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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