#also fuck graham linehan though

[kimwxlers]

Happy The End of the Ice Age Day!

#my gifs #ted crilly #dougal mcguire #father ted #dermot morgan #ardal o'hanlon #tvedit #it's the end of the ice age... and my birthday! #also fuck graham linehan though

[tanadrin]

Imagine one day a new social trend starts spreading. It’s something unbelievably dumb. Not harmful per de, but truly silly to believe. Let’s say, I dunno, healing crystals start going mainstream. Everybody’s talking about their crystals. It becomes impolite to criticize people who believe in healing crystals. They become a big part of people’s personalities, and people on TV start talking about them, and one day years down the line politicians are debating funding for crystal-based medicine. And through it all you are sitting there going, what the fuck is happening. I thought we were all on the same page on this. You want to get along and be friendly and open minded but you cannot pretend to believe in healing crystals, this is nonsense, and when the topic comes up you refuse to lie about it. This eventually starts to have social consequences—they’re that popular!—but what can you do? You cannot pretend a lump of quartz can cure the flu or whatever. It’s just all so unbearably embarrassing.

I think what the centrist/liberal/center-left reactionary turn driven by culture war stuff feels like. And I think the key emotion is probably cringe. Not hate, not fear, though those emotions may reinforce the turn. I think in a lot of cases people who imagine themselves pretty open minded and flexible have as part of their worldview something they thought was bedrock social consensus—on the level of “healing crystals are silly woo”—so bedrock maybe that it didn’t even need to be a conceptual boundary they actually policed in their minds.

For instance, when she started her anti-trans turn, JK Rowling made a big show of not being really anti trans, just arguing that Some People Had Gone Too Far. She wasn’t a frothing religious reactionary, after all. And I believe that’s probably true! I think Rowling probably did have a mental model of sex and gender with a little bit of give in it—of the “we can humor the odd weirdo” type. But as the discussion of trans rights in the UK got more serious over her lifetime, trans people went from “the odd weirdo” to “a recognized minority,” and eventually this ran against a bedrock belief that on some level men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. To act otherwise was just too embarrassing. And she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in the name of political correctness.

Other people whose brains have been eaten by the anti-woke mind virus (as @eightyonekilograms calls it) have something going of the contrarian in them, who enjoys yelling “up yours, woke moralists!” or w/e. Im thinking of ppl like Glenn Greenwald here, or Dave Chapelle, people who seem not to feel alive except when people are mad at them. That’s a separate but interesting dynamic. And there are people like Graham Linehan who become totally unhinged through this process of auto-radicalization, moths drawn ever closer to a particular source of validation within their chosen reactionary subcommunity, until they are truly parodies of themselves. That is also an important dynamic, but it’s one that only takes hold after the initial turn has begun.

I think the role of that feeling of cringe, that refusal to entertain an idea because it is too embarrassing (even if it does actually have a decent body of research behind it, unlike crystals) is important to think about, because I am interested in how to get people over it. I know that feeling has affected my own thinking over my lifetime. I wasn’t raised particularly conservative, but I had to learn not to cringe at a lot of feminist thought before I could appreciate it and learn from it. I explicitly didn’t have that cringe when it came to gay people for whatever reason, so it never entered my mind that it might be a problem. I remember being surprised to learn when I was very young that some boys wanted to marry other boys, but my response was “huh. Go figure.” Because for whatever reason I had not picked up that this was something I was supposed to be grossed out by. A general doctrine of empathy, of trying to understand people on their own terms, can help forestall some of this stuff, but it’s not foolproof in either direction—I don’t want to believe crystals have healing powers if it becomes socially popular to do so, just because it is socially popular to do so! And if they do, I don’t want to not believe they do just because it is socially unpopular!

(Obviously the crystals thing is not a one to one metaphor for the trans thing, so don’t read too much into that. Maybe astrology would have been a better analogy. Also I’m not talking just about people whose reactionary turn is predicated on trans issues—I think this dynamic applies to everything from gay rights to the Tridentine Mass. But trans issues are a handy example bc, as the adage goes, somebody posts once about trans people and they never post anything normal again. I think the classic rapid-onset trans derangement syndrome is closely tied to the fact that gender norms are a really deep element of many people’s social-consensus-based worldview, and so challenged to that worldview are felt as really cringe.)

