I don’t know which is worse, the Drifters singing O Holy Night, or Aled Jones singing O Holy Night in a duet with his younger treble self. They are both dreadful, but I think that now especially, in the aftermath of Strictly Come Dancing, we must face the possibility that Aled Jones may in fact be a better dancer than he is a singer.
Either way, I have a feeling that this festive season is not going to be good for my skin.
I woke from a dream of teaching Willow improvisation. I offered to share a taxi with her from her house to school, but apparently her laptop wouldn’t fit. I pointed out that “taxis are, like, quite big these days”, but she wasn’t convinced by my pretending-to-be-Oz antics.
Also, related to the impro workshop (no, really), Xander was drawing things on a tree, although it turned into a whiteboard when Oz started drawing happy clouds. I had to show him how to use the board eraser though, so I feel pretty good about things.
It’s just occured to me that I might have been Buffy, which is quite disturbing. Maybe I was Giles, though, which would be good.
In real life, there’s a guy at the station who looks a bit like John Goodman. The dream world was still better, though, and the happy clouds were really cute.
It seems to be trendy for bloggers of an ex-Cambridgey persuasion to make mention of the broadcast of John Finnemore’s play Tails You Lose on Radio 4 yesterday. So I shall join the fun and mention that I tuned in to listen on one of the computers in the office I’m working in. As a result I erroneously sent out a number of letters inviting candidates to come to interviews in May rather than January, and angered a woman who had come into the office to complain and thought we weren’t taking life seriously enough. But it was well worth it.
I will not try to describe quite what a good play it is, except to refer back to the last time it was mentioned on this website (Edinburgh 2003) when James Aylett commented that anyone who didn’t like it does not have a soul.
In this case, it is quite possible that one man who would not be particularly keen on the play is Paul Burrell, whose soul appears to be for sale on Ebay.
Later today I plan to go to a party at the house of Anthony Windram, a one-time comedy collaborator (in fact, we first appeared on stage together in an early Finnemore opus, the very fine 1999 Footlights panto Sherlock Holmes – about which undergraduates who weren’t even born in 1999 still talk in hushed and reverent tones). Anthony is one of the nicest people in the world; he also has a very amusing accent. So I am looking forward to seeing him very much indeed, especially as he has promised that if he can’t get hold of a recording of Wham’s “Last Christmas” he will sing it to me instead.
(If this happens it will presumably become “Lerst Chrerstmers”.)
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Tony
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Every time I input a new applicant into the database I’m working on I have to designate them as a “candidate”, which always causes my brain to start playing David Bowie’s very fine 1974 song Candidate, the repeated refrain of which is “if you want it, boys, get it here, thing” – so you can imagine how difficult it is for me to concentrate on my work.
“Gunmen who seized a Greek bus with 26 people on board have explosives and want to fly to Russia, one of the hostages has told Greek television.”
I’m not an expert, but shouldn’t they have hijacked a plane…?
I notice that there are fresh claims that Blunkett fast-tracked a visa for his ex-lover’s nanny.
The Home Office say these claims are ridiculous, but in these difficult times I wonder if it would be as well to lock Mr Blunkett up without trial for the next two years just in case?
(… from last night’s recording) was my unscripted grunt to signify how annoyed Joseph was with the guy who’d stuck us in his garage. There was something wonderfully satisfying about stepping back from the microphone and getting a cheery thumbs up from James.
Being a soldier was fun, though. I might have to write an audio play where I get to do nothing other than hit things and cry out “they’re over there”, and “hit it with a shovel”. Possibly involving killing vampires, so it’s less disturbing than slaughtering children.
It is estimated that, across the UK, up to 1 billion Christmas cards and as much as 83 square km of wrapping paper will end up in rubbish bins over the Christmas period.
In my opinion this is a disgraceful waste of trees which could otherwise be cut down, put in houses and decorated with fairy lights.
…I pointed out the extremely depressing undertones in Wham’s seminal hit Last Christmas.
This year I’m wondering if it’s actually more positive than I thought.
“Last Christmas I gave you my heart, the very next day you gave it away” – that’s definitely not happy, but “this year to save me from tears I gave it to someone special…”
I wonder if it could be about Jesus?
On that subject, last night I took part in a nativity/epiphany extravaganza for radio, which featured the Division’s very own James Aylett as Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary, a role which he managed to make his own without even using a tea towel.
Along with all the other men he was also a soldier when it got to the nasty bit where Herod kills all the babies. At one point in the convincingly horrific soundscape James shouted “there’s some more of them getting away over there!” and I suddenly had an image of a row of babies running off down the street.
From then on my own soldier was doubled over with laughter and I shall never find the killing of the innocents horrific again.
Talk To Rex 