almost witty

I’ve been watching a lot of Comic Relief programming this week. Forgive me if this sounds as if I’m sat on my sofa with a blanket wrapped around my lap smoking a pipe and shaking my cane at the teen tearaways across the road - but it all seems a bit too slick these days. And (whisper) not actually that funny.

When the only comedy moment out of the incredibly unfunny and dull Comic Relief single, Comic Relief does the Apprentice and Comic Relief does Fame Academy is musing on what Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was on when she was sweating profusely, one has to realise someone’s taken the comedy out of Comic Relief. Which rather defeats the “unique” spin on what is essentially a telethon. Shame, really.

Still, I’ll be tuning in tonight, making the odd donation, looking at pictures of a man who painted himself red and buying Shaggy Blog Stories, essentially a book collection of 100 funny stories from around the UK blogosphere with proceeds going to Comic Relief. I really should have offered one of my oh-so-hilarious anecdotes but I’ve only just noticed.

Shame the-powers-that-be behind Comic Relief haven’t tried to capture the UK blogosphere in the same way - there’s not even a banner you can splash on your webpage.

Why do I have a particular interest in this? It was central to one of my favourite nights at work some eight years ago, when I was behind the scenes on the web coverage for Comic Relief:

- “blogging” from behind the scenes via live web updates, in the days when blogging and broadband barely crossed the lips of even a savvy web developer (whither blog this year, web chaps?)
- encoding and uploading Doctor Who videos in full Quicktime quality live as soon as they’d been transmitted
- hanging out in the infamous BBC canteen and marvelling at how big Dawn French actually is (the camera took away pounds with her then!)
- helping out on the Comic Relief webchats
- watching the frantic goings-on behind the scenes, and realising they weren’t that frantic
- marvelling at my boss’s then new-fangled hands-free thing for his mobile phone, thinking what a prat he looked in them, and how they’d never ever catch on
- being so tired and irritated (at what, I have no idea now!) at the end I didn’t go to the wrap-up party. One of those decisions I shall regret forever.

I really wish I’d done some screencaps.

I have been caught massively enthusing about the genius that is Spaced - the finest sitcom a pop-culture/nerdy obsessed person could ever possibly hope to have. Complete with strong characters all round. It’s so hip it hurts…

Anyway, skip to the end - and some kind soul has put up the first episode of Spaced online on Google Video. So here it is: watch it!

Then buy Spaced: The Collectors Edition from your friendly Amazon UK dealer.

According to one of those nonsensical surveys commissioned by companise which lazy journalists pick up on to fill a slow news day, Cardiff people buy more comedy DVDs than anywhere else - at least according to Tesco’s online DVD sales.

Not that I’m an expert on Cardiff, despite having lived here for four years, but for a bit of fun, let’s speculate on why that is.

(continue reading…)

Ahhh The Young Ones. That “classic” British TV sitcom about four young students which inspired me to create one of my first websites and FAQ back in 1994. 12 years ago. *gulp*

That website got me to where I am today. Lying in the gutter looking at the Star Bar and dreaming of a time when I was namechecked by Microsoft, Yahoo, Future Publishing and it got my foot in the door at the BBC. Amazing how I still, to this day, get the odd £10/US$50 voucher for sending people to amazon to buy the videos. It probably made more money than most of my dotcom employers in the late 90s.

The Young Ones was the Trojan Horse that allowed alternative comedy to sneak into British television sitcom land, and television comedy was never the same again. Indeed, one can argue that The Young Ones started the process by which traditional sitcoms have now apparently been killed off.

Ironic really, that when you watch The Young Ones again 22 years (!) on, it’s *so* horribly dated in a way that even older sitcoms (eg Fawlty Towers) just hasn’t.

Anyway, that short quick trip down memory lane was just an excuse to link to these video clips - one from the show itself:

An advert for the Young Ones computer game from the mid-80s. The graphics are amazing, the voiceover is an astoundingly bad impersonation of “Vyvyan” - and I still have no idea what you do in the game.

UPDATE: You can download the game, although you will still need a handy Commodore 64 emulator to get it to run on your PC. and there’s a walkthrough on how to play the game - although on the C64 version, there’s a bug which means you can’t win as Rik. That’s what you get for voting Tory.

On with the video clips. This is an MTV commercial for the accompanying album Neil’s Heavy Concept Album. A horrible mash-up of oh-so-British nostalgia and heavy American selling techniques.

(Found via screenhead.com)

And finally,

When it comes to planning a marathon (to me) 700-mile round trip between South Wales, mid Wales, North Wales and Milton Keynes, planning becomes extremely important. But not about the route, oh no - it’s the tunes, man. What is going to stimulate your brain on those lonely roads.

However, my fiendish plan to sample podcasting with my iPod came a cropper when I picked up my otherwise lovely-if-petrol-guzzling car. It didn’t have a cassette player to which I could attach said iPod - just a radio and CD player. So I was stuck with the radio - at least in those fortunate times when the mountains of Wales didn’t shield me from radio transmissions.

And so it came to pass that on a Saturday afternoon, I was idly scanning through the radio stations. And I came across the bliss that is Saturday afternoons on Radio 2.

Now, normally I wouldn’t go anywhere near Radio 2 since I still, for some unfathomable reason, like to think of myself as a reasonably hip dude - even if I can’t stand gangsta rap. (that’s sooo 5 years ago anyway). To my diseased trend-following brain, Radio 2 has always been a bit of a slippers-and-Ovaltine radio station, while Radio 1 and 6 Music has been the hip young thing. A bit too hip, since I cannot bloody stand Sara Cox, and she still pollutes the airwaves on Sunday afternoons.

But then I stumbled across the tail end of Jonathan Ross, then came a glorious hour of “comedy analysis”, basically an excuse to stitch together a bunch of comedy clips. Then came Chris Evans, and he sounds as interesting and zany as he ever was - except it’s far more palatable on a Saturday afternoon driving up the A470 than on a bleary-eyed morning. Those three hours were radio heaven, as far as I’m concerned.

So get my slippers and Ovaltine on standby, and slot a Val Doonican 8-track tape into the player, would you?