Armando Iannucci OBE

I wish I had some well thought out position regarding Armando Iannucci accepting an OBE but I really don’t. In the 24 four hours since I gave an involuntary ‘yipee’ and kissed the dog when I heard the news, I’ve tried to rationalise it a number of ways. In the end, the best I’ve achieved is to nip over into the neighbour’s front garden, rip down their JB Sport’s branded Union Jack, and give it a wave as I sit watching my well-worn DVD of ‘The Armando Iannucci Show’, followed by some ‘Thick of It’ and ‘Veep’.

On the face of it, I should be delighted. There are only a handful of satirists currently working whose work I admire and probably highest on that list is Iannucci. And, as the person behind so much great comedy but himself rarely seen on the screen, he doesn't get the recognition that he deserves. Should he have rejected it to show how impartial he is to the politicians? Perhaps. But, then again, I wish he'd replied when I'd asked him to consider providing blurb to my one and only published book. In the words of Woody Allen, ‘give me a break from all your “could haves” and “should haves”. Like my mother used to say: “if my grandmother had wheels, she’d have been a trolley car”’.

The only people who seem to have a problem with his award are certain journalists who are using it to remind the rest of us that they too could have had gongs but rejected them. It’s a fair if rather self-satisfied point that they make. But it’s also good to see the establishment finally recognise its most talented satirists. A country is only as great as its ability not to take itself seriously. Yet I then begin to wonder that if the establishment is so comfortable in its sense of entitlement that it can laud the very people that seek to undermine that entitlement, perhaps those people are not doing a good enough job trying to undermine it. Would my admiration for Iannucci be higher or lower had he told the establishment to stick it in their slightly inbred ear?

Is recognition by the establishment even a good thing? How often does the establishment choose the worst poets of the day and make them poet laureate? Is it actually good that you’re recognised by the very same people who have ennobled Gary Barlow and knighted Kenneth Branagh for his horrific Shakespearean warbling. (Apparently, it was Julie Birchill who coined the fabulous putdown that ‘Stephen Fry is the stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person looks like’. Well, less snappily, I think that Branagh is the stupid person’s idea of a Shakespearean actor.)

And so, I continue to doubt my judgement that Iannucci’s award is a good thing. Yet if Alistair Campbell has a good point about Iannucci taking a reward from the very establishment he’s made a good career mocking, does anybody really want to take Alistair Campbell’s side on anything? And if Wodehouse could take a knighthood and so could Chaplin, then I don’t see any problem with modern comedians accepting these shiny pretty things. And so my rationalisations continue… Perhaps the OBE will help Iannucci in his dealings with the BBC. If it leads to him being made head of the BBC comedy unit, I’d be delighted… Does it give him more power being inside the establishment or does it further go to show that the media really is dominated by a powerful few?

In other words: I really don’t know how the hell I should feel except that I’m genuinely pleased that he’s pleased. It leaves me in no way disappointed, just a wee bit chuffed, but still monstrously conflicted and baffled. I’ll leave any grumbling for another twelve months and the day when the same bauble will go the way of James bloody Corden. That’s when I’ll suggest that Iannucci should get a knighthood. Not only that. I will bloody well demand that he takes it too.

[Afterthought:

No sooner had I posted the above, it was pointed out that when Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, and a few other comedians I could mention, all took gongs or joined the establishment, I was the first to point out that they’d ‘sold out’. Well, that’s certainly what I’d said but there is a big difference this time. I like Iannucci and his work. So, at least the hypocrisy in this instance has a totally rational foundation and I don't feel like I need to make an apology about being an apologist.]

The Brief Confessions of an R. Crumb Addict

Slightly distracted yesterday afternoon, I found myself thumbing through the books on my drawing table. They’re a pretty oddball mix of oddballs that usually help get my brain working. Some B. Kliban was there (B. Kliban is always there), some Ralph Steadman, as well as a book of illustrations by the great Arthur Rackham. Nobody could draw a set of bony knuckles quite like Rackham. Well, I say nobody but there's perhaps one person…

It’s not often that you remember when you first discovered a favourite writer or artist. For me, the exception to that rule is R. Crumb. I discovered Crumb on the 13th February, 1987 when the BBC aired the documentary, 'The Confessions of Robert Crumb', as part of its Arena series.



A quick glance as my bootlegged copy of that now rare treat reminds me why I was hooked. Crumb fascinated me on a deep level I didn’t really understand at the time. He was a pure bred creature of the counter-culture but expressed himself in a way that was counter to that prevailing counter culture. He wasn’t the long-haired bohemian with a nice line of patter for the ladies. He was unfashionably radical: the thin, less-than-avuncular self-confessed weirdo who played the mandolin. He was Ron Mael but with a dip pen and Rotring.

Yet I didn’t immediately succumb to Crumb’s charm or lack thereof. For years afterwards, I’d see ‘The Robert Crumb Handbook’ in shops and I’d pick it up, want to buy it, but wasn’t sure I knew why I wanted to own it. I suppose I was back then still under the influence of a secondary school system that had taught me that I couldn't draw, shouldn't try to appreciate art, and that those of us born in the working classes were born to do one thing and one thing only. And that was grim, dark, unrelenting work involving lathes, drills and hammers. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that I was confused why I found his pictures so appealing, when their subject matter made me feel so uncomfortable. This wasn’t another Steve Dikto or Gil Kane, whose illustrations of perfect people never interested me. This was an illustrator who emphasised the spots, the pimples, the rolls of fat, the gnarly knuckles. He was the Philip Larkin of illustration. And like Larkin, a poet I struggled to understand because he poeticised the world I knew too well, Crumb was always lurking deep in my mind as somebody whose work drew me in.



I couldn’t fathom why I was interested in this man who obsessed about committing gross indecencies to these Amazonian women with large thighs and big butts. Yet Crumb is like that. He challenges you to like him. It’s a familiar pose and one that I suppose I’m immediately drawn towards. In a world full of people it is supposedly easy to like, I prefer a challenge. My world outlook lies somewhere between the twin evils prevalent on Twitter: the self-congratulatory pleasantries of the middle-aged women’s book club and the hate-fuelled spleen of unfulfilled office workers one demotion away from a shooting spree. Crumb is somewhere in that grey area of hating, doubting, struggling, but somehow finding certain forms of solace which make life worth enduring.

I now have a pretty good collection of Crumb’s comics and books, though hardly complete. I’d need the income of a Silicon Valley pioneer to fill in all the gaps and there are plenty of gaps. If Crumb is nothing else, he’s certainly prolific.

The best introduction to his work is Terry Zwigoff's excellent and disturbing 1994 documentary, 'Crumb', but, in essence, I suppose Crumb's career splits broadly into two periods. Crumb himself has suggested that things changed the moment he stopped taking drugs. The work from his early LSD fuelled years is widely considered his best and his Zap Comix are populated by the characters for which he’s most widely known, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont. The sex is also more prevalent and off-putting, such as the strip ‘Joe Blow’ which manages to lampoon both the sexual mores of 1950s America and the bohemian attitudes of the counter culture that R. Crumb was supposedly a champion. It’s probably amounts to confessing that I’m not a true-Crumb fan when I say that I find his earlier career less interesting that his career post-drugs. Crumb himself has said that in the following decades he lacked the same inspiration (something he also attributes to growing older) but I think this is to downplay Crumb’s real achievements. It’s in the later work that he becomes the cartoonist for the postmodern age, especially in his Weirdo comics where the character of ‘R. Crumb’ becomes more of a staple: blurring the divisions between the actor and the artist, the narrative and the autobiography. Personally, I find the Hup comics to be a Crumb highpoint, eschewing many of the elements that made him a darling of the flower power generation, to which he probably didn't ideologically belong.



