Despite appearances, Man Writes Blog is not dead but merely lying dormant. I have been crazy busy with this other project and unfortunately lots of other things, including regular sleep and exercise, have sadly fallen by the wayside.
I will still post things on here from time to time but for the next couple of months there probably won't be loads of activity...
Many apologies for the lack of activity on the blog over the last couple of weeks. I've been ridiculously busy but the reason is actually rather exciting and so I thought I should at least take the time to share it with you.
Ready? I'm in negotiation with a major Hollywood studio to adapt Man Writes Blog into a feature film. I know. I still can't quite get my head around it.
I'm not allowed to say too much about it until the deal's been formally signed off, but the basic plot will follow a blogger's life over the course of an entire year with the main character providing a Sex and the City style narration about the ups and downs of his life via the entries on the blog.
Tom Hanks is apparently very interested in playing me (well — the glossy Hollywood-ised version of me) and so there's a very good chance that the film will go into production once the producers are happy with the script.
So who knows, in a year or two you could be watching Man Writes Blog: The Movie and say rather too loudly to the person next to you: “I knew that blog before it got really famous...”
My radio listening habits wander between BBC 6Music (for Adam and Joe), Radio 4 (for feeling smug and cerebral), Radio 1 (a recent experiment to see if I can learn to listen Chris Moyles without wanting to punch something), XFM (to keep up with what the indie kids are listening to) and occasionally Capital (annoyingly commercial and repetitive but periodically worth enduring for Johnny Vaughn).
One of the songs which has been played to death over the last few weeks on Radio 1 and Capital is Take Me Back by Tinchy Stryder, which contains the following lyrics:
Take Me Back
...
I'm sorry I misleaded you pretty lady
I'm sorry I mistreated you pretty lady
...
Now it's a catchy enough little ditty, but the first couple of times I heard it, it left me slightly unsettled and I couldn't work out why. Until I realised that although “misleaded” sounds like a real word, of course in reality it isn't.
Now I can't imagine Tinchy is a regular reader of this blog, but just in case he is, I'll address him directly.
I'm sorry Tinchy, you can't just go around inventing words like “misleaded” — completely ignoring the perfectly servicable “misled” in the process — simply because it happens to rhyme better with “mistreated”. It's lazy and I expect more of you.
And while we're being candid, let's just admit that the only reason “misleaded” sounds like it rhymes with “mistreated” is because you're not really pronouncing “mistreated” properly — that's a ‘t’ not a ‘d”.
One of the creative challenges of being a lyricist is to pick existing words that work together both in terms of metre and rhyme but also semantically. If you can't do that without resorting to made up words it doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means you haven't spent long enough at the computer.
Of course Tinchy, you're the one with the hit single, not me, so maybe making up words is the way to go. Here are some more suggestions for new words you could incorporate into future remixes of Take Me back or possibly your live shows:
Take Me Back (Man Writes Blog Lyrical Remix)I'm sorry I upsetted you pretty lady
I'm sorry I forgetted you pretty ladyI'm sorry that I losed you pretty lady
I know I should of choosed you pretty ladyI'm sorry what you seed me do pretty lady
I'm sorry what I sayed to you pretty lady
I've been playing Apple's Texas Hold'em poker game on my iPhone quite a lot recently which features an impressively glossy interface and a host of virtual opponents.
There are two possible views of the game in progress depending on how you hold your iPhone. Hold it horizontally and you get a stylised overhead perspective showing the whole table with current bets, but hold it vertically and you get a full screen view of the player whose turn it is to bet.
The virtual players are clearly actors filmed against a green screen and then transplanted into the virtual world of the poker game to create as realistic an environment as possible.
Apple have tried hard to create a range of distinctive (if somewhat stereotypical) characters for the player to 'interact' with. There's the cowboy-hatted good ol' boy, the wraparound shades-wearing hoodie, the wealthy housewife, the heavily-tattooed biker dude, the cute college chick, etc. etc.
It seems that the actors chosen to play each of these complex, multi-layered personalities was asked to perform a small range of standard poker actions: look at the cards, fold the cards, place a bet, be disappointed at poor cards, be excited at a win, and so on.
The problem is that the range of behaviour and emotion for each character is really quite limited and soon becomes repetitive and sometimes pretty ridiculous.
For instance, one of the characters, a pretty college girl, has a little "stirring two bowls with invisible spoons" victory dance which comes into play whenever she wins a hand. However the same jubilant routine is trotted out regardless of the size of the win and so she'll do it as readily for having a $10 stake returned when everyone folds as she will for a $10,000 win.
