Topical comedy

I submitted some sketches to BBC radio this week, as a kind of writer's audition for a new topical/satirical comedy show they're about to launch. Turns out it's quite difficult making funny out of the news.

Here's one of the sketches that guarantees I won't be invited to submit any more. Relevant news commentary is here.

SOUND: CLATTER AND CHUFF OF A STEAM TRAIN; WE ARE INSIDE ONE OF THE CARRIAGES. A WOODEN DOOR SLIDES OPEN.

GUARD
The body is in here, Monsieur Poirot...

POIROT
Ouf! What a mess! Do we know who it is?

GUARD
Yes, Detective. It is the body of a Mr Fred Goodwin.

POIROT
The former chief executive of the Royal Bank Of
Scotland...

GUARD
The very same. I’m no forensics expert, Monsieur
Poirot, but he would appear to have been stabbed.

POIROT
Yes. Yes, and if I’m not mistaken... It looks as though
he’s been stabbed around about sixty million times.

GUARD
Ah. That’s interesting.

POIROT
Do you know something, Monsieur le ticket inspecteur?

GUARD
It may be a coincidence, but... A group of about sixty
million people boarded the train in Istanbul. As I
recall, they said they were the entire population of
Great Britain.

POIROT
Then there’s our motive. Which carriage are they in?

GUARD
I’m afraid they all disembarked at Belgrade.

POIROT
Ah well. Just blame it on a teenager then.

I didn't like Slumdog Millionaire

An opinion piece.

---SPOILERS THROUGHOUT---

It's not a bad movie. It looks great, the actors are good, the story's fairly compelling and told in an interesting way. But I got the sense that at the end - after the beautiful girl says "Kiss me" to the poor boy who's been through so much, and the cast does a dance number over the credits - that I was supposed to be feeling good. Wiping away emotional tears and feeling all warm inside because the beautiful couple overcame the odds and now they can live happily ever after.

Instead I was miserable as hell. Because when you take away the love story and all the talk of "destiny" - which, let's face it, is Hollywood bullshit - what you're left with is a movie about a hideous reality that millions of people have to endure every single day. And they don't get a happy ending.

Take away the impossibly beautiful girl and the impossibly lucky guy, and it's a story about kids scavenging for food on immense rubbish heaps, vicious gangsters burning out childrens' eyes with chemicals, religious-crazy mobs beating and burning the poor to death while the police stand by and watch, and men becoming millionaires by exploiting anyone less fortunate or more ethical than themselves. And these bits of the film aren't Hollywood bullshit. These are the bits that are based on reality.

Nevertheless, as lucky guy kisses beautiful girl and the dancing begins, I'm supposed to forget all the horror we've just witnessed and sing along.

Unless, maybe, I'm not. Maybe Danny Boyle has done something very clever, and disguised a depressing bit of social commentary as a feelgood love story. Maybe he's like a Ninja Ken Loach. Maybe everybody who sees it walks out of the theatre as suicidal as I did, guilty and hopeless and wishing as-soon-as-possible extinction on the human species.

Still; beautiful girl.

Making shadows in After Effects

Literally nones of people have expressed an interest in how Grey Bloke's new look was achieved, but here are some images grabbed from After Effects anyway in case any geeks are reading this.

As far as I know, this is the easiest way to apply shadows to a flat image if you want to retain some flexibility and have the option to change the light source.

Graham needs a new source of income

I don't want Graham Murkett to have to go out to work -- it's important that he spends all his time half-dressed sitting in front of his computer. So a while back I decided that he'd done a deal online with a guy from Nigeria and was now set up for life -- though his millions haven't changed him one bit.

Flight Of The Conchords have just used exactly the same idea (season 2, episode 2). The sums of money are different and they end the episode broke again, but the "Nigerian scam turning out not to be a scam" idea has now officially been done.

And maybe it already had been done in countless other shows; maybe the idea just wasn't that clever in the first place.

But Graham now needs a different reason for not needing to work. I wonder if he might have inadvertently started a pyramid scheme way back before everyone realised they were rubbish...?

State Of The Art

While the SomeGreyBloke sitcom and the radio thing hang in "Will Anybody Ever Get Back To Me?" limbo, one thing that is progressing is a (very) short film called State of The Art.

I don't want to give too much away at this stage, but it's being animated in Maya (a young chap who lives in London has come on board as animator) and the main character voice was provided by Max Koch-pronounced-Cook (who you can see here being Tony Soprano, Phil Leotardo, Al Pacino and Robert de Niro).

It started as an idea I suggested to the BBC back in September when somebody there was briefly interested in me. I can only assume that interest has waned -- but we're going ahead with the film anyway, because... Well, just because.

More old work

Found another few Morph episodes I made in 1995.

That's FOURTEEN years ago. FOURTEEN YEARS.

Chas builds an enormous Leninesque sculpture

I have no idea what I was thinking with this one

And how contrived is this?

That Carol Thatcher apology in full

"Carol Thatcher does not condone any racist comments. It was a private remark, said in jest, and she regrets any inconvenience caused."

So that's alright then.

Here's Stewart Lee on "Has political correctness gone mad?", saying it better than I ever could (obviously):

Heresy

41st Best Standup

BBC wishlist

Informative review of a BBC Writer's Room talk held last night, courtesy of Kevin Murphy.