There's something more guided about his later career which makes it more valuable. Crumb attributes his characteristic drawing style to his discovering the work of the great American illustrator, Thomas Nast, at an early age but, I think, it’s in his later work where he reveals a more self-conscious and serious approach to technique. From the early strips where the dominant colour was white, the pages deepen in hue. The eye is encouraged to wallow in densely inked detail in work such as Psychopathia Sexualis (Weirdo 13), Bosell’s London Journal (Weirdo 03), and Nausea (Hup 03). It’s as if his penmanship found a new level, especially when illustrating to the work of others. He certainly wouldn’t be the first artist to produce some of their best work when limited by outside forces -- a problem of the anything goes school of art is that it has no conventions to breaks. Crumb’s sex fantasies were always a crowd pleaser for those that like that sort of thing but his work is best when laced deeper insights. It’s most evident when he’s illustrating the words of Harvey Pekar or Charles Bukowski, but at its best when he providing his own commentary, usually to his autobiography.







Perhaps it’s this that led him to choose his strangest project of all. ‘R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis’ is a work of a stubborn, irascible genius that’s still delights in playing off his angels against his demons. Filled with the statuesque figures of the Amazonian women that have become his trademark, Genesis is a loyal depiction of the Good Book, leaving it to the reader to make any judgement about the deeper moral relevance of the Bible to a modern society. And that, I suppose, is the essential part of loving Crumb's work. It's almost Puritan in its interests, looking inward to the soul of the person making judgements, misjudgements, and choosing whatever path they find works for them through their corporeal days.

And, I suppose, that is how I see Crumb: as a satirist deeply engrained in the Protestant (despite his Catholic upbringing) tradition that gave us Jonathan Swift, whose 'Lady's Dressing Room' would have provided Crumb with his most perfect material, as Swift deconstructs the very elements of a lady's beauty:

A Glass that can to Sight disclose,
The smallest Worm in Celia's Nose,
And faithfully direct her Nail
To squeeze it out from Head to Tail;

The Animated Leveson Inquiry

http://youtu.be/WWB8E45yZTE

I thought I’d broken the habits of working late into the night until I started to mess around with these animations. Anyway, yesterday I joked about animating the Leveson Inquiry. Last night I did just that until about 3.30 in the morning. It’s throwaway stuff but helpful to do these things quickly, roughly, and the result is okay if not spectacular.

Constant rain today, which improves my mood immeasurably. I intend to sit down and just draw cartoons. Only, I’ve not had a half-decent idea for a cartoon in about a week. That sometimes happens.

There’s an interesting book out about the Imagination, called I notice ‘Imagine,’ written by Jonah Lehrer. I saw him interviewed on The Colbert Report last year where he was explaining that imagination works best when you don’t try to address it directly. For me, that means not trying to consciously think of cartoon ideas. The best always fall into my lap when I least expect them to. By that score I should probably go and hang some wallpaper or dig a big hole in the garden. Except I’m not going to do either. I’m going to sit at my desk and apply the whip hand to my imagination. It will be futile but judging from the zero interest in yesterday’s cartoon, futility is my profession these days… There, an idea has just fallen into my lap when I was least expecting. My next book should be about futility. Think I’ll make it an erotic potboiler with BDSM elements. I’ll call it ‘Fifty Shades of Off White’.

Damn. I’m waffling.

 

The Euro 2012 Animation

I won't repeat what I said below regarding the quality of the voice acting. But I will mention that the video contains a few errors, such as the fact there are 23 men in the England squad. None are worth the vast amount of effort to fix them.

The Morning After

Head a bit like soup this morning. I finished the new animation very late last night and it’s currently rendering in the background. In about half an hour, I’ll uploaded it to Youtube and then post it here.

I’d given myself five days to finish the animation. In the end, it took an exhausting nine. At least four of those were down to the mistakes I made along the way learning to animate and work across three quite complicated software packages. I learned so many lessons, such as always having a solid script when you begin. Next time, I’ll also spend plenty of time rigging the puppets, which make life so much easier than having to fix things later on. Each shot in the animation can take up to ten minutes to render, so to make a mistake, as I did repeatedly, makes the process so much slower.

As for the acting, the less said about that the better. Frankly, I'm just embarrassed by how poor it is. When I set out to create these animations, I wanted to aim for the quality of the brilliant Morten Morland, who works for The Times. I think I now know why he gets professional voice actors in to work on his cartoons. Listening to it, I realise that I sound worryingly like John Shuttleworth.

In the end, the music worked out well. The Creative Commons websites provided what I needed and I’m delighted with the result. The music I now have is substantially stronger than the copyrighted music I was using whilst working on it. So, thanks for the suggestions and help. Next time, I’ll have the right music selected from the outset.

It’s now all a matter of what I do next. I finished writing a novel a few weeks ago and it seems like bad form to just allow it to sit on my desk. The problem is that no bugger seems to want to read it. Perhaps I’ll go back and redraft it. Perhaps I’ll do another cartoon. Perhaps I’ll just sit and think up a few new cartoons. Perhaps I’ll go and hide and wait for the usual internet trolls to tell me that I’ve just produced the unfunniest thing they’ve ever seen.

No cartoon today but animation to follow...

Music and Muppets

It’s been a difficult morning. My internet connection has gone flaky just 24 hours after my singing the praises of Virginmedia. However, I’ve managed to connect long enough to post this and to see myself get a namecheck over at the Times Online, where Kermit the Frog answered one of my questions. That has to be a personal high for me, greater than anything I’ve achieved so far. I've now dyed myself green in honour of the frog.

However, I face a bit of an uphill struggle today. I’ve finished my animation and edited it to my satisfaction. Only, I’m now stumped as to what to do about the music. It’s a crazy situation that a small not-for-profit animation requires copyright lawyers and a sizable bank balance before it can get a descent soundtrack but that’s the case if I want to do this legitimately. Of course, I could rip music from different places (and I’ve done that in my edit) but now I want to post this to a wider audience, I’d like to do it without ending up deported to Guantanamo.

The alternative is to use some free music produced by some unknown bands (all of whom seem to specialise in ‘experimental’ music, which is just like real music but without all the notes) or use music that’s fallen out of copyright, usually some tuba sola by a Russian orchestra recoded in the dark days of Stalin and potato blights.

I would normally post a small cartoon here but this internet connection won't allow me to upload graphics. A shame. It would have been a good one too...

 

 

New MacBooks...

Apple have done it again. Just when I think I’m past caring, I fall for another of those videos where they explain the innovations in their newest gizmo and leave me lusting after something I’ll never be able to afford to buy and for which I really have no need. This time it is the new Macbook. Sod the Retina display. This Macbook has asymmetrical fans in which the blades are offset so they spread the sound over a range of frequencies, making the Macbook quieter than ever before. If only they could fit asymetircal fans to my neightbour's kids who woke me at 6.30 today acting out what I can only assume was the the Siege of Carthage.

Woeful England performance yesterday against the French, though I think expectations were so low that a draw is considered a victory to rank alongside Agincourt. From the perspective of somebody who witnessed what Hodgson did to the attacking instincts of a relatively talented Liverpool team, I’m not filled with hope. But I am willing to give him the tournament to change my mind. Perhaps this year is the year when super defensive strategies will win. It worked for Chelsea, so why not England?

Sat down and watched the last episode of Veep last night. Disappointed I didn’t get to see the President. I was sure I’d heard some big star was lined up to do a cameo. Still, a great series finale, probably attributable to the fat it was written by Jess Armstrong and Iannucci , and still better than nearly everything else out there. I just wish Iannucci would do more 'Armando Iannucci Shows', which remain one of the best sketch shows the BBC has ever comissioned.

Okay, today I’m hoping to finish the animation I’ve been struggling on for about a week and had previously considered abandoning. I rewrote it yesterday, improving it in the process, and recorded some woefully acted dialogue. In the meantime: have a cartoon straight from my sketchbook. It's not well drawn but I quite like the gag...

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Buddhist Gag

Didn’t know if I should go with the word ‘buddhist’ in this cartoon. Does it make the meaning too obvious? Is it even a cartoon or merely a doodle? I don’t seem to know anything this morning. Russell Brand is apparently going to help the Dalai Lama spread the message of Buddhism (as long as the message contains ‘bollocks’ and ‘shit’, I suppose it will work out in the end) and James Corden has now won a Tony award. After my previous post, this makes me wonder again what’s funny. I confess that Brand can be funny, just monstrously irritating at the same time. Corden, however, is the anti-Hicks, the anathema to everything that exists in my comedy universe. Frankie Boyle put it well this morning when he tweeted: ‘James Corden: the white Lenny Henry’.

