John Noakes and the Spirit of the Braying Mob

Excuse me if this isn't polished or even interesting. I don't have any careful arguments to weave and, even if I did, I'm not sure I have the care and attention needed to weave them. I guess I'm feeling a bit dejected with the world. I've been working hard all month trying to communicate with the world but the world doesn't seem all that interested in talking to me. Well, screw the world. I can at least talk to myself or, if I'm lucky, some other lone intellects out there that don't belong to a marketing scam robot or some Chinese plastics company intent on filling my comments with spam.

I wanted to write about John Noakes who, you might know, went missing (but was thankfully found) yesterday and I wanted to write about him without using the word 'celebrity'. I despise that word, which has to be the curse of our age. It has been elevated to the point that to possess 'celebrity' means that you're a special kind of person, worthy of special treatment and to be judged against lower moral or artistic standards than the rest of common humanity. For example, I was searching last week for a publisher and I came across one who advertised their interest in humour. You should know how rare that is for UK publishers, who largely take no interest in humour unless it's disguised as some postmodern pastiche of Polish pork butchers in the 1300s. This publisher therefore caught my eye, until I read that writers would have to pay to have their books published. There was, however, an exception. In the case of 'a celebrity', the publisher would be very interested in discussing an advance and contact.

It's a sign of how the world has become. Yet the truth is that people who are celebrities tend to be the dullest among us. To be a celebrity is different to being a writer, a musician, an actor, painter, poet, illustrator, inventor, sportsperson, or even a politician. It's why the very best writers, musicians, actors, painters, poets, illustrators, inventors, sportspersons, and politicians live ordinary lives. They don't wish to live like a celebrity. To be a celebrity simply means that you have fame and, really, there's nothing less interesting than a person famous only for having fame. The other day The Times dedicated a double page spread to Alan Titchmarsh, one of the dullest men on the planet and it was amazing how many dull things the dullest man on the planet had to say in what was, predictably, a very dull article. Yet still: he's famous and because he was famous, he even had his face in full colour on their colour supplement.

Welcome to the UK, 2015. For those that have: here have more. Those without, we want you to have even less.

Last weekend witnessed another visible demonstration of celebrity when Kanye West took the stage at Glastonbury. He walked out thinking, perhaps, that celebrity would do most of his work for him. It didn't. It was a risible performance, highlighting the fact that this was one of the least enjoyable Glastonbury weekends in quite a while. All the excellence was to be found well beyond the headline acts. Patti Smith produced the performance of the festival but I also enjoyed, as you might expect, the show put on by FFS on the last night, which was largely ignored by the media. The media were too busy talking about The Who, who did what The Who have always done but didn't do it with much swagger. The fact that they refused to allow the BBC to broadcast their set was small minded, greedy, or both. In future, no act should be allowed to headline (or otherwise) at Glastonbury if they make non-broadcast a condition of the performance. The question wasn't so much who but why? Why were The Who performing at Glastonbury? I think it was simply because they're a world famous act. They have 'celebrity'.

I arrived at the beginning of this week reflecting, yet again, on how celebrity is ruining our culture. If you're not a celebrity, then you're obviously nobody, and perhaps it's because of the problems associated with being a nobody that an otherwise excellent band like the Fat White Family (a bit blues, a bit Velvet Underground, a lot The Doors) have to resort to the tales of the sordid excess in order to get noticed and then heard. The same is true of writers, actors, artists, comedians. To get noticed, you must doing something in excess. You must run out on stage whilst Kanye West is performing. You must paint your work in your own excrement or blood. You must write your book whilst sitting in a cupboard for ten years and never seeing daylight...

Then John Noakes went missing.

I can't think of many people who have meant as much to me as John Noakes. Yet to describe what he did is to skirt around the phrase 'celebrity'. He was, of course, a TV presenter, which usually is a job that amounts to very little. Presenters are usually celebrities. Vernon Kaye and Claudia Winkleman are both celebrities but I can't honestly tell you of a single discernible skill either of them has to make them worth the money the BBC pays them. Cut their wage to a sixth and you'd still find people equally adept at fronting that kind of show. I'm serious. I fail to understand why the BBC think it important to pay millions to people who are merely presenters. A disembodied robotic voice could link segments together almost as well... Did I say 'almost'? Well, I meant to say 'better'.

Yet Noakes wasn't simply a presenter. He was an accidental comedian. In fact, when I think of what I like in comedy, I think about those qualities that Noakes embodied. He was relaxed and slightly unprofessional in a way you can perhaps see in the very best comedy. You see it in the Marx Brothers but also in Robin Williams or Steve Martin. Noakes made mistakes and allowed people to see his mistakes, a bit like Stewart Lee does when he highlights a mistake and weaves it into his set. Noakes was a clown but doing serious work in the very same way that Clive James would always use humour to make a deeper point. Yet beyond all of that, Noakes was simply likable and so very and utterly human. He was the best uncle many of us have ever had with any degree of regularity in our lives.

When he went missing yesterday, I was upset. I don't know why. I'm not ashamed to admit that when I tried to explain it to somebody later on, I actually found myself getting teary eyed. I didn't realise how much John Noakes meant to me. He must have meant a lot because I even used Twitter to look for updates. Perhaps I wanted to find other people who shared my upset and I was genuinely heartened to find that there were others just like me. It reminded me that not everybody on Twitter is a hate filled troll.

