I Watched Masterchef Australia Last Night

Don’t ask me why, I just was. As a comedy writer, I appreciated one moment in particular for it contained that absolutely essential ingredient of a perfect comic moment: tragedy.

A lady in her 40s spoke at the beginning of her dedication to cooking and her desire to become a professional chef. She didn’t do very well in the first round. She under-cooked her meat or forgot to set her jam or threw a potato at the judge. I’ve forgotten what she did wrong but that’s not important. Now she was in the bottom ten, fighting for her place on the show.

Before the next challenge – which was to surprise the judges with chocolate – she revealed that she had brought along with her a talisman; a Portuguese porcelain cockerel. “It’s always brought me good luck in the past and I hope it will do so again today,” she said, fighting back the tears.

The countdown had begun. The lady in her 40s ran to grab the ingredients she needed for the challenge. She put them all in a supermarket basket and ran over to her work-desk, determined to restore the judges’ faith in her talent as a cook.

As she ran back to her work-desk, she tripped and tumbled to the floor. Her upturned basket of ingredients splattered beside her and her lucky Portuguese cockerel cracked beneath her falling body.

“So much for my lucky cock,” she said.

She lost and went home.

Short Film Written: Help Wanted

I wrote a short film many years ago. I think it’s funny.  Unfortunately due to one reason or another, I never got round to doing anything with it.  So this morning I thought ‘Why not ask Twitter if they want to make it with me?’

I’ve not given this any serious thought.  I mean it’s Saturday; I’ve only just made myself a cup of tea.

Anyway, the idea is that I attach the script, you tell me what you think – and, more importantly, what you think you might be able to contribute to it – and we take it from there.

No money is involved.  At all.  It’s more about giving people a chance to be involved in the filmmaking process.  For no money, I must stress this.  Nothing.

The film is called ‘A Man Cuts Down a Tree and it has Consequences’.  I’d quite like to play ‘Jon’.

It’s a bit silly but I hope you enjoy it.

TreeShort

Evan Davis has Two Silver Rings on the Index and Middle Fingers of his Right Hand – A Poem

Evan Davis has two silver rings on the index and middle fingers of his right hand,
I don’t understand.

I don’t understand,
Why Evan Davis has two silver rings on the index and middle fingers of his right hand
I don’t understand.

They’re very nice rings,
And I’m sure they signify all sorts of things,
But I don’t understand,
Why Evan Davis has two silver rings on the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

Basically I’m finding it hard to make my expectations of how a business
news reporter should conduct himself, fit comfortably with Evan Davis’s seemingly reckless finger decoration.

They distract me when,
I watch Dragon’s Den.

Hire Me

The Strange Person and the Evil Pillar Box

I spent the best part of Saturday doing this. Have mercy and watch it.

A Muddy Cluster – Senior School Memories (Part I)

Senior school was horrific. I was educated at a comprehensive school in Barking & Dagenham in Essex and it would have been more beneficial to my development had I just stayed at home for five years and eaten glue.

The night before my first day at big school, I watched ‘Red Dwarf’. I then went to bed and cried. It wasn’t just the fear of the unknown that gripped me beneath my Dangermouse duvet; it was the fear of the known. I knew this wasn’t going to work. I just knew it.

The Blobs

The dye was cast when I went to my first art class. If I was going to achieve anything in this place it would be in art class. But as I entered the classroom, the smell hit me. That smell. That earthy smell. I could forget about pencils, papers and paints for the first term. I was about to be imprisoned inside a fortress made of sodding clay.

Mr. Turner took the class. He was one of those over-stretched teachers who also taught English and PE, yet didn’t look happy in any role. Before his arrival every week, my fellow classmates would locate bits of clay from around the room and hurl them with ferocity at the enormous wall on one side. Mr. Turner would enter the room, survey the muddy cluster of shit-blobs on the wall and begin the lesson.

He often silenced the class by smashing a rolling pin down upon one of our hard, wooden desks. God, that noise. It was like being struck by the pin itself. The lunatic.

So for the next few months, I produced a succession of embarrassingly wonky, ugly and inadequate clay containers. I had no control over clay; it just did what it wanted to do. It was as if a distracted, fat-fingered man was responsible for all my work.

The Gloves

To add to the humiliation, the eczema on my hands was reacting badly to the clay so my mum bought surgical gloves to wear during lessons. Now, my original approach to big school was to not stand out in any way; to disappear into the fabric like one of the permanent clay spots on the wall of the classroom. Pulling on a pair of surgical gloves at the beginning of every lesson like a Harley Street surgeon didn’t assist me in this quest. Immediately, my fellow pupils struck me off the mental list of school stereotypes; I was neither the ‘bully’, the ‘clown’ nor the ‘cool kid’. I was the ‘neurotic’; except that children at this age don’t know what ‘neurotic’ means, so they probably opted for the more common colloquialism, ‘pussy’.

