Protected: Dubya and his SpinMeisters have they no shame?

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Dubya and his SpinMeisters have they no shame?

I could not believe that even Dubya could stoop this low. But I suppose he and his spinmeisters never let an opportunity go by that they don’t try to portray him in the “heroic” presidential mode.

I understand that Thanksgiving in the US is one of the most important family and community holidays in the calendar and I am thoroughly disgusted that Dubya should pull this gob-smackingly cynical stunt of flying out to Baghdad to be seen with the soldiers there, in order to shore up his image there among the soldiers and as one of the first publicity stunts of his presidential election campaign. Does he and his minders really think Americans are that stupid? The sight of his tear streaked face and the horribly corny words of his speech made me nauseous. Perhaps he should be awarded the Golden Turkey for the worst case of self-delusion. I think the tears were genuine and he really does seem himself as the heroic president bringing succour to his troops. If I’d been there I would feel like stuffing the turkey down his throat and hope it choked him.

As well as the cynicism involved why was he wasting American taxpayers money with his secret flight on the presidential plane, probably surrounded by other jets to protect it and all his accompanying security staff? If there had been an accident or somehow someone had worked out he had arrived and managed to attack him, I could see there would not be too many Iraqis or anyone else left alive in Bagdhad. They truly would be bombed back into the stone age and beyond by the avenging US forces. He obviously had no thought of the consequences of his actions other than the obvious benefits to accrue to his image.

I can understand the soldiers being pleased at seeing him. Their’s is a thankless task and it would at least be nice for them that the President should meet with them on a day when they are all obviously missing their families and friends back home. I would not begrudge them this and I know some Americans can somehow separate the office from the incumbent and still respect the position as such even if the holder of the office is a low-life like Dubya.

Am I being too cynical myself? Or was there any real thought for the soldiers concerned and not just a photo op for the journalists, as Dubya starts down the re-election trail?

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Protected: Monty Python Biography Review

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Monty Python Biography Review

After my previous post found this review of the new Python biography by a local comedian/comedic actor and writer, Shane Maloney

Something completely different
By Shane Maloney
November 15, 2003

Cleese’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.

THE PYTHONS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
By the Pythons
Orion, $85

Some wag once defined an intellectual as anybody who could listen to Rossini’s William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. Likewise, how many of us can hear Sousa’s Liberty Bell March without instantly being reminded of Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

It is now more than 30 years since the Pythons were hatched. The first program of their first series was broadcast by the BBC in December 1969. Auntie ABC, moving with her customary alacrity, followed suit a mere two years later. Within four years, colour television had also arrived in Australia. The rest, as they say, is history.

Much of that history is recounted in a sumptuous coffee-table volume, The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons. Richly larded with photographs and Terry Gilliam’s trademark artwork, this whopper of a book sets out to inform as much as amuse. A chronological assembly of interviews, diary entries, correspondence and scrapbook ephemera, it chronicles the formation, collaboration and disintegration of one of the most remarkable creative teams in the annals of funny business.

You don’t have to be a sketch-reciting, silly-walking Python obsessive to appreciate the impact on British humour of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Gilliam. From their tentative beginnings as freelancing gag writers, they crowned their collective achievement as the Pythons with individual projects as diversely brilliant as Cleese’s Fawlty Towers, Palin’s Ripping Yarns and Idle’s The Ruttles.

Chapman is dead, of course, which has put something of a dampener on his output, but Gilliam has won a reputation as a filmmaker of great verve, particularly if you don’t count The Fisher King.

Contrary to popular belief, the on-screen Pythons were not all former public school boys. Only Palin and Cleese (real name Jack Cheese, by the way) attended public schools, and minor ones at that. Idle was sent to an orphanage at the age of seven, a place so cold that he didn’t thaw out until he was 19.

Jones, the Welshman, played rugby for his grammar school. Chapman, son of a policeman, was raised in the sort of genteel thrift that required him to put blackened cardboard inside his shoes to cover the holes. And Gilliam, born American, went to high school in suburban Los Angeles. What they had in common was that they were all war babies, born between 1939 and 1943. Apart from filling their heads with memories of air raids and absent fathers, this meant that one of their main shared childhood influences was radio.

“The Goons of course were my favourite,” recalls Jones. “It was the surreality of the imagery and the speed of the comedy I loved – the way they broke up the conventions of radio and played with the very nature of the medium.”

But by the time they reached Cambridge and Oxford, the madcap anarchy of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers had given way to the savage satire of Beyond the Fringe and This Was the Week That Was. To Cleese, these shows marked “the beginning of the end of deference”.

Like their predecessors, Peter Cook et al, each gravitated towards university reviews, from which they were recruited into television scriptwriting.

