Month: July 2004

This weekend, I have mostly been wondering how Julia Sawalha manages to keep her job. Perhaps you’re not familar with the advertising campaign for catalogue-based retailer Argos, in which she stars as hapless PA to Richard E. Grant’s ageing, but clearly very wealthy rock star. There’s been a whole series of ads, and usually the concept involves her covering up for some mistake or other by lying to her boss with the aid of shabby Argos furniture. This all started when she couldn’t be bothered to redecorate his house properly, so popped out for some cheap crap from Argos instead. One small white lie later (telling him it was all created by the fictional designer Arguus), and she’s up to her neck in it, forced to continue to fill his house with poor quality flat packed furniture whenever he asks after said designer.

The latest episode in the series has perhaps the worst example yet of her deception: it opens at an auction, where “Elvis’s fridge” is being sold. Julia puts in the opening bid, at £100,000, but then her phone goes off. It’s Richard E Grant phoning to see how she’s getting on, and while she’s on the phone to him, she is outbid by the chap behind her. But that’s no problem for Julia–she just pops down to Argos and picks up a suspiciously similar looking fridge, and Richard never suspects a thing.

There are two problems with this. The first is that Elvis died almost 30 years ago, and I would have thought that fridge technology might have moved on a tad in the meantime. What Argos seem to be implying is that the Electrical equipment they sell is the same as you could have bought in the 1970s. Well, no wonder it’s cheap.

But the main problem is that Richard E Grant thinks he’s paid over £100,000 for the fridge, while his PA has just popped down to Argos and bought a cheap similar one for a couple of hundred quid. What did she do with the other £99,500?

So clearly the message here is that if you want to defraud your employer out of a significant sum of money, while buying ancient electrical goods, Argos is the one for you.

Last night, after over three years of meaning to get round to it, I finally managed to see a performance at the Globe. At times, during Much Ado About Nothing, admittedly not one of my favourites, I was reminded that the comedies are–puts on English student hat, pretends to be in tutorial (wonders why no one is saying anything…)–er, like, a bit rubbish, aren’t they? You could argue that the same ridiculous plot devices occur in both the comedies and the tragedies (there’s people falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, then jumping to conclusions on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, and you can always rely on there being a friar somewhere along the line popping up to suggest that the best way to solve all the problems is if someone pretends to be dead), but it’s somehow more acceptable when it isn’t followed by a ludicrously contrived resolution in which everyone ends up happily married, and instead concludes with blood, gore, and entire families dead.

My inherent distrust of the genre aside, the performance was excellent, although I was very disappointed with the audience, which featured a few too many examples of that most cringeworthy breach of unwritten Shakespeare-viewing etiquette–people laughing at the jokes. Ok, I’ll let you off with the visual slapstick, but no one’s fooled that you’re laughing at that cunning play on the word “shrewdly” for any reason other than to let everyone know how clever you are for having understood it. It’s not big or clever, and I don’t care what you say, nothing that Dogberry the constable says is even remotely funny. Oh, and if the group of Italian tourists to my right who spent the whole of the first act translating the play to each other in a very audible non-whisper would like to go and do that somewhere else, that’d be great.

Gripes aside, it was great. I might follow this up by trying to see Measure for Measure at the end of next month. Anybody interested?

I think this is my new favourite BBC Online graphic (spotted in the wild here):

Is that the Republican Elephant and the Democrat Donkey engaged in some kind of lewd sexual act, resulting in some skyscrapers falling over? Is this satire? Or just a crap logo?

Last night we happened to catch the first few minutes (it was all we could take) of the new BBC 3 show, and shameless Richard Herring rip-off, Hercules. Unfortunately, unlike Herring’s witty and charming take on the concept of performing 12 near-impossible feats, the BBC show is vapid sub-Survivor rubbish taking itself far too seriously (one of the contestants is an extreme Gym champion, which tells you just about all you need to know), and the tasks are all things like who can hang from some hoops for the longest (although to give them their due, the BBC do display their typical quest for historical and mythical accuracy by requiring contestants to kill their own children in order to take part), but where is the animal killing that featured so prominently in the original labours? No shooting birds, killing a boar, or slaying the mythical hydra (although you’re allowed to cheat on this one by getting your nephew to help you)?

