Who owned the footage of Lily Allen, Dizzee etc that I used for the Christmas Messages video I posted yesterday and were upset that it had been used without their permission which is why the video has been taken off You Tube. I wish to say that I acted alone in the creation of the Celebrity Messages and no else needs to be executed. Please let me just have Christmas with my family and then you can do what you need to do.

Yours very, very sorry.

Adam

It’s over halfway through the series and I’m digging it so much. It’s on BBC2 on Monday nights at 10pm in case you haven’t caught it yet. Quite apart from the fact that it’s very satisfying to have a comedy show this intelligent being commissioned ‘these days’ (he says sounding like an old fartprick) it’s properly funny stuff. Even the bits that don’t make me laugh are so artfully done I’m happy to wait for the next very funny/brilliant bit, of which there are many. The riff on nostalgic memories of Woolworth’s, MFI and Zavvi this week was a peach. My wife, who normally has low tolerance for TV comedy said “he’s very dishy isn’t he?”. Yes he is, I thought, which I guess makes me a kind of groupie.

So it was exciting for me to contribute to the show, kind of. OK, I contributed to the first of the red button interviews that Armando Iannucci did with Stewart that you can see after the show goes out each week. I was excited to be involved even though I don’t imagine Stewart even knew I was. Can you spot my input? Is it sleazy to want you to spot my input? Sorry if so.

I said I would upload this fleshed out version of the Chocolate Cake Slice pirate radio interruption that we played on the 6 Music show a few weeks back so here it is. I think you can download the MP3 and keep it for ring tone purposes or whatever (right click or ctrl click on the link). I may try to do a video for this track too, but I feel like I should do a vid for my Quantum Of Solace song before. Oh golly, so much to do, so little point…

CAKE SLICE

LISTEN AGAINST, RADIO 4, WEDNESDAY 14TH NOVEMBER 2007, 6:30PM

I’ve been contributing some fairly demented pieces to a new comedy/topical-ish/satire-ish Radio 4 show called Listen Against which starts this Wednesday. It’s the brain baby of our 6 Music brother Jon Holmes and if the pilot was anything to go by it should be hoot packed. I don’t think I’m in every episode but I pop up as foreign secretary David Miliband from time to time. Have a bite!

BOOK NOW FOR BUG 04, THURSDAY 29th NOVEMBER @ NFT (BFI SOUTHBANK)

I have to deliver my pilot the next day so I may well be stressed and under prepared when I host this night of hot new music video and talking but that’s never stopped it being a good evening before so come along. Mo details here. I see they call me ‘inimitable’ on the site! Nice but not strictly true. To imitate me just stick out your tummy and say ‘I’m the shizbot!’ in a plummy drawl. Don’t do it in front of me though please.

LADIES & GENTLEMEN NEWS!

Herewith, an update on the sitcom I appeared in as part of Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase recently. Last night I had a long weird dream about it and at one point I bumped into Andrew Newman, currently head of comedy and entertainment at Channel 4. He said “Hi Adam. Good news about Ladies & Gentlemen isn’t it?” “What do you mean?” I said, “I thought it wasn’t being commissioned.” “No, we changed our minds” said Andrew from behind his large dream glasses. “We realized it was too good to let it slip away so we’re going to go ahead and start shooting early next year” and off he went. As I turned round I saw Kevin Lygo (director of television and content at Channel 4) who came up and embraced me warmly. “Well done on Ladies & Gentlemen” he said and wandered off after Andrew. I woke up feeling fantastic. Then I remembered that Channel 4 have indeed decided not to commission Ladies & Gentlemen for a series and do not, as far as I know have any plans to change their minds and issue me with congratulations and embraces as if I was solely responsible for the thing in the first place. If that situation does arise however, I’ll be the first to let you know!

RADIOHEAD NEWS!

not endorsement of irresponsible drinking!

I just got back from the Oxford countryside where I’ve spent the last couple of days with the members of Radiohead and a few of their friends putting together a three hour webcast, which went out live last night, to celebrate the completion of their album In Rainbows. It was intense but fun. Funtense! Like the band themselves I suppose.

My friend Garth Jennings and I drove up to the band’s residential studio on Thursday morning and as soon as we’d unpacked our gear and marveled at the coolosity of the place, we sat down for lunch with the webcast team: the five bandmembers, producer and technical mindhub Nigel Godrich, the artist currently known as Stanley Donwood (who along with Thom is responsible for all the Radiohead artwork), and various other friends and helpers.

I’m a long time fan of Radiohead and I’ve only recently got to know them a little (Jonny did the theme tune for my BBC pilot MeeBOX) so I’m still not properly over the strange feeling of excitement and anxiety you get when you see musicians you admire in ordinary situations having formed a very personal one way relationship with them through their work. I think it’s something that’s peculiar to music because a good song becomes part of you on a far more fundamental level than a great performance from an actor or even a really good book. So when you’re suddenly presented with the architect(s) of so many things that mean so much to you, there is an understandable desire for them not to think you’re a dick. Unfortunately that pressure is often exactly the thing that makes a fan immediately revert to dick mode. Or is that just me?