I’ve only just discovered that Corden had a huge spat with Patrick Stewart, which raises Stewart intimately in my opinion. Sadly, Stewart has never won a Tony, which perhaps says it all...

My Post-Veep Blues

I’ve spent a week animating something that I might have posted to this blog if it were anywhere near completion. Hence the reason I’m writing something instead. It’s a good excuse to do something different. I keep telling myself that I’ll post more, even if it’s going to be my usual gripes about the state of comedy in the UK or the extent to which I find myself thinking that the internet is utterly abhorrent. I have so many grumbles that I might as well release them like Mr. Burns releases his hounds. I'd even do the Mr. Burns voice if I could. Only, as I've established this week, I have a complete inability to do voices.

I’ve always been wary about throwing things out onto the web. Most of what I do I do because it amuses me but I’m increasingly aware that my sense of humour isn’t shared by other people. The other day, I stumbled across somebody referring to one of my earlier versions of this blog as 'a crap spoof website'. Well, to coin a phrase: sod it. If comedy amounts to whatever emerges from Miranda Hart’s mouth, then we’re more damned than I already think we are. Hieronymus Bosch might have had some impressive visions of what Hell looks like but my vision of hell is Miranda Hart in jogging pants, falling over, and goofing into the camera as all of hell’s minions laugh and start to hand her BAFTAs.

But is this what happens when you get older? I can handle the hair loss and the increased tendency to find beauty in the older woman (hell, it explains my current thing for Julia Louis-Dreyfus). What is worrying me is my inability to figure out what makes people laugh.

It’s a worrying thought. I’ve written comedy for so long yet I can’t even remember the last time I watched good comedy on the BBC. Technically, the forthcoming ‘Veep’ would class as one of theirs. Though it’s made in the States, it comes from the same team as ‘The Thick of It’, which is probably the last good comedy I did watch on the BBC. It’s produced by the peerless Armando Iannucci and, for what it’s worth, I’ve been enjoying it as much (if not a little bit more) as ‘The Thick Of It’, though it’s very different in texture. It’s less grey, grubby, and as biting, but it makes up for these deficiencies with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tony Hale and a good dose of mid-Atlantic profanity. I’m not turning this into a review other than to say if you haven’t seen it, watch it when it starts its run on the BBC. I recommend it more than I recommend life itself.

Anyway, back to this animation I’ve worked on for the last seven days and I’m now considering consigning to the big ‘failure’ bucket. Watching something as good as ‘Veep’ fills me with hope that there’s still room for good comedy, even if it also leaves me feeling awed by the high standards. I can’t even fill two minutes with something funny when the only person I have to rely on is myself. I hit a brick wall when I realised that can’t do impressions. I sat there all week at a microphone, trying to make voices sound reasonably similar to certain real life people only for everything to sound uniquely like me. It’s really thrown a spanner in the works. I suppose it’s good that I learn this now before I waste any more time on something that’s bound to failure.

Which brings me, apropos of nothing, to mentioning that I watched ‘Monster in Paris’ tonight. It’s a likable movie, though it has a minor character deluded into thinking he can sing. He couldn’t, of course, but he kept telling himself that he was merely not suited to the mainstream. It hit home a bit, I think. I saw myself, wondering if my humour is just too left of centre for its own good. I sometimes wonder if my comedic sense has just slackened. I just have these big blind spots, such as Miranda Hart, where I don’t understand comedy. I don’t find Lenny Henry funny yet the guy has made a great career out of it. Walliams and Lucas. I abhor them when the nation laud them. Where Stewart Lee stands, however, I find genius, just not a popular hit. I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it.

Ah, I repeat my new favourite phrase: sod it. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say other than to lead up to a doodle from my notebook. It made me smile, which is a rare event lately…

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Fergie in 'Squeaky Bum Time'

Okay, so I'm still new to this stuff. Learning to draw is a lot easier than learning to animate. It might seem that I abandoned this blog for a week but that’s the time it took me to get this working. It's my fourth attempt at an animation and probably involved far too much time and energy given the end result but it's definitely a process of trial and error. I’m also spending so much time learning to get things moving on the screen, that the script is probably a little basic. So apologies if you expected high satire. There are a few parts of this I’d like to do again (the movements of the body are a little rough) but I want to move on to try something new and with a little more wit.

Send Her Victorious!

And, for the sake of not wasting the paper, my bad ink version of the same joke...

Roy Hodgson: I Scouted Eden Hazard

Remember! Today's A Special Day!

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Dave Whelan Speaks...

Please visit my new website...

Office Work: The Basics

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Olympic Torch Relay Latest

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Two Trees

Here for your Friday delectation are two cartoons about trees. I drew the first a few days ago. The second was drawn way back in March, 2011, which accounts for the poor quality of the earlier tree. However, not one to rest on my laurels (pun gloriously intended), I will draw a new tree cartoon in twelve months time and hope it looks better than both.

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And On The Fifth Day...

Politics Thursday

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Summer's Here!

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John W. Henry Interviews Surprise Candidate For Liverpool Post

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Today's Handy Tip...

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Modern Politics

 

 

My New Book

My new book is out and my new website is open. Come on over. Everybody welcome except you supporters of Damn United...

The Baddams Family

Another entry in the Guardian's Gallery competition but essentially my finding more excuses to practise drawing these panel strips. Click the pic to make it bigger.

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Bruce Forsyth To Be Knighted

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The All New Miracle Baldness Cure

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Pretty Random

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Britain's Got Talent

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Dear Apple… From The Shmuck

No cartoon. Just a story...

About a week ago, my second generation iTouch stopped working. I woke up one morning to find it stuck on the Apple logo. I tried to restart it but it wouldn’t switch off. I tried a reboot and, again, it just sat on the Apple logo for about half an hour until the screen flashed and it rebooted again. At the time, I was really busy with work so I didn’t dedicate much time to getting it working. I read the many reports of similar failures on the web and realised that I would have to take it to my nearest Apple Centre, which happens to be in Manchester.

Yesterday was a big day. Despite missing my music as I work this week, I'd managed to finish the first draft of the book I’ve been writing/drawing since January. It was a big thing for me, so I got up today determined to treat myself to a trip into Manchester to fix the problem with my iTouch...

I arrived at the Apple centre to find it as congested as usual, with an equal number of staff to customers. I was quickly intercepted. They probably smelt money, though I know it wasn’t coming from me.

‘Hi, can I help,’ said a guy.

‘Yes, my iTouch won’t start.’

‘And what’s your name?’

‘David,’ I replied, buying into the slightly 1960s vibe they encourage at the Apple Centre.

‘Great. I’m Ken,’ was roughly the reply (I forget the actual name). ‘Can I take a look at your iTouch?’

I handed it over. He played with it. He scratched his chin. ‘I’ve not seen this problem before,’ he said, though I didn’t believe him (and neither should you -- just Google ‘iTouch stuck in restore). ‘You need to make an appointment to see the staff at the Genius Bar’.

The Genius Bar, in case you don’t know these things, is the bit at the back of the shop staffed by wiser Macheads who sort out your hardware problems. I made my appointment for an hour later, left the shop, walked around aimlessly, and trudged back in time for my 12.30.

‘Hi, my name’s Barry,’ said the guy at the Genius Bar. ‘What’s your name?’

‘David,’ I said, feeling the slight shame I feel when in these friendly relationships with Apple staff. I’m not a happy clappy sort of guy. I feel awkward, too big, too unfashionable, too trivial and too serious all at the same time. I don’t wear beads or rubber bands around my wrist. I don’t have long flowing hair or a beard. I’m grumpy, scruffy, and my fingers are covered in ink…

‘And what can I do for you?’ asked Baz (I think he’d allow me to call him that, if that was his name).

‘My iTouch won’t start.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘if you can just wait a moment, I’ll get a colleague to come and see you.’

Minutes pass before Baz’s colleague arrives.

‘Hi, I’m Simon,’ said somebody probably not called Simon. ‘Can I ask your name?’