My label had been handed to me and my enthusiasm for art had vapourised. Still, only five years to go.

NASAAAAAAAA!

With President Obama having to spend trillions of dollars bailing out the country’s banks in the last week, it was no doubt about as welcome as a herd of cattle in the Oval office when news arrived on Tuesday 24th February that NASA’s $280m CO2 satellite had plopped into the Antarctic ocean having reached a vertical distance that barely exceeded the height of Stephen Merchant in a stovepipe hat.

The Taurus XL rocket prepares for greatness

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory gets to work

Before his historic victory last year, Barack Obama appeared quiet on the subject of space and space-related things. During the early days of the presidential campaign, Obama’s team announced that the future administration would divert funds originally intended for NASA’s Constellation Program towards education initiatives. However, the negative response to this proposal forced them to backtrack.

It is from this and other other public spats (such as the locking of horns between ex-NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Obama’s team leader Lori Garver during transition talks last year) that has illustrated an obvious unwillingness on the President’s part to squander billions of dollars on sending people into space to measure the redness of Mars and lick pathetically at expelled spurts of gravity-free apple juice.

Having lost the controversial figure of Mike Griffin – a man who spoke publicly of his cynicism towards the climate change argument – NASA were presumably keen to put the difficulty of the administrative transition behind them and turn up at Obama’s door with a box of chocolates, a bouquet of roses and a puppy dog expression. Unfortunately for NASA, the chocolates were all strawberry cups and the roses were riddled with Black Spot.

No doubt conscious of President Obama’s desire to put climate change back on the agenda after eight years of gross negligence (where the issue of global warming was positioned just under the issue of ‘Reducing Miss Beazley’s Travel Expenses’ on the Bush priority list) NASA couldn’t have timed any better the launch of their first satellite to monitor greenhouse gases. But in keeping with their fractious relationship, this costly device decided to monitor sealife in the Antarctic Ocean instead.

Miss Beazley

In one, ominous splash, NASA’s most praiseworthy mission was over; both rocket and satellite hit the icy waters taking with them hope for a smoother partnership with the President, a greater understanding of the Earth’s changing climate and almost $300m. One can almost imagine Barack Obama bursting in on a room full of scientists and launch directors, screwing a paper cup and yelling, ‘NASAAAAAAAA!’ in the gruff voice of an angry police lieutenant.

The President has made many bold decisions during his first fifty days in office with little consideration given as to whom it might piss off. With NASA’s latest idea for harmony now full of Antarctic cod, the diversion of funds may yet be back on the agenda.

Get a Fabulous Jaw, Prole

I was trying to access my Hotmail account a few days ago and found it a draining experience, for every time I attempted to open an email, an advertisement for Gillette unrolled itself like a carpet from the top of my page downwards, obstructing important links.

Whichever marketing company thought that the best way to reach a potential customer is to obstruct anything else that they are trying to do, to annoy them like an upset child tugging at their jacket and kicking them in the shin, is – in my opinion – evil.

What made this episode worse was the nature of the rolling carpet ad. Now taking up half my screen was the smug face of Thierry Henry, ditching his va-va-voom in favour of a shiny chin. Now, I have nothing against this sublime sportsman, I understand his role; he’s just a famous face, a tailor’s dummy told to rub his jaw and smile idiotically in return for large bags of Euros. My gripe is what the marketing men have instructed Thierry to push this time around.

According to Gillette, our chins, jaws and under-the-nose bits are unappreciative of the way we shave them. They want to be prepped before and soothed afterwards, preferably with Gillette-manufactured ‘Next Generation’ shave technology. Appease the lower half of your face today with the new ‘Science of Shaving’ range of Gillette oils, creams and gels for that total, rewarding, rejuvenated feeling.

“I love me the most when I’m doing this”

In these economically troubled times, I’ve been looking for methods in which I can stretch my weekly budget unnecessarily. With Gillette’s new ad campaign telling me that I’ve effectively been pushing a cheese grater into my wretched skin all these years and laughing as the blood dribbled down my punctured jowls, this issue no longer needs to be addressed.

In addition to this, I have bought a house with a bathroom that does not obey the laws of physics and has subsequently eradicated the concept of time from its perimeters. This enables me to spend an extra three hours per day in front of the mirror, moisturising, creaming, revitalising, soothing, phelopneasizing* and, finally, shaving.