Yet there were, predictably, a few others who saw it as another opportunity to make cheap jokes about the disappearance of an 81 year old man suffering from Alzheimer's. They are the people who made me quit Twitter or, at least, have minimal contact with social media. They are the always-looking-for-a-laugh narcissists, who are always at your elbow playing everything for laughs. They're the Colin Hunts of the online world who give a bad name to anybody who has ever tried to make people laugh for a living.

I suppose what I find irritating about them is that I could easily be one of those people myself. When I first used Twitter, I used it as a way of writing jokes and being 'witty'. Yet you soon find it's an insatiable medium. Your best material is stolen by others and the many of the people also in the business of being funny are quite happy to steal their material from old joke books. People who aren't serious about comedy seem unable to stop trying to be funny. Serious comedians are often described as sulky and miserable when they're not on stage but that's because people assume that to have a comedic outlook on life means that you're always 'up for a laugh'. In my limited experience, it's quite the reverse. It's why I despise Twitter. It's also a place where you're always encouraged to be that little bit more edgy. When I write what I write about real people, I don't mean to hurt them. I write knowing there's a distance between my writing and the chances of their reading what I write. Twitter is very different. Your words too easily end up in their timeline, seen by their eyes. Twitter magnifies the venom and I quit the moment I realised this. I quit the moment people began confusing my comic creation with the real Richard Madeley.

Others didn't share my concerns and still don't. Twitter comedians are no comedians in my eyes. They're precisely the people I didn't want to become when I was growing up. What I wanted to be was some latter day John Noakes, who was a free spirit, fascinated by the world but never to the point of pretension. He was funny but never to the point where it would begin to wear on you. He was balanced pretty evenly in that place where the best human beings exist: good natured, interested and, above all things, simply humane.

It's why his disappearance yesterday upset me. Not because John Noakes the celebrity had gone missing. It was because I remembered John Noakes as simply the best example of a generous, witty but unashamedly joyous spirit there was when I was growing up. He's one of the best examples of our kind and of a better age, before Twitter exposed us all to the vile psychopaths who hurt people in the name of humour. I'm now at the stage when I actively despise people who try to be funny on Twitter. They're little more than piss-soaked mongrels howling at the heels of the braying mob. Yesterday reminded me that they're still out there seeking their celebrity. And the sad truth is: one day their excesses might become so great that they might indeed find it.

Random Musings After Stewart Lee's Guardian Article About The British Comedy Awards

It was the British Comedy Awards this past week. Jack Whitehall again won the title: 'King of Comedy' and, the same evening, 'Mrs Brown's Boys' received a special honour from the Writer's Guild of Great Britain. This is the same 'Mrs Brown's Boy's' which is routinely described as the worst TV comedy ever, not just by critics here in the UK but critics in its home country of Ireland.

The contrast is a strange one but probably rooted in the spasm of the old class war we seem to be experiencing at the moment where there are (generally) only two types of comedian.

If you're working class, you have to conform to a stereotype of the rough diamond, the 'cheeky chappie', or the uneducated buffoon. You live by your wits and your comedy is generally perceived as being that of the gifted savant. Wisdom in the mouth of fools. It's the comedy (with varying degrees of emphasis) of Johnny Vegas, Peter Kay, Lee Mack, Jonathan Ross, Sean Locke, Ross Noble, Phil Jupitus, Joe Wilkinson, Rhoad Gilbert, Greg Davies, Sarah Millican and even the woeful Henning Wehn.

If you're middle or upper class, you're allowed to be eloquent and smart. It's Noel Coward sipping a martini while issuing the clever bon mot. It's the territory of David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Jack Whitehall, Jimmy Carr, Miranda, Marcus Brigstocke, Russell Howard, Michael McIntye, Alexander Armstrong, and even the woeful Miles Jupp.

Perhaps the class war never went away, though for a brief spell, alternative comedy did seem to offer a chance for everybody to be eloquent and witty or to simply play the fool. It began, I guess, with 'Not The Nine O'Clock News' and the good times lasted, I'd argue, until the final series of 'The Fast Show'. Since then, things have settled into fairly a predictable routine.

Stewart Lee is one of the few comedians who doesn't seem to conform to one of the stereotypes. There are others: Dave Gorman, Richard Herring, Bill Bailey, Mark Thomas, Mark Steele, Frank Skinner, Jon Richardson, Eddie Izzard... I'm not entirely sure what class Lee is but perhaps that's why he doesn't quite fit into the predictable coterie over at the BBC. And that's the problem. The BBC is the problem. Its comedy output feels like it's being decided by managerial types, inculcated with safe southern metropolitan middle class values,  who this week run comedy and next week could be running sports or Tesco or the Post Office.

Having said all that: I'm not one of those bearded Marxist types who lines his cat's litter tray with old copies of the New Statesman. I've never really believed in 'class war'. Yet how else can you explain both Whitehall and Macintyre, both of establishment/BBC stock and both of whom are the blandest of comedians, manufactured rather than exhibiting any natural wit? Perhaps they symptomatic of a bigger problem with our country where there's such a huge difference being born in the north and born in the south. I read this past week that Manchester has had its spending cut by £300 per head. In Surrey, they've had a £10 raise. I would normally try to tell myself that it's a freak of statistics but when you see George Osbourne's advisor having his pay raised by 18%, you have to question what kind of country we live in.