‘I’m David,’ I said.

‘And what’s your problem?’

‘My iTouch won’t start.’

‘Okay, let’s have a look at it.’

He proceeded to restart it. It wouldn’t – the power had drained due to my inability to turn the damn thing off – so quick as a flash (it is a Genius Bar, after all) he plugged it into a Mac to get some charge.

‘I’ll be back in a minute, David,’ said Simon. ‘Let’s just give it some power.’

So I waited. And I waited. And Simon (or was it Barry or Baz) went off to serve another customer.

And he completely forgot about me!

Thankfully, another of his colleagues eventually spotted the miserable guy not buying into the Apple vibe as he watched his iTouch recharge.

‘Can I help?’

‘My name is David and my iTouch won’t start,’ I explained.

‘Okay, my name is Stewart. Let’s have a look shall we?’

Now the iTouch had some power, Stewart could try to restore it by putting it into DFU mode: hold down the Home Key and Power, count to ten. And miraculously, something happened! It came up with a bar to show that it was uploading my new firmware.

‘Okay, that will take some time,’ said Stewart. ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’

Well, I’ll give Stewart his due, he didn’t forget me. Although he began to serve another customer, he paused at one point to inform me that the firmware wasn’t reinstalling.

‘It’s stuck,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I replied.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘this looks like it’s a hardware fault. I’ll get another colleague to come and talk to you about your options.’

I was then introduced to yet another member of staff.

‘And you are?’ he asked.

‘David,’ I said. ‘And my iTouch won’t start…’ I waved at the thing. I was too tired. My feet were aching after standing there for half an hour. (Incidentally, the floor in Apple centres is solid granite or something equally hard and uncompromising. I’m sure it’s to stop people loitering for too long. I was luckily standing slightly behind the desks where the staff stand on two inches of foam rubber. All very telling…)

However, I digress.

‘My name’s Sidney,’ said the bloke who looked like a Sidney but probably wasn’t. ‘Let me just check the serial number.’

He typed it into his iPhone. ‘This was bought in December 2008,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied. Two years and a few months sounded about right.

‘Well, that means it’s out of warranty. You have two choices. You can have a brand new unit for £112 or you can have 10% off the price of any new iPod.’

I thought about it for two seconds.

‘I’ll have neither,’ I said, picking up my iTouch. ‘I’ll go buy a HP instead.’ And with that, I walked out the shop.

Now, I felt bad being so spikey. You might say I was even rude. But before I get to the second part of this story, let me just say that I always had faith (perhaps naïve faith) that Apple were a better company than this. I know what my local Trading Standards officer would say about 30 months of use from a device that cost me the best part of £300. Warranties don’t mean a thing. You have to get ‘reasonable use’. I wouldn’t call 30 months reasonable use, especially when I was pretty sure that this was a software fault of theirs and not, as the staff maintained, my faulty hardware.

Yet Apple portray themselves as a company who really care about their customers. They treat you to this fake bonhomie, as though we’re all part of this big happy family. Only, it’s not a family. It’s a prostitution racket and they love you until your money runs out.

Well, to conclude this story: I get home, utterly dejected. Not just about the iTouch but lots of other things in my life, which is what happens when my luck isn’t in. It was raining, I was wet and tired, I was bemoaning my writing, cartooning, blogging, everything and more. But I was also determined to prove that my iTouch wasn’t dead because, frankly, I can be a very stubborn bastard.

The next bit won’t interest anybody except anybody with an iTouch stuck as mine was, so I’ll cut the story short: ten minutes past ten tonight, I was listening to Spark’s ‘Lil Beethoven’ album belting out of my fully functioning iTouch.

Screw you, Apple!

Here’s what I did.

The DFU mode is important. You’ll have to do this a lot. Hold down both the Home button and the power button, count 10 seconds, let go of power whilst keeping Home pressed in. Do this whilst the iTouch is connected to the PC via the USB. You should hear the PC recognise the device.

Download the 3.0 version of the firmware. It’s available on the web. Apparently, it’s the only one that doesn’t have the protection that prevents you from downgrading…

Boot your iTouch into DFU mode, load iTunes, hold down the shift key as you click on the restore button. Pick the 3.0 firmware you’ve downloaded. It should install.

The first time I did this, it reached 100% but no further. I rebooted the iTouch and did it a second time. That’s when it worked.

Along the way, I’d done many other things (working by trial and error, I was rebooting the iTouch and trying to restore it for about 5 hours before it work), some of which might have contributed to my eventually unbricking the iTouch.

I used TinyUmbrella, though it didn’t work the majority of the time and usually crashed when I tried the ‘Restore Fix’.

I’m not sure if this was the reason it finally worked but I also used the ‘greenpois0n’ jailbreak hack. I’ve never wanted to jailbreak by iTouch but I’ve done it now and I’m be grateful that these devices have been broken. And those people who think jailbreaking is bad, consider this: there are clearly techniques for unbricking an iTouch that Apple, despite their huge revenues, haven’t explored or don’t want to make available. A simple bit of software distributed around the Apple Centres could probably restore functionality to the majority of bricked iPods. Could it be that difficult?

How many people have gone into Apple and agreed to pay £112 for a new iPod when their old unit was functioning perfectly, just stuck in a loop somewhere in its firmware? Are we to assume that Apple encourage their staff to look puzzled before they declare with their very best expert advice that they’ll have to regretfully squeeze you for £112?

I have wanted to buy an iPad but this whole experience has put me off the idea. Those Android tablets are looking more impressive by the day, especially when I have days like today…

Little Jack Warner

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The cartoon I didn't send to the Guardian's football gallery on the theme of FIFA...

Some FIFA Cartoons

Proving that you should always quit when you're ahead, I entered this week's Gallery competition at The Guardian. I won last week but haven't done at all well this week. My first cartoon they rejected because they thought it wouldn't get past their lawyers... No idea what the hell I've said in it to warrant that...

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So I did this cartoon, which made did no better than make the final selection...

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Have I Got News For You...

Been really busy the last week. Barely spent any time away from the drawing table. One thing of note was seeing one of my old Photoshopped images on 'Have I Got News For You' on Friday. Not sure Richard Madeley was too pleased though...

Chelsea Search For New Manager

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My entry in the Guardian's weekly Gallery.

Ned

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(Click the picture for the larger readable version)

First of all, let me set the record straight: I don’t hate everybody. I’m nearly 7% less misanthropic than you’d think I am after reading the above cartoon. In fact, I'm nothing like Ned. Except I have been getting a lot of emails from Facebook recently and, try as I might, I still can't learn to enjoy social networking.

Twitter can sometimes be fun in that I can vent my nonsense somewhere with no consequences. It’s a one-sided conversation and I don’t need to lose a valuable hour of my day chatting with somebody on the other side. Facebook, on the other hand, is a long term commitment to relationships. You’re meant to be interested in what other people are doing. And the thing is: beyond the circle of my friends, I’m really not interested in learning what other people are doing. I’m really am just too busy.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, though, if it was limited to just knowing what other people are doing. Facebook continually tells me what a great time other people are having and I don’t want to know how hot it is in the Seychelles. Here in the North West, it’s raining. It’s June in a couple of days yet here I am trying to stimulate my brain with my SAD lamp.

Then there are the constant pointless messages. Join this. Vote for that. I’m a vampire, bite me! Well, I’m a socially awkward nerd, so why don’t you bite me instead? I sometimes wonder if it’s impossible to find the right audience on the web. I disappear from the blog for a few days and come back to find that my most regular visitors are people searching for ‘nipples’ and ‘royalty sex’.

Those visitors won’t read this. Which means, if you’ve got this far, you can be certain you’re not a 'Barry' and possibly not even a 'Ned'. You’re probably one of the people who might enjoy a website like ‘The Laughing Squid’. I go over there and begin to think that the world is not all bad.

And would you look at that: it’s finally stopped raining.

FIFA Politics

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Sarkozy Demands New Internet Controls

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Here.

