Northern Lights

Just been on a brief holiday in Bonny Scotland. I don’t like to mention these things in advance because burglars might be reading.

Went up to Glasgow on the 19th. Pottered around the Necropolis, as seen in almost every episode of Sea Of Souls. Lots of interesting examples of tomb one-up-man-ship.

The next day we visited the Gallery of Modern Art, a small and not particularly inspiring collection which made such an impression on me I can’t remember a thing about it six days later. Then onto the wee underground railway they have there to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Lots to see, including stuffed animals, a mass of floating heads, suits of armour, and a lovely collection of Dutch paintings. I wasn’t totally won over by the Glasgow Boys paintings – my main impression was that you came away with a strong sense that the cheapest colours of paint were dark green and brown, so Scottish painters tended to concentrate on painting things that were dark green and brown i.e. bleak scenes of poor people eating mud under overcast skies.

Then across the park to the Hunterian Collection, which includes such marvels as Isaac Newton’s Death Mask. Then back onto the dinky train (actually constructed by Hornby) to pootle around the riverside development before meeting friends in town and heading to a rather lovely pub called Oran Mor, built in a disused church. Made me think of all those other empty, neglected churches around the country that could be converted into pubs.

Next day, we tootled off to Stirling, to look at the marvellous castle they have there. It was something to do with the Battle Of Bannockburn which, I’m afraid, I’ve only heard of because it’s mentioned in the ‘University Challenge’ episode of ‘The Young Ones’. We all have to get our knowledge from somewhere. Anyway, did a tour around the various halls, and saw a very good talk about Margaret Tudor. Oh, I am so middle-aged, with my visits to old castles and being interested in history (insofar as it was mentioned in episodes of 80’s sitcoms).

Next day, off to Edinburgh for the festival. The Royal Mile was a vision of hell. After dropping off bits, our first show was Kevin Eldon Is Titting About at The Stand. To digress briefly, last time I was at the festival I’d seen a show there and had a really miserable hour. The reason being, the comedian was someone I’d seen at university ten years previously who’d been very good – and now, here he was, ten years later, doing exactly the same material. Mentioning no names but it was Boothby Graffoe.

So with these shows there’s always the sense that they can go either way. You can see people you’ve never heard of being totally brilliant and people off the television die on their arses.

Or, in the case of Kevin Eldon, you can see people off the television being totally brilliant. His show was lots of bits of things stuck together – poetry, characters, songs, stand-up – but performed very, very accurately, and extremely tightly-written. Five stars out of five.

Next we saw Stewart Lee's Vegetable Stew. Stewart Lee’s one of those comedians who can go either way, sometimes he’s very good, and sometimes he’s one of those comedians who like to point out that Bible stories/English idioms/pop music lyrics don’t bear rigorous logical scrutiny at great length. And who likes lots of repetition. However, I thought this show was extremely good. I can’t remember any specifics but I recall quite a lot of it seemed to be about crisps. Anyway, that’s good, means I’ll laugh at all the jokes again when they turn up in his TV show. Five stars out of five.

The following day would up the comedy ante, if that makes any sense to you, as we would see five shows in one day. Five. Five shows out of five!

First we popped into a free show, because it was raining, and it was free, a revue-type-thing by three students (I assume) in a basement called Making Faces. For a free show, it was a basement bargain, and surprisingly good. I’m not sure the three students’ different styles really meshed together at all – one deadpan, one sweet, one excitable – but in maybe five years or so, after life has knocked them around a bit, they’ll write better material – basically, it came across as a show written in a week, when really you want each show to be the result of months of writing. They came across well, though, and had a great sense of fun. Five stars out of five.