Anyway, there I am sat in Radiohead’s kitchen thinking ‘I’m in Radiohead’s kitchen!’ and all around me are bits and pieces that I recognise or am curious about, but I’ve go to focus on the matter at hand, which is: what are we going to shoot in the next 30 hours or so that we can play in to supplement the live elements in the webcast? Nigel, Stanley and the band have already got a good few items in the bag but they need more. Thom looks at Garth. “What have you got?” he says. Brilliantly concealing his fear that the band will pour buckets of tepid scorn over the few fairly silly ideas he and I have come up with, Garth pitches his arse right off. Luckily everyone seems up for pretty much anything so when Garth suggests we take Thom and Jonny out to a field somewhere to shoot a performance of Faust Arp it’s not long before the four of us are squeezed inside a mini on our way to Wittenham Clumps, a hill overlooking Didcot powerstation that was a hang out for the band in their younger days.

FAUST ARP

The sun is almost down as we scramble up the hill and after some brief, breathless discussion over whether the wind is going to ruin the sound and whether Jonny and Thom should sit or stand, we start filming. They perform the song, one of my favourites from In Rainbows, three times. The third one is the best and the wind even holds off for a gap in Thom’s vocal before blustering into the mics. It’s pretty dark by then but luckily my camera picks up enough to make it worth it. We get a final cutaway of Thom and Jonny silhouetted against the streaks of orange behind the powerstation then head back to the studio.

JIGSAW FALLING INTO PLACE

The next item on our agenda is the Helmet Cam video for Jigsaw Falling Into Place, the first single from the album. The Helmet Cam is something I made a couple of years ago to shoot some bits for my comedy night. It’s a mini surveillance camera mounted on the front of a bicycle helmet which makes the head of the wearer appear stationary while everything around them slides around nauseatingly. It’s a technique that’s been used a lot (Martin Scorcese and Peter Gabriel spring to mind), but it always occurred to me that the bike helmet version might be good for some kind of music video. When I found out we were doing the Radiohead webcast I got to work making 5 new ‘units’ for the band. A bike helmet is ideal for mounting the camera because you can strap it on tight enough for it not to wobble too much, but it has the downside of making you look like a bit of a prat so I was concerned that a band like Radiohead might be uncomfortable with that. If they were they didn’t show it and when Garth and I had hooked up all 5 helmets in the band’s main studio and checked they were all recording, we got everyone in, strapped the helmets on and ran through the song a couple of times. That was it. After supper Garth and I loaded everything onto a laptop and it looked great. We stayed up til 2.30am chopping the footage from the 5 cameras together and when we were finished it looked pretty good. In fact we were very pleased. The band give a fantastic performance made pleasingly odd by the Helmet Cams so that by the last section my heart was soaring as we watched it back. What a band! What a song! Crank it up. I hope you like it.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

On Friday morning Garth and I finished tweaking the Jigsaw video and put together the Faust Arp footage then began to think of what was next. Garth had an idea about using the climactic scene from David Fincher’s Seven for something. Although to me it seemed quite well trodden territory (we did our own version for The Adam & Joe Show years ago) the idea of incorporating Thom somehow was too tempting to pass up so Garth found a box and went off to pitch to Yorkles. A few minutes later I found Thom sat on the sofa in the main studio with Garth facing him on a chair with the box between them. It looked like a doctor’s surgery where the patient has just been told he’s going to have to have his leg amputated. Thom took a deep breath and said “come on then, let’s do it.” Once his head was in the box Thom said “hang on, this is familiar. It’s No Surprises all over again!” We gave him a little slap and stuffed some packing foam in his mouth to show him who was boss and he was fine after that.

Everyone seemed to like the finished item although Thom was worried that there would be copyright infringement trouble. Garth and I reassured him that as it was a non profit exercise it shouldn’t be a problem unless anyone at the film company was feeling particularly humourless. You’re not though, are you chaps?

The rest of the day was a scramble to get things finished and transfer bits to various computers for the webcast. It was deeply impressive to see everybody getting this thing together themselves without any help from so called professionals other than the guy sat outside in the satellite truck. Nigel and his two man team sat in his little control room surrounded by old vision mixers he’d bought off E-Bay and various laptops and put together a three hour live show that was slicker (in a good, home made way) than it had any right to be. In the end the last 20 minutes of the thing went out with no audio thanks to a problem with the satellite link, but as far as I could tell there was still an amazing amount of wonderful stuff in those three hours, including about 5 live performances from the band in addition to pre recorded pieces that I would certainly have been delighted with had I been watching at home. At one point I even found myself doing a scrappy link with Thom, which may have made for some pretty awkward viewing (see below) but was certainly one of my prouder presenting moments! What other band would work so hard to do something like that for their fans though? Maybe Jimmy The Hoover and Living In A Box in their heyday but very few since.

As if all that wasn’t enough we had been visited earlier in the day by David Byrne who was conducting an interview with Thom for Wired magazine. When they had finished David came up to the control room and watched the Helmet Cam video. I was stood next to him as he chuckled away at the sight of them all being so serious in the silver helmets. “What a great performance!” he said. “And you can crop the helmets later, right?” I had to spend the next couple of minutes explaining to David and Thom why I thought we should keep the helmets in vision. Good times. Byrne is completely white haired now and very dapper indeed. Apart from Bowie I loved David Byrne in a kind of romantic way more than anyone when I was growing up so the old gay Byrne fancier in me was delighted to find him looking so good. I’m sure he’d be pleased to hear that. He’s so great though. No wonder Radiohead took their name from one of his songs, even if it was one of the unlikliest and least representative in the Talking Heads cannon (I have a soft spot for it nonetheless). If you’re a fan, you should really check out The Catherine Wheel (almost a lost Talking Heads album) and The Knee Plays which has just been re-released. It’s grade A art pop that’s great to listen to while you’re making art. Details of all those can be found on Byrne’s well maintained website here where you’ll find all kinds of treats including this wonderful clip of a NY City bike ride with commentary from David. For a cycle nerd and Byrne obsessive it doesn’t get much better.

