I worked on this week's episode of The News Quiz, Radio 4, which has Jeremy Hardy, Sarah Millican and Paul Sinha on it: why not have a listen again here.
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I worked on this week's episode of The News Quiz, Radio 4, which has Jeremy Hardy, Sarah Millican and Paul Sinha on it: why not have a listen again here.
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Nice to see my telescope sketch from this week's Newsjack is making quite the splash in the world of giant telescopes. They seem a bit upset about the accent though.
Listen to the offending sketch here:
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Working on the Now Show on Radio 4 this week - listen again here. It's got Rory Bremner on it!
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Here are some sketches I had in the latest series of Recorded for Training Purposes, a sketch show on BBC Radio 4:
Reading Heat:
Men's Health:
Plus, a train announcement:
and an email disclaimer:
]]>Michael Gove's free schools:
and the Big Society bank:
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Very excited to be working with Somethin' Else on their day of interactive radio. Can't say exactly what the result will be yet: watch this space.
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With two major series, Ashes to Ashes and Lost, finishing this week, and leaving many viewers underwhelmed by their big twist finales, I'd like to save you from future disappointment by pointing out that there are really only 3 twists. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.) There are incidental twists that arise out of the characters and are genuinely surprising (The Crying Game; Star Wars), but if an ending has to explain everything, don't get your hopes up: it's almost bound to be one of these.
1) The narrator done it. The unreliable narrator has been around since Wuthering Heights and before, but still most people's heads explode when they come across the idea that HE'S MAKING IT ALL UP. He is Tyler Durden/Keyser Soze/the murderer! Etc. Did provide the only satisfactory Agatha Christie plot there is.
2) It was all a dream. Strictly speaking banned from all stories by people over the age of seven but it still sneaks in. Only David Lynch should be allowed to do this.
3) They're all dead. Hard to believe this could still be considered a surprise when it's been used in everything from No Exit to The Third Policeman but since every TV series ending recently seems to unveil this as their Big Explanation, obviously it is to someone. I expect the last episode of Mad Men to reveal that Don Draper was actually killed at the Battle of Gettysburg and was sent into Sixties advertising as Purgatory.
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Here are a few of my sketches from the new series of BBC Radio 7's
topical news show:
From the Archive - Football Scandal:
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A letter of support from David Miliband:
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And Moira Stuart in the cupboard:
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Writers, no need to sweat over Robert McKee - this poster from 1900 for the play Blue Jeans explains all you need in the way of structure:
No. 1: The big political barbecue.
No. 2: Thrilling saw mill scene.
No. 3: The great lynching scene.
No. 4: Rising sun roarers.
Job done.
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I've got a sketch being broadcast in the first episode of BBC Radio 7's new topical comedy series: listen on the iPlayer for a while longer here, or there's also a podcast. It's the one about the thrift expert.
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**Update** Also sketches on Episodes 4 and 6: Gordon Brown on the plinth
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and a Satanist's Thought for the Day:
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This 20-minute screenplay was adapted from The Diamond Lens, a short story by Fitz James O'Brien, an unjustly neglected 19th century writer of tales of the uncanny, considered by some to be one of the forerunners of modern science fiction.
It's the tragic story of a pioneering microscopist who falls hopelessly in love with a miniscule woman.
Nothing could break down the barriers which Nature had erected between us.
In Love... With an Animalcule!
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley is sitting, looking through the microscope, moving the slide around.
He leaps in astonishment from his seat, then scrambles back into his chair to stare through the eyepiece.
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. DAY
As if through the eyepiece, we see, in front of a stylised painted backdrop showing a sylvan scene, a semi-naked nymph, clad in wisps of chiffon, dancing around. The effect is like an end-of-the-pier Victorian pornographic peepshow styled by Julia Margaret Cameron.
The nymph, ANIMULA, is young and beautiful, balletic in her movements.
LINLEY (V.O.)
Animula! My heart's delight!
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. DAY
Through the eyepiece frame: Animula flits about her 'stage', picking flowers and fruit.
LINLEY (V.O.)
Those eyes of mystic violet. That lustrous hair! Oh, light of my life!
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley gazes rapt through his microscope.
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. DAY
Animula, seems to hear something in the distance; she exaggeratedly listens, then sweeps theatrically 'offstage'.
An empty set is left.
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley becomes agitated, moving the slide about as he looks in vain for Animula through the microscope's eyepiece.
LINLEY (V.O.)
It seemed as though I had suddenly gone blind. What could have caused this disappearance? Had she a lover, a husband?
He puts his head in his hands.
LINLEY (cont'd)
The agony of my sensations startled me. I battled against the fatal conclusion, but in vain. I had no escape from it...
A silent-film caption reads:
In Love... With an Animalcule!
Linley takes his eye from the eyepiece, and his gaze falls on the glass slide with the tiny drop of water imprisoned on it.
LINLEY (cont'd)
Within that miserable drop of water dwelt all that could make my life lovely. Could she but see me once! Even the slightest link between us...
Linley rises from his seat and flings himself on his bed in a fit of despair.
LINLEY (cont'd)
But it could not be. Nothing could break down the barriers which Nature had erected between us.
