Rescued from Twitter-blivion

I like Twitter as a way of pasting ephemeral jokes and comments, but the timeline having writ moves on and nobody ever sees them again, limiting the audience to those awke at the time.

So here's some old tweets:

• English cricketers deny match-throwing allegations. "We really were that crap, honest" said the team spokesman.
• Old HTML / coders never die: they just / degrade gracefully
• Bob Dylan to publish second volume of autobiography as e-book: fans brand him Judas
• every arts centre is the same arts centre
• every local newspaper is the same local newspaper
• The first rule of Mime Club is you don't talk
• I'm trying to finish my study of the Moebius strip but it's never-ending.
• PENSIONS MINISTER make the Pensions Time Bomb more interesting by calling it the pensions timey-wimey ball
• My wardrobe is full of clothes waiting for them to get back in fashion and me to get back in shape. Not happening.
• The emergence of evolutionary psychology as a specialism shows that at some point in the past making lazy generalisations was selected for.
• Although olive oil spread brand-name Bertolli sounds Italian, it's actually named after the inventors, Bert and Ollie Baxter of Accrington.
• I have to keep re-watching Memento because I can't remember how it ends.
• Whoever decided to call a metal hair attachment a 'fascinator' must have a very low boredom threshold.

More at @mlocock

Radio 4 comedy: no laughing matter

The much-anticipated post-Huphrey Lyttleton series of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue has now started, under the genial chairmanship of His Twittership Stephen Fry. I didn't think it worked very well. Even under Humphrey, the programme had become stretched and formulaic, giving increasing time over to rounds to allow bad singers to sing badly, at the expense of lively wit. But Fry didn't work very well, mainly because he followed so closely the phrasing and persona established by Humphrey. The same occurred when Angus Deayton was replaced on Have I Got News For You? : not only did his successors sound like ill-at-ease imitators, by demonstrating how much was scripted, it cast a retrospective pall over Deayton's talent by revealing its origins. It seemed to be a lack of confidence by the Clue producers: Samantha and Sven have been a running joke for 10 years or more - isn't it time to start a new one? And when Fry introduced Sound Charades with a reference to Give Us a Clue, last broadcsat in 1992, didn't someone pause to calculate how many people will never have seen it? It is a shame that the opportunity to introduce some new rounds or jokes was missed.

But it is still the best comedy on Radio 4, compared to the anaemic Hut 33, the bizarre and laughter-free WW2 Bletchley Park drama, in which the cast do what they can with funny accents and overacting to compensate for the lack of jokes, or Elvenquest, the Lord of the Rings parody. Successful parodies of fantasies have to be based on a credible sincerity about the world they inhabit: Elvenquest instead was a rag-bag of incongruous banter. This wouldn't matter so much if the elements had been original, but they included an evil master suffering disillusionment at his role and an incompetent sidekick (as in Old Harry's Game), a dog's view on human behaviour (as in About a Dog), and the central relationship between a dithering 'hero' and a strong and dismissive heroine (as in Hitchkiker's Guide to the Galaxy). This last comparison is fatal - at one point I thought to myslef 'that's nearly up to H2G2 standards' - in other words, the comdey had almost got as far as a programme made 30 years ago.

There appears to be a strangehlold of large-cast underwritten mediocrity at the moment, in which series like Claire in the Community and Old Harry's Game stand out like beacons of competence.

Allowed lists (comedy script)

I was talking to my wife* yesterday about allowed lists. You know- the lists of celebrities you're allowed to sleep with, should the chance occur, without any question. For a lot men, it's easy: their Allowed List is a Girls Aloud list. I'm a bit more sophisticated than that. I haven't really given it much thought, but my list would be: Kate Bush, then maybe Katherine Heigl, in fact any of the women off Grey's Anatomy, or better, all of the women off Grey's Anatomy ... sorry, just drifted off there. Anyway, the point is, it doesn't matter who's on my list, because it's not going to happen. It's not worth even thinking about. No, it isn't.



But all people, it seems, have these lists. And celebrities are people too, in a way. You can imagine Guy Ritchie asking Madonna one day who's on her list, and she says "Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Chris Martin". Next awards ceremony she goes to, she has the night of her life.



* My pretend wife, that is. My real wife has ticked the 'no publicity' box.

Review: Not Going Out (Series 2), The IT Crowd (Series 2) and Dog Face

I wasn't sure about the first series of Not Going Out (BBC1); now it's back, and I'm becoming sure that it doesn't work. The loss of Megan Dodds left a major hole in the set-up that shoe-horning Sally Bretton into the flat as Tim's sister, Lucy, did not adequately fill. The process has exposed the interchangeability of Lee's sparring partners, and has done nothing to diminish the peripherality of Tim. The most surprising thing about the second series is a sad drop-off in the writing quality: in Series One, Lee's rants were clever and funny if rushed; now they are slower and less funny. The introduction of an incompetent Cockney cleaner smacks of desperation. This is not to say that it won't be popular, of course; just it won't stand out as deserving of it.

