Workaround with Pat & Mat

 

"... and that's it!"

 

 Thanks to Faren Taghizadeh for introducing me to this!

 Apparently, growing up up in Tehran, you got your clownish antics and bywords for ineptitude, not from the Chuckle Brothers, but from any Laurel and Hardy short that didn't have wives in it, or – thanks to the fact that neither were identifiably female – from Czechoslovak Television's Pat & Mat. But do you know what? I'll take it. Because every episode I've seen so far of Lubomir Beneš' and Vladimir Jiránek's "... a je to!" ("... and that's it!") is beautifully animated and unimprovably funny, powered by a genuine love and undersanding for the detail of how things actually break. Silent partners Pat and Mat are a charming realisation of the differently ept; endlessly creative, endlessy unfazed; the architects of both their own undoing and their making do. This is the stuff, and there's hours of it.

 

 "I have called it 'Slapstick' because it is grotesque, situational poetry."

Kurt Vonnegut

The Last Time I Thought About Sharing Space in a Comedy

 It was this time last year. I was talking to Gemma Brockis about Home, whose second series had just aired, and we were basically firing off superlatives at each other. We both knew Rufus Jones, who created the show and plays the "lukewarm xenophobe" Peter, whose family attempt to accomodate a Syrian refugee, Sami, played by the excellent Youssef Kerkour as as unmoveable, vulnerable and intimately honest as a handprint. That's Peter above, in his new car, which he has to share with strangers on account of his new job, as an Uber driver. His previous job had disappeared in anticipation of Brexit, for which, naturally, Peter voted. Everything Rufus took on in choosing to write this requires the guts of a fire-breathing goat – as he says, "writing never feels easy, so you may as well write about something that matters" – but nowhere are those guts more gloriously on display than when Peter receives news of this redundancy, but I don't want to spoil it. Home is here. If you haven't seen it, absolutely do. Rufus is amazing, everyone in it is amazing, Carrie Quinlan's in it too, and it is directed with unwavering subtlety by one of the funniest clowns I've ever seen, Peepolykus' David Sant.

I Just Watched The First Comedy Ever Made, and Laughed a Lot and Realised Things.

When Comedy Was Queen

 Beaneath this hilarious hat is Marie Dressler, star of stage, screen, and Tillie's Punctured Romance, the world's first feature-length comedy film (or "photoplay", as it was billed on the poster, this being a medium so young nobody had yet settled on a name for it.) Made in 1914 by Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, I finally got round to watching this the day after Biden's inauguration, newly bouyed after a good night's sleep, and freshly in love with the promise of its place of origin. This was also where I'd got up to in David Cairns' invaluable run-down of the early works of Charlie Chaplin, as it was his first feature too. 

 

And here's the new favourite, joining hot acquisition Dressler, and Sennett's star fixture – and the woman who gave him more than one break – the brilliant Mabel Normand, for a lovely curtain call at the film's end.

 

 While not top billed, Chaplin is definitely one of the film's stars, and if you're normally turned off by him, you might still enjoy to a surprising degree his turn here as the gold-digging, Fairbanks-'tached louse – Bialystok in the body of Bloom – whose pursuit of Dressler makes him the butt of many jokes... literally, in fact, this being Keystone, and butt placement being key.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Chaplin played a lot of heels before he turned auteur, I'm learning, and it suited him. Here, he hopes to marry Dressler's Tillie Banks for her millions despite, simultaneously dating fellow grifter Mabel Normand, having met the heiress when, playing fetch with her dog, she accidentally threw a brick in his face. Bricks in faces are an early Keystone staple, I'm also learning, and knew no gender boundaries: Mabel Normand could take a brick to the face as well as anyone. Custard pies were a later refinement, but not I feel, necessarily an improvement. 

 

The third act.

