Tag Archives: comedy

Capturing The Golden Girls: My Sample Script

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The Golden Girls is one of the funniest sit-coms ever written. Its dialogue zips, licks, and zings, each performance by the members of its main cast a masterclass in marrying archetype to authenticity to create larger than life characters that never-the-less still ring true in the real world.

The Golden Girls showed older women leading rich, fulfilling and interesting lives: pursuing relationships, nurturing friendships, wise-cracking, problem-solving, and enjoying full and healthy sex lives – not laying down and preparing to die, or fading into thankless quasi-matriarchal obscurity. At a time, and especially in an industry, where executives weren’t overly inclined to put older women front-and-centre, here was a group of older female actresses who were not only carrying a successful prime-time comedy show, but one of the most successful prime-time comedy shows of all time. The legacy of The Golden Girls, and that talented quad of actors, is the laughter that still rings in the air – from generations old and new – many long decades later.

I loved The Golden Girls as a kid, and I love it still. My partner and I recently started a re-watch, and we’re re-hooked. Even my 8-year-old caught an episode and chortled heartily at these women 55 who were years+ his senior.

I got into the rhythm and cadence of the show so much that I started hearing fresh dialogue in my head. I decided to get it all down, and see if I could pull off a successful facsimile of a ‘new’ episode. Not a whole episode, mind. Just a short sequence. You can access it in PDF form by clicking on the link immediately below:

GOLDEN GIRLS

I know it isn’t formatted correctly, especially the dialogue, which shouldn’t run along the lines as far as it does, but the exercise – for me – was to see if I could successfully capture the show’s tone, and the characters’ voices.

If you’re a fan of The Golden Girls, I want to know if you can see and hear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia in your mind’s eye as you’re reading along.

Let me know. I fancy tackling Red Dwarf next.

Movie Review – Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love

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Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love (2019, Gravitas Pictures)

Released Blu-Ray/VoD: November 12th

Director: Tyler Cole

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love follows Damian Booster (Aaron Burt), a popular LA podcaster and perennial playboy, as he wrestles with his true feelings in the wake of an ultimatum from his non-Bechdel-test-passing girlfriend, Danielle (Emily Pearse): Come meet my mother for brunch in a few days to demonstrate your commitment to commitment, she tells him, or kiss our conjoined, couple-shaped ass goodbye.

One man’s tragedy is another man’s comedy, after all; and one man’s love story is another man’s horror. So why not blend them all together? Damian spends the duration of the movie dealing with a mounting crisis of mind and soul, his fear of falling in love manifesting itself through a succession of scary movie tropes.

Accompanying Damian into this hinterland of horror, hopelessness, har-de-hars and horniness is his visiting friend Alan (David Lengel, who resembles a sort-of elongated David Schwimmer) and a nightmarish assortment of neighbours and nutty, night-time denizens of the town.

First-time film-makers Tyler Cole (the movie’s director and co-producer) and Aaron Burt (the movie’s writer, co-producer and star) also know a little something about suffering for love, having gone through extraordinary struggles to commit their vision to the screen. Between them they’ve sacrificed jobs, homes, savings and sanity. Tyler even sacrificed bodily autonomy by following through on a promise to have his wrist tattooed with the logo of a hire company if they agreed to lend him audio-visual equipment for the movie.

So was the struggle worth it? Will Tyler smile wistfully each time he looks down at his branded wrist, or will he find himself wishing that his inked limb could join the discarded hands of Luke Skywalker and Ash Williams in some fleshy, rotten pile or pit somewhere?

Mercifully, Tyler’s self-vandalism wasn’t in vain. There’s much to enjoy in Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love: it’s fun, inventive, ambitious, creepy, consistently surprising, rarely dull (with the possible exception of a clunky scene in which Damien invites Alan to be a guest on his absolutely abysmal podcast) and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny. Burt is a down-to-earth lead; a great straight-man who gives generously to his fellow performers, both on the page and on the screen. With his help, and Cole’s, the cast brings a naturalistic, quasi-improvised feel to the movie that really fits its style.

The dialogue can occasionally feel clunky, but when it works, it works brilliantly, especially in those segments when the movie activates the ‘com’ portion of the horr-rom-com triangle. Its greatest assets in the laughter stakes are Nancy (Carly Reeves), a nutty, stream-of-consciousness-spouting wild child from the neighbourhood, and Travis (Darren Keefe Reiher), Aaron’s boozing, belligerent next-door neighbour. Nancy and Travis may be broad characters, bordering on caricature, but they’re so well played, and outrageously funny, that you won’t care a jot.

Burt and Cole have achieved so much in this movie with such limited resources. Visually, some of its finer flourishes wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget, studio-funded project. Never-the-less, while the film has lofty ambitions, and an undeniably unique and fascinating conceit, it never quite manages to live up to its full potential.

Experimentation with form and content in cinema is to be lauded. Sometimes the weirdest of gambles can push the boundaries of what’s possible, or even re-invent cinema itself. But melding such a disparate trinity of genres into a coherent, meaningful shape is a tall order. Horror and comedy make great bedfellows, as do romance and comedy: it’s the threesome that’s the tricky part.

Ultimately, Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love never quite coalesces into something that fully justifies its Frankensteinian approach to film-making. Instead, we get a very entertaining, mutant mish-mash of The Shining, The Hangover, Swingers and every generic slasher and romance flick of the 80s; well-crafted vignettes that work well in isolation, but rest uneasily when sitting next to each other.

The responsibility for the movie’s structural problems lies more with the composer than the conductor. After all, the success or failure of the movie’s central, genre-busting conceit rests solely upon the shoulders of Damien’s character, and, alas, he hasn’t quite the weight or the heft to carry the burden. He feels more like a cipher than a real guy; a blank-faced agent of plot. As a consequence his breakdown, and subsequent breakthrough, feels hollow and unearned.