The answer, of course, is a deeply indifferent one. The government can do what they do because, so long as 'Mrs Brown's Boys' is on TV, everybody is happy. It's unthinking comedy for an unthinking audience. Comedy is soma for a politically neutered age.

Comedy should, of course, be dangerous. Yet when was the last time you watched TV and felt nervous energy building in your gut because you didn't know how a routine was going to end? I remember getting clammy hands as a child whenever Spike Milligan or Peter Cook appeared on a show. They made me so nervous. I remember Tommy Cooper dying on stage. In retrospect, it was the saddest thing I've ever seen on TV. Having just put on a silk kimono, he sank down into a cross-legged position but it seemed like it was all part of the act. I laughed like so many laughed that night as he fell asleep, his breathing becoming more shallow as he slowly slipped back into the curtains. Then his act came to an abrupt end. It was an age when a comedian was expected to do the outrageous and he seemed to have done just that. It was genius. He'd broken the rules! Or so we thought...

These days, very little is unscripted. Few tinker with the rules to produce something new. The exceptions are comedians like Stewart Lee, Jerry Sadowitz, and, even, Frankie Boyle. They walk on stage and I get that rare hit of adrenaline because I don't know what they'll do. That's what I genuinely cherish about Lee: that he's always risking failure. I actually admire his failures (for example, perhaps, his 'Baconface' routine) more than his successes because too few comedians take risks. It's easy to make people laugh but hard to make them laugh well.

However, a lack of risk is not entirely the only reason we have so much bland comedy. There's a big difference between the structure of standup and the structure of TV comedy. The BBC wrongly assume that a competent routine means that any standup can write a sitcom. The Edinburgh Fringe has become a pathway straight into the BBC. Yet anybody who had tried to write knows the difference between dialogue/quips (easy to do) and narrative structure (hard to master). The BBC simply aren't interested in writers. There are very few Galton & Simpsons coming through the ranks. Both Armando Iannucci and Andy Hamilton, possibly the best of the current crop of writers, perform or have performed. And it's performers that have the power. Writers struggle even to get inside the system. They are, at most, casual labour and gag writers for the celebs. The worst thing to be these days is a writer who doesn't want to perform. It makes you a nobody or, rather, an 'everybody'. Everybody believes they can write. Amazon expect everybody to publish their work for next to nothing. It's the world of long tail economics and the web consumes the rest. Everybody writes comments for websites for nothing. Effort, skill, thought, time, energy, patience: take it all. Why should anybody be paid for writing words? Writing is no longer a craft. It's a natural consequence of existing and everybody is a comedian on Twitter.

To give a final example: Johnny Vegas grew up not five miles from my doorstep. Our accents are probably the same. I like Vegas. He's another with an anarchic growl. However, the BBC used to have a section of their Writersroom website which contained scripts that would-be comedy writers could read to learn their craft. One was a Johnny Vegas monologue. It's not a terrible monologue but hardly Alan Bennett. Now, perhaps I obsess too much over apostrophes and commas but, if you write and have spent your life studying how great writers construct their prose, then these are the things that give you pleasure as a writer. The Vegas script has a raw energy but nothing more than that. As a model for writers, it was a joke. The only thing it proved was that performers need to reach a much lower level of competence than any writer. Their name carries them the rest of the way.

Yet we're not supposed to point this out. People say we're bitter. "Oh, he's simply a failed writer," they say and they're right: I am. One book published (I like to think of it as a 'cult classic') but which disappeared off book shelves in under three months for reasons I still don't understand. Yet if I am a failed comedy writer (I stopped trying a long time ago), I hope that doesn't invalidate my point which is that too much of our comedy is dictated by standup comedians. Even a few years ago, situation comedies were acted by actors reading scripts written by writers. Strip the craft from comedy and comedy becomes a minor function of celebrity. Ant & Dec are not comedians. They are just famous. And if you only need to be famous to be funny, then that allows the sons of the rich and influential to take it for themselves. It's easy. Make a few self-deprecating quips on a panel show and the nation love you. It's a national disgrace and it's not even remotely funny.

Billy Bragg: The Video Game Hero

It feels like I've been building this game for months but I discovered today that tomorrow will mark eleven weeks. As far as development times go, that’s nothing. For me, it’s been eleven hard weeks of learning something entirely new and working long long nights. And it does, finally, feel like I’m nearing the end.

The past few days has been about adding a few aesthetic effects and balancing levels so challenges are neither too easy nor impossibly hard. Last night, I had one of my most important breakthroughs: I managed to integrate interstitial advertising into the game. It’s a horrible business, inserting these ugly ads into something you work so hard to get looking good but it’s the ugly reality of this business. Nobody is willing to pay for anything and advertising is the only way I’ll ever make any money from this terribly doomed project.

I’m also tidying up some of my animations, which look okay, though sometimes just plain rough. A better example of my animations (and, yes, this is the ‘good’ stuff!) is my Billy Bragg character (above), who features as one of the game’s heroes or antagonists, depending on which side of the political spectrum you fall. The game, as I think I’ve mentioned, is broadly satirical and Bragg acts as a nemesis to the game’s chief protagonist along with other celebs and politicos ranging from Stewart Lee to the Mayor of London.