Next it was time for education, and It Is Rocket Science at the Gilded Balloon, with Helen Keen. An hour-long potted history of rockets, from the first guys with beards writing down equations in a Russian university to the V2 rockets and the Apollo missions. All delivered with enthusiasm and a little, but not too much, home-spun whimsy. Have to admit, I fancied Helen Keen a great deal, but I’m married so ignore I said that. She could be the straight man’s Brian Cox. I enjoyed it a lot – and it was good for a show to concentrate on a topic, rather than just being about ‘space’ in general – so I award it five stars out of five.

After that down the hill to the Pleasance Courtyard. Someone once told me – probably Davy – that if you spend five minutes in the Pleasance Courtyard you will see everyone you have ever known walk past. Or is that a cafe in Paris? I forget. Anyway, within minutes of arriving I was getting flashbacks of people I’d worked with in the past, or been in BBC comedy meetings with. It’s a strange thing, and probably why I don’t like going there.

But we were there, to see Adam Riches Rides!. It was billed as character sketch comedy, but to be honest it was more like an hour of free-wheeling madness – it begins with Adam coming on as a centaur Pierce Brosnan and basically gets stranger from there. Lots of audience participation – oh dear god no – but thankfully someone else was victim-ed who not only took it in fun but also added to the show (a show which is reliant on the audience participants being willing and good-natured). I get the impression that a lot of sketch comedy nowadays involves comedians showing off how many accents they can do and how they can do an impersonation of their grandparents; Riches’ approach is to treat sketch comedy as a succession of fairground rides, or comic strip interludes, where it’s all about the props and the slapstick (which is great fun live, but unlikely to transfer well to TV). If I had to quibble, I’d say the PA system was annoyingly incoherent, and the routines could have had more variety beyond talking animals and cowboys, but I was laughing my face off throughout so I give it five stars out of five.

Then down the hill and to the left a bit to the Underbelly to see my mate Toby’s show Now I Know My BBC. I’d already seen a preview, but after a month the show is much tighter and more focussed, and moving and nostalgic and all those things. You come away from it remembering why the BBC is so lovely, and why having something that brings people together (unlike newspapers trying to make people fear each other) is something for us all to be proud of. There’s also a rather good Noggin the Nog joke. Five stars’ out of five.

And finally back to the Pleasance for Tim Vine’s The Joke-Amotive. One hour of puns, like watching your friend’s dad showing off at a children’s birthday party. I love Tim Vine; like Tommy Cooper, he makes a virtue out of the groanworthiness of some of his material, warning the audience that there’s more to come, letting them know when they’ve reached the half-way point and so on. But the relentless barrage of wordplay has a cumulative effect; the end result is that you feel quite punchline-drunk. Five stars out of five.

So there you go. If anyone wants to quote these reviews, my name is Tim Eout, make sure you get the spacing right.

And then we came home again.

We Are Golden

What’s this, another plug? So soon after the last one? Will this blog ever escape the swirling vortex of Jonny’s ego? No.

Latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, the one with Sylvester McCoy on the front, is something of a Jonny Morris special. Not only does it include news of my second Jago & Litefoot: The Theatre Of Dreams and not only does include a very lovely review of Cobwebs (‘Pick of the month!’) but I have taken over a fair proportion of the rest of the magazine with my comic strip and a feature on the brilliant Doctor Who story, ‘The Shakespeare Code’.

The feature basically points out all the clever historical and literary references in the episode, including a dozen or so subtle ones that to my knowledge no-one has pointed out before. It also includes at least one glaring inaccuracy, so Shakespeare scholars will be able to read it with a warm sense of intellectual superiority. (Cross-dressing only leading to sexual attraction between women in Shakespeare and never between men? What about The Merry Wives Of Windsor, you fool!)

Anyway, it’s intended as a tribute to the marvellousness of the episode, so hopefully any glaring errors will be forgiven in the general spirit of positivity.

The comic strip is called ‘The Golden Ones’ part one of a four-part story (my first true epic!). At the time of writing, I’ve written the first three parts – schedules and availability of artists meaning I’ve written the story after it, and half the story after that, before finishing this one. It’s also possibly my very first comic strip to not feature a flashback sequence three-quarters of the way through. Must stop doing that.

