Oh Dear, Oh Dear

Evil Tim Footman has tagged me to tell lies about the Chuckle Brothers on the internet. Or more precisely, seven true facts and one lie. And only about one of the Chuckle Brothers. And you have to guess which fact is factually incorrect.

I can choose which Chuckle Brother I want to lie about, apparently, although up until a few minutes ago that was something of a moot point, since up until a few minutes ago I had no idea who the Chuckle Brothers actually are.

(I know! And me with a Masters degree in popular culture and everything! Raymond Williams would be awfully disappointed.)

All the name conjured up in my head was a rather confusing montage of Chuck Norris and those two scousers from Harry Enfield who say 'calm down calm down' and bob from side to side.

I have since established that the Chuckle Brothers are neither martial arts action heroes nor comedy Northerners from a TV sketch show. I had to find this out for myself, because Mr BC was no real help in the matter:

Me: Do you know anything about the Chuckle Brothers?

Mr BC: Hmm. I think Richard wrote an episode for them once.

Me: Anything else?

Mr BC thinks for a moment.

Mr BC: No.

Anyway, these days we are fortunate enough to have access to an oracular fount of human knowledge, namely 'the' Wikipedia. Here are some facts that I sourced from 'the' Wikipedia about Paul Chuckle, who is one of the Chuckle Brothers. One of them is factually inaccurate. Can you spot which one?

1. Paul Chuckle (real name Paul Elliot) is one of the Chuckle Brothers.

2. Paul is a comedy Northerner, but not one from a TV sketch show.

3. That's not to say that Paul isn't in a TV show, because he is. It's called Chuckle Vision, and it's meant for children, which is why I've never seen it. (This will probably change soon.)

4. Paul has a catchphrase, but it isn't 'calm down calm down'. It's the equally lexically economical 'oh dear oh dear'.

5. When Paul crashed a motorbike while on holiday in Kefalonia, he was dismayed to discover that, far from rushing to his aid, a number of onlookers had instead chosen to loiter at a distance intoning 'oh dear oh dear' in a comedy Northern accent. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the occupational hazards of showbusiness.

6. Or they might have been actual Northerners who were just saying 'oh dear oh dear' in a concerned tone, only in his disorientated state, Paul mistook them for fans. A loss of perspective regarding one's own importance in the grand scheme of things is another of the occupational hazards of showbusiness.

7. Also, this was reported in the Metro, so it might all have been made up to start with.

8. Paul and his brother Barry are very popular in Mexico, where they are known as Los Hermanos Chupacabras.


Los hermanos Chupacabras: ¡uy uy uy!

Erm...over to you.


UPDATE: Far better efforts are to be found at Slaminsky (Perkin Warbeck), First Nations (Friedrich Nietzche), Betty's Utility Room (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole) and Geoff's blog (Madame Blavatsky)...

Look Out At The Station

Mr BC and I get on the train at Truro. Presently, a well-spoken lady comes up to where we are sitting.

WELL-SPOKEN LADY: (indicating seat next to Mr BC) Is this seat free?

MR BC: I think s-

FLORID GENTLEMAN: (having just arrived on the scene) No, that's my seat.

ME: (indicating seat next to me) This one's free.

WELL-SPOKEN LADY: (with evident disdain) Oh, I couldn't possibly sit there, back to the engine. I would be sick.

MR BC: Me too.

FLORID GENTLEMAN: Me too.

ME: (inwardly) Why, you shower of lily-livered weaklings, honestly. Look at me, I've clambered out of a river gorge in Africa in the beating hot sun, not to mention battled with killer flies* in the Venezuelan jungle and swum in the cold North Sea on New Year's Day, and you can't even contemplate sitting on a train looking backwards? What's the country coming to, I don't know, tut tut, blah blah blah....

Outwardly, I give the well-spoken lady a disapproving frown.


Later:

MR BC: That was Jenny Agutter.


Crikey. I wonder what the karmic retribution is for frowning at a National Treasure.



* Well, I *thought* they were killer flies. It was only after our guide had shouted 'No pican!' at me for about the 80th time that it dawned on me she wasn't shouting 'Run for your life!'** but in fact 'They don't bite!'.

