January 28, 2010
SITCOM NEWS!
READING REVIEWS FOR THE PERSUASIONISTS
January 8, 2010
ALONE IN THE SHED NEWS!
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, THEN CONTINUES FOR A SHORT WHILE…THEN ENDS!
Here are the 4 pieces I made for 2009 Unwrapped presented by lovely Miranda Hart, a Time Trumpet-ish review of last year that went out on BBC2 on 30th December. My Shed bits were spooves of Channel 4’s Alone In The Wild which went out in September last year. Visit the BBC Comedy website to read my hilarious accompanying blog entries now!!! Careful to tape up your sides before you do though or they might split with mirth! Seriously. Hospitals have been reporting record numbers of mirth related injuries since my blog posts went up on the BBC site. Oh wait, apparently they’ve been reporting record numbers of injuries from slipping on ice. So tape up your feet AND your sides.
June 11, 2008
MeeBOX TRANSMISSION NEWS!
WATCH MeeBOX ON BBC3, SUNDAY 22nd JUNE 2008, 11.45PM
MeeBOX, the pilot I made for BBC3 last year is finally being transmitted on the night of Sunday 22nd at 11.45pm. I showed a few clips from the show when I was MCing at the 100 Club last weekend (thanks for making it a very enjoyable night if you were there) and they all went down very well so I’m hoping the massive audience I’m bound to get in this incredible slot will respond with similar enthusiasm. It was made for very little money but I had a very happy time putting it together and I’m deeply grateful to all the many people who helped. When the show goes out I’ll say more about the production and give some proper credit for anyone who’s interested. As far as the future of MeeBOX goes, I have a meeting at the BBC next week so I hope I’ll be able to tell you soon if I’ll be making any more for TV.
In the meantime, here’s the first of a few clips to whet your appetite and maybe encourage others to tune in. This is a video for a song called Sausages that I made with Garth Jennings. It pretty much speaks for itself I think. It’s nice and short so I hope you’ll send it around to all the Sausage lovers and haters out there. Lord knows, everybody’s one or the other!
love Adam. 12th June, 2008
December 5, 2007
MeeBOX PILOT FINISHED, KEN ON COMEDY SHUFFLE NEWS!
MeeBOX PILOT FINISHED!
My BBC pilot MeeBOX was delivered this week and I’m pleased with it. It clocks in just shy of half an hour and it’s very colourful, sounds nice and I think it’s funny so thanks to everyone who helped me put it together and here’s hoping the BBC want to commission a series! It’ll probably be on TV sometime in January or February next year and I guess we’ll hear whether or not it’ll get the nod around that time too, so as soon as I know more I will of course let you know as you are my oldest and dearest friends. Except you. You’re a prat.
The only thing I didn’t have time to do was to film more vlog/video diary style pieces to give the while thing more of a narrative through line and introduce more characters for which I was hoping to rope in various comedy pals, but if it got commissioned I would rectify that. As it is, it’s similar to a lot of the stuff I’ve been posting on You Tube for the last year or two with a few slightly more elaborate items featuring my character Famous Guy which I think work well.
I’m also very excited to have some great graphic elements to tie the thing together courtesy of computer wizzbot David O Reilly who I worked with on Time Trumpet. David’s made a lovely, trippy title sequence inspired by a theme tune specially composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. There was some concern from the BBC that it was a little long for a title sequence (it’s nearly a minute) but I think it sets the tone nicely. My only worry is that it’s too much to live up to! Here’s Matt Berry (who makes a brief appearance in MeeBOX) talking about the importance of title music on Screen Wipe following the death of Ronnie Hazlehurst earlier this year. I know Jonny’s a bit Hazlehurst aficionado too so he’ll dig that. As I write he hasn’t seen the finished MeeBOX pilot yet so I hope he doesn’t regret putting his name to it when he does!
By the way, if you haven’t heard Jonny Greenwood’s music for Bodysong, you should check it out. It’s in the same spirit of joyful extra curricular experimentation as David Byrne’s equally fantastic Catherine Wheel score. He also played me a bit of his music for the new Paul Thomas Anderson film There Will Be Blood, and that sounded lovely too so I’ll certainly be investigating further…
MeeBOX wise though, I might have a kind of Out Of Focus Group/MeeBOX screening party before the show goes out next year so I’ll keep you posted.
KEN KORDA HOSTS COMEDY SHUFFLE ON BBC3, 11pm, THURSDAY 6TH DECEMBER 2007
Whenever I get asked to be a guest or a presenter on a ‘proper’ TV show my instinct is always to say thanks but no thanks. Contributing sketches or inserts for other people’s shows or appearing in character is one thing but turning up as ‘Adam Buxton’ is quite another. Nevertheless there’s a nagging voice in my head that keeps saying ‘you’ve got to say yes once in a while or people will just completely forget who you are and you’ll never work again, and who knows, you might get good at it suddenly!’ Subsequently I’ve been a guest on shows like Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Have I Got News For You and It’s Only TV But I Like It and I was a crap each time (although I think my second appearance on Buzzcocks was nearly OK). The problem is that I still feel so outside the whole world of big studios and audiences and crews that I invariably revert to empty headed grinning tool mode.
