Eclectic Trains

Well I hope you caught the show, Limmy's Show that is. I'm not going to bore you with a long, windbaggy review, suffice to say I was smiling and laughing from ear to ear throughout the show. It felt like an old virtual friend had jumped from the small small screen to the small screen and was talking to me right in my front room (are you talking to me?). Quite a shock for someone (me), who like Brian Limond (aka Limmy) has probably has spent far too many hours over the last 10 years staring at cyberspace. And what have we got to show for it? Well, Brian's got Limmy's Show and good luck to him.

Fellow Blogger, Antonine Plato, caught one of Limmy's rare gigs in London back in 2007 and wrote a nice little prophetic piece about how we might see this fella on the box. Blogtastic crystal ball usage Antonine! It must be getting late...

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the arrival of Limmy's Show to a telly (or Sky box) near you. Ever since I was sent a link by my brother to his Swearing Xylophone back in 2003, I have been a member of his fan club. Limmy, a Glasgow-based internet comedian, has a keen eye and ear for the absurd and plays with his audience's preconceptions of Glaswegian caricatures to hilarious effect. He had a brief outing on BBC's The Culture Show in 2007 and has performed at a few festivals, but now he is getting a long-awaited television series. Like all early-adopters of fringe artists, I hope he doesn't water down his material too much but I think in the current climate it might be unrealistic to expect a defensive BBC to let Limmy have full creative freedom. His website videos - www.limmy.com/blog/videos - are truly out there and certainly not to everyone's tastes. I have favourites and here are two of them and if you don't like these, don't watch the show.

Yes or No - Ever wanted to get violent with a contributor from the floor? Watch this.

What would you do? - Under extreme pressure from work, your family or the bank? Have a taste of this.

Limmy's Show
Wednesday 18th February, 10pm
BBC2 Scotland (Sky 990 / Freesat 970)

And repeated...
Monday 23rd February, 11:15pm
BBC1 Scotland (Sky 971 / Freesat 960)

And, of course, BBC iPlayer.

Yesterday was a nightmare waiting to happen and happen it did. I left the office early and on time at 1.15pm to travel back to East Ham to see my eldest daughter in her Xmas performance of Hansel and Gretel. I had my work bag (a Dell computer bag without a computer in it) and my video camera. (I intended to video the show, or at least key moments with my daughter in, so that my wife, at home with a sickly youngest daughter, could see the recording). I took the Central Line from Bethnal Green to Mile End and changed at Mile End to pick up the District Line to Upton Park. The District Line was, however, not happening. Someone had "fallen under a train" at Whitechapel and trains weren't moving. Sad, but how was I going to get to the Xmas show on time? I waited for 5 minutes and realised that the announcements advising passengers to take alternative routes applied to me. I hopped on the next Central Line train to Stratford and caught the only black cab in the rank to the school in E13. As I pulled up outside the school with 2 minutes to spare (and £10 lighter), I saw my daughters' former childminder (P) with one of her charges (C) strolling along and on her way to see the show. I said thanks to the driver and said hello to P and C as we walked into the school playground. I got through the reception door and then my small, fragile world fell apart...

...I had committed a Mr Magoo like atrocity on myself - the video camera was still in the back of the cab...

...to cut a very long and tiresome shaggy dog story short; the video camera has not been retrieved. I saw my daughter's show and very good it was too. (Although strangely I never saw my daughter, as she had decided, I think partly in protest of not being given a major role, to hide her face behind the back row of the choir. I could hear her recorder playing but not see her. A video camera would not have altered this odd situation. Ironic, you might say as I had no camera anyway). I managed to track down my taxi driver by some deft detective work. All right, I went back to the Stratford taxi rank and chatted to some drivers who recognised my description of the driver and said I must have been a customer of "Big John". I got Big John's mobile; texted him; he called me back and he said he would try and help but he had picked up 2 customers after me and the camera wasn't on the back seat any more.