** Or, more cryptically, 'No pecans!'.

My Interesting Life

It was brought to my attention by Annie Rhiannon that I had not blogged for some time.

Here then is a quick roundup of things that happened during my blogworld absence:

1. Visitors from Cornwall came, intent on spotting celebrities in That London. Within 48 hours they had racked up Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Noel Gallagher, Dustin Hoffman and Jodie Kidd, most of them in the organic wholefood supermarket in Kensington. Not to be outdone, Mr BC and I went to Sainsbury's and saw Rula Lenska. Chiswick is a hotbed of A-list stardom and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

2. I had an email from an informant, informing me that the informant had seen Peter Serafinowicz's brother in the High Road Brasserie, and that he looked just like Peter Serafinowicz (the brother, not the informant).

3. I retrieved a cat from SE27.

4. LC and I sold something we'd made* to a very big company, which made us happy. Capitalism rocks.

5. I watched Mr BC play Bioshock. At no point did he exclaim 'that's what you get for messing with the J-man!', but it can only be a matter of time.

6. The television broke. No one was unduly bothered.

7. I attended an event about how no one in the television industry knows what's going on any more. A man from Channel 4 said the channel had run out of money** and had asked the government for help. A scuffle broke out in the audience. It was a bit like the last days of the Roman Empire, but with free canapés.

8. I offered to be interviewed for an online magazine on the subject of fear of public speaking. The thought of talking to the journalist is making me anxious.


* When I say 'we' made it, what I mean is LC made it, while I hovered behind his shoulder making helpful suggestions like 'I think the logo should be bigger'. I am very much the Pointy-Haired Boss to LC's Dilbert.

** My commitment to factual accuracy and editorial integrity compels me to add that this may be a slight exaggeration. Although it might go some way towards explaining this (the bit about the sitcom, not the bit about the mobile phone).


UPDATE: In accordance with my new editorial policy of 'telling lies then correcting them in the footnotes', I should acknowledge that my informant points out that Peter Serafinowicz's brother didn't look 'like Peter Serafinowicz' so much as like 'what you would expect Peter Serafinowicz's brother to look like'.

Hobbit

The lovely Mr BC and I are dining in Pizza Express in Chiswick. A young man comes in to order a takeaway, wearing jeans that are really quite daringly tight for W4. Then he goes away again. Presently:

MR BC: That was a hobbit.

ME: Hmm?

MR BC: That was Merry. Or Pippin.

ME: Oh gosh, yes, so it was! It was him out of -

MR BC: Lost.

ME: I was going to say Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.

MR BC: That's him. Dominic, er, Thing.

ME: Yes.


CUT TO:


INT. QUINQUIREME TOWERS - MORNING

MR BC and PATROCLUS in bed, drinking tea.

MR BC: ...and we saw a hobbit.

ME: Ooh yes, I'd forgotten about that! I'm going to write a blog post about it. Something about collecting the whole set, in various chain restaurants in Chiswick. I'm going to look out for Elijah Wood in Zizzi's, that sort of thing. I'm not sure I'd recognise them all, though.

MR BC: You could recognise them from the tattoos.

ME: What tattoos?

MR BC: They got tattoos at the end of The Fellowship Of The Ring.

ME: In Rivendell? I don't remember that bit.

MR BC: (pityingly) In real life. All nine of them, they got tattooed with a 9, in Elvish, when they finished filming.

ME: Nine? I was only collecting four hobbits!

MR BC: Only John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli, didn't want a tattoo, so his stunt double got it instead. But his stunt double doesn't look anything like him, so he'd be harder to spot.

ME: This is all too difficult now. I think I'll just put up the Lord of the Rings video from Flight of the Conchords. It's funny.

Just Don't Ask Me How I Know

The lovely Mr BC and I are in a minicab, on our way to Paddington Station.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: And now on London's Heart 106.2, Toby Anstis enters the Time Tunnel.

There is a slight pause.

ME: Toby Anstis's cat once shagged my cat.

Mr BC: ...

