The Spirit of the Stairwell

I was introduced to Damien Walters last night.

By which I mean I watched the video below.

I think he was bitten by a radioactive gymnast.

Film Club #1 – 6th February 2010

“You Can’t Kiss Away A Murder!”

Join me for the inaugural Film Club this February and a whole day’s worth of shadowy figures, femme fatales, plot twists, heavy drinking and hard knocks. Also there will be films to watch. Ahahaha – see what I did there? I pretended that the words that described the films were actually the things we were going to do on the day. It’s an old comedic device but, I think we can all agree, a hilarious one. Especially now I’ve explained it fully to you.

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood’s classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.

Don’t worry, I have suddenly got really intelligent or anything, I just copied it from Wikipedia. Film noir will be the theme of our first club day and I’ve chosen 4 of the best films of the genre to show you and also a silly Steve Martin pastiche to round off the day. You’re welcome to come for as much or as little of the day as you want.

Anyway, here’s how it should all pan out:

Schedule

10.00am – We all start drinking whiskey early in the morning.

10.30am - Asphalt Jungle Kick off with John Huston’s original heist movie, made the same year he introduced America to film noir with The Maltese Falcon. We wouldn’t have Reservoir Dogs without it.

12.30pm - Gilda Why did Tim Robbin’s character want a poster of Rita Hayworth on his cell wall during the Shawshank Redemption? This film is why (also the tunnel thing).

2.15pm – Stakeout Food. Lunch will be a selection of things you could consume while on a stakeout. Binoculars will be provided to spy on the neighbours.

2.30pm - Touch of Evil Orson Welles’ masterpiece and one of the best film noir ever made. The version we’ll be showing is the 1998 recut that attempted to reassemble Welles’ original vision from a 58 page memo the director wrote after viewing the studio’s original theatrical release. It’s the best version basically.

5.30pm – A selection of detective-themed games – cluedo and scotland yard among them. Also more shots of whiskey and maybe a fist fight.

7.00pm – DOUBLE BILL: Double Indemnity/ Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid – Played back to back, the most twisted, dark, OTT classic the genre has ever produced and a silly Steve Martin comedy that makes fun of it. Dress code is film noir, let’s all dress up as femme fatales and private dicks.

And it should all be over by 10.15pm.

Click here to be taken to the facebook event to register your interest in attending and find out location details.

“She liked me. I could feel that. The way you feel when the cards are falling right for you, with a nice little pile of blue and yellow chips in the middle of the table. Only what I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t playing her. She was playing me, with a deck of marked cards and the stakes weren’t any blue and yellow chips. They were dynamite.”

I colleague of mine had his leaving party today. He’s an amazing guy – clever and inappropriate and very, very funny. I made this little video as a tribute to his rebellious nature. It’s silly and slightly puerile and makes insulting phrases out of anagrams of people’s names.

You probably need to work where I work to get the most out of it but nevertheless – my gift to you. Good luck, Nigel.

Today, I’d like to bring everyone’s attention to the numerous advantages of the humble podcast.

These are as follows:

1. They’re free.
2. They feature a wide range of the world’s best comedians, thinkers and assorted artistic types.
3. They’re free.

I can’t for the life of me work out why they’re not more popular. There are podcasts out there that dance all over the faces of the vast majority of mainstream comedy shows. Being independently produced they are also blissfully unconcerned with the sort of stuff that habitually leads to creative stagnation – money, demographics, marketing, pandering to the lowest common denominator … right through to coherence and sanity. Of course it’s a continuum like any other sort of broadcast media but generally speaking you can find more genuinely original, challenging content on a podcast than can be found anywhere in the TV schedules .

Want some recommendations? Thought you’d never ask. These can all be found on iTunes as I guess it’s the most well know podcatcher but if you get the podcasting-bug don’t be afraid to check out some of the independent sites.

Okay so …

Daniel Kitson – This guy is awesome. He’s one of those stand-ups that never quite got the national acclaim of middle of the road comedians like Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay but he’s incredibly sharp and really funny. He reminds me of Jim.

Only funny, like I said.

Carpool – The guy who played Kryten, Robert Llewellyn, in Red Dwarf gives celebrities lifts in his car and then has a chat with them on the way. Surreal but brilliant.

Mark Kermode – Best film critic ever.