THE PAIN, THE PAIN. Sure insurance may cover it (I haven't checked the policy yet). But the camera was pristine - a 3 year old, low tech memory machine. The tape inside it had my youngest daughter's Xmas show, as recorded by my wife which I still hadn't seen. Now do you understand? How could someone pick up that camera and not make an effort to return it? If they played the tape they would see immediately that someone's sentimental, personal family stuff was going to be sorely missed. The new "owners" of my camera could even work out which school my daughter went to, because, as my wife informed me, the headteacher's traditional welcoming speech to parents before "Whoops-a-Daisy Angel" kicked off the nursery kids' Xmas show, mentioned the school's name a number of times.

RETURN THE CAMERA TO THE SCHOOL, WHY DON'T CHA? Are you on the same page? Acute pain. I am a very careful chap. I guard my gear. A suicide, a delay, a freak diversion, a taxi ride and some recognisable faces could all be added into the mix of distractions but at the end of the day I just magooed. Plain Mr Magooed it. Magooed it big time!

Rectifying a situation like this isn't easy. You fight with yourself, you retrace steps and you make strange phone calls to lost and found warehouse operators. The line is a bit echoey...

...but then COMEDY COMES TO THE RESCUE. I didn't feel like drinking. COMEDY, that's what I needed. I believe great comedy can be truly cathartic.

I've been working through the first series (2000) of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. My wife and I love it. Last week we did 2 nights, 2 episodes a night. But last night we did 5 x half hour episodes. We split our sides. We hardly moved from our seats. Larry David just walked from one catastrophe to the next. Most of his scrapes are generated by him speaking his mind combined with an uncouth and unreasonable attitude but he also gets more than his fair share of simple pure bad luck. Genius, absolute genius. I sat there shaking off a bad day just enjoying someone else's misfortune. Larry was having a worse time than me and I was so much happier because of it.

He made Series 6 last year and 2-5 are also out on DVD. Santa now knows what I want for Xmas. How I missed this the first time round is a mystery to me but this is one thing that is being retrieved from my cultural lost and found.

...Deep inside I know that I'm him...

...I need to get myself a HD camera anyway...

The coverage of the build up to the US presidential elections has had to compete with Brandgate (or Manuelgate or Sachsgate or Whatevergate). The US is about to elect a new leader and we have had another media scandal that engulfs the media in a cannibalistic feeding-frenzy. This alone is quite shocking.

I must admit my head has been spinning with issues that sometimes appear very trivial and then very serious, simultaneously. Ross and Brand weren't funny on this particular occasion - there seems to be a wide consensus on this one. (I'll come clean: I can find Ross funny and on occasions his cheeky childish wit can amuse but his rude, boorish, self-congratulatory shtick - a large part of his act - has started to wear thin. Or put another way, "sisters", I think if I were a female celeb I would think twice about appearing on his chat show. Juliette Binoche, Jane Fonda, Nicola Kidman and even our own Jade Goody have all been subjected to Ross's sexist, car crash sense of humour. Brand's humour has always been too obscured by his ego for me to appreciate his "talents").

Anyway... talk about a diverting issue. As some intelligent articles have pointed out this isn't about Ross or Brand. The column inches devoted to the subject aren't an extension of a public debate about the nature of humour and what makes us laugh. "Can the comedy of cruelty ever be justified. Discuss." No, the official liberal media response to "Brandgate" has betrayed a papable disgust with the thousands that have complained about the Brand-Ross Radio 2 show. Charlie Brooker's column - a very funny column that I read regularly - in The Guardian was entitled: "Want a rush of empowerment? Join the angry idiots registering their disgust with Ofcom". His opening salvo was: "So it's here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest."

At the beginning of the week I must admit I was caught up in the fears of the liberal media elite (being a lesser member with aspirations). In particular, the worry that a "Daily Mail witchunt" against Ross and Brand might increase the likelihood of a knee-jerk and censorious response from the BBC, troubled me. But there was something else going on here...

...and then I stumbled on Neil Davenport's article on spiked: A revolt of the masses against the BBC?

Neil takes apart the issue and really explores the BBC's contempt for its audience. The Ross-Brand affair is set in the context of "the media’s low horizons and lack of faith in its audience". This article is a devastating critique of dumbing-down whilst also being a fresh clarion call for funny, and intelligent, comedy. I couldn't recommend it more.