Fillum…

October 9, 2010 //

This is not a review of a film – Claudia Winkelman I am not – but rather a story around a film, and a vindication – in 1986, I was right to like something…..

In the 1980’s, BBC2 used to run a film programme that ran two films back to back, and had a critique of both movies in the middle. For example, they ran Fritz Lang’s 1920’s masterpiece “Metropolis”, and then compared and contrasted the techniques used in that film to Coppola’s “Rumblefish”. Both black and white, although thematically different, they highlighted Coppola’s nods towards Metropolis. It was a very interesting programme, and a great way to while away an evening. Sadly however, it predated my ownership of a video recorder – not that I’d have been able to put the entire programme on one tape, and, back then, keeping things for posterity on tape was not something I did.

I wish I had. For the last 25 or so years, I have been hunting down a film by Kathryn Bigelow that was used in this programme, The Loveless. It was compared and contrasted with The Wild One, Marlon Brando’s banned 50’s motorcycle gang flick – showing, for example, how Bigelow used stylistic and iconic shots from the Wild One to compose a nihilistic and brooding film that doesn’t so much tell a story, but paints it. The effect is of the story being told as a sideshow to a slideshow of leather clad ‘bad boy’ sequences – think, if you will, of a very, very dark flip side of “Happy Days”, where the Fonze is a really, really bad boy…

This is a quite relevant film because it represents Kathryn Bigelow’s directorial debut, is Willem Dafoe’s first film and because of the way it eschewed the formulaic pacing of movies – you know the sort of thing – 15 minutes setting the scene, building to a hectic and chaotic “leave them on the edge of their seats” ending that Hollywood seems to think is de-rigeur these days. No, this film slides along at a pace similar to Dafoe’s brylcreem-ed hair melting in the sun, and invites you to enjoy the view along the way. It oozes along to the fairly inevitable conclusion.

Interestingly, it has a soundtrack by Robert Gordon (yes, the same late 70’s Rockabilly chap who had his whole act and sound lifted by those oh so naughty Stray Cats) who also plays the foil to Dafoe’s brooding malevolence in the film. Gordon’s part in the film portrays the constant challenging of alpha male status present in every gang.

It is rare that I can have seen or heard something once, a long time ago, and for it to be as good, if not better than I remembered. I salute myself – although it bombed on release, it is now considered a cult classic. I’ve altered my list of ‘1001 films you must see before you die’ to include it….

Categories BBC2, Robert Gordon, The Loveless, Willem Dafoe

Lucky Dips….

September 12, 2010 //

One of the joys of record collecting – or vinyl to those of you that are unable to understand music that doesn’t come on shiny discs – is that some of the sellers of vinyl quite often throw stuff in a ‘bargain bucket’ and you can get three or four LPs for a fiver. A fiver for an armful of vinyl is worth taking a punt on, and quite apart from the fact that the record might be physically dubious, you never know, it might turn out to be worth listening to. You know the sort of mild panic that comes over you when you succumb to the three for two deals – you can never quite figure out what the third one should be?

Well, I’d grabbed a bunch of stuff – all 80’s, as they are in these circumstances, typically, and I was looking through the racks trying to work out what to take a chance on to make up that elusive fourth purchase. In the end I closed my eyes, and picked one. Well, it fitted the bill – I’d never heard of The Big Dish, or their “Swimmer” album. I handed over my denarii and headed for home, wondering why I never get that feeling you used to get when you’d splashed your pocket money on a saturday morning in WH Smith on a new record. I digress. I do that a lot, which is why I don’t write for a living… Well, it was unplayed – it still stuck to the inner sleeve, so I thought I’d take a chance on playing it on my Linn (I have a Thorens that I use for physically dubious stuff…).

It isn’t often I get sonically clobbered by a record – largely because I’ve heard most stuff and I know what to expect – but this record did that for me. From the opening track (Prospect Street) to the last track, I was captivated. It has 80’s production values, but thankfully no Yamaha DX7 synth washes, and it has a feel of what Hall & Oates might have done if they had collided with Lloyd Cole on the way to see Go West. It is a slice of intelligent pop, of the kind that existed before Stock, Aitken and Waterman took over the remainder of the decade’s output.

Categories Uncategorized

Daft lyrics #1 in an occasional series

August 3, 2010 //

“Tonight theres going to be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town”.

