February 2012
3 posts
Dancing in the Street: Fame
This might not be the first dancing in the street scene, but it’s the first one that made an impression on me and made me really, really want to go to the kind of school where someone would pull up in a car outside and start playing some music, and we would all run out into the street and block traffic with our dancing. Alas, this never happened.
Watching it again now, I am mainly...
Dancing in the Street: Enchanted
Unless you have daughters of a certain age, chances are you haven’t seen Enchanted. I don’t have daughters of a certain age, but as there’s a part of me that remains forever twelve (same part that’s going to see The Muppets for the second time tomorrow) I have seen Enchanted, a few times, and this song is one of the highlights. Amy Adams plays a cartoon princess who is by...
Dancing in the Street: Ferris Bueller's Day Off
And so begins my tour of great dancing in the street movie moments. We’re kicking off with Ferris because some of you may have been unlucky enough to see the unspeakably awful Superbowl advert featuring an adult Ferris Bueller taking a day off work. A more cynical, dead-behind-the-eyes, triumph of cash over soul stunt you have never witnessed, and I implore you not to look it up, even out of...
January 2012
5 posts
The Muppets
The other day I tweeted saying that I’d been to see a preview of the new Muppet film and it had moved me to tears. Later I was talking to a friend who saw the tweet and assumed I was joking. In fact no, I wasn’t joking, and neither was the girl I went with who if anything cried more than I did, and nor were probably a fair bit of the rest of the audience, if only I’d thought to...
Letters of Note: Nothing good gets away →
Read it and weep (in a good way.)
(NB click the title to get through to the link)
The Iron Lady
My expectations of The Iron Lady were pretty low - I only went because friends were going, and for lovely Harry Lloyd (who was a delightful Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and did a memorable turn as a villain in one of my favourite Doctor Who two-parters, Family of Blood.) Usually I’m a Meryl Streep fan too, but I wasn’t sure I could take her Thatcher seriously having seen...
Happy New Year!
Here are some of the things I am doing to motivate myself this year. This is not a comedy list, by the way. It is for reals.
1. I read a book called 18 minutes. It didn’t take me so very much longer than 18 minutes to read. Also, it is the only self-help book (but business self-help, so that’s OK, I swear) which ends with a chapter telling you to ignore most of what it said, which...
December 2011
4 posts
The Devil Gets All The Best Tunes
Like musicals? Like me? Like me in musicals? Hey presto!
I am in this musical which is on at the Drill Hall, London from December 13th-16th. (If you want to be sure of getting tickets, the date to aim for is Thursday 15th.) So, for you Warhorses fans out there, is Robbie, and many other of our regular collaborators (not that we’re Vichy France or anything.) It is written not by me or...
Naked Warhorses
Robbie is bloody clever and has figured out how to upload Copenhagen and Marengo’s Gay Times piece onto our Warhorses blog. I got sent it too, but can’t even figure out how to rotate it so it faces the right way up. Anyway, Copenhagen and Marengo are guest columnists in this week’s Gay Times and we hope you enjoy.
In other Warhorses news, our book is close to fully funded, which...
November 2011
13 posts
Superb(ums)
kevinbolk:
As promised, here’s the Avengers parody (namely of this promo image of the movie) I’d been working on. Those are some strong male characters. Am I right, ladies?
Here’s the original promo shot for The Avengers:
Read More
The Killing 2
A weekend of retro pleasures: teaching at my old school, hanging out with my sister and her kids in the seaside town where we used to go for family holidays, shopping in charity shops, playing Simon Says, the yearly ritual of getting wound up at the Old Toupeed Man / Sexy Young Woman presentation combo of Children in Need, and watching The Killing - oh, those heady days of earlier in 2011.
Oh,...
Warhorses of Downloads (and books and trekking)
Hey gang! For all of you who can’t believe you missed Warhorses of Letters, or who want to listen to it again and again and again, you can now download the lot on iTunes.
Meanwhile I am busy writing jokes for the book. Robbie hasn’t approved them yet, but I think he’s going to like the one about the Mexican-American telecoms engineer. Or maybe he won’t. If you buy the book...
Strictlywatch 2011: Apology
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted a Strictlywatch for this week. This is because I have finally had enough. After fast-forwarding all of Bruce, all of Tess, and all of the training footage, getting irritated with the use of props, being baffled by the inconsistency of the judges’ comments, and being bored by a large proportion of the dances, I realised that I no longer care...
Scramble
So this is fun. My iPhone has scrambled my data. When I listen to Summer Camp, I get the cover of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. For Flight of the Conchords, Devandra Banhart. For Hello Saferide, Crowded House. And when I texted my cleaner to ask her to change the sheets, I got a very confused reply from the director of the musical I’m in. (Which musical? This one:...
Anonymous asked: who run the world?
Strictlywatch 2011: Culottes Rule
Well. This is embarrassing. How can I - self-professed Strictly expert - have failed to realise that the Culottes Rule would be enacted this week, in which any female dancing in culottes is automatically voted off the competition? Lulu, OF COURSE, was the one to go. Only getting her grandchildren into the training room could have saved her. Meanwhile I have to go back to Strictly School for...
Strictlywatch 2011
Welcome Strictlyites! It’s Guy Fawkes night, as we are reminded EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE OF THE SCRIPT, and this week the exciting development is that Len’s having the night off and we have a special guest judge, Jennifer Grey, of Dirty Dancing and ill-advised nose job fame. She won last year’s Dancing With The Stars in the US, which just goes to show how different the Americans are...