Presumably the prize for the series winner is the chance to impregnate the 49 daughters of King Thespius in one night, and then head on over to the Olympics and win every event, just like Hercules himself. The flash bastard.

I must say, I’m eagerly awaiting our copy of the how to stop terrorism booklet, Protect and Survive, sorry, Protect and Survive 2004, which should be popping through the letterbox any day now. Apparently it contains some top advice (we’re supposed to duck and cover).

Personally, I’m just very disappointed that we won’t be getting a stop terrorism fridge magnet, like when the Australians did this back in February (how do they expect us to stop terrorism without fridge magnets? what, not even a I’m not scared of the “axis of evil” badge? a honk if you’re a member of a sleeper cell bumper sticker?), but it’s nice to see that the Government are so prepared that they remembered to register all the domain names that are similar to the official one, www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk, like, oh, I don’t know, www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk. And we wouldn’t want that to fall into the wrong hands, now would we.

Run Away! The terrorists have already won!

UPDATE: See the government’s response. Apparently they are worried that the information on the site may “confuse people”. But then, as the guy behind this says himself: “let’s face it, if anyone actually mistakes this for the genuine Government web site, then they probably have more problems than getting unhelpful advice”

It’s just as well that I haven’t really got any work to do today, because it’s meant that I have been able to spend most of the working day making travel arrangements for our upcoming holiday in Croatia. At least now it’s a holiday in Croatia. Until this morning it was a holiday in Venice, that being the closest place we could get an even remotely reasonably priced flight to at short notice. Now I’ve at least got us as far as Split on the Dalmatian coast, via an overnight ferry crossing from Ancona, in Italy (on which, for comedy value, but mostly owing to it being rather fully booked, we will be travelling out in a first class cabin, and back in–hopefully–a seat each). That arranged, I just had to get us down to Ancona, and I may or may not have booked that journey via the TrenItalia website, given that the online booking only appears to work in the Italian version of the site. Italian being a language I don’t speak, I had to stumble through with a mixture of educated guesses, based on my knowledge of French and Spanish, and Babelfish.

Ok then, mostly Babelfish, but fantastic tool that it is, it does seem to mostly come up with things like this, from my confirmation email:

Kind MATTHEW ARMSTRONG, we confirm to Them that l’acquisto of the travel from demanded She e’ state concluded with happening. In the ringraziarLa in order to have chosen Trenitalia.com we supply Them here of continuation the relative data you to its purchase.

(I mean that’s just sloppy: it hasn’t even bothered to translate some of the words, half of it is just gibberish, and even I can work out that “con successo” means “with success”, not “with happening”).

So, really, I could have booked anything. Which sort of adds to the fun, really.

Last night, Sal, myself, and a couple of friends (some of whom for some reason choose not to describe the minutiae of their lives on the InterWebNet, but most of whom do) went along to see how Richard Herring would produce an hour’s worth of comedy entertainment out of the series of modern-day Herculean tasks he’s been attempting (and documenting on his own corner of the Internet, thus cementing his position as “king of the nerds”).

His erstwhile comedy partner Stewart Lee had also initially been on the bill, but having “got a better offer” he was replaced by some young comics about to head off to Edinburgh and lose a lot of money, interspersed with the “talents” of compere, Logan Murray, performing (according to the copy of Time Out on my desk) as the character of Ronnie Rigsby, whose act was either meant to be awful in an ironic way, or just genuinely sub-Harry Hill rubbish. Given that he was actively encouraging the audience to heckle, (because his act mainly consisted of telling said hecklers to “fuck off”), I’m tempted to plump for the former, but either way it created the curious effect that, whenever one of the acts got into his stride and started to warm the crowd up, he had to go off to be replaced by the compere who cooled things back down nicely. Out of the five acts on the bill, four of them were passably amusing in a “I’ve seen a million stand ups do this sort of thing at this level” kind of way, and one of them was a man whose entire act consisted of encouraging the audience to throw chocolate bars at him.

Hercules… itself turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be, although judging by his blog today it sounds like this was the first time the show itself really came together. It’s a shame I probably won’t get to see the finished version, if only because I won’t find out how he’s going to get all 12 tasks into a one hour show, given that he got through about 4 last night (and despite encouragement from the audience refused to carry on with the rest of his material), but what we heard was very funny.