In this age of geolocation, geolocation, geolocation (doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?), one might be forgiven for looking back on the days when maps ruled the earth – possibly even the glovebox of the car – with a benevolent sigh, thinking that ‘they’ didn’t know what it was to be geolocated. You’d be wrong – even with the aid of a map, you can pretty much deduce what Mr Philip Lynott meant – there is going to be a jailbreak, and it is going to be somewhere in this town. Well, golly gee, might that be at ….the jail? Is this the dumbest lyric ever written in a song? Well, possibly, but a little further study of the offending lyric sheet, and I use the word ‘lyric’ advisedly, reveals that he is suggesting that “Don’t you be around”….implying that he and the boys are going to make trouble for you. Now I may not be going along with the spirit of the song, but if you break out of jail, you aren’t going to hang around to settle scores and draw attention to those that would want you back behind bars, are you? And why on earth issue a warning about it in the first place – surely the element of surprise is key to the whole caper?

Phil, not one of your brightest moments with a pen.

Categories Uncategorized

New Technology baffles pis*ed old hack…

July 18, 2010 //

The ‘news’ (can news about news actually be called news?) that the hit rate on the Times website has fallen by 66% since Uncle Rupe’s paywall idea was implemented is no real surprise. Falling circulation and the lack of people buying traditional print are cited as the reason behind this brave move, but the Guardian and Telegraph are still available for free, so in reality, it is braver than you would think. As long as google news aggregates the feeds that still exist in the clear, then News International are doomed to fail in this rather crude attempt at market-making. Any online presence, be it newspapers or otherwise, relies on google’s monetisation of the site for income – does this mean then that the Dirty Digger is not getting enough footfall in the first place to sustain the online presence? Has he perhaps failed to learn the lesson in the myspace debacle and is having another go at imposing a fiscal structure on this herd of cats we call the internet?

As to falling revenues in print at Wapping, maybe this is what happens when you substitute news in a paper with the relentless chasing of “news nouveau” – this endless reporting on vacuous celebrity culture and lifestyle, which exists only because the redtops are too lazy to get proper stories written up. Wapping, meet the Ouboros.

Categories news, paywall

Californication

July 17, 2010 //

I don’t watch tv. I like to acquire my entertainment, I think it is fair to say, by taking my custom to a show, and watch it at my leisure, not as a bum-on-seat to be ‘messaged’ at by advertisers. As a result, I have quite a narrow list of things I watch, although I have been working my way through the ‘1001 films you must see before you die’ book and I’ve been enjoying and appreciating work that, let’s face it, Murdoch just wouldn’t give air time to. Perhaps I’ll return to that in another blog, but at the moment I am ‘learning’ film. What else is a boy to do with these hours available to him?

Californication is not for the faint of heart – if you thought you’d like it because it has ‘that bloke from the x-files in it’ then it probably isn’t for you – I am amazed at the irreverence it shows. For an American tv show, anyway – the pandering to the bible belt and the advertising demographic gamut that producers have to run normally means that this kind of innovation gets stifled. Or left to Canada, or the UK.

Look it up, grab the first series wherever you can, and watch some first class writing, and dare I say it, acting. David Duchovny plays a superb and believable character (ok, believable in my dreams) with such swagger and bravado, I wonder if he isn’t wasted on the small screen. Fox Mulder would regard Hank Moody as a phenomena to be investigated as paranormal by his standards in the x files. It is a work of genius and I’ve just learnt that it has been commissioned for a fourth series. That makes me a happy man.

Categories Uncategorized

Men and motors

July 4, 2010 //

I own (or rather, I am the custodian of) a 1981 Lotus Esprit S3. It does one of three things. It sits hibernating in a garage, is on the road and is running, or it is undergoing one of those ‘niggly’ jobs. I am not the world’s greatest custodian of Hethel’s finest, and how I came to own it is a story in itself.

