• It was announced this week that head of Apple, Steve Jobs, has received a new liver. The iLiver was chromed and had his name etched on the back. Early reviews suggest that it works no better than a normal liver but spending a penny now costs £1.79.
• This week, disgraced cricket promoter Allen Stanford learned that he now faces 375-years in prison. Reacting to the news, ex-England opening batsman, Geoffrey Boycott, suggested that Stanford spend the first 370 years ‘playing himself in’.
• Sean Penn has abandoned Hollywood part way through his latest film after his children begged him to spend more time with them and their mother. In unrelated news: the world waits for Jack Black’s children to start speaking.
• Concerns mount over Kim Jong Il’s health. Apparently the bugger’s still alive.
• Meanwhile Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on power is slipping. But that what will happen when your fingers are covered in baby oil.
• And as Italy continues to be gripped by the tales of Bacchanalian orgies in Berlusconi’s villa where 18 year old super models apparently parade around the place naked, we ask: how do we ensure our MP’s stop claiming for Jaffa Cakes on their expenses?
• Michael Martin continues to claim that he was hounded from office because of his humble working class background. Indeed, there’s nothing more humble and working class than being crap at your job and having your chauffeur drive you to Celtic matches.
• This week ‘The Observer’ reported that Britain’s nuclear power stations have had 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other ‘events’ over the past seven years. Thankfully, the leaks all occurred in parts of the UK that don’t read ‘The Observer’. Which is ironic, given all the extra eyesballs they have up there...
• As mobile users in Africa get their own weather forecasts, we get a look inside the high tech software that runs the service: Line 10: Print ‘Hot and dry.’; Line 20: Goto Line 10.
• In the world of coincidence: as Ronaldo admits that he’d decided to leave Manchester United last year, a supporter also admits that it was last year when he decided that Ronaldo was a complete tosser.
• As Facebook launches a Farsi service for people in Iran, we ask: aren’t they suffering enough?
• And, finally, Twitter’s in the news this week as Iranian leaders face a new crisis. They must either stop oppressing their people or Stephen Fry will unfollow them.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Head First Into Shallow Waters
‘You said that you only read the first ten pages of a script,’ said the woman whose head I could only see from the rear. ‘So, would it be okay if I made the font smaller?’
This was one of the better questions asked at the BBC’s Writersroom event but even this hammered me deeper into my seat and caused my right eyebrow to begin The Dance of Brutal Honesty.
I could feel it rising: the urge to say something monumentally arrogant. I could see myself standing up and launching into my best Peter Finch impression, shouting: ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’
But, thankfully, I wasn’t the one answering the questions. I was in the audience at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Another prospective writer, or, as I increasingly saw it, another sick fantasy wrapped in a fragile ego wondering why the hell he’d travelled at that way.
Yet, too that point, the day had been going so well. I’d reacquainted myself with the best book shop in the North West: Blue Coat Books, which in my student days was housed in the Bluecoat Galleries but has now been relocated to Hanover Street. I had enjoyed the frothed ice of ‘summer berries’ in Waterstones, where I’d also bought Graham McCann’s book on four of the finest comedy writers of the twentieth century: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, and Galton & Simpson. I’d then made the tiring slog up a hill I hadn’t trod in about four years and felt strangely nostalgic about the exhaustion.
I’d made that walk, from Lime Street to the University, for about a decade, only to find at the end of it that a doctorate in English Literature made me well qualified to despise criticism and critics. Wanting only to write, I’d quit the offered life of academic papers, lectures, tutorials, and marking, for the uncertainty of poverty, low self-esteem, and creative obscurity. I’d not been back to the University since.
Only, now I was back, I found I was being nothing but critical.
The truth is that I despise being around writers. Or, should I say, ‘would-be’ writers. I’ve worked with academics who have published dozens of books and, on the whole, they are flawed, troubled, and occasionally crazy. Yet they are also people that labour under no pretensions as to what they can or cannot do. They go about writing in a professional manner. It’s normal folk who take up the pen that worry me.
Aspiring writers tend to have a crazed look in their eyes, like dogs that spent their formative years with abusive owners and are damn sure that they’ll never be locked in another shed for another long hot Summer. The stench of desperation hangs on them like some primal musk. Everything is easy to them. Writing is not a struggle. They say things like: ‘I’ve got a script here, and one at home, and I finished one this morning, will write another this afternoon... Or do you want me to write something new?’
I felt ashamed to be among them. I could feel the eyes of the theatre staff on me, as though marking me out for special pity. ‘He thinks he’s a writer! Bless!’ And how could they think any different? Like every writer’s group I’ve ever attended, I end up surrounded by people driven by the post-Romantic urge to ‘express themselves’. These are those writers that gather in the local library on a Thursday morning and get their pictures in the free newspapers posted through our door.