Adam & Joe – This is probably the most consistently funny podcast I’ve ever listened to and regularly makes me laugh out loud. They are both hugely talented. Song Wars – where they challenge each other to make up songs around different themes each week is particularly awesome.

As It Occurs To Me – Richard Herring wrote and recorded these, one a week, for 10 weeks and then released them unedited. He used no pre-written material, finding things during the week to generate content. By the end it’s more like a fever dream than a comedy show. But the person having the dream is very funny so it’s also incredibly compulsive to listen to.

Penny Arcade: Dungeons & Dragons Podcast – This is a real oddity. The guys who run Penny Arcade  sit down to play a new version of Dungeons & Dragons. One of them has never played a role playing game before. They then proceed to rip the piss out of their earnest Dungeon master for the next few hours. “I am Jim Darkmagic. Of the New Hampshire Darkmagics.” It’s really, really funny.

The Odd Cast – “Listening to this podcast is like being down the pub with your best friends – the conversations are not always coherent but you can be sure of some witty banter with some film, tv, life, love and comedy put-downs all thrown in.” Not my words, the words of an anonymous iTunes reviewer (which might possibly have been us).

Also – Leisure Wear – like pyjamas but warmer. I love my new trousers. I’m telling you, Leisure Wear is the way forwards.

Quick one today, just ruminating how fast 15 years can fly by.

Check out the following pictures that illustrate these things about life, family and growing up:
1. Tiny little munchkin children can suddenly explode into lanky adulthood when you’re not looking.
2. My dress sense has got steadily better (I no longer wear t-shirts of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows).
3. Caroline’s dress sense had a major blip in it around the turn of the millennium (she is also pregnant in that last picture).
4. I have never smiled with my mouth open.
5. We don’t have a set way we cross our arms.
6. I’m definitely over the hill looks-wise.
7. My cousin Kathryn has a trademark smile.
8. Check out my little cousin, Jonathan, rocking out in those stripy circus shorts. That takes guts, man.

1994

2000

2009

Here’s to 2015 where Jono’s a foot taller than me, Caroline has 5 kids hanging off her, Kathryn’s covered in tattoos and I’ve gone back to wearing Phantom of the Opera promotional stuff.

Let me put this bluntly. There’s no way to sugar coat it, I’m a geek. A card carrying, statistic spouting, pedant spluttering member of the cultural elite. In fact I’m not just one kind of geek, I’m legion. I’m a computer geek and a theatre geek and a movie buff geek and a comics geek but more than anything else, oh so very much more, I’m a Doctor Who geek.

Yes, from 1989 onwards I’ve been in the thrall of the timelord and I can’t think of a programme that’s had a more positive effect on my life. While other young boys had heroes who kicked balls into far off nets or slaughtered hundreds of enemy soldiers with a belt-fed machine gun, my hero defeated evil with little more than a bag of jelly babies and an off the wall sense of humour. No behind the sofa for me, I had my face pressed up against the screen.

This may sound silly but I can actually remember making the decision to be more like the Doctor, to clown around and let people underestimate me, to attack any new situation with a mixture of childish enthusiasm and deep thought. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that the man I am today owes a lot to the values instilled in me then. I still abhor violence, I still love traveling and meeting people, I even sometimes still walk with my hands clasped behind my back (although admittedly this did look very odd when I was 9 years old, I kept overbalancing and falling on my head).

I mention this because myself and a couple of equally eccentric pals will shortly be unleashing a new Dr Who podcast on the world, hosted from this very website. We’ve called it ‘The Ood Cast‘ – see what we did there? The first series of six episodes will consist of an introductory show followed by a programme on each of the five 2009 specials, up to and including the end of David Tennant’s 10th Doctor.

So … exciting for everyone who likes either a) Dr Who, b) my podcasts or c) both.

Extremely dull for everyone else. But then I guess we can’t all like the same things …

‘I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations – terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty. We all have a world of our own terrors to face.’ – The Doctor

PS – Check out the Ood Cast Blog while you’re waiting for the audio adventures to begin.

I spend a good proportion of my life in the cinema. I’m no maths whizz or anything but let me see if I can work out the exact percentage for you … right, 24 hours in a day, sleep for 5 of them, work for 7 of them …

I spend about 50% of my life in the cinema.

