A song I went and done for a band I don't have

Binge drinking is bad. Let’s get that out the way for starters.

Look at this binge drinker. Do you want to look like this flippant goon?

Flippant goon. Accessories models own

The Man claims that, as a nation, we have the worst relationship with alcohol in the known and perhaps unknown world. The Man is calling for minimum pricing and applying stricter licensing laws as the answer. But this form of social drinker kettling technique is not the answer. Making drunkenness acceptable during the morning commute, at the office and down supermarket aisles. Now this would solve binge drinking.

I only bring this boozy subject up, because I was partaking in a bit of binge drinking the other evening. For those who have done binge drinking then the scenario will be as known as well worn slippers:

Starting out with intentions of having “just the one” with a friend, the conversation quickly moves to the day’s activity at work, a reciprocated drink bought later and the discussion continues onto good old times and shared memories, a “one for the road” after and I am revealing to anyone who’ll listen what I think is both a good idea and, simultaneously, a fundamental problem – stopping only for a little air drumming to the song on the jukebox – before deciding to go home, finding the envelope of a utility bill and settling down to write a country and western song on the back of it.

Ah! A story as old as the fermentation process itself.

This is what I penned.

Thank you, thank you. We are Greville and the Tombstones. Now, here is a song I wrote [oh yes – I should say at this point, I did an introductory dedication bit, as is customary to any country and western song, as well] for a girl. Yeah, a girl. I don’t think she’ll ever know it’s for her. But it is. Not that she’ll care. Will You, Sara-Lou!
Anyway this is one I call – Your Thieving Hands.

You took me heart,

I did not give it,

You could’ve had part,

But that wasn’t your game.

You’ve got it caged,

Somewhere very secret,

So I’d like it back,

From your thieving hands.

You say it was,

Anyone’s for the takin’,

But if it’s truly yours,

Why can I feel it breakin’?

So I’d like it back,

From your thieving hands.

A crooked act,

Of your own doin’,

You smoked it out,

The night we drank.

I had sweeter plans

For my heart a-brewin’

So I’d like it back,

From your thieving hands.

And now I’m on,

Experimental medication,

My blood is circulated

By machine intervention

The electrics need cooled, by twelve fans

So I’d like it back,

From your thieving hands.

Sara-Lou you sonofabitch!

Of course I can’t play guitar, so it would be mostly bongo led.

Ultimately, I believe the lesson here is: stopping binge drinking would prevent me getting into this good ol’ boy kind of nonsense.

The show only starts when someone throws a double 6

On Friday I created my own TV channel. OK, that's not strictly true. If it was strictly true I would have watched a Quincy M.E. double bill, then a Columbo followed by Star-Trek then Star-Trek TNG before continuing with a T.J. Hooker. An X-Files from Season 1 would be on after My Girl [Zooey does make me go... erm... gooey]. Then I would recommission Perfect Couples and watch the 2nd season of that before I would put on some arts review show as I get ready for bed all the while wondering if classic Bullseye was on another channel. But instead of this, I programmed the TV set to change channels on its timer in order that I didn't even need to bother with changing the channel myself, by remote control.

I mean the remote was right there but I figured: look it has been a long enough week without me trying to fumble with a remote control in the dark. I was also too lazy to put the lamp on. [Note: need to buy timer for lamp]

One of the shows I set-up was the Mad, Bad Ad Show (C4).

This is how C4 sells it:

Hosted by Mark Dolan, The Mad Bad Ad Show is an ingenious factual entertainment show all based entirely around advertising. It has two teams. One led by Frank Skinner and one by Mark Watson. They are each joined by an advertising industry insider or a figure from business who bring genuine insight into the murky world of marketing. People such as ad director MJ Delaney (Newport State of Mind) marketing guru Trevor Beattie (FCUK) or serial entrepreneur Theo Paphitis.
They'll be there to entertain, but also to explain the methods and tactics behind the adverts, dazzle us with the sneaky techniques they use to flog us their products and amaze us with examples of their craft from across the world and throughout the past 100 years.

OfCom should be called in the morning. This is more misleading than a L'Oreal ad featuring Luscious Long Lashes.

The MBA Show is strangely off-kilter from the start. Presenter, Dolan, sits parallel to the teams, whereby he has to unnaturally shift position to read the auto-cue above the audience as he pretends to talk to the panellists. This is made all the more distracting by his news-reader delivery.

With the team captains taking up most of the chatter between questions (Frank Skinner was replaced by Micky "Ombiounce" Flannigan somewhere along the line), the advertising experts get sparse opportunity to give insight. There are also 3rd team members present, not mentioned in the above pitch. It is telling, therfore, that I am unsure, really, what the 3rd (comedian) team members are to do. They sit on the long sofa not so much as spare parts as, well, sofa furniture. Like fleshy cushions.

