My friend Tom of our number gave me this cursed book back in 1994 – not the specific copy above, mine's more fire-damaged – but I never got round to making anything in it because I never seemed to have the requisite cigarette packets, golf tees or fringed tweed. Look at the fun I missed out on though.
During this blog's hiatus, however, I did manage to fashion this picture round from it for the Dungeon Zoomers who continued to quiz online, and now – to round off a week that started with robots – I thought YOU coud play along TOO, maybe, if you open this page in a few different tabs? I don't really know how this will work. Anyway, all you have to do is match the following names and raw materials...
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
... with the corresponding, delightful toys pictured below. I'll post the correct answers in the comments although this one's actually pretty easy so maybe I won't. CHWAT!
And here's what it looks like once you're sat down. This was taken an hour before we opened on Tuesday – a happy event, although I was unusually conscious of my spittle in the spotlight during my belter. Ellis and Claire, far right, have just spotted a cat.
Interrupting the blog silence to repost – almost belatedly (we open tonight) - the following message from Magnitsky the Musical's award-wining whimsyist Robbie Hudson (pictured above):
It’s the end of the world and it will be hilarious. The Official
Mighty Fin will have a 20th birthday next year. And so this year: Listen & Often, in association with TallTales, proudly presents:
ROBOTS!
by Robert Hudson and Susannah Pearse
It’s a rehearsed reading of a new comic musical for Radio 4. In other
news, Radio 3, which is focused on the classics, has commissioned a new
version of The Mighty Fin’s 2019 smash hit, Hall of Mirrors. Both these shows are recording in January, which means it’s impossible to do a fully-produced show now. But ROBOTS! will
be a joyful return to Waterloo’s delightful and incredibly convenient
Network Theatre (Surprising Tunnel! Jolly Bar! Bins!) and Charles
and the Technical Unit will do a special effect but they won’t tell us
what it is yet.
Seriously, though, we have really missed live theatre, this will be as
much fun as we can possibly make it, and it will be lovely to see you.
Book tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk/listenandoften. See you there.
Will we? Dare you?
L to R: Me (redhead), Robbie, (not), Alexa Lamont (redhead), Musical
Director Harry Sever (redhead), Ianthe Cox-Willmott (redhead), Harry
again.
The Network Theatre is underneath Waterloo Station, down a tunnel, beyond the smells, and very pleasant. You can come tonight, Thursday or Friday. The special effect might be a zipwire. The night promises to be smart and silly (we're wearing shirts and doing voices) and the apocalypse-spanning songs, by Susannah Pearse, are typically astonishing – I love singing Sue's stuff at Christmas. The source material is Karel Čapek's play "Rossum's Universal Robots" – the source of the word "robot" and I think I'm playing the guy on the left. Olé!
Mack Sennett's more famous for being an early filmmaker than a good one, but if the comedies he produced rollercoaster in quality, that does at least mean there'll be highs. Here's Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy, playing possibly cinema's first Robot, three years before Karel Čapeck invented the word. Clockwork dolls were clearly already a thing though, as attested to by Turpin's brilliant impersonation of one, two minutes in. That's one high.
Another is the repeated and unambiguous raising of his middle digit, as seen at the top of this post, when eight and a half minutes in, the "lovesick janitor" played by Turpin – upon whom the automaton is modelled – takes its place to perform a series of sinuous physical jerks for a couple of talent scouts. It's pleasingly reminiscent of Brigitte Helm's robot dance in Metropolis made a decade later, and these talent scouts are won over, although not as won over as Metropolis' panting swells. Director Herman C. Raymaker is not as silly as Fritz Lang.
A third highlight is this intertitle:
And a fourth is the last seventy seconds, into which Sennett suddenly seems to have decided to see if he can cram the entirety of Con Air. He doesn't do badly either. I like Mack Sennett. Enjoy!
"Most of the programs that I did were either in the far distant
future,
the far distant past or in the mind. "
Electronic and Ambient pioneer Delia Derbyshire produced this pre-Kraftwerk, Die Antwoord-sampled marvel as a hymn for robots to sing at the end of a now lost episode of the BBC scifi anthology Out of the Unknown. According to this article on the nicely named "wikidelia", it recycles a track Derbyshire originally composed for a sex-education schools' film, rejected on the grounds that its wobbulator-induced ooh-ooh-oohs sounded "too lascivious" – and to be fair to Science and Health, now they've pointed that out, the deep chromium honeys do sound quite down to party.
This surviving still from the show got me very excited, because I immediately recognised the robots from their later reappearance, painted white, in a hastily rustled-up, unbudgeted fifth episode of the "Dr. Who" story The Mind Robber, recalling the impression made on me by the idea that the threshold between Imagination and Reality might be a white void inexplicably patrolled by machines.*
* As anyone who remembers the first episode of Time Spanner may have guessed.
So went the opening titles of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and this maybe should have been the show's mantra when it returned to Netflix, because the reboot seemed a little overthought. Can anything be more obnoxious, though, than taking a thing made with care and talent, and pointing out the one thing that you think is wrong with it? Let's see! For those of you don't know what MST3K is, the old opening provides one of the most charming eighty seconds of introduction I know (if you're reading this on a phone and see no video, try clicking "web version")...