After the gig, he did look rather taken aback by the gaggle of slightly drunken fans (curse those cheap Red Stripe pitchers) chatting to him at the bar, including the actually not drunken Angel, who settled for having parts of her body signed, having failed in her initial plan to throw her underwear at him (in an ironic way, of course. Aaah.)

After that we stumbled out of the venue and into Chinatown for a quick Chinese meal that I can barely remember, during which I made a rash promise to try out some hair product for the benefit of a certain large chemist store’s magazine, before catching the last tube home. I awoke this morning to find a monumentally painful splinter of indeterminate origin in my little finger that Sal helpfully suggested I should leave in there “until in grows out”. Painful business this comedy lark.

On one of those Evening Standard headline boards by the train station yesterday: “CLIFF RICHARD TICKET RIP-OFF”.

I didn’t have time to stop and find out, so does anyone out there know what the rip-off is, exactly? Perhaps the fact that they’re actually tickets to a Cliff Richard show?

Almost 8 months after moving into our flat (that’s 8 months into a 12 month lease), we’ve finally managed to persuade someone to charge us for our energy supplies. Unfortunately, in what is no doubt an affectionate tribute to the metric martyrs, the cheeky scamps at London Energy are clinging to the Imperial system and trying to charge us for our gas as if we had an old meter measuring usage in cubic feet, rather than a modern metric meter (thereby effectively charging us three times as much as they should be when they multiply our already metric reading by 3 as part of the imperial to metric conversion). I’m only two phone calls into the process so far, but I can already tell that what might to you or me seem like a simple thing to resolve (involving, oh, I don’t know, maybe looking at the meter, and paying particular attention to the bit where there is a huge letter m and a superscript 3, and then changing you records), is going to become another saga. The best bit is that when we move out in 4 months time, we get to do this all over again. Fantastic.

So said Sydney’s Alex Lloyd, two songs into his set last night on breaking a string. “No, I only brought one, ’cause I couldn’t be arsed to carry two”. He recovered well, though, sending his roadie (a spectacularly underemployed chap, given that there was only Lloyd, his acoustic guitar and his keyboard player onstage, who had spent almost the entire half hour it had somehow taken to set things up taping up some leads with gaffer tape) out the back to grab him a stack of spare strings. Lloyd then proceeded to perform the impressive feat of stringing and tuning his guitar while singing the next song, something that he repeated later in the gig after breaking a second string. (Presumably it was only the fact that it was a different string that prevented him from having to finish the gig with just five remaining on his guitar).

As I mentioned the other week, this was our first visit to the Brixton Academy. Sorry, the Brixton Academy Islington. We arrived at the venue just behind TNT magazine, which would be reviewing the gig after finishing her bagel (“outside, thanks love”). No such food-related incidents preventing our entry, we ventured inside, to discover a room even smaller than I’d expected it to be, and almost unbearably hot for most of the gig, until half way through when the bouncer at the side of the stage decided to open the doors to cheers from the section of the crowd within range of the air flow and a sense of relief all round.

Apart from the overpowering heat, and despite his inconsiderate decision to play a whole pile of stuff off his first album, the one I don’t have, the gig was great. No Everybody’s Laughing, but we did get Amazing, Hello The End, Black The Sun, Green, My Friend, 1000 Miles, and a rousing Coming Home, amongst others. He’s a remarkably laid back performer, strolling casually onstage, nonchalantly finishing his cigarette before getting started, but then launching into a performance of ever-so-slightly slower acoustic versions of his songs that a proper reviewer might describe as emotional or powerful. Let’s just say it’s inoffensive, melodic, guitar rock and leave it at that. As I said earlier, I’m not sure that playing a single, largely unpromoted, UK date to around 800 Aussie and NZ backpackers, me and the two other English blokes in the venue (who were standing in front of us) is quite going to break him over here, but then maybe that wasn’t the point at all, and it was just an excuse for him to have a holiday over here.

On the way home we topped off the surreal experience of going to a gig in a shopping centre by popping over the road into Sainsbury’s to pick up some groceries. Rock and Roll!

Oh, there’s only so many photos you can take of a slightly chubby chap playing acoustic guitar, but some of the ones I did take are here.