I was a young petrolhead (mark II cortina) having freshly passed my test and I was out poodling about in the car when I was overtaken by a JPS Esprit. The rear view of these cars is quite breathtaking, and being a man with a certain amount of ambition and benchmarking to do in his life, I declared that I was going to own an Esprit before I got married. So, aged 19, my die was cast – I’d already become a Lotus afficianado aged 14 when I was allowed to sit in a Lotus Elan, and that combined with a wildly successful F1 team contributed to my choice. I think every petrolhead affiliates themselves with a supercar marque – some pledge undying allegience to Ferrari, some to Aston Martin, some to Lamborghini and some actually achieve their aim of owning a supercar. Now, in the grand scheme of things, Lotus were supercar ‘wannabees’ and had never managed to shake the tag of ‘kit cars’ despite some very attractive traits like handling and (your mileage may vary at this point, but stay with me) styling.

So, this young 19 year old made a vow that still haunts him. “I’m going to have an Esprit before I am married”. Well, guess what, I didn’t. Revision 2. “I’m going to have an Esprit before I have children”. I think you can probably guess what happened there. Revision 3 of the vow suggested that I was going to own an Esprit before I was 33. Douglas Adams wrote, “I love deadlines, I love the sound they make as they go whooshing past”, and this vow was beginning to resemble his comment. What happens at this point (it is 1995 by now) is that the Vow was modified to have slightly less concrete milestones. As soon as I did this though, Autotrader popped the “car of my dreams” (TM) into my peripheral vision, and without consulting anyone (the then-wife, bank manager or indeed my common sense), PTO208X was mine. I had done it, I was 34, and I owned a Lotus Esprit. This one, an S3 was a better bet than the fragile S1 and S2 versions, and wasn’t quite as garish as the Turbo – even then, I wanted that classic wedge shape, unfettered by louvres and skirts.

It stunk of petrol (leaking tank) and so began my long standing relationship with the Stratton Motor Company. Fixed, I drove it to work every day. In the summer it was unbearable, in winter, it was, well, less fun. It started to be left for a month at a time in the garage, and of course, it only had two seats so it’s use as transport for the family was a bit of a problem. It didn’t languish unloved exactly, but it did need more TLC than I had time to give.

It still gave me the thrill I had anticipated when I made the vow, but what happens after the vow, or, more to the point, the ambition has been fulfilled? When you make the vow, do you understand that you might be taking on something for the rest of your days? No.

Allow me to share something of the car with you. I am no motoring journalist, but I’ll attempt to give you a flavour of the experience. As you can see, it is blue – rather appropriately, it is Essex Blue. It has a blue velour interior (no leather anywhere), unkindly described as “muppet pelt”. It has a period stereo with chrome buttons and a green LED readout. It has silver and gold wheels. It has mistakenly had it’s bumpers and mirrors colour coded (returning them to matt black is number 3 on my list of stuff to do) but overall it is a proper example.

An Esprit of this vintage is so different from modern cars. Opening the car-park unfriendly wide doors, and lowing one’s sizeable frame into the unfeasibly small seat is easy enough, and once ensconced, you can drink in the little 70’s touches – the Jaeger digital clock, the Austin Maxi ashtray (to the right of you in the door sill, just behind the rather daftly placed handbrake). It is quite snug as the interior is dominated by a huge tunnel through the middle (which is of course the chassis, not a transmission tunnel as the engine is behind you), but it isn’t claustrophobic. It is at this point that I feel I can chuck a Barry White tape in the player, open the shirt to the waist and check my white flares for chocolate stains – it has an ability to transport you back to the 70’s. Later Esprits don not appear to have this effect, I think it is simply the velour acreage…

The next stage is to pull the choke out. This novel, yet effective device causes the carburettors to run slightly rich which aids starting. I turn the key in the ignition, listening for the sound of the small gatling gun behind me to finish it’s protest (fuel pump – the noise it makes when it is priming is quite comedic) and then I can pump the accelerator pedal twice. I pause, and turn the key. Sometimes, it will catch first time, if not then it will go on the second try. I leave it to settle for 10 seconds or so and then we are good to go. Reversing is always interesting, because of the appalling rearward visibility, but in the Esprit the mirrors are your absolute best friends, and you need to buy them a pint on a regular basis. At this point, having moved it out of the garage, I’ll move the choke back to halfway, and leave it to “warm up” for a few minutes.

