The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

I've seen Richard Herring's Christ on a Bike tour and a two-hander about Doctor Johnson this week, which were both good fun, and also listened to the last episode of ISIRTA series 6, which I've just got hold of- the last part of the Electric Time Trousers serial is amazing- David Hatch, the narrator, recaps the last episode and then goes "rocks fall, everybody dies. Now, I shall sing!", and then Cleese says he can't do that and resurrects them, only to make his character into the star, and then all of them push themselves to the mike and take over (particularly the ones who play several characters each), and at the end they all get killed again so David gets another chance to sing... anyway, the Herring show, the play and the serieal all do one of my favourite things, drawing attention to their medium and playing with what you can do on stage or on radio, making meta-jokes, even deconstructing themselves for the audience's delectation [1]; which just makes me wonder slightly about why I don't like litfic much, when one of its selling points is just this sort of messing about with form and levels of reality. Maybe it's just that there has to be something there to mess about *with*, and I've got more patience when there are jokes to be had than for the beauty of language on its own?

([1]See also, Dick and Dom's Funny Business, eg, holding up little signs that say "Tenuous link alert"; Kenneth William's rants in Round the Horne; everything Foley and McColl have ever done; the "backstage" sketches from Mitchell and Webb; the front-of-curtain chats in the Boosh live shows; Absolutely's "This. Is. RADICAL. Television" series opener; etc- I *said* this was one of my favourite things.)

So I was listening to The Burkiss Way and realised that Renwick and Marshall must have written for Not The Nine O'Clock News, because there was the "I want to buy a gramophone" sketch!... except on TV, I don't remember it mutating through a game-show and ending with Genghis Khan chopping somebody's head off. (I think early Renwick and Marshall are the most overtly Python-influenced writers I've come across- it works well in Burkiss Way where it's mostly fun stuff in playing with the format and having sketches run into each other; in Alexei Sayle's Stuff you can see why writers might steer clear of Pythonesque themes, because it feels really derivative. And Angus Deayton isn't as good at being John Cleese as John Cleese is.)

Anyway! Went to see Mark Watson last night, and it was marvellous fun. He was sitting at the front with a laptop and a Word doc open on a screen as people came in, and having strange typed conversations with the audience; also, he did a bit about people needing to be less self-conscious and do more fun things, like chasing people... so when it turned out there was an 11-year-old in, he chased him around the audience. It was v. amusing. And his prepared stuff was good as well.

Dammit, I've lost Asylum somehow. Why why why. I really felt like watching Norman Lovett being scary and Julian being loopy.

Anyway. Mark Watson Makes The World Substantially Better (with Tim Minchin and Tim Key) was enjoyable, Radio 4, Listen Again, same drill as usual.

I passed a busker this morning. He was playing La Bamba on an electric harp. (Not a lap-harp. A full size one.)

BBC7 is repeating The Remains of Foley and McColl starting tonight. Somewhat miffed because I won't be able to record any of them (that whole things-in-boxes problem), but I'll listen to them on Listen Again, and so should you, because they're good. They're full'o'crunchy meta, do radio-based jokes rather than being a TV show in waiting, also (most importantly) are funny.

Enjoyed Old Red Rope on Monday night- none of the acts hugely memorable, though, except Robin Ince.

I did myself a little list of things to put in this post. It went "harp, Foley & McColl, Monday", which reminds me of a list in Always Coming Home- I can't remember all of it, but part of it's something like
"A list of things that will be needed two weeks from now.
Certain prickly seeds
Stones with conical depressions in them
A young donkey
Rain"
and there isn't any context to it. Just a nice thing to wonder about.

Last night I went to see The Cowards at the Hen and Chickens because they were pretty good on this week's 28 Acts In 28 Minutes on Radio 4, (a cunning idea. If an act's rubbish, just wait 30 seconds and the next one will be on.) and weren't at all bad; I was going to the H&C anyway to see the later show. The later show ended up being full, but the Cowards were good, anyway!

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I read The Midnight Folk a few days ago and am now on to The Box Of Delights. They're both good books, I particularly like the dream-logic, and the rich sensory descriptions (the magic in these really feels magical), and the touches of humour- the marine cellarmen, and the way Abner and Sylvia Daisy quarrel while calling each other "my Astuteness", "my Inspiration", "my starlike Abner", "my blue and my yellow Sapphire".
Somehow Box never seems like a sequel to Midnight Folk to me, though- it's more as if Midnight Folk is an alternate history to Box (the very different way they use magic and dreams may be behind this, or that one is set very much around Seekings house and the other ranges far more widely; but Caroline Louisa, Abner, and Sylvia, in particular, feel like different characters with the same names.)

The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show is On BBC 7 tonight (11.30 BST)- this week's episode, The Tragedies. Listen, adore, spread the love :-)
BBC 7 site, Listen Live or Listen Again links are on the right.