 

 I laughed a lot at this film. It's full of excellent violence, but also, as with Tille squeezing behind her unnamed suitor to join in the eavesdropping above, the ticklish interplay of people who are just too close together. Here's another example: future comedy star Charlie Chase who, given essentially the role of an extra on Mabel Norman's right, seizes his moment with laudably shameless man-spreading.

 

 

Watching the film within a film (noticeably more realistic than the film which it's in – 

ARGH, WHAT DOES THIS REMIND ME OF? Answers below, please.)

 

 Everyone in these Keystone comedies is slightly in each other's way, I realised. It's how so many of the jokes happen – the patting of the wrong knee, the cane in the arse, the plank in the face – but it's also just a good way to maintain comic tension. I also realised I enjoy this as a comic device every bit as much as I enjoy someone being interrupted. 

 

 Side note: I'd already been thinking about the invasion of space when Blackadder III turned up on televison and I suddenly noticed how close Hugh Laurie was standing to Robbie Coltrane. Everyone in those middle two series of Blackadder stood weirdly close to each other, which might be why those two series were the funniest. Would Upstart Crow feel more like Blackadder, I wondered, if everyone just got up in each other's face more? (And might this be a part of the secret of the success of Ghosts? Of course, the modern aspect ratio requires a larger cast.)

 

Normand, unbothered.

 

 Anyway, the headline is: I laughed a lot at the first ever feature-length comedy, over a century after it was released. Maybe it's non-reputation is down to critics who didn't think it was Chaplinny enough. Too anarchic. I've no idea. The other headline, I guess, is that the first ever feature-length comedy starred two women. So maybe it's down to that.

 Here's the excellent, historic, pioneering Tillie's Punctured Romance. I love it.

 

A Quick Look at the Papers with Steve Bannon

 BOO! Ha. No. This is old news. From 2018. The untouchable past. And, to give both sides, Boris Johnson called this "so-called association with Steve Bannon... a lefty delusion whose spores continue to breed in the Twittersphere." So who are you going to believe? Our Prime Minister, or deluded lefty, Steve "Badges" Bannon? Indeed, the idea that the Brexit campaign might have just been a vehicle for a populist, far right coup, and that nobody actually campaigning for it really wanting to leave the EU, is... well, is given some credence I suppose by Johnson's many statements before the referendum on the folly of leaving the EU. But a person's allowed to change their mind. And if the entitled energy of this coup-staging prick...

 

... is in any way reminiscent of the energy of the Leader of the House...

 

 ... Well, the latter won an election, so he's entitled to take the piss. 

 "Wash your hands to the National Anthem." Love it. Herd immunity. Highest daily death rate in the world. One thing the Prime Minister has been consistent in throughout his political career is his praise for the mayor from Jaws, so you can't say people didn't know what they were voting for, ie someone who could be trusted to put business interests before human life – not business interests in general obviously, because Johnson also famously said "fuck business" regarding Brexit, but his friends' business interests – and the National Anthem, of course. And statues and shit. 

 No, it's not a coup if you win an election, no matter how many thousands die. No matter if over a thousand are still dying every day. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Steve Bannon was granted a Presidential pardon yesterday. But why am I talking about that? That was yesterday. Today is a new day. America has a new President. Trumpism's definitely gone. And I love America. And I'm sure the happiness will kick in in a bit.

 

"Thus ended the worst journey in the world."

A shelf the size of France.

 

 Today was spent finally catching up with Sarah Airress' engrossing account, over more than a year's worth of blogging, of her trip to Antarctica, to research a graphic adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's 1911 Terra Nova expedition, The Worst Journey In The World. I hope Sarah doesn't mind if I share some of it here.

 

From The One Show, April, 2020

 

 Emotional, educational, and beautifully documented with her own photographs, the trip to McMurdo took place two Novembers ago, months before Covid saw the rest of us having to rethink our living arrangements, and Airress was there for a month. But her account, begun in September of 2019, has continued to run on until at least last Saturday, which is what I powered through today, transported by every paragraph. 

