April 14: Since all the kids are doing it, who am I to buck the trend?
New book launch time, baby!
(Better finish writing and drawing it, then, eh?)
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The book I’m currently enjoying is Last Shop Standing by Graham Jones. Picked up cheap in a charity shop, it’s from 2010 and simply looks at all the independent record shops Graham, a record dealer, has worked with over the previous forty years.
It gives you a great insight into how record selling used to work , the hyping, the blagging, the totally criminal methods used by some labels to get in the charts, and the resourcefulness of shop managers in the face of unhelpful record labels, difficult customers and, from his viewpoint in 2010, the challenges of the internet.
If you love small scale homespun stories, which are mostly not about big names but give you a good look under the hood of a business I have certainly loved all my life, it’s a fun read.
I look forward to finding out which, if any, of the 50 record shops he covers in detail have become, 15 years on, the eponymous last shops standing. He writes this all before the arrival of both Spotify and National Record Shop Day.
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Re; Last One Laughing
“.. the show that could save Amazon”? Mate, I think Amazon’s doing fine. It can afford to spaff money up the wall on random TV commissions until something sticks. It’s all a tax write off.
No, my big question re Last One Laughing is: why so big a set?
That massive set, coupled with the big pay checks the comics are obviously getting (for literally one day’s work), reeks of overspend. Why? Why not take that whopping budget (let’s assume between twice and five times a Channel 4 spend) and spend it on making more episodes? Or investing in different shows?
“If the lady’s paying, why not have the vicuña?” (Name that film). If Amazon are offering to make the shows Channel 4 and BBC no longer can, why not use their money to invest in something for the future?
Amazon’s spare cash could single-handedly revive the UK sitcom, the studio audience comedy, maybe even the entire business. They’ll get content which they can endlessly exploit, and so will the prodco’s. Explain to me why you’d spend all that money on one oversized set instead?
My social media is split between my artists who think AI is the work of the devil, and my civilians (Inc a good few comedians) who think AI action figures are cool. But who’s best? Only one way to find out…
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April 6: Oh dear. The latest film we’ve bailed on mid-movie: the woeful Electric State.
I was all prepared for a mindless roller coaster ride or a comedy adventure or something fun. The pedigree of the folks involved suggested I might get something a bit Jurassic Park or Guardians of the Galaxy, or a bit Enola Holmes or some such. But no.
I’m struggling to find words other than The Guardian’s “bafflingly dull” but honestly that sums up my feeling. For the first half hour you get an amazingly over-expensive avalanche of visuals that are telling, not showing, you an over complicated back story. We had robots since the 50s, then there was a Robot War under Bill Clinton in the 90s, and now it’s two years later and we’re in a post apocalyptic world with some robots and some VR helmets and parameters for the rest of the story that are too dense to remember and, most importantly, have not been entertaining yet.
How could anyone think a mega-dump of exposition would be more interesting than, I dunno, making a film that told a story?
Anyway, it doesn’t get better. Tropes and notions that have been better done in things from Fallout to ET to Planet of the Apes are done unoriginally and without you ever caring about any of the parties involved.
After a little over an hour we gave up on the soulless endeavour. Don’t bother telling me it gets better. I will never care.
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April 6: Dunno about you, but my Facebook feed is equally divided between mainstream news footage of yesterday’s anti Trump protests and folks complaining that the mainstream media hadn’t covered yesterday’s anti Trump protests.
April 4: Happiness is seeing The Socks on Ian’s shirt, at tonight’s gig at Chorley Theatre, which is sold out, which is also happiness.
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April 7: Trump Tariffs
Hey fellow people who don't know much about stocks and shares and wondered how this Trump tariff thing was going to affect you. Have you got one of those private pensions where they show you a graph of how well it's doing?
Well don't look at it. Not unless you want to see what an outline drawing of the Matterhorn looks like.
Siri, please show me a story that gives me an excuse to say “that ship has sailed” again.
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April 10: The Studio
Missing your dose of one-shots, now that we’ve all forgotten Adolescence? May I recommend the brilliant The Studio.
It’s on Apple TV and (3 episodes in) is the best new international comedy of the year. The one-shots aside (and they are amazing -episode two is a single shot throughout (ostensibly) and is sublimely done) it’s also hilarious.
If you like movie insider comedy you’ll adore this. Remember that flop The Franchise last year? This gets right everything that got wrong, then tops it. It has the plotting of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cameo comedy of Extras, the fast talking of Aaron Sorkin, the style of The Player, the cringe of Motherland and The Office, and a solid core of all its own character driven comedy.
It’s shot onto my Top Ten TV of the year instantly.
