April 10: Just received most marvellous email out of the blue, re my mum:
“… I have been trying for years to ‘track’ your mother down, as she drew my portrait whilst ‘looking after’ me on a London to Edinburgh train on 1st September 1957! I have only just found her obituary online and I would like to convey my sincere condolences to you & your family.
“Corral will have only been 19 when she drew me, aged 9, after being ‘tasked’ by my aunt with looking after me till I got off the train at Darlington. (My parents had driven me to my aunt’s house in Basildon & left me in her care for the remainder of the summer school holidays, before my aunt sent me home on the train from Kings Cross).
“I have kept this drawing for over 60 years but still have fond memories of sitting gazing out of the window while your mother drew me.”
Isn’t that an amazing find?
April 7: Uncle Kev's Faulty Face Recognition, Example 97: So Jennifer Garner, out of the new Fantastic Four, is NOT the actress from season 1 of Reacher and Fall Of The House Of Usher. That's Willa Fitzgerald. But she IS the actress who played Anna in Inventing Anna, who WASN'T in fact the actress out of Unbelievable and Booksmart, who was of course Kaitlyn Dever. Got it.
Update: And she's Julia Garner, not Jennifer Garner! But apart from my ability to remember names or faces, I think I'm getting up to speed.
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When did the term OG creep into common usage?
I have only today discovered what it supposedly stands for. Though given that I’ve just seen it being used to refer to a pair of shoes and to Sir Ian McKellen suggests it has developed a certain flexibility.
I am the OG person who learns things a generation after everyone else.
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April 6: Just watched Cocaine Bear at last. Jolly good fun.
And filmed where?
I had no idea till I kept seeing tell tale clues in the end credits. Did you know? Can you guess?
(Reader, the answer was Wexford)
I'm not sure how keen Amazon are for anyone to buy my Eurovision Colouring Book. On the plus side, they've knocked a quid off the price. On the minus side, look at the bottom right hand corner of this picture.
"Usually dispatched within 3 to 7 months" - "FREE Prime delivery 29 May - 13 October, 2024"
Don't hold your breath waiting, kids. (You can get it on Etsy, it's cheaper and you get it next week)
*****
Is there a word for killing a world famous violinist?
Yehudicide
April 7: Things you discover when you're searching for something else. Who knew that Nicola Walker was in the Cambridge Footlights with Sue Perkins? Or that Andy Parson had curly hair? Once.
Visual gags that either never get old or that Cambridge Footlighters are obliged to do at some time: The Coathanger.
Above, Footlighters from 60 years ago in I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again; below, Footlighters from 40 years ago plugging their 2024 tour.
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April 10: One thing that’s puzzling me, here in Ireland, is the so called Dublin Posh or D4 accent, as Joanne McNally has here. Is it just me or does it not sound in the slightest bit “posh”?
If you think of posh Edinburgh, or any posh variant of an English accent, aren’t they defined by sounding dainty or refined, with the edges smoothed off. This Dublin Posh, compared say to lovely lilts I’ve heard from Galway or Wexford, sounds more like a docker than a debutante.
Look at me slap bang in the middle of the ad for UKCGF comic cons. It’s like me and my free caricatures* are some sort of attraction.
*NB I now tell folk the caricatures are optional, they don’t have to have them, they’re free if they buy something from my table, or a couple of quid donation if they want it. So far two people out of 100 (only done this at one event so far) said I could keep it. And they were foreign students who, to be fair, might not have understood what I was saying.
See you in Swansea on Saturday for more of the same. (Also original Marvel and Gladiators art. And books. So many books. )
April 12: Happiness is: taking 20 copies of your book to Ireland hoping to sell them to kids. It’s the school librarians that buy them. One takes 4, one takes 2, one takes none saying they’re getting rid of books and going digital (the horror!).
Then on the 5th and final day the librarian says “I’ll take ten” and I only have nine left.
And she displays them. The perfect end to a highly enjoyable week.
(Though next year I’ll have to charge more. Hotels, car hire, airport parking, and flights mean a trip like this is noticeably more expensive than it used to be)
April 17: To our credit none of us took photos at Alan’s funeral yesterday.
Damn. I bet we all really wish we’d taken photos. It was great, despite the circumstances, to see people we’d not seen for so long. It was a good send off.
Music included Birdland by Weather Report, and All You Need Is Love.
“I see there’s a lot of old people around. Must be cos we had such a mild winter”
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April 19: I was on the horns of a dilemma cos I was coming to the end of my print run of my self published book (Richard The Third, my biggest hit to date). Cos I'm selling them in schools, with kids taking about 25 copies a time, and they've been the big sellers at comic cons (eg 26 last Sunday), my initial print run of 500 was almost gone (so I'm ordering more, courtesy of the very excellent Stuart Gould, who I trust we all use).
So no I'm just feeling disappointed that I hadn't in fact sold as many as I'd thought. There's no pleasing some people.
