Brief travelogue and comedy reviews
Mar. 25th, 2013 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shark_hatI have been to Glasgow. It was nice. I exchanged an incorrectly sold cable at the Apple store and had a large hotel breakfast.
…
(largely unaltered from notes done when v. tired)
Lovely train ride up via Carlisle, sun shining on amazing craggy scenery, with the high peaks snowcovered, and wee lambs in the fields.
I went up originally to watch a recording of Pappy's' new sitcom, Badults, at BBC Scotland- though if the comedy festival hadn't been on I might have been able to resist. The record was on Thursday night, starting at seven and supposed to finish at 10 (actually went to 10.45). The one I saw is planned to be ep 5 (of 6). It's a bottle episode, and a proper farce, whisking in and out of doors and all. The boys get a 3-for-one deal on matching onesies on the same day that Matthew's sister and internet girlfriend, and Tom's mother, come to stay- with hilarious consequences! (Tom's mum was played by Julia Deacon- Marsha from Spaced- who was excellent, so that was a consolation for not seeing Jack Docherty this ep.)
It's always fun to go to a recording, and this one was great, beautifully done and dotted through with daft sight-gags like a couple of sequences where people mirror each other. Oh, and one brilliant callback with musical punchline. As ever in a TV record, there were lots of retakes, mostly just for slightly fluffed lines though once for a doorknob falling off. (Emer: “Third time I've pulled this knob off today.”) They had a bet on where the guy who fluffed a line first would give money to charity; Matthew lost it for the third time in the series, on his opening word. And the studio played a cash register noise in.
(Tom: “We need to do a pickup on the boob grab? Yesss!”)
It was fun to watch the props guy keeping track of the remarkable number of full lattes, half-full lattes, and nearly empty lattes required. And topping up six bottles of a vile blue drink every time they had to do a retake of downing it. (Matthew: “We can just act and not actually drink it? Now you fucking tell me!”) After several takes Tom went into another bit of the set so he could burp away from the boom mikes.
A couple of memorable things from moments just before a take started; in a drinking scene, Matthew's quote of the Dorothy Parker line “I'll be under the host”; Tom bodily shoving Ben onto the sofa. It was also quite amusing watching them fidget.
Snowed like fuck on Friday, so I didn't go to the Botanical Gardens. Rosehip tea in a Mackintosh tearoom, tenements, dim sum, snowy parks, cast-iron railings, Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets In Space! (Fun! War, Famine, Pestilence and Howard; sawing a sock in half; an invisible Third Sock, Zeppo, a Méliès moon disguised as a kitten; terrible, terrible airport puns; the wrong sock ad-libbing; “There's a man down there with teeth on his head,”; dueling lightsabers; Tony the piano; their warm-up music, falsetto socks doing The Ride of the Valkyries, that fitted beautifully with the New Zealand Test highlights on the telly) and late-night sushi. I think I like Glasgow.
I read a fairly terrible mid-nineteenth century American sensation novel (with not one, but two unacknowledged true heirs wandering about the place, and happy slaves called Pitpat and Wool), and had to read Jane Eyre to cleanse my palate.
The Botanic Gardens in the snow were pretty- the glasshouses are very good, I kept thinking I was at the last bit and then there would be another door into another climate zone. And Kelvingrove art museum is excellent without being too huge; I now have a favourite of the Scottish Colourists... (SJ Peploe, thank you for asking)
Pub was out of black pudding for the black pudding and bacon salad, had to have a haggis and bacon salad instead. #modernscottish
And Mitch Benn's Reduced Circumstances show was neat, a bit more talky than his show with the Distractions, and a has bit of a theme, but basically good daft songs. “Intelligent design? We shouldn't fall for that, we're not Americans who expect everything to be perfect, we're British, we're used to things that are a complete fucking shambles but somehow stumble through.”
Buy one of his records! (though none of them have the song about global warming, because he only plays that in Scotland. Nor the Bouncy Druids one because that's just too silly to record.)
Sunday: square sausage and potato scone roll for breakfast, managed to have a quick look at the Tron church before getting the train, and spent the journey home going "Huh, I expected the snow to be melting away as we go south. I wonder when that'll happen?" before getting home and realising no, there's been five inches here.