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April 15: Article about anti-plus size Ozempic backlash
Ironically this anti-plus-size backlash is accompanied, on the radio, by the new single by Lambrini Girls which choruses “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”
The double irony is that the song, a smashing punky number currently on the 6 Music playlist, is an ironic song attacking body shaming. The other repeated line is “Kate Moss gives no f***s that my period has stopped, Wish I was skinny, but I'll never be enough”
The industry has embraced the new US administration. They don’t call it body fascism for nothing.
My Facebook continues to be split between comedians and other civilians doing AI action figure memes, and artists reacting against it with Anti-AI "Starter Pack" memes. Where will it all end?
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The song Running/Planning by CMAT
I’ve moved on from actors who look the same to pop songs that sound the same. Who else has heard Running/Planning by CMAT (crazy lady crazy name) and thought “oh, Texas are back”.
It sounds more like Texas than Texas have for the last twenty years. In particular it’s very like Say What You Want. Just me on this?
April 20: Thanks to the fab sellout crowd at Rondo Theatre Bath last night for being brilliant throughout Post Office Scandal The Musical.
Special thanks to Linda Brooks for these super Sock selfies. A lot of these were taken last night. Bring em on if you want to share.
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April 21: Doctor Who record low overnight ratings
Seriously, this is still a headline? Even I know TV ratings are meaningless and irrelevant in 2025, and I’m an old person!
A TV show that is released online earlier in the day, so every super-fan will have watched it hours before broadcast, and exists in a world where everyone schedules their own TV so everyone else will watch it most likely that same night but not at broadcast time, is watched by a quite surprising million people who had nothing better to do on a Saturday night? Pretty impressive.
I watched it at 10.15 Sat night after I’d got back from a gig, and again on Sunday night cos I thought it merited a second viewing. Those are the stats that matter.
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April 21 - Lux v Hotel Reverie
Last night we watched two TV shows doing a Purple Rose of Cairo: Doctor Who Lux, and Black Mirror Hotel Reverie. I’ve got to say both were ambitious and impressive but one succeeded where the other fell short.
We watched Lux twice, and parts of it are excellent. But the intrusive music kept being distracting and annoying, taking you out of the drama, while the plot itself had me not sure what was happening, or at stake, a lot of the time. And I remain un-gripped by Ncuti Gatwa’s performance I’m afraid. I keep imaging Christopher Eccleston or Jodie Whittaker delivering the same lines and thinking it would work better.
Hotel Reverie was a joy. It had at least one of us welling up by the end, and it balanced its comedy and drama brilliantly. Charlie Brooker obviously realised that much of his premise would crumble under examination (acting a 90 minute film in real time with no rehearsal? A movie studio that seems to have made its hit films 70 years ago still being in business and only now facing closure? Etc) so he leant into it. We knew the maguffin had silly plot holes but we didn’t care because the virtual world inside the screen was the one that mattered. A well told romance, with music that helped tell the story rather than drowning it.
The contrast between Black Mirror and Doctor Who are fairer to make than they ever have been. We can’t blame any paucity on lack of budget any more ( as we might have done when Jodie Whittaker had to compete with Marvel TV series or Peter Capaldi was pitted against Stranger Things). Here are two examples where one show worked better than another:
The flashback. Emma Corrin in Reverie crossed the wall of the virtual world and suddenly gets a montage of images that tell her backstory. We get it and it’s dramatic. In Lux, The Doctor tells us about the Gods and we get a montage of images of the last season’s villains. It’s just a mess that has you trying to remember stories you only liked one of.
The old movie. Reverie reconstructs its 1940s “not-Casablanca” perfectly. Every shot, the film treatment, the music, even the accents. Lux has a brilliant design for Mr Ring A Ding, very Fleischer studio, spot on. But then he uses his catch phrase as a punchline in sentences where it’s never set up - he says “Don’t make me laugh” when no one has said anything funny or in need of correction. And he has that awful song which a) nobody in cartoons of that time had b) has atrocious lyrics and c) he launches into in the middle of the action of his own movie, incongruously.
I’m being picky, I know. There was so much to love in both shows, and much of Lux was joyous. The Duck Amuck Chuck Jones* film play was fun (but again fared badly in comparison to, checks notes, Duck Amuck by Chuck Jones) and the Whovian fans were great, a true high point (and this is coming from someone who liked Love And Monsters).
Hey, good luck to both shows. We’re lucky to have them and we should be glad of that. The fact that both shows remind us of the demise of British broadcast TV at the hands of the streamers (Channel 4 lost Black Mirror to Netflix, and Disney have enabled this last gasp for the BBC flagship show) is just another part they play in our cultural history.
I’m happy to recommend both.
* NB I originally posted this suggesting Tex Avery directed Duck Amuck. What movie could it be I was thinking of?
