Please role-play making a hotel reservation by phone
I cleaned my mouse at work. I believe the greatest contribution anyone could make to human hygiene is to develop a keyboard and mouse that do not need to be touched. This probably makes me sound like Howard Hughes, but I think the best thing you can do with your old age is develop irrational phobias and go insane. In fact keyboards and mice should probably have sensors that detect if there is any food or bacteria on your fingers and if necessary run and hide underneath the huge pile of Boards And Solutions magazines on your desk. The second greatest contribution will be making the word "hyg**ne" easier to spell.
The National TV Awards, Britain's equivalent of the Emmys* this year introduced an award for the best reality TV contestant, won by Nikki from Big Brother. Although this still isn't as stupid as Top Gear winning Best Factual Program. I'd like to know one fact that has featured in that show in the past 10 years (how to destroy a speed camera by filling it with concrete probably does not count, unless you include useful concrete-related facts such as its ability to harden underwater or the large amount of heat produced as it sets around Jeremy Clarkson in the foundations of a motorway flyover). The X Factor, which won Best Entertainment Program, has featured many more facts, such as whenever Simon Cowell tells contestants they are shit. David Schwimmer's speech while presenting an award: "Enjoy it, cherish it, savour it, because one day it will all be over. You will wake up one day in a foreign country presenting awards to shows you were not even a guest star in. Not even a call. I'm still acting, by the way." Not very often, I'll wager.
*not really. Probably Britain's equivalent of the cast of Hope And Faith** making themselves tiaras out of aluminum foil and pretending they've won Emmys.
**this is the most worthless current/recent American show I have seen but perhaps correspondents can fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
I aim to win a National TV Award next year with my new show in which we sneak up in the dark and spy on shitting bears. It will be called Torchwood, and when people say things like "the sun is rising, it is a new day" it will not have any deep and significant double meaning, it will just mean that the bears will tear your head off unless you run away in the near future.
I've decided that instead of NaNoWriMo I'm just going to write lots of random crap this month. I realise the phrase "instead of" in that sentence is a little presumptuous, as indeed is "this month", but hopefully the word "crap" will cancel that out. This is the sort of attention to detail in the choice of language I intend to practice throughout this month.
A few entries ago I expressed my excitement at Robert Fuest's film of The Final Programme finally being shown on TV. I watched it last night.
The Final Programme, based on Michael Moorcock's novel, is BRILLIANT. It has those extraordinary late 60s/early 70s aesthetics like A Clockwork Orange or Barbarella or even Tommy, but unlike Tommy (or possibly Clockwork Orange) it's not completely repulsive and stupid. The cast is eclectic but generally impressive, the photography's great, there's invention in every scene. If you crossed Blow-Up with Diamonds Are Forever and got Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct, it wouldn't be 0.00001% the film this is.
To enumerate a small fraction of its genius you have:
Pretty much any pre-1990 film about computers is excellent for its nostalgia value, whether it's the rather dodgy Demon Seed or the Japanese anime Secret of Mamo. I'm not sure if it's true to the spirit of Michael Moorcock's novel, but it's certainly true to its time, when as long as you could make a film consistently weird enough, you could be confident that your audience would be on enough drugs to appreciate it.
There's also a certain Kubrickian quality to its themes of apocalypse and science, and particularly in the ending. Though this is Kubrick played as farce, which makes it much better than Kubrick played as po-faced yawnathon. Also perhaps a certain foreshadowing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Do you see why it is great? Fuest also directed The Abominable Dr Phibes and various episodes of The Avengers. Which should make it all much clearer where he's coming from. And budgetwise it shits all over Psychomania.
If you're not sufficiently convinced to track down this movie right now, I don't know what kind of crappy taste in films you have.