ADDENDUM

Here’s how the Wired piece turned out.

What a couple of days though! I do hope it won’t be the last of my Radiohead dalliances. Cheery Ho.

CAVEAT!

If any of these recommendations don’t turn out as well for you as they did for me, I’m sorry but please resist the temptation to tell me about it in great detail. As much as I’d like to be, I’m simply not Nicky Campbell.

6 MUSIC AND DIGITAL RADIOS!

Thanks if you tuned in to our first Saturday morning show on BBC 6 Music. We’re there for the next year (!) from 9-12 every Saturday so if you haven’t already, invest in some kind of DAB radio and plunge into the superior world of digital listening! I get many of my electronicals from Stone Audio here. They deliver the quickest of anyone I’ve used on line for this kind of thing and they send you e-mails written by actual humans with real names if your product is out of stock so you can select an alternative. If you’re after a digital radio I’d go for a Tivoli DAB or for a lovely sounding, compact i-pod speaker/radio (although this one’s NOT digital) may I recommend the Tivoli Audio Model PAL (Portable Audio Laboratory) Radio. Many of my close friends have received one of these as a birthday present over the years and they always go down a treat.

Of course if you just want to listen again to our 6 Music shows you can do so from their website here. As the weeks wear on I hope we’ll get round to providing the BBC webfolks with some more recent pics. It would be nice if we were still as fresh faced as the fairly ancient photos on the site suggest, but it’s probably best for all of us if we simply come to terms with the older, jowlier versions. Isn’t ageing terrific!?

As we mentioned on the show yesterday we haven’t yet nailed down the details of the podcast situation but we’re thinking along the lines of doing a monthly digest featuring the best of the Saturday morning shows as well as a good few specially recorded nuggets where we can be a little more free wheeling than we might be on air. I’ll keep you posted.

BOOK NEWS!

A while back I went for a meeting at Faber & Faber who were interested in hearing any book ideas I had. Days later however I got the commission for my BBC3 pilot MeeBOX which has taken up most of my time since so my literary pretentions had to be popped on the bookshelf for a while. Shame though cos I had some great ideas for books.

10,000 THINGS THAT ARE SOOO CRAP

This would be just a long list of things that I think are crap. Mainly I would just write them all down in no particular order without even really justifying why I thought they were crap. Every now and then there would be a childish drawing of one of the things I thought was crap but it wouldn’t even be on the same page as the thing it corresponded to. Here are some of the things that would be in there: Trees (so crap!) Bad Food (yuck!) Metal (the point anyone?) Fish (hate them!) and the letter ‘p’ (Piss off!) You get the idea. There would also be a tie in TV show. In fact I think I’m going to make it and put it in MeeBOX as a clip.

RAPPER MOUSE

This would be a children’s book based on a story that I made up for my sons one time. There’s a mouse and he wants to be a rapper. He’s called MC Mouse. The book would be cute but also streetwise and there’d be a lot of quite rude jokes that would go over the kids heads. I would illustrate it myself to ensure that I got more money, even though the illustrations would be embarrassingly poor. The kids won’t mind, have you seen how crap their drawings are? Anything looks like genius to them. There would also be a tie in movie and of course an album both of which would also be sub par.

I WAS BULLIED AT SCHOOL

A very slim collection of memories from my school days when I was often bullied. I would make it sound as if the bullying was very bad although it was actually fairly low level. I would leave out the times when I was a bit of a bully myself, or maybe I’d mention those times but make it sound as if I learned some valuable lessons. Perhaps I’d even track down some of the people that bullied me and the people I bullied. Has someone done this already? Fuckit, I’ll do it again but it’ll be different cos I’ve got a different name. Again, could also be a TV series.

ADAM BUXTON’S POLAROIDS OF COCKS

I travel the world at great expense for a year taking pictures of people’s penises with a Polaroid camera then put them in a book. Some of them are famous people, others are just ordinary people, some of them are homeless etc. What do their cocks say about their lives? You decide. I’d do cocks first as I’m not gay so it would appear that prurience was not my primary motivation. A year later I would do Adam Buxton’s Polaroids of Twats. Both would sell very well. Again, I don’t care if this has been done before, I’m doing it again with my name on it.

Unfortunately Faber & Faber tend to concentrate on slightly different kinds of books but I bet I could talk them round. My meeting there concluded with me being given an armful of their recent publications which all turned out to be very good. Particularly entertaining were Ten Bad Dates With De Niro, a great collection of well written movie top tens for both the high brow and low brow film fan, and Simon Reynold’s excellent Rip It Up And Start Again, about post punk music from 1978 to 1984. If you like bands like Talking Heads, New Order, Devo, Pere Ubu, Orange Juice and their arty experimental pop colleagues then you will love this book. He covers the story of pretty much every single significant act from that time with enough love and enthusiasm to make you want to listen to all their stuff again, even the really quite rubbish stuff (the rubbosity of which is also acknowledged). It does for this most interestingly diverse and rewarding period of music what The World At War did for WW2! I’m telling you!

