posted from Nige's laptop

(originally posted on myspace here)

And look at the mess he's made. We're back rehearsing "Money" again after another break, this one three weeks long. (Here are some shots of us before then, brainstorming in the yard while the levels for the End of the World are unceasingly tweaked within. We are, as you can see hard, at it:)

So listen, while everybody's not looking I think I'll pop off to Paris for a couple of nights. I'm not bringing the laptop but I promise I'll catch up when I get back. No, the only reason I'm suddenly getting back in touch so hurriedly is that the That Mitchell and Webb Sound show airs tonight on Radio 4 and this is just the kind of place where I should be telling people about that (oh and all the stuff I wrote for the telly should now be up in a playlist on my profile.) Apparently I've written the opening and closing sketches of this first episode and they're both pieces I'm really pleased with. In fact the final sketch - if it's about tycoons - was directly inspired by the work done on "Money" so yes the spoof will now air before the show that inspired it. What this also means however is that you now have only about, well, none hours left to listen to some other stuff I'm quite proud of which aired on Laurence and Gus' final episode last Tuesday in a towering seven minute sandwich of sick whimsy towards the end. But look that's my fault entirely. Still, quick!

Ah Nige's back, looking very handsome. 

As is the Yard: 

As are we all. All so handsome. Hello Nige. Goodbye you. 

posted from a phone

(originally posted on myspace here)

Well that was brilliant. I haven't seen Daniel Kitson before and, long as it's taken me to do get round to it I'm quite glad the first time that I see him should have been in a park at midnight. A large crowd, but my initial begrudging of the laughter that greeted him opening his mouth lasted about empty seconds - I meant forty seconds, predictive text. No he said he felt like spending the hour just congratulating us for showing up, and by that point I would have been very happy with that. Instead he read a story from a stool, lit by the lamps through the trees like a moomin, and that was fox too (wow, I meant to type excellent and see I've typed fox. That's incredibly predictive.) And I listened to much of it only drifting off to try and remember when I'd last written a love story, and to wonder how on Earth I'd go about trying to write one again... i don't know how to do paragraphs on a phone... New paragraph... And now I'm sat by the American Embassy in a break from walking home. I've never been here before. I've just a had cool, refreshing all-day-breakfast packaged sandwich and it's two in the morning. Pimm's o' clock. I'm tucking into maltesers now and living the dream. Not a proper dream, mind, the kind you have once you've pressed the snooze button (I have to, the tune my alarm plays is soporific to a fault) then find a spare room beyond the bathroom, and a whole other house beyond that, and a design magazine on the floor, and you know it's French because they're giving away an inflatable woman tucked into the pages like a free scent, and you pull it out and wonder shall I? and then the alarm goes off again. And you wake up and fall asleep.

"YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE! THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!" and other amazing dialogue.

(originally posted on myspace here)

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.

FOR KIDS: Bimbo, Evita and Flaps (Remnant)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Today's post has suddenly been erased. Hecht. Oh well, I can't be bothered to write it again. But here's the contents:

Peter Arnold was outside in the sun, hard at work on a giant labia.

"It was meant to be a diaphragm," he explained.

"Is it for the show?" I asked.

"No."

Snap (+ a sketch Jon Taylor's mother was good enough to compliment me on last night)

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:

Lots Of Love. Does that mean I done a meme? 

... coming up this Thursday: Giant Death Ray Sketch.

What's missing from this picture?

 

 At nine o'clock it was still light in Battersea Park, and I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that's missing, and why I feel I'm wasting my time here. I mean, look at it. Where else would I rather be? Just behind me is the vicarage I lodged in when I left school, attached to a round church with a photograph of the planet Earth where Jesus would normally be, or at least that's what was there back in 1993, when I first left home. And it's becoming difficult to maintain that enthusiasm for independence now I'm 34. London has never looked more beautiful, and I'm limping to keep up. Battersea Park is practically deserted and there are party-boats on the the Thames but this doesn't feel like home tonight. It feels like a very well-appointed waiting room. 

 

 I don't know what's missing.

 Maybe this is because of the fire, because my home has gone but I'm only now getting ready to entertain. Maybe it's because of the pain in the right leg. Maybe it's because I should be writing. I've had another week off and done... not nothing I suppose, no, on Tuesday I went to the hospital to blow into a robot and receive a clean bill of health, good, and on Friday I went to "The Hospital" to eat Eggs Benedict and discuss a script about a hitman - but it's not much. I mean, Gemma went over to California for the week and still managed fit in research for the show (from a book about Manet... and there's a mur-mermuh-mermuh programme about him on iplayer right now in fact). It's all good stuff she's found. Here's some:

"This is a quote from the charge d'affaires at the British Embassy in Paris in 1869.