I’m posting this Bragg video today because I like to prove that I’m not idle and because it links conveniently into a brief ramble about the most depressing thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Billy Bragg has confessed (perhaps tongue in angora bearded cheek) that ‘the internet has changed my songwriting by taking up all the time I used to spend writing songs’. He was talking on the today’s excellent Guardian feature, ‘Seven Digital Deadly Sins’, where he proceed to suggest that he spends most of his days watching a variety of people falling down holes.

I’m sure Bragg was playing up to the camera. At least, I hope to hell he was playing up to the camera. If not, then I’ll take my ticket now and catch the next bus off this lousy planet.

If the dimternet has tamed Bragg then what hope the rest of us? Had George Orwell been around today, would he be spending his time watching ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ (a video, I’m happy to say, that I’ve never seen) rather than writing ‘1984’? Or would he, as I’d hope, be among the few of us who are genuinely trying to cut ourselves off from the online world or, at least, merely use the medium without it robbing us of our lives and souls. I’ve written before that social media is the soma of this generation and nothing has changed to make me question that. I don’t think I’m simply being reactionary to say that we are losing strength in our mental limbs and we must do everything in our power to retain focus on the things that matter. Social media boasts about ‘ease’ and ‘speed’ and its integration into our lives but I fail to see how that’s a good thing. It’s why I find Bragg’s confession so depressing. He’s spent his life talking about activism yet it’s left to Bill Bailey’s contribution to the debate to point out how political engagement has changed with social media. Politics has become a trivial and, frankly, no so interesting meme in a greater world of hamster videos and fat people falling over.

That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the power of a good one liner, wit squeezed into 140 characters, but there is also a place for length, pace, argument, and complexity. In a separate piece yesterday, Will Self (who also, incidentally appears as one of the 'good guys' in my game), recommended books for teenagers based on their length. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing. Explore the places of difficulty in your life. It’s where you always discover the most fascinating revelations.

I suppose I’m as much a victim of this change as anybody. Friends shake their heads slowly, clearly thinking I’m a fool because I don’t get involved in social media. I’ve certainly made decisions I’ve regretted. I always thought my book by Stan Madeley (the UK’s top Richard Madeley lookalike ) would have been more popular than it was. The fact I didn’t engage in social media and publicity was plain stupidity on my behalf. Yet I’m stubborn when it comes to my convictions. Bragg is probably right when he concludes by saying that ‘everybody wants to be famous, nobody wants to be scrutinised’. That’s the world where people are more interested in celebrities for their celebrity rather than anything they actually do.

I genuinely can’t see the attraction of fame. Scrutiny sounds far more interesting. I’d rather be disliked by a few than loved by millions. I’d rather be Will Self than Katie Perry, Billy Bragg rather than Stephen Fry. Social media is made for the latter, which makes it sad when I see it embraced by the former.

This is a ramble but I’m tired and I suppose it’s when I’m tired that I can see that my Android game is only going to be another expression of my stubborn unwillingness to join the throng. Only I could make a game that skips merrily past the mainstream and attempt to attract a very small minority. I only hope just a few people will smile and appreciate that I’ve tried something a little different. I’m hopeful, for example, that it will be the only video game featuring Billy Bragg.

Naturally, he won’t be singing but, so far, neither will I. The game looks pretty good but it still lacks music. I’m still attempting to finish recording my closing satirical song, though getting a quality track is killing me. I’ve fingerpicked a pretty good acoustic guitar pattern and even if my £12 USB microphone isn’t exactly studio quality, it’s not entirely bad. My singing remains the problem. I can’t decide if it’s a problem of my accent (I sound terribly northern) or simply a weak voice. I’ve been recording multiple versions in different registers so I can stack my vocals. Oddly, I think I probably sound less bad singing as a group than I do singing alone but I’m finding it difficult to mix them into anything reasonably listenable. Ideally, I’d like to just record myself singing over the guitar but one mike and a bad voice don’t make for a good combination.

But that’s another ramble for another day and I must go and make this blog post available on social media. [sarcasm=true; walks_off = “chuckling maliciously”;]

On Vube Talent, Alan Gogoll, Google Ads and English Folk Music

Morning was creeping over the local church by the time I finally fell asleep last night. I’d been working late trying to get a website finished but also struggling with a problem with my soon-to-be-published Android game.

Taking a break from one kind of code or the other, I was browsing the web when I accidentally clicked on a link that took me a website called Vube. It seemed to consist of amateur (and not so amateur) musicians posting their work to be voted on by the public.

It was apparent very quickly that these people are serious about their music. For ‘unknowns’, the quality of the videos was astonishingly high. The sound quality of most of the recordings sounded, to these ears at least, on par with something produced in a professional studio. Yet as I browsed through the performances, amazed by some, I was equally depressed by others. It’s not the level of talent that I found depressing – though, I suppose the internet has collectively taught us that the world has an abundance of talent which routinely gets ignored. What I found depressing was the real lack of creativity.