Another first series that promised more than it delivered was The IT Crowd (Channel 4), but this has matured into something very good, mainly because it is less interested in the rather cardboard corporate context and more interested in the interplay of Jen, Roy and Moss (and Richmond) as friends. Jen (Katherine Parkinson) has learned tounderplay her main face-twitching, so that all she needs to do is look blank as she finds the colleagues with whom she had started the evening have transformed themselves into a wheelchair-bound gay and a barman.

Dog Face (E4) explores the area of the comedy of embarassment mapped out by Little Britain. Ideas with potential, like the film subtitler who imports his personal vendettas into his work, are overplayed and rendered needlessly coarse, while others might have made a good single sketch but are repeated to the point of boredom, like the science teacher whose answer to difficult questions fromher class is to distract them by showing them her pants. I don't think they will be a second series to review; the debut episode was sneaked out without fanfare as if the broadcasters were unwilling to promote it.

The Queen's English, whatever the comedians say

Seldom a week passes without a comedian raising a laugh by referring to the Royal Family as German (usually on the News Quiz or Have I Got News For You). It is notable, I think, that it is most popular with the generation of alternative comedians who at one stage were a bit edgy, daring and anti-Establishment; it is the last vestiage of the far-off days when hatred of Thatch and Tebbit was an essential qualificatiaon for success. The joke's fulklest form is found in Elton and Curtis' Blackadder Goes Forth, when Captain Darling, accused of being a spy, insists that he is as British as Queen Victoria ("You mean your father's half German, you're half German and you married a German" says Blackadder).

The odd thing is that these comedians would in normal circumstances distance themselves emphatically from lampooning a lifelong UK resident on the grounds that some of their ancestors were born abroad. Particularly Ben Elton, whose father was German, Curtis, who is from New Zealand, and David Baddiel (half German, quarter Russian).

My calculations are that Victoria was 1/4 British, since her mother was German and her father half-German; Edward VII was 1/8 British, George V 1/8 British, George VI 1/16 British; Elizabeth II is the first Windsor Royal to be more than half British (17/32 British).

Review of Not Going Out

Not Going Out is a new comedy on BBC1 for Friday evenings. And if that sentence doesn't make your spirits sink, you haven't been watching Blessed, or My Hero, or the under-powered Worst Week of My Life, or My Family, or that My Family clone so bad that my brain froze rather than allowing its name to reach the cerebral cortex. The bar for success is not set high.

It ought to pass it. The writing is sharp and clever, if a little self-indulgent: the inclusion of three zany elements (depressive author, Lee's job packing Christmas crackers, and circus skills class) in a single episode seemed to me to be trying a bit hard, when the core of the comedy has to be the interplay between Lee, Kate and Tim. Unfortunately some of the best lines were lost; Lee's delivery was so fast that he didn't give them space to breathe, and the audience's early laughter often swamped the killer line.

A more serious problem is the location: whatever one may say about Men Behaving Badly, Extras, or even Two Pints of Lager, they all have a distinctive locale, a real place where these characters and their relatives live. In contrast, Not Going Out is set in a vague generic city, the same city as Coupling, with an anonymous flat, anonymous bar, anonymous office, and characters with no history.

Kate is American, so she is earnest and New Age. That doesn't really cut it as back-story. It always amuses me when people say America is a classless society when it is clearly just as nuanced as ours: Friends isn't just six random people, but six people each from a specific social milieu.

Tim and Lee's characters are equally simple: accountant and slacker; so middle class and dolemite; so pompous and sarcastic. It's a bit schematic.

But it's not as if we are spoiled for choice if we want to watch smart comedy, so I'll hope for improvement.


Update

Now the series is over, and it's time to come off the fence.

Actually, my first impressions proved quite reliable: the Tim character proved impossible to develop, and played only a minor part towards the end. The core of the comedy is the relationship between Lee and Kate, one of comfortable coupledom without the sex, masked by verbal bickering. Megan Dodds managed to undercut the excessive kookiness or earnestness of some of her lines with a sly twinkle in her eye that implied her detachment from her statements. Lee remained slightly problematic, partly because his character was boxed in by its narrow definition: the most complex thing he could do was to realise how he felt about Kate; but also because unlike Megan's actorly clarity of diction, his remained a rushed mumble. Jokes about the badness of Kate's cooking aren't funny: strangely enough, neither were the similar jokes in My Family, Butterflies, or The Young Ones. The only halfway good jokes about bad cooking were in (crikey) The Vicar of Dibley. So leave it.

Paradoxically, this was a comedy that tried too hard: it would have been better with fewer wisecracks and a more paced direction. Still, all on board for Series 2 (no, not you, Tim).

Is he having a laugh? Extras, That Mitchell and Webb Look and Lead Balloon

It is ironic that Ricky Gervaise, who saves his sharpest barbs for what he dismisses as catchphrase comedy, has unleashed a catchphrase himself: in the last week I have heard at least three broadcasters say "Is he having a laugh?", in contexts where it is clear that the phrase has risen from their subsconcious, without any deliberate attempt to reference its source. So people are watching the new series of Extras. It's hard to see why exactly: the three main jokes are repeated each episode:
1. people are more prejudiced than they are allowed to admit these days, and this may be revealed in extreme situations
2. celebrities famous for their amiable image are in real life obnoxious in various ways
3. people (particularly Andy Millman) will sometimes have to deal with the conflict between what they want to do and social norms of behaviour

We haven't yet seen the last variation on the celebrity joke- Jeremy Paxman, Julie Burchill or Richard Littlejohn revealed as mild-mannered and indecisive in private.