I’m curious if other people who grew more liberal in their thinking over time had a similar experience of having to overcome what was basically a feeling of embarrassment at certain ideas.

[beesmygod]

Since you’ve reminded me of British Television have you seen Absolutely Fabulous? I’ve only seen a couple eps so far but it defies description.

Also the IT Crowd, which makes me cry laughing even though it was written by Graham Linehan (presumably before he became the man he is today?)

AB FAB IS SOOOOO GOOD LOL. I WANT TO BE THEM....

the tragedy of darth linehan is that he was absolutely one of the top comedy tv writers of probably all human history. father ted, black books, IT crowd, etc are genuinely so fucking funny and were the foundation of a lot of people's humor. its just. he got social media and it completely fried his brain. he became this like. fucked up parody of an old man online before transphobia became his signature move. people criticized a rotten joke in IT crowd (one joke! one joke out of an entire career!!) and he just completely fucking lost it.

lol at ruining your life so much it retroactively destroys your previously glimmering legacy.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

So, what does everyone else do when there’s really depressing news on a weekend that’s painful and triggering and makes them want to distract themselves with the very silly other things? Does everyone else make a second edition of their thing that was originally meant to be a relatively short compilation but got out of hand and became a feature film?

The original version started out as a way to collect clips from various Bugle episodes in which John Oliver talks about the harrowing experience of existing on the same plane of reality as Sarah Palin, because I thought his absolute devastation about that was funny. But as it went along, I added some Daily Show clips, and then I added pictures over the audio, and then I added some video over the audio, and then next thing I knew, it was 74 minutes long. I had accidentally made a documentary/romcom about the story of John Oliver and Sarah Palin. A story that Andy Zaltzman, at one point during the documentary, acknowledges is like a romcom, and they suggest it’s like John Oliver is living the Groundhog Day movie. So that became the title of my, I’ll say it again, feature film. I called it A Groundhog Day of Hatred.

Today, I needed a distraction from the fact that everyone in the world is a terrible person, so I updated it. I added onto the end a clip from last summer’s Last Week Tonight, and a clip from last week’s Strike Force Five podcast, as both of those had not aired when I originally made this last year. It now runs at 119 minutes. Getting to the point where if this were a real movie, it would be too long.

Here’s the shiny new one, in all its glory. A Groundhog Day of Hatred, second edition:

Okay, that would be a bit of a weird thing to do with my time today, but not that bad. You know what would be worse? If in my search for distractions, I'd created a romcom-style movie poster for it:

Look, I'm being self-deprecating about what a colossal waste of time this was, but I also think this is fucking hilarious. That poster might be the funniest thing I've ever made. I will draw your attention to the top of the page, in which I chose to advertise the film with a pull quote from Richard Ayoade (whom I remembered today was John Oliver's best friend at Cambridge, and God, fuck that guy). Richard Ayoade really did write that exact thing as a pull quote, though in reality, of course, it was for Graham Linehan's book. I think we should all start a trend of quoting that Richard Ayoade statement but pretending he was talking about something besides Graham Linehan. That is a good bit, everyone get on board with it.

There is also a pull quote from the excellent @lastweeksshirttonight, who really outdid themself in capturing the style of bullshit faux-academic language in things like that.

The picture in the bottom right corner also appears in the video itself, and I was so proud of myself for finding it last year. In one of the Bugle clips, Andy Zaltzman talks about opening The Daily Mail website and seeing a picture of John Oliver and Sarah Palin on the front page. I searched for ages to find that picture, knowing I had to put it in the documentary, as visual accompaniment to the part of the audio where they talk about that. After literal hours and hours of searching, I finally thought to use the Wayback Machine, where I spent another hour trying various dates from the week before that Bugle episode aired, before I finally found it, halfway down a page that was actually a link away from the main page. But it was worth the effort, because I managed to find a picture that perfectly encapsulated the spirit of my documentary.

It has all the elements of a great film. It has anger, confusion, one man's descent into darkness. It has a battle for the soul of a nation. It has an educational element about a period of American political history. It has some tasteful nudity (audio nudity only, no visual nudity, that's what makes it tasteful). It has a star-crossed relationship. It has a harrowing journey with a note of hope at the end, followed by an epilogue. What more could you want?