Even more comical is the fact that each character has an individual “tell” which betrays when they are bluffing and another for when they are holding a particularly good hand. This is clearly supposed to add to the realism of the game.
The issue here is that once you've spotted someone's tell, it's exactly the same every time and so you then know with 100% certainty when they are fibbing. I now try to ignore these as far as I can because it does give you a pretty unfair advantage.
And to compound things, some of the tells are not particularly subtle. One player actually pulls a pair of shades out of his pocket and puts them on before making a big bet on a rubbish hand. When he gets dealt a good hand I'm surprised he doesn't strap on a drum, stand on the table and do a one man band rendition of “Winner Takes It All”.
To keep players on their toes I think it would be good to change the tells in future versions of Texas Hold'em, so here are some suggestions for the game designers:
Since the start of the year the my efforts have been largely marshalled against an online comedy project which is a guerilla attempt by me and writing partner Mark to sidestep development hell by writing, producing, directing, performing, and editing our own project without permission or interference from anyone else.
I've been deliberately vague about the the project on this blog because initially we were keen, as far as possible, to make our spoof reality show look real and having stuff showing up on Google talking about it as a comedy was not particularly helpful. But we're slightly more relaxed about it now and I figure if I don't mention it by name it probably won't show up anyway...
In one recent episode we did low-budget spoofs of the five films up for the Best Picture Oscar. Hoping the ride the wave of interest in all things Oscar, and as a viral marketing experiment, I posted all five videos on separately on YouTube, with a link at the end of each to the main series, should people watch all the way through to the end (which is by no means guaranteed in YouTubeland).
The Slumdog Millionaire clip has been by far the most popular, partly I think because of the elevated interest in the film after its massive success at the awards, but also because I posted our video as a response to a more serious one (which was getting several hundred thousand views) about controversy surrounding the film and accusations of “poverty porn”.
By posting these videos up cold and attaching one of them to a non-comedy clip we've opened ourselves up to a much wider church of opinion on YouTube than we've currently reached with the other videos. We've had a mix of positive and negative comments but the most interesting comments are those that I have no idea if they are positive or negative.
A couple of days ago someone commented “hhg” against a clip. The only thing I can find on the internet that this might mean is “Holy Hand Grenade” a reference to the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
If this is the right reference, I'm still none the wiser as to whether it's positive or negative. Maybe I'm reading too much into it and someone just dozed off while watching the clip and they typed “hhg” with their forehead.
My favourite one, however, arrived this morning and was posted on an earlier clip by someone called getsomedonuts:
This guy is fu*king clownshoes.
Now I can assure you that in the clip there is no-one copulating with a circus performer's footwear, so I could only assume that “clownshoes” was being used adjectivally, but was it a favourable comment or not?
Well, I had to fall back on the Urban Dictionary, which delivered the following definition:
clownshoes1) A hopeless loser. An awkward, unattractive, and otherwise inept individual. Also known as a powertool.
...
So the commenter thinks our main character is a complete loser. Not entirely sure how I feel about that but at least I understand what the comment means.
Not sure I'll be using “clownshoes” in everyday conversation, but powertool, I can definitely see myself making use of that in the coming weeks...
I was unfortunate enough to watch a few minutes of Paris Hilton's British Best Friend on ITV2 last week.
Now I know Paris by reputation but have never really watched anything she's been in. But a few minutes into this particular tent pole in the ITV2 schedule it became clear that there's so little going on between Paris's ears that if you slapped her head hard enough it would make that "pffft!" noise that an old CRT television does when you chuck a stone at it.
If you haven't heard of it, Paris Hilton's British Best Friend is basically a programme where a vacuous American somebody invites a group of vacuous British nobodies to compete for their friendship, something that no-one in their right mind would want in the first place and which should anyway happen organically if it happens at all.
The closest equivalent I can think of would be a show called Alan Sugar's Who Wants What I've Got? where Alan Sugar has a nasty bout of gastroenteritis and a group of mercenary young entrepreneurs compete for the chance to give Sir Alan a frenchie and thus catch the condition themselves.
When I originally heard about PHBBF, I had hoped it was some kind of Darwinian honey trap where anyone who walked through the doors of the audition room immediately fell through a trap door into a huge pit which would later be filled in with concrete for the greater good of humanity.
During the small section of the programme that I managed to endure, one sobbing wreck of a girl who on the brink of eviction was putting her case to a stoic (or possibly just catatonic) Paris to remain in the competition — “I just want it so much!” she whined.
Which is good because if we look back on our own experiences that's exactly how we choose our best friends, isn't it? Not the coolest, or the most charismatic, or the most loyal, or cleverist, or funniest person that also wants to be friends with us, but simply the person who wants it the most.