My Facebook continues to show an even spread of artists hating on AI action figure slop and comedians saying nothing could be cooler than slightly ironic AI action figure slop. I am allowed to be friends with everyone, right?
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April 21: Hallelujah, here's a glorious Easter revelation for you - Tales From The Bible is now available in a beautiful paperback book version in glorious black and white, on that Amazon for only £9.99
The Book Of Esther, Book Of Ruth, Story of Joseph, Rahab The Prostitute, and Jael Wife Of Heber, all yours for the asking.
Doesn't feature any of your actual Little Baby Jesus, but I bet it's what he would have wanted.
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Re: HIGNFY not covering trans court decision story
Who knows anything about behind the scenes on Have I Got News For You?
I've got bias-confirming anti-BBC folks on my Facebook claiming that HIGNFY deliberately ignored the trans/Equal Rights verdict story because the BBC is biased. Whereas I maintain (cos I think I've been told this) that HIGNFY often doesn't do stories that break on Wednesdays because they haven't finished breaking by the time they record the show on a Thursday afternoon.
Siri, show me how I can publicise the new season of Sandman by portraying its author as Mr Popular The Nice Guy
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April 23: Article about Doctor Who being "broken"
Many good points made here. My big question is: why do we care so much?
There are a few cultural gems about whose fate my online friends get concerned, comics and Doctor Who being top of the list (a list that includes James Bond, the BBC, pubs, stand up comedy, the Edinburgh Fringe - you’re getting a good idea of my friendship circle here).
For me Doctor Who and how badly it’s faring is a barometer for the state of the wider broadcasting ecosystem, and its current downswing certainly mirrors that of a lot of telly. But more than that it’s an old friend who’s been part of our lives for longer than most of us have been alive (I’m rare in having been born before it started in 1963) and we’re desperate to see it stay with us.
Here’s my take: TV is not dead, it’s in a golden age. This month I’ve watched milestone telly of the decade, including Reacher and The White Lotus which are not only critical successes but are also in the Top 10 Streaming Chart. Internationally they’re being watched by billions. And at number 9 in that chart this month? Adolescence. A British created show that once would have been a Play For Today on BBC1.
So telly is doing well, we’ve never had it so good. It’s broadcasters that are suffering. That’s in flux and we’ll see what shape it all takes as the years roll by.
As for Doctor Who, it remains the one thing everybody wants: IP with content. On this weeks The Rest Is Entertainment podcast they pointed out one of the biggest hits on streaming recently was an old 1960s show (was it Bonanza or Dragnet? I forget). The point was that back catalogue of episodes meant viewers could chalk up many hours of consumption simply because there was so much to consume.
And what does Doctor Who have? That!
So whoever takes the show on next, if Disney drops it, in which case it would sit very well in the Amazon stable, they get tons of content which, if they know how to exploit it, it is a goldmine with unrivalled potential.
I agree that the Disney RTD series has misfired, and that public awareness of the show is having one of its slumps. (This first happened in 1966 after Dalekmania, so it’s nothing new). But I feel the right streamer could find the right showrunner (as Amazon did with Reacher and Fallout, and as Disney does with approx half of their Marvel shows) and Doctor Who will once more make ground breaking entertainment.
I’m looking forward to it. It might just take time. And we may have to go the long way round.
The Couldn't Afford Two Quid Club from Plymouth Comicon (video)
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April 29: Another school another book signing. This was quite a posh school, a prep school in Sussex, so a wider range of ages than most primary schools (prep schools go up to Year 8, but you knew that). So I was able to offer them my whole range of Shakespeare books, not just Richard The Third (which is aimed at 7-12 year olds). Happy to say they bought across the range (Macbeth, Hamlet and Midsummer Nights Dream) but Richard remained the most popular choice.
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Re; Kneecaps' "Kill Your MP" comments
Dear Director of Public Prosecutions, I would like you to investigate a Mr Morrisey off of beat combo The Smiths for his lyric “hang the DJ hang the DJ” which has, for forty years now, led to no DJs being hung yet. Something should be done about this at once.
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April 29: Today I am mostly writing Shakespeare, outside in the sun (yes be jealous) wearing the only pair of flip flops I own. Which are themselves a pleasant reminder of the only time The Socks played Australia.
Book signings ahoy - May 17 Book-Ish Abergavenny, May 24 Script Haven Worcester.
Come get your face drawn for free, and if you fancy my books (signed by the author, by the way) then all the better! Spread the word!
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Richard The Third | Findlay Macbeth | Prince of Denmark Street | Midsummer Night's Dream Team |
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Shakespeare Omnibus | Comic Tales From The Bible | Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories | Space Elain |
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