(Reader, I ordered a new print run of 500 books for £1200)
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April 20: Anyone else trying to get through Feud: Capote and the Swans? Only 2 eps in and left a bit cold.
Whether it’s the original book, the writer, or the director to blame I don’t know. Or whether it’s because it’s hard to sympathise with Elmer Fudd and his awful ladies who lunch, and why you should care about whatever happens to any of them.
It better perk up is all I can say.
April 22: Who Do You Think You Are, but for horses. Spotted this weekend at Calke Abbey. This one horse was the great great great etc grandad of Red Rum, Desert Orchid, Shergar, and Seabiscuit.
Posh folk and their inbreeding, eh?
April 24: A long lost find (by Hev) reminds me I was illustrating Shakespeare (gasp) 20 years ago.
This is the booklet from a CD-Rom called Superbard, from Harper Collins in 2003. Yes, they used to print a booklet telling you how to use your computer. Try telling the kids today.
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April 26: Just did that trip to the Post Office that reminded me I need to raise my postage prices on Etsy. Hadn't given them a thought.
So I just posted a book to the Netherlands, it cost me £6.55 and I'd only charged the client a fiver postage. And domestic postage for a book is now £2.50, and I was still only charging £2.25.
Come to Uncle Kev for lessons in how to lose money in ways you never even thought of.
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Cos I'm meant to be getting on with proper work, I've been distracted by this. The Variety glossary of movie terms that only they use. How many can you work out?
Ankling
The Eye web
The Frog web
Beantown
The Lion
The Wickets
Mitting
An Oater
Pubcaster
Shingle
Solon
Terping
Zitcom
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April 28: Last night’s movie is one I highly recommend: Blackberry
An excellent comedy, not made on a big budget, with no big stars in, it told its (true) story perfectly, with comedy throughout and not flagging once.
I knew none of this story, didn’t even know the Blackberry was a Canadian invention. V good.
*****
April 29: Forgive my ignorance, but what the hell's a HEIC?
I transfer some images to my laptop today and instead of coming across as jpgs, as they've always done, they're a heic. I now have to look up another word. Honestly, the future, would you stop coming up with new things?
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April 30: Jerry Seinfeld talks about "woke" comedy
Ok, the whole “woke destroyed comedy” is nonsense, and I don’t think he meant that anyway. But his “where is comedy on TV?” point is an interesting one.
My TV comedy viewing habits have certainly changed over the years. I used to be a sitcom vulture. I ran a thing called The Sitcom Trials, which was part of my desire to join the great tradition of sitcom writing. A tradition which, when I looked up at the end of my twenty year experiment, had all but died.
The studio audience sitcom, where you laughed along with a crowd whose laughter you could hear, has almost entirely been replaced by the comedy drama (eg Motherland or Derry Girls, where the laughs are definitely there, but in a filmic rather than theatrical way) and panel games (eg HIGNFY and Taskmaster) which will regularly reduce me to tears, like Frasier and Fawlty Towers once did, but without the narrative element.
We’re told US TV is crying out for a new trad sitcom, something broad with wide audience appeal. They’d kill for a Friends, but will we see its like again?
Recently I’ve tried watching a few new BBC comedies and they’ve fallen flat for me. Mammoth, Mandy, and Alma’s Not Normal just seemed to lack the wit or the writing chops. Certainly when I rewatched Philomena Cunk and Motherland for balance I found I was still capable of laughing at comedy on film made under cloudy skies, so it was them not me.
Is there good new sitcom out there? Or do we not really want it any more?
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April 30: A post Baby Reindeer discussion, mentioning how Michaela Coel avoided starting a manhunt and opening a can of worms with I May Destroy You, led to me finding this story. In short Michaela spells out how she was abused by a stranger, whose identity we don’t find out, and how she and a colleague were verbally abused by someone in TV. Which could just as easily have started a “who was he?” hunt as Reindeer did.
Maybe nobody cared when these stories went into IMDY.
Some forty year old photos unearthed from a drawer, taken at a comicon in London in, I think, 1985. That’s Alan Moore on the right, along with Garry Leach, Alan Grant, Kevin O’Neill, Richard Burton, and Martin Lock of FA.
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May 1: Nostalgic for the old Readers Digest, which ceased publication this week. My Mum and Dad got it and it was a big source of wisdom through my childhood.
If you never encountered it, it was a collection of articles from other magazines and papers, and abridged books, supplemented by features such as Humour In Uniforn, Laughter Is The Best Medicine, and “I Am John’s Spleen”, a piece where a body part would describe itself in the first person. That feature helped me to a B in O Level Biology.
Naturally Readers Digest has folded because it was, in sum total, just what you get on Facebook, except you had to wait for and pay for it, which are not concepts that work these days.
Interestingly, when it came to clearing out the parents house, the Readers Digests were nowhere to be found. They were not the sort of thing one held on to, they were the sort of thing you donated to the dentists waiting room. Now the whole thing’s gone to the dentists waiting room in the sky.
