Doom, Gloom, Dead Drives and Dogging

If I hadn’t been woken at 4AM this morning, I might have posted a cartoon today.

I was already having a fitful sleep. Late last night, I’d been trying to teach myself how to create a 3D model of a minor celebrity (for the quite innocent purpose of voodoo) and failing miserably. I went to bed and dreamt about polygons until I was woken by a tick tick tick whrrrr sound coming from my office/work den/the Well of Lost Souls. I followed the sound until I discovered my PC, which had woken itself in the night. One of the hard drives was having a fit: drive heads banging their way destructively through my files and motors wheezing their last. The bloody thing had failed, leaving me wide awake and wondering what the hell I could do. What was on the drive? Was it work? Was it my huge collection of Richard Madeley pictures I’ve amassed for the purposes of satire?

Thankfully, it wasn’t work, though it’s nearly every bit of software I need to do my work. I really need to buy a new drive but that will have to wait until I get that dreamed-of-job working in telesales, perhaps in some Manchester shithole where I can contemplate leaping from tall buildings every hour of the day. Until then, I’ll have to tighten my belt and try to work on with 400Gbs missing from my system.

Better news is that my animation is now up at the Film 4 Scenestealers website. I’m also now ranked Number 4 on Google for the phrase ‘Burtonwood dogging’, so all of you people arriving here looking for details of ‘Burtonwood dogging’ (and, yes, I’m looking at you in Kidlington, Oxfordshire), let me take this opportunity to tell you how much you disgust me. Oh, I could never say this to your face but isn’t the world bad enough without the likes of you going off down secluded country lanes to watch some puny window cleaner banging away at some elephantine play group assistant? Get a hobby! Man up!

On a more serious note, I’m really sad to see the passing of one of our few comedy greats. I have one of Eric Sykes’ novels sitting on my desk (next to the dead hard drive) as I type, as if to remind me of what a comedy machine he was. His eponymous TV series was probably his most mainstream but I think his greatest achievement was in bringing silent comedy back to the masses, making the word ‘rhubarb’ into byword for laughs. And so, another of the few people I would have liked to have met has gone but Lenny Henry, Graham Norton, David Williams, Matt Lucas, and Miranda Hart continue to get jobs at the BBC. My hard drive is dead. Doggers prevail. Dark days, my friends. Dark days…

Diamond Geeza

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Before the story broke, I barely knew the meaning of Liber Rates. Now, deep into resignation country, where the titans of British banking are falling like… Well, I’d say dominoes but that doesn’t seem apt, unless they’re diamond encrusted dominoes, made from the rarest ivory taken from the last tusk of the hairy mammoth. Yet in whatever manner the fall, the most shocking aspect of this Libor fixing scandal is the extent to which people are shocked that the banks have been playing unfairly.

That’s the problem with thinking about banks. We retain the last vestiges of the Victorian sense of banking, where thickly bossed doors open onto marbled shrines to commerce, industry, and Empire. I think of old men with large chin whiskers, pulling at their fobs and checking their watches against the great golden clock in a lobby, populated by dozens of bank tellers, each one an identical copy of T.S. Eliot. Yet perhaps The City was already changing when he wrote his poetry from a bank. In The Waste Land, he writes of:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Such is London but such is The City, unreal and now always in fog. The problem of banking and bankers, is that it attracts too many men who fix their eyes only at their own feet.  The fronts of the buildings are now made entirely of glass but the business has become far less transparent. These are the bastards who arbitrarily impose fines on their customers on a whim and who are entirely without shame should the error occur on their side of the bullet proof glass. I wonder how Nat West and RBS would have responded had a customer explained that they couldn’t pay their bill because of a computer glitch. Would they perhaps waive bank charges during the delay? Or would they be rubbing their hands together and booking another holiday in the Seychelles?

Bob Diamond was apparently one of the greats of modern banking. I’m not sure what this means, though it reminds me of that excellent film ‘Margin Call’. Bob Diamond, I would assume, would be in the Jeremy Irons role. It means that somebody, somewhere, Kevin Spacey is burying a dog this morning and weeping about the sorry state of a once great profession.

In Bruges: An Animated Scenesteal

This is my entry for Film 4’s Scenestealers competition. The aim of the competition is to remake two minutes of a Film 4 movie, though based on the judging criteria, I realise I now have no chance of winning. They want a film that matches Film 4’s ethos, which probably means that they don’t want a broad comic take on ‘In Bruges’, transposing two of the characters for those that the leads played in Harry Potter. Some sombrely lit neo-realism piece is probably going to win. However, here it is my entry in its glory...



