What happened yesterday…
June 28th, 2007 at 19:29

Yesterday, Katy and I went down to London to watch the big Prime Ministerial changeover. Here’s what happened in video form. Words and pictures to follow shortly:

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Sir Menzies Campbell
June 7th, 2007 at 02:05

So I was out and about shopping, like a normal person, today in Northampton, when who should I bump into but Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats!

Well, that’s not entirely true. My being there was entirely pre-meditated. I’d read that he was coming in a most excellent newspaper, so being the awful politics nerd that I am, thought I’d turn up.

It was quite tight for time as Ming was scheduled to turn up at half two, and I had work thirty miles away at five. Ming was 40 minutes late. And I was 20 minutes late for work. If I were a half-decent satirist, I’d probably remark about the LibDems… getting to work on time policy? Something like that? I don’t know.

Also, I turned up about an hour early, so spent an awkward hour milling around the Market Square. I didn’t know exactly where Ming would be – only that he’d be somewhere in the market. As you may recall, I’m pretty awful at looking busy, so basically started doing laps of the market whilst becoming increasingly concious that I was doing nothing.

Whilst waiting I noticed the weirdest thing – periodically, they’d be a loud speaker play a jingle, followed by an announcement advising you not to litter, as there’s a fine. It just felt a bit Orwellian – perhaps like the almost identical device out of The Prisoner.

But anyway, there were about twenty people gathered around the market square eventually – mostly LibDem councillors (including apparently the youngest LibDem councillor in Northampton, who I briefly spoke to about, er, politics, unsurprisingly), and the press. To be honest, I was expecting bigger crowds: I was probably the only genuine member of the public there.

When Ming arrived with his surprisingly lightweight entourage (about five people) after doing the hand shaking thing that important people do, him and everyone there moved into the market where he could meet some “ordinary people”. It was at this point I noted that he didn’t have a police escort or any (visible) security guards, so I could have happy-slapped him, in retrospect.

At one of the market stalls, there was an embarrassingly staged moment where one of the market traders showed Ming that he’d set up some sort of display with oranges on it – the premise being “the future’s bright, the future’s orange” – attempting to pun on the LibDem colours. I don’t think Ming had the heart to tell him that the LibDem colour was in fact Gold/Yellow/Not Orange.

As he moved along – and as I was walking literally next to him, being an awful twat and poking a camera in his face constantly – a real member of the public accidentally got in on the action and started harassing Sir Ming. “I want to personally invite you to my house“, she shouted, trying to highlight some undoubtedly tedious issue. In the end, Ming just ignored her – which I suppose is the only course of action when you’re confronted with a nutter.

Ming Campbell official market banter:

Punter: “Fancy seeing you on the market stall!”

Campbell: “I don’t cost anything!” (Poor Ming is known for struggling with banter and being quick witted)

I also noticed that Ming doesn’t have laces on his shoes – is this because is old so isn’t flexible enough to bend down to tie them?

The story basically ends here – Ming milled around the square for a bit, before going back with the LibDems to their lair (or “council offices”, as they’re known). On the way back, realising it was my only chance to work towards completing my collection of photos of myself with minor politicians, I barged into Ming again and asked for a photo with him – the results of which you can see above.

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Tom Morello / Stop the War Gig / etc
June 6th, 2007 at 00:37

Last night, I went all the way down to London for a gig so peculiarly tuned to my interests I thought that it might be a set up to put me on some modern day Beadles About equivalent.

It was Frank Turner, supporting Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello (“The Nightwatchman“) in an anti-war gig organised by the Stop the War Coalition. Oh, and it was compered by Mark Steel. I think its pretty difficult to get a better collection of celebrities and causes – what made it all the more spooky was that the venue (The Scala) was a six-minute walk from St Pancras station.

This actually meant that to get there I probably took less steps than it would take me to walk to my “local venue” in Leicester.

What with it being in London, and being a gig organised by some undoubtedly nutty left-wingers, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Unsurprisingly, there were some proper Marxists outside handing out leaflets and getting people to sign petitions. For some reason, when coerced into signing the petition (against the war, not capitalism), I gave away my real home address. I think this might end up being a mistake.

We (JD and myself) were frisked by some security guards on the way in. I was patted down by a security guard. As this happened, I pre-empted any sort of search by trying to explain that my pockets contained, er, my phone, wallet, camera, PDA, iPod and London map book (I was travelling lite). When I offered to prove this, he didn’t seem to care, and just waved me in. My PDA could have contained a flick-knife SDIO card for all he knew.