It has one part where Andy Zaltzman makes a somewhat less-than-ideal comment about how she can't be VP because she has five kids to raise. In his defence, he was trying to point out the hypocrisy in someone preaching family values and then taking a job that stops them from raising their family, and I've heard Zaltzman point out that exact hypocrisy in male politicians as well, so this wasn't a specifically gendered comment. But still, I thought I'd acknowledge that it doesn't come off great when someone says something like that about a woman in the public eye. You live and you learn. You cannot hold people to everything they said in 2008.

I do think this is a genuinely interesting relic of a bygone era in American politics, when this sort of ludicrousness seemed shocking and worth being horrified about, rather than totally normalized. So my film has value as an archive for posterity. I shall premiere it at Sundance next year.

[anthonysstupiddailyblog]

Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (711): Mon 26th Feb 2024

As stated in an earlier blog I intend to enter a sitcom script into this year's Sitcommission put on by the British Comedy Guide. I've entered this competition before, once was fourteen years ago with a script that was abysmal and then in 2014 with an entry that was marginally better but had no plot. I spent most of the script describing the funny hats that my characters were wearing and although the hats I was imagining would have been HILARIOUS I've since learned that in a sitcom you can't just have characters who look funny they have to actually say and do funny things too. I went over my blog from last year to look for stuff that I could use in the script I'm going to enter for this years Sitcommission. I'll be honest a lot of the funniest stuff included in my blog from last year was just me writing about funny stuff Luna has said or done so I can't really use any of that because that would mean Luna had essentially written my sitcom. I did eventually jot down quite a few good ideas and transferred them onto little cards. Graham Linehan says that when he starts off writing a sitcom script he has about 70 ideas on cards but his sitcom scripts are always half hours whereas the script I need to write only needs to be fifteen minutes so I should only need about 35 cards. On the subject of the time limit, giving entrants only fifteen minutes is fucking stupid. Expecting you to be able to establish character and story and also pack the thing with jokes while sticking to a fifteen minute deadline is impossible. Bizarrely they justify this time limit by saying "Well most sitcoms in America don't go longer than 22 minutes"…so why is your limit fifteen minutes then? That's like offering someone a bunch of bananas and telling them "It's important to get you five a day". They also say not to make the setting too imaginative because the scripts that make it to the final are going to be acted out on a stage so it has to have a minamalist setting. Have they not heard of fucking pretending? When they watch Whose Line Is It Anyway? are they unable to laugh at the jokes because they can't get over the fact that the improvisers aren't actually weilding Lightsabers while riding on the heads of giraffes they're just pretending to? So yeah the rules are more stupid So yeah I hope the person(s) who came up with the rules to this competition gets into a car crash and the driver of the other car is thehe person(s) who changed NBA rules so the number eight to number ten teams have to play an extra game to decide who makes it to the playoffs! Legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder says that the way he writes scripts is to finish the first draft in a single day so that the next day, even though the script is shit, he has something to improve on so once I finish this Edgar Award challenge I’m going to try to get the first draft of a script written in a single day and then between now and the deadline for the competition I'll do multiple rewrites and with each one Ill make the hats my characters are wearing funnier and funnier each time then I'm bound to win the competition.

[green-violin-bow]

That is a very true post about Lovecraft and Rowling. Is it all right that I still love your Mystrade HP stories more than anything?

Anon, you lovely thing—that JKR post I reblogged wasn’t intended to make you, or me, or anyone, feel guilty about enjoying HP or the Strike books. Goodness knows, as someone who got a degree in literature in two languages, I’ve studied, and still love, an awful lot of literature by an awful lot of people with awfully shitty opinions.

I enjoyed studying Sartre’s writing...but he was about the standard level of misogynist as many men of his day. I fucking love golden age crime writing...but both Christie and Allingham were ragingly antisemitic. Some of the new editions of their work are actually edited to try and get rid of the most offensive comments about Jewish people. I love Woolf’s writing, but she (and most of the Bloomsbury Group) are often accused of elitism and classist snobbery. I fucking loved my surrealist literature module, but the backbone of it focused on Andre Breton, who was both a misogynist and extremely homophobic. The incredibly interesting women and queer men of the movement were often pushed aside both by Breton himself at the time, and as part of university curricula now. The huge majority of my literature degree, in both languages, was incredibly white, without much critical dissection of that fact—it was pretty much left up to the students to make choices seeking out postcolonial literature modules or to try and build a more intersectional approach themselves in their own research and reading.