The bare-faced cheek of this campaign coupled with its trite marketing approach (which has not altered for decades) proves that Gillette’s commercial arm, despite its futuristic buzzwords, is a dinosaur. Most men see through faux technology in adverts, they don’t relate to male models with jaws like Butler sinks, they are aware that buying a ‘pre-shave oil’ will be as beneficial as applying cottage cheese to their faces, they know about marketing and competition and leading brands. If Gillette continue ignoring the fact that the drumming gorilla was a turning point in 21st Century advertising, they will find many more men seeking the best that they can get elsewhere.

*According to Gillette, ‘Phelopneasizing’ is the name attributed to the way male models glide their fingers across their jawline while smiling in the mirror. A special ‘finger cream’ is available from Gillette for easier gliding.

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Jacob’s Bladder

The Nativity Play is a tainted one for me. It will forever be associated with my impromptu performance as Jacob, father of Joseph, at the Mark’s Gate Junior School in Essex, 1987.

I had auditioned for Jacob a week earlier but was passed over in favour of my friend at the time, Gavin Fisher. Jacob is a peripheral character in the Nativity Play and has often been omitted from many a production – let’s face it, the story still works without him – but in this celebrated reworking at St Mark’s, he had a sizeable portion of dialogue. I was, and probably still am, a character of contradictions for although my desire to show off burned as brightly as the Star of Bethlehem, there was still a degree of discomfort for me about the nature of live performance: What if I forgot my lines? What if I’m too nervous? What if I trip over a cardboard sheep?

For these reasons, Jacob was the halfway house character; he flowed along with the play, stealth-like, popping his head up occasionally to say the odd narrative-pushing line such as ‘Where is he?’ and ‘Oh, he’s over there.’ Jacob fitted me like a glove in this uncertain point of my career.

Alas, as I have previously mentioned, my audition was bettered by Gavin Fisher. I held no grudge. I congratulated Gavin and took the part of an angel instead, a role which required wearing wings, saying nothing and doing less.

Gavin was a friend of mine but certainly not in the league of ‘Bestest’. We would get together from (lunch) time to (lunch) time and make merriment by reenacting Monty Python sketches or conducting our own Atari ST game reviews but the chance of forging a meaningful bond never existed, due largely to the fact that I was rather aloof as a child and far from keen on the whole ‘house visit’ scenario.

It can be said that delving into my childhood will not unearth a heartwarming, Kite Runner-style story of beautiful, spiritual connection with another boy. But if you want far more superficial tales of fragmented friendships based on cool toy ownership, I’m your man.

Two performances were scheduled on the last day of term; one in the afternoon for the pupils and one later on in the evening in front of parents, VIPs and an assortment of local authority figures such as army officials, police officers and doctors. These prominent personalities had been invited by the headmistress by way of thanks for their contributions throughout term for the school’s modular about choosing a career.

At lunchtime, word got round that an incident had taken place. Several third year pupils had started a mass brawl with a group of second year pupils. I don’t know where I was at the time which speaks volumes as to my interest in playground violence. I thought little of it as I climbed into my white sheet and hooked glittery, cardboard wings off my neck-hole in readiness for the first performance.

While sat in the assembly room with my fellow angels, my teacher Ms Sellinger strode towards me, agitated, frustrated and emotional. She grabbed my arm and took me into the corridor. There, standing outside the headmistress’ office, dressed from head to foot in sheepskin garments, was Gavin Fisher. This weak and easily suggestible nine year-old had been involved in the lunchtime skirmish. Within minutes, we had swapped our primitive costumes. Thanks to some swift punishment meted out from the headmistress, I was now Jacob, Joseph’s father. This left me with seven minutes to learn my lines.

The music teacher, Ms Catch, scribbled down my lines on an A5 piece of paper and instructed me to conceal it inside one of my furiously hot and itchy, woollen sleeves. Fifteen minutes in, I had delivered my first line and beaten those early nerves. However, the sheer weight of the overwhelming coat of dirty, smelly, sheep’s arse wool was sending beads of sweat streaming down all over my puny body. Fully up-to-speed with the early news story of the day, my fellow little actors stared at me with a uniformed expression of anxiety, hoping that I wouldn’t crash and burn the play, Hammond-like, with a succession of fluffed lines and awkward pauses.

No such horror occurred but there was one particularly sticky moment when the Innkeeper expected me to ask him a question after I had read all the lines on my trusty piece of A5. I could feel over two hundred tiny pairs of eyes penetrating the back of my head as I looked down and found that Ms Catch had forgotten to write down my last line. A stern voice shot into the air from behind the upright piano.

‘I’m sorry Michael, I forgot to write that down. “We are looking for a baby, born in a manger.”‘

And so it was that Ms Catch had rescued me, albeit heavy-handedly. I then went to take up position with the angels and sheep in the background till the end of the play.