RADIO CONTROLLED PLANE NEWS!

Last Christmas my wife got a cheap looking RC plane for one of our young sons and it looked so unpromising that after the initial unwrapping euphoria it lay untried for the next few days. However on New Year’s day (surely one of the most depressing days of any year) driven to desperation by physical misery and unable to watch more frigging telly, we found the nearest field and gave it a go. It worked pretty well! It was hard to steer but Frank, aged 4, was able to keep it in the air for several satisfying minutes at a time and since then we’ve become rather skilled at making the thing do what we want. All it needed to be ready to fly was a 20 minute charge from the controller which we started as we left the house. By the time we arrived on the airfield, we were ready for takeoff!

We’ve lost a few to roofs (rooves?) and wear and tear but they’re cheap enough for it not to be the end of the world so I keeping ordering new ones and the newer models are even better. What’s more, the place I order them from, Wonderland Models delivers the next day, and again if they don’t have what you need they call you up and suggest alternatives. Along the way I’ve tried buying other similarly priced RC planes and helicopters and not one of them is as satisfyingly easy to use and hardy as these X Twin planes which have provided me and the boys with some of the most enjoyable afternoons ever. Hope they do the job for you too.

But now I’m back and despite the weather going all biblical and television finally being exposed as the cesspool of deceit I always suspected it might be I’ve got a fair bit to enthuse about. First let me tell you how my gig at the Albany went before I went so rudely AWOL.

MY GIG AT THE ALBANY, 12th JULY 2007

On my way to The Albany I was cycling past stationary traffic on Whitehall when someone opened the passenger door of a black cab and I slammed right into the edge of it. I went most of the way over my handlebars and sustained quite a serious bashing to my right shoulder, left thigh and shins. I didn’t flip out but I said to the guy who was looking at me with a mixture of alarm and indignation, “what are you doing opening the door without looking!?” He came back with “what are you doing cycling up on the inside?” “That’s generally where people cycle” I replied. Yesss! Score 1 for me!!! He looked chastened but not perhaps suitably chastened. The show was starting in 10 minutes so I decided against a pointless row and peddled on, a little shaken and achy. I suppose in those situations the correct thing from a legal point of view is to exchange details in case my injuries turned out to be more severe than I thought and I decided to call Baines & Ernst or whoever. I can’t help feeling that life’s too short though.

The gig went OK to begin with but I quickly lost control of the filthy mother. For a start I had foolishly drunk a pint of fizzy lager backstage and for the first few minutes of my act I was negotiating with a belch that refused to surface and torpedoed my concentration somewhat. Plus the lights on the tiny stage, which were only a couple of feet from my face (but several faces from my feet), seemed unusually bright. I could see Rob Baker, who was an AP on The Adam & Joe Show sat in the audience. ‘Fuck’ I thought, ‘I haven’t seen him for ages and now he’s going to think I’m a loser.’ All in all in was in a bad frame of mind and that was before I got to the new stuff I’d just finished writing just hours earlier.

Needless to say I was no way on top of these shiny new nuggles and after a few minutes I managed to completely silence a previously very jolly room. In my defence they went quiet during a dramatic passage for which silence was entirely appropriate, but later on when some laughs would have been welcome, they remained disrespectfully silent. In fact it was probably the quietest reaction I have ever got for anything I’ve done live. It was so extremely quiet I couldn’t help laughing a little at the utterness of the quietude. They only started laughing again when I had left the stage and Dave Armand & Nick Tanner had returned.

In the past that kind of reaction would have shaken me a fair bit but for the first time I found myself not minding too much. I knew the stuff I had written was good and I just needed to do it more to make it work. It’s worse if you know deep down that you’ve gone out with some ropey old shite and been busted for it.

Anyway, I’ll let you know when my next experiment with silence is due. Now for the rest of this week’s inconsequential fartcloud.

THE TAO OF BERGERAC NEWS!

Back in mid June I played a part in the first episode of a live recording of a new Radio 4 comedy series called The Tao of Bergerac by Will Smith and Roger Drew, who I met while working on Time Trumpet. Inspired by an audio book of John Nettles reading the Tao, the show features Will ‘navigating the minefield of his life’ and it’s very good indeed. I can say that without smugness because I had absolutely nothing to do with it’s creation other than turning up and reading one of the parts on the night in the incredibly fancy new BBC radio theatre in Broadcasting House. You can listen again to the show here and catch future episodes on Wednesdays at 6:30pm on radio 4.

One of the most amazing parts of this excellent programme is when at the end Will links random films to episodes of Bergerac by connecting the work of their featured stars. I should stress that only the first of these was scripted. When we recorded the episode Will took about 6 or 7 films shouted out by members of the audience with no prior preparation and was able to link every single one to specific episodes of Bergerac in less than six steps with no hesitation whatsoever. It was one of the weirdest, nerdiest and most strangely impressive things I have ever beheld. Check it!

BBC PILOT NEWS!

This month I start work on my pilot for the BBC with the provisional title of MeeBox (although that may well change as there seems to be a glut of projects with ‘box’ in the title at the moment). The overall idea is to create a sort of spoof of the kind of material you find on places like You Tube, ie. clips, virals and ‘vlogs’ from various ludicrous characters (including Famous Guy and possibly Ken Korda) spouting off about all kinds of moronic crap. I’m aware that there are probably about 100 other projects not dissimilar to this either being pitched or in production at the moment, but I hope I’ll be able to make it my own somehow! Basically I’m going to try out all kinds of different bits and see what fits and what doesn’t.