It perhaps would’ve served the story better had Damien’s sense of horror been wedded to some disturbing pattern from his or his family’s past, or had sprung from some long-buried guilt or shame. As it stands Damien is nothing more than a mildly narcissistic man-child who’s reluctant to grow up and sheath his shaft, like most of LA’s aspiring entertainers, and, I’d wager, a significant portion of the planet’s male population. His journey, like him, is shallow, whatever he appears to have learned about love by the end of the movie.

Tyler Cole makes up for the short-fall in tone and theme by really throwing himself into his role as director, clearly relishing the opportunity here to flex his creative muscles. He must’ve felt like an actor whose agent had secured him every single role in a movie, the chance to run free and do, and be, everything at once.

As Cole deftly jiggles, juggles and muddles the aesthetics of three distinct genres, it’s hard not to see the finished movie as an extended demo reel for his extensive talents. This could well be Tyler Cole’s ‘Scott Derrickson’ moment (a director whose path led him from Hellraiser: Inferno to Doctor Strange).

Cole’s use of light, and lighting, is particularly strong – bathing the dingy rooms and corridors of Aaron’s apartment complex in the red and blue hues of his shifting moods – as is his understanding of how to build and release tension, all of which serves the eerier moments well. He also knows how to get under your skin with a good jump-scare.

It’s just a pity that the movie makes you feel terror more effectively than it does relief and happiness for the protagonist’s plight.

Who knows? Maybe that’s an apt description for love in the real world, too.

THE VERDICT

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love might not inspire you to tattoo yourself with its logo, but you won’t come away feeling short-changed.

It begs repeating that this is a first-time movie whose creators should be celebrated for their tenacity and dedication; whose vision and ambition should be applauded. Just because I judge it to have failed in some of its loftier aims, doesn’t mean that I consider it a failure. Far from it. It’s raw. Brave. Bold. Original. Haunting in places, hysterical in others.

It’s clear that Burt and Cole are both going places. Don’t be frightened to join them on the first leg of their journey.

You might very well end up falling in love with their work.

Watch the trailer here

Jamie on the Box – Tuca & Bertie

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TV Review: Tuca & Bertie

Two barmy birds land on Netflix and make a virtue out of perseverance

Tuca & Bertie: from the people who brought you Bojack Horseman.

That’s how easy it was for the show to snag me. Cards on the table. If a new show was to come along carrying the tagline: ‘From the people who brought you Bojack Horseman comes back-to-back clips of old ladies receiving painful enemas on rusted gurneys round the back of the supermarket’, I’d be on my couch with a bucket of popcorn ready before you could say, ‘I think we’ve reached something of a cultural nadir.’

Tuca & Bertie is helmed by Bojack Horseman alumni Lisa Hanawalt, who helped develop that show’s trademark look. While T&B shares an aesthetic flair and a penchant for anthropomorphised creatures with its cartoon cousin, the two series couldn’t be more seismically different.

Bojack – eclipse black

Bojack Horseman is a deliciously dark study of existential angst, addiction and depression filtered through the id and ego of a washed-up, middle-aged actor on the cusp of his last chance in life, love and Hollywoo (sic). Tuca & Bertie, on the other hand, is a bouncy, breezy, larger-than-life look at the zany exploits of two female friends as they try to ‘level-up’ into their thirties without losing themselves, or each other.

The two friends are mirror opposites: Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) is an extroverted, fleet-footed toucan who’s taking her first tentative steps towards sobriety and self-reliance; Bertie (Ali Wong) is an introverted career chick (a songbird if you want to get literal about it) who’s just started cohabiting with her drippy but dutiful boyfriend, Speckles (Ex-Walking Dead favourite Steven Yeun).

If Bojack is storm-cloud black, then Tuca and Bertie – in style and execution, if nothing else – is a magical rainbow swirling inside a nuclear-powered kaleidoscope.

I disliked Tuca & Bertie’s first clutch of episodes, feeling meaner towards it precisely because I expected to love it so much. Maybe ‘disliked’ is too strong a word. It’s perhaps more accurate to say I was confounded, puzzled and nonplussed. I scouted online for reviews, and could find only frothy-mouthed outpourings of acclaim, which made me dislike the show all the more.

Was I the lone voice of dissent? What was I missing here? Was there something wrong with Tuca & Bertie, or with me?

While I loved the show’s arresting, vivid, and inventive visuals, I felt that the characters were broadly drawn to the point of caricature, and largely unlikeable to boot. The narrative was wispy and meandering, more dawdling behind the action than driving it; and the themes seemed fluffy and inconsequential. The absurd elements and sight gags, which should have been the show’s greatest asset, felt over-laboured. There was nothing of substance to orient the madness. It felt like going on a blind date and discovering that your partner is one of those people who describes themselves as being ‘certifiably mental’ or ‘totally up for the banter’.

But by far Tuca &Bertie’s biggest sin was that after four episodes the show had barely teased a titter out of me. Sure, I sniggered once or twice, especially at the unexpected introduction of some rather unorthodox sex bugs, but for the most part I sat grinning at the TV like an agitated gibbon, trying to trick my brain into making my mouth laugh. Was I over-thinking it? Was I not giving it a chance? Was I condemning it for not being Bojack? Was there an element of subconscious chauvinism afoot? Was it possible that Tuca & Bertie’s funny message was being broadcast at too high a frequency for my despicably male ears to hear?

As quickly as that last thought tapped a toe into my brain, my mind snagged it with the teeth of a hungry coyote and shook it until it was dead. Firstly, one team of women isn’t going to be representative of all women, everywhere, in any case. Secondly, I’m a veteran of The Golden Girls, one of the funniest sitcoms ever made; I’m Team Roseanne (the character, not the increasingly loopy lady who brought her to life); I’d happily watch and re-watch a movie called ‘Carrie Coon Cooks Prunes in Pantaloons’ over the output of most male stars; I have a fierce love for Captain Janeway; I think Happy Valley – created by, written and starring women – is one of the most compelling, uncompromising, and rich crime series ever produced; and I regularly read and rave about the works of great female novelists (or just novelists, as I prefer to call them).

