Talk To Rex

I’ve just had Barclaycard’s online insecurity check decide I’m not me… while listening to John Finnemore’s sketch about credit card security codes.

I hate reality. At least John’s world has jokes.

Some people may have previously been aware of Heil Honey, I’m Home, a 1990 British sitcom cancelled – for some reason – after only one episode. Apparently it helps to know that it’s satirising 1930s politics within the context of a parody of US 1950s sitcoms…

…sorry about the long silence. I’m MDing a satirical sketch show at the moment and it’s rather taken it out of me. Whatever “it” really is.

If you get bored while you’re waiting for me to get “it” back, have a listen to the wonderful John Finnemore, Apparently.

It just took me three attempts to spell the word “maybe”.

First time round it came out as “maby”, which I could see was going to be wrong even as I was writing it. I decided to try it without the “y”, which I felt was getting in the way, and came out with “mabie”, which was arguably even further from the truth and a silly thing to do because I knew there was a “y” involved somewhere.

I suppose the question is, how long before I am reduced to dribbling and gutteral snorting, assuming this can only get worse?

I dreamt that I was at a Footlights alumni event – not a performance, really, but just a tiny room with old Footlighters standing up and doing old material for each others’ enjoyment (like that would ever happen…). A young Dudley Moore was sitting behind me making sarcastic comments about everyone because he thought it was all a bit crap and wanted to be the centre of attention (I know Dudley Moore was never at Cambridge, but my subconscious seems to have a problem with facts), and next to me James Aylett gave me an encyclopaeidic commentary about all the performers and their material.

Then James Bachman got up with some random bloke and they sat on stools with guitars, and when he strummed a chord the whole room erupted and applauded ecstatically. And James Aylett said, “oh, brilliant, they’re doing the fudge song!”

In my dream, at least, I was well aware of the reputation of the fudge song – it had been spoken of in hushed tones when I was in Footlights as the damndest funniest song ever written by a Footlighter ever.

In actual fact, the song turned out to be a musical setting of the food chain of sea creatures, set to an old musical hall tune. I couldn’t hear all of the words because people were laughing so uproariously and singing along (even Dudley Moore begrudgingly stopped making sarcastic comments) – but I remember feeling a mixture of envy that the song could provoke such a huge response, and bewilderment because it seemed to me that it wasn’t very funny at all.

I woke up before they reached any kind of punchline.

…because in spite of the aforementioned overreliance on Bible-by-numbers imagery and music (actually it’s the soundtrack that really doesn’t meet the quality of the rest of the drama), this is one of the best things the BBC has done for a long time. The acting is uniformly excellent, the script is intelligent and gripping, and it manages to be surprising but not in a cocky way – unusually, Pilate is a bit of a bastard, Caiaphas is a very reasonable man and Judas is entirely sympathetic, yet none of this feels forced or unnecessary, just an intelligent and historically-informed reading of a well-known story.

So what’s my gripe? I must have one, seeing as how it’s the only thing that spurs me into blogging these days.

My gripe is with BBC scheduling. Episode one was shown last Sunday, episode two was shown at a different time on Monday, then we have to wait until Friday for the third installment at yet another different time, before the final episode on Sunday which the BBC website usefully informs me is at a time “TBA”.

When I first heard about this drama nearly a year ago, I was told that the plan was to show the drama in five half-hour installments at a fixed time across the week, essentially soap opera-style (as the BBC did very successfully with Bleak House). So why the change of plan? Loss of nerve in head office, anyone?

It seems both utterly foolish and quite typical of the BBC to squeeze their beautiful and expensive drama into whatever slots were available rather than treat it as the prime time major adaptation it is, quite probably because somebody decided at the last minute that Jesus doesn’t have the pulling power of John Jarndyce. As a result, whilst I’m sure many middle class churchgoers will make the effort of hunting down episodes of The Passion, I doubt very much that it’s going to attract vast numbers of casual viewers.

Which is a shame, because it really is an awful lot better than Torchwood.

When I first told Alastair that I was writing a Britten biopic, he said “let me guess, it begins with a distant shot of Benjamin Britten walking along a beach”.

Which, of course, it doesn’t. Because it would be one of those immediate cliches that, in my case, has me running to turn off the television (or, less conveniently, the cinema).

The equivalent for films about Jesus – actually, anything biblical – is a shot of the desert and panpipes. Instant turn off, and surely the kind of thing any self-respecting director would look for alternatives to (even Mel Gibson managed to do something interesting here).

So, delighted though I was to hear about the BBC’s The Passion, a serious attempt to do something new with a Gospel dramatisation (it’s got Paul Nicholls in, it must be serious), I was pretty dismayed when the first thing it gave me was desert and panpipes. Actually I’m afraid I haven’t managed to get any further in than that yet.

This is deeply sad, not least because Minghella’s uniformly superb output has been curtailed so tragically early.

He was one of the few directors who had me running to the cinema the moment his films were released; he once made me cry out loud in a cinema, and his gorgeous production of Madame Butterfly had to be seen to be believed (which is unusual for an opera, where hearing is usually the primary sense…); he understood, I think better than any directors of his generation, the finest points of the art of storytelling, he instinctively knew how to use images, and had a better grasp of music than many a film composer.

Didn’t know him personally, you understand… but he’s up there in the top five film writers who I have learned most from. Top three, even. I’d say that every one of his films is a masterclass in the art, if that didn’t make them sound so dry.

And I’m gutted there won’t be any more of them.

For the last month I’ve had my old computer set up in my room, taking up a lot of space and not looking terribly pretty next to the new one but there because of my paranoid fear that I would suddenly discover that I had forgotten to transfer an important document onto my new computer, or that my new computer didn’t do something right and I would have to do it using my old one until I found a better way to do it, or that if I put the old one away the new one would suddenly stop working and I’d have to get the old one out again.

And in a way the old computer served its purpose, in that I felt perfectly safe and happy even though I didn’t need to turn it on once.

Today I put it away. In a box in a cupboard, an operation which involved much complicated manoeuvring of other boxes thanks to our relatively limited storage space and the fact that we all seem to own an improbably high number of boxes. It took the best part of an hour to win this life-size game of Tetris but I did it and now my room is nice and tidy and I need never look at the old computer again.

I decided I would celebrate this triumph by updating my website. After half an hour of happily tippy tapping away some new words for the news page about how there really isn’t much news at the moment, I got ready to upload it to the interweb, for which I need but one simple web address for the FTP window that I upload it to.

Wonder where I put that then?

Ah yes. On the desktop of my old computer. It would appear to be the document that I forgot to transfer.

Of course, something like this was bound to happen, but to happen on the same day as I put my old computer in a cupboard – that’s just fate rubbing my face in the whole crappy situation and gloating over the fact that I’m going to spend an hour tomorrow moving boxes to get the bloody information back.