The point is—it’s impossible to be entirely ‘Tumblr-pure’ about the literature and other cultural things that you enjoy and admire. The trick is to maintain critical distance, and to be critically engaged—to be able to say simultaneously ‘I love this’ and ‘I don’t admire or support this aspect of this book / TV show etc’. Of course there’s a part of me that grew up thinking of JKR as a wonderful, clever, thoughtful person who I admired greatly, but hey, that’s done now. She has views I don’t endorse and won’t ever support. But only people who are obsessed with being performatively ‘pure’ online will be unable to hold concurrent contradicting opinions about a cultural thing.

I’m so flattered that you love my HP Mystrade stories. I wish JKR was someone we could both admire. But we can enjoy transforming and playing in the world she created without reference to her or her opinions.

Also, it’s totally fine not to want to engage with an author’s work anymore once you’ve realised how disgusting their opinions are. I don’t think I could read The Silkworm (Galbraith) again, having realised how the caricature character of Pippa Midgley is intended to play into JKR’s transphobic agenda. Similarly even though I used to love Black Books and The IT Crowd, having witnessed Graham Linehan’s insane transphobic rants online, I just can’t watch those shows anymore. I don’t find them amusing or clever, seen with context on the creator’s bigotry. But those are personal lines in the sand, not something that should be imposed on anyone else in a childish, internet-purity ‘you’re not a Good Person™ if you choose to continue enjoying the content without reference to the creator’ way.  

Sorry about the ramble, and thank you for your question! x

#anonymous

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

The other day I made a post about the whole Robert Webb transphobia thing, and how that just sucks and it’s disappointing that the people who make cool stuff can’t just reach a basic minimum of decency so we can all keep enjoying their cool stuff (obviously, that is not the biggest negative consequence of Robert Webb perpetuating transphobic disinformation). It’s not the absolute worst example of shit people in comedy, but it just sucks. It’s not Jim Davidson. Or Russell Brand. Or Graham Linehan. And Graham Linehan brings me to the subject of this post.

If anyone wants an antidote to things that suck to any of those degrees, I’ve just listened to Michael Legge’s Halloween EP, available on Bandcamp for an eminently reasonable price (in, I like to remind people as often as I can that Bandcamp is good like this, a system where the money actually ends up where you want it to).

The main draw is this 20-minute thing called Grim Night, a spot-on parody of podcast by a failing, once-successful man who’s gotten so caught up in transphobic rhetoric that he can’t see sense anymore. It starts out as that, close enough to the bone to make me say “Wow, Michael, you’re really not messing around here, just barely keeping it general enough so you can say it doesn’t technically make it explicitly clear that it’s sending up one specific person.” But as it went along, that did get more and more explicitly clear, which I enjoyed every time. Mentions of losing friends and losing a wife and losing a career and losing respect in his industry and getting banned from Twitter and making friends with Jim Davidson on GB News and being a dick to Deborah Francis-White. Really… really doesn’t leave much room for speculation about who that is. Also he named the character “Grim Night”, the word “Grim” sounding even more like “Graham” in Michael Legge’s accent than it does in mine.

Graham Linehan is a relatively easy target, I guess, if you’re a comedian who’s not averse to starting shit within your own industry, which Michael Legge I believe isn’t, though I’m pretty sure by 2022 (when this came out) Graham Linehan was sufficiently blackballed by the comedy industry so that calling him out doesn’t really count as starting shit within the industry anyway. Honestly, I’d been meaning to listen to this for a while because I thought it would be entertaining, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until now because I didn’t expect it to be groundbreaking or anything. Left-wing comedian talks shit about Graham Linehan. Amusing thing to listen to, worthwhile thing to do (Robert Webb is an example of how we can’t just assume all comedians are on the right side of this, it definitely helps if they let us know), does take a bit of courage given Linehan’s tendency to sic his horrifying followers on anyone who criticizes him, but not exactly a new or shocking idea.

