June 29, 2006
NEW CLIP AND ARMANDO IANNUCCI NEWS
A NEW POPE , TIME TRUMPET, YOU-TUBE & THE KERSAL MASSIVE
Here’s a thing I made last year about the Pope’s funeral which I roadtested at my Out Of Focus Group nights at the Zetter then included in my Edinburgh show, I Pavel. I had to really crowbar the filthy mother in there because goodness knows it’s got nothing to do with Pavel at all. I pretended it was part of one of Pavel’s booze fuelled TV watching hallucinations and people didn’t seem to mind on the whole. In fact Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant came to see the show one night and I remember noticing that Ricky’s characteristic hyena snort was loudest during the Pope’s funeral bit. I think Stephen’s a low level sci-fi nerd so he liked the silly names and that too. Anyway, Ricky and Stephen are famous and successful so it must be good, right?
I showed the piece to Armando Iannucci when he was talking to me last year about this series I’ve been contributing to which I think it’s now OK to reveal is called Time Trumpet and should be out on BBC2 in a few weeks. It’s a bit like an I Love The 70’s type talking head clip show, but set in the future with old versions of current celebrities as well as people like myself, Stewart Lee, Richard Ayoade and Matt Holness playing ourselves very oddly and looking back on various real and imagined cultural landmarks of the past (which is in fact the present of course). You see? No then. It’s similar to a one off show we were all involved with a few years ago called 2004 The Stupid Version except with the slight futuristic wonk. If you missed that show, here’s a thing I did about the Bin Laden ‘press release’ from that year which ended up getting used. And here are some pieces from The Stupid Version by Mantlepies who are once again contributing. Anyway, the Pope’s Funeral…
Armando liked it but I believe they’re planning to use another thing I did which featured a similar sci-fi themed commentary about the Remembrance ceremony around the Cenotaph in Whitehall. He preferred the Remembrance version because I hadn’t tampered with the video footage at all, just changed the audio so it was a little more ‘pure’! On the Pope thing I was trying out After Effects for the first time and couldn’t resist tinkering all over it’s arse. Anyway, hope you enjoy the clips and Time Trumpet when it arrives. I’ll post further details when I have them.
I posted the Pope’s Funeral thing on You Tube as well, as part of my ongoing experiment to see if I can make a dent in the mystifying Tubiverse. A few weeks ago I also posted my Randy Tartt video up there and up to now it hasn’t exactly set the world on the fire. I wonder if this one will do any better. However I’m beginning to understand that to get thousands of ‘views’ you either need some genuine oddity or a parody of that genuine oddity. Stuff like my videos, which mainly exist for their own sake and don’t have any celebrity/reality/topical/gore/sex value do less well. Then again things like The Shining trailer are such simple, brilliantly executed ideas that not only do they spread across the world in weeks, they spawn hundreds of similar efforts which do pretty well too. In a way it’s like a model of the way the film industry works: certain formulas are always a good bet for success but the really big hits often come out of nowhere, then you get a few years of pale imitations as everyone tries to cash in.
You can understand all that when there’s millions of dollars at stake but it’s hard to see what’s behind the current wave of Kersal Massive parody hysteria. Presumably the amiable chavs at the centre of the whole thing have become celebrities in the You Tube club and now, as taking the piss out of celebrities has become weirdly mandatory, the rest of the club is diligently spoofing them in all the usual internet ways. So we have the remix, the puppet version, the animated version, the straight-ahead lip synch and presumably at some stage, the movie trailer version and the Star Wars version. Come to think of it, it sounds like an episode of the Adam & Joe Show. Man, I need to get BaaadDad learning that Kersal Massive stuff and then I’ll be the You Tube king! Fuck the Pope’s flipping funeral! Hang on, I was working up to saying something about You Tube being the looped colon of modern culture but I’ve changed my mind for the time being…
June 16, 2006
FROM THE ADAM & JOE VAULTS
A&J’S AMERICAN ANIMATION ADVENTURE: RUGRATS (& BEING LET DOWN)
Here is the final episode of this series split into Rugrats part 1 and Rugrats part 2 together with some outrageous, self important over-analysis of its status as weakest of the series: I subscribe to the theory that you should leave the shittest ’til last in the hope that if people have built up an affection for something they will be more forgiving when it goes weak. Of course the other way of looking at it is that if people like a thing they’ll feel let down if it goes a bit bollox but personally I was always in the forgiving camp. For me this applies particularly with music.
Some people say they’re into a band and then go fucking mental when that band puts out an album that they reckon isn’t as good as an earlier one. “Have you heard the new album? It’s fucking dreadful! A disgrace! They’ve lost it!†In my experience that’s seldom the case. These people are usually spitting bullets because a band has tried something a little different and it hasn’t completely happened. It just seems joyless and disloyal to go around ranting abut how awful they are suddenly. Fair enough, if a band starts putting out one shit album after another, you bail out until you’re given notice of a return to form (though in Bowie’s case that it’s usually hopelessly optimistic hoobah, though the last one was pretty good).