Humour is always a difficult thing to sell. It looks easy to the point that everybody might claim to be, at the very least, an amateur of the art. Everybody can be funny and, unless you have the context of a live audience and the reality of laughter or silence, there’s very little to differentiate one person’s attempts at humour from the rest. Then, of course, there are so many types of humour, that you can always be sure that if you play something broad, they wanted witty. If you give them dry and witty, they want you falling on your arse with a bucket of manure over your head.

I think I'm going to go do some cartoons. I've done so many drawings recently, too many of them rushed, meant to hide in the shadows, that I might as well post the one decent drawing I think I've done in the past two weeks. It took me an absolute eternity to get anything like a likeness, but knowing my luck recently, you're not thinking Colin Farrell...

So here it is. My caricature of Graham Norton/Ed Norton/Aung San Suu Kyi, or whoever you wish. I'm knackered...

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Wallpaper

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I have an hour before my video finishes rendering, so I look up at the world after days of constant drawing (the above was another rushed doodle for this blog, so apologises for the quality). I also see that nothing has changed. Spain are still European Champions, rain is disrupting Wimbledon, and the banks are after our money with a sharp knife clamped between the salivating lips.

I’m beginning to have serious reservations about the amount of time I’m putting into learning the software required to create my opening scene. I’m hoping it will be a fly-through of a small town rendered in 3D I've created, a bit Tim Burtonesque if I pull it off right, though without the right music and artwork, that’s looking increasingly unlikely. The idea was a good one and the early renderings have looked quite good. Only, to get the town looking how I want it to look, I have to decorate the place. Hence the reason I spent Sunday drawing houses, fountains, statues, walls, bushes, trees, streetlamps, pedestrians, bikes, old men... The list goes on and I still find myself with gaps that need filling and require something more than yet another shrub or badly drawn house.

So, that’s what I’m about to do: go search the web for interesting pictures of things to stick in the centre of a town. Suggests that don’t include vomiting teenagers and urinating tramps are most welcome… Actually, the urinating tramp actually sounds quite good. I’ll go and start with that.

 

One of Those Techno-Junkie Intermissions...

I am two fools, I know, for loving technology, and for saying so, in whining poetry…

So, okay, I also love the poetry of John Donne but not so much that I won’t butcher it for cheap effect this rainy Sunday at the beginning of July.

I finished my new animation yesterday. It’s been a labour of love but also I’ve put extra effort into finishing it because I want to enter it into a completion. I have no chance of winning – I don’t think I’ve won a bloody thing in my life and that includes three numbers of the national lottery* – but I like to give these things a shot.

So, animation finished, I looked at it yesterday and began to think about the opening. And at this point you might notice that there’s no animation accompanying this blog post… Well, as much as I looked at the opening, I thought to myself: it’s good and technically not bad but surely I can do better. So, I looked into ways of improving the opening 10 seconds (yes, just 10 seconds!) and I’m now up to my ears in technical PDFs explaining how to use 3D software, light scenes, create models from drawings, so I might create some staggering intro.

I probably won’t manage to pull it off and, in a day or two, I’ll sheepishly post the animation I finished a couple of days ago, with a small note: the 3D idea didn’t work because I don’t have a team of 50 animators and the budget of James Cameron.

However, for the rainy Sunday, at the beginning of July, I do love technology. And this explains why I’ve not posted anything deeply meaningful today and I don't have a cartoon. But, just wait for this intro... I'm telling you... It will knock your socks off.

* Just to show how unlucky in competitions I am: our family had a sweepstake and I picked out Italy for the Euros. Only, I then swapped it for Croatia…

 

Tom Cruise Rejoins Dating Scene

Tom Cruise is one of those entities that could only exist at this point in time and space. He is, for want of a better word: perfect. The marketing people love him and he, being a product of their dark arts, does everything he can to help them. On TV, he shines in interview. He seems lively, interested, self-deprecating, and, unless you look too closely, he hasn’t aged a day since he wiped the spittle from Dustin Hoffman’s chin in ‘Rainman’. At film premieres, he takes more time signing autographs for fans than any other star, and though his films tend to stick to the generic conventions (boom, bang, kick a chair, snog, bang), they aren’t woeful. When he appeared on ‘Top Gear’, he posted the fastest time in the ‘Star in the Reasonably Priced Car’ and for recreation he rides motorbikes and pulls loops in his plane. In addition to all of that, he has great teeth and more money than Jesus’s sandal salesman. I would even go so far as to say that, except for the aforementioned ‘perfection’, it’s hard to really dislike Tom Cruise.

Unless, of course, you mention the bit about Scientology…

I don’t go in for much religion but I think if there is a God or Gods out there, up there, or in our sock drawer, then that God or Gods gave the game away and revealed himself, herself, themselves, in the delightful arrangement they made by which they gave Tom Cruise everything that a man might desire for in life, on the proviso that he has to become the mouthpiece for the biggest pile of half-baked theological shite ever written down by a mortal hand. It was surely a deal that would make Adrian Messenger think twice and Doctor Faust ring his publicist to see if he should prick his finger and sign.