I’m conscious that all this is starting to smack a little of the old ‘all of my best friends are black’ defence, and my list is quite possibly patronising and self-consciously right-on to the point of pukiness, but I’m simply trying to call attention to the fact that while men and women are physiologically and psychologically different, and subject to a host of different stresses, triggers and dangers throughout their lives, we aren’t so different that our inner worlds are closed off to each other.

Men and women aren’t really from Mars and Venus. Just because something’s about women, or by women, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ‘for’ women (or at least not only for women), and vice versa.

To rule out the patriarchal angle once and for all, I asked my partner to watch episode five with me: the episode where Tuca and Speckles (Bertie’s wishy-washy architect boyfriend) go on a road-trip to visit Tuca’s boozy, caustic and unspeakably rich aunty. I wanted to get some female perspective, see if there were things I might have been missing because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be looking for them.

We sat stony-faced and silent for most of the episode’s twenty-six minute run-time, swapping and sharing the odd strained smile or apologetic grimace. Afterwards my partner said that although she wasn’t a big fan of Bojack Horseman, if she ever happened to catch a stray episode with me she at least ‘got’ the show. She could see what other people saw in it, and why they liked it. Tuca & Bertie, though, was a different kettle of ornithoids entirely. ‘What is it supposed to be doing or saying?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, I just wanted it to be over.’

I went back to trawling the net. There had to be others out there who shared my feelings. Not rabid incels or trolls who rebelled at the mere suggestion of a possible male hegemony, but normal – well, comparatively normal – people like me. I found a review of the show by critic Alan Sepinwall, the Head Ed for TV over at Rolling Stone magazine. He, too, had struggled with the first few episodes, but felt that the show deepened as it progressed, becoming steadily richer, funnier and more coherent, striking a rich nexus of quality about four or five episodes in. By this stage I was already five episodes in, and whatever Alan Sepinwall had found in Tuca & Bertie still eluded me, but I was now more hopeful than ever of finding it – whatever ‘it’ was.

‘OH YEAH!’, I hear the more ideologically trenchant among you roar. ‘Long live the brotherhood, is that it, Jamie, you SCUM BAG? You were prepared to keep hating it right up until the point another MAN came along and said that it was good, so it MUST be good, right, because a fucking MAN said so?!! PIG! YOU PIG! YOU PENIS-POSSESSING, MANSPLAINING, MUCK-SPREADING, PATRIARCHAL PIG!’

Please lower your pitchforks, folks. I know how this looks, but I can assure you that my reverence for Alan Sepinwall has nothing at all to do with his penis, an item which I can only assume he possesses. I’ve followed his career ever since his humble beginnings recapping (among other shows) The Sopranos for the Newark Star Ledger, the very same newspaper that Tony Soprano liked to read in the show. I followed him from HitFix to Uproxx to Rolling Stone, picking up most of his books along the way (I even reviewed his latest, The Sopranos Sessions, for Den of Geek, which you can read HERE). I utterly respect Alan Sepinwall, and usually agree wholeheartedly with his reviews and recommendations.

As I finished episode six, though, I started to suspect that our tastes might have reached their first point of opposition and impasse. Tuca & Bertie still hadn’t clicked for me, and it had a scant four episodes to leave its mark. I’d never give up on a show mid-way through a season, but season finales are handy check-points at which to decide whether to push on or switch off. I figured I’d be switching off. Surely it was too late in the game for a last minute save from the plucky, flocky ladies, and their world of sentient trees and building with great big pairs of tits bouncing from them?

Turns out it wasn’t.

My revelation came later than Alan Sepinwall’s, hitting me somewhere around episode seven or eight. It was around then I started to feel that the show was going somewhere, and saying something.

Tuca started to seem less like an obnoxious, sassy, single-friend composite and more like a rounded, damaged person whose denial-scented psychopathology sprayed out of her whenever she was confronted with pain or truth – the sort of person who, say, goes to a mindfulness retreat and accidentally turns it into a murderous cult. True story.

Bertie began to feel less like a 2D, Diet Monica-from-Friends and more like a living, breathing, relatable mix of conflicting wants, duties and desires. As the season drew to a close, everything started falling into place. The stakes became real, and finally there was something solid to counterbalance the crazy and the zany, which only served to make the crazier and zanier elements seem crazier and zanier, and funnier – much, much funnier – too.

I watched Tuca and Bertie mesh and unmesh, attract and repel, laugh and cry, rant and rage, love and hate, playing out the complex and familiar dance of female friendship in a winsome, winning and truthful way. There were fears. Secrets. Some key #metoo moments were handled sensitively, powerfully and, most importantly, with humour. Was this a different show I was watching?

The laughs were coming thick and fast, too. Not just titters or gently expelled puffs of nasal air, but real, booming, take-you-by-surprise, do-I-really-laugh-like-that laughs. A scene in the hospital between Tuca and a rather frantic medical appliance had me losing my shit quite considerably.

I fell in love with the way the show adds fresh dimensions of humour and tension to the humdrum and the ordinary through its hyper-inventive visual style: text-messages walking to their recipients; characters tussling with themselves inside their own brains, or suddenly becoming live-action puppets; and frenzied NOOOOOOOs growing animate and hurtling their way across town, with characters sometimes hitching a ride on them.

Tuca & Bertie will be back for a second season next year. I didn’t expect to say this way back at the mid-point, but, do you know what? I’m really looking forward to it.

The birds have nested. Now it’s time to watch them hatch.