One of the things I wanted to do was incorporate some phone call stuff that wasn’t so much pranky as character based but having seen a few clips of E4’s excellent Fonejacker, I might steer clear. If it was just another shit Crank Yankers type thing it wouldn’t be a problem but Keyvan Novak and his chums have breathed enough new life into phone japes, I’m worried that particular route might be a bit redundant for the time being, although as with Trigger Happy TV, I’m always amazed when someone does just one thing, albeit very well, for a whole half hour and then makes a whole series of it. That’s the way to get into people’s head though I guess. Keyvan Novak’s clearly a talented guy though. Can really be the same unfeasibly handsome Iranian actor who appeared in Holby City, Spooks and Syriana?! If so, I feel another Sasha Baron Cohen coming on…Bastard! If you haven’t already seen it, type ‘fonejacker ‘ into You Tube and get watching, you’ll definitely like at least one or two. I’ll keep you updated with pilot news in the next few weeks.

VERY LATE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS RADIO & TV SERIES NEWS!

As usual I’m a few years late with the latest comedy sensation, but over the last month my life’s been improved by Flight Of The Conchords. In case you’re as tardy as I, they’re two engaging Kiwi chaps who write very amusing songs, mainly parodying various musical genres in a non tedious way and banter winningly in between. I only just listened to their radio series a few weeks ago. It’s a peach! This week I got hold of a couple of episodes of their US TV show from Bit Torrent and it’s an even more delicious peach! Joe, if you’re reading this, check out this amazingly loving and spot-on tribute to the sublime ridiculousness of early Pet Shop Boys from episode 2. How much more kindred do you want your spirits!?

I’m telling you, if you’re partial to super talented, funny musicians (see also Matts Holness and Berry and Julian Barratt ) and the kind of enjoyably odd conversational rhythms that the Boosh do so well then it’s time to book your Conchord flight! (yeah? Get me a job on a shit magazine, IMMEDIATELY! But not NOW!) Look out for many exciting US comedy talents in the Conchords TV show too, some of whom, like Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schall, were on the bill with David Cross when he was over here a few weeks back. Here’s one more blast; surely the last word on pathetic rap (although nothing will ever stop me pathetic rappin’!) ‘I’m a motherflippin’!’

Vito Rocco who directed The Last Chancers (the comedy drama I was in back in 2003) needs your help! He’s got himself involved with some bad people who are pitting talented young directors against eachother in a ludicrous internet vote thing for the chance to make their own feature with a budget of 1 million quid. Do the guy a favour and lend him your support by voting here, but do it quick! There’s only another day to go as I write this. Also, if he gets his film made, I reckon I’ll get a part. I mean what kind of tool would get his friend to harness the awesome power of his blog chums then not hand him a delicious peach of a part as a thankyou? With your help we’ll find out! Vote Vito!

Firstly, please excuse the fact that I appear to have temporarily turned into another internet critic, a form of life so humble that not even David Attenborough would be curious about it’s filthy rituals. OK, let’s go.

The first episode of Entourage series 4 was bad. In fact it was perhaps the worst episode of the show so far. They’d done it as if it was a documentary about the making of the film they were working on. Unfortunately the badly observed conventions of the genre acted like a giant wall between the audience and all my much-loved Entourage buddies! We were left with a weedy sounding British guy providing a fake voice over that failed to parody any recognisable film show or behind the scenes documentary maker I’ve ever heard of, shots of people having dramatic plot based freak outs that would NEVER be caught on camera (let alone cleared for use in a behind the scenes piece), and unfunny interviews with Entourage protagonists being indiscreet in a way that you simply never, ever see on an interview of this kind.

Now, obviously I’m taking all of this much too seriously and Entourage doesn’t pretend to be surgically accurate with it’s portrayal of Hollywood life, but if you’re going to fuck with such a great formula, at least stick to the flipping rules! I’m sure they’ll be back on track next week. After all, for my money the Sopranos took a bit of a dip at the beginning of their sixth and final season, but the last 8 or 9 episodes were right back on target and the controversial finale was absolutely what you’d hope for from a show that was very seldom didactic or simple minded. OK, so it was no Lenny’s Britain, but the Sopranos was an extraordinary show and I’ll miss it very much. If you’ve never seen it, well, I wish I was you and I still had it all ahead of me is all I can say.

If you’ve never seen Grindhouse, er well, your nerves are possibly a little less shot than mine. Edgar Wright organised a screening at London’s trendy Soho Hotel last week so that he could show both films with fake trailers in between (one of which Edgar directed) the way Tarantino and Rodriguez intended. Indeed, this non stop double bill format was the way American audiences saw Grindhouse but I believe the two films are being split in the UK, which seems a shame as part of the genius of the whole thing is the way you respond to various kinds of tension after spending such an unusually long time in the cinema (or not if you’re one of the millions that stayed away in the US).

First of all the screening itself was fun because half the world of British comedy was there, including various members of League Of Gentlemen, The Mighty Boosh, Garth Merenghi and Little Britain. Also Peter Jackson! When we’d all been reminded not to go to the toilet during the trailers in the middle and risk missing Edgar’s contribution, the lights dimmed and the first film, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, began.