The gear selection is a work of art – the lever is topped by a beautiful globe of turned wood, and it is no more difficult to select the gears than it is on a modern car. Which is quite an achievement when you consider that the rods, levers and cables that operate this do so through half the length of the car. So, into first and take off. As you pick up speed and work through the gears (short-shifting, and being gentle of course, because it won’t quite be up to operating temperature yet (does this sound like I am describing an old pre-war Morris?) you can hear the engine behind you, the note of the cam belt whine rising and falling like a banshee experimenting with it’s new-found voice for the first time. It is amazingly smooth to drive. This variant of the Esprit didn’t have power steering, yet the steering is never heavy (no great lump of an engine over the front wheels) but chats to you all the time like an over excited child on a sweetshop trip. Pulling up in traffic, a glance at your fellow road users give you a birds eye view of their doors, or if you have a lorry to your right, you can pass the time waiting for the lights admiring their wheelnuts. It is low, and that is when you begin to appreciate that not everyone can see you. Pushing the choke fully home, you can start explore what happens with the slightly higher engine revs. A spirited push of the loud pedal propels you forwards like a giant has just started to play with a matchbox toy – this is due to the fact that the car weighs next to nothing, so a much larger part of the engine’s ability is available for it’s primary function – forward motion. But even at the legal maximum, it still feels smooth, and nothing changes – the steering is still talkative, and you only have to think your way through a bend; the car responds with no drama or lean. Corners become irrelevant, and you begin to understand why people refer to the Esprit as a driver’s car. It takes a lot to unsettle it, and to use a cliche, the car always seems to be organically attached to the road. If you drive this car like you drive your daily car, you’ll never fully appreciate it’s capability. If you tune in to what the car is telling you it can do, you’ll find yourself able to negotiate roundabouts with the minimum of fuss, at speeds that you won’t quite believe. It is the quickest way to put a mile on your face.

The downsides to driving this car are that the noise and the heat in the cabin are a bit much especially on really hot days (1981 – air conditioning was something that was fitted to American and Japanese cars only) but it isn’t a showstopper. At cruising speeds (yes, 70mph, officer) in 5th, it is quiet enough to hold a conversation, and appears quite civilised. 100mph, I am reliably informed, comes up all too quickly and fuss free if you let it.

I write this in the knowledge that this week, my car comes back from hibernation – she has been at Strattons for some work, and hopefully, she will be available for some fun this summer. I can’t wait. Now, where did I put that Barry White tape…..

Categories Esprit. 70's, Lotus

Friday on my mind. Plagiarism for beginners, pt 1.

July 1, 2010 //

I think the reason that I wasn’t aware of a lot of music in the mid-late 80’s was because I no longer avidly read the New Musical Express and Melody Maker from cover to cover, and because I was in a band. Oh, and maybe Stock Aitken and Waterman had rather poisoned the rock chalice for me, into the bargain. You all paid for his train hobby, you know, every time you stuck your hand in your wallet for the latest Kylie….

I always felt it was important to not listen to too much current stuff lest you plagarise. As Morrissey said, Theres always someone with a big nose who knows, who trips you up and laughs when you fall. A truism, as it turns out…

We’d been in the studio (“we” being “Another Country”) and time was running out [2] – everyone else had done their bits and finally it was down to me to do the lead bits (which were never my forte) in the 30 minutes left. By my own admission, I am no Steve Jones (the Pistols guitarist is renowned for being the most accurate studio guitarist of the 70’s…and to this day, if ‘Fire and Gasoline’ is anything to go by) and I’d got nothing prepared so I busked it. I rattled some bits off – nothing coherent, but the nods from the other site of the plexiglass window made it all seem like I’d done an OK job. In today’s vernacula-transatlantica, I believe I ‘nailed it’ (which used to be a euphemism for something quite different back then, but I digress).

I got the thumbs up from the rest of the band and settled down to listen to a fairly crude mix in the control room, and then we were off into the warm Sarfend (thats Southend on Sea, for those of you that don’t frequent the Canvey Delta) night with two tracks on a cassette. We used to rehearse at Lee Brilleaux’s rehearsal place (yes, there was a mezzanine bar, no we never did. Not ever. All we ever did was admire the records set into the walls) and got a reasonable facsimile of the studio tape into the live version, and it turned out that the song, “Ring Out”, was a firm favourite at the weekly gigs we were doing around Southend. [1]

Another Country were taking the Sarfend scene by storm according to our own well-oiled publicity machine (4 pints of Stella is a brilliant journalistic lubricant – ooh, a new word – Journolube. Now is that a verb or a noun? I am getting to the point of this, trust me) and we landed a big gig supporting The Bible at the Cliffs Pavilion (I think it was The Bible – or The Christians, I’m not sure). We went on, and pulled the old Faces trick of owning the stage (helped by the fact that our ‘following’ had nothing else to do that sunday evening) and played an absolute blinder. I wouldn’t say it was our best gig ever, but we did rather blow the main band away. The £30 we slipped the sound engineer to turn us up louder than the main act was the first in a litany of dirty tricks I learned….