Jamie on the Box – Santa Clarita Diet

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TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet 

Netflix’s popular zomcom is back for its third season, and it’s bloody good

Years ago I worked with a lady in her early sixties, who told me that the secret to her long, stable and happy marriage had been variety, pacing and always having something to look forward to. She and her husband courted, they married, they got a house, they had kids, they moved, they grew, they became grandparents – the beats of their lives perfectly timed and arranged to minimise monotony and banish boredom whenever it threatened to rear its head.

Variety, pacing, something to look forward to. See? The secret to a successful marriage.

It’s also the secret to a successful TV show. The best ones keep moving – quickly, powerfully and with purpose – forking off at just the right times and in just the right directions to keep the journey rolling forwards and the scenery fresh. In gourmet terms: giving you just enough to fill your belly, but never enough to make you sick.

Two recent shows that have been exemplars of this pattern are the super-slick, high-concept comedies The Good Place, and Santa Clarita Diet. The former is due a welcome return later this year, while the latter dropped its third season on Netflix at the end of March: even zanier, funnier, and gorier than ever before. This time around there’s also a surprising amount of heart to proceedings, and I don’t just mean the kind that’s ripped from a victim’s chest and snacked upon by the ravenous undead.

The aftermath of Officer Anne’s desert-based pledge to serve as Sheila’s disciple (season two’s cliff-hanger) is dealt with in typical fast and funny fashion, paving the way for this season’s trio of real and credible dangers: the FBI, sniffing around Eric and Abby’s explosive political statement; the Knights of Serbia, an ancient order dedicated to the eradication of the undead, in town to ply their post-fatal trade; and Dobrivoje Poplovic, the Serbian colonel who wants to capture Santa Clarita’s ‘zombies’ and subject them to a fate worse than… well, undeath.

As always, Santa Clarita Diet deals zippily with its many perils and conundrums, putting them front-and-centre just long enough to wring the maximum amount of interesting and hilarious moments from them, but always wrapping them up and burning them off before they threaten to become humdrum.

This season’s enduring philosophical and ethical question centres on the morality of immortality, specifically if it’s ever right to pass zombiehood on to another person, even with their consent. As the season unfolds it’s clearer than ever before that the power of life over – and life after – death is a heavy burden to bear, for biter, bitten and bystanders all.

Good old Gary

Jonathan Slavin is brilliant as former mental-patient Ron – a maniacal, bug-eyed cross between Peter Capaldi and the Dean from Community – who dupes literal talking-head Gary into biting him, before going out proselytising in the name of zombiehood. Despite Joel and Sheila’s very active opposition to Ron’s reckless behaviour, Sheila has a crisis of conscience when she meets Jean, a prickly old lady with a terminal illness. Jean’s prickly because she won’t live long enough to see her first grandchild born. To bite or not to bite. That is the question… the question that Joel and Sheila have very different answers to.

And Joel finds himself under increasing pressure to join the ranks of the undead, so he and Sheila won’t find themselves separated by his inevitable natural death. Will they or won’t they renew their wedding vows to read ‘Til undeath do us part’?

Incidentally, having loved and admired Timothy Oliphant as seasoned tough guys in both Deadwood and Justified, it’s a joy to see how good he is at comedy. He’s pretty much done a reverse Brian Cranston.

One of the many brilliant things about Santa Clarita Diet is how the big questions about and dangers to Joel and Sheila’s marriage are dealt with as if they were the sort of minor irritations more typically encountered on tea-time soap operas. In Santa Clarita, as in real life, we absorb the horrors of our lives and shrink and tame them until they seem as ordinary to us as Uncle Frank farting at the Christmas dinner table. The very funny juxtaposition between the absolute, blood-splattering insanity of the undead life-style and Joel and Sheila’s sanitised, almost cliched existence in middle-class suburbia is made funnier still by the couple’s tendency to react to the misfortunes and people around them with the forced jollility and fixed smiles of a cutesy couple in a 1950s sitcom.

Laughs, gore, fun, shocks, head, heart, soul: Santa Clarita Diet’s third season has got the lot. Not to mention a healthy, hefty dollop of empowerment.

While representation in media is important, the recent glut of male-to-female character transformations on the big and little screens has felt less like a cultural revolution and more like an effort on the part of media financiers to adjust to the shifting demographics of cinema attendance and merchandise spending. In short, they’re going where the money is. And all the while radical feminists, right-on lefties, chauvinist assholes and slobbering incels battle each other beneath market capitalism’s steely glare…

Santa Clarita Diet proves that you can approach the whole subject of gender and representation without being gimmicky; without even making it obvious that’s what you’re doing. It’s quietly subversive; a highly polished, very funny, wildly entertaining show that just happens to have strong female characters at its helm. And not strong in a ‘look, I can bench-press a body-builder, and I know 6 kinds of karate’ sort of a way, but strong in a ‘we’re regular women surviving and keeping our family afloat in these unique and highly dangerous circumstances, and sometimes we fuck it up’ sort of a way.

Sheila and her daughter are the lynch-pins of the show: strong, flawed, fierce, funny, likeable women who drive the action forwards through a combination of their tenaciousness, kindness, curiosity, compassion, intelligence, impulsivity and thirst for activism. In contrast the men – while also very likeable, and occasionally heroic in their own bumbling way – are neurotic, over-cautious, angst-filled, and frantic. Joel and Eric evoke the Jay Pritchett and Phil Dunphy dynamic, except both of them are Phil Dunphy.

Toxic masculinity – whether it’s located in lecherous lotharios, serial abusers or actual Nazis – is always punished, and always fatally. It doesn’t get much more right-on than a recently empowered woman literally devouring the very worst the patriarchy has to offer. I look forward with great relish to see how the squeamish and squirrelly Joel reacts to joining the ranks of the post-living.

Here’s to the variety and exquisite pacing of season four. To Joel becoming Sheila’s newest pupil, to Abby embarking upon a fledgling romance with Eric whilst rising through the ranks of an ancient order of zombie-killers, to Sheila’s new ass-kicking team of an old lady, a camp coward and a reformed zombie killer.