‘Me and my friend are going to write a comedy’ asked some young girl at the back. ‘Do you want us to write the whole series first?’
‘Have you written the first episode?’ asked the professional script reader.
‘No, we’re just about to start.’
My other eyebrow began to dance. The opening act to a ballet was being performed above my nose and I knew it was going to end with a tragedy.
Then the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand to ask a question. On his lap: his script. The laminated cover had been reflecting the stage lights into my eyes for the whole presentation. His raised arm allowed me to see the title: ‘A Sample Script For “Doctors”’. He’d written his own version of an established show. But he wasn’t the only one.
A few moments later a hand goes up on the far side of the theatre: ‘Could I send you my script to “Eastenders”?’
Another person asked a question I didn’t hear but the reply suggested they’d asked about a show on Channel 4.
But by that time, I was all out of eyebrows. So my heart just sank. My heart sank and sank and sank.
Yet now I’m home, preparing for two days in my own private Manchester hell, I find that a quite different feeling is enduring about the event. In a perverse way, it has changed me.
I’ve always been hesitant about the purpose of the Writersroom. I’ve suspected it enabled the BBC to appear to be listening whilst going on doing their usual tricks of commissioning work from friends and those already inside the industry. The standard of BBC comedy is such that I’ve believed that no other explanation is likely. My recent attempts to write for ‘NewsJack’ has only increased my cynicism. I would have been happy if my sketches and one liners had been less funny than those broadcast but when I’m sure that my material is strong and still gets ignored, then I have to look for explanations. Perhaps I’m not funny. Perhaps my funny is not a mainstream funny. Did my work even get there?
Yet listening to head of the Writersroom North and the script reader, I did start to have faith in the system I had come to doubt. I believe they believed in the project and that belief now convinces me to believe a little bit more than I did before. I found that I wanted to ask questions, to beg for mercy before them, to say that I’m not like these people with their musicals set around the world of soft cheeses, the reheated episodes of Dr. Who, their questions already answered a hundred times on the Writersroom website. Yet I wouldn’t know what to ask. Not when others have more pressing issues to raise:
‘Can I include real music in my script?’
‘Does it have to look like a script?’
Somebody wise once said: writers write. To which I would add: would-be writers ask stupid questions about fonts.
This was one of the better questions asked at the BBC’s Writersroom event but even this hammered me deeper into my seat and caused my right eyebrow to begin The Dance of Brutal Honesty.
I could feel it rising: the urge to say something monumentally arrogant. I could see myself standing up and launching into my best Peter Finch impression, shouting: ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’
But, thankfully, I wasn’t the one answering the questions. I was in the audience at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Another prospective writer, or, as I increasingly saw it, another sick fantasy wrapped in a fragile ego wondering why the hell he’d travelled at that way.
Yet, too that point, the day had been going so well. I’d reacquainted myself with the best book shop in the North West: Blue Coat Books, which in my student days was housed in the Bluecoat Galleries but has now been relocated to Hanover Street. I had enjoyed the frothed ice of ‘summer berries’ in Waterstones, where I’d also bought Graham McCann’s book on four of the finest comedy writers of the twentieth century: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, and Galton & Simpson. I’d then made the tiring slog up a hill I hadn’t trod in about four years and felt strangely nostalgic about the exhaustion.
I’d made that walk, from Lime Street to the University, for about a decade, only to find at the end of it that a doctorate in English Literature made me well qualified to despise criticism and critics. Wanting only to write, I’d quit the offered life of academic papers, lectures, tutorials, and marking, for the uncertainty of poverty, low self-esteem, and creative obscurity. I’d not been back to the University since.
Only, now I was back, I found I was being nothing but critical.
The truth is that I despise being around writers. Or, should I say, ‘would-be’ writers. I’ve worked with academics who have published dozens of books and, on the whole, they are flawed, troubled, and occasionally crazy. Yet they are also people that labour under no pretensions as to what they can or cannot do. They go about writing in a professional manner. It’s normal folk who take up the pen that worry me.
Aspiring writers tend to have a crazed look in their eyes, like dogs that spent their formative years with abusive owners and are damn sure that they’ll never be locked in another shed for another long hot Summer. The stench of desperation hangs on them like some primal musk. Everything is easy to them. Writing is not a struggle. They say things like: ‘I’ve got a script here, and one at home, and I finished one this morning, will write another this afternoon... Or do you want me to write something new?’