For a left wing gig populated by socialists who love sharing and holding hands, I thought £6 for two Cokes at the bar was a bit expensive.

The gig started with some Stop the War Coalition chap coming on stage and doing some spiel about, er, the war, before introducing Mark Steel, who did some talking, before introducing the first act: Frank Turner.

Frank played a short set including most of his, er, “well known” songs – Thatcher Fucked the Kids, and so on. I’d love to write more about what he did, as he was good, and I enjoyed his music, but I can’t really think of any way to explain what happened, other than “a man played a guitar and sang for a bit”.

The next act was more “interesting”. Susheela Raman sang some Tamil folk songs and did some “covers” of more popular songs. I’m not sure it quite gelled with the rest of the acts – whereas the others were strummy guitar things with English language lyrics, she did the sort of stereotypically screechy “non-western” folk-music noise and sang in Tamil – which sort of makes any of the political points she was trying to make more difficult to understand.

Ed Harcourt, who was the third support, was alright too. Perhaps a bit generic. He ended his set by doing some clever bit where he recorded samples of him playing different instruments live, and built up a song live. First he hit a drum for a bit, then did something on the guitar. Then did something else, and something else. It was really quite clever. I guess you had to be there.

It was Morello everyone was there for though. Before he came out on to the stage, Mark Steel did some stand-up-come-political-rant about the war, which was excellent. If there were an audio version of YouTube, I’d upload it, as I had the foresight to take along my iTalk iPod thing to record most of the gig.

Morello finally came on stage at around 21:45. Whilst the time might not seem like an important detail, it was utterly critical to my and JD’s success. We had to catch the last train at 23:15 or we’d be trapped in London overnight. If I weren’t an atheist, I’d have been praying that the gig didn’t over run.

So he played some songs – his solo stuff. Which is quite good, really. I like how still does vaguely rage-esque bits in otherwise acoustic songs. When playing a cover of This land is my land, this land is your land, or whatever it’s called, he pushed his hand against the neck of his guitar and continued to strum, creating something resembling the unique Rage sound.

At one point, someone in the audience yelled out “Play Bombtrack” – for the uninitiated, this is a Rage song. The audience cheered wildly – more than at any other point in the gig. “I’m not going to play that tonight”, Morello responded. But the audience still cheered and clapped. You could tell he was backed into a corner. Let’s face it – most of the audience were there to see the guy from Rage Against the Machine, and wanted to see RATM songs – myself included. Excellently, he relented and played the first bit of Bombtrack, but unfortunately, didn’t play all of it. The audience still cheered. Perhaps admitting defeat, he said to the audience “if you behave yourself, perhaps you’ll be rewarded later on”, like a parent – if we were good enough to endure his “alright” solo stuff, he’d play what we really wanted to hear.

It must be a bit depressing as an artist to have fans only want to hear your old stuff.

True to his word though, he played a bizarre acoustic version of Guerilla Radio – which was also well received.

It was getting pretty tense as the gig neared the end. The encore began at 22:52 – our train was leaving in 23 minutes. Morello finished his set at 23:03, and literally as the last chord was still echoing, we had to start moving in order to catch the train in time. The audience were still cheering wildly, shouting “more” as we left the building. I then had perhaps the worst eight minutes of my life, as I tried to run (although JD would contest it was a light jog) to the station, knowing how much was riding on me making it on time. JD cleverly left the iPod recording, so I’ve got eight minutes of audio at the end of myself, hideously unfit, puffing and panting and complaining my way through central London.

We narrowly made it – with only a couple of minutes to spare. I was about ready to die. But it was worth it, as I’d just seen one quarter of my favourite band play live. And it was for a good cause, even if it is about four years too late to stop the war. Excellent.

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Top 3: Name-droppable Authors
April 27th, 2007 at 00:59

Being the educated type, I’m not adverse to reading the odd book. I do enjoy reading, and I’d like to do more of it.