What Politicians Think About

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Obama Plays The Popularity Card

Volcanoes

Dear Internet,

It’s been too long since I last wrote. How are you? Keeping well? How’s the family? I’m sorry I’ve not been in touch. I’ve been very busy finishing my next book, now over 90% complete though delayed last week as I prepared for the Rapture. I’m pretty sure you were as excited as I was about the prospect of hearing Gabriel’s Trumpet. They say he’s been having lessons from Roy Castle. However, I will admit that I was disappointed when Judgement Day didn’t arrive. It’s not that I really wanted the world to end but I don’t like being lied to. I mean: if you can’t trust Christians, who can you trust?

Yet I suppose life’s grim duty must carry on. It was brightened somewhat by the news that the royal couple are back from honeymoon. It’s been a long fortnight since I’ve felt safe sculling in the rip tides off Anglesey and I’ve also been waiting to see some more of Kate’s legs. Pippa, frankly, doesn’t do it for me and I haven’t been able to get my mind off Schwarzenegger’s flooze, pictures of whom leave me feeling a frisky as the Frenchman who confused the IMF with IVF, both of which seem to involve injecting liquidity into an unwilling market.

Apparently, many French people believe that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged crimes are no big deal, which baffles me but perhaps explains the shoddy service in French hotels where you can’t even order a hot indecent assault in your room after eight o’clock at night. I also fail to see Strauss-Kahn’s motivation. Was he really that sex starved or did he just need a reason to take out a superinjunction? It seems that if you want to be talked about these days you must take out a legally watertight injunction demanding that people don’t talk about you. Either that or take a bullet put through your eye.

Speaking of bullets-through-the-eye-being-surprising-debilitating: purely for the reason that I’ve only just worked out how to draw him, I’m still disappointed that Osama Bin Laden remains dead. It also explains why I was looking forward to the Rapture when the dead would again walk the earth and be valid targets for satire. However, I’m turning my negativity to better ends and I’m now learning how to draw Castro, Gadhafi, and Jim Jong Il. I’m also writing lots of material about David Cameron’s Big Society, which I’m sure we’ll still be talking about in ten years’ time…

Right. I shouldn’t waffle about like this any longer. I have work to do. I hope to be around some more this week but it depends on which way my brain goes and which way the jet stream blows in from Iceland. In the meantime, have a very hastily doodled cartoon about volcanoes.

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Schwarzenegger Announces New Film Project

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More Fashion Tips

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A Random Post Signifying Nothing

Dear Internet,

Why do you only send people this way when they’re looking for images of bondage, nipples or Bin Laden’s gruesome remains? It fills me with very little enthusiasm to write or to draw. Not that I suppose it matters to you if I do, Internet. There are millions more people out there willing to fill your infinite space with their infinite outpourings of hope and suffering. You are the magical typewriter onto which an infinite number of monkeys hammer and here is my random keystroke of the day. It's a crap cartoon to fill the time when I’m off doing something more productive. I might come back to you, Internet. Then again, I might not.

S.

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A Good Complexion

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Sensitive Teeth

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The Collaboration

My third attempt at animation after being seriously let down by a Zebra who claimed that he couldn't find his microphone in his loft and then claimed that they don't sell them at Argos...

The Worst Form of Government Except For All Those Others

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Bit of a late post today, though perhaps apt as we get closer to the moment the polls close. Apologies for the lack of cartoons today. I'm working on a new animation which is my most ambitious yet. Might not get it finished tomorrow so expect to see it Saturday, Sunday, or even next week.

The AV Referendum

Ahead of tomorrow's vote, I thought I'd post my other attempt at creating an animation.

Toothpaste

CIA Accused of Manipulating Photo of Bin Laden's Dead Body

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Butterflies

Well, that was a wasted few days. Been learning how to animate and this is my very first attempt at hand animation... Wish I could work out why there's cracking in the audio. Not much else to say but it needs work...

M62

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The Party

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Royal Hats

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Pictures

Haircut

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The Collector

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The Unseen Magic of Mario Testino's Official Royal Wedding Portrait

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Vanity Fair

Royal Wedding Fever

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Cartoons From A Train Journey

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Doh!

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Story at The Guardian

Free Royal Wedding Souvenir

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That Big Fat Gypsy Royal Wedding

Some two years ago or so, I was told by somebody close to an editor at a national newspaper that there’s no way that Photoshopped satire was ever going to succeed. At that time, I was producing one or two 'cartoons' a day. Occasionally a picture would get picked up by the newspapers and my blog would earn a mention. But as far as producing work for newspapers: they weren't interested. Editors, I was told, were very twitchy about the copyright issues of Photoshopped work. Like most people working in digital satire, I had to 'borrow' my source images from elsewhere. Working for nothing and producing no income from your work means that it’s impossible to pay photo agencies upwards of £50 a picture, which you then pull apart and combine with other pictures, also priced upwards of £50. It was a depressing thing to hear after two years working on ‘The Spine’ but I knew other Photoshop satirists were discovering the same thing.

Realising I needed to do something different, I quit the blog and went off to write a couple of books. Yet at the same time, I was also being enlightened by reading Nige’s blog. It was Nige who introduced me to the work of B. Kliban. I’d always been a huge fan of cartoons but I'd never studied them with any seriousness. It was through Nige that I started to form an attachment to the holy trinity of Ronald Searle, Ralph Steadman, and Gerald Scarfe. American illustrators interested me less, though I would eventually be drawn to the work of American counter-culture cartoonists, notably Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez and Drew Friedman, as well as modern satirists like Steve Brodner, Pat Oliphant, and Tim Kreider. Yet discovering Kliban was an utter revelation. His cartoons filled an empty space in my brain. The first time I saw one of his gags, the click was almost audible. I realised that I wanted to try real cartooning myself, that the execution mattered less than the joke, and that I should try to draw the kinds of cartoon that amuse me.

I began posting the results on my private blog. At the beginning, they were very basic line drawings created in Adobe Illustrator. I couldn't draw but that wasn't the point. I just wanted to create cartoons that made me laugh.

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I created hundreds of cartoons over a year or so until a couple of real artists who read the blog persuaded me to start using ink.

Ink! It was a horrendous feeling at first. I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no CTRL+Z to allow me to go back and fix my (many) mistakes. I also wasn't set up for using pen and ink. It was a matter of simple things like arranging a place to draw, buying a lamp, a drawing board (and eventually a chair and drawing table). It was finding the right instruments, struggling to understand how dip pens work, and to find which pens suited me. Then I had to find the right paper. I began drawing at A3 scale but discovered it was far too big for the one or two cartoons I was trying to produce every day. Then there was the physical side of sitting over a desk, living with my fingers almost perpetually covered in ink... But I was cartooning on a daily basis and I was enjoying publishing the results on my private blog.

Yet daily satirical cartoons have a short shelf-life and I realised that I might as well do something with them. I’m working on other things which keep me busy and it sometimes makes it a struggle to update here every day. Some weeks, like this last week, I'm not in an ideal mood to cartoon. Yet for all its sins, badly-drawn figures (sometimes, to my chagrin, commented upon, sometimes not), jokes which only I find amusing, and the horrorshow of the statistics, this blog has been something I’ve enjoyed.

Yet the world’s hard brutal irony has a way of creeping up on a guy.

I link to Gerald Scarfe’s website because he still has the devil’s flair. His strokes are wild, loose, yet absolutely precise. I buy his books. I search out his work in the newspapers. I check his online shop. I try to figure out his techniques and yet get nowhere when I study his crosshatching.

Today I noticed that there’s a new book listed there… It’s called ‘The Big Fat Gypsy Royal Wedding’ and it’s written by Scarfe’s two sons, Alex and Rory. It’s a clever idea, looks a funny book, and I'd encourage you to go out and buy it (though only after I've begged you to buy the book listed top right of this blog). But what frustrates me, leaves me standing against the wall banging my head against the plasterwork until my brains leak into the cavity beyond, isn’t the fact that it’s is a royal wedding satire when I couldn’t get a publisher to look at the book I’d written eight months ago…

It’s the simple fact that it’s not a book of cartoons. There’s not a single bit of splattered ink in sight.

What frustrates me, makes me gasp with sheer irony of it all is the one simple fact: the whole bloody thing is Photoshopped.