It is, in a very real sense, my home from home. When the lights go down and the screen flickers into life I feel this overwhelming sense of calm and well being, as if everything’s alright with the world. Financial concerns, global warming, tooth ache, the Middle East question – they all slip into the background, receding like the tide to lap unobtrusively at the edges of my consciousness.

(Except if it’s a Matthew Lillard movie, then I feel nauseous like any sane person would, although I still sit there which gives you a clue just how deep my compulsions run)

I worked in a cinema for a while and ended up sleeping there a fair bit too. Once I became a manager I used to get the projectionists to chain two or three new releases together over the course of a night. Then I’d run from screen to screen watching them one after the other, finally falling into the little cot I’d made under my desk to grab a few hours sleep before I had to open the whole place up again for the early morning Mums & Toddlers crowd.

Good times.

Anyway, my favourite cinema is on Haymarket and is currently owned by Cineworld which is amazing as it means I can use my Unlimited card to see films there for free. (The Unlimited scheme is the only thing that lies between me and bankruptcy, I think it’s the best value for money of any endeavour in the modern world. It’s like something from a warmer friendlier time, like something out of the 50s, like I was sold it by a man in a trilby and a pastel three piece suit.)

It used to be called the the Carlton Theatre  and it opened in 1927 when it was used both as a live theatre and cinema. I guess that’s why I love it so much. It used to seat about 1,150 people, it was MASSIVE, but it’s now been split into three screens, with Screen 1 (the main cinema) being a conversion of the old upper balcony and Screens 2 and 3 built where the stalls used to be. In the 50s it was taken over by 20th Century-Fox and became the West End showcase cinema for their productions. How cool is that? It’s like our very own piece of the old Hollywood studio system right in the middle of London.

The lobby and the main screen still have all this Italian renaissance plasterwork which have been daubed over in awesomely tasteless shades of pink and purple. It’s just  perfect. This hulking great opulent wedding cake of a building all painted up like it was still a pretty young thing, refusing to admit its glory days are behind it and grow old gracefully. It beats every purpose built, brushed steel, neon lit popcorn paradise into a cocked hat without even trying. It’s a one-of-a-kind, flying unbowed in the faces of the multiplexes that want you to have the same beige, homogenous movie going experience whether you’re in Fulham or Tel Aviv.

Brief Encounter had it’s premiere there. Hitchcock has squeezed his rotund buttocks into its faded upholstery. The buttocks of a genius. You can’t compete with that kind of history.

Plus, the last time I was there (watching the Coen’s latest A Serious Man – brilliant) I saw a mouse scurry across the aisle. A mouse. Amazing. It was probably some kind of super-talented mouse that always dreamt of being a film director like Truffaut or Fellini and subsequently escaped his life of rodenty-drugery  to make his home at the Carlton and really learn his craft. He’s probably made friends with a simple yet kind-heatred kid who has just started as assistant projectionist and together they plan to make a film that speaks to all of us about acceptance and how awesome mice are.

You know, like Ratatouille.

Except with films rather than food.

That would be pretty sweet.

Nothing much happened today.

Oh, except this …

See that? That’s the first picture ever of my new nephew or niece.

The very first.

And I know this life is packed with everyday miracles and one more baby isn’t going to be front page news or anything.

But wow.

How often do you see a picture of a stranger and know instantly that person is going to be pivotal to your life from that moment on?

Not very often.

The hospital has dubbed him or her “Baby Flint” but they’re also half Mead, they could have my Nanna’s smile or my Poppas’ sense of humour or my Dad’s singing voice. Baby Flint is this amazing genetic lottery and we have no idea what traits, talents or features will win out.

A whole new person growing, changing, consolidating by the second. Making its way from probabilities to certainties.

Congratulations, Caroline and Matt, you are both phenomenal people and will make parents of the very highest order.

Things won’t ever be the same now.

I can’t wait.

The golden age of British television is well and truly over. Anything with even the tiniest, weakest spark of creativity and originality has long since been extinguished – drowned in the murky swamp water of what passes for modern television listings. It’s a simple mathematical formula, so straight forward that even the current specimens of pond life masquerading as TV executives can understand it without getting their crayons out to write it down.