So I have to say, it was a lot better than I’d expected. It was really, really well put together. It made me laugh out loud an impressive number of times for something just under 20 minutes. Also, impressively for anything that short, it got some genuine emotion in there. Builds to a crescendo where Michael Legge actually makes an effort to capture a sense of the depth of desperation that would come with sinking to that level. Goes over the top enough to be funny, but not so far over the top that it stops feeling like this level of emotional desolation is accurate to the situation. I guess the real Graham Linehan helped Legge out with that, by being so over-the-top that you can take a parody of it pretty fucking far without it seeming surreal or inaccurate.

By the end, you can feel the absolute bleakness of Linehan’s situation (so harrowing that there’s almost an invocation of pathos, I found myself right on the edge of sympathy for Graham Linehan before I remembered just how deeply undeserving of sympathy he is, which I think is the effect Michael Legge was going for), but there’s also an emotional resonance in Michael Legge’s own anger. Because it starts out as feeling similar to his comedy anger that he’d have about loud people on a train or whatever, and by the end you can feel every bit of his genuine fury and sense of betrayal, at seeing what happened to a guy he’d clearly once looked up to, who’d horrifically let everyone down on behalf of some groups that Michael Legge is part of: people in the comedy industry, Irish comedians, people who’ve met and liked various Serafinowiczes. I’ve seen David O’Doherty talk about it too (you’ll be pleased to know that his view on Graham Linehan is: anti), and I’ve gotten a similar sense from him that there’s an extra feeling of betrayal from an Irish comedian. I realize Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland are different things, but Michael Legge drops enough references to Linehan being Irish for me to think there’s something similar there.

...I also realize I'm projecting here, and maybe imagining intentions that weren't there. I am absolutely projecting my own special, extra level of rage that I feel about people who do their horrible things while engaged in things I also do, or being part of some group with which I identify. It's an infuriating feeling of betrayal by your own.

Anyway, I think this post has lost the thread of how fucking funny it is, so to reiterate, it's fucking funny. It’s very funny all the way through, including during the harrowing ending. Michael Legge packs so much into only twenty minutes, that’s so short that he doesn’t even have time to separate it out. Be funny, be painfully emotional, be a strikingly accurate parody - all at the same time. He manages it.

I should have listened to this earlier, it’s so good. Everyone else should listen to it if you want a bit of your faith in humanity restored, that some comedians are all right. It comes with three other files, two of which are also fun. One is an extremely relatable rant about how rabidly he’ll defend the importance of building a few hours into each day for doing nothing. Another is talking shit about Andrew Tate, which is also a good thing to do. And the third is a bit that also appears in his Strawberries to Pigs audiobook, which I’ve also started today (more on that to come, but I’ve hugely enjoyed the first few chapters), so I skipped that one and will just hear it when I get to that point in the book.

#Bandcamp

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Guys, I need people to know how fucking funny it is that people are losing their mind over a Michael Legge Tweet that suggested one of the royal children was telling another royal child that King Charles is a cunt (I assume - we don’t see who he’s pointing at and it could be anyone, really, I’m pretty sure you could have just walked around that coronation event and pointed at any random person and said “cunt”, and you’d probably be correct). Honestly, does this shit happen on Twitter all the time? I mean, I know it does, that’s the entire point of Twitter. But is it this fucking funny every time? Because if it is, I might have to go on there more often.

I know it’s not actually funny. Apparently people are harassing a radio station over it, and harassing his management. And harassing Michael Legge himself, obviously, which I guess is also a seriously bad thing, but I feel like if anyone’s going to not give one fuck about that, it’s going to be Michael Legge. And he did sort of ask for it, he had to know that posting that shit would piss people off. But I think it would be fair for him to not expect it to piss people off this much. Like, if Michael Legge posted a picture of two royal children with the word “cunt” on it and then was shocked that people got upset at all, I’d say, “Oh come on, you posted something provocative and you got a reaction.” But surely it would be fair for him to be surprised that people are calling him a horrifying danger to children, right? And trying to get his management to drop him? Also trying to get him dropped by a radio station that I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually work for?