Ed Miliband Set For Op to Cure 'Bunged-up' Voice

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The Grand Scheme of Things

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A Little Minecraft Humour

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Don't worry, I'm just clearing my sketchbook of dumb ideas and this cartoon makes no sense unless you're one of only 2 million people who play this game and also have a sense of humour as inexplicable as my own...

 

Bank Holiday Friday

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Friday's Fairy Tale

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Cameron's Message Ahead of Royal Wedding

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TV Star Wins Gagging Order Over 'Intimate' Photos

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What Difference Would The Alternative Vote Make To UK Politics?

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Playboy Hot Tub Suspected in Legionnaires’ Outbreak

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Margate’s New Gallery Celebrates Opening With Tracey Emin Goose Installation

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Margate’s new £17.5 million gallery of contemporary art was opened today by artist Tracy Emin who provided the gallery with its newest installation as she strangled a live goose on the steps. Watched by civic dignitaries, Emin explained how the goose’s struggle was symbolic of the creative act of getting up in the afternoon, scratching yourself, randomly doing something, and then presenting the result to a gallery for a nice slice of Art Council funding. The goose will now be attached to a fifteen metre rubber hosepipe and installed the main hall where visitors will be encouraged to play it like a bugle.

‘This is going to be on the country’s best galleries so I was delighted to be on hand to strangle this goose and to turn it into a rubberised bugle,’ said Emin.

Animal rights campaigners did not mar the event after being assured that it was only a metaphorical goose strangulation being used for the purposes of lowbrow satire.

Miliband Makes Amends For Gaff

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Vince Cable Plays His Favourite Party Game

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Experts Spot Flaws in American Movie Version of Royal Wedding

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Roman Abramovich Buys The Art World's Most Flawed Masterpiece

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I know... Not come out as well as I'd hoped. Surprisingly difficult to produce a parody of Edvard Munch with your fourth attempt at using watercolours. Bloody stuff gets everywhere. You should see the state of my carpet...

Church of England Cracks Down On Sham Marriages

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Back Soon

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I will take some small crumb of comfort knowing that this cartoon goes live just as I sit down in that damn chair.

As it says, back soon...

Sarkozy Intervenes in Africa (Again)

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Monday's Quiz Question

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Man With Three Voice Boxes Earns Promotion

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In any normal walk of life, the misfortune of being born with three voice boxes would be considered a disadvantage.

‘You would think that. You might think that. That’s something you might consider,’ says Gary Neville, an unemployed 36-year-old from Manchester, who has bravely overcome his disability to be awarded the lucrative job of Sky Sports' annoying pundit, a position recently vacated by Andy Gray.

After years of therapy, Gary has learned to overcome his problems by training each of his voice boxes to say the same thing but in a slightly different way. He finds it a boon when commentating on matches.

‘Sir Alex always said you had to keep going,’ said Gary as he put pen to paper on the five year deal at twelve o’clock today. ‘Sir Alex never let us give up. Sir Alex said you had to keep playing until you hear the final whistle.’

Yet as disability groups celebrate Gary’s success, there have been some who cast doubt on the appointment.

‘Three voice boxes might be an advantage,’ said an anonymous source inside Sky, ‘but not one of them can say a decent thing about Liverpool.’

When this was put to him, Neville responded with remarkable candour. ‘Sir Alex said that you should always respect the opposition. Respect the opposition, that’s what Sir Alex always used to say. At the end of the day, you have to beat the team on the field especially when they’re a team like Liverpool.’

Sky are delighted in their new acquisition and have dismissed concerns that some viewers might be annoyed by Neville’s habit of rephrasing whatever he’s said another two times.

In unrelated news, Sky have announced that subscribers taking their HD service have dropped significantly over the last two months, with the biggest fall seen around noon today. Sky also admit that viewers using their 3D service might find that they experience more nausea in the coming months. They say this is normal and there is no need to report faulty equipment but paper bags will be going out with this month's Sky viewer's magazine.

Crisis at BBC

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BBC Centre was briefly evacuated this morning when Richard Madeley’s ego was left partially exposed during routine maintenance. It is believed that that levels of gin and tonic normally used to cool the ego were allowed to run low at 8.27AM. Madeley's ego then began to compliment itself as to the job it was doing presenting Chris Evan’s morning radio programme. The BBC has stressed that the incident lasted no more than five minutes during which time Madeley announced his ambition to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, explained the invention of the clockwork cog, and declared his interest in all things Liberian. The Liberian Embassy has since assured us that his claim to own 95% of the country is unfounded.

Events leading up to the incident are now sure to figure prominently in the BBC’s formal investigation. Space around the ego had been filled with unfiltered coffee earlier in the day as part of the usual routine for producing high energy radio. It is believed that this only compounded the danger once the G&T ran out.

Madeley was later said to be comfortable and his ego back down to operating temperatures. He will be monitored in the coming days to ensure that there is no further leaking of his ego into the environment. His wife, Judy, has refused to evacuate to a safe distance but precautionary measures have been taken to issue her with lead-lined mittens and a long stick.

Phone Hacking: Yates Under Pressure

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Story

Bob Dylan Plays China

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Things That Are Inexplicably Different

Defective Spoons

Continuing our 'Clearing-The-Decks-Of-Any-Dumb-Cartoon-I've-Left-Over-In-My-Old-Sketchbook' Day here at The Spine...

Shocking Michael Jackson Sculpture Appears in Hackney

The story.

Accountant To Star In Fantasy Film

I'm a bit behind with my cartoons today, so excuse them if they're a bit rushed. I blame my having watched 'Season of the Witch' last night instead of working late into the night.

Have you seen ‘Season of the Witch’? Basically, a couple of Crusaders (Cage and the ever magnificent Ron Perlman) are doing their bit for the crusades when they are suddenly struck by their consciences and decide to give it up. Returning to Europe, they discover the land infested by plague, which the Catholic Church believe is caused by some young looker (Claire Foy) who they’ve decided is a witch. Herein, Cage and Ron agree to transport the witch to an abbey where monks possess the last Book of Solomon which can vanquish the plague.

I could go on but it was a load of old hokum with absolutely no thought to historical accuracy and some of the worst casting I’ve seen. Their guide on the quest is a scoundrel raised on the streets of this Medieval European village with a sun-baked California accent. The only thing to be said other than Ron Perlman should be cast as the lead in every film (and, while I’m about it, can I recommend the woefully underrated ‘The Last Supper’ as his best), is that I hope Nicholas Cage pays off his debts soon because I don’t think I can take much more of this.

Steve Martin Exposed: The Secret Life of Hollywood's Most Reclusive Star

From his home, high above the smog and poor people in the Los Angeles hills, life might seem idyllic for Steve Martin, the legendary comedian, writer, banjo soloist, intellectual, and self-professed Hollywood hard man. Yet his rags-to-riches tale eclipses more than a few of the hard luck stories set in the City of Angels. Not many men have battled demons as hard and as long and few tales hide as many dark secrets – secrets that are only now being revealed by those who were once close to ‘Steve’ but are now beset by hard times and open to financial enticements from unscrupulous foreign websites.

What secrets does Steve Martin keep hidden? Why does he insist on Twittering naked except for his favourite banjo tie? Why did he say ‘no’ to the much ridiculed Scientology but ‘yes’ to the even more ridiculed Buttockology? What does he keep in a rented hangar out in the Nevada desert? And why do some people say that Steven Martin doesn’t suit a hat, though he insists on wearing one anyway?

***

Born August 14, 1945, into a Greek Orthodox family with Italian leanings, Stavros Martinee, was a large child. Some say he was the biggest in the county but that record was held by another boy called Gern Blanston who would grow up to wrestle hogs semi-professionally across the Midwest. Yet for the young Stavros, the pig pen held no special attraction. He was instead fascinated with the workings of his Uncle Pepe’s dairy farm which is where he spent so much of his childhood. Under Pepe’s guidance, Stavros learned to feed cattle, clean the barn, spit whilst leering at the neighbour’s buxom daughters, and, most importantly, discover the pleasure of handling milk-rich udders. Udders fascinated the young Martinee. Some boys have a special proficiency with the violin, maths, or sports. With the young Stavros, it was the ruminant teat. Revealing himself to be a prodigy when it came to sitting astride a three-legged stool, he could fill a bucket in sixty seconds, a county record, without spilling a drop. His skills didn’t go unnoticed. Given the chance to attend the local farming school, he enrolled when still only twelve years old and rose to the top of his class having undergone the ritual of running his genitals through a threshing machine at the tender age of fourteen.