Inni? I'm Outi
At a certain point during the premiere of the new Sigur Ros concert movie, Inni, I started thinking about all the great work that I’ve slept through in my life: both parts of the two-part stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, Shoah (I KNOW - sorry about that), Capote, the other film about Capote, Kirsten Hirsch performing her memoirs, these are just a few from the last few years that I...
Apology: Apology: Explanation
Righty ho. Apparently there is a bug in the system which means that some people have £5 added to their purchase, but if you update the basket it should disappear again. Any more problems let me know. Sorry about all this - hopefully this is the last of it.
Apology: Apology
Apparently there is still an issue with wrong payments - please bear with me. I’m really sorry about this. If you’re having trouble, drop me a comment.
Apology
Sorry to anyone who tried to buy a signed hardback and was charged £20 instead of £15. The problem has now been rectified. The Warhorses book (and print, mug, embroidered horse blanket, pony trekking trip etc) can be found here.
(I’m assuming none of you actually paid £20 for a £15 signed hardback (unless you’re outside the UK and paid £5 for postage) but if you did please let me...
October 2011
13 posts
There’s another episode of Warhorses of Letters coming up tomorrow, so today is your last chance to catch Episode 1 on Listen Again. That’s all. I don’t have anything funny to say about it.
Strictlywatch 2011: Halloween "Special"
Well. If that wasn’t the nadir of Strictly Come Dancing, I hope that I am absent when that nadir comes. It seems unlikely, as I have apparently committed to reviewing every dance of every episode until the end of time, but maybe as a mark of gratitude for my loyalty, if the production team see a worse episode than this coming, they could slip me a note, and I could spend the hour and a half...
Words in the English language that are more...
1. Gusset.
Strictlywatch 2011: EPIC SPOILER
If you like your Strictly unspoiled and box fresh, stop reading this post and, whatever you do, do not click on this link.
Still with me? Did you click? Hang on, I’m going to attempt a page break so as to protect the unspoilered.
There. Did that work?
[UPDATE: apparently not. Sorry.]
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.
(At this point, you need to go back to that image and scroll down, if you...
How Warhorses of Letters saved my life
Tonight at 11pm it’s the first episode of Warhorses of Letters on Radio 4, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d write an uncharacteristically serious post about how I came to write it with Robbie.
At the end of 2009, I was severely ill, and ended up spending a month in hospital. I emerged in January 2010 skinny, frail and exhausted. The novel I’d been working on...
Strictlywatch 2011
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Sublime being Broadway Week. Ridiculous being - well. I actually got an email from a friend saying “Your blog had better reflect fully the true awesomeness that was this week’s show.” I had to read it twice to make sure it didn’t say “awfulness”.
If last week had the celebrities pulling it out of the bag, this week had them...
I don’t much like this new look but I am trying to find a tumblr layout that lets me add a blogroll so I can link to some sites I like. Please bear with me. Even better, tell me how to add a blogroll. In the meantime, you see where it says ‘Warhorses of Letters’? That’s our new Warhorses of Letters blog. It has a blogroll. Robbie set it up.
Update: Slightly nicer look, and...
Anonymous asked: Why is it that when I go to buy the signed £15 book at Unbound, after registration the site tells me that I need to buy £20 worth of credit? Is that a mistake?
Strictlywatch 2011
Limping in like a dancer with an injured ankle, it’s Strictlywatch. On a Thursday. I KNOW.
Stunned as I am that it’s already a theme night on Strictly, I have to say that I wish every week was Broadway week. The outfits! The choreography! The general sense of contestants pulling things out of the bag! In a good way! And most of all, the tunes! *Assumes Craig voice* I LOVED IT...
Strictlywatch 2011
It’s back! Late! Back! Extremely late! But back!
Let’s leap straight in, shall we?
I have nothing to say on the subject of Bruce, as this year, as in previous years, I am deliberately watching Strictly with a half-hour digibox delay so that I can fast-forward all of his links. As for Tess, the sight of her being forced to simper at Bruce’s jokes despite being an intelligent...
Things for which there should be a word in German
The process by which all other items in a white wash end up inside the duvet cover.
September 2011
14 posts
Question of the week: is it important for panel... →
Reading The Medium Is Not Enough today, I came across this question and here’s my answer.
Just over ten years ago, I worked booking guests on a (non-comedy) panel discussion show which had a male presenter and three guests. I was informed by the producer that I could only ever book one female guest per show because to have two female guests would ‘unbalance the panel’. I would...
Things there should be a word in German for:
The tiny moment of relief when your sore throat stops hurting so much because it’s morphing into a cold, just before you get really sick of having a cold.
Things there should be a word in German for:
The wardrobe crisis occasioned by coming back from a long trip and none of your laundry being dry.
The weather gods smiled on me (who are the weather gods? I should know this. Bad author of Greek mythology-based novel, bad) and I got my day as an extra. It would be far too spoilerific to reveal too much, but I think it’s OK for me to say that, if you’re not entirely sure what I look like and want to spot me, look out for my hat. Also, that we were filming outdoors - you already know...
Stand by: rumours of my scene’s cancellation may have been exaggerated. Or, to put it another way, there’s so little time left of the shoot that they may have to drain the swamp and do it anyway. Even as I type, teams of orphans are sucking up pools of stagnant water through straws in order to ensure my acting debut*. I won’t believe it until it actually happens, but maybe,...
Disappointing announcement alert: because of the torrential rain we’ve had (and are continuing to have) in New York lately, the location where my scene was to have been filmed (note: “to have been”) is flooded, so the shoot is postponed, which means I’ll be back in London by the time it’s dry enough to shoot. No cameo role for me.
In the balance against the total,...
