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…