Yet udders were not to be his life. One day whilst handling a fully-laden teat, his hand slipped and he fell awkwardly from his milking stool. Before he could react, his hand was crushed beneath the rear hoof of a one-ton Friesian. Learning to use that hand again would take many years. The family doctor encouraged the boy to take up magic and the banjo to help improve his dexterity and Stavros soon proved adept at both. No boy could saw a banjo in half quite like the young Martinee and he entertained the elders of the village many a night with the tunes he produced on a deck of cards ruffled close to their ears.

Aged 16, Stavros’s life changed forever. Whilst throwing quoits around the village duck for the purposes of polling in the local county elections, he was spotted by a travelled carnival owner and invited to tour. Aware that the young Stavros’s foreign name might impede his career in the conservative world of the carny, the showman Anglicised it and Stavros Martinee became Mrs. Edith Flankduster.

Edith would travel with the circus for four years, rising to the rank of bearded lady number three, but by the time he was nineteen years old, Edith Flankduster had already decided that he wanted a life away from punters pulling his whiskers all night. It was the early 1970s and, like many men his age, Edith wanted to shave his chin and to wear tight underwear visible beneath even tighter trousers. It would be the last time he wore a beard and the first time he would be known by his new name: Steve…

At first, he called himself Steve ‘The Scrotum’ Martin because he thought it gave him added charm. Yet life was difficult that first year. Complaints from the heavy metal band, of the same name encouraged him to drop his 'Scrotum' and he found his fortunes immediately improve. Unsure what he could do in the world with only one good uddering hand and three years of experience as a carnival freak, Steve Martin had gravitated into show business and made his début (emphasis on the accent) at the 45th Street Comedy Bar on November 23rd, 1971. People who attended his first performance remember it as one of the most memorable nights in LA’s history. It was the night that the sewers backed up and there was a terrible smell over fifteen blocks. Little else is remembered about Martin’s act, though some say it involved erotic contortions and steroid abuse. However, by 1972, the act had evolved to include four of the five jokes that would serve him well over the next two decades.

He rapidly established his popularity at local comedy clubs by buying drinks for the crowd and then, on the 17th March 1975, he declared that he would be the first comedian to fill the Hollywood Bowl. Advertising went up on March 18th, and, after a week of hectic promotion involving collecting social security and sitting in doorways rattling a tin cup and prodding a blind dog, Martin finally walked on stage to meet his adoring crowd. They’d been promised a ‘night of large breasts and motorcycle jumping’ so they were in an excited state when Martin appeared in his trademark white suit. From a distance, the suit looked like leather and his white hair resembled a crash hat. The crowd were also heavily influenced by weed, LSD, and liquorice torpedoes so they were off their guard when Martin launched into his act consisting of juggling, jokes, and yawning.

The night would go down in entertainment history as Steve Martin mesmerised his audience for the whole of the twenty seven minute set, later released on VHS for a ridiculous price for such a short show. But this would not be the last time that Martin’s business acumen proved valuable. With the consummate skill of a man trained to get the very last drop of milk from a dry teat, Martin leveraged his popularity with doped-up college kids to amass a fortune by selling merchandise such as t-shirts, records, posters, beer mats, mittens, socks, turnips, emergency rubber washers, and personalised back scratchers shaped like Martin’s badly-deformed hand (now perpetually locked in a clawhammer, though proving helpful when playing the banjo).

Friends who knew Martin at the time say that money changed him. No longer willing to run to the bathroom before the cheque for the meal arrived, he now fled the state, left no forwarding address, and started to part his hair down the middle. He was also driving around LA in a yellow Rolls Royce and guarded at all times by South American mercenaries instructed to call him ‘chief’ whenever in he was in the company of ‘tall blondes, brunettes, redheads or really cool bald chicks’.

What did he do with his money at this time? At first he wasted his money at the Playboy Mansion but eventually his began to channel his fortune into films. ‘The Jerk’ (1979) was originally planned as a cinéma vérité study of poverty in the Cuban ghetto in the years after the revolution. Problems with the script and trouble with the Cuban authorities after Martin was caught smuggling a family of refugees beneath the ‘famous comedian’s cape’ he’d adopted by that time, meant that the finished film was considered a failure. However, much to the filmmaker’s delight, it seemed to resonate with a student crowd who considered it a comedy masterpiece. It was quickly trimmed from its original running time of four hours twenty seven minutes, redubbed into English, and launched on a mainstream audience who were unaware of its art-house origins.

Again, Martin was not slow to grab the proverbial tit and he quickly milked the success of ‘The Jerk’ in order to make a succession of films, all of which found popularity among a heavily-medicated audience.

His 1982 masterpiece, ‘Roxanne’, was a critical highpoint. Originally conceived as a sex education film for the space programme and titled ‘Your Upside Down Is Heaven To Me’, it was eventually turned into a light romantic comedy starring Daryl Hannah. The script was changed and all the footage destroyed from the three weeks that Martin had spent on a closed set filming explicit sex scenes with a variety of household objects. It was during this time that Marin badly burnt the end of his nose whilst getting intimate with a lava lamp, meaning that he had to wear a prosthetic through filming. It would be the last time Martin directed himself in a lava lamp environment.

The next few years saw Martin try to establish himself with a family audience. ‘Parenthood’ (1989), ‘Father of the Bride’ (1991) and ‘Bilko’ (1996) were all big hits with people’s mothers but despite abandoning his core audience of ‘druggies, wierdos, and people who keep chickens for recreation’, these big-paying roles suited Martin as he was devoting more time to a new passion.

Steve Martin saw his first monster truck in 1988 and instantly fell in love. He described the moment with typical candour in his 1999 Rolling Stone interview in which he eloquently equated it to seeing ‘this big noise thing’. By 1993, he had the largest collection of Monster Trucks in Hollywood, though they were often hidden away from the public’s gaze in the large annex to his home that Martin claimed to have built for his art collection which he was also amassing at the time for tax purposes. The truth was that the art collection was housed in an old aircraft hangar in the Nevada desert, where they remain to this day, exposed to freezing nights and heat of the desert sun.

Martin’s next films were a series of serious dramas. The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Novocaine (2001), and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005) established his reputation as an actor with a remarkable bank balance. Yet, again, Martin wasn’t satisfied and looked to abandon Hollywood as he started to spend more time playing his banjo with the notorious paramilitary folk group, the Steep Canyon Rangers.

***

Today Martin lives the life of a recluse, his only contact with the outside word being his Twitter account and occasional appearances at folk festivals where he plays the banjo and mumbles incoherently into a microphone. Allergic to poor people, Mexico, and spruce, Martin is choosy about the theatres he plays and instructs his management to levy high prices for tickets for the concerts which, true to his roots, are still only twenty seven minutes long including intervals.

Although a new younger audience has come to love ‘Uncle Steve’ through his hilarious tweets, Martin’s love affair with technology is more sordid. Unable to type due to his long standing milking injury, Martin travelled to India in 1992 where he spent six months with the guru Siri Mau Flidiahisa. There he was initiated into the mystical world of skiitatrijakjohja, derisively known in the west as ‘buttockology’. Teaching patience and promoting good circulation through the rhythmic clenching of the buttocks, the meditation techniques also taught Martin how to type using only his gonads. This he continues to do to this day, with this trademark typing errors attributed to the busy life of a Hollywood star but, in reality, caused by the sudden and rapid temperature fluctuations in the hills above Los Angeles.

Neighbours speak of hearing the clattering of his keyboard late at night as Martin works on his novels. Short in pages and large in print, each one is a masterpiece and takes him three long years to write using only his testes, but critics agree that Martin has a flare for words and hope that he will write more. Now a level three advocate of buttockology, he is currently writing his memoirs, spending long nineteen hour periods one buttock before switching to the other as words drip from his nuts.