Definitely something to look forward to.

My Hell on the Fringes of the Edinburgh Fringe

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I put on a free show as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011, and I think there’s a chance I might go to hell for it.

We’ll get to that later.

I can’t say I used to be a stand-up, because it isn’t true. It’s more accurate to say that stand-up used to be my hobby, like stamp-collecting, building rubber-band-balls, or making sculptures of your neighbours’ faces from mashed potato as they sleep. The rule is you don’t get to call stand-up ‘work’ or class it as a job until you’ve progressed to regular paid work, or are doing it for a living – which is fair enough. If you slice someone’s stomach open without the proper training, you’re not a surgeon: you’re a killer.

There are no qualifications in stand-up. It’s all vocational. You have to travel up and down the country, initially (and perhaps eternally) at your own expense, performing to as many different crowds in as many different cities and venues as possible, building and honing and polishing your set, until you either get good or give up. I gave up. I never found my voice or achieved any lasting consistency across my sets. Some of my performances were good, a handful were really good, some were lucky, some were middling, some were awkward, and many of them were absolutely train-wreck fucking awful. I guess I could’ve gone somewhere, maybe, perhaps – eventually – but I lacked the guts, gumption, focus, dedication and, later when I started a family, time to level-up.

I can attest that there’s nothing like being plugged into the stand-up circuit and working with some of the most naturally funny, insanely talented people in the country to help bring into sharp focus just how unfunny and untalented you actually are. I would consider myself a funny person, but only under 4 very strict conditions: a) when I’ve written things down for people to read, b) when I’m drunk, c) when I’m bored or angry, or d) if I’ve known you for a long time, and feel incredibly comfortable in your presence. Option d) is rather a big barrier to getting good at stand-up. With all the best will in the world, you can’t stay on stage for 6 months as the audience slowly grows fond of you. Ditto backstage at gigs: if you exempt yourself from the bare-knuckle banter and withdraw into yourself long enough to let nerves or silence dictate your place in the room and the wider industry, then you’ll always be a wall-flower.

Anyway, ignorance, naivety and alcohol conspired to convince me that I was ready to attempt 40 to 50 minutes of stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe very early in my ‘career’. My show was called God vs Jamie Andrew, and it required me to dress like a priest and rant blasphemously. I enjoyed it greatly, even if my audiences couldn’t always say the same.

Thankfully, I’d managed to secure an obscure venue with an odd-shaped room at an obscure time of the day, far from the madding crowd, so there weren’t many witnesses to my early stutter-steps (or fall-down-the-stairs-steps). Again, a few of the performances went alright – some of them even teetering on good – but even the ‘good’ ones were rough, raw and unready, and any success was as temporary as it was lucky. Sometimes I played to near silence, and not all of that could be attributed to the fact that the venue was a hostel, and the audience on any given day might have consisted entirely of bewildered Japanese people with a poor grasp of English. Sometimes I was shit. Sometimes I didn’t care. One time I actually dragged a stool on to the stage, and with shaking hand sat humbled and dejected in front of the audience calmly explaining to them that I was so disgustingly hungover that the hour ahead would be a penance for all of us. It was. Fair play to them, though, because they stayed, and even placed some coins in the bucket, I’m sure more out of sympathy than gratitude.

One day, after a particularly enjoyable performance, I decided to kill a few hours before getting the train back home seeing some other free shows. I was full of joy and vitality as I strolled along Edinburgh’s thoroughfares and up and down its nightmarishly steep staircases, and by ‘full of joy and vitality’ I mean I was drunk. Good drunk, though. Happy drunk. I was walking along with a beatific smile slapped across my lips, regarding the world with a goofy, half-cocked optimism, unable to drive or even properly walk but somehow convinced that I had the power to change the world.

Outside the train station I saw a homeless girl sitting on the street. She was a crestfallen soul in her mid-twenties who looked like the girl-next-door who by six-degrees of unlucky separation had become the girl-next-doorway. Christ-like thoughts danced through my head. I wanted to help her. Who knows if I was motivated by actual goodness, drunken sentimentality or some misplaced sense of self-importance, but it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t help her. The only thing of direct value in my pocket was a train ticket, and I didn’t think she’d appreciate that. She’d still be homeless, but just… somewhere else. “Hey, I’ve really enjoyed your debut Fringe show, ‘Sad Street Girl’. Why don’t you use this ticket to take this motherfucker on tour?”

I gave her the only other thing I had: a flyer for my show. Way to kick a girl when she’s down, right?

I invited her to the venue I’d be performing at the next day, and told her I’d put money behind the bar so she could come in an hour or so before the show started to have something to eat. All she had to do was say my name at the bar, and the staff would sort her out.

I walked away feeling pretty good about myself. I was a living saint; a half-jaked Jesus. They would compose songs about me. Build statues in my honour.

The next day, the homeless girl arrived at the venue, and duly spent the fiver I’d put behind the bar on booze. Who was I to judge? Booze had united us, so maybe it was the key to the success of our fledgling relationship. I drank to that.

When I told her I was going out to flyer to drum up an audience for that day’s show, without a second’s thought or negotiation she grabbed a stack of flyers and raced out into the street ahead of me. She fearlessly and tirelessly approached (and in some cases stalked and hunted) hundreds of passers-by, and delivered a pitch that was so friendly, enthusiastic, and charming that she pulled in the biggest and best audience of my festival to that point. The show went well, and the crowd was engaging and appreciative. They were also incredibly generous at the end of the performance (‘incredibly generous’ at my level of renown and expertise meant that there was enough money in the hat to cover my train ticket home, get me drunk and still have a little left-over for some description of post-drinking, artery-hardening fast-food). I rewarded my new Head of PR and ticket sales with another couple of pints. I was feeling good about myself: riding high on the buzz of a good show, and surfing on a wave of well-being for my part in helping a person less fortunate than myself. What a good soul I was.