The National TV Awards, Britain's equivalent of the Emmys* this year introduced an award for the best reality TV contestant, won by Nikki from Big Brother. Although this still isn't as stupid as Top Gear winning Best Factual Program. I'd like to know one fact that has featured in that show in the past 10 years (how to destroy a speed camera by filling it with concrete probably does not count, unless you include useful concrete-related facts such as its ability to harden underwater or the large amount of heat produced as it sets around Jeremy Clarkson in the foundations of a motorway flyover). The X Factor, which won Best Entertainment Program, has featured many more facts, such as whenever Simon Cowell tells contestants they are shit. David Schwimmer's speech while presenting an award: "Enjoy it, cherish it, savour it, because one day it will all be over. You will wake up one day in a foreign country presenting awards to shows you were not even a guest star in. Not even a call. I'm still acting, by the way." Not very often, I'll wager.
*not really. Probably Britain's equivalent of the cast of Hope And Faith** making themselves tiaras out of aluminum foil and pretending they've won Emmys.
**this is the most worthless current/recent American show I have seen but perhaps correspondents can fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
I aim to win a National TV Award next year with my new show in which we sneak up in the dark and spy on shitting bears. It will be called Torchwood, and when people say things like "the sun is rising, it is a new day" it will not have any deep and significant double meaning, it will just mean that the bears will tear your head off unless you run away in the near future.
I've decided that instead of NaNoWriMo I'm just going to write lots of random crap this month. I realise the phrase "instead of" in that sentence is a little presumptuous, as indeed is "this month", but hopefully the word "crap" will cancel that out. This is the sort of attention to detail in the choice of language I intend to practice throughout this month.
A few entries ago I expressed my excitement at Robert Fuest's film of The Final Programme finally being shown on TV. I watched it last night.
The Final Programme, based on Michael Moorcock's novel, is BRILLIANT. It has those extraordinary late 60s/early 70s aesthetics like A Clockwork Orange or Barbarella or even Tommy, but unlike Tommy (or possibly Clockwork Orange) it's not completely repulsive and stupid. The cast is eclectic but generally impressive, the photography's great, there's invention in every scene. If you crossed Blow-Up with Diamonds Are Forever and got Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct, it wouldn't be 0.00001% the film this is.
To enumerate a small fraction of its genius you have:
- Jenny Runacre as a glamorous, sexy, evil computer programmer wearing a succession of wonderful outfits.
- The hero keeps a fridge full of chocolate digestives.
- A trendy bar selling dehydrated wine (served by Sandra "Trillian" Dickinson).
- Brightly-coloured poison gas.
- A Hindu sage played by an elderly English actor.
- A disused German base in Lappland that was part of the Nazis' hollow earth theories.
- Sterling Hayden with the zaniest facial hair a famous actor has ever worn (even Sean Penn).
- Unique firearms, i.e. the Corneliuses' needle-guns.
- General indifference to the destruction of Amsterdam.
- A hero who tells his enemies to "piss off".
- A villain who looks like David Thewlis in Shameless.
- A message written in lipstick on a window.
- Brains in tanks.
- Jon Finch's clothes by Tommy Nutter (the best tailor in Swinging London).
Pretty much any pre-1990 film about computers is excellent for its nostalgia value, whether it's the rather dodgy Demon Seed or the Japanese anime Secret of Mamo. I'm not sure if it's true to the spirit of Michael Moorcock's novel, but it's certainly true to its time, when as long as you could make a film consistently weird enough, you could be confident that your audience would be on enough drugs to appreciate it.
There's also a certain Kubrickian quality to its themes of apocalypse and science, and particularly in the ending. Though this is Kubrick played as farce, which makes it much better than Kubrick played as po-faced yawnathon. Also perhaps a certain foreshadowing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Do you see why it is great? Fuest also directed The Abominable Dr Phibes and various episodes of The Avengers. Which should make it all much clearer where he's coming from. And budgetwise it shits all over Psychomania.
If you're not sufficiently convinced to track down this movie right now, I don't know what kind of crappy taste in films you have.