Of course, the divorce of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is a personal tragedy and all that. But perhaps it is a sign that at least one person in Hollywood has the sense to see a few of the flaws in Scientology, such as the fact that it reads like a not particularly good episode of ‘Star Trek’. And not even the original ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. I mean ‘Star Trek: Deep Space One’ or one of those spin-off novelisations written by William Shatner.

Besides, I saw Katie (I’m firmly on her side, I think, should they need me in court) in that underrated chiller, ‘Don't Be Afraid of the Dark’, and she seemed far too rational in that. If she couldn’t believe a young girl’s tales of the creatures living beneath the floorboards, I thought it highly unlikely that she could believe in the concept of our Thetan overlords. Unless, of course, it was the perfect teeth and the speedboats that confused her. Thetans are known for their perfect teeth and speedboats. They'd probably so well as the 'Star in the Reasonably Priced Car’ too... But look at me! I've already said too much. To learn more, send me a cheque for £1000 pounds and/or 10% of your gross income for the next year, whichever is largest.I can't promise you answers but I can promise to set you on the right path to the truth...

Bend The Rules For Beckham

I’m not a David Beckham fan. Put me in a room full of people who aren’t Beckham fans and I’d quickly make plenty of enemies among the majority who think my opinions too extreme. In many respects, Beckham represents the turn towards self-indulgence this country has seen over twenty years, where the body has become the place where consumer products battle for prominence. From the prevalence of tattoos to the feminisation of male culture, from a world in which style wins over substance, to the worshipping of the shallowest celebrities: all roads seem to lead to Beckham. Even at what he does best, he embodies the showy but not particularly effective side of football.

Yet to leave him out of the Olympic squad seems morally wrong, especially when that place is given to a player who allegedly refused to be on the stand-by list for the England squad. Beckham never ruled himself out of playing for England, flying ridiculous distances to appear. As captain, one sensed that it meant something to him beyond the increased marketing possibilities. He worked so tirelessly for the country to win the Olympics (though, here again, I’m pretty indifferent to the whole bloody spectacle that it seems strange to be arguing that winning it was a virtue) that do deny him the chance to play for his country, one last time, seems ridiculously petty.

Yet this country has become so obsessed by winning that we seem to have forgotten greater qualities, such a loyalty, friendship, common human decency. Robert Preston was just on the news saying that the failure at Barclays is down to customers not realising that there had been a change in corporate culture: that the banks started to screw us over in the name of profit because they’d forgotten that they were actually meant to serve the interests of the customer.

Who really gives a stuff if we win a gold for football at the Olympics? Let Beckham play and show that we cherish something greater than winning, greater the Mammon… That itself would be a victory, though a victory that in a way stands in the way of everything that Beckham has cherished, promoted and exemplified over the last two decades.

No cartoon, as yet, today. I’ve been busy animating and drawing a cartoon which might actually earn me a couple of bob. But then again, it might not.

On Dogging, Cruising And Other Outdoor Pursuits

Another cartoon from my notebook, scribbled in a Warrington coffee house the other day. For once, it’s inspired by real life.

Because they're trendy, enlightened, and possibly part Scandinavian, Warrington Council tries to encourage cycling. Go to their website and download the cycle routes. They have plenty. The council encourage people to travel to the town along other cycle routes that pass through the local nature reserves. Those nature reserves follow the paths of the old canals built by cold eyed industrialists but now in the hands of an even stricter group of people: fishermen, who block the paths with forty foot rods that wouldn't have looked out of place strapped to Ernest Hemingway. It's one of these canals I occasionally ride whenever I need new art supplies.

The only problem is that once you’re beyond a very well-tended part of Warrington’s cycle routes, towards the edges of the county, the council don’t really take as much care about the quality of the cycle routes or where their routes pass. And like the geniuses that can only emerge in the public sector, Warrington Council have put their ever-so-family-friendly cycle route right down a lane whose only other occupants are cruising homosexuals, dogging couples, and prostitutes servicing their clients into the shallow woodland. Apparently, the place is well known for genital pleasures and it's advertised quite widely on the internet. What makes it worse, however, is that the Council, in their wisdom, have stuck a turnstyle at the entrance to this lane and it’s at this turnstyle that all the cruisers, doggers, and prozzers park, chat, and prepare to do business. It’s also where all cyclists have to climb off their bikes and navigate the parked cars and people with strange looks in their eyes. Families ride the route but the council don’t seem to care. They must consider it part of the ‘educational’ element of the route. I know I've learned a few things since I started to ride that lane. One is never to look left nor right or stop to tell somebody the time.