Another half-hour or so later, my new friend had to leave, so I walked her to the door and thanked her profusely. She thanked me back. I said she could flyer for me any day and I’d make sure she was paid for it. We said our half-drunken, smiling goodbyes and both went in for a hug, but as our bodies drew close we looked into each other’s eyes and there was an awkward moment where it looked as if we might… just might… were we about to?…we were leaning in… were we about to… kiss?

We didn’t, but we had a long – perhaps too long – hug, and then off she went.

I stood in the street and lit a cigarette, trying to process what had just happened. My brain became the cop at the end of The Usual Suspects, suddenly slotting the horrible truth of the last few hours into place. I told myself I’d done good deeds, been a good man, but what had I actually done?

I’d lured a homeless lady who clearly had a drinking problem into a pub, plied her with alcohol, allowed her to work for me for less than the minimum wage, paid her in alcohol instead of cash, and then almost kissed her whilst drunk and dressed as a priest.

Nice one, Kaiser Soze.

What are you going to do at tomorrow’s show? Euthanise an old lady live on stage? Exploit some sex workers?

Actually, that’s a great idea for a show…

See you next year, Edinburgh!

THE END

PS: Please get out there and see live comedy, because many of the funniest, most-accomplished, most exciting and novel stand-ups in the country – and indeed the world – aren’t on TV, but out there tirelessly working in comedy clubs, theatres and the back-rooms of pubs up and down the country night after night, week after week. Get up off your arse and give yourself a treat.

Now That’s What I Call Funny – @ Glasgow International Comedy Festival

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I’m taking part in this three-hander of comedy in Glasgow this March, as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. Do come and have a giggle with me, Richard and Ross. And tell every person you meet about it, and get them to do the same. Your ticket money means the difference between me getting a train home after the shows, or hitch-hiking on the M9.

Click here to buy tickets, which would be a smart move because a) it’s a cosy and compact venue with a limited number of seats, and b) the tickets will go like hot cakes that have been sealed in a rocket and fired into the heart of the sun to make them even hotter. Megan Fox will be in the rocket, rubbing the hot cakes all over her nipples. You get the idea: the tickets will sell fast, right?.

515 NTWICF Poster 2a

Red Dwarf X-pectations

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Red Dwarf X premieres on Dave tonight at 9pm. In a few short hours we will know if that ‘X’ signifies buried comedy treasure, or if it will make us all think of a solitary dead eye on the corpse of a cartoon character that’s been drawn by a three-year-old.

And, yes, I know it’s Roman numerals for ten, before some clever cunt who genuinely thinks I’m some sort of drooling malcontent tries to point it out.

Lister and the Cat.

Red Dwarf was my favourite comedy as a youngster, and memories of the show are inextricably linked to memories of my childhood, and of growing up. I shared favourite quotes and crap cast impressions with schoolmates (I did an impressively shite Kryten). It’s fair to say that each new episode was ‘event TV’, and fellow geeks and I would spend the day after transmission reliving the entire episode to the point of suicidal tedium.

When the first series was released on VHS in two-parts I scrimped and saved summer holiday money to get my hands on it. £13.99 for three episodes at a time in good old combustible, snappable video format – and no Monster Munch for a month – but it was worth the sacrifice.

From the series 4 glory days.

And what a show: Smeg, Talkie Toaster, two Rimmers, the first Kryten (‘They’re dead.’ ‘But I was only away for a minute.’), Lister having twins, the Better Than Life video game, the fried egg, chilli, cheese and chutney sandwich, the Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society (or CLITORIS for short), Lister eating dogfood and burning books, inflatable Rachel, a self-destruct system that dispenses chocolate bars, Gandhi with a machine-gun, Kryten dating a blob, Lister fighting a curry monster, Kryten having a penis, Rimmer going nuts in a Gingham dress, Mr Flibble, group hallucinations thanks to aggressive marine life, Lister marrying a mutant, Rimmer being able to touch again, the Polymorph, Ace Rimmer, Dwayne Dibbley!

So many classic moments and characters have been etched into my brain. I was so obsessed with the show that I was moved to write this in my diary when I was 16:

“I brought down Red Dwarf with me that I’d videotaped the night before, because Papa likes it. I don’t mind watching it for the second time, as instead of concentrating on the programme, I like to concentrate on the reaction of the person watching it. Let me explain why: if you enjoy a certain thing on the television, it must contain elements you can relate to, therefore each one you enjoy reflects a facet of your personality. Every time my grandfather would laugh at one of the jokes, I would take that as a personal victory. It’s not as simple as merely saying, ‘Oh, he enjoys the show,’ because on some level his laughter is telling me, ‘Oh, he likes me.'”

I think it’s clear from reading that diary excerpt that I was a bit of a wanker. And incredibly creepy. After all the bizarre staring I subjected him to, my grandpa must have thought I was some sort of cross between Droopy and the little dead girls from The Shining. It also appears that my self-esteem was almost entirely based upon other people’s enjoyment of a 1980’s sci-fi comedy show. I must remember to write that one down for my psychiatrist.

Kochanski: Red Dwarf’s very own Yoko Ono.

Still, as much as I loved – and still love – the show, something went wrong: Rob Grant, one of Red Dwarf’s creators and one half of its writing team, quit the show after series six. It became clear that Rob was the writer responsible for the ‘com’ part of the ‘sit-com’ equation, and a noticeable dip in quality was evident following his departure. Series 7 still had some excellent moments – most notably the JFK-themed curry hunt – but the dissolution of Red Dwarf’s writing partnership, along with the decision to forgo a studio audience and film the show more like a comedy-drama, changed the atmosphere and ‘feel’ of Red Dwarf for the worse. Kochanski didn’t help either. She was shit (the character, rather than the actress) (yeah, add that rider to spare her feelings, Jamie, because she’s definitely going to be one of the three people who actually read this shite, you fucking egotist).