He tours the UK with his banjo later in the year. Prices are exorbitant and he won’t be performing anywhere near his fans. ‘I don’t want those people near me,’ he was quoted as saying recently. Yet fans need not fear being deprived of Martin’s genius for very long. As one of his oldest friends said confidentially, ‘Steve’s a twisted marvellous genius of a fellow but so long as he’s got a pair of testicles and a willing audience, he’ll always put on a show’.

Auditions Begin For 'Britain's Got Talent'

It’s the show that critics accuse of exploiting vulnerable members of society but the family of its latest star are quick to point out that he’d be the first person to boast about his appearance on the new series of Britain’s Got Talent coming to ITV later this month.

Only, when the footage of last night’s audition is aired, it’s very unlikely that Harry Swollen will be able to enjoy his fifteen minutes of fame. In all likelihood, he will be in the same Level One coma he’s been under for the past eighteen months.

Swollen is but one victim of the rash of trampolining accidents that have filled hospital waiting rooms in the past twelve months. Only, for Harry, there was no hour long wait in A&E followed by a plaster cast and weeks spent preventing his wife’s slow brother Verne from covering his leg with semi-pornographic doodles. His trampolining accident threw him through a second floor bathroom window where he cracked his head on the bidet before momentum carried him out onto the landing and down the stairs. He has been unconscious ever since.

‘We’ve certainly been through some dark times,’ admits his wife, ‘but we have to keep going and look forward to some happier days for the children’s sake.’

Those happier days are the work of amateur puppeteer Maxwell Higginbottom and the story of Harry Swollen’s success is really the story of how the two men came together and started to make dreams happen.

The 2010 series of Britain’s Got Talent holds bad memories for Higginbottom. Unable to proceed past the qualifying round, he failed to win over the judges with his five minute shadow theatre of Polish folk tales performed to Stravinsky. It was the kind of disappointment that might have ruined a less determined man but Yorkshire-born Higginbottom admits that he can be stubborn. ‘Northern grit we call it,’ he says from his workshop in Halifax. ‘I just had to go back to the basics and reassess where I went wrong. Turns out I was missing the X factor.’

He found that X factor being fed intravenously two hundred miles away in a hospital in Hillingdon. After reading of the story of Swollen’s accident, he approached the family and proposed that he could turn their grief into laughter by reanimating their husband and father via two lengths of sold three by two for the purposes of song and dance.

‘It’s remarkable what he can make Harry do,’ explained Hilda Swollen as she washes down her husband ahead of a candid photo session with a national newspaper. ‘The first time I saw Maxwell at work, it was just like Harry had woken up and was eager to get down to the Labour club. He always loved to dance, did Harry, though I think he’d surprised to discover how good he’s suddenly become at tap.’

Hilda and the family have sworn to keep the result of the audition a secret until the day of broadcast but Higginbottom has dropped a few clues as to how it went.

‘Let’s just say that we’re keeping Harry’s bikini line well waxed and we’re putting him through twice daily stretching sessions to help make him more supple. I want to see Harry finish a dance with the splits. It’s hard work on my wrists but if we can work the right amount of slack into his groin I think it could be the kind of performance to win over the hearts of a nation.’

That news is certain to please Swollen’s growing number of fans who believe the coma patient might become this year’s Susan Boyle. ‘Where SuBo led, HaSwoI can follow,’ says family friend, Jimmy Pool, who is now acting as Swollen’s manager. ‘This time next year, we expect Harry to be conquering America, assuming, that is, that we can get him through customs as hand luggage.’

BBC News Denies Charge of Nepotism

 

It's all a conspiracy, I tells ye!

Mike Sergeant

Dan Snow

Roland Buerk

 

Sky News Hires Monkey To Review The Papers

Fulham FC Unveil Michael Jackson Statue

Yes, it's Sunday and, yes, this is very quickly doodled, but this story was too good to miss. Thanks to the Zebra for pointing it out...

India Win Cricket World Cup

Michael McIntyre Launches Tour of Nation’s Stadiums and Arenas

The Parable of the Ass

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Profile: Barry Norman

[singlepic id=56 w=600 h=450 float=right]Here, for the first time, I'm pleased to reproduce a chapter from my forthcoming book, ‘Famous Men Called Barry’. If it proves successful and you enjoy this, I might publish other previews of the book, including my chapters on Barry Sheen, Barry Took, John Barry, and my two chapters on the greatest Barry of them all: Barry Humphries.

Chapter 27: Barry Norman

Although eventually he was to become Britain’s favourite film critic, Barry Norman’s career began in the rag trade in the East End of London in 1952. Originally trained as a lingerie draftsman specialising in girdles for the larger cut of womanhood, Norman was responsible for the first press-studded gusset and elasticated thigh supports which were to become industry standards by the end of the decade. Yet by 1963, the hippy movement saw the advent of the liberated female figure. The classical hourglass shape of the 1950s, popularised by pneumatic stars such as Marilyn Monroe, gave way to that of pot-bellied crystal bangers such as Mama Cass. Girdle sales plummeted and when the industry faced its severest cutbacks of all after the failure of the 1964 elastic harvest, Norman faced redundancy for the first time in his life.

Yet with the wiles that would later serve him well among the elite of Hollywood, Norman saw an opening in the rapidly expanding world of print journalism and, in 1965, he became the first fashion correspondent for the Racing Post. Establishing his reputation as an investigative reporter, he went undercover as a jockey for the whole of the 1967’s racing calendar. He won only five races and raced for half the season with a broken collar bone but his exposé about the secret world of high society ‘butter jockeys’ led to his being named Sports Journalist of the Year. It marked a new phase of his career.

Moving to work for the Daily Mail, he began to specialise in showbiz news and, in 1970, wrote the first contemporary account of Hollywood’s treatment of the post-Oz munchkins. ‘Sit On My Lap, Little Man’ was not a best seller but it caught the eye of producers of the BBC’s new movie show, Film 72.

The offer of work was originally to have been for six weeks whilst Raymond Baxter, the regular host, was on sick leave after accidentally swallowing aviation fuel during the filming a segment about Spitfires in the movies. Baxter never returned to the show, though would continue to make documentaries about Spitfires until he was shot down in 2007. Meanwhile, Norman was confirmed as the series’ regular host and would continue in the job until 1998.

Norman admitted that he was nervous to find himself the nation’s chief arbiter of movie tastes and in his first few seasons he would rarely criticise a film, choosing to instead mock them with his trademark dry humour. However his dislike of subtitled films from Eastern Europe involving symbolic shots of wheels soon established him as a favourite among film fans. He was popular among movie stars too and would often call upon his old skills to provide custom underwear, including the hand-stitched black basque he provided for Joan Collins iconic performance in The Bitch (1979).

Despite his success and popularity, there was a dark side to the Barry Norman phenomenon. He was irritated when the public began to know him by the phrase ‘and why not’ and he spent most of the 1980s writing letters to the newspapers to explain that he’d never uttered this phrase. Over the years he attempted to develop an alternative catchphrase of his own but the British public never took to either ‘it didn’t tickle my nachos’ or ‘did it succeed? You can call me Aunt Gracie if it did’. It was a bad time in Norman’s life. As his fame grew, so did his frustration, leading to the notorious events of the 1992 Bafta Television Awards when he had be pulled off a prostrate Rory Bremner by Caroline Quentin and Christopher Biggins.

Yet, by the 1990s, Norman had reconciled himself somewhat with his catchphrase. He had come a long way yet, to his credit, he never forgot his roots and would continue to mention one item of lingerie in every single show over the thirty year run of the show.

Officially classes as a natural treasure in 2002 and recently spared from government attempts to sell him to France to reduce the country’s debt, he now lives in retirement and spends his time watching cricket or dozing in a comfortable armchair with a film on in the background, occasionally muttering ‘and why not’ though, of course, he will always deny it when he wakes up.

BBC Headlines Deliberately Misinterpreted

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Not much about it here.

 

Gaddafi Inner Circle Shocked By Defecation

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