I recently tried to avoid the lane, taking the nearby main A-road, but had an accident that ended with my being gently nudged off the road by a low loader carrying two JDB diggers. I think the low loader didn't come away unscathed and I only suffered severe lacerations to my knees. I now try to travel the cycle route early in the morning but it’s still strange to be cycling along to suddenly see some thin, emancipated woman, prematurely aged from drug use, emerge from the shrubbery followed by some lank haired taxi driver with a moustache straight from 1970s casting checking that his fly is up and giving you a hateful look because you’re there to see his indiscretion. Alternatively, you might see a strange couple, dressed in unsuitable attire for rambling (high heels, short skirt heavy make-up... and his wife's dressed no better), standing with a camera pretending to be photographing a dandelion until you’ve passed. Or you find yourself propositioned by a man standing with his hands deep in his trenchcoat lurking in the shadow of the copse...

Which brings me to the point of today’s post. Even if I was that way inclinded: a cruising homosexual, a dogger, or a man who uses prostitutes, what on earth would possess me to get intimate with a stranger in such a miserable spot of woodland? I wouldn’t even eat my packed lunch surrounded by insects, rotting vegetation, and the fly tipped rubbish of various housing estates. Why would I want to drop my trousers in that place? What on earth attracts these people to such a miserable stretch of lane, used by cyclists and the occasional rambler? Perhaps it’s another dimension to human sexuality that I don’t understand: like women who want to read ‘50 Shades of Grey’ or the middle-aged mothers who lust after Peter Dinklage.

I do know that it’s a weird world and it’s only getting weirder.

The Alan Partridge Conundrum: Or How Alan Partridge Lost His Edge

Just had my first tattoo but it was a complete accident. I managed to stab myself with a croquill when it was heavy with ink from the above cartoon. I now have a black spot on my thumb that won’t wash off. It's not too bad, I guess, unless I ever find myself in the company of pirates.

However, whist drawing, I gave more thought as to why the Alan Partridge special on Sky Atlantic, ‘Welcome to the Places of My Life’, was so spectacularly poor. I think the issue has much to do with the reason why the third series didn’t match up to the second. Alan Partridge’s greatest comedic virtue is that we enjoy his failures but only when set against the background of his greater successes. The fact that he’s a third rate Terry Wogan has always been the best joke but the fact that he uses this 'success' to settle old scores is where the comedy genius lies. His natural nemesis is the BBC and this lends his adventures a sharp satirical edge that’s missing when he’s reduced to a mere radio presenter. In Series One, the comedy was broader because the Partridge character was working within the context of his own show on the BBC. The character hadn’t quite developed but there was so much potential in what was meant to be his last chance to succeed inside the Beeb. Series Two achieved the perfect balance between the aspiring TV celebrity and the nobody, but, by the third series, the satire had become a little more shallow as Alan’s stature had been reduced.

The forty minute special continued that decline, showing Alan who is by now simply too ordinary. Though the writing was a little weak, the main issue was that there was too little of Alan doing what Alan does best. Conversely, the best parts were those moments when he again had (and demonstrated) power: the parody of BBC documentary about council business where Alan had his old cocky swagger; Alan looking at sheep which remind him of the enemies he made inside the BBC; the walk with the vicar who Alan bullies into speeding up for the cameras; Alan mocking the greengrocer simply for being ordinary. This is Alan Partridge at his best: displaying that familiar power relationship that exists between minor celebrities and their audience. It’s a vainglorious arrogance that is just a short walk from fascism, a celebrity where power corrupts quickly and absolutely. The moment that exemplifies it best was when Alan was fantasising about Hitler taking over Norwich Town Hall. So much more could have been done with this. Partridge’s comedy has always come from the fact that inside this bland TV presenter beats the heart of a tyrant.

If there is ever another series of Partridge, they need to get back to what he does best. They need to give him more power and situations to dominate. Perhaps they should make him run for political office, like a latter day Esther Rantzen. That would be a show I would happily to pay to see.

Things I Discovered Yesterday

• Hedgehogs, though slow moving, can be known to leap suicidally into the path of cyclists who must veer dangerously of the way to avoid them.


• Veering dangerously out of the way of suicidal hedgehogs has a tendency to make cyclists fall of their bikes.


• The ground is hard when hit wrist first from the back of a moving bicycle.


• Drawing is difficult when you’ve sprained your wrist.


• Mentholated ‘cooling’ balm provides excellent relief on said wrist, less good when you fail to wash your hands adequately and accidentally deposit aforementioned balm on your foreskin.


• Alan Partridge isn’t always funny, especially when dragged out into a 40 minute pseudo-documentary which even the most ardent fan of the Partridge found himself willing it to be over.


• It’s hard not to prejudge a sharply dressed bald meathead in the bank with the name Giselle tattooed vertically down the side of his bestial neck and loudly depositing £4000 into his account. He might not be a gangster. He might be a hairdresser.