Right now, I’ve picked up John Keay’s Sowing the Wind again, and I’m trying to force myself through it, as I know it’s good for me. It’s about the history of the Middle East and why it’s all fucked up, basically. It’s an irritating read, because it’s full of flowery poetic descriptions over the sort that can never be verified scientifically. Talking about Lawrence of Arabia, Keay describes what was going on inside his head and exactly what he was thinking at that time – he doesn’t even say “Lawrence wrote in his diary…” or anything, so it just comes across as baseless assertions. It’s the same sort of irritation that William Shakespeare felt on July 8th 1610 at around 3pm, when one of the lesser playwrights told him that he thought he should cut some of the “chick crap” from Romeo and Juliet.

But anyway, one of the best things about reading is that it makes you feel self-satisfied and entitles you to act like a smug knowledgeable twat for a couple of weeks after you’ve read the book. This feeling lasts longer if the author is well known and is invariably described as an “academic”, or if the book is described as a “classic” or “seminal” work. So I present to you, my top 3 name-droppable authors (who’s work I’ve read).

Richard Dawkins is quite popular at the moment. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the observable evidence (hoho!). The God Delusion is an excellent book, and despite what you may think is merely a man ranting about religion, it’s actually a sort of operators manual for atheists, which arms you with a rebuttal for every pro-religion argument. Idiots may say things like “Dawkins is just a fundamentalist atheist” whilst stroking their beard in a self-congratulatory way about how wry they can be, but Dawkins argued his own way out of this: he’s not a fundamentalist because his beliefs are willing to change if evidence proves that he was wrong before, which is something a religious fundie would never do. Drop Dawkins into your conversation and you’ll immediate add loads of rational scientific weight to whatever you’re saying.

2) George Orwell

This is largely assumed reading, but if you’ve read Orwell, you’re allowed to make knowing references to aspects of his work without actually naming the book. It sort of separates you from the proles – if you can casually drop “everyone is equal but some are more equal than others” into a conversation about say, receiving preferential treatment when acquiring a good or service, your peers will immediately respect you and laugh at your clever reference.

1) Noam Chomsky

Said to be the world’s most important academic, Noam loves saying vaguely controversial things about America in his books. It’s almost a trump card in a political argument to say that “Chomsky proposes that democracy isn’t about letting people run their own affairs, it’s about keeping power from the people and running their lives for them”, or whatever. And you can’t really go wrong if you make a comparison between the war on terror and the Nazis, just like Noam has done. Chomsky loses points, however, because he’s somewhat polemic. He’s a big liberal, so can be undermined by an idiot saying “Yeah, but he’s bias” because of his left-of-centre opinions, whilst unwittingly implying that everyone else is somehow not bias. But still, name drop Chomsky and you’re guarenteed to sound educated.

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London II
April 5th, 2007 at 02:27

As you might know, having watched the video blog below, I went to London yesterday with JD and Fundar. We went there to see the third series of That Mitchell & Webb Sound being recorded. It’s basically like their similarly named telly sketch show, only if you close your eyes.

The day began at 11am, when we caught the train.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; At the station; Cost: £1.00.

About 90 minutes later and we were in central London.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; London St Pancras; Cost: £1.10.

Our first port of call was Camden market. It was a bit weird, as it was full of people in a different socio-economic group to me. Or at least people who dressed like it. Being a market, the place was covered in people hawking tat – even the shops were open at the front and sprawled out into the streets. It reminded me of seeing a news correspondent walk through a crowded Kabul market place, I mean, if Afghanistan was populated exclusively by goths.

One man even offered to sell us cannabis – not that I realised at the time.

Almost every other market stall was selling t-shirts with “hilarious” slogans. As you might know if you’re a regular viewer of my torso, I quite like t-shirts with slogans on. I’m currently wearing an excellent t-shirt with “I’m blogging this” printed on it, for example. The trouble is, it was like the t-shirts on sale were bought wholesale by people who are a few years behind everyone else. “National Pornographic” isn’t clever or funny and “I’m a bomb technician, if you see me running try to catch up” was old even when the first alchemists were inventing explosions for the first time.

Our next port of call was Leicester Square, where we went to get some lunch and have a look around.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Leicester Square Subway; Cost: £1.20.

When I wasn’t buying overpriced Coke, we were trying to be too clever for our own good. We put together an excellently long shot for the video, and then JD phoned his brother to see if he could see us on a webcam. He could, although unfortunately screenshot evidence of this incredible event does not exist.

After lunch we headed to Embankment, which is just next to Whitehall, where all of the big Government buildings are. I love London because its so easy just to stumble into landmarks. It makes it almost unremarkable when you realise you’re standing outside of Royal Bank of Canada head office.