The big innovation is that both team captains come to play their own filmed TV advert (for humorous created product) at the end. We get to see them struggle in VT's beforehand with idea clouds and focus groups as they get creative. I suppose that this is the part where the learning of the ad dark arts are revealed and they can work with their experts and we can all be carried along on the journey.

Instead it is a further chance where the team captains get to make some jokes, skipping over any actual expert advice and then put together ads which are so long that they would take a entire slot in the Super Bowl. Highly dubious if the products they were advertising could ever afford the broadcast space anyway, the audience then vote on their favourite.

To fill the rest of the void viewers are treated to a standard panel show. In fact, scratch that. Viewers are treated to what would constitute a round - a single round! - of Noel's Telly Addicts. In fact, scratch that. Viewers are treated to watching a few TV pals over at Mark Dolan's house playing The Logo board game on his improbably long white couch. Where, for confusing reasons, talks to them by staring into the wall with the imitation coal fire on it.

To be honest, it may well be ahead of it's time. Instead of getting a board game at Christmas born from a favourite TV panel quiz, we will end up with panel shows where public figures are playing snakes and ladders. Yes, that'll be the future of TV quiz's right there. Watching Phil Jupitus saying: "was it Professor Plum, in the Library?" And we'd deserve it.

The thing is, the show is totally advertising genius. I hope C4 are pricing astronomical sums for the ad breaks in between the segments. Because there is no doubt that viewers will be no less aware of the adverts than if they were appearing between C4's list show, 100 best TV Ads Ever! and people are expecting Stuart Maconie's top half to appear and talk about when he first saw it: "I had just been out to see The Smiths perform one of their seminal gigs and sneaked in to the family living room, back then you needed to warm up the Televison, so I went to make a sandwich..." Oh why must you go on Stuart Maconie!!

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In other news, and this seems as good a place as any to start the hype - for those not counting there are only 7 more blogs until I hit 100 blogs! A century of blogs will need to have something pretty special to mark the occasion. I am working on it... especially as I have now announced it here.

And if I come up with nothing, I might just upload me playing Halsall Magnetic Travel Ludo.

1st meeting of Film Club is over

I am occasionally taken to start many groups. I have started both club [known as the Revelairs for my followers of this very blog] and secret society [although, I can’t for obvious reasons say anymore. Not even the society members know if they are in it or why. Nevertheless, there they are, their pictures wallpaper pasted to my wall] in my time. But most recently I have started up a gang.

Not a violent street gang where we threaten passers-by with the promise of a flick-knife only for the police to find they are those novelty combs. Joke’s on you, Officer Dibble! Nope, I have started a gang that goes to the cinema on a Saturday afternoon, with 2 of my friends.

I have called us The Raven Filmonomic Affair.

I am thinking we can get hoodies printed up for when we go out. As the Raven Filmonomic Affair.

Eventually, after seeing another film or two, we might get tattoos. Each of us with an individual jigsaw piece that will fit into each others' when we come together. As the Raven Filmonomic Affair.

This all began when I was asked if I wanted to go to the cinema last Saturday. It was the afternoon and with no others plans on the afternoon horizon, I went along. We saw The Descendants, starring George Clooney.

I hadn't been to the cinema for quite some time. Things have changed. People seem to go to the cinema in these troubled financial times to be entertained, to have some laughs. Despite of what is being shown on the big screen.

I was bemused at the ripple of laughter at the Red Bull advert. I was getting scared at the chuckling to the Lynx body deodorant advert. Did these people around us chortle away at these very same adverts on their own TV's at home, muttering "very good, ho, ho"? Was the peer pressure to be known to be enjoying the cinematic experience causing this phenomena? If the car ad with the little boy who thinks he's Darth Vader came up, then all bets were off - they'd literary have to piss themselves to show their communal approval.

The Descendants is - giving nothing away - not a comedy. It finds brief moments of lightness in an otherwise difficult set of situations. Much like life. I did enjoy the filmatic pans of locations and the sound effects are terrific. Those who enjoy good sound execution should certainly buy a ticket.

But there is an underlying sadness percolating in each scene. So when, at the point Clooney's character gives the devastating news of his wife's death in disarming brutal fashion to her friend, I was astonished that the audience around us erupted into guffaws. Stopping just short of the thigh slap. I am not sure that was quite the intended reaction to that line of script, to be honest.

But it seems that this is the modern way of things. People go to the cinema to have jolly fun.

Needless to say that it was a good film, however, it's story path and the weird experience of feeling as if I was missing the big joke of a man coming to terms with his masculine roles at the most devastating point of his life, meant I have opted to pick the next film to see. As the Raven Filmonomic Affair.

Iron Sky.

