Went to the Union Chapel for a comedy gig on Saturday, where the line-up was far far better than the acoustics. It's lush for music, that church; comedy struggles. Audience banter relies on a relay system to be understood; the man at the back who offered self up to compere Maxwell as one from far away was not, as I thought, from Nepal but rather ( Read more... )

Having finished my work for the day, I've spent the last hour or so satisfying an itch of curiosity.

I now know, and have the workings to prove it that:

- Of the 470 guests in 156 episodes of QI (inc. Comic Relief specials), 103 (21.9%) have been women ( Read more... )

Whoop! You can now see 4 short board meetings from what the Grauniad have called the Alernative Comedy Memorial Society, huzzah huzzah. In which 3 hour long playground-for-comedy-and-experimentation shows are distilled into 5-7 minute sketches, with almost all the ACMS board (Tom Golding subbing in for his ex Sara Pascoe) and a proper sense of ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I read Baxter & Pratchett's Long Earth, set 10-ish years in the future where people have realised they can [to use a NacMacFeegle term] craw-step sideways into one of those parallel Earths that in 1957 Hugh Everett postulated may be there. Mr E from Eels' dad, gently opening the door to a new sort of philosophical quantum mechanics, and ( Read more... )

In June, in what may have been the most Hay Festival thing EVER, actor Jeremy Irons read TS Eliot's Four Quartets to an audience who were: a) delighted to be in the presence of his great actorliness, b) probably more familiar with 'The Lion King' than modernist poetry. (I definitely am, and I studied such works at college.) A lot of the words just ( Read more... )

Have you given money to Comic Relief this year?

This is a link to the point in Friday's coverage where they showed Jennifer Saunders throwing clean M&S pants at shewho, because of Mark Watson.

That is worth at least one pound, I reckon.

Maybe more, if you watch from the start of the segment. And get to the end, to see what Rufus Hound did for charity ( Read more... )

Listening to Mark Radcliffe interviewing Darwin Deez, yer singing man with the stupid haircut. He's just described self as a VISIONARY, because he's an Aries. And Mark, who let the first bit go, has interrupted the Zodiac enthusings to ask if that starsign makes him "strop-tastic", a particularly British idiom the American then struggles with. And ( Read more... )

Have you seen/heard Macklemore & Lewis' Thrift Shop? So damned pleasing.

As is the jazz-age Postmodern Jukebox version. Frickin' awesome.

No. Not that British investigators have found, anyway.

Though basing your evidence on THEY DON'T ALWAYS SIT NEXT TO EACH OTHER seems kind of shonky; maybe one hen had said something considered cutting, and was being briefly ostracised from the perch space...

Some things I have just learnt, reading Schedule 1 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 198226.1 If you gives a second-hand dealer a false name or address when selling them something, you can be fined up to £200 ( Read more... )