It’s also not actually funny because that’s a serious fucking problem, the way right-wing people see something they don’t like and immediately jump to it being a “danger to children”. That’s how you get people who protest drag events claiming that they’re only protecting children from predators. It’s the same basic concept, even though Michael Legge is, you know, not a drag queen. But it comes from the same thing, the idea that if someone doesn’t show deference to right-wing expectations (ie. gender roles, respect for the monarchy), then they are endangering the children, and need to be stopped in the name of the anti-pedophilia movement.

I know that. I know that. I know this has insidious roots. But fucking hell, it’s funny. Proper, laugh-out-loud funny. I read every comment on that Tweet, and they got genuine laughs out of me, way more laughs than I’d have in that same amount of time from the average comedy special. People who don’t understand quotation marks, and think he’s calling the kid a cunt. People who do get that he was putting the word in the kid’s mouth, and not applying it to the kid, but they’re still furious that he’d imply that a royal child would say such a vulgar word. Like “have a kid say a dirty word” is still a horrifyingly edgy thing, and not old as fuck. God, have these people not seen those annoying FuckH8 campaigns from like 2008? If you insist on criticizing Michael Legge for something, I guess you could point out that an “It’s funny when little kids say swear words” joke was a bit hack by about 1965. I still enjoyed the one he did, though. But the criticism you can’t level at it is that suggesting a kid saying a swear word is such a shockingly edgy thing that only a horrifying danger to children would do it.

For something that has almost nothing to do with this, I’ve had Michael Legge in my Bandcamp cart for a few weeks now. I have a cart there with Micahel Legge’s Stawberries to Pigs audiobook, his Halloween thing that I think is trashing Graham Linehan, and Nato Green’s Whiteness Album. All things I want to hear, all by comedians I want to support (as you can on Bandcamp, that’s by far the best way to financially support an artist, if there’s anything you’re willing to spend money on and it exists on Bandcamp, buy the Bandcamp version rather than any other version, that way most of the money will go to the artist, and it’s the best option for the consumer because you don’t get some link to a streaming site, you get a downloadable file), but my work lately has been really inconsistent and my ability to pay rent has been a bit precarious, so I can’t justify purchases like that, but I’m trying really hard to get a new job. So I’ve put that stuff I want in a Bandcamp cart, with the idea that as soon as I get a new job and have a more stable source of income, I’ll make that purchase. That, and I’ll get my own NextUp subscription, which I should really really do as I’ve benefitted so much from them.

Anyway, this is making me really hope one of these potential new jobs comes through soon, because it’s making me really want to throw some support at Michael Legge right now.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Anyone want a Chorlte headlines round-up? Those always fun, right? Let's do one of those, have some fun by finding out what's going on in the amusing world of comedy!

...Bit bleak today, that one. Bit bleak.

I mean, I guess performing in the street is better than getting into venues, though God, the "I've been cancelled" ammunition they'll get out of this is deafening. Not that there was any way to avoid it, I think the venues were right to cancel on him (though I do think it's off that the first one only canceled a Comedy Unleashed gig after they found out Graham Linehan would be on it - if you supposedly have principles that prohibit airing Linehan's views, then surely the rest of the Comedy Unleashed lineup should also go against those, just in a way that's less famous and headline-grabbing), giving him the chance to yell about being cancelled is the lesser of two evils.

It's a tough situation, knowing your options are to platform hate speech or to give him a cancellation that those people can only use to get more attention and boost their profile. Though there were other options, like not booking the gig in the first place (and even if you didn't know Linehan would be at the gig when you booked it - you know it was Comedy Unleashed). Another way to mitigate the damage would be to not help him use this to get more attention by, for example, giving him multiple large headlines on a famous comedy website. I realize I'm technically giving him attention now, but I'm a tiny Tumblr blog that has only mentioned this once, Chortle has run a bunch of articles about it in the last few weeks.

Anyway, on the first one, I'll say that's fucking bleak, but the one silver lining is that many of the countries with high sexual harassment rates are actually the safest places, because those are the places where sexual harassment is reported and those reports are taken seriously and properly tracked, while the places with low rates are where it just gets swept under the rug. So... maybe increasing rates according to a comedy HR department is a sign that comedy is moving toward better reporting procedures?