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT AND DAY (B/W, FLASHBACK)
A dishevilled, sleepless Linley pores over his microscope, day and night, spying on the object of his obsession.
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. DAY
Animula, oblivious of her observer, does a striptease and bathes herself in a river.
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
In the spirit of experiment Linley dims the lamplight shining on the slide and the water droplet.
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. TWILIGHT
In the dim light Animula shows signs of distress, with an expression of pain, wringing her hands.
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley turns up the gas on the lamp so the light shines strongly.
LINLEY (V.O.)
How I delighted to learn I could have any effect on her, however invisible or anonymous the force.
INT. ANIMULA'S WORLD. DAY
Animula's environment is flooded with light, an effect which makes her gambol and sing with pleasure.
LINLEY (V.O.)
If science only had the means of magnifying sounds - what carols of happiness would have entranced my ears!
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley is turning the lamp up and down, staring through the microscope.
LINLEY (V.O.)
I grew pale and emaciated. My inability to touch or even speak a word to my beloved, I realised, was driving me to distraction.
I concluded that I had developed an exaggerated notion of Animula's charms because of my seclusion from female society. If I compared her with the flesh and blood women of my own world, this false enchantment would vanish like the dew.
INT. LINLEY'S FLAT. DAY (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley looks at a newspaper advertisement, for a celebrated dancer, performing nightly at Niblo's.
LINLEY (V.O.)
Signora Caradolce. Said to be the most beautiful, the most graceful woman in the world...
INT. THEATRE STALLS. NIGHT (B/W, FLASHBACK)
Linley is sitting among the audience in a small theatre. He waits with anticipation.
The curtain rises.
The backdrop is a crude painting of a woodland scene, like a rough parody of Animula's home.
The audience around Linley start to applaud with delight.
A tall figure pushes aside the drapes to emerge and dance around the stage, dressed in white muslin.
Linley shrinks into his seat.
The figure onstage is graceful but muscular, and leaps athletically; this is very different from Animula's dainty caperings.
Linley, hands trembling, puts his opera glasses to his eyes.
We see what he sees, framed by the glasses:
An Amazonian woman, her face harshly painted, smiling grotesquely, lumbers around the stage.
Sweat runs down her face. As her feet hit the floor the scenery shudders.
Linley jumps to his feet, horrified, and runs from the theatre.
A short film. Lost in the museum, Jenny mistakes another woman for her mother, and is lead out of her safe, orderly world to somewhere much more frightening.
INT. MUSEUM. DAY
Away from the modernised part of the museum, the display cases are heavy, Gothic, crowded with objects - ammonite fossils, chunks of meteorite, arrows and feathered bows, leathery things that could be shrunken heads.
They walk through in single file - Nina leading, Rory and Jenny hand in hand.
Jenny stops and stares at him.
Nina has disappeared down a narrow corridor. They can hear her footsteps receding. Jenny looks back. The way they came looks dark and deserted.
They follow Nina.
INT. - MUSEUM STOREROOMS - DAY
Shelves along the sides of a long set of rooms are lined with parcels wrapped in brown paper, and a jumble of strange objects. A harsh overhead bulb casts jagged shadows from the weird assortment - a cuckoo clock, sea creatures in a jar, a 1970s computer, a birdcage...
Rory rips a bit of paper away from one of the parcels. An old anatomical model, of a man's head and torso with the skin removed to show muscle and half the brain exposed, is partly revealed. Rory jumps back.
She taps the side of her nose confidentially.
The two children look at her blankly.
Three more 55-word stories, published in Notes from the Underground:
The system of status-related hats was a great success. No more wasting time at parties talking to someone, only to discover they were a junior executive's girlfriend or a waiter. James was delighted to finally make it to the level of trilby, although he noticed that anyone above a pith helmet now ignored him completely.
Arnold was reluctant to leave the craft, for fear his companions would talk about him while he was gone. If the two of them ganged up, the six-month journey back would be a misery. Again. So he pretended to be uninterested in visiting Titan, and always ate his lunch at his desk, watching them carefully.
Horror at the Table
Little did Claudia realise when she started to research her family history, that a year later she would be sitting in an expensive restaurant opposite the ghost of her great-grandmother. Now she slumped, worn out by months of making small talk with the disappointed old lady, not to mention the endless storm of broken crockery.
Sweet Thunder has a collection of home recording tapes found in charity shops, which are fascinating for the glimpses they give into private and work lives, some of them decades ago. There are stalacpipe organ recordings and astrology readings, but strangely the most interesting are the more mundane moments: a legal secretary practising her pronunciation of legal terms ("Pun-i-tive damages. Quaa-ash"), some drunk men talking about spreadsheets, and a surgical needle sales meeting.
Best of all is the conversation between an elderly couple, where he ruefully admits to falling for her April Fools Day joke yet again:
"In 51 years I've never missed an April Fool. I can get you ten times in a day!"
"The thing is I think you're so sincere about everything. Trick after trick after trick!"
"April Fools Day I lie all day long."
You are cordially invited to the grand opening of Bluebell.fm – the home of robot folk tales. If you are fond of enjoying yourself, then this is the place for you.
Time: Now
Place: Here