Aw, look at this lovely lego sitcom set, too small for real actors of course, and there's nowhere to sit down. So let's move our attention instead to more functional models, and to this fortnight's round in the old Dungeon Quiz. We never really talk about old sitcoms in our group, so I'd no idea how easy people would find this. What about you? Can you name these shows from the following photographs, as lifted in bulk from some archive I found on the BBC website? I was hoping to include a bit more small-"v" variety, but it's harder to find a nice range of depopulated sets than – well, than I'd left myself time for. Sorry. Not all of these are sitcoms. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments...
Someone
other than myself drew this sweet catalogue of me and my worldly
possessions (Le Petit Plastrier) and for all the gnashing on bile that
follows I remain giddy and red-eyed with gratitude for that fact, and
have no complaint with anything outside myself as subsequent posts will
hopefully testify... Pblaaackk! It's September now, is it? Yeah.
Right. What is it in this room making me cough every time I come in?
This is it, the only space I have remotely moved into, how can I be
allergic to it? Money's
opening in a week now but I'm missing the hundred-and-forty-third day
of the Big Push, laid up here in the Jock Block instead as though I've
just come out of hospital and we're back in February, incapable of
sleeping on my back once again, turning to the sputum pot I'd only kept
as a momento and staggering to the bathroom for a toxic harumph. Is it
sun-stroke? Is it nerves? Is it the karaoke at the Dungeon Summer Party
where I went as Daryl Hannah out of Blade-Runner? I want a microscope. I
want to peer at a sliver of this and give it a name. I want to look in
the mirror and not see Zach Galifianakis' downy corpse squinting back. I
want to write about Paris, and the seventh week of "Let's run it again
from the Jewish Question", I want to get some ideas down for Sirs Harry
and Paul, I want to run off every footling, glittering nugget I promised
everyone so that I can get on with the stuff I promised myself, but
CHIEFLY I want to use this blog for something other than lists of stuff
I'm supposed to do. How am I ever get my own unfathomably-depressed-literary-giant-teatime-telly gig at this rate? And have you SEEN how overgrown the machine's been getting in our absence?
Well okay, what have I written... There's the closing sketch of this week's MitchellandWebbSound so
have a listen to that maybe (three closers in a row. "Closer" is an
industry term I've just used wrongly) although now I think of it, if you
have it on and DON'T listen my sketch does sound pleasingly like
Peepshow... And I also filled in this questionnaire I filled in on
F*c*b**k a bit back (a bit is a measurement of time. I have lost track
of time. The Bit System is: A bit equals some bits and some bits make up
a bit, so we're talking a bit back. So it works fine.) You had to
answer every question using the titles of songs sung by just one band or
artist. I chose the songs of Leonard Nimoy, and after essentially two
month's blog silence the results are as good a reacquaintance as any, so
you can have that... (oh and I've put links to the tracks where I can
so don't click on them if you won't be able to face it, they're not the
easter eggs I meant, I don't really know what easter eggs are)...
If you could change your name, you would change it to:
Abraham, Martin and John
Thought for the Day:
Spock Thoughts
How I would like to die:
Amphibious Assault.
My motto:
Well what else would my motto be? The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins?
And who knew Lego did whites? And weren't Buffalo Springfield good
sports? Right I'm going to try and catch some L-shaped Z's now, sweet
dreams and prosper. Pblaaackk!
In a break from rapping at Bishop's tonight we got onto the subject of Lego.
Peter
reminded me that in the old days if you wanted to make a spaceship, it
would normally involve inordinate amounts of trellis and possibly a
tree. All of which has nothing to do with what follows, although maybe
the image does, but probably not.
After an early night to bed I
woke at five this morning. I filled a large cup with some water and ice,
logged on to iplayer, and rustled up a documentary about the Nigerian
schism in the Anglican Church. Bring that schism on, thick bigots, say
I. It's the only thing that makes me wish I believed in God: I'd love to
be an Archbishop. I'd bandy around words like "charity" and "evil" like
it was my birthright. Surely that's the whole POINT of being a
religious leader though. Don't pussyfoot around Leviticus, just say
"Jesus had a much better idea: instead of looking to the Scriptures for
our morality let's trust to our own informed and inherent empathy, not
the most original of premises I know, but I AM AN ARCHBISHOP so I think
that this was GOD'S idea, new idea, even though a lot of people had
thought of it first, still we should clearly listen to THAT and not the
old mad, survivalist, cutting-it-in-the-desert stuff, admittedly it
doesn't seem THAT MUCH like a religion, but OUR churches are mainly
lovely and old and yours, while admittedly incredibly popular, aren't -
look, YOU ARE EVIL and you imprison homosexuals, albeit your services do
look a lot more fun." But no, that apparently would be foolhardy and
that's not how the Church works.
And it clearly didn't send me to
sleep, although it was quite draining. So then I loaded up a whopping
two-hour-plus slice of Boris Johnson taking questions from the London
Assembly, which was every bit as enervating (a word that still
stubbornly refuses to mean "elevating" crossed with "energizing"). Tossy
guff about "Ken's pet projects urgh AH OOH newts (laughter) MUH that
number by the pound sign is very big, I'm sure smaller numbers exist
therefore that could be cheaper MUH UM New Routemaster ie not a
Routemaster AH consultants, what do they do? MUH BUM knife crime" and
then that silver gitfox from the BNP started getting excited about some
definitely non-racial study he'd just commissioned as to what percentage
of the - now, it was some section of the community, I can't for the
life of me remember exactly which one he'd decided to single out for
study, but there... no, it's gone - anyway the "something" community
was affected by knife crime, at which point I shut up my laptop, popped
on a fleece, and threw myself to the alsatians.
And then... and
then... and then at Bishop's this evening I caught Barack Obama on
Channel 4, quite shrewdly talking to the assembled Berlin throng as
though he'd already been elected (a charade I'm sure the rest of the
world will be quite happy to go along with even if it turns out he
loses. I would.) The telly played the speech's book-ending soundbites,
"The road is long", and the hokey moonshine of "I speak not as a
candidate for President but as a citizen" and I was none too impressed
but thought I'd look up the rest, tonight, just now. And good:
Dude, did he say "a world without nuclear weapons"?
Twice?
Of course, the last time I felt this good about a speech it was Tim Collins' address to his troops before the invasion of Iraq (as jotted down here by the lady standing behind Kenneth Branagh)
so, you know, fuck it. And indeed, looking over this central third
again, I can't really put my hand on my heart and swear that David
Cameron could never have made this exact same speech albeit lying
through his shiny head. So why post it?
Well, I think it's when
he talks about walls. Living in London I've seen a number of barriers go
up in the last five years, mainly black and yellow, sometimes orange
and slotty, and sometimes tortured metaphorical barriers I try and cram
into this sentence like the barriers to anyone under 21 buying alcohol
in a shop. Every politician seems to think barriers are the answer. So,
yes, it's nice to hear someone talk of walls coming down for a change.
And that's the nub. It's not just that he talks like he's already been
elected, it's that - although he does mention the war - he talks,
uniquely, like a leader in a time of peace. And that he gets his
countries and his history right. And that, although I don't know the
size of his claque, there's 100 thousand Germans there waving Stars and
Stripes, and someone in the audience is clearly ululating... "Hope" is
such a potentially duff word. But no I think, here, he's nailed it. I
just wish Hicks or Hunter were still around so I could check.