Afterwards, we were hobnobbing with the quite multitudinous audience when some spotty oik came up to me and asked if the Easybeats tribute lick was intentional. Oh yes, I’d absorbed at some point in my teens, ‘Friday on my mind’, (most likely the Bowie version on Pin ups, as I used to fall asleep with the headphones on with that album) and spat the lick onto tape in my hurry to get something out. And of course, the spotty oik scored a good three points there, because I hadn’t got a clue what he was on about. Of course, my position is quite different (22 years to form a riposte helps) now inasmuch as I take the view that Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal. In my case, though, I’d add a subnote to the effect that Mediocre Artists absorb Mick Ronson licks in their sleep…

[1] The provisional title of the as yet unrecorded album was “Kiss me where it smells”, the punchline to the band’s favourite joke. A young couple were parked up and steaming up the windows. As things progressed, she whispered “Darling, kiss me where it smells”….so he jumped into the drivers seat and drove her to Canvey Island.

[2] Sorry, that wasn’t meant to read like ‘Smoke on the water’; I shan’t insult your intelligence by editing it – Canvey is so very like Montreaux, no?

Categories 80's, Another Country, Music

RIP, Alex Chilton

June 27, 2010 //

I hate the way that magazines like Mojo write eulogies about recently deceased “stars”. One of thie phrases is “they also served” – how crappy does that sound? That you never really made it to tier 1 celebrity status, so that in death we write about your career as a footnote to the big star that died last month? It is done in a fawning and obsequious manner, suggesting that (insert star here) couldn’t have possibly risen to the levels he did without the help of (poor hapless 2nd rate muso). Really, in the language of transatlantica, it sucks. Possibly as much as being dead…

Take this month’s issue of Mojo’s “Real Gone” page – Lena Horne. Now I’m fine with having her in the obituary pages of a serious paper – as a singer, she was the first black superstar, as the headline notes. But really, it isn’t for the pages of Mojo. Ronnie James Dio, Steve New, and Stuart Cable all bought the farm this month. Steve New did some brilliant and often overlooked work with the Rich Kids (the first “punk/New Wave” supergroup?). My opinion is that he was probably more deserving and relevant recipient of the full page with the ‘headline’.

This brings me to my point, and the title of this entry – the untimely death of Alex Chilton in March. Very few people in the UK really understood or had ever heard of Big Star – I’d have never sought them out if I hadn’t spent valuable homework time listening to Radio Caroline in my youth – and in the UK, the most recognisable piece of work he ever did was arguably “In the streets”, the theme tune to “That 70’s show”. Yet, in the mid 70’s Alex and Big Star produced a body of work in their three/four albums that still brim over with ideas and creativity that makes them sound apart from their contemporaries and, (cliche alert) ahead of their time.

I was upset when I heard he had died, as he was down on my list of people to see before I died. My friend Ed sent me a soundboard recording of a live gig from the late 80’s which I listened to by way of a tribute, but all it did was crystallise the “what a waste” feeling I had into something approaching real loss. I don’t often get that from a dead “rock star” (sorry Ronnie James Dio, but I’m not about to track down your finest work, even in death), and I feel like I do when I know that a favourite author is no longer producing work – for example, I have three unread John Steinbeck works to read that I have been saving because once I’ve read them, I’ll never be able to enjoy the delight of discovering another “Doc” or “Jeb”.

Thank you Alex, for the music you created that was thoughtful, tuneful, and inspiring. I can’t admit that you featured on every mixtape I ever put together, but songs like “September Gurls” or “Thirteen” will always remind me of a time past – and I don’t think I can think of a higher accolade than that.

I think Robyn Hitchcock (another Alex Chilton afficionado) put it quite well, when he said “Myriad musical roads met in Alex, and he diverted their course to his own artistic purposes with much grace and few illusions.”