I felt ashamed to be among them. I could feel the eyes of the theatre staff on me, as though marking me out for special pity. ‘He thinks he’s a writer! Bless!’ And how could they think any different? Like every writer’s group I’ve ever attended, I end up surrounded by people driven by the post-Romantic urge to ‘express themselves’. These are those writers that gather in the local library on a Thursday morning and get their pictures in the free newspapers posted through our door.
‘Me and my friend are going to write a comedy’ asked some young girl at the back. ‘Do you want us to write the whole series first?’
‘Have you written the first episode?’ asked the professional script reader.
‘No, we’re just about to start.’
My other eyebrow began to dance. The opening act to a ballet was being performed above my nose and I knew it was going to end with a tragedy.
Then the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand to ask a question. On his lap: his script. The laminated cover had been reflecting the stage lights into my eyes for the whole presentation. His raised arm allowed me to see the title: ‘A Sample Script For “Doctors”’. He’d written his own version of an established show. But he wasn’t the only one.
A few moments later a hand goes up on the far side of the theatre: ‘Could I send you my script to “Eastenders”?’
Another person asked a question I didn’t hear but the reply suggested they’d asked about a show on Channel 4.
But by that time, I was all out of eyebrows. So my heart just sank. My heart sank and sank and sank.
Yet now I’m home, preparing for two days in my own private Manchester hell, I find that a quite different feeling is enduring about the event. In a perverse way, it has changed me.
I’ve always been hesitant about the purpose of the Writersroom. I’ve suspected it enabled the BBC to appear to be listening whilst going on doing their usual tricks of commissioning work from friends and those already inside the industry. The standard of BBC comedy is such that I’ve believed that no other explanation is likely. My recent attempts to write for ‘NewsJack’ has only increased my cynicism. I would have been happy if my sketches and one liners had been less funny than those broadcast but when I’m sure that my material is strong and still gets ignored, then I have to look for explanations. Perhaps I’m not funny. Perhaps my funny is not a mainstream funny. Did my work even get there?
Yet listening to head of the Writersroom North and the script reader, I did start to have faith in the system I had come to doubt. I believe they believed in the project and that belief now convinces me to believe a little bit more than I did before. I found that I wanted to ask questions, to beg for mercy before them, to say that I’m not like these people with their musicals set around the world of soft cheeses, the reheated episodes of Dr. Who, their questions already answered a hundred times on the Writersroom website. Yet I wouldn’t know what to ask. Not when others have more pressing issues to raise:
‘Can I include real music in my script?’
‘Does it have to look like a script?’
Somebody wise once said: writers write. To which I would add: would-be writers ask stupid questions about fonts.
Monday, 23 February 2009
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
A Conversation
Them: Hi Richard. I’m such a fan. Love and kisses. xxxxxxxxx.
Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com
Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.
Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.
Them: Oh, but I am.
Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.
Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.
Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.
Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?
Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com
Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.
Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.
Them: Oh, but I am.
Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.
Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.
Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.
Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?
Saturday, 17 January 2009
The Beauty
The restaurant was Brazilian. I assume that the waitress was too. She was also stunningly beautiful, made all the more apparent by the way she hovered in the background and on the periphery of the action. She was something of an incongruity among the showy gimmickry of the rodizio, the waiters with their red kerchiefs and swords. Straight hair tied into a simple stroke that trailed from her authentic smile, she had a clean beauty with nothing artificial, nothing added. Just beauty. The only good thing about the meal. My only point of interest.
I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.
‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.
I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.
It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.
I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.
I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.
‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.
I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.
It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.
I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.
Monday, 12 January 2009
Monday
Three new pictures in the vault. Been in a strange mood precipitated either by an approaching cold or by two days watching the Twitterers go by. It’s as intriguing as it is depressing. Large swathes of human beings have nothing interesting to say but will say it nevertheless. I’d much rather somebody spoke nonsense that read about their preparations for the Sunday roast or how many tax forms they’ve completed. I even find myself defending Wossy who can actually be funny in his Tweets. Funnier, at least, than accountants and ever-so-sincere teenagers moaning on about ‘sickos’ who pretend to be famous people. It’s a difficult balance to strike. I’m tempted to turn Him into a voicebox for aphorisms such as ‘Celebrity is oppression; a tyranny of the few over the masses’ or ‘Fame is toxic and celebrity the result’. If feels like Twitter is now becoming overrun by celebrities at the rate that rats reproduced during the great plague. Yet the truth is that I’d always choose John Cleese’s smallest utterance over the ramblings of yet another social networking guru advertising a blog about media trends. Why do people bore me so utterly? Am I just a freak?
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