• I hate tennis and I don’t give a stuff if Andy Murray wins.


• We are governed by a privileged elite who wouldn’t know the common touch if it was the size of a badly sprained wrist applied anally and smeared with a mentholated ‘cooling’ balm.

Today, I am going to attempt to draw but my wrist bloody hurts… The animation is coming along, though I was to put some effort in to tidying up some of the weaker drawings. This animation is for a competition, so I really don't want it to have any noticeable weaknesses, other than my horrible voice acting.

 

Toast

Not a great cartoon but I'm unbelievably busy with the animation. Also, I have so many grumbles this morning, it’s impossible to believe that I got up in a good mood.

First of all, I’m annoyed with myself for missing the Alan Partridge special last night. If the reviews are to believed, I missed something special. Secondly, I’ve got to do some voice work this morning, voicing two parts for the new animation, which means twice as much hell to get through, trying to make my voice fit the parts and try not to sound like I’m reading the Biggleswade telephone directory. Is it true of all people that you never think you have an accent until you hear your voice played back to yourself. I sound like I’m an extra direct from the new episode of Wallace and Gromit. Johnny Vegas and Peter Kay are both from these parts and I sound like a slightly nasal version of their less confident brother.

However, before all that, I have to get to an art shop… I've almost run out of ink.

 

 

 

That Old Hodgson Magic

I’m down with a miserable cold, so no cartoons today and I really don’t feel much like typing. I am, however, working on a new animation which is a little different this time and my most complicated to date. I might even have it finished in less than a week...

I must say, however, that England’s exit from Euro 2012 came as something of a relief. I might now begin to enjoy the tournament. The thought of having to endure another 90 minutes of Hodgson’s anti-football nearly had me demanding a young priest and an old priest to perform an exorcism on the TV. I’m only disappointed that we managed to survive the group stages, where hard fought success over two teams we should be bullying in the playground every day of the week seemed to have filled many with the usual deluded faith tinged with xenophobia that we have the right English manager setting up the team to play the good old English way. Instead, I stick with what I said in my Euro 2012 animation: hoofing the ball is not a tactic we should be proud to embrace and to play 4-4-2 revealed a lack of tactical nous and an unwillingness to accept that the game has moved on in the last 30 years. Last night only made me thankful that Liverpool appointed Brendan Rodgers so I won’t have to watch that kind of football played every week next season.

4-4-2 against Italy was madness. Gerrard and Parker were run ragged in midfield, as evidenced by the fact that it was probably the first time I’ve seen Gerrard suffer cramp after 60 minutes. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a particularly mobile midfield but Pirlo was directing play from his bathchair. As for Hodgson’s team selection, Ashley Young must have some photos of Hodgson naked with a burlesque dancer. He’s been so dire against Sweden I’d wondered if he was applying for dual nationality and had ownership of a fjord. He was even worse last night. The only surprise about the missed penalty was that he didn’t go down inside the box.

Rooney also had no running after 60 minutes and Carroll caused them more trouble in 30 minutes of normal time and 30 of extra than either Young or Rooney caused them in the whole 120. I can’t actually remember what Wellbeck did except make a couple of clearances from defence. The biggest surprise to come out of the Euros is my admiration for John Terry. Did I really type that? Well, it’s there so I guess I must have. Terry has been my player of the tournament. As great as I think Gerrard has been (and he was in the first three matches), Terry has been fantastic in all four. I’ve never been a fan of the man (and I still dislike him in that respect) but as a full back, I concede that there are few better.

I suppose it’s too much to expect England fans who don’t support Liverpool (and therefore saw what he did to relatively good players) to recognise that Hodgson will never bring success to the team. He’s a manager who thrives on sustaining the equilibrium. He’s achieved with England exactly what he achieved with Liverpool: he expertly downplayed expectations; distracted us with talk of new team spirit and unity in the camp; and then he took credit when he managed the most mediocre success. The only difference is that unlike the Kop, England fans don’t see through his sleight of hand and I fear he’s going to be in his job for a number of years.

Urgh. That’s a horrible thought and I’m feeling too grim to dwell on this. I’m going to get to work. I have clouds to animate… I know. Doesn’t that sound like some real edge-of-your seat entertainment? In fact, it’s a bit like watching England hoof the ball…

Afterthought: since when did Joe Hart start to hoof the ball so much? What happened to calm distribution from the back to retain the ball, take a little pressure off, and build an attack? Am I simply naive about the basics of football to think it's stupidity of the highest order to keep giving the ball away?

Munro: The Angry Baby

http://youtu.be/-v629GFoF_8

Even if my animations aren’t getting better (though I hope they are), I’m definitely speeding up. This one is the product of about a day’s work. It’s also pretty heavy on the profanities, so an advanced warning/apology is probably needed. I simply wanted to try something a little more ‘ranty’.