…
(largely unaltered from notes done when v. tired)
Lovely train ride up via Carlisle, sun shining on amazing craggy scenery, with the high peaks snowcovered, and wee lambs in the fields.
I went up originally to watch a recording of Pappy's' new sitcom, Badults, at BBC Scotland- though if the comedy festival hadn't been on I might have been able to resist. The record was on Thursday night, starting at seven and supposed to finish at 10 (actually went to 10.45). The one I saw is planned to be ep 5 (of 6). It's a bottle episode, and a proper farce, whisking in and out of doors and all. The boys get a 3-for-one deal on matching onesies on the same day that Matthew's sister and internet girlfriend, and Tom's mother, come to stay- with hilarious consequences! (Tom's mum was played by Julia Deacon- Marsha from Spaced- who was excellent, so that was a consolation for not seeing Jack Docherty this ep.)
It's always fun to go to a recording, and this one was great, beautifully done and dotted through with daft sight-gags like a couple of sequences where people mirror each other. Oh, and one brilliant callback with musical punchline. As ever in a TV record, there were lots of retakes, mostly just for slightly fluffed lines though once for a doorknob falling off. (Emer: “Third time I've pulled this knob off today.”) They had a bet on where the guy who fluffed a line first would give money to charity; Matthew lost it for the third time in the series, on his opening word. And the studio played a cash register noise in.
(Tom: “We need to do a pickup on the boob grab? Yesss!”)
It was fun to watch the props guy keeping track of the remarkable number of full lattes, half-full lattes, and nearly empty lattes required. And topping up six bottles of a vile blue drink every time they had to do a retake of downing it. (Matthew: “We can just act and not actually drink it? Now you fucking tell me!”) After several takes Tom went into another bit of the set so he could burp away from the boom mikes.
A couple of memorable things from moments just before a take started; in a drinking scene, Matthew's quote of the Dorothy Parker line “I'll be under the host”; Tom bodily shoving Ben onto the sofa. It was also quite amusing watching them fidget.
Snowed like fuck on Friday, so I didn't go to the Botanical Gardens. Rosehip tea in a Mackintosh tearoom, tenements, dim sum, snowy parks, cast-iron railings, Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets In Space! (Fun! War, Famine, Pestilence and Howard; sawing a sock in half; an invisible Third Sock, Zeppo, a Méliès moon disguised as a kitten; terrible, terrible airport puns; the wrong sock ad-libbing; “There's a man down there with teeth on his head,”; dueling lightsabers; Tony the piano; their warm-up music, falsetto socks doing The Ride of the Valkyries, that fitted beautifully with the New Zealand Test highlights on the telly) and late-night sushi. I think I like Glasgow.
I read a fairly terrible mid-nineteenth century American sensation novel (with not one, but two unacknowledged true heirs wandering about the place, and happy slaves called Pitpat and Wool), and had to read Jane Eyre to cleanse my palate.
The Botanic Gardens in the snow were pretty- the glasshouses are very good, I kept thinking I was at the last bit and then there would be another door into another climate zone. And Kelvingrove art museum is excellent without being too huge; I now have a favourite of the Scottish Colourists... (SJ Peploe, thank you for asking)
Pub was out of black pudding for the black pudding and bacon salad, had to have a haggis and bacon salad instead. #modernscottish
And Mitch Benn's Reduced Circumstances show was neat, a bit more talky than his show with the Distractions, and a has bit of a theme, but basically good daft songs. “Intelligent design? We shouldn't fall for that, we're not Americans who expect everything to be perfect, we're British, we're used to things that are a complete fucking shambles but somehow stumble through.”
Buy one of his records! (though none of them have the song about global warming, because he only plays that in Scotland. Nor the Bouncy Druids one because that's just too silly to record.)
Sunday: square sausage and potato scone roll for breakfast, managed to have a quick look at the Tron church before getting the train, and spent the journey home going "Huh, I expected the snow to be melting away as we go south. I wonder when that'll happen?" before getting home and realising no, there's been five inches here.