I have not heard anything about it except for the one line summary in the cinema's own leafleting that I scanned at the ticket kiosk. But, come on, who doesn't want to see a film that provides this synopsis as the reason to see it:
“In Iron Sky you will see what happens when Nazis return from the Moon”.

I am guessing as they will all be in their 90’s by now, wasted away from the lack of gravity on the moon, it could have some pretty hilarious consequences…? Imagine them trying to walk about on Earth! ha, ha! Trying to wipe out the free world but getting freaked out at the modern speed of life and personal pagers, all the while carrying the posture of half deflated Goodyear tyres! Hee, hee. Fantastic.

Of course, maybe they burrowed into the moon and found moon people. In which case it could be fascinating.

Either way Iron Sky is my feel good movie event of the year.

Geophysing the ruins of Time Team



"So the Saxons did this? Sure it wasn't you?"
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/

To me, Time Team (C4) is just about as perfect Sunday TV programme as you could hope. It is like Grand Designs but without the peril.

Since 1994 presenter, associate producer, Devil's advocate and agent provocateur of the show, Tony Robinson, has stood on a bit of field and explained that they only have "3 days" to dig it up. The programme then follows the Time Team digging up the field to see what was buried in it.

Tony is flanked by historian Mick Aston and archaeologist Phil Harding (and occasionally a posh guy who knows about Romans) and some of the other field archaeologists who have become minor players as the series' have rolled on.

Sure, it helps that Tony Robinson is clearly a time traveller - planting much of what the Time Team find (spoons, worked stones, bodies) during the ad breaks.

[Now I know what you might say here - Greville, Tony wouldn't need 4 minutes to go and plant things thousands of years ago as he is a time traveller and could return before he is gone. But I say, that that is not how Tony necessarily travels in time. And you might say, but Greville, the theory that Tony sees where a trench is going to be dug on the episode then sneaks off to 300AD to plant a pot in the earth is unfeasible. But I say, I may not know anything about quantum physics but is there really all that stuff underground? Come on! Look for the clues! What kind of fool do you take me for? He definitely does it.]

However, there is something about Time Team, that watching the discovery of a pot shard and listening to the debate as to if it was a wine vessel - in EVERY episode - which simply adds to its charm and success.

Above all, though, and this is important, Time Team is not sexy. Mick's jumpers are not sexy. Phil's greasy hat and odd, straggly hair is not sexy. Tony's 2nd trimester beer baby belly is not sexy. The arguments between these men and the guy with the resistivity meter about where to dig next are not sexy. Time Team is all about dirty fingernails and flaxen dress reproductions on windswept fields. The closest you get to sexy is the rarer than a iron buckle, field archaeologist's Thong Shot.

Not for Time Team is the desperation of trying to crowbar in some populist crackpot theory to make things more exciting. [I am looking at you Channel 5. "Mystery of the Vampire Skeletons", indeed!]

Time Team is not afraid to tell it like it is: Ritual or Trade route.

Not for Time Team is the use of CSI style computer generated shenanigans to piece together events of history [The Bone Detectives].

Time uses a man with map and another man who does pencil and oil illustrations.

Time Team has the balls to put out an hours worth of programming showing woolly jumper academics enthusiastically pointing at different toned clay in the ground and claiming it is a castle.

Time Team is informative, slight entertainment viewing. I doubt anyone sets their TiVo box to record an episode but at the same time it is hardly likely to cause anyone to demand it is removed from the schedules. Even when they do those Specials [in that they talk to an archivist and blow the bigger budget on a re-enactment - otherwise it is just the same] and it crops up on a Tuesday night at 10pm.

But like all great spanning, risen Empires there has to be a Fall. Or a Fall-out. And like all great dynasties it was a decision to sex-up the whole shebang that has been the cause of it.

Mick Aston left, citing the plans to "cut down the informative stuff", the letting go of some of the field archaeologists an increase of "pratting about" and a general reduction of the show to "pap".

It is true, the most recent series has tended to see the Time Team enjoy themselves a little too much away from considering putting in a Trench 4. Perhaps most damning of all is the introduction of a new co-presenter, model and Cambridge qualified history babe, Mary-Anne Ochota [This in itself is an outrage as everyone knows it should have been more qualified historian and Time Team alumni Bettany Hughes or nobody] that may have contributed to Aston's "Keys and Gray" pique of anger.

Nothing sexes up and dumbs down a history show like a nubile history geek girl in frame. Time Team viewers do not wish to be distracted from the artifacts by her white teeth, shaved ankles and summer blouses. Time Team viewers only want their strange, curved structures plotted on the geophyis results. Will this be the moment that people will point to signifying the end? Time will tell.

But this very week Mary-Anne has posited that things "didn't work out" and has left the show. So far details beyond this have been sketchy. It will be interesting to see as the series goes on if what went wrong is detectable, or she will be coldly sentenced damnatio memoriae.