Categories 70's, Alex Chilton, Music

Mac on a shoestring.

June 12, 2010 //

It was the last time I lost all my data to a virus in 1999 that made me wonder if there was a better way of improving the lot of the average computer user. Windows, whatever version, is a large target for any malware author, so I began with a brief switch to linux/aix and solaris – which worked to an extent for me, in that it stopped me doing real paid work and let me waste my time with incessant fiddling with init.d and assorted shell scripts. An education, sure, but it didn’t put food on the table. And then Lotus/IBM dropped the unix client for Lotus Notes and I was forced back into the misery of windows.

Guess what – more viruses, more BSODs and generally more misery – plus reduced battery life that meant I had a laptop that wouldn’t last the hour and a half commute to work. During this brief sojourn I was still keeping one eye on OS X – an OS that I had known, loved and used as NextStep for many years. I even had a black NeXT cube at one point, but I digress. In 2002 then, I bought my first mac for many years, a cube. I maxed it out to 1.5gb, I upgraded it left right and centre to run the fastest processor going, and set about seeing what the delta was between XP and OS X. Well, I was pleased at the time that MS Office presented no issues, all the Adobe products I might use were there, and wow, there was a Lotus Notes client….sadly though, it didn’t work. Well, it did, but it didn’t understand fonts at all, and rendered most of my work as unintelligable gibberish. Nevermind, I thought, Virtual PC should solve this. It didn’t. I ended up with an inane mix of a small PC running on my network that I remotely ran via VNC. This wasn’t ideal, but OK. So – I became a mac user. I especially loved the fact that the terminal program would do a delightful green on black to make me feel child-like again…

Then in 2005/6 Apple announced it was going to move to the intel platform, and since then I have followed the antics of a community of people that are committed (or they should be) to running

OS X on non-apple hardware. I’ve tried it several times – and actually lived with one for a year or so, but nothing seemed to quite match the Apple hardware….until last year. Quite by chance, I bought a Dell 490 for a client and noticed that it’s spec was identical to the then current Mac Pro. So I had a go at installing OS X on it. Well, I’m still using it. I can’t let go of it. It has 32gb ram and two quad core xeons. I’m sure you’ll agree that is overkill for most things, but for the first time in – oh, 10 years, I have a proper workstation that runs like stink, does everything I want it to do, and is still unthreatened by viruses and malware. But the best thing of all is that I can run VMWare Fusion on it, and I have copies of every OS I have ever used, right from dos 3.3 through to Windows 7 – all available to me at the click of a mouse. I can even run – count them – eight VMs simultaneously with it barely registering an increase in fan speed. I don’t need a separate W2K3 server, it is a VM. I don’t need a separate domino server – it is a VM. In fact, I’ve managed to replicate almost every hosting environment I could ever need to, from solaris to linux, all in one box. Hmm. Loads to fiddle with, but how much productivity is there in that?

Well, the answer to that is that when things “Just Work” TM, you don’t need to fiddle with stuff incessantly. A new project using wordpress? Fire up an appliance, configure wordpress and go. Joomla? Start the Joomla environment. It is too easy, really, when I look back on the days when if I needed a new “server” of any description, it would take a day to install and configure. It has set me wondering if this is the IT equivalent of the disposable consumer society that I have come to despise (throwing a toaster out? Did you check the fuse?) – that “environments” that were created and maintained as a result of time and effort can just be disposed of without a second thought? One day, and it may come soon, we’ll have lost the skills that allowed us to create a centos 4.0 domino server on linux, and OS/2 LAN server or a version of netBSD that allows Nintendo 64 development tools to run. Think back to running DOS. Could you edit a config.sys file with edlin, still?I know I’m an old fart, and that I am a packrat when it comes to knowledge about old IT skills, but I really worry that I am turning into the old nerd in the corner of the pub that suggests that a twin disk setup for your cpm/80 might solve all your problems…

My “hackintosh” does need me to keep those skills I acquired with NextSTEP to keep it running, but only if I upgrade the OS or add hardware that doesn’t fit the apple envelope,but guess what? I bought a Mac Pro anyway….

Categories Apple, joomla appliance, Mac, vmware

Laughter….the best medicine.