Reality television and lifestyle shows cost next to nothing to make and pull in millions in ratings. All you need to do is commission another vacuous mess starring either a washed up celebrity or ordinary members of the public with ‘special’ talents (ie. being more irritating than scabies) and then sit back and watch the cash roll in. Why hire actors with screen presence and charisma? Why avail yourself of directors with vision or writers with a story to tell? You’re not going to make any more money off of it so why bother?

It’s not a problem unique to the UK, American television (historically laughably weak compared to its British counterpart) also suffers from the same blight. The difference is they have the money to support both the tat and the sublime ideas that come along every once in a while and make the whole thing worthwhile. And that’s why they’re currently wiping the floor with us when it comes to quality drama. If you haven’t seen these series then I suggest you stop reading the blog right now and go out and buy some box sets. They are, in order of jaw-dropping-disbelief-if-you-haven’t-seeniness, the following:

The West Wing, Firefly, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Dollhouse (actually anything by Joss Whedon – Buffy, Dr Horrible, even Angel in later series), The Sopranos, Arrested Development … I could go on but this has already turned into a rant and I haven’t even got to the point yet.

*Deep cleansing breath*

The fact is that even with the current British system, good shows do slip through occasionally, normally sitcoms like Outnumbered or Pulling – modest shows that hide their radical hearts behind genre tropes – wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are also some shows with massive ambition and creativity that are successful despite it all and against the odds – but that’s just basically Dr Who (and I’ll devote a whole series of podcast to that soon).

Finally there are aberrations, new shows from channels that are ironically also the main culprits when it comes to pumping excrement into the schedules – the BBC3s and ITV2s of this world, full to the brim with Top 100 shows and programmes about other programmes hosted by foetuses in designer clothing. The worst of these is E4, which is like T4 but all the time and just as unwatchable.

However every now and then E4 will have a go at original programming and surprise itself. Skins is awesome. The Inbetweeners is laugh out loud funny.

And now there’s Misfits, a show which you can guarantee started with an executive walking into his editors office and saying something like “Alright, hear me out, it’s X-Men for the Skins generation.”

And that’s exactly what it is but despite all that it’s pretty damn good. The characters are interesting, it’s actually fairly funny and the concept is great – young offenders get hit by lightning and get superpowers themed around their deepest desires. A disgraced athlete with the ability to turn back time, an awkward recluse who can turn invisible – that sort of thing. The powers are well handled, the actors range from fine to quietly impressive and the whole concept is milked for every last joke, twist and scare it can provide. I’d take a hundred episodes of it over anything Big Brother, X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing have ever produced.

It’s hugely derivative of course (Marvel’s Runaways, the aforementioned Skins, Buffy, it even nicks some stylistic and thematic tricks from quality BBC fare like Life on Mars and Being Human) and it’s not always as funny or as clever as it thinks it is but what it does have is a rough, brash confidence that allows the viewer to overlook these failings and concentrate on what it does well. Which is deliver twisted, memorable stories a cut above most things currently on British TV.

Consider this the first Stairwell recommendation of the new year.

Regular readers may remember that I cycled, along with 27 other riders, to the climate change talks in Copenhagen during December. It took us three days and one hundred and forty miles. During that time we experienced just about every emotion it was possible to feel. For us the road to Copenhagen was littered with joy, frustration, belief, doubt and ultimately sorrow.

For ourselves we mourn the death of Hereward Cooke, one of our number who died standing up for what he believed in. He passed away peacefully in his sleep after a full day’s lobbying and campaigning, his journey completed.

He was a great man. He wore hiking boots to cycle in. He was an inspiration.

But we must also mourn for us all as the Copenhagen talks produced nothing that even approached a solution to the global threat posed by climate change. It’s because of people like Hereward that we have to keep on fighting.

For now I present a transcript of my Twitter activity during the four days preceeding our arrival in Copenhagen. It’s very silly and idiosyncratic but I hope it gives a flavour of the adventure we all shared together.

It’s not something I’ll ever forget.

The Tweets

Day One: Wednesday 9th December 2009

Day Two: Thursday 10th December 2009

Day Three: Friday 11th December 2009

Day Four: Saturday 12th December 2009

Addendum

You can also check out the video of our journey that appeared on the Guardian website (including Jim introing the RDM) – Guardian Video

and finally …

“RT @juliandobson “The shame and failure of Copenhagen is not the end of the story. If our leaders can’t lead, the rest of us must.” #COP15″