It took us a second to realise that we were standing outside the Ministry of Defence. Unfortunately, as you might see if you’ve watched the video, I didn’t remember to take the opportunity to mention the MOD’s seven paper cuts last year. We walked past it and bumped into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I’m the sort of person who finds this exciting.

Standing outside the FCO was Tim Marshall, Sky News’ Political editor. In retrospect, I probably should have gone and harassed him – after all, he is a celebrity, and I assume celebrities love nothing more than idiot members of the public going up to them and talking to them because they recognise them, despite not being able to remember their name.

Sort of next to the Foreign Office is Downing Street. The Downing Street. Despite it just being an old house that you can barely see behind the multiple layers of security (a ramp, a big set of gates, a number of police with machine guns) it was dead exciting. I reeled off as much Downing Street trivia as I could on the off chance that the Policeman near me would say “Hey, you know your stuff, want to go in for a look around?” Unfortunately he just continued to look stern.

Excellently, it was about at this point that I tried to show-off my knowledge of history by explaining that Whitehall used to be one massive Palace of Whitehall before it was destroyed by a fire. Fundar, being a cynic and troll, accused me of making this up just seconds before we passed a sign explaining that a building was the last remaining segment of the Palace of Whitehall.

Just behind the foreign office, when we weren’t really sure where we were going, we stumbled upon the Treasury. Not just any old treasury too mind- Her Majesty’s Treasury. I missed a golden opportunity to see if I could get in because I’m a tax-man – it would have made an excellent scene in the video too. I did, however, have this excellent photograph taken of me:

After a bit more walking we ended up near Parliament and Brian Haw’s anti-war protest. MPs passed a law to try and get rid of Brian, by banning protesting near Parliament without a license a couple of years ago – unfortunately for them, Brian’s still there because he’s been continuously protesting since before the ban came into force. Interestingly, Brian’s patch of green is surrounded entirely by a massive roundabout, and the conspiracy theorist within me thinks that they’ve made it intentionally difficult to get to the centre where Brian is by altering the traffic light patterns, as I was stuck in the centre for a good five minutes before I dared cross the road.

We spent a few minutes standing outside Westminster Abbey. We were going to go in for a couple of minutes, but discovered that it costs eight pounds to visit a church. Although you could apparently “worship for free”. I didn’t think I could get away with pretending to be religious.

We walked down past the Palace of Westminster to the green where they do the live reports on the telly and did a bit for the video, before deciding to head to the Tate Modern. Exciting travel story: we took the circle line from Westminster to Mansion House.

It turns out that St Paul’s Cathedral is right next to Mansion House, and opposite the Millennium Bridge.

Coke Pepsi Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Tate Modern; Price: £1.55 (yes, 55).

Unfortunately, it’s my sad duty to report that the Tate Modern is the most overrated place in history. Even more so than the Auschwitz “theme park” the Nazis set up during World War II.

I feel like an idiot for not being able to appreciate modern art, but most of it is shit. One of the biggest pieces (in terms of physical size) was Matisse’s Snail (click that for a picture). It’s some coloured paper laid out on to a bigger piece of paper. It looks like something a child with learning difficulties could have made.

What makes it worse is the, er, back-story, as it isn’t even deep and metaphorical. According to the textual description next to it, Matisse saw a snail, and then laid out some coloured paper in a shape (very, very, very, very) vaguely resembling a snail. That’s it? That’s shit.

Beret-wearing sycophants probably look at the same picture and say in their trumped-up posh accent and say to each other “that’s bloody brilliant, oh, it’s just so inspirational. My god, it’s a work of genius.”

Another incredible work was a canvas painted almost entirely orange, apart from a strip down the right hand side which was painted a slightly darker orange, the premise being that the darker line is “disruptive”, or something like that. I’ve never seen such pretentious bollocks, and I’m a regular viewer of Newsnight Review.

It must be great being an artsy twat, as you’d experience such an exciting life. “Fuck me! It’s a lightswitch… that’s just, like, so powerful… on and off, representing despair and consequence“.

One of the more ridiculous things was some metal tiles on the floor. Apparently this changes the viewers interaction with art by allowing you to walk on it. That’s fucking incredible. I mean, walking on tiles. Genius.