 

One of the interesting things I learnt: In dry air, minus 10ºC can still feel "very mild".

 

 Most recently, she wrote about her visit to the remains of an already misshapen stone igloo that "Cherry" built in 1911, during the disastrous journey to find Emperor Penguin eggs that gave his memoir its title, and she quoted his return to the base hut:

Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we found it difficult to stop. ... Then into my warm blanket bag, and I managed to keep awake just long enough to think that Paradise must be something like this.

We slept ten thousand years ... [301]

 I looked out the George Robey, and could only find something from 1913. Still, I thought it might give me a taste, and tried to imagine men who only twenty-four hour hours earlier had been so uncomfortable that they willingly risked death, laughing themselves silly to this:

 

 It was alright, I suppose. Not as ticklish as I'd hoped, I thought, but tastes had clearly changed. Then I re-read what Cherry wrote: "a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone"... A broken record! And immediately I could hear them, high as kites, their past no more distant than my own. 

 

 

From Sarah's record of the 28-sleeping Cape Evans hut (source).

 

 About her return towards the end of 2019, Airress writes of the "thin places" – an apparently Celtic term, and possible improvement upon the word "liminality" which I've been trying to find a replacement for for years now. You can see, and indeed buy, more of Sarah's work here. And her brilliant visualisations of John Finnemore's Cabin Pressure, which is how I first knew about her, are viewable here.

One year on from "Frankenstein Wednesdays", and For One Week Only: ALL THE MONSTERS!!!

 

 Hats off, shoes off, and feet up to Matthew "Bishop" Woodcock for alerting me to this... The youtube channel Fear: The Home of Horror has been granted permission to share a generous clutch of beautifully restored Universal horror classics until January the 23rd! First up is the original, quite boring Dracula, which I wrote a little about HERE before I learnt to love Lugosi. I ecommmend it though, particularly for Dwight Frye's extraordinary Renfield, which I still like to think Tolkein might have seen before inventing Gollum.

 

 Next on Fear's playlist is, surprisingly, not Frankenstein, but The Mummy, a film I remember being quite sexy. Edward Van Sloane is back, as is "The Dying Swan". The plot – in which is an undead snack courts the spitting image of an old flame – is now a firmly established vampire trope, Karloff's never looked more gorgeous, and the opening five minutes are genuinely chilling. (Fun twitter fact: apparently there were once laods of mummies, but we ate them.)

 

 Next up is director James Whale's original, phenomenal Frankenstein, which I raved about almost exactly a year ago HERE, and stand by every single superlative.

 

 The first time I saw James Whale's The Invisible Man, in my late teens, I felt like I was watching a film from another dimension. I adored it. In my Bride of Frankenstein piece (see below), I write "The villain's anatagonists are hilarious. Their performances are shrill and dull... but enormous and precise and musically human. To Rains' mad scientist everyone else in the world is an expendable idiot, but thanks to the strengths of its comic relief The Invisible Man is a celebration of us expendable idiots."

 And those antagonists, Una O'Connor and E. E. Clive, return in The Bride of Frankenstein, thought by many to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. I think... well, I write about it HERE.

 

 Both Claude Rains and Bela Lugosi then return for The Wolf Man, Universal's second attempt at a werewolf picture. I break down the plot in my Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman piece thus (spoilers ahead): 'When Univeral returned to the idea in 1941, they chose for their hero... Lon Chaney Junior as a visiting American, and man of the people, "Larry Talbot", who sits on the wrong bit of the armchair in a fancy castle, or in the front with his chauffeur, like John McClane. Talbot tries it on with locally engaged Gwen Conliffe, whom he takes to a "gypsy carnival". There he is bitten by a dog he then beats to death, only to have it turn into Bela Lugosi. Bela's mother, the gypsy Maleva, is the only one who can explain this mystery, the keeper of the lore - a potentially problematic depiction, unless one considers how much the Catholic church would literally kill to be considered this powerful an authority on the supernatural. Talbot is finally despatched in his wolfman form (not that of a dog, like Bela –  never explained) when his skull is smashed in with a silver cane by his father, and Maleva repeats a beautiful elegy over his body, previously spoken for her own son: "The way you walk was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end." She is played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who studied under Stanislavsky, and every time she reaches "... to a predestined end" the mixture of grief and relief broadcast will leave you feeling naked.'