By a huge margin, the majority of these performances involved the word ‘Cover’  and I very quickly established how many versions of ‘I See Fire’ by Ed Sheeran a man needs in his life before he starts to root for dragons instead of hobbits. The answer, incidentally, is five.

The experience reminded me of walking past those artists you usually find working in shopping centres. They work in pencil and produce amazingly accurate reproductions of famous faces. Because they work from published photographs, their work is a copy of another, so despite their copious ability with the pencil, it’s all a mechanical effect. There’s no true 'art' to their work. Nothing of themselves on the paper, though, of course, they clearly draw the chipmunk member of One Direction because that's what will sell.

Likewise, there’s very little of the people performing the covers on Vube, just lots of pitch perfect good looking young women singing songs that involve vocal gymnastics. Lots of seasoned instrumentalists proving they’ve mastered their instruments as well as their heroes but have no message of their own they feel willing or able to convey.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, such as the amazing Alan Gogoll whose genuinely original guitar work just shone above anything else on the site. It’s strange how Gogoll’s talent has lodged itself in my mind. I saw a video of his posted on another website a few weeks ago and (not recognising the name then) I stumbled across more here where his name has now firmly lodged. His is the kind of talent it’s good to see emerging via the web.



I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just jaded. Everything about my work is rough and imperfect. I like that but also recognise it as a huge defect. I’ve mastered nothing, even if I put my heart and soul into every one of my projects. It also saddens me to see in linking to Gogoll's site that he earns a crust by performing at weddings. Reminds me of those amazing street musicians you see begging for coins as rich bankers stroll past. Some might say that the latter make the world turn but it's surely the former, people like Gogoll, who make it worth lingering around in that world.

I'm neither a banker nor an artist. It’s been over a week since I last blogged and I’m still slowly getting there with my game. Monday night, Unity updated to version 4.5 and immediately my game blew a fuse. As far as I can figure out by looking over their changelog, they’d fixed a problem registering touches on the screen which meant that my game had been calculating certain things based on the wrong values. With the correct values suddenly entering into my equations, things began flying all over the screen. That was a worrying few hours as I struggled to get my game back to where it had started. However, things began working again and they perhaps now work better than they did before. I’m now looking forward to trying a few of the other things the Unity gurus have fixed.

Yesterday was what’s commonly known as a ‘ball breaker’. This week I’ve been trying to add ads to the app, which hasn’t felt right. I’ve worked hard drawing every graphic in my game and I really didn’t welcome the intrusion of ads for some woeful Kim Kardashian flab busting workout DVD. However, this is the world we live in, I need the money, and I had to face the more pressing problem of actually getting the game to compile with a library of code for Google Ads. At the same time, I’ve been using all my valuable time building a website for a nursery school (just as depressing as it sounds), with breaks from that relatively easy work broken my throwing myself into the ugly world of Java libraries, Unity plugins, and worse. Yesterday was a fourteen hour stretch of work (minus a couple of quick stops for food) but the website now looks complete but more importantly, the following appeared on my game’s level select screen in the last hours of darkness.



Damn, doesn’t it look beautiful?

The answer to my problem was to remove the old Unity plugin I’d been using to integrate my game with Google’s Play Services and use the official Google plugin, which didn’t  conflict with Google’s other plugin for AdMob, their ad delivery service.

Beyond all of this, the last week has been about bug catching (both real [damn this muggy weather] and virtual) as well as adding small details, such as a credit screen that isn’t a boring credit screen. I’ve also…

Well, I really hesitate to admit this given my criticism of Vube, or perhaps out of shame, embarrassment, or what Stewart Lee once described as the horrible thought of ‘a man trying to do something sincerely and well’… However, I’ve written a song for the game. The music has been bothering me since I began because I really like doing things myself and I didn’t want to use third party music, even if it’s in the public domain. I’ve been currently using a 1920s jazz recording as my soundtrack. I’ve yet to decide whether to keep it (it fits in with the theme of the game) or go without music. My song, however, is meant to accompany my credits. I can (but rarely) write songs but this, I think, isn’t one of my worst. The lyrics are nicely twisted and, in my few spare minutes, I’ve even worked out an arrangement of odd finger-patterns for the guitar. All was good until I sat down and tried to record myself singing it. The guitar part sounds surprisingly good but the recording sounded terrible. A bad voice, my battered old Gibson acoustic fitted with new strings, and a £12 USB microphone doesn’t make for a combination worthy of Vube. Yet amid the hissing and crackles, I could recognise something I’ve never realised about my singing before. I sound like a bloody English folk singer and that’s not something that fills me with particular enthusiasm to try again, let along post to Vube, here, or the Google Play store attached to my game.

I don’t know why I should find this odd. Perhaps it’s because I predominately listen to American musicians, with the notable exception being P.J. Harvey, so I my tastes are fairly attuned to American tones. My voice seemed naturally to drift to very different places which were purely English folk. Vocally I sounded a bit like John Renbourn or (now sadly late) Bert Jansch. My guitar work sounded like Bert Renbourn or John Jansch. Perhaps I need to hire a Vube star to record my song…

I’m not sure what makes me uneasy about English folk music. Perhaps it’s the image of middle-aged real ale-drinkers talking about church sculpture. I’m now trying to convince myself that it’s not all bad. There’s always Billy Bragg.