There you go: Some nasty bullies have shot an employee called Joel into space, and the show's going to be pretty much just us watching terrible films, with him and the robots that he built to keep him company telling jokes over it. However, despite the show's popularity with children – evinced by the drawings and letters Joel would read out at the end of every episode – absolutely no mind seemed to have been paid over who else would get these jokes; if someone in that week's stinker looked like New York theatre director André Gregory, or Frank Zappa's drummer Jimmy Carl Black, they'd get a mention. This might have been one of the things audiences took comfort from the most, though – the idea of being let in on something – because, ultimately, what the old show felt most like was being allowed to stay up late, with a parent or older sibling, and watch whatever was on because you couldn't get to sleep. Joel kept those robots company in the dark. That was the tone, and those were the stakes.
I've adored the show for decades, and I'm sure it's had an influence. In fact – it's honestly only just occurred to me – yesterday's post was quite an MST3K-y "bit", a little esoteric but comfortable with its own pointlessness (Jesus... maybe all my videos are!) When the show's brilliant creator, Joel "Robinson" Hodgson, was replaced on the Satellite of Love by another softly-spoken Gizmotic employee, Mike, and the robots were recast, and the mad professor's mother took over persecution detail, the show's tone remained beautifully unaffected. That, to quote another science project, was its triumph, and there are possibly hundreds of full episodes on youtube if you fancy more than a sample.
Fast forward twenty years or so, and turn on Netflix, and Mike is now Jonah, the robots and persecutors have again been recast, but the show is still guys telling jokes peppered with obscure references over "cheesy movies", and the material is still strong, and as tonally similar as one should expect given the different century. However. While the tone of the jokes is similar, the tone of the show itself has changed, and nothing illustrates this change more than the new introduction. I'll let it explain...
"I should really JUUUUST RELAAAAAAAAAX"
... Or rather, not explain. Do you see what I meant about overthinking? I loved the reboot, and I'm sorry it got cancelled, but I think this might be why. Not because "cheap-looking" isn't a word in Netflix's vocabulary, but because, honestly, how Jonah eats or sleeps are not the first questions I have after watching this. What did I just watch, for example? Which bit was the "simulation"? The shadows in the window of the moonbase? But there's also that screen. And what's Jonah's job exactly, that has him flying off and rescuing people? And is it related to the woman who's trapped him on the dark side of the moon? Who's she, and why, having trapped him there, does she then pipe him up to the Satellite of Love, which isn't a satellite now anyway, because it's moored to the moon, by a pipe? I mean, none of this matters, I know, but why, therefore, have any of it? Even more confusingly, perhaps because it was realised this introduction itself needed an introduction, every episode sees it preceded by a "cold open" set
on the satellite itself, from which Jonah is routinely extracted by
the same pipe that then deposits him in the shuttle, making this not in fact an introduction at all, but literally what happens to Jonah narratively at the beginning of every episode. No wonder he looks so confused. This new subject's energy isn't that of a space-bound Moominmamma either, like Mike or Joel, but of a champion doing all he can to live up to the old show's reputation. This is the energy of pretty much everyone involved; they're all so excited the show's back, and they're here for the fans, and this is wonderful, but it's also almost the exact opposite of the care-free energy of the original.
I mentioned the show's material earlier. I'm not sure if the writing on a show should even be called "material" - I'm not sure that metaphor works, garment-wise. The material decides how comfortable an item of clothing feels, so the real material of a showisn't the writing, but the tone. And the tone felt really different. Who should have worn the jump-suit then? Some great young improviser who canstill project a strong enough air of not giving a shit to calm down a couple of robots. I can't help thinking of Lauren Lapkus, but maybe she hadn't listened to enough Zappa. Anyway, I'm watching a lot of things in the dark at the moment. That's my point. I have not yet made any robots. Here's your moment of Lao...
A few years before Disney's chastely fleshless skullbot, the LA-based Iranian artist Behnaz Farahi designed a less humanoid but also far sexier eye-contact-responsive item called "The Caress of the Gaze". It was admittedly designed to be worn by probably quite a sexy human. Most fashion is. According to this article, a camera beneath the top's mesh of quills registers not only whether or not the model is being looked at, but also the gender of the onlooker, and potentially even their age, possibly to stop the piece responding too sexily. Seduction doesn't seem to be the point of the piece however, so much as the creation of an article of clothing that can respond involuntarily to its wearer's environment, both physical and social, like hairs rising on a second skin. This is almost the exact opposite of the intention behind Farahi's most recent piece, and the piece that introduced me to her:
Taking its title from an article by Giyatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" is a work about not being looked at. The Barandi masks that inspired it were said to have been worn as a protest against Portuguese colonists. Its eyelashes flutter not in response to the male gaze, but to communicate in a secret language, like the American soldier who blinked TORTURE in morse code while filmed hostage in Viet Nam. As Farahi herself explains however, it is not in fact the wearers of these masks who will be communicating with each other in this language, but the masks...