 

 Finally, fast-forwarding through all the bad times and the shoddier sequels, we come to the superb and hugely influential horror/adventure/comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstien, which I write about all over the place... 'Han Solo's screaming flight from the Stormtroopers, Bugs Bunny's toying with Elmer Fudd, The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, nearly all of Spielberg's output, even Dangermouse and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. All shared that tone of "Horror Comedy" - so much so it seemed the only tone going - and all may have learnt a thing or two from A and C Meet F.'

They're up for a week. Get stuck in. Enjoy!

Going South at 2am

 This is a photograph of Southwark, but we haven't got there yet. The walk from my flat to Waterloo Bridge is pretty much a straight line. Last night I found this:

 

  I don't know what the sign was for, or if this person's meant to look like they're drowning, but it works on a lot of layers, so I left it alone for others to appreciate. Something else I found on my walk last night:

 

 If you deviate from the straight line, there are tiny entrances to casino car parks, crammed frantically with statues and palm trees, a small garden centre's worth. I left these alone too. Continuing south, I recorded evidence of Theatreland's devastation:

 This play had gone so wrong that literally every word of its title was now back to front. Just south of this, someone had tied the traffic lights together.

 

 I crossed the Thames, into the sanity of Southwark. Nearly every job I'd had in my twenties was here, somewhere along the South Bank. 

 

  After graduation, I got a job at the British Film Institute, working as an usher, or behind the reception desk, or in a little booth in the Museum of the Moving Image where visitors could buy videos of themselves being asked pre-recorded questions by Eamonn Homes or Zig and Zag.

 

 Later, when I moved out of my parents' flat, I worked in another museum behind the Oxo Tower. The theme varied. It was free. Everyone from Shunt happened to work there as well. We froze, and read books.

 

 The Museum Of... had great, rattly animatronics from Tim Hunkin, and a room at the top with a fountain, and shelves stacked with thousands of small Body Shop bottles filled with water from the fountain, bearing labels on which visitors had written decriptions of what made them cry. No one was using these rooms for anything else.

 

 I then worked at the London Dungeons beneath London Bridge station. Shunt coincidentally moved next door the following year. Both venues would occasionally, accidentally, and independently, shut the station down with their smoke machines.  

 

 A lot of the buildings I passed last night must have gone up since then.

 

 Once the Shard was built and the station renovated, my most regular visits to this area were as part of the Ghost Bus Tours, which was started by Big Ben from the Dungeons.

 

  If the tours had time, we'd pull up outside Redcross Way, make everyone get off, and take them into a tunnel whose walls were decorated with a kind of Dalek pelt which, the last time I visited here, I noticed had been stipped of it its nodules. But last night the nodules were back, newly tinted.  

 

 That other tunnel between the eyes is painted with swans, and takes you to the site of a pauper's grave, Crossbones – now a car park – and the memorial garden just beyond. That's is where we'd take the groups.

 

 The garden is fenced with the old car park gates, to which locals tie gifts honouring the "outcast dead" or more recent, personal bereavements. None of this looked any different last night.

 Normally I'd take the riverside walk, but I'd heard hollering from the bank, and while I know that's also what fun can sound like, I favoured the privacy of the main roads.

 

 So, that's how I saw all this shiny new stuff, and it's possible that at two in the morning, at the height of a global pandemic, is the best time to see it. I remember when City Hall was just hoops.

 

 I hope I don't find it too difficult whan I finally have to stop being alone. I turned back when I got to the giant ants.