I was buying superglue in Wilko earlier in the week (trying to repair my favourite USB cable -- yes, I have a favourite USB cables, mock as much as you like!) when they started playing Billy Bragg’s 'Handyman Blues'. It’s a great track from an excellent album but never before had I thought about the Englishness of Bragg’s voice. Perhaps he doesn’t sound enough like me to make me aware of his sameness. I suppose it’s why, when I first started to read English poetry, I found Larkin unbearable. Eventually, I realised it was only because I was responding to a world he was describing which felt too much like the grim world around me whereas a poet like Ted Hughes felt elevated, distant, heroically what a poet should be. I found Larkin's similarity  too unsettling and only after a very long time did I begin to enjoy his poetry without that sense of suffocating identification.

All of which is me rambling slightly because I can. I needed more sleep than I got last night. This is the dull reality of what should (and, in truth, usually is) a fun business. Today I really want to devote itself to rain, as I’m suddenly taken with make a late addition to my game in the form of an aesthetically pleasing rain effect. But perhaps I should just get the game finished and out the door. It's taking far too long to get everything right.

 

A Meat Cartoon

So today’s cartoon makes little sense but I like it. I doodled it watching Curb Your Enthusiasm late last night, so my humour was probably set to full twisted. Meat products must have also been on my mind, perhaps because yesterday was Baconface’s birthday. I don’t use Facebook, detest Facebook, and wish I’d never opened any of my Facebook accounts. Yet I went on Facebook to wish him a happy birthday on such a special yet arbitrarily chosen day. My main purpose was to see if I could prompt that bugger into bringing his lumberjack wit to the rest of the UK. It won’t happen any more than my Sparks strips brought them back to Manchester. However, you’ll never know if you don’t ask…

My other purpose was to make the point that I think I’m owed some free bacon since he used my cartoon on his website. It’s ironic that certain other comedians loudly complain that their fans are downloading their shows from torrent sites. That might be true but they never once took a cartoon from a blog and didn’t even provide a backlink. I think it must be a Canadian thing, like hoary marmots and the four string Yukon banjo (aka the Yokonlele).

Okay. Time for a bike ride and then this afternoon I’ll start something new. It’s a shame that Baconface's shows have come to an end. His strips are actually the most fun to draw simply because I do them purely to amuse myself and as a technical exercise. But perhaps all good things must early end. His mask was getting smaller and his bacon less artfully arranged. It’s harder to draw random bacon and, had he toured, the next strip might have tested my limited skills to breaking point.

Baconface The Comedian Goes Missing

Here’s a doodled strip about Baconface Smith I’ve been working on in my spare time while waiting for inspiration to strike. Yes, it makes very little sense but what the hell… I like it and I had fun drawing it.

Stewart Lee's Usual Friday Morning Rant

As a fan of great comedy writing, I tend to hang on every word of Stewart Lee’s agitprop, which is why I feel so bright and savage this Friday morning. I lay in bed chucking over Lee’s latest policy statement about the place of writers in stand-up and, by the time I’d finished, Lee's feisty words had certainly got the blood pumping. It contains some fruity insights, a few slices of Bacon, and only one disappointing nugget in the form of his denial that he took a ‘sideswipe’ at Michael McIntyre. It’s a great way to begin the day but an even better way to spend your morning is to watch the hour long lecture that accompanies the piece. It’s very highly recommended for anybody interested in writing processes, comedy, or stand up. It reminds me again why Lee is one of the good guys and I'm even more committed to finding the money to buy a ticket for his Liverpool show even if I have to steal a swimming pool from a neighbour's garden and flog it at the local flea market.



Meanwhile back in the land of the failing comedy writers: last night I endured another episode in the long-running sitcom, ‘Neighbours in the aforementioned swimming pool’. The latest ran two hours and included the classic line: ‘Grandma! Do a backflip!’ Sadly, no backflips were attempted because I didn’t hear that other classic line: ‘Grandma! Why are you being admitted into a spinal trauma unit?’

About 2am this morning, I finished drawing the main lines of my latest strip, which I hope to submit to a competition in the coming days. My previous strip was full of heartfelt biography but probably didn't hold together, whereas this new strip is outright satire and has a more coherent narrative and some bits that might make people laugh. Or I hope it does, once I get all the crosshatching finished which is what I should be doing right now…

More Baconface

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When I wrote my slightly tongue-in-cheek review of Baconface's show, I had an alternative comic strip pencilled out. I chose to finish the other three panel strip simply because it would take less time. Now I’ve sat down and inked this in, I realise it has no home. So, here it is: a comic strip without a reason.

I could, of course, make up a reason. I could, for example, recommend that if you’re one of those lucky rich bastards going to Edinburgh for this year's Fringe, then you go check out the genius of Baconface for yourself. Perhaps video his entire act and stick it on Youtube so I can see what I'm missing. He’s performing at The Stand all through August and the tickets are available to buy for the ridiculously cheap price of £5. You can’t even buy real quality bacon for that price.

While you about it, you might want to also book tickets to see Stewart Lee who is also appearing at The Stand during August but for the slightly less reasonable price of £10. However, his tickets are going quickly and a few shows are already sold out. I wouldn't recommend videoing his performance and uploading it to Youtube. He's a big man and looks like he knows how to do violence.

