Sunday 10 February 2008

#45

I saw the latest Lynx advert on telly yesterday. For a light-hearted humourus advert it was suprisingly disturbing. It was disturbing on some deep level. Really odd. It was the inverse of that Simpsons' episode where Homer imagines himself in a chocolate world and goes round eating chuncks out of buildings and even biting chunks out of unsuspecting, still breathing and animate, wild life. Even that was ever so slightly disturbing as well as funny, perhaps because on some level it was a little glimpse of the reality of us eating animals without the slaughterhouse and the supermarket shelf to distance us from what we're actually doing. Well in this advert it is the main character that is chocholate, and this time there is some kind of strange literalization of being devoured... in the carnal sense... as one woman takes a bite out of his arse cheek as he travels, unsuspecting, on the tube, and two others women devour his ears in a goulish choco-threesome in the cinema. He even gets his arm ripped-off and stolen by a choc-thursty woman in a passing car. One can't help thinking he's a bit of a slapper and asking for it though, as he starts-off his day by ripping his own nose off his face to crush-up and sprinkle on some girls ice-creams.

Thursday 7 February 2008

#44

How was your Christmas then? Good I hope. I was going to do a pre Christmas blog entry, but I couldn't manage to write it without it sounding sanctimonious, where as all I was trying to do was to save people from their own Christmas madness by saying that perhaps we should just spend less time and money on Christmas preparations and gifts..... perhaps then we might enjoy actual Christmas a bit more when it arrives: not being warn-out and skint. If we all spent half as much and gave half of what we had saved to charity we'd all be better-off. Well, anyway, then it started to sound preachy too, because even though I'm an atheist (admittedly with occasional attacks of agnosticism) I was trying to say we ought not to loose sight of Christ because even if you don't accept his supernatural nature, as I don't, he was at least, a darn nice bloke who, to say the least, meant well... he said a fair few good things and spread a fair bit of love and good will about and did it in a largely level-headed tolerant way... and, he sacrificed himself for mankind, making him symbolic of all those people who have sacrificed themselves for mankind: like, for example, the people who went-into the melting down Chernoble reactor to contain it knowing full well it would be the death of them, or people during World War II who went on missions knowing full well there was no chance of returning but they did it to stop a powerful evil regime spreading across the globe, and I'm sure there are contemporary examples. And then and I was saying we should try and remember the Christmas message too a bit more... but then I realised I had forgotten what it actually was...it's in my head in an abstract way but I just would not beable to recite it in words...I knew it when I was at school but the relentless accelerating march of the heartless commercial Christmas has slowly drowned it out in my mind, and I guess it must be the same for other folk who don't go to church: that's one problem about being and atheist -- while you're unlikely to be the immoral being that some religious people would fear you to be, you do miss-out on some regular formal moral tuning.... even watching 'A Christmas Carol' on the telly on Christmas Eve is probably a minority occupation these days. Anyway, as it turned-out I never managed to finish the blog entry anyway because all my time got absorbed by the very over-commercial exhaustive pre Christmas preparations that I was trying to wake people up to. I think just think Christmas should be more human for people like me and more spiritual for religious folk...which I personally think, amounts to the same thing.

Sunday 3 February 2008

#43



'Thank God You're Here' is a brave effort by ITV, for a change. If you've not seen it yet, it is a Saturday night improvisation show on ITV where a contestant goes through a door into a staged scene where they will have to totally ad-lib there way through, without any prior knowledge of anything about the scene like where it is set or what it's about, or what the other characters are going to ask them or what events await them. Sometimes it falls flat... but that's what you've got to expect sometimes on an improvisation show, especially the way they have done it: on 'Who's Line is it Anyway?' (the sadly long extinct C4 improv. show) they were probably able to sharpen things-up far more with editing after the event because they had small games (and maybe they even cut-out a couple of games per show that didn't work very well), but with 'Thank God You're Here' each actor, presenter, or whoever is the contestant, have quite a long scene to endure that can't be tweaked so much in the cutting room. And you can tell it is genuine improv: the occasional look of confusion or apprehension confirms it. They have some surprising contestants too... I was a bit sceptical when they wheeled-on Fern Briton one week, I was disappointed even, although I quite like her as a presenter -- I just thought she would be a bit rubbish doing improvisation...but she was ace! And indeed she won the show. I think the best scene though was in another episode when Phil Nicol was thrown in at the deep end as a cow boy and his improvisation was excellent and so unexpected, he turned his character into a gay gold prospector and he thought of such excellent names for all the characters right on the spot.



It's ashame Channel 4 don't do 'Who's line is it anyway?' any more.