my character's in the scene. I don't know. No point worrying about your craft now, sunshine. Plough on...
What else? Our gallant Producer Ed did some behind-the-scene production notes. I'll do that then. Here then are my own solipsistic titbits.
Tidbits?
Episode 1. Okay you can't hear the episode now, but... I'd say by the time Episode 1 aired there was still about a third of
the series as finally broadcast yet to be written. Exciting. Unrelatedly, when I first saw John perform the final story, about crossing the Atlantic on a
horse that thought it was a cat, it didn't have that ending – the
ending where the day is saved by the horse landing on its feet – you know, the
punchline you might have thought was the whole point of including a horse that thought it was a cat. No, he'd simply decided to include a horse that thought it was a
cat and see where it went. Come on, that's fascinating! Another tiddlebiscuit: I think "School Slogan" marks the only time
Margaret and I have turned up to a sketch accidentally wearing the same
accent. Incidentally, Jason Hazely turned up to play the piano for this one, having just learnt that six out of the top ten non-fiction books for that week were the Ladybirds he'd co-authored with Joel Morris. By Christmas it would be eight. He looked terrified. I remember bumping into Joel on the day of a tube strike back in Summer, when the two of them were just getting started: They do a Christmas book every year, and this year decided to have a proper think about which publisher they'd really like to write for. Joel was so happy showing me the caption for the dog rack. The secret of comedy is love. Timing's just a symptom. I've changed the subject. Anyway, I love Jason and was very happy to do stuff in front of and with him.
Here him in the actual Ladybird archive
Episode 2. For some reason, when playing the voice in John's head I found it very hard not to think "How would Rob Webb play this?" I'm not saying I could guess the answer, or that I would think it ethical to act upon it if I could. I'm just saying... I'm just saying. Similarly, I first encountered the Wrong Friend sketch rehearsing "Souvenir Cabin" with John and his comedy partner of yore mumKevin Baker. Kevin was unmatchably hilarious in this role. I tried to match him regardless, which is why I am shouting here more than acting.
Episode 3. Oh, Ed hasn't done any notes for this. I remember we went to see "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" on John's birthday – the
one where Mark Strong hits a burning owl mid-flight with a cane (back
when the circus really was a circus). The spy story here, set in a zoo which is actually not a spy story at all, was first performed in "Souvenir Cabin". It was here that I learnt to keep schtum through a laugh and hold out for a second wave, like some BMX skillz. Obviously though, stillness doesn't show up on radio. It's like the grunting. Plough on. What else? I don't think Jurassic Park 3 is a worse movie than Jurassic Park 2.
Episode 4. We do a thing called Silly Voices Day: a closed-plan, blue-sky, coffee-and-biscuits ideas ramble that helps give John something to write for, which is where "Kirates" came from. The first time we tried out "Word To The Wise" at the Canal Cafe I could barely get through the sketch with what the Americans call "breaking". In retrospect I think it helped. By the time of the recording, I could rattle right through them, and I wish I hadn't. "Kirates", of course, is all about not getting through it – the building pressure that corpsing (no pun intended) can provide is written in. (To see what the real thing can add to a sketch, watch the wave after wave Rachel Dratch catches with the line "I can't have children" below.)
Episode 5. Silly Voices Day probably paid for itself with just this episode, which I adore. "Schmoogle" came from that, as well as pretty much everything Lawry suggests here. That extra recording in January really paid for itself too: John had had a month off (on the Finnemore scale of course, "a month off" means "a month spent writing just the one thing") and returned carrying gold, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, a phrase I realise is a lot easier to imagine applied to John than most other humans.
Episode 6. I'm not saying you can't act and shout at the same time. What I find oddest about the self-proclaimed "Most Self-Indulgent Sketch In The World" is just how much I enjoyed playing someone not enjoying playing someone playing themself. It's all a bit...
The story about putting Queen Victoria's brain in a robot was apparently inspired by this film, and the robot hedgehog itself was inspired by a remote-controlled hedgehog from the charity Christmas cabaret in which this story had its first performance. (Go, Mighty Fin!)
(Before I deliver my final tildaswintonbids: if anyone is wondering
if Lawry Lewin, Carrie Quinlan, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Sue Pearse and
Ed Morrish are not just brilliant at their jobs but also fun and kind, they
are.)
Final tin lid: When I sang "For he's a jolly good fellow" to John as the train manager, we had to retake the whole thing because the audience joined in.
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.
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...