Of course, you’re already too late if you wanted to see Sarah Millican (also at The Stand). Although tickets to her show were priced totally unreasonably at £12, all her shows are now sold out. However, if you did want to see her, then I suggest you buy a ticket for your head doctor. Just tell him that you’ve lost your fucking mind.

You see: here is an example of what’s wrong with this country. Baconface for £5 or Sarah Millican for £12? There are some days I don't despair but they're very few.

As for me, I won’t be going to The Fringe. I’ll have to make do drawing comic strips of what I imagine The Fringe will be like.

Review: Baconface - The New Face of Comedy (and Bacon)

Should pigs die so stand-up comedy can prevail?

That’s the deep moral dilemma that’s been testing me these past few days as the smell of bacon still lingers on my clothes and I feel weirdly complicit in some sick twisted crime for which there is as yet no name.

It’s hard to justify the death of an animal so a man can mask his identity but that’s precisely what’s happening whenever our newest comedy import takes to the stage. The Canadian comedy legend, Baconface, has been playing the Soho Theatre this last week with his show, ‘It’s All Bacon’, and this is my first chance to actually sit down and write the review of what was a truly terrifying hour or so of my life.

As his name implies, Baconface wears bacon on his face and he emerges into the spotlight like some stocky reject from a Texas chainsaw casting call. But he doesn’t wear bacon all over his face. Perhaps sheer laziness prevents him from fashioning a proper mask – a meat helmet, if you will – so what we’re really looking at is a man with a face that is part man and part bacon. It’s really a bacon-human flesh hybrid and should really be advertised as such. 'Baconmanface' would be a more appropriate name.

The gaps in the bacon aside, the act itself was as brilliant as it was occasionally incomprehensible to these northern working class ears. Baconface’s thick Canadian accent was often abrasive and sounded like Tom Waits doing a bad impression of Tom Waits were Tom Waits Canadian and suffering from emphysema. I picked up about 80% of what Baconface was saying and since 50% of that comprised punchlines, I laughed perhaps 30% of the time.

Yet there is also something quite humbling about being in the audience for a Baconface show. Remember: this is a man taking a perishable meat product under hot stage lighting every single time he performs. He’s not chosen to use a traditional prop like other comedians. He’s not wearing a fez which might last him twenty years if properly maintained. He’s not grown his hair long like Ross Noble yet neither has he Michael McIntyre’s bouncy fringe dancing playfully like flea-infested dingleberries over a dead sheep’s mutilated arsehole. He’s not even got the youthful good looks of Russell Howard, attractive to both women and aging paedophiles alike. This is just a man with his bacon which is technically pork and, as we know, pork is prohibited in many of the world’s great religions. Culturally, theologically, and morally: this is as cutting edge as stand-up comedy gets.

That’s why we have to admire his commitment to his art. What would it cost to wear six or seven good slices of bacon on your head? Sixteen rashers of Tesco smoked best go for £4, though they’re currently doing a 3 for £10 deal. That’s 48 rashers of quality bacon for £10. Now that expense comes straight out of Baconface’s profits before he’s even taken to the stage and that meat is only going to last him about eight shows. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why his runs are so short. He’s just finished playing five nights in London and in August he’s going to do a run of nine nights in Edinburgh but followed by a run that will last thirteen consecutive nights! Will £10 of bacon last that long? My advice: book soon for the early shows before his meat goes off.

Baconface’s stagecraft was rough and not particularly elegant and that brings me to my one criticism of the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were parasites living in that bacon. It sincerely hope that Baconface won’t develop trichinosis which is a parasitic infection commonly caught from exposure to uncooked bacon. Indeed, I immediately thought ‘parasitic infection’ when I noticed Baconface’s tendency to scratch himself but I couldn’t tell if that was just stage nerves typical of the one show or a habitual tic. His bacon certainly wasn’t the healthiest I’ve ever seen and, by the end, I was feeling nauseous as the smell of rancid meat drifted off his every punchline.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see how the act develops into the summer months. How well with Baconface’s bacon hold up in warmer venues where his bacon is likely to attract flies? Beneath the bacon he wears what appears to be a modified pair of y-fronts but I’m informed by those in the know that it might be a Mexican wrestler’s mask. Whatever it is: will it provide ample protection against bacon juice seeping through and penetrating his skin? It would be a tragedy is this Canadian legend had to cancel his tour because his face had rotted off from the same virulent worm larvae that affect swine.

His involvement with Stewart Lee’s new TV series is the last enigma and should prove interesting. Baconface might be a comedy legend in his native Canada but over there the humour is less sophisticated and tends to be about overly colourful cardigans, elk, and the etiquette of hunting geese with a crossbow. British audiences require something more subtle than duck call jokes and it’s not entirely clear that Stewart Lee would be the best person to teach Baconface that craft. Baconface deserves to hone his routine with a comedian who has more jokes and fewer emotional, intellectual, and sexual hang-ups about not being Russell Brand. At the moment, Baconface is very much still finding his feet in a new country and he could learn a few tricks from the current generation of comedy talent such as Tim Vine, Miranda Hart, or any of those sexist postmodern Australians that have come over here and are so very funny.

[Update: Also check my Baconface update in honour of his debut at the Edinburgh Fringe ].