But although I have laughed from time to time, the truth is that Gervaise's school of the comedy of embarrassment can get a bit wearing. In the most recent episode, Millman storms into a high-price shop to revenge Maggie's hurt feelings, boldly promised to buy the dress regardless of cost, and then attempts to wriggle out of paying for it once he finds out the price. This is quite funny at first. But watching five minutes of wriggling is painful, or boring. Now that Millman has lost his status as an Everyman figure, since being shown up at a BAFTA awards ceremony is unlikely to chime with many of the audience, the reliance on accuracy rather than gags that made The Office compulsive viewing is unavailable as a fall-back.


I have seen it suggested that putting on sketch-based That Mitchell and Webb Look immediately afterwards was tempting fate, but it bears up well, mainly because unlike most sketch shows its hit rate is close to 100%, probably because it is writer-driven. Some of the recurring sketches, such as the snooker commentary, worked better on radio, but the razor-sharp parodies of pointless gameshows, docusoaps, and lifeswap programmes are both accurate and funny.


Lead Balloon, Jack Dee's new comedy, isn't bad either. It was instructive to compare its first episode with last week's Extras, since both featured an accidental humiliation turning into a media frenzy despite the best efforts of the main character. There were some graces of omission: the tearaway teenage daughter was dealt with in passing in a matter-of-fact way, rather than forming a whole episode as it would in My Family. The foreign au pair was a bit unwelcome; the American agent was the major pain, along with the recursive 'I'm a comedian trying to write comedy' segments which comedians seem to love despite the indifference they inspire in everyone else. Strangely enough, in the light of my comment on Extras, Jack Dee is portrayed as being a nicer person 'offscreen' than in his usual persona.

Everybody loathes Elton

Ben Elton is often mentioned by British comedians as the most-hated man in the business. It's a bit hard to see why, exactly, it's just that he is rich, successful and mainstream, and makes musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber (which is at least three strikes in most people's eyes, I suppose). His career has been odd, though: starting as a political firebrand and anarchist Young Ones writer, then moving to the high wit of Blackadder, before blanding out in his Man for Auntie sketch show and The Thin Blue Line anaemic police comedy, underusing Rowan Atkinson as almost a straight-main. From here it's easy to see his early radical days as a careerist stunt: that was where the buzz was at the time. I'm not sure that's right, though- his novels continue to reflect his passionate intensity, and even the Thin Blue Line was quite advanced in its philosophy considering its positioning: there were a lot of jokes about sex (that's not quite true: of the jokes there were, a lot were about sex), but the characters' sexual orientation and colour was never exploited, as it would have been in most comparable sitcoms. Given the widespread wish for Elton to fail, it's surprising how little anyone has had to say about his latest masterpiece, the couple-with-young children sitcom Blessed. Now, this may come as a revelation, but young children cry, and need feeding, and make a mess. Sometimes the parents get tetchy as a result. With hilarious consequences. Or not. Actually it's not entirely laugh-free. But what amuses is the plotting and the frustrated rants of the lead character, rather than verbal agility. One problem is the inaccuracy of the cultural references. The record producer hero has to deal with a manufactured Spice Girls grrl group, with the moral issues that raises about whether he should insist on his rights to his creative work or let them steal it in return for lots of money. The trouble with this is that he is starting from the view that groups should be talented and creative, not manufactured. It's hard to believe this when for a start, he works as a jobbing music producer churning out advertising jingles and backing tracks, and is hardly therefore at the 'art for art's sake' end of the business, but more importantly, his views are anachronistic: after all the Idols and X Factors, nobody seems to mind that stars and groups are designed by marketing consultants, publicised by publicists, and sold to the media in bite-size chunks from 'wow I won' to 'ex-singer in drug shame' to 'who?'. After Darius lost out to much laughter in the first Pop Idol, or whatever, and dismissed as a talentless poser, I thought I'd heard the last of him; I hardly expected him to crop up in 2005 as a credible and successful artist with fans and No. 1s and everything. So Elton here is being misled by what he thinks and feels, which is not believable as what his character thinks. The characterisation has another major flaw: the ageing rocker guitarist. With his wrinkled, twitching face and leathers, he models himself on Keith Richard. But Elton tries to have it both ways: sometimes, he is clearly a delusional loser whose pose is just that, masking an empty and tragically wasted life; but sometimes he really is a star, able to charm groupies and acquaintances. In general, I would think that the series owes its origins to Elton's life experiences, and would have been better if it had accepted the fact rather than mask it by, say, changing the father's job from comedian novelist living in London with his young family, to something totally different, like, record producer living...

What I don't understand, after all this, is the eerie silence. Shouldn't the airwaves be jammed with pundits queueing up to say it's terrible and Elton is finished? I can only suppose they have realised it's more cutting, in the long run, tosay nothing, just walk away.