It was pretty good. It reminded me a lot of the kind of films that Joe and I would go and see of a weekend at school, for example Reanimator, The Hidden, Return Of The Living Dead, The Stuff etc. As with those films, I was sort of amused and slightly grossed out a couple of times but it was never really terrifying or really funny, which is the problem with a lot of genre splicing outings for me. The scene in Dusk Til Dawn where it looks as if Tarantino’s character might rape Juliette Lewis’s character has more grimly real tension in it than anything in Planet Terror. Also it’s weird how seeing a girl with a machine gun attached to the amputated stump of her leg is much less exciting than being told about it.

Planet Terror finished and the fake trailers rolled. I’m biased but I thought Edgar’s (‘Don’t') was quite easily the best. As a properly funny spoof of the imagery and tone of those kinds of late 70’s, early 80’s horror trails it was head and shoulders above the others. Eli Roth’s effort was OK, albeit revolting and not that funny.

Roth turns up in the first section of Tarantino’s contribution, Death Proof. As I said before, part of the effectiveness of this film may well have been down to having just sat through Planet Of Terror and being totally immersed in the Grindhouse experience subsequently, but I came out of Death Proof feeling completely shredded in a way that I have only been a few times going to the cinema. E.T. and Schindler’s List spring to mind. And Harold & Kumar Get The Munchies.

It starts inauspiciously with a long scene in a bar featuring some unappealing young women and a couple of unappealing cameos from both Eli Roth and Tarantino. It’s all self indulgent to the point of parody. Then it goes beyond parody and into boredom. Then Kurt Russel turns up as a gnarled stuntman with a scary black car who sits at the bar and eyes the unappealing women. Then he seems fairly nice so any tension there is dissipated. Then, seemingly aware that the audience will be getting quite bored by now, Tarantino pretends to drop a reel (a joke which, along with some deliberately ropey edits, is used a lot for the first part of the film then abandoned) so that the film literally, cuts to the chase. I won’t spoil it by going into too much detail but for about 5 minutes the tone suddenly darkens considerably and I found myself completely gripped and unbelievably tense!

5 minutes later, it was all over and the film seemed to begin again with a new set of slightly more appealing young women. This time there’s no jokes about dodgy edits, scratchy prints or dropped reels, there’s just these women on a road trip. Then they stop off for some lunch at a café and have a lady chat. Ooh! It’s Kurt Russell at the bar again! What’s he going to do!? Well, we’ve got a pretty good idea what he’s going to do but how long are we going to have to wait before he starts doing it this time? The answer is A VERY, VERY LONG TIME INDEED. The scene in the café with the women talking in sassy, super modern, empowered Tarantino-ese about, er, gosh I honestly can’t recall, must have lasted about 20-25 minutes. The sassy chat was again, banal to the point of parody. Then again, it waddled past parody into profound, suffocating torpor. But it’s Tarantino, I thought, he must know what he’s doing, though what can he possibly do to enliven such utter dullociousness? 10 minutes later I found out. The final minutes of Death Proof are as relentlessly exciting as anything I’ve seen for a long time, maybe ever. The question is, would I have felt that way had I not been so fucking bored for so long beforehand? Was it all a masterclass in deconstructive pacing? A brilliant cat and mouse game being played out not only between the characters on screen but between the director and the audience? Or was it a shit film with 2 really fucking good bits? I’ll leave that up to you, and if you can, go for the double!

Right, now back to dealing with frigging Facebook requests. No doubt I’ll telling people how wonderful and fun Facebook is in a few months, but right now I’m still in the very early hate and denial stage.

My heart’s really pounding! I’m shaking a little. I’ve got enough nervous energy to power a small nervous factory. I’m converting that energy into blog. This is the second time I’ve felt like this in a few days. The first time was last weekend when I went to a screening of Grindhouse organised by Edgar Wright, more of which later, but right now it’s because I was just on an emergency nappy mission in a lightning storm! The lightning and nappies weren’t the problem though. I returned from the garage and parked the car across the road from our house just as the rain was starting to pelt cartoonishly. I got out with the nappies and ran into the road without properly checking for traffic (it’s a quiet road). Suddenly someone screamed incredibly loudly in my ear, “OI!! YOU FFFUCKING PPPRICKKK!!!” A tall guy on a racing bike, dressed entirely in special cycle gear whizzed past me. I came back with “calm down you stupid twat!” but he kept on going without looking round. A passer by laughed. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at how insane the cycle dick was, how brilliant my comeback was or how much the peddle ponce had freaked me out.

I ran into the house out of the rain but for 5 minutes I had to fight the urge to get back into the car, catch up with the cyclist and mow down the miserable fuckstick. OK maybe not mow him down, because of all the consequences, but give him a slice of my mind at least. ‘I’m sorry I stepped out in front of you’, I would have said, ‘but that does not give you the right to immediately scream at me as if I’d just burgled your house and shat on your girlfriend. What’s wrong with a ‘careful mate!’ or a vigorous tinkle on the bell? Your over the top, knee jerk aggression is helping to tatter the already threadbare fabric of modern existence. And you look like a very low quality Nancy.’ Then he would have cycled the rest of the way thinking carefully about what he’d done. Yes, that’s what would have happened. But I came to my computer instead and now I feel a bit calmer. Fucking cyclists. No wonder everyone hates us. I’m going to watch the new episode of Entourage I got off Bit Torrent. It’s the first of season 4! That should calm me down completely. I’ll tell you about my Grindhouse night tomorrow.

