Uncategorized

• to re-read every book I own
• to hack the arms off people who wear large and ungainly rucksacks on crowded tube trains
• to get a large number of stickers saying "terrorist" and start tagging people with them
• to subcontract my job to a history of art graduate

There are people trying to sell our book on Amazon, used, for more than the RRP. Given Amazon is offering it at about 65% RRP, this seems more than somewhat crazy. Or is it just more clever than I can figure out?

Is it just me, or does Pilsner Urquell sound like a particularly nasty creature from Tolkien?

Frodo slept on the ground that night, famished as he had never been before. Amongst Hobbits, missing one meal was considered eccentric, and he had never heard of anyone missing two. It had been three days now since he had seen Sam, with his blessed ability to make food out of whatever he could find. He could smell the meal that the orcs were cooking, and wished that he could not.

Morning light was kissing the mountains when they came for him. The leader of the orcs was joined by the Pilsner Urquell, fresh from the caverns beneath the Orthanc. Frodo could sense Saruman’s stench about him.

—-

Normal blogging will be resumed once I stop having strange ideas run through my head when I look at bottles of beer.

Outside my office is a small series of grass humps. Pigeons sit on it. No one’s sure why it’s there. Inside my office is my desk. Soft toy zebras sit on it. No one’s sure why I’m there either.

It’s just another ennui afternoon here, which is just a pretentious way of saying I’m bored and pissed off about it. Half the office have gone to Google for lunch, and not come back yet; close to the other half have taken the afternoon off under DoubleClick’s Summer Working Hours (which sounds like it should be its own timezone, but just means you get every other Friday off). Yesterday was one part good to one part vodka, so little about today has been enjoyable; basically nothing since I got into the office.

So I’ve been doing what anyone in my situation would do: finding books on the history of information. (Actually, my sister’s being doing most of the work, as she has the history contacts.) Witness Empire and Information, a history of how information and communication in colonial India led to the downfall of British governance. (Judging by the cover, there’s a severe danger of period woodcuts and cartoons that could now be considered racist.)

Next up: a refreshing history of cod.

I’m not sure I get this. We want to reduce energy consumption, right? So let’s have an enormous series of concerts, which millions of people will drive to, watch on their television or the internet, or listen to on radio; and which will use an enormous amount of electricity to power in the first place. I remember an estimate for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert that the energy used for that one evening could power Luton for a week. Can we get figures on what the eight Live Earth concerts are using?

I’m all for musicians doing their bit, but do you see them turning it down? Something more appropriate, surely, would have been a massive, world-wide, series of local, acoustic concerts?

I’m going out to enjoy the sunshine. I’ll turn my computer off before I go.

This beats the New York Times. Easily.

This is a lesson in the dangers of doing early morning live interviews and getting quoted (or in some cases misquoted) directly from them.

But for all that I wish they hadn’t gone and written down the “bang bang bang” bit (not that it made a lot of sense when I said it either), I think it’s all worth it for the header: Prescott ‘difficult’.

I’m a bit worried about these apparent “physical scenes”, on the other hand. Are people going to be expecting some kind of Prescott ballet?

We’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, and although there’s a really neat, subtle, clever way of dealing with them, we’re both far too busy to set it up right now. Accordingly, with regret, comments are disabled.

But wait! If you really want to comment, do please email web at talktorex, and we can set you up a special Talk To Rex account just for you to add comments! Won’t that be special?

James & James

Yeah, sorry. What with convalescing from tonsillitis, rehearsing Tony Blair – the Musical and keeping some very odd hours, blogging has somehow slipped off my agenda. It may only be a coincidence, but the same time as my blog entries petered out, there was an alarming resurgence of activity on John Finnemore’s blog, hitherto dormant for months on end. I’m wondering if I’m the victim of some kind of black magic here. Even Alastair has managed to write something this week, including a description of me as “tragic and bedraggled” which pretty much sums up the current state of affairs.

But seeing as how I’m up to my ears in a groundbreaking piece of topical theatre, it would be remiss of me not to comment on the fact that Saturday night saw two simultaneous televisual explorations of the post of Prime Minister, both of them rather awful for different reasons.

In our publicity and press information for Tony Blair – the Musical we have been constantly reinforcing the fact that our aim is not to exaggerate aspects of Blair’s time in power to serve our own dramatic ends, but to try to give it a bit of perspective by seeing it through his eyes. I have also mentioned that a lot of recent comedy/satire/drama about Blair has completely failed to do this, and ends up either portraying Blair as stupid, or as an evil, power-crazed warmonger (for the record, he is neither). So I was delighted to find my views vindicated (again) by Channel 4’s The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair.

This wasn’t, I’m afraid, a clever combination of my 2006 Fringe show The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget with the one I’m working on now; it was a programme purporting to be a documentary in which moody pictures of Blair, his face in shadow and his eyes beady and calculating, were accompanied by dramatic music and histrionic voiceovers saying things like “this is the leader who transformed Labour into a ruthless vote-winning machine… a man who came to office promising to unite the nation only to bitterly divide it. A man who wanted to be a great reformer at home, only to take the country into bloody conflicts abroad…” By five minutes in I was wondering how we could have been so blind as to make an insane meglomaniac the most powerful man in the country.

Which was also the concept behind the BBC’s alternative programming, though their Prime Minister was considerably less nasty. Although yes, he was shown to be callous and to have blood on his hands, he was essentially a jovial character – a man who bounced around, winking at the camera and making jolly asides to dissipate the tension even in the darkest of situations. Although not the kind of company I would necessarily keep myself, he certainly wasn’t the grim, threatening monster that we saw in Tony Blair over on Channel 4. This Prime Minister was really a bit cuddly, all things considered.

Which was odd, because he was meant to be The Master, insane Time Lord, arch-rival of the Doctor and one of the most evil villains in the whole of time and space.

Perhaps the scripts were mixed up. But more likely this was just another example of the current production team on Doctor Who not knowing the difference between a good idea and a bad idea. For a tragically brief four minutes last week we got to see the Master as played by Derek Jacobi, who chose to be sinister rather than bouncy: this was a good idea. Replacing Jacobi with a Master who bounces around like a Chuckle Brother on crack: that’s a bad idea, that is.