An iron age hill fort
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/totty-presenter-mary-ann-ochota-quits-679815

Are we looking at the final throes of the Time Team age? The men behind the success are becoming fragmented, the tensions are hinting at secret conspiring and disruptive intentions? Are we staring at the era of Time Team where the bourgeois stand in public houses with their real ale toasting the day and sing folk songs into the night as the trenches outside lay in waste and back-fill? Are we looking at Tony fiddling as Rome burns?

That he totally did do, by the way.

I am a human, I am no dancer

It is said non-choreographed dancing is the direct physical reaction to melodic sound completely bypassing the self-conscience. Further, as a result of this state, it supposedly reveals in a male to a female exactly what kind of lover he is.

This is a lot pressure for a man - knowledge of the latter does not particularly help with the former, you know?

Mainly, I say, dancing is a social contrivance for rhythmic humiliation.

This was brought home to me like an ice cream headache last week when I found myself on the dance floor of a local social club at the end of a party. By this stage of the evening it was the last dance, the DJ insisted that everyone left was to get onto the dance floor and cut some rug. Up to that point, I had stoically remained seated. Being the designated driver I was not on the alco-pops. This had barred the usual path to short circuiting my self-conscience. As I made my way forward I knew I had seen busier train platforms after the last train of the night. There was going to be no hiding place.

Desperately, I tried to invoke a zen to free my body from my mind.

Now the most pure of dancing is surely produced by the Rock 'N' Roll Flower. It is solely designed for the purpose of dance. It will literally dance unquestioning to anything: The SugaBabes, someone clapping their hands, a husband and wife having a domestic, David Guetta.

And yet, ironically, even though I dance exactly the same as the Rock 'N' Roll Flower - I would not be considered close to a decent dancer.

Call me worthless. Tell me I will never find happiness because I am so ugly. Spit on me and yell that I deserve it. I WILL STILL DANCE

Once I was on the dance floor, I knew I was in trouble. I didn't know the quango crafted auto-tuned song. Girls and ladies were not only swaying and sashaying but would punctuate their movements with hand actions. Yes, there was understood interpretive hand actions to all but me. I was in all sorts. Rendered the dance equivalent of mute and knowing it would be too obvious if I simply walked back to my chair, I pulled out my stalwart default Ian Brown dance moves.

A few female friends began to giggle. They subtly drew attention to me. A girl I knew exclaimed that I couldn't dance (offering me a business card of a dance teacher while dancing at me) as I continued to jog on the spot.

I began to panic. There must be moves I have busted in the past that I can pull out of my armoury? A shape I can lay?

My life flash danced before my eyes:
Well, there was the school dance, where the coolest boy in class taught me to dance like MC Hammer. But that could dislocate my hips these days. There was the time at university when I created a short-existing dance sensation of standing still with my head raised to the ceiling and hands behind my back on the dance floor during the breakdown segment of songs. But that might just make me appear foolish outside the student fraternity. Or the occasion when my hair was long and I did a bit po-go-ing and shook my head in time at a rock concert. But it will possibly take longer than this track to grow my hair. There was the dancing I did at my parents anniversary party, I felt pretty cool that night. That might work - just need to remember what I did back then. If only I could remember...

What song is this... does this go on the radio?

My mind was wandering now:
How come dancing is so easy for girls? They can do whatever they like. Shuffle and give little effeminate flicks of their wrists. Do full on mime actions to lyrics. It's all the same. They cannot look silly dancing on a barely populated social club dance floor whilst every so often doing hand grabs to one another, if they tried. They always look good dancing, totally at ease with the situation.

And look at me. Here I am jogging on the spot, being horribly aware of my own body letting me down. And now another guy is in my view. The girls are loving him. He is doing the robot. What is that saying about his bedroom manner? I bet he is into all kinds of weird funk. I could do the robot.

Then another flashback: Robot is a no go. Abort robot. My robot appears to have pneumatic valve issues. It is in need of a service at the very least.

Nope. I will stick to the Ian Brown jogging on the spot. While still trying to remember what shapes I was throwing at my parents anniversary and smoothly morph them into proceedings here. Now what was I... it was a bit like... was that?... Surely... Oh... No....

It was at this point that I realised now what I was too young and naive to know all those years ago.

I was totally air-doggy-styling at my folks party. And miming a bit arse slapping for good measure.

Some kid in the playground had been acting it out and I must have thought he was showing off a sweet, sweet dance move.


Yep, Lord of the Dance, that is moving without self-conscience whilst hinting what someone is like in the sack, right there. No more disturbingly put than through the medium of a 12 year old boy in front of his parents.

I became suddenly very comfortable with my ape-does-jogging on the spot until the end of the song. That'll do for me. After all it is good to leave a little mystery about you, girls like that too, you know.