I finished shooting on Modern Men last week. It’s going out later this year as part of a kind of comedy playhouse that Channel 4 are doing, a little like a bigger budget Comedy Lab. The show (which will not be called Modern Men when it goes out because there’s an American show with the same name) was immensely good fun to do and more than ever I hope it gets picked up for a series but it’ll be a while before we find out. I’d love to tell you more about it and show you some pics, but I’m going to have to wait a bit to avoid stepping on any toes.

Someone told me they saw me in another one-off comedy thing on BBC3 the other night. I think they must have been talking about a show I did earlier this year called The Scum Also Rises about shenanigans in an advertising agency. This was also a hoot to be part of and was produced by Iain Morris’s company Bwark. Iain used to host a show on Xfm with Jimmy Carr of course and during his time as a commissioning editor at Channel 4 looked after Bo Selecta and Peep Show among others I believe. Apart form anything else he was always a very loyal supporter of Joe and myself and it was good fun to get to work with him.

Before I continue with other news I want to say thanks very much to everyone who’s been indulging my non-line communication stance and writing actual paper letters to me recently. It’s really amazing to get post that isn’t grim and it also makes me feel a bit like a pop star, which is of course the whole point. Sorry if it’s taken a while to get back to you, but I swear I will eventually as long as you don’t forget those SAE’s! For a reminder of why I tend to duck out of on-line communication, check out the ongoing fartstorm of hilariously semi literate lunacy under the Help Tha Police clip on You Tube. Thanks if you’re one of the people that occasionally leaves intelligent and constructive comments under these clips, but as far as talking sense into some of the other nutbuckets goes, you should probably take up grass straightening if you want to see quicker results.

ADDENUDUM – JULY 2007

The original HelpTha Police clip has now been removed along with all the insane comments, which is a shame but I wouldn’t be surprised if this copy eventually yields more of the same…

A&J COKE PODCAST 8 OUT NOW

The 8th Adam & Joe Coke New Music podcast is now available for free download on -tunes (type in ‘coke new music’) or visit The Coke website here. If you’ve already heard Podcast 8 then the pic below is proof of my story (note the hair). If you haven’t heard it yet then all will be explained when you do! This is the first of our new shorter, more regular Coke podcasts (they’ll be every two weeks now). Hope you think it’s an improvement. If you don’t, we guarantee a full refund of your no money!

ADAM & JOE RELATED IFFLE

We did an interview recently for an excellent website called Cut Out And Keep. Read it here. Joe has answered a lot of questions put to him by his My Space chums here (although he incorrectly suggests I’m not that keen on live radio; I loved the fact that our Xfm podcasts were more dense than our live show, but I still liked being live). Also our friend Zac, who was largely responsible for the best songs in The Adam & Joe Show, has put together this beautifully designed website for his proper band Astroman that you might like to peruse. I don’t think they do The Robert De Niro Calypso at gigs unfortunately.

LOST FINALE

None of my visible friends watch Lost so I’m afraid I’m going to have to share my thoughts about the Season 3 flash forward finale with you imaginary chaps. Maybe it caught me at a bad moment but I was left feeling quite depressed when it finished. After a few episodes which made me think the writers really did have some sort of ingenious overview already worked out, the sudden jump to a miserable future seemed to suggest they were back to throwing any old shite at the wall and seeing which drips were the most engaging. Perhaps I’m just bitter because I WANT THEM TO TELL ME WHAT THE JIMMYLOVING BLACK SMOKE IS ALL ABOUT!!! How the fricking heckfire can they possibly come up with a half decent explanation for a malevolent black wraith that makes machine like clicking sounds? Of course, they may be saving that one for some future revelation-fest, but as it was set up in the very first episodes, I think we deserve a few clues by now! All that said, I enjoyed seeing pop eyed Ben getting at least some of the shit kicked out of him by Jack and I was delighted when Charlie finally died after weeks of frustratingly close calls. I jumped around the room singing You All Everybody at the top of my lungs (if Oasis covered this I would worship them like genius twats). Also, good to see my old friend Penny back for a second season finale turn! Come on Penny, get in touch! Let’s re-live those fun photobooth times!

If you’re a Lost fan (and if you’re not you must have been very bored and confused for the last couple of minutes) you’ll enjoy this enthusiastic review of finale 3. There’s a string of comments and entertaining speculation beneath the review that’s remarkable for being neither stupefyingly dull nor peppered with lame brained abuse, surely a first for a discussion about pop culture on the net! Or maybe it had just been mediated. Anyway, worth a look if you care at all about Lost. Now with 24 gone too, what the shitting hell am I going to watch until January 2008? Wait a second, I’ve just realised that there’s 8 episodes of Entourage Season 3 I haven’t seen yet on Bit Torrent!. Hey heeeey!!! I guess if I had comments on this blog, someone would have told me, but that’s the price you pay for peace I guess.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD THINGS OFF BIT TORRENT

I know that the vast majority of you will be familiar with Bit Torrent and the notion of file sharing but for those of you who still wait until THE MAN says it’s OK to watch your favourite TV shows on your vidilamp (or ‘TV set’ as they used to call them) here’s an idiot’s guide to watching what you want when you want for nuffin’, the way TV-Jesus intended! I’m using a Mac so if this method doesn’t work for you try following the instructions here. Also apologies in advance if this is badly explained or technically inaccurate!