Ms Catch added the last line to my A5 for the evening performance which, although I just about scraped through it, was a horrendous experience filled with more perspiration and more uncertainty. The presence of the VIPs did nothing to help my nerves either. By the end, my life-saving piece of A5 had transformed into a crumpled tissue paper of smudged blue ink and sweat. However, congratulations from my parents, teachers and even one or two of the authority figures in their awe-inspiring uniforms helped cushion the impact of this frightening episode of my young life.

This is why, whenever I see a Nativity Scene or Play, whether it be an amateur production at a local school or a window display in a department store, I’m engulfed by the spirit of that heavy coat of sweaty, woollen horror and wonder how on earth the experience didn’t put me off acting for life.

The Pink Pander

BBC2 never treated Laurel & Hardy with any respect. When I was growing up, Laurel & Hardy films acted as filler in the daytime schedule, cementing the daytime cookery programme to the lunchtime business news. However, this did not deter me. The BBC may have scattered Stan and Ollie’s films across the holiday calendar with irritating randomness but I can guarantee that before each broadcast I was poised eagerly on the edge of my sofa with a blank 240min BASF videotape in the machine and the ‘REC/PLAY’ command at the ready. My adoration of their glorious slapstick humour fuelled me with the determination to not let a single moment of comic perfection pass me by.

Comic perfection doesn’t really exist on the big screen these days; it’s much more of a slog to arrive at a punchline or a pay-off than it was in Laurel & Hardy’s day. No example illustrates this more than the new Pink Panther franchise, the second installment of which (entitled with total disregard for its comedic history as ‘Pink Panther 2′) is due for release in the Spring.

Peter Sellers’ immortal comic creation, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, was a wonderful character within a largely flawed set of films. The humour throughout the Pink Panther series struggles to maintain a decent standard with verbal jokes and wordplay falling flat in particular. However, these films are magical because they contain moments of comic perfection borne out of the relationship between Sellers and the director, Blake Edwards. In some cases, Edwards took a backseat to allow for Sellers’ instinct with timing. As Stanley Kubrick proved with Dr Strangelove, the trick with Sellers was to let him have fun and just keep the cameras rolling.

In addition to this, Edwards also had a vision for the ‘comic stunt’. In this age of computer generated soullessness, the comic set piece has all but disappeared. In fact, memorable set pieces in general have disappeared from the mainstream. Directors no longer have everything riding on a single take because the post-production team will both erase any aberrations and embellish the existing action later. As a result, the opportunity for magic is vastly reduced.

Imagine this horrific scenario: A Hollywood producer phones Adam Sandler – “Hey, Adam. We gotta great idea. A remake of ‘Safety Last’ with you in the Harold Lloyd role, climbing the building in New York and hanging off the clockface and shit…Yuh…Uh-huh…No, don’t worry about your fear of heights, baby, we’ll bluescreen everything. Whaddayasay?”

A far-fetched scenario perhaps but certainly no more outrageous than Steve Martin’s abominable recreation of Inspector Clouseau for not one but two Pink Panther films. Disregarding for now the sheer audacity of the man to ruin a once glorious comic character in order to revive his own career, it is the staggering achievement of how Martin’s reinvention fails to even share the same continent as a joke that appalls the most.

The humour of the new Pink Panther franchise is vulgar, obvious and devoid of timing. It is a classic example of Hollywood’s tired approach to comedy in recent years. Forget the ingredients required for cinematic magic, this is about bums on seats, so let’s put an audience-friendly screenplay together full of jokes about sex, where men are depicted getting kicked in their genitals, and animals act humourously (flying out of windows, grabbing men’s genitals, accidentally being set on fire, etc). Together with the flimsy scripts, the overly stylised production values of the films of A-Listers – where garish effects, hasty editing and intrusive incidental music trample clumsily over scenes like B-Movie giants – has left us comedy connoisseurs looking elsewhere for our fix.

My 240min BASF tape crammed with such Laurel & Hardy classics as ‘Towed in a Hole’, ‘The Music Box’, ‘Blockheads’ and ‘Dirty Work’ has now been retired in favour of the most beautiful DVD boxed set in my possession and it is this definitive collection of Laurel & Hardy’s work that lifts the spirits. I don’t have a comedy hero on the big screen who is alive. My pleasure in the comedy film genre is obtained only through the viewing of classics from my personal DVD library, for the effortlessness of performance, the excitement of the single take set piece and the non-existence of post-production interference are all remnants of a bygone age.

“…we’ve added this hilarious bit where a dog flies out of the window and grabs onto your genitals as you’re hanging off the clockface…it’s the shit…”

Don’t think it won’t happen.