The artwork is by Martin Geraghty, who has done a superb job, particularly on the last couple of pages which include some absolutely terrifying images. I just write down what I’d like the pictures to show, I can take no credit for the end results. In fact, I think I may just pause to admire it again...

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Not wanting to spoil any surprises, I won’t go into too much detail, except to say the ‘influences’ for the story are clearly ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ by David Bowie (hence the title), ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’, a recent single by Mika, ‘The Ring’, and ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre. I can tell you what the story is not; it was originally pitched as a story set in a comprehensive school in Leicester, a sort of sci-fi parody of the government’s current witless policy to allow private organisations to take over or set up state schools. That was the starting point; the story then went on a journey as it became clear that any Doctor Who story set in a comprehensive school is going feel like it’s re-treading ‘School Reunion’ and it was felt that, lovely as a Doctor Who story set in Leicester would be, that’s the sort of thing they do on telly, while in the comic strip we can afford to go to more exotic and visually-interesting locations. And it’s always good for stories to change and grow – writing down the first thing you think of tends to lead to quite predictable stuff, but throwing some other ideas into the mix, and writing down the fourth thing you think of results in something, hopefully, more surprising and imaginative.

The magazine also includes news, reviews, a charming interview with Sylvester McCoy, a feature about a range of Tom Baker audios that I have nothing to do with (envy!), a feature on the Doctor Who prom, and an extremely mind-boggling article about how time travel works in the Doctor Who universe (pity the poor sod who wrote that, I’d go out of my mind).

Available from all good newsagents and supermarkets from Monday, a bargain at £4.20

A Walk In The Park

Over the weekend, visited Bletchley Park with Mrs Wife and various chums. Bletchley Park – or The World Famous Top-Secret Bletchley Park, as the guide leaflet paradoxically described it – is where Alan Turing and various other Boffins spent the second world war cracking Jerry codes, famously – and top secretly – the Enigma cipher, starring Kate Winslet, which was solved using the Bombe, and less famously – but even more secretly – the Lorensz machine cipher, solved using Colossus, the world’s first computer.

You get to see all this stuff, apart from Kate Winslet. There’s a museum full of Enigma machines, which are like small portable typewriters but with a lit-up letter display instead of somewhere to stick the paper, and then you can visit the mansion, where the code-crackers worked at the start of the war before their numbers grew so large they needed dozens of huts to be built. You can also visit the actual hut where Alan Turing worked, which now houses a display on War Pigeons awarded the Dickin Medal.

We also did a tour of the park, which was interesting, being guided into the various huts – some of which have been restored, some of which have been destroyed, but a few of which are in a pristine state of dilapidation, which is kind of what you want to see, the original buildings, no matter how tatty they may be now. The Bombe was housed in a cramped, dark, hot, stuffy room, and visiting it you get a sense how nightmarish it must have been to have been stuck in there for 8 hour-shifts. When asked about Turing’s suicide, our tour guide described him as being ‘naive’ for assenting to mood-altering hormone treatments for his sexuality; probably not the best word to have chosen.

I’d recommend a visit, though with a couple of provisos. As it stands, Bletchley Park is already more or less at capacity, visitor-wise – the huts are small and cramped, and our tour party was too large for comfort – so goodness knows what the place will be like if they increase the number of visitors. It’s kind of at that tipping point between being the actual place, in its original condition, and being a tourist attraction with all the slickness and artificiality that entails.

And secondly, although much of the museum is lovely, I’m rather at a loss as to why it includes things like model boat and railway collections – they give the impression that the place is being run without a clear sense of purpose and is being used as a repository for the random contents of some well-meaning donors’ attics.

The National Museum of Computing was shut.

BTW I have switched off comments for this blog, because I have a rule about not arguing with people using pseudonyms on the internet, and because if anyone who actually knows me wants to comment they can do so when these blogs appear on my Facebook.