STEP 1. DOWNLOAD ‘CLIENT’

The software that enables you to download the actual movie files is known as a Bit Torrent ‘client’. There’s a lot to chose from but I use a simple, basic application called Transmission, which you can download free here. Chose the version that says it will work with your computer and once you’ve downloaded it to your desktop (which takes only a few minutes) double click on the icon to open and install it on your hard disc.

STEP 2. CHOOSE YOUR ‘TORRENT’!

Before you use your client to start downloading the movie files, you need to download the ‘torrent’. This is a very small file that your client uses to access the movie. Think of it as the invite that gets you in to the party! No invite, no entry, so to download the torrent you need to go to one of the many file sharing sites on the net. I use Isohunt, which you can find here. Once you’re at the site, you type in the name of the show you’re looking for and you’re shown all the various episodes that kindly folk have uploaded!

Now, this is the only slightly tricky part. On the right hand side of the screen you should see a couple of columns with an ‘S’ and an ‘L’ above them. This refers to the number of people who have the whole file on their computer (Seeders) and the number of people who are in the process of downloading parts of the file (Leechers). In order for your file to download quickly (a fast torrent may still take an hour or several to deliver a 30 minute show) you need to find a torrent that has the highest amount of both. The fewer people there are seeding, the longer it will take to get your file. Click on the ‘S’ and the files will be arranged for you in order of ‘most seeded’. Now the only other thing to look out for is the format of the file you’re about to download.

Once you’ve found the episode you’re looking for click on the title and a window will open beneath it. It says ‘DOWNLOAD TORRENT’ followed by a load of info about where the torrent came from etc. Scroll to the bottom of the window and you’ll see a list of the actual files contained in the torrent. I tend to go for anything that has ‘.avi’ at the end of it as this suggests I’ll be getting a single file that I can open and play easily with an application like VLC (which you can find here). The TIPS PLAYING CLIPS section of this site above has more info for Windows users about playing movies.

STEP 3: DOWNLOAD TORRENT

Once you’ve selected the file you want click on DOWNLOAD TORRENT and after a few seconds a file will appear on your desktop. This is your torrent. Now open Transmission or whatever client you’re using and import the torrent by clicking OPEN and locating the file on your desktop. Once the torrent has been opened by the client, your movie file will start downloading to your desktop (or wherever you have directed it). A progress bar will tell you how long you have to go, although this tends to fluctuate wildly depending on how many people are logged on and sharing at the same time. Sometimes, it’s a question of leaving your computer on overnight and letting it download at its leisure.

THINGS THAT USED TO WORRY ME ABOUT BIT TORRENT

• IF I SHUT MY COMPUTER DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF A DOWNLOAD DO I HAVE TO START AGAIN?

No. Once you turn your computer back on and re-open the client, it picks up from where you left off.

• CAN I DOWNLOAD SEVERAL FILES AT ONCE?

You betcha! The more the merrier, especially if you want to get hold of a whole series. Downloading multiple files doesn’t affect the speed.

• CAN PEOPLE HACK INTO MY COMPUTER WHILE I’M DOWNLOADING?

If you have a router (which nearly all broadband services come with) then no. If you’re worried about security take a read of this.

• DO I DUMP THE TORRENT AS SOON AS IT’S FINISHED DOWNLOADING?

Well, that’s up to you, but this whole system is made more efficient when people share as many files as they can for as long as they can, in other words it’s good Bit Torrent etiquette to leave the torrent active in the client for as long as possible to enable other people to share it too. Obviously this becomes impractical once you’ve got loads of files or you want to shut down your computer, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

• WHAT HAPPENS IF THE TORRENT JUST STOPS FOR AGES?

It could mean either that none of the seeders are on line and you just need to wait til they come back, or that the file is incomplete. The pain and frustration of an incomplete file is something you just have to get used to with Bit Torrent. I’m still receiving counselling after thinking I had located Eat The Document, the rare Bob Dylan doc, only to watch it stall at 65%. Thinking at least I had two thirds of the film, I tried to open it but found only scrambled pixels of Zimmerman. A very sad day.

• CAN I GO TO JAIL FOR DOING THIS?

You’re just as likely to go to jail for posting a copyrighted clip of The Adam & Joe Show on you Tube, ie. not. Personally I wouldn’t want to encourage twats who upload shitty pirates of new film releases by downloading them, but I have to admit that I’ve checked out the odd film once it’s out on DVD and someone sticks it up there. If it’s any good, I buy the DVD for the added quality and all the extras, but if it’s some piece of lazy shite (The Holiday for staggeringly rotten example) then I feel very happy not to have forked out for it. Anyway, the best application for Bit Torrent as far as I’m concerned is catching up on TV stuff, which should be free anyway. Why anyone would have a problem with more people wanting to see your show is beyond me. Well, OK the advertisers have a problem with it, but it’s easy to screen out ads on most recording digi boxes anyway, so it’s up to them to concoct new ways of insinuating their stinky messages for an on-line audience. I recommend they try using my voice to do it. It’s proven to get results!!! Good luck and if you haven’t already, check out Entourage! It’s the shiznit biatch!