Oddly, I think I’m most proud of the opening, which I cobbled together in After Effects. For once, I didn’t spent my hours following tutorials but worked it out for myself. I took some null objects, which were parented with the letters and lines, animated them around the Y axis by various amounts. The only problem I had was getting the letters to all line up at the end, a problem I solved by animating the whole thing in reverse (meaning I had to make the dust drift up by reversing the gravity). Then I played it backwards at the video editing stage. I think I remembered a Buster Keaton movie (it might even be Chaplin) where they had to make a train stop on a mark, so they filmed the whole scene backwards. Why am I telling you all this? No reason other than I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

I’ve been back blogging full time here for a few weeks and I know there are people visiting. So, please, tell me what you think about the swearing. Too much? Not enough? I’m tempted to make a second Munro film, not least because so much of the hard work is done. The advantage of animating using these so-called ‘cut outs’ is that I can reuse them again. Well, that’s one reason for doing another. The other reason is that I enjoy a good rant, which perhaps makes Munro the closest I’ve ever come to animating a version of myself. It’s a very frightening thought…

Knitting Air

I thought I’d be animating vulgarities today but, due to circumstances outside my control, I’m forced to go back to my novel earlier than I’d hoped. I wanted to leave a few months before looking at it again but life does this to me sometimes: it’s a matter of get a publisher/agent or get a job, so I’m sitting here trying to hammer some sense into 95,000 words (and about 30 illustrations) that still don’t fill me with confidence. Fixing a novel is about as easy as knitting air.

The problem with comedy writing – indeed the same can be said of cartooning – is that you’re far too close to the work to be able to laugh. Familiar with every joke, one-liner, or groaning pun, you no longer see the finished article as a sustained piece of comedy. You see it as the unstructured outpourings of your mind. Of course, I’ve asked people to read it but you can’t believe your family’s judgement. In fact, the age-old ‘my mother loved it’ is the worst thing you can tell a prospective agent, even if, as in this case, my mother loved it. The feedback I’ve received from friends has been next to minimal. One person could only manage half the book, hated chapter two, and didn’t like the name of my protagonist. That has been the sum of meaningful feedback. I don’t blame them for not reading it, not least because they have busy lives and there’s nothing worse than being obliged to read a book when you don’t normally read books. The problem with writing something as long as 90,000 is that you pity the poor buggers who you ask to help. Writing a book is as much an organic process as it is sequential. The finished article has to make sense when you read it from front to back, but discovering that sequence involves making mistakes, taking the wrong path, backtracking, and countless rewrites.

So now I sit here trying to rewrite Chapter Two, with very little sense of there being anything wrong with it, compared with the rest of the book which I wrote too recently to approach with a fresh eye.

Even if I wrote about 400,000 words for my book of spoof letters (only 60,000 made the finished book), writing that was so much easier than working on a novel, not least because feedback came 1000 words at a time.

So what am I doing writing this? I’m avoiding looking at Chapter Two. I worry about what I might find. Incidentally, if anybody comes across this blog post and does want to read my book to provide feedback, then please email me at david@the-spine.com. If you sound serious, I’ll send you an epub of the book. I need all the help I can get.

On Colin Hunt and Clive James...

Drawing this, I thought 'too misogynistic', which it is, I suppose, when I was only hoping to be misanthropic.

Speaking of my being misanthropic, it was strange this morning. I received a message via Twitter from a self-publishing author I slightly know who asked me to tweet all my followers with an ad for his book. I should ignore the fact that, except for my @richardmadeley account, I don’t have any followers, except to say that doesn’t it say much about celebrity that people loved my @richardmadeley account but are completely indifferent to the real me? Yet even if I had followers, I won’t retweet his message. If I don’t pester people to buy my books, I’m not going to pester them to buy the books of somebody who tells me that he's selling them by the van load. And, frankly, I can’t bring myself to be that much of an arsehole, even if being an arsehole is what it takes to be a successful author these days. It’s all about getting your name out there: inundating people with your banal tweets, your self-serving message, your big gormless grinning face, your cheerful inane banter, your ceaseless self-promotion. I love the work of writing, drawing, and now animating my work. I hate the idea of sitting here all day telling people how great that work is or that I’m always happy and cheerful. It’s the side of Twitter that I despise: the constant stream of effluent coming from would-be comedians trying to be witty. The Fast Show used to feature a character, Colin Hunt, who thought himself funny and could never switch off. Twitter was made for him. Twitter is full of Colin Hunts and I don't intend to be one of them.

As you can see from the quality of today’s cartoon, I’m running low on my very best cartoons on account of a new animation I’m working on. So far, I’ve drawn and rigged the main character and I’ve animated the opening shot, which has pleased me enormously. I’m now down to the tricky business of getting a script written so I can record it. The big question is whether I should swear or not.