'The second empire has gone off the rails. It is no longer being guided it is hurling itself at an accelerating speed towards the abyss'... 

"The 1867 expo opened late. On the opening ceremony, they were surrounded by builders. because of bad weather, barely half the exhibits were there. Of those that had arrived, only a fifth had been unpacked. The opening ceremony, conducted by Emperor Napoleon was on 'a muddy fairground amid packing cases, tarpaulin-shrouded exhibits and crews of frantic workmen' one observed described it as 'a sickly child that was bound to die', so. That became the biggest show in Europe. It's all ok... 

"London in 1867 had a heatwave. They drank cold tea and gentlemen wore wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats... 

"Abolishment of arbitrary arrest and obligation of workers to carry identity cards... 

"Napoleon went to war in Alsace Lorraine with bladder stones. In a lot of pain, he rouged himself, and tried to die in battle but failed. He lamented he was 'not even able to get himself killed.'... 

"During the seige, they killed all the animals in the zoo to eat. The richer Parisians therefore dined on all sorts of curiosities. Castor and Pollux, the two elephants in the Jardin de Plantes, had been cruelly and bunglingly dispatched with a chassepot firing steel tipped.33 calibre bullets. Elephants had long been the most esteemed and well loved residents at the zoo. They were fed honey cakes and were said to enjoy the singing of patriotic songs. Their keeper, M. Devisme, had protested at the execution (which was watched by several big-game hunters and other Parisians) and afterwards fell sobbing in the snow, huggling the trunk of one of his dead charges. Elephant steak promptly found its way onto the plate of Victor Hugo who was further satisfying his gastronomic curiosity by tucking into bear and antelope. (Horse meat gave him indigestion. Wealthy Parisians were able to choose from zebra, reindeer, yak and kangaroo)" 

The night before Gemma mailed that, I had a dream about dying elephants in the Shunt Lounge, a whole pile of them at the foot of a low ramp being gored by elephants that had failed to make the jump and goring the next ones in turn. It was a mess. Maybe I need a desk. There are four canvasses stuck to the wall of the room I now occupy. They're stuck there with blue tak. Two are blank. The other two bear this picture:

 

 But as long as this isn't my home that's not my problem.

All good. Videgum has proof.

So, YES, I should alert you to the fact that there is at least one sketch, maybe two, of mine airing on BBC2 tonight at 10, as the third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look finally gets broadcast. And now I have. Alerted you. It's going to be very good, I'm pretty sure of that, and the what-is-called "red button content" should also be worth your thumb's time and energy. What they've done is taken a number of the radio sketches – including Asbo Zapruder – and turned them into cartoons, and what could have been a very bad idea has, in fact, been realized with great sensitiviteh and f'nesse, so I am cock-a-hoop. I'm cock-a-hoop and back online, though bound to this crippling, skip-green couch by a short, yellow cable, because my wireless connection is still for some reason – Well, I don't know where to begin, it's all magic isn't it, but the unimaginable resources of information that should be shooting invisibly into my laptop at speeds that can only be explained by the theory of relativity are still having to do so through a kind of wonky, TVam band of narrow plastic, and not through the air like I have every right just to expect it to. So my legs hurt.

But in better news it turns out that, during the week I've been offline, everything became fine! 

Well okay, not the Government, clearly, not the BNP, not, like the NEWS world, but the other world, the you and me world, the people just getting on with stuff world, the world, in short, so diligently monitored by the mighty, mighty Videogum has been throwing up all manner of giddying evidence of the excellence of people over these past seven days, which I have very much enjoyed catching up on. Although my legs do really hurt. Okay, so tuna might be heading for extinction, but LOOK, we'll always have kittens:

And LOOK, someone's spent three years making a wedding invitation (as one commenter puts it "Dear People in Love, the bar has just been raised"):

And LOOK, this should be fake, someone clearly must have faked this to advertise T-Mobile or Diet Coke or something, but NO, it happened, so everyone is definitely fine! I'm going to watch telly now with Tom and Will. On Sunday, I was dumb enough to say some nasty things about Gordon Brown in front of Will. "I guess we have different ideas what Leadership means," he said. Yeah. I think it definitely means this:

Videogum. My church. I can't get up.