Danny John Jules as The Cat.

The Cat in particular became a one-dimensional retard, who seemed to spend his time pulling stroke faces and uttering the odd hackneyed and unfunny line about corduroy trousers. It was the cat’s almost sociopathic selfishness, vanity and callousness that made him funny in the earlier series, not his stupidity, which was never so much emphasised. Things picked up a bit with series 8, although I do agree with one Amazon reviewer who said that the show became like ‘Chuckle Brothers in Space.’ Also, in general, I feel it would have been better if the series had stayed with the six-separate-stories format and left the two-and-three-parters alone. I really liked the episode ‘Cassandra’, though, with the super-computer that could predict the future. It felt like classic ‘Dwarf’ again.

The pant-shittingly bad ‘Back to Earth’.

Then came the three-part special ‘Back to Earth’, broadcast on Dave in 2009, that was so hellishly bad it felt like Doug Naylor had travelled back through time to 1989 to personally spunk in my face. The entire first part – especially the tomato banter between Rimmer and Lister, and the distressingly cringe-worthy scene in which Rimmer conducted away to himself oblivious to the plight of his ship-mates as they battled a giant squid on the monitors behind him – almost made Citizen Khan look like the single greatest comedy ever produced. Fair enough, some of the ideas in ‘Back to Earth’ were inventive, if not a little derivative, but so what? It’s a comedy. It’s supposed to make me laugh, first and foremost.

Anyway, ‘Back to Earth’ was discussed on a comedy forum a few years back, and I found an interesting bit of chat about it from Scottish comedian Stu Who?.

Ok … so here’s a hypotheses … eh?

When we are younger and haven’t watched a vast amount of comedy, sit-coms, etc, we adopt some programmes which grow, with the passing of time, to be our nostalgic, firm favourites.

In their time, they were quite good, but weren’t really the classics of comedy that we think they were.

If the show is revived, we tend to compare it with the rose-tinted view of the previous series, rather than reality.

Or … in other words:

Red Dwarf was a pile of juvenile shite back then … and still is.

Discuss

I hope he’s wrong, and this isn’t just a case of me donning rose-tinted spectacles and staring at my childhood like… well, staring at it like a creepy grandchild who won’t leave his grandpa alone.

Red Dwarf was funny. Red Dwarf IS funny.

I know it’s just a TV show, and if I’d started watching it when I was 40 I probably wouldn’t give this much of a shit. I know I’m displaying a fanaticism and a personal stake in this akin to a religious fundamentalist defending his holy book. But please, please, please let tonight’s episode exceed my expectations, and blot out the years of disappointment I’ve suffered since Rob Grant left. Let the little embers and flickers of past genius that still glowed in the show, in some form or another, in the later series rage into a comedy bush fire. Let me love Red Dwarf again. Let me laugh.

Give me back my fucking childhood, Doug Naylor! And wipe that cum off my forehead.

Being an Open Spot – The Falkirk Herald

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It must have been a slow news week at The Falkirk Herald back in June. Here’s a wee piece they did about me being an open spot, complete with entirely unnecessary moody picture. And, hey: I AM the news, motherfuckers.

Cunt of the Week (03 Sep 2012) by Ross Leslie

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Matt Bendoris – high quality journalism guaranteed.

I seriously considered making my ‘Cunt of the Week’ the pathological liar and teen romance high school preppy, Paul Ryan, after that performance at the Republican National Convention. I could also have added the embarrassing ‘turns’ by Romney-bot and former American hero, Clint Eastwood, however I remembered Jamie’s normal readership includes such intellectuals as Richard Hunter and Gregor Wappler, so I just left it as I didn’t want their brains to hurt. 

Therefore, step forward future sexual assaulter Matthew “Matt” Bendoris, for your journalistic car-crash of an interview with a fit lady, the super-talented Scottish violinist, Nicola Benedetti. Link to said article is here – http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/mattmeets/4502198/Matt-meets-Scots-violin-queen-Nicola-Benedetti.html – enjoy for yourselves.

Now, of course, you get what you deserve if you happen to read The Sun, hopefully a form of genital warts; that being said, and I believe this to be a true fact, 97 per cent of male Sun readers already have genital warts. Seriously, check it out on the Internet. And I wasn’t reading The Sun in online or print format, so don’t start by saying, ‘Haha Ross, your cock is all warty, too.’ It’s not, and I have photos to prove it, right? Anyway, yes, let’s get back to the cunt. (not with those warts you won’t, dirty – Jamie)

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a red blooded male who likes to have the sex with ladies, and have done so on hunners of occasions, absolute hunners man. I have the humans I have procreated at home to prove it. Because of this I am well aware that Benedetti is a good looking woman; however, I wouldn’t try to mentally prepare her for a sexual assault whilst interviewing her for a national newspaper and then clearly take the huff halfway through because she clearly finds me physically disgusting.

Nicola Benedetti

He then says that she doesn’t take the bonniest of photos sometimes, and she is a bit beaky. Google image this weedy, specky cunt: he looks like Harry Potter in the first movie. He then gives us a blow-by-blow account of what she is wearing, and describes her physical attributes, sweat clearly pouring onto his keyboard as he types the words.

But what does any of this have to do with fucking music!? I am not a classical music fan – I’m more of a Carly Rae Jepsen man – but she is very talented in her field and it might be an idea to ask her some questions about that, eh? I suppose she has to take her share of the blame for agreeing to speak to the cunt in the first place, or at least her agent should be fired, but maybe her agent is still pissed off she didn’t want to get her vagina out for FHM-Zoo-Nuts, or whatever it’s called these days.

He does then ask a little about her music, but this is buried amongst references to her boyfriend being a lucky man, as he somehow snared this one – perhaps by being a man, and not coming in his pants when he first saw her; and then, worryingly in this boozed-up country of ours, he mocks her for only having FOUR drinks on her birthday night out. ‘I bet she didn’t even start a single fight in a taxi queue,’ he thought to himself.