Judging by my experience with one of the members of staff, they seem to have employed the snootiest minimum wage workers available. I was carrying a sealed Pepsi, bought from their own cafe through one of the galleries, and a Zoe Wanamaker-esque woman approached me, and said without even mentioning the brand, “I see you have a carbonated drink, could you put it away please? We’ve had people drop them before causing spillages”. I can’t imagine the disasterous repercussions of Pepsi getting near birdshit on a canvas, or whatever. I’d have thought the artsy Tate people would enjoy interpreting what the Pepsi stain represents.

In fairness, it wasn’t all terrible. Roy Lichenstein’s Whaam! was good. And there was a gallery of some framed pages of an old Soviet magazine showing the industrialization of the USSR, which was interesting. And I can’t really complain about the entrance price, as it was free.

After we left the Tate bitterly disappointed, we thought it finally time to head to the Drill Hall to see Mitchell & Webb. We took the tube to Goodge Street.

Coke Price Watch: 500mlish glass; Goodge Street Hamburger Union; £1.65.

Before the show, we went to Hamburger Union, which seems to be a medium-speed food chain exclusive to London. We filmed some more video here.

Coke Price Watch: 330ml can; The Drill Hall; £1.

Finally, we got into Mitchell and Webb ready for the recording. Our tickets had been validated and we had been allocated seats. Unfortunately, before we could go in the theatre, we had to wait in a tiny bar for around an hour standing up with around 200 other people. It was almost unbearable after a day of running around London. My legs hurt and I was overheating, but we stuck with it, as, after all, we were now at the primary reason why we were in London.

Mitchell and Webb recorded two shows at once, so we got approximately 90 minutes of new sketches from them, supported by Olivia Coleman and James Bachman And they were excellent. There were a few about a doctor arguing with a patient who got diagnosis’s off of the internet, which got progressively more surreal. If this sketch makes the translation to their second TV series, I imagine “I’m Bill Paxton” will become a well known catchphrase. You’ll know why when you see it.

Other memorable sketches were “Celebrity Fame Zepplin”, in which Mitchell reeled off hundreds and hundreds of reality TV clichés in quick succession and parodies if Radio 4’s Afternoon Play.

In retrospect, I should have taken my iTalk and covertly recorded it so I could write more about this. I can’t remember many more of the things they did, but I remember enjoying it immensely. So, er, I guess I win.

I had an incredibly good day over all, and I don’t think even if I had bumped into Hitler on the train home he could have dampened my spirit that much. London late at night is surprisingly non-threatening, but we were in a reasonably posh area- right near Tavistock Square, of London Bombings fame, in fact. I imagine I’d be telling a different story if they’d been recording the radio show in Hackney or wherever. And you’d be reading this from my will rather than my blog.

It was also a research packed day – our serious scientific survey has conclusively proved that London prices are infinitely more expensive than rural England. Which, er, is no surprise really.

I would highly recommend listening to That Mitchell & Webb Sound when it’s broadcast on the radio – I’ll plug it on here when it is, as it’s dead good.

Well done for making it through nearly 2000 words too. Why not watch the video?

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Society Proprietary
March 27th, 2007 at 16:52

Here’s something I never thought I’d do: I appear to be taking an active role in a student life. I appear to have been talked into being a part of the people who organise the Globalisation Society, which, as the name suggests is basically an excuse to get celebrities down and get photos of myself doing a thumbs up with them under the pretence of them doing a talk on globalisation or related issues.

At least, I’m hoping that’s what it’ll be. I’m not too clued up on globalisation.

Last December I met Tony Benn, of “well respected lefty type” fame. Unfortunately, the worst thing in the world happened and the batteries in my camera died at the moment the picture of me and Tony was taken, meaning I’ve no pictorial proof of this event ever happening – so I could just be making this up. My camera batteries died just after I won four gold medals in athletics at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games too, incidentally.

Sarah tells me she only wanted my help because of my extensive celebrity contacts. After all, who else can boast that they’ve received e-mails from both Malcolm Rifkind and Kate Lawler? Y’know, her off Big Brother and the former foreign secretary.

I think the real reason because they know that I (figuratively) ooze charisma and likeability out of every orifice, and want to use my image to publicise the society – a bit like how ITV will use Coronation Street as the lead in on a failing series to try and inherit a bit audience and not look like a tedious lowest common denominator failure.

Either this or that I can make websites, anyway.