I have a complex attitude towards swearing in comedy. I've always told myself that I wouldn’t do it and, generally, I haven’t. It was a restriction I set myself because I find that swearing usually gets in the way of the business of being funny. Like Jimmy Carr’s edgy jokes, I find it too easy a route to take. However, that said, some of my favourite comedy is very sweary. Armando Ianucci's ‘The Thick Of It’ and 'Veep' are the obvious examples but I also love Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s experiments in profanity in the guise of Derek & Clive. So, at the back of my mind, I’m wondering if to push my next cartoon out into those same murky waters. If I do it, I want it to be creative swearing and to be making a point. And since my next cartoon might be something of a rant, the swearing would be apt. We'll see...

On a final, sad note, I was really upset to read Clive James’ interview with Radio 4. In fact, I read part of it but could read no more. By the same token that I despise Twitter for the superficiality of the content, the glib attitudes that turn friendship into a mere follow, I like to think that a nobody can occasionally blog something meaningful about a stranger and mean every word. I recently wrote a review of James’ latest book and concluded with the line that he’s ‘a trickster who makes us laugh before fooling us into thinking seriously’. I can think of no better way of explaining what he’s always meant to me and why my thoughts are now with him.

 

Misremembered Nursery Rhymes

My eyes feel bleary this morning; as bleary, in fact, as the needle in Jimmy Carr’s moral compass after its rapid 180. So he now admits to having been in the wrong over his financial affairs. All is right with the world and he’ll soon have new material for his next show. He’ll mention taxes, give a coquettish look to crowd and people will applaud. As Arthur Smith (a true comedian and a man always worth listening to) said just 18 hours ago: ‘Jimmy Carr's tax avoidance cannot be morally wrong since he does it in an ironic way.’ And as they always say about good jokes: it’s good because it’s funny but good because it’s also true.

What I find strange is the number of people still defending Carr. I understand, of course, that no laws were broken and that nobody likes paying taxes. However, I also understand that in some people’s eyes, celebrities can do no wrong. It’s one of the things I discovered when pretending to be a celebrity: that people will always stand by you, no matter how dumb you act, how ignorant the comments you make, how rudely you treat them. I often wonder if future historians will give a name for this period in our history which reflects the morally vacuous celebrity culture that has taken over all our lives. The Dark Ages, The Enlightenment, and Restoration all seem perfectly applicable to their times. Postmodern doesn’t do this moment of history justice. We’re living in The Great Decline or the Celebocracy. Would I even be talking about this if it had been some bank manager caught fiddling his taxes? I doubt if I would. I’m as bad as anybody.

Okay, enough rambling nonsense. I have my own reasons for second thoughts this AM. I worked late last night on this blog’s makeover and wake up thinking that it’s still not quite right. I felt I wanted this place to look a little different after the rather understated previous design. I’ve always liked strange fonts (Kliban did a wonderful ‘barf bold’ which is something to see) and I wanted to try one of my own. They don’t usually work out but I’m quite pleased with my efforts. I might add to it. I might not. We’ll see. I’m intending to start work on an animation this morning, which shouldn’t take as long as others. I want to try a few different techniques I’ve been reading about. For that reason, not one of my better cartoons today.

The Bus Seat

Woke up monumentally uninspired to write anything this morning. I blame Roy Hodgson. He has to be the luckiest football manager ever to take the England job. He sets out to play a dull but compact football, gets on the right end of a few bad decisions by officials and a few lucky breaks, and he ends up winning the bloody group. All of which makes my Euro 2012 animation seem out of date. Needless to say, I think we'll get thumped by the Italians but, then, what do I know?

If that’s not bad enough, I wake up to read that Jimmy Carr thinks that he’s done nothing wrong and that he is now being victimised by the Murdochs. Christ riding a moped! As Frankie Boyle has correctly pointed out: it makes it hard for a comedian to criticise the conditions of the country he lives in when it’s partly his fault.

Urgh... Now I hear that Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis have separated. I've always liked Depp. He likes the things I like and this just makes me sad.

That's the final straw. I'm heading into Manchester to buy myself a new sketch book, my current one now down to the last page...

The Jimmy Carr Cartoon

I said I might stick my caricature up here so here it is in it's inept glory.

It doesn’t surprise me that Jimmy Carr’s been avoiding paying tax and in many ways I don’t blame him. I tend to think that governments always find more imaginative ways of wasting money. Yet what astonishes me about wealth is that few people seem to reach a point at which they no longer think it necessary to dodge the taxman. Would I be any different had I earned £3.3 million in a year? Until it happens, I suppose I don’t have the right to judge. I would hope, however, that I would only be too pleased to pay tax, realising that to earn even a hundredth of that would make me deliriously happy.