“They came looking for you at Cambridge,” says Idle, referring to the BBC comedy department. “The same as MI5 or Russian intelligence.”

Skit writing did not strike all of them as a long-term career prospect. Chapman had trained as a doctor, taken up smoking a pipe and embarked on a PhD in claret. Cleese – a “parentally predetermined solicitor” – was looking for something with a pension plan.

It was only after several years of rattling around London, odd-jobbing for the likes of Marty Feldman, David Frost and the Two Ronnies, that the constituent components of the Python team were thrown together by the BBC in May 1969 and instructed to come up with 13 programs by October.

“Put together,” says Idle, “we formed almost one perfectly mad person.”

Their major innovation was getting rid of the punchline, made possible by Gilliam’s cartoons, those bizarre amalgams of psychedelia and Victoriana. When a sketch began to run out of puff, it would be stomped on by a gigantic foot or inexplicably replaced by a policeman with an open tunic and breasts.

Tentative titles for the program ranged from Bun, Whacket, Buzzard and Stubble and Boot to Owl Stretching Time and Arthur Megapode’s Cheap Show.

By the time the fourth series went to air, Monty Python was a major industry, spinning off stage performances, records, books and films. But 10 years of standing in the rain in damp chain mail had taken its toll. This parrot was well and truly dead. Defunct, deceased, a member of the choir eternal.

Which is just as well. But thanks to The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons, particularly the photographs and illustrations, we catch a revealing glimpse of the comedy landscape’s most outstanding bunch of plinths.

Shane Maloney’s most recent book, Something Fishy, is published by Text.

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I don’t think so

Read this article in the paper this morning –

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I don’t think so

Read this article in the paper this morning –

Pitt for Pratt?
November 25, 2003 – 11:31AM

Brad Pitt has emerged as the unlikely favourite to take on Ricky Gervais’ role as David Brent in a US remake of British television series The Office, ananova.com reports.

Ironically, Gervais has joked that either Pitt or George Clooney should play him in the US version.

However, TV bosses seem to have taken him seriously, and have approached Pitt to take on the role.

A British TV insider was quoted as saying: “Brad’s really into British comedy. He loves Monty Python and things like that.

“He’s seen The Office, and thinks it’s brilliant, and he’s been approached by the team to take the lead role.”

“As a fan he could insist on keeping the basic premise of the programme and make himself less attractive.”

I know you Poms have seen The Office, but I don’t know whether it has been released in the US. But it is basically a sitcom set in an office workplace with all these characters(I find most of them decidely unfunny) who are invariably portrayed as losers headed by this manager played by Ricky Gervais who I know, I know is supposed to be the epitome of everything creepy and wrong in middle management, but I think I’ve met too many of them in my career to really find them funny. They mouth the right HR argot of the moment and swear they’re interested in providing an equal opportunity workplace but are just your usual run of the mill chauvinist pig whose only interest is his own career and to shag the best looking bird in the office and joke about it with his friends later at the pub, in between belittling those who he thinks are losers. I watched two or three episodes but just found it to be nasty. But Brad Pitt playing this unsavoury cahracter. No! Too horrible! If he thinks it’s going to be as funny as Monty Python he better think again. It’s not.But then if his aim is to promote a less attractive image. This part will do it for him.

Speaking of Monty Python I must get the new book written about the Python team. Sounds great. I listened to the biographer being interviewed on the radio last night and it sounds good.

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Protected: Some Apt Cartoons

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Some Apt Cartoons

Gairid wrote to say she missed some of the cartoons, so here a few that amused me this last week –

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Another Lemming Moment

What is it about vampire quizzes that make me do them, other than boredom? Maybe it’s the pretty men’s pictures? Though this Louis isn’t that great. The Lestat though, mmm a pretty good contender with Travis Fimmel, actually better he has that certain look of ‘arrogance’ that I imagine Lestat would have.

Louis: You are the wanderer, the Lover, the lost
Soul. You love being a vampire but you’d never
tell them that. These poor human just don’t
have a clue. But that’s ok, because all you
need is love!

Which Anne Rice Vampire do you most resemble? (Very nice Pictures)
brought to you by Quizilla

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Another Lemming Moment

What is it about vampire quizzes that make me do them, other than boredom? Maybe it’s the pretty men’s pictures? Though this Louis isn’t that great. The Lestat though, mmm a pretty good contender with Travis Fimmel, actually better he has that certain look of ‘arrogance’ that I imagine Lestat would have.

Louis: You are the wanderer, the Lover, the lost
Soul. You love being a vampire but you’d never
tell them that. These poor human just don’t
have a clue. But that’s ok, because all you
need is love!

Which Anne Rice Vampire do you most resemble? (Very nice Pictures)
brought to you by Quizilla

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