Additionally yesterday, Sean, Sarah and I were discussing the society with one of my lecturers, when the scariest thing happened: he told me that he’d heard about my website from another member of staff, so needless to say I’m now double checking everything I’ve ever written to make sure I’ve never said anything critical of the lovely, lovely people at university.

So, er, hello everyone at my university’s business school!

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Has beens
March 17th, 2007 at 22:35

Comic Relief is one of my favourite TV events of the year, after the annual overnight transmitter engineering tests when they show the test card, and checking to see if Teletext has once again forgotten to change their clocks when they go forwards.

This year I enjoyed the jarring tone-shifts when they switch between poor people and Catherine Tate, and the irony in a lot of material being derived from the misfortunes of the poor people they were trying to help (see: Vicky Pollard and urban deprivation). I think the best bit though is watching it with a clean conscience because I donated weeks ago, and knowing that my cash is going to help some poor destitute multinational get some free publicity on prime-time BBC One. A close runner-up for “best bit” of the evening would probably be the slightly bizarre sight of Davina McCall getting the audience to cheer Oracle and Cisco – I never knew there were so many fans of databases out there.

I think if I were a proper student, complete with Thundercats watch and German army jacket, I’d have really enjoyed Peter Kay’s bit where he got all of the rubbish has-been celebrities to sing along to some old song. I imagine most of the people in the studio with him probably have mock Che Guevara style t-shirts with their faces printed on, labelling them a “legend” – the sort of thing a student would buy to show how “crazy” and “wacky” they are.

It does make me wonder though: how do the likes of Roy Walker, Keith Chegwin and Jim Bowen resist the temptation to slash their own wrists? I mean, they know they’re old, crappy celebrities and their best days are behind them. The only work they can get these days is touring the student unions peddling their old material. They must spend one evening a month being worshipped “ironically” by students as if they are some sort of God, dying a little inside every time they repeat their catchphrase again, before going back to being a forgotten nobody during daylight hours. It might be good money, but it’s not right.

I bet Jim Bowen cries tears of regret every time a drunken student tells him that he “couldn’t beat a bit of bully”. When he looks back at what he could have been, the only thing keeping him going must be the deluded hope that there’s a Noel Edmonds style resurrection on the cards.

I imagine the same would be true for supervillains, if they were real. The Riddler, past his prime and stuck in Arkham Asylum spending his time solving Sudokus, must still yearn for the days when he constructed elaborate schemes to snatch diamonds after entering the museum through the skylight, or whatever. The best crime he’ll get away with now is scrumping apples.

Poor, crappy, old celebrities.

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Cultural Exchange
March 2nd, 2007 at 23:01

I haven’t been to university all week, because lectures have been cancelled due to a “cultural exchange” – they’ve invited a load of celebrities in to give talks, basically. In keeping with the spirit of cultural exchange, I went to see two white, middle-class, British men talk about what they do. Specifically: Alan Yentob and Andy Hamilton.

Alan Yentob is the creative director at the BBC, and he gave an interesting talk, using exciting media buzzwords like “360 degree commissioning” and “user generated content”, and excellently, gave us an exclusive insight into the Google/BBC deal that was only announced about an hour previously. It was almost as if I was on the bleeding edge of the new media zeitgeist, whatever that means.

After giving a nineteen minute answer to the question of “What is a creative director?”, the audience were allowed to ask him questions. And this is when I remembered why I hate the general public. The bloke sitting next to me decided to commit the heinous crime of asking a stupid question. He tried to take issue with Yentob, who is also a former controller of BBC Two, over a programme about art transmitted over two years ago, claiming that it was “woefully inadequate”. He seemed to get quite worked up over this – he’d even got the book of the series out of the library to illustrate his point. It makes me wonder why when he saw that a top BBC exec was coming to town his mental process was approximately “I know, I’ll go and ask him about an old TV series that he had no hand in, and pick him up on minute details, and try and express my conspiracy theories about copyright issues surrounding the artwork shown on the series, in detail, in front of audience of one hundred people”.

It was embarassing to watch as he just hammered on and on about this art show that nobody saw, nor even cared about. He was probably about 45 too – shouldn’t he have been, er, working or something?

And he was sitting next to me? What is it that makes me some sort of nutter magnet?

Finally, when they got around to taking more questions, the bloke from the university running the show seemed to have a problem determining people’s genders. Hilariously he mistook a bloke for a woman. Then later on the other way around. It was probably funnier if you were actually there, but I want to note it on the internet so that this moment in time is archived somewhere.