And that guy who was in Dictionary Corner's turned out to be... that. Second Dictionary Corner guest to have something like that come out about him in the few years since I started following panel shows, as far as I know (along with James Veitch). My dad liked him, he went through a phase relatively recently (but not so recently that it was after the charges first came to light) where every time I went over to his house he'd show me a different Ivan Brackerbury hospital radio DJ video on YouTube. This is why we can't have nice things. The Thick of It's my favourite TV show in the whole world and God, the cognitive dissonance that it takes to watch the first two seasons and pretend I don't know anything whatsoever about Chris Langham.

[anthonysstupiddailyblog]

Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (277): Sun 18th Dec 2022

I was nice and careful on the bike ride to work today even though the snow and ice looked to have cleared up and it was all but gone on the main roads at least. I figured that as long as I was careful on the slip road that takes me on the final stretch to work and kept a look out for black ice then I should be okay. Unfortunately the council have put up a fucking barrier to stop people going directly down that road and you have to go all the way down the dual carriageway, turn right and then circle back on yourself (which if I’m not mistaken is the first thing the Nazis did when they got into power). I was approaching the right turn and gently put on my brakes but I must have broke too harshly and turned too quickly because the bike slipped out from under me and I went flying onto the road. Luckily the bike literally slid right the fuck out from under me so it didn’t land on me and also I ended up going arse over tit and landed on my back which thankfully was cushioned by my rucksack which was full of all my work shit. I wasn’t hurt at all but more annoyed at the fact that I hadn’t seen this slippery patch and obviously thankful that this had happened on a quiet day when I was travelling relatively slowly because of this had been on a packed dual carriageway and I’d been doing 50 then I’d probably be dictating this blog from a hospital bed to a nurse via blinks of my eyes. A guy in a car saw what had happened and slammed the breaks on his car and backed up to make sure I was okay. I motioned to him that I was fine but this guy must have fucking shat himself when he saw my legs go up in the fucking air like that and the bike go hurtling 10 feet down the road. Plus he kept asking if I was sure I was alright before I got back on the bike and continued on my way. I hate to think that this guy drove off worried that I’d hurt or concussed myself and he just let me go. Unfortunately the right pedal rest has come off the bike so I’m going to have to get that fixed now but to be honest I couldn’t give a shit about this fucking bike at the moment. There’s too much going on with work and Christmas and the holiday that I can’t be dealing with this shit right now. I’ll just wait until the new year to get this sorted and just get the bus / walk to work in the meantime. I don’t know why but I can’t help but feel like this is somehow Matt Hancock’s fault.

While I was working I came up with a few ideas for the sitcom script. I can already tell that this script (which I haven’t even completed the first draft for yet) is immediately better than any of the scripts I’ve written before (which admittedly isn’t many but they were still dogshit compared to this). I’ve followed Graham Linehan’s sitcom writing advice very carefully by writing up all my ideas for jokes / scenarios on individual cards then mixing and matching the cards to look for patterns and trying to build scenes. Ive also tried my best to follow Linehan and Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder’s advice to not let it worry me that the first draft will be patchy and have bits that seem awful because the first draft is just something you need to cobble together so that you have something to change. Linehan seems to be of the opinion that going over their first drafts is the thing that puts off a lot of sitcom writers because the first draft isn’t usually any good and the thought of putting the first draft that they’ve come up with on the air fills them with dread. However he advises people to just keep in mind that no one is ever going to see this first draft and that with a little effort you should be able to turn that awful first draft into a hilarious third / fourth draft. I’m really happy with how this is coming along and after I’ve submitted it to the Sitcommission competition I might post it on here too so my friends / followers can tell me what they think of it (and that’s proof that I must be happy with it because ten years ago the very idea of showing anyone a sitcom script that I’d written would have made me cringe). For this competition they encourage you to submit “episode one” rather than a pilot episode because the winning script gets passed around to industry executives with the intention of making them into full seasons. As such executives want to read a typical episode and a pilot isn’t a typical episode because it will be spent introducing the characters and setting up the premise of the show. I’ve already written a pilot episode of the show and this script that I’m writing now is “episode one” (though really it’s episode two. If I can just churn out four more episodes then I’ll be able to cross “sitcom” off my bucket list because it’s long been an objective of mine to write a full season of a sitcom (I’m glad I’m not American because then I would need to write 22 of the fuckers before I could cross it off.