May 29, 2010 //

That is quite evocative of that famous Reader’s Digest feature, no? I confess to being quite sad at the passing of the UK edition of the Reader’s Digest – I learnt a lot from the late 60’s and early 70’s issues. I recall surprising my mum with my detailed knowledge of the pineal gland after reading “I am John’s Kidney”. A shame – nevermore, the letters from Tom Champagne (made up name? I think so – Harry Merlot and Dick Shiraz aren’t quite in the same league are they?) telling me I’ve won a boxed set of James Last LPs. I shall mourn their decline with a thunderbird wine, as the bard of Upminster once said.

What makes me laugh? Well you have seen the Leo Sayer and Linda Ronstadt clip in a recent blog so I’ll leave that out. In no particular order, other than they occured to me that way, here is my top 10 ‘things’ that make me laugh. Although, having just done a crafty edit and run through of this, I think on balance the order is about right – but of course the value of your investments may go up or down. Or was it your mileage may vary? Indeed, should all men have a tag on their neck saying caution, may contain nuts? Thenkyew, here all week laydeesangennelmen, he’s here all week.

1. The Anaconda Ball Pool. This is just straightforward idiocy from the lads at Jackass. I’m not sure which bit I like best, the end, or the slapstick kicking at the start. Don’t try this at home, and if you have kids, well….the ball pit will never be quite the same for you….if you liked this, may I recommend the “Bee Limousine”, and for pure stupidity, the Penny Farthing BMX. Or buy Jackass 2 the movie – available from all good retailers. Pick up some tena-lady while you are there….

2. Bill Hicks – The Marketing Rant. This was a close run thing between oh, EVERYTHING the master did, and this one. This has a message that I feel I can relate to. How it is that I’ve never found anything Bill Hicks says or rants about remotely disagreeable, I’ll never know. It is quite possibly the only time I’ve agreed with an American on everything. Taken too soon, he was, taken too soon…

3. From failblog – The Error Message. ‘Nuff said. I laughed until I stopped….

4. Sid James’ laugh. Not a ‘naturally’ funny man by his own admission, he did have the epitome of the dirty cackle to carry him through.

5. The Goon Show. When I was younger, I’d sit glued to the radio when Radio 4 (or was that the Home Service….eek, does that age me?) used to re-run the Goons and I used to find it hilarious. Milligan and Sellers were in a class of their own. My favourite anecdote is of Sellers turning up at Milligan’s doorstep stark naked at midnight, and saying “I say, Spike, do you know a good tailor?” when Milligan answered the door…

6. No child born in the sixties could escape the influence of Monty Python and I am no exception. Here is one of the paths less travelled. Really, everyone knows (and can recite good chunks of) the Parrot Sketch so I’ve chosen this :

Why Marcel Proust is featured in so many comedy skits is beyond me, or perdu les temps. Cough. I blame Kenny Everett.

7. Steven Wright. This clip by the unique Steven Wright (not to be confused by the english idiot radio DJ) shows his technique of extreme deadpanning.

8. Dennis Leary – I never really thought DL was funny per se – “No cure for cancer was just a load of recycled Bill Hicks rants, but he did a set of trailer rants for MTV which I liked at the time, and still make me laugh.

I’m a particular fan of the tirade against Michael Stipe….

9. Rob Wells, aka Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys. I spent ages trying to find a single clip of the Trailer Park Boys that typified the whole series, and this one just about does it. I fell in love with this show in Canada years ago (hell, I even have a TPB T-shirt, which is a bit, er fan-boy of me) and I’ve followed their exploits ever since. This clip comes second to one that I was looking for but couldn’t find – if you find Ricky baked out of his head on animal tranquilisers shooting at “fuckin’ purple squirrels”, well, you’ll have hit paydirt. If you haven’t seen the adventures of Ricky, Bubbles and Julian, then you have missed out. Frankly, I have never understood why Canadian comedy is always overlooked by the UK terrestrial channels.

10. This is Paul Merton at his best. I know ‘LOL’ is a bit of a passe thing as it has become the riposte of choice at the end of a text message, but I did when I first watched this. In fact, I very nearly PMSL, and was in extreme danger of ROFLOL. Watch and I defy you not to smile. It is a joy to watch him warm to the theme and take it to ever more ludicrous levels….

Categories Canada, Humour