When I was very kindly asked to host an episode of the current series of Comedy Shuffle for BBC3 I immediately asked if I could do it as Ken Korda. I was sort of expecting them to say they wanted me to do it as myself in which case I would have passed but they said they were fine with Ken so I bit the bullet. In fact I was looking forward to it because they had lots of people I like very much on the show (Kristen Schaal, Tony Law, Brian Gittins and a brief appearance from Devvo) and I thought, surely I’ll do a good job this time!? Well I didn’t. It started off OK but the whole thing was being shot as live (ie. with very few stops and re-takes) and I hadn’t given myself enough term to really get to grips with the bits I’d written so after a couple of OK links I got flustered and it all got away from me! Fucking hell, I should just change the title of this blog to ‘Igotflusteredanditgotawayfromme.co.uk’. I don’t think it was disastrous but it wasn’t the triumph I’d hoped it might be.
The audience in the studio were great though and if you came along that night, thanks, it made a real difference having you there and I know the other acts appreciated it too, especially as there was a lot of quite odd stuff that night that could easily have fallen totally flat with a less enthusiastic crowd. Of course TV often has the effect of flattening anything slightly odd so the final show may yet fail to amuse but I hope not. If nothing else you may like some of the pre-recorded stuff, especially a very nice observational routine about girlfriends putting cutlery back in the wrong place by yet another 6 Music affiliate, Jon Richardson. His material is very much straight ahead stand up but it’s well observed and well delivered. I’m sure he’s going to continue to prosper. Don’t judge Ken too harshly though, it wasn’t his fault!
KEN ON FLIGHTPLAN
Speaking of Ken I know I’ve posted a link to this clip before but it’s taken on new relevance in the light of the subject for Song Wars on our BBC 6 Music show this weekend. As we speak Joe and I are composing exit music theme songs (you know, like Men In Black, Wild Wild West etc.) for films that don’t have them and for a lazy second I toyed with the idea of just bringing in my guitar and performing this one again, but I thought better of it. This one’s not bad though! Not very bad at least.
THANKS FOR SELLING OUT BUG 04!
Thanks to all of you who came along for the fourth BUG at the BFI Southbank/NFT last week. I think it was my favourite so far, mainly due to the fact that the auditorium was completely sold out and everyone seemed happy to be there, which always makes life easier from a hosting point of view! I even managed to crowbar a couple of my own videos in there in the form of the Radiohead Jigsaw video (which the band and XL, their new label, have decided to use as the official promo for the single!) and a sneak peak of an item from MeeBOX (both made with help from Garth Jennings who was also there that night). It was a thrill seeing both vids on the big screen with decent sound and they seemed to go down well on the whole.
Anyway I hope you enjoyed the evening as much as I did, and if you still haven’t been then join us for BUG 05 in January when we’ll all need some cheering up. I’ll let you know details nearer the time.
October 12, 2007
LADIES & GENTLEMEN & A&J COKE PODCAST VIDEO!
LADIES & GENTLEMEN, TONIGHT AT 10:30pm ON CHANNEL 4!
Go on watch it. I’ve no idea how Channel 4 decide which of these Comedy Showcase programmes will get a series but if you watch it and dig it and then talk to people about it and the digging of it then maybe someone at Channel 4 will overhear and be impressed. I think that’s kind of how TV works isn’t it? Surely it can’t just be the frigging ratings!
The show itself is a kind of cross between Friends and Father Ted set in Victorian times and it’s quite silly and amusing. My Mum loves it and thinks it should be a series. My Dad says he can’t imagine how anything could be less funny, but then again he’s hated pretty much every single thing I’ve ever been in on TV so that’s not a total surprise. I like it and I would love to do more so set your brainium to ‘extremely positive’ and watch the heck out of it for the team!
LAST ADAM & JOE COKE PODCAST NEWS!
After a highly enjoyable 12 month stint doing these, the 13th and final Coke podcast is now available for free download from i-tunes or the Coke website. It’s not the best but we recorded it one morning immediately after doing the breakfast show on 6 Music a while back and I was totally exhausted having been up late with vomiting children the night before, which is why I more or less just mumble in agreement between whatever Joe says then confuse myself about whether or not to continue joking about the end of the world.
We could have continued doing these podcasts for a while but we kind of want to get back to doing another one that’s more just me and Joe talking about whatever we like without the music, albeit great music(!) As I’ve said before we should have some news about when that might happen in the next week or so (honestly!) so hang in there. As far as the Coke podcasts go, I’m going to try to put together a bumper ‘best of’ without music before Christmas so I’ll let you know when that’s done. Listening back to a few of them the other night, there’s actually some fairly funny moments in there, but they could use filleting!
Thanks to Coke for having us though. We didn’t feel abused or exploited once, which was nice! Also our producer Ben Bond was amazing and very skilfully wove shows out of even the most aimless rambling some months. I really hope we get to work with him again.
A while back I said I might post some footage of us recording one of these shows so here you go. It’s an unedited chunk of us burbling in a studio off Covent Garden for podcast 11 in July of this year. Because it’s unedited you’ll notice we repeat the odd sentence a few times, not because we can’t speak, just because we’re retaking it! Also we can’t really speak. Oh, and in case you think it’s in black and white to add gravitas, I accidentally left the camera on the night vision setting so it was all sickly grey green and I thought black and white would be preferable. It’s not a rollercoaster ride of hilarity but I thought a couple of people might find it interesting. The end makes me laugh though. ‘What, you find decapitated women funny?’ said a friend who heard it. What do you say to that?