In the case of the Pixies for example, people complaining that Bossa Nova or Trompe Le Monde weren’t up to Doolittle or Surfer Rosa seem to have just totally missed the point. Those early albums should make Pixies like your best childhood friends. They’ve proved themselves worthy of your affection for life! Watching them change is exciting and any faults they pick up along the way you forgive because they’re still fantastic company. You certainly don’t bail on them if they turn up wearing slightly gay clothes one day, or if they announce they’re into jazz. If anything you dress gay too and dig out some Be Bop, as long as it’s just a phase… Hang Wire, Blown Away, Alison, Subbacultcha, Motorway To Roswell, Palace Of The Brine, Alec Eiffel, they’re as good as anything Pixies ever did! I’m overstating my case a little but it’s Friday night and I’ve got beer. Back to this Rugrats based episode of Adam & Joe’s American Animation Adventure…
I seem to recall Joe and I were keen to revisit People Place, a regular item we had in the 4th series of The Adam & Joe Show which featured 2 daytime TV presenters who steamrollered members of the public with their ignorant bullcrap. As we didn’t know or care much about Rugrats we thought that might be a good way to go and it seemed to fit with the style of post Andy Peters children’s television presentation we were going for. That’s why Joe and I are called Andy and Peter you see? Brilliant. It doesn’t quite work though and the silly facts and figures bit at the beginning is lamer than most our People Place sketches. The line “Welcome to a place where dreams and drawings of those dreams come to life…and we’re here to find out what†makes me cringe and the stuff where Joe asks one of the animators if he’s always had a ‘long pencil’ just indicates that the pickings were a bit slim for this episode, no disrespect to Joe who was at least doing more to drive the thing than I! Of course the joke was supposed to be how nice and talented all the animators were and how horrid and shallow we were but it’s not that funny and comes off as a bit patronising somehow, especially as you can see that the animators really were an unusually odd and interesting bunch (checkout the bizarre variety of personal fashion styles on display in the offices of Klasky Csupo!) and we end up not so much pretending to steamroll them as simply steamrolling them.
Things pick up a bit when we get into the VO booth and the semi autobiographical rivalry kicks in. The whole thing of getting to do a cameo voice was based on those shows where a TV presenter gets to do a line in a big American animation as part of a show they’re doing to promote it. Offhand I can think of Jonathan Ross’s cameo as a bartender in Shrek 2, Vernon Kay as a robot extra in Robots and of course the daddy of the genre, Andy Peters as a camp British baggage handler, hilariously out of place in Toy Story 2. I’m pretty sure that’s what Joe had in mind when he was delivering his line “You guys next. Go under!†and it certainly makes me laugh.
Fun fact: when I’m in the VO booth with rollerskates on my hands and I bash them down on the floor then yell out in pain, I had just sprained my hand and was genuinely in pure agony which once again enhanced my performance as a miserable little git. Well I think that’s a personal record for unwarranted trivia and analysis! I’m getting another beer! Cheers baboon!
June 12, 2006
AWARDS NEWS
THE CADS 2006: CELEBRITY MESSAGE VIDEO
Last week I hosted the Music Vision Awards 2006, also known as The CADS (which stands for Creative And Design with an ‘S’ at the end). It’s the big pop video awards shaboobah for the UK and it took place at the Hammersmith Palais, which is where I saw my first ever gig. I went to see Prefab Sprout on Monday 18th November 1985 with Joe who got me into the band and we had a good evening although I remember thinking ‘why is it so loud? I can’t hear what he’s singing. Why are they playing all the songs so fast? It sounds much better on the records’ and that’s still pretty much the way I feel about most gigs to this day.
Anyway, the CADS were enjoyable. I had thought that I wouldn’t host any more awards ceremonies after doing the Q Awards with Joe in 2002, which was a drag and we weren’t great at it (I must have said ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ about 1000 times, as a form of nervous punctuation throughout the night) and the Interactive BAFTAS that same year, which was better but still uncomfortable, for me at least. The CADS always seemed like more fun though. For a start it’s not televised which takes the pressure off considerably and it’s for an industry that on the whole I genuinely love and admire, ie. pop videos. Also I wanted to see if I could do it on my own.
For both the BAFTAs and the Q awards I put together a little film to be used as part of our introductory speech and both times they went down well so I thought I’d do the same sort of thing for the CADS. Here’s the fake celebrity messages from people who couldn’t be there that I played at the end of my speech last week. People liked it I think and I got props from Dom & Nick who won a couple of awards for their amazing video for Believe by The Chemical Brothers so I was pleased with myself.
I said ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ too much again though. Basically if I’m doing something live and I’m not in character I get very nervous and turn into a cross between Alan Partridge and Dermot O Leary. It’s bad. I’m getting better though I think. They key is to do more videos and less talking!
Here’s Joe and me about to host the Interactive awards in 2002, coming about as close to a BAFTA as we’re ever likely to.