[Update 2: Also check my strip in honour of Baconface's recent disappearance when he walked off stage.]

What Would Stewart Lee Do?

The problem of entering into any kind of debate on the internet is that, sooner or later, you eventually find yourself arguing with a died-in-the-skull idiot. That's what happened to me around midnight last night.

I really have to stop reading The Guardian and perhaps transfer my allegiance to The Independent. Not only do they knock back or ignore every article I submit to Comment is Free but their obsession with celebrity culture is sometimes worse than you find in the very worst of the toadying tabloids. At least the red tops write about celebrities. They don’t have the bastards knocking out 800 word articles on everything from handbag etiquette to global warming.

It was in the context of this that I’d expressed my continued disbelief that yet another bland article ostensibly written by a celebrity had been published in Comment is Free (as Orwell would say, more free for some than others) and I suggested that I’d like to see video footage of its author, Bill Nighy, actually bent over his laptop typing the article before I believed he’d written it himself. Only, unbeknownst to me (and I’d imagine that large number of people who know and enjoy Bill Nighy’s work but don’t know much about the man), Bill Nighy suffers from a condition known as ‘Dupuytren's Contracture’ which means that some of his fingers are permanently bent. As is the case with too many Guardian readers who only seem to take pleasure in finding offense in everyone and everything, one clown jumped to the conclusion that my ‘bent over the laptop’ quip was taken as a mocking insult about Bill Nighy’s disability.

It always interests me this question as to whether insult inferred means that insult was intended. Recently, Sergio Garcia made a remark about Tiger Woods and ‘fried chicken’. I was talking about with this with friends and nobody could understand why ‘fried chicken’ was considered offensive until we’d Googled it and discovered it has connotations to slavery in the American South when chicken was a staple food of the poor. Now, if Sergio Garcia did understand the significance then the insult was intended. If he didn’t, then was there an insult and should he need to apologise? Some would still say yes. All I know is that I’m still pissed that somebody could believe I’d make a joke about Bill Nighy’s hands. An apology is needed but I know it’s not me who damn well needs to make one.

Perhaps any moral philosophers out there can answer that for me but what was particularly galling about last night’s exchange was that it had happened when I’d been in a rare good mood.  I’d just finished watching my first viewing of an illegally downloaded copy of Stewart Lee’s ‘If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One’ which I’d managed to snag from a Bitorrent site without contributing to an Irish donkey sanctuary…

Okay, I didn’t illegally download it but the running joke in the show is Lee’s paranoid belief that all his viewers are guilty of copyright theft. On his website, he even asks that they donate money to a donkey sanctuary… Luckily, the show was on the Paramount Comedy channel a few nights ago so the donkeys will have to go hungry for another week.

However, the reason I mention Stewart Lee isn’t just because I watched him last night. It’s because he is the chink in my armour, the lump of Kryptonite that looks like KD Lang on steroids (after she’d let herself go)...

Whenever I leave a snarling comment on celebrity articles I usually find that I’m pretty much alone in believing the encroachment of celebrity into all forms of journalism a sad sign of the times. People get quite irate that I could attack their favourite celebrity who they’re quite happy to fawn over. ‘Oh Bill! Wonderful article,’ they gushed yesterday. Last week it was ‘Great piece of writing Elton’ and the week before was Russell Brand winning plaudits for his horrendous abuse of the English language. Thankfully, the people who attack me for attacking their favourite celebrities don’t know my secret. Because when I say that I don’t want to read celebrities, I actually mean that I don’t want to read celebrities except when its Stewart Lee.

Lee often writes for The Guardian, usually when David Mitchell is ‘away’. I never read Mitchell on principal. But Lee ticks too many of my boxes and that probably makes me a hypocrite of the highest order. He's the only stand-up comedian that I actually enjoy watching. His act isn't about gags it's about the structure. He makes stand-up look like the art form it is and makes me wish I had the confidence to get up on stage and try it for myself. I thought I was alone in despising Michael McIntyre until I heard Lee on the subject. He was possibly the first person I heard who shared my view about Russell Brand’s prose, though Lee prefers to the direct line of attack. His pithy verdict of a Russell Brand article in the New Statesman was ‘1500 words of pro-religious, over-written wank’. The only thing he probably got wrong there is the exact word count.

I'm least comfortable when he talks about political correctness, which he believes in but fails to address the hypocrisy you see in many politically correct people whose words often disguise the worst kind of bigot. There is at least something honest about a misogynistic or racist arsehole. It’s those that hide their hatred behind a pretence that make me go cold. They're the people that usually commit the worst crimes once the putsches begin.

So, I wonder, if Stewart Lee were in my shoes, would he issue an apology had he written the Nighy remark? Would he stop complaining about celebrity journalists? Would he abandon The Guardian and start reading The Independent instead? We he even waste his time writing this blog?

I notice that he’s touring with his new show ‘Much A-Stew About Nothing’ and I recommend anybody who loves truly great comedy to go see him. He’s coming up to Liverpool in October. If I have any money left after the Ralph Steadman exhibition, I should go myself and produce some heckling in the form of a prolonged Q&A. Only being one of the top Guardianistas, he’d probably punch me in the nose and demand more money for his bloody donkeys.

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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