Andy Hamilton was good too – he’s the baldy hairy chap who writes comedy for Radio 4 and telly. I can’t really think of much to say about him as the audience were slightly more sane, and I seem to have lost the ability to describe events in, er, bloggy way.

I think the most terrifying part of the day was discovering that Alan Yentob had parked his Jaguar (complete with driver) outside the fire escape on the specifically “do not park” bit, so that if the building had burnt down, we’d all have burnt alive inside of it.

UPDATED: Listen to the entire Yentob talk by clicking here. (82.8mb – yeah, it is a bit big.)

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Robin Ince
February 18th, 2007 at 01:13

I went to see comedian Robin Ince last night- for the second time. Unlike the first time, I didn’t have the foresight to take my camera to get a slightly updated picture of me and Robin Ince. I think I look almost the same – just give me some more hair and a different black coat, blue fleece and black t-shirt.

It’s actually quite hard to write about going to see a comedian. I could go down the route of trying to remember some of his material, repeating it on here and execute it in the style of Barzan Ibrahim (ie: badly). Alternatively, I could go down the MySpace blog route of “omfg it was really gud!!!”, and not actually elaborating on what “it” was, and why it was good.

Basically, the point that I’m trying to make is that it was really excellent. And more importantly: really funny. He covered some topics similar to the last time I saw him: like Daily Mail headlines, for example. He even bought props. His ability to improvise and react to situations in the room was incredible- he started a running joke with an audience member about starting a band, and went off on a tangent about music after hearing a squeaky door. Of course, it could all be scripted, but it didn’t seem like it.

Before and after his performance, he sat in the bar at the table next to the one me and JD were sitting at. Unfortunately, I didn’t dare talk to him, which in retrospect is a shame, as I’d love a celebrity friend. I did vaguely consider seeing if I could steal his mobile phone whilst he was on stage… I could have got Ricky Gervais’ phone number or something. But, alas, the accepted norms of the society I live in overrode my desire to be vaguely associated with celebrities. Damn.

In conclusion: Robin Ince = Recommended.

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All my heroes are just parasites
February 3rd, 2007 at 02:27

As I’m a witless slave to consumerism, I quite like celebrities. I don’t mean the awful kind of celebrities that you might find populating ITV’s latest reality TV failure, I mean the good kind: like Adam Hart Davis, Richard Dawkins, Peter Snow and Patrick Moore.

So basically I seem to be a fan of white-haired old men.

One thing that concerns me though is whether these people are just as cool in real life as they seem to be on screen. I mean, for all I know, when the cameras are switched off, Adam Hart Davis might bark orders at the runner like a career SS soldier before snorting cocaine off of a prostitute’s back. Whilst still in his court jester costume.

In terms of slightly more concrete evidence to celebrities being bastards in the flesh, Patrick Moore, as it turns out, is a member of one organisation I have a special segment of my brain dedicated to loathing: UKIP. I shit you not. It’s a bit depressing really that someone who you assume is cool because he likes space and that, is actually a senile old man with 19th century opinions (asked “Where did all the science programs on TV go?”, he’s said “A lot of TV is run by women these days.”)

Eccentric funny-named, asteroid-worrying, Cheeky-Girl-partnered LibDem MP Lembit Opik supports fox hunting. What the hell, Lembit? You used to be cool! You’ve changed, man.

I wonder if John Sergeant is an obnoxious, self-righteous, right-wing, big-lipped ponce who doesn’t let anyone else get a word in edge-ways?
Most of the musicians I like are probably complete and utter wankers in real life. Leftover Crack, for instance, are big fans of, er, crack. If I turned up backstage and tried to make friends with them they’d be like “that James O’Malley is such a slave to consumerism… he won’t even snort one line of cocaine, and doesn’t understand our hip New York street slang”.

Its weird- if some crack-addled tramp-a-like expressed political opinions to me in the street, I’d ignore them and get on with my life, but give that tramp an electric guitar and a sense of rhythm and I’ll be the first to absorb his opinions and claim that I’ve deeply believed whatever he’s saying for years and that I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon.

I think I have some sort of pathological desire to be friends with celebrities. Are there any celebrities reading? Do you like me? Want to go for a drink some time and discuss how I can exploit your famous connections to springboard my own career?

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