I actually emailed him when I read it to congratulate him on his fine journalistic work, and asked if he had managed to get out the semen stains from his underwear. His response?: ‘Cheers’. Why argue with a fucking moron, Leslie, why do it? In summary: Bendoris – fuck you, cunt.

Ross Leslie

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER: Ross Leslie hasn’t been doing comedy for very long, but in his short-time on the Scottish stand-up circuit he’s already won Scotland in Session’s ‘Fuck You I’m Funny’ competition, been a finalist in The Shack’s Massive Comedy Gong Show, and been violently and lubelessly hate-fucked by the circuit’s premier sexual terrorist, Vladimir McTavish.

Leslie’s first ever gig was a gong show; a gong show being the harshest, most brutal comedy environment known to man. It’s the stand-up equivalent of D-Day. Less a baptism of fire, and more a baptism of the raging and eternal flames of Hell. It certainly doesn’t do wonders for your nerves or will to live, so for Leslie to have spent the majority of his first thirteen gigs gonging it means that the man has balls like space-hoppers. Or he’s completely insane.

Jonathan King. NOT from Fife.

Ross Leslie wasn’t just born in Fife. He IS Fife. If Fife is a Kingdom, then Leslie is its king – much like a blue-bottle is king when it’s perched atop a particularly gooey mountain of dog shite. We continue the royal theme with a little known fact about Ross: he was the disgraced pop guru Jonathan King’s first victim, and the only one of King’s victims not to press charges. ‘I knew he was lying when he said he’d make me a star,’ swooned Leslie. ‘I just wanted that wonky wee mouth gorging on my stauner.’ Leslie still visits King in prison six times a year for conjugal visits, and he always takes with him a Thomas the Tank Engine rucksack containing a jizz-stained school tie, an 80s shell-suit and a giant tub of mashed bananas.

PS: I apologise for the hurtful and disgusting lie I made up about Ross in this biography. Let me set the record straight. Ross Leslie is NOT from Fife.

FOLLOW ROSS ON TWITTER: @misterross  

CHECK OUT ROSS’S BLOG:  http://mum-blings.tumblr.com/

Cunt of the Week (11 Jun 2012) by Rik Carranza

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The head cunt, presiding over his cunt empire.

My Cunt of the Week is not a single person; it’s an organisation. That’s right, Mattel, I’m looking at you. 

You see, a number of years ago – when I was much younger, smaller and more naive – I saw a movie which, at the time, blew me away. That movie was Back to the Future, Part II. If you haven’t seen it then, quite frankly, you need to re-assess your priorities in life. However, for the sake of clarification it is the second part of a trilogy of movies wherein a teenager, Marty McFly, goes on a series of adventures through time, almost shags his mother and claims to be Clint Eastwood. On a side note, if I had a time machine I would use it to punch someone at every major moment in history, or I would go back 2000 years or so to Jerusalem and claim I was Jesus. Probably the second thing. Yeah, I’d do that.

Look closely to see Rik Carranza's supporting role in BTTF2.

Anyway, in Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly goes to the year 2015 and after a series of misadventures ends up in possession of A FUCKING HOVERBOARD! That’s right: a hoverboard. A skateboard with no fucking wheels! The first time I saw this I was too young to blow my load, but, trust me, it gave me the same feelings.

According to the movie, the hoverboard in question was made by Mattel. Given that the movie originally came out in 1989 and was partially set in 2015, it is safe to assume that Mattel didn’t have the product back then. However, as we are coming up for 2015, by my reckoning hoverboards should be coming out within the next couple of years; you know, so we’ve got time to become familiar with how they work. With this in mind, I contacted Mattel to ask whether or not their hoverboards would be hitting the market soon. This was their reply:-

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Hello

Thank you for your email.  The Hoverboards are not part of the UK range, but we do value your feedback and this will be passed to the relevant departments for their future reference. 

Kind Regards

Karen Allen

Consumer Response, Mattel UK

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I felt disappointment until I saw the phrase: ‘NOT PART OF THE UK RANGE’. So it does exist then? Awesome! Getting a little bit excited I did some research and found this: http://www.slashgear.com/mattel-hover-board-prepped-for-2012-holiday-release-13213241/

It’s a fucking replica! It doesn’t hover, it just makes some shitty little whooshing noises. Fuck you, Mattel. I want a real hoverboard; not some replica. Adding further insult to injury, it’s only available in the US. By releasing this, Mattel aren’t satisfying fans. They are fucking with us. Acting like strippers by showing us the goods, but not letting us touch. There are self-lacing shoes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Efr2TaEPo), holograms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TpDxLfjHc&feature=player_embedded), video calling (http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/home), and video googles (http://www.geeksugar.com/CES-2008-Awe-eMagins-OLED-Microdisplay-Headset-943210), but still no hoverboard. So get your ass in gear, Mattel, and give me my hoverboard.

Rik Carranza

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER The end result of multiculturalism gone wrong (at least according to the Daily Mail), Rik embraces both cultures the same way John Terry embraces racial harmony. When he’s not trying to make people laugh he likes sports from the comfort of his couch, movies from the comfort of his couch and pet ownership from the comfort of his own couch. In fact on the few occasion that he leaves his couch he has had some success in stand up comedy, which he started in 2009 and still can’t be bothered to quit.

Rik was arrested in 2007 for having sex with a snowman in a school playground. The terms of Carranza’s release state that he must spend the winter months sedated to prevent any further sexual outrage, so unfortunately you won’t be able to book him for your Christmas party.

FOLLOW RIK ON TWITTER: @rcarranza

READ RIK’S BLOG: http://rikcarranza.blogspot.co.uk/

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Write for next week’s Cunt of the Week (CoTW) : http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/01/cunt-of-the-week/