ME: Yes, I know, it's not one of my better claims to fame.

Mr BC: ...

ME: Actually it sort of is.

Just Generally Overexcited

Well, other than general overexcitement, I have completely failed to identify a unifying theme to link all of the major elements of the past week's shenanigans, which included:

1. One tip-top super Iron & Wine/Calexico gig at the Kentish Town Forum, at which the mighty nibus and I had to pretend to be from Radio 2 (we weren't very good at this, and kept getting in the wrong queue), and which thanks to our swanky guest list status we were allowed to view from a distant and muggy vantage point somewhere at the back, near the ceiling. I'm still not totally convinced about Calexico's new album, but All Systems Red, which gradually builds up into a mighty wall of guitar noise, is almost Sigur Rós-ishly awesome live. Nice work, Calexico boys!

2. One tip-top super Jenny Lewis gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, which was only slightly marred by her creepy 70s-horror-film-style dress and the fact that I had inadvertently got tickets for a distant and muggy vantage point somewhere at the back, near the ceiling. But the lovely Jenny has a gorgeous voice and some spankingly good songs, *and* she can rhyme 'mirrors' with 'fears', which is a skill sadly denied to us Brits. Nice work, Jenny!

3. One tip-top super lunch that was attended by ACTUAL REAL TELEVISION AND FILM STARS. I got terribly overexcited and started shouting things like "perspicacity!" and "it's grown a hive mind - it's producing its own thoughts!", which didn't work quite as well as conversational gambits as I'd hoped. Luckily my lovely companions (most of whom I think I also offered jobs to, like some kind of diminutive, scruffy-haired, one-woman press gang) made up for this by steering the conversation towards sensible things like football and Shakespeare. Nice work, lovely companions!

4. A meeting with my tutor, who professed my tortuous 5,000-word essay to be "rather excellent", and asked if I'd thought about doing a PhD, at which point I got ridiculously overexcited again and started rattling on about virtual gift economies, the decommercialisation of culture, and similar claptrap. Nice work, future pop-culture academic patroclus!

5. The Modernism exhibition at the V&A, which for anyone considering going, is not only very, very, very well put together, but is also stuffed full of (possibly unintentionally) comical items and captions. The captions are always my favourite thing about any art exhibition, and I often find myself reading them without even looking at the actual artworks on display. Today's favourite (relating to this building) was:

[Bruno] Taut believed that glass could orchestrate human emotions and contribute to the creation of a spiritual Utopia.

Apparently Modernism was all about achieving universal human happiness by getting everyone to live in buildings that look like upside-down daleks, wear felt suits decorated with brightly coloured chevrons, and sit on columns of air. Sadly it largely failed in these ambitions, but you have to admire them for trying. Nice work, ultimately unsuccessful proponents of the modernist aesthetic!

6. Nutso amounts of work, which only served to contribute further to this week's general ridiculous levels of stress and overexcitement. Nice work, work!

Ahem. I think I'll just slink off now, take a couple of valium* and lie down till I regain some semblance of composure. Nice work, prescription barbiturates**!


* Not really - Bach Rescue Remedy is as far as I venture into the world of narcotics these days.

** Or, more accurately, 'Nice work, prescription benzodiazepines!'- thanks to Dr Snackspot, renowned comestibles specialist, for the correction. I knew I should have looked that up.


tags: calexico | jenny lewis | V&A | modernism

Random Celebrity Crime Incident

Ah, the Camden New Journal. They use Telewest, you know. That's probably why their links are all 404s and have comically unrelated filenames.

Anyway it's probably a good thing - reading about all that local violence could make you paranoid. Not that long ago I saw a guy kick another guy to death in Kentish Town Road, on an otherwise normal Saturday afternoon. In an unrelated incident, H. was asked by the police to stay away from a gun-wielding Adam Ant for his own safety.

But despite the murders and stabbings and muggings and the drunks being sick on the steps of the Kentish Town Baths, posh estate agents FPD Savills are seeing fit to ask £295,000 for a one-bedroom flat on Prince of Wales Road. This is the sort of thing that makes me think the property boom might come to an end quite soon.