This is something that seems to come up again and again in reality shows, particularly the ones like X-Factor based on some loose notion of talent, this idea that if you want something badly enough you have a fundamental human right to have it.
If that were true, I would have spent the last twenty-five years living on a desert island with Janet Ellis playing with a fleet of remote control cars and drinking Slush Puppies every day.
In job interviews, when asked why I thought I was the best candidate for the job, it's never occurred to me to just say because I really, really want it.
“Well John, if I'm honest, we saw a number of people who were far more qualified and experienced than you, but none of them seemed to want it quite as badly, so congratulations! You're our new Client Services Director for Asia Pacific.”
Clearly this won't be the last time we have to endure this barely sentient rich kid on our screens so I thought I'd at least try to influence the precise form in which she might reappear and thus have come up with the following new reality shows for our Paris:
If I put together a petition to send to ITV2, you'll all sign it, right?
It is only very recently that I have fully embraced the concept of tea. Certainly in terms of my 36+ years on this planet I would say less than the last 1% has seen me drinking tea on at least a daily basis.
It's not that I previously disliked tea. My relationship with it was much like that most of us have with a certain category of friend — in their company you have perfectly nice time but after parting ways, if nothing specifically reminded you of them for the rest of your life you probably wouldn't think of them again.
Contrast this relative indifference with the fact that a love of tea is the closest thing that most of the English come to religion. Secretly, I never felt like a fully signed-up, card-carrying Englishman because I didn't share my fellow countryfolk's passion for leaf tips infused in hot water.
Coffee on the other hand I get. I'm neither a coffee gourmet nor a zealot but there are certain times when a good cup of strong, frothy coffee really hits the spot. I must confess, I still don't understand why a mixture of beans, hot water and milk should cost three quid but once I've got one I do rather enjoy it.
I used to work for British Gas on summer placements as a student and the office I worked in had a series of small "tribes", each with their own coffee run. Keen to make me feel welcome (and perhaps also to claim me as their own) for the first couple of weeks each tribe included me on their own individual run. I was too polite to refuse and by the end of the day I'd usually had at least a dozen cups and was buzzing like a sniffer dog after a double shift.
Of course, that was horrible early 90s coffee machine coffee. Our coffee palate is much more educated now and the making of coffee has been elevated to something approaching an art form. There's even a proper name for someone trained to make coffee. I'm pretty sure there's no tea-making equivalent of a barista — it doesn't take much of an induction to be able to stick a tea bag in a cup and add some hot water.
Which brings me on to the teabag. Some amazing strides forward have been made in medicine, technology and engineering in the last two decades but can any equal the progress of the teabag? This year is the twentieth anniversary of the round teabag, and since then we've seen the introduction of both the drawstring teabag and the pyramid teabag.
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that for anyone in their twenties or thirties, the arrival of the pyramid teabag was a JFK moment — we can all remember where we were when we first heard.
It is hard to believe that the pyramidal tea bag can be improved upon but the natural next step must surely be the spherical teabag. If a pyramid give the leaves more room to move around in comparison to a conventional flat bag (circular or otherwise) then just imagine the freedom that a spherical bag would provide. The tea leaves would be practically free range.
But the construction of a perfectly spherical perforated paper bag must surely present some problems. Paper cannot be easily moulded, pressed or cast. If we draw inspiration from the humble football, then a multi-faceted shape approximating a sphere, such as a dodecahedron would seem to be the way forward.
In a fairly brief foray into standup many years ago I used to do a routine about Gillette product development meetings in which the result of the thinking-outside-the-box, blue sky brainstorming sessions was always the decision to add another blade (you may have heard a similar routine elsewhere, but I was doing it in 1995, so there). The natural endpoint to this process seemed to me to be a razor called the Gillette Centurian, which had 100 blades and was the size and shape of your entire face — one sweep and you were done.
I believe that PG Tips and the other major teabag manufacturers now have the opportunity to enter their own potentially unending period of predictable innovation. Every few years they can introduce a new tea bag, based on a geometric shape with even more faces, edging forever closed to the theoretical nirvana of the truly spherical teabag.
I may have come fairly late to the tea drinking party, but I think there are some exciting times ahead. So boil the kettle and strap yourself in — it's going to be one hell of a ride.
P.S. I said I'd tell you how the BBC meeting went. Well it basically went okay and our radio project is still in the running but there's been another minor regime change on the development side of things (our producer has a new boss) and so there is now the all-too-familiar situation of having to sell the project to somebody new...