Yet if I can’t judge the man’s actions according to my own moral compass, I can judge the man and his material. To say he’s one of my least favourite comedians is to over simplify my attitude towards Carr, a gifted comedian with a sharp wit who seems genuinely interested in the theory of comedy if we are to judge from the book he co-authored a year or so ago. However, there is also a deeply repellent side to his humour which values jokes at the expense of the weak and vulnerable. Comedy is a powerful force when directed at the rich and powerful. Directed towards others, it has a blunt force that does nothing but harm. It’s a point that Steve Coogan has previously made in reference to 'Top Gear' but I’d say that it equally applies to Carr. And Carr does certainly hurt, even if he does it with a certain lopsided smirk as if to highlight that his postmodern irony is irony at its most ironic.

Bad taste jokes are usually funny and, for that reason, they are an easy crowd pleaser. To tell them on stage, prefacing the jokes with warnings, doesn’t make the telling of them any less cheap, snide, or immoral. And by the same score: cheating the taxman in legal ways does not make it easy to condone. He cheats the taxman and though his lopsided grin reminds us that it’s all done legally, it shouldn’t be a surprise. His comedy has always been at our expense and we have paid him handsomely to now mock us with his off shore bank accounts. None of this surprises me and all of it reminds me why I watch so little British comedy.

Tonight, I'm going to give 'Wilfred' a try. It's am American comedy based on an Australian show, about a man's relationship with a neighbour's dog, who only he sees as a man in a dog suit. How I missed this when it was shown on the BBC, I don't know but I have high hopes for it. It's a grown mad in a dog suit! How can it not be funny? Right?

Microsoft's Surfaces And Why I Always Fall For the Hype

What better way to start than with a cartoon about my own stupid belief in marketing spin? I don't honestly think I've ever noticed that a razor gives me the 'closest shave ever' yet I still refuse to stick with the old fashioned single blade razor.

I'm even worse when it comes to technology. I've just spent half an hour being wowed by some of the best sales people in the business. I've been watching Microsoft's launch for their newest product.

‘Microsoft Surface’. So, okay, I'm very gullible. I don't hate the title for their new tablet as much as I expected I would. Frankly, anything that doesn’t contain the word ‘iPad’ sounds like a cheaper alternative. However, having watched their presentation, I’m not so sure that it’s a bad name or a bad product. The ability to run Windows software (at least, in the costlier version of the Surface) really does attract me and I quite like the integrated kickstand. (After all, they say it has the same mechanism as the door on luxury car...) Having spent an eternity trying to find a good stand for my old iPad and then even more trouble to find a keyboard that works with it, I actually like the fact that Microsoft are aiming their product at somebody like me.

Of course, a downside of this is that one of the Surfaces seemed to crash or stop working during the presentation, which suggests that it might well have a few of the characteristic ‘undocumented features’ familiar to anybody who works with Windows. However, being an ex-convert to Apple machines, who enjoyed using one of those domed iMacs for a while and then grew tired of its very closed and limited ecosystem, I’m now a fully-fledged convert back to Windows. I love Windows 7 and look forward though have a few doubts about Windows 8 (I think it might be too radical). Most of all, I am happiest when hardware allows me to do what I want with it, rather than what it thinks is most appropriate to me.

All of which makes it sound like I’ll be first in the queue for a Surface. I won’t. They’ll cost an arm and a leg, and, financially speaking, I have neither. However, a man can dream, can't he? Or in my case, salivate over his keyboard whilst licking the screen…

Okay, back to work now. I want to finish a caricature I was working on last night. It might appear here later on. It might not. The problem with caricatures is that I usually finish them, proud at capturing a likeness, of Tom Cruise perhaps, hand it to somebody and they’ll say: ‘you’ve really captured the essence of Charlie Sheen’. Later today, I might post my picture of Charlie Sheen. Then again, I might not. We will just have to see…

Doughtnuts

I love drawing this style of cartoon, blatantly nicked from B. Kliban, but I hate trying to explain them. The inexplicable is half the pleasure. It’s about ramping up the degree of absurdity over the course of four panels. The only logic is that there shouldn’t be any logic.

Speaking of logic, I’d naively assumed that because the pro-austerity party had won (albeit marginally) the Greek elections, the markets would have been singing cheerful ditties this morning. As it is, I wake up to find that the world is still going to hell in a handcart bought on high interest terms from the Chinese. Perhaps somebody can explain to me why over the last few years, talk of war in the Middle East, Japan facing nuclear meltdown, and the continued existence of Jedward have never had the same effect on the world markets as the debt problems of a nation whose main industry seems to be tourism and hairy Lotharios in tight speedos.

Okay, I have jobs to do, the first of which is to decide which job to do. I’m tempted to start work on an animation but I’ve had a long enough break from writing that I should really knuckle down and work on the book.