Missing Scene, a nice little audio sketch show from some nice comedy people.

Also available as a podcast.

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A seasonal swear for y’all, from last night’s Not Going Out Christmas special.

It’s right up there with The IT Crowd swear, both in delivery and context. A wonderful swear indeed.

Merry Christmas readers

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Have you ever noticed, yeah, how, yeah, have you ever noticed how every Christmas you go into the shops, don’t you, looking for Christmas presents, you know, and they’re the same, aren’t they, they’re the same as the are the rest of the year, but, to make them Christmassy, you know, to make them Christmassy they’ve put all the products into baskets.

The shops have realised, haven’t they, they’ve realised that all you need to do to turn a normal product, a normal product, into a Christmas present is to put it into a basket. A basket. Just put it in a basket. Just a basket. Put it in a basket. Then it’s a Christmas present. Today, today, today I saw a pack of HobNobs and some PG Tips – in a basket. For a Christmas present. In a basket. That’ll do for Nan, now what about the wife? Canesten Combi, in a basket, job done.

Thank you very much.

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Did this man record the world’s first “Parental Advisory” pop song?

Many people believe that the first use of the word “fuck” in a commercially released pop song was in Eddy Duchin’s 1938 recording of Louis Armstrong’s “Old Man Moes”, vocals by Patricia Norman.

Apparently, the “scandal” caused the single to sell 170,000 copies. That’s about half as many as Joe McElderry has sold this week, but remember that this song was released at the tail end of the Great Depression.

No wonder they called it the Dirty Thirties.

On first listen, I was convinced there’s definitely a fuck or two in there, but on subsequent listens I’m not so sure.

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I was in a pound shop today.

It’s really got that bad.

But I just needed some smoking paraphernalia, and the High Street’s resident fourforapoundyourgaslighters guy is still in hospital (burns unit, very sad.)

The Pound World is only slightly larger than your typical convenience store, and it’s always rammed. Only the Greggs next door can rival it for custom.

Today, two out of four aisles were all queue.

The teenage idiot in line in front of me was buying a can of Coke. That’s all. One can of warm Coke. In an everything’s-a-pound shop where everything costs a pound. With a ten-minute queue. In a town with about a thousand places to buy warm Coke at half the price with no queue.

When he got to the counter, the eye-rolling check-out girl told him his pound would actually buy him two cans of Coke, and you should have seen his little eyes light up. It was like all his Father Christmases had cum at once.

“Bargain!” he said, wasting another minute of my life while he wandered off to see if he could remember where the Coke shelf was.

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Here’s an ad for Zwinky.com I spotted on Youtube today:

And an ad I spotted in the back pages of Viz minutes later.

Become a cartoon, or become a hooker? The choice is yours.

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“It sounded better in my head.”

Probably not the best first thing to come out of your mouth after having watched a troupe of trained professional actors graciously perform your script aloud for free.

The actors, to their credit, didn’t seem to take the comment personally. I would have.

My faux pas immediately zoned me into an embarrassed funk.

Listening back to the MP3 of the occasion, as the assembled comedy writers and actors perform an uncomfortable autopsy on my sitcom effort, I note that I could have stammered Hugh Grant into epilepsy.

I probably had unrealistic expectations.

The only other time I’ve ever heard my own script read out by actors was when they were being broadcast on the radio. It was Lewis McLeod performing words I’d put in Gordon Brown’s mouth, so it sounded just like Gordon Brown, just like it did in my head.

Not being an absolute idiot, I’m aware that there is a massive gap between what a writer sees and hears in his head and what they eventually see on stage or screen, but the crashing reality of that gap, that yawning chasm, that deep-throating chasm, didn’t really hit me until that reading.

To be fair and to be absolutely honest, these weren’t bad actors.

Before they got to my script they’d more or less cold-read four others and done, I think, a blinding job of it. Characters that seemed dead to me on the page became hilarious. Jokes I didn’t get suddenly worked.

But when it came to my pitiful little sitcom effort, pretty much every gag seemed to fall flat. The characters sounded nothing like I had expected. Nothing like how I thought I had written them.

Later, a fellow writer in attendance told me it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and that some people were in fact chuckling. Fuck him. Idiot. What does he know? Leave me in my funk.

What to make of all this? Can I not write characters? Was it just a bad reading? Is there some knack to making characters instantly actable?

Three weeks later, I still have no idea what I’m supposed to have learned from this experience.

So I’m just going to pretend it never happened.

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Nothing to do with me, just a nice amateur sketch I came across today.

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So, poor Rachel Adedeji got kicked off X-Factor last night. It’s an absolute disgrace.

And I think we all know why.

The fact that such a fantasic singer received the least number of public votes three times out of four surely highlights how racist and sexist we have become as a society.

I pray for the day that the Britain finally feels ready to accept a black woman as X-Factor winner. Sadly, that day seems very, very far away today.

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Saoirse is back!

You may remember, this is the former dot-com yuppy fuck who had a bit of a David Icke episode a couple of years ago and decided to walk from Bristol to India with no money and no documentation.

He got as far as Calais before being turned back as a suspected asylum seeker, which was just about the funniest thing I’d read in months.

Well, The Guardian chose to give Mark Boyle a column last week. Why, I’m not sure. Probably part of its commitment to shitting away dead trees on delusional middle-class fantasists.

Predictably, he manages to look like a plonker almost immediately.

I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

Nice metaphor.

“Social homeopath” says it all really. Take a laughably unscientific and unworkable form of “medicine” and apply its principles to economics. A placebo for western capitalist guilt.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid.

Note how he “got” himself a caravan. Where did he “get” it from?

Did he forage it? Did he grow it himself? Did he find it? Or did he “buy” it?

mobile and laptop would be run off solar

It would be too much to ask to ditch mobile phones and laptops. He’s not that kind of hippy.

But they are solar-powered. Free energy from the sky, man. No emissions, no fossil fuels being burned to power these eco-babies. And no need to give money to The Man.

Boyle doesn’t explain how he pays for his line rental, talk time and internet access charges.

(I’ve looked into it – his idiot acolytes beg people to top up his pre-paid account for him)

And there’s again no mention of how he acquired these items of cutting-edge technology in the first place.

But I know what you’re thinking: What about the gym?! Memberships don’t come for free!!

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription.

So that’s alright then.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads.

Yeah. After he’d got his mobile and laptop sorted, food was the next essential.

All he has to do is rely upon the waste from a global agricultural, industrial, chemical and logisitics infrastructure, run by a handful of mega-corporations and subsidised heavily by tax-payers. Simple.

What’s really shocking about this column is that Boyle makes no attempt to explain what he’s trying to achieve by working the land and relying on hand-outs like a fucking tramp.

And his conclusion is nano-thin, with no attempt to explain or justify any of his statements.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security.

Especially if they’re the kind of friends who pay your phone bill for you, eh?

How very heart-warming.

That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don’t own a plasma screen TV, people think you’re an extremist.

I don’t think you’re an extremist Saoirse.

I just think you’re an idiot.

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