Category: Uncategorized

So, I’m up to my eyeballs in scripts for Scrap It!, with altogether too little time between now and shooting the thing. Nevertheless, one can’t work all the time, so yesterday I upped and offed to Edinburgh. It’s the Festival, don’tchaknow, and as I’ve noted here already Gareth has a show. Now, I’ve seen a couple of reviews and they’ve been moderate, which is in itself interesting – my best guess is that the reviewers wanted to do a hatchet job but actually, it’s just not that bad a show, which left them rather bereft of a story.

So I booked a couple of tickets and headed off; met up with Mark; thence to the Gilded Balloon to meet Rosie, for whom I’d actually booked the other ticket (meeting Mark was a happy accident).

Meanwhile, a less happy accident had befallen Gareth. “The show’s cancelled – he’s had an accident.” informed the box office. Eek. OK – so I called him, intending to demand something like a street-theatre personal performance. Violet answered, sounding a little intense but otherwise like Violet. “Oh, hi Jonathan. It’s horrible,” she said, with an airy cheeriness, “Gareth’s having muscle spasms and can’t breathe, but not to worry, the paramedics are here now.”

“Oh right,” I said, catching more her tone than the words themselves, “so where are… what?” The information content finally caught up with me.

After a few hours sitting in A&E they finally saw a doctor, and Gareth was soon discharged. Just a bit of muscular weirdness, they thought; don’t do whatever he did to cause it in the first place. Which isn’t entirely reassuring, but in the circumstances probably better than the alternatives.

Meanwhile, Rosie and Mark and I had circled in a holding pattern in case Violet needed us, and also because John was with her and the whole thing might have turned into a bizarre and impromptu deletetheweb bloggers’ meetup. In a hospital, but I’ll take any Edinburgh venue I can find. Eventually, we tried to get in to see Ben Moor at the Pleasance, but he’d sold out (later it transpired that he hadn’t, and the box office was just being mean because they thought we were late, their clock being six minutes fast)… and then I came home and set to work on the scripts.

Much later, I had a long conversation with a somewhat hyper Violet, and a shorter one with a somewhat spaced-out-on-painkillers-and-muscle-relaxant Gareth. Poor lad.

Today, Gareth’s on much better form but still not sounding quite all there; he didn’t do the show this afternoon. He’s clearly despondent about this, but I think he’s done amazingly. By rights, the whole endeavour could (and, playing the averages, perhaps should) have been an unmitigated disaster. It wasn’t. People turned up, he had reviews – some good and none bad – and the audiences loved it. This is not how shows from Edinburgh virgins usually pan out.

Chin up, mate. But not so far it wrenches your back, OK?

For those unfamiliar with the finest sport in the world, there’s a fine old tradition when it comes to commentating on cricket. Engendered in part by the game’s civilised pace (some might say ‘glacial,’ but they’re heathens), it’s considered quite normal, even de rigeur, to discuss matters other than the cricket itself.

Those brought up on television coverage tend not to understand this – which might be the cause of Suw’s regrettable and I trust temporary confusion – but those introduced to Test Match Special at an early age cope just fine. We grasp the importance of, say, discussing the relative merits of chocolate cakes sent in by listeners.

TMS is available via the BBC’s live RealPlayer stream, of course (my favourite means of listening: this Dashboard widget, or maybe this one or this one). But at times – say when frantically writing scripts over a weekend – spoken commentary is too intrusive. Happily, there are several live ball-by-ball or over-by-over web feeds available, including reports from the venerable and magnificent CricInfo.

My favourite, however, is the Guardian’s coverage. Their scorecard is cleaner than the BBC’s, and the over-by-over commentary incorporating emails from readers is often downright hilarious. Right now they’re discussing what’s on the reporter’s iPod, Abu Dhabi, and trying to remember what the capital of Borneo is called.

From Martin – who seems to email me links at random, as some sort of plausibly deniable vicarious blog – this movie. Some crazy digital media cats in Berlin mount a bunch of stuff (projector, battery, voltage inverter, magnetic clamp… mac mini) in a flight case, and then… oh, you just have to watch it. It’s a glorious endeavour, though one has to marvel at it not turning into a study of, say, mac durability vs. small quantities of ‘controlled explosion’ plastique. Also – if you’re going to have shoals of fish swimming with the train, surely there should be porpoises too?

Damned ingenious, however, and all the more admirable for that. Bravo!

A little more detail over at We make money not art, which reveals what appears to be the project’s main site.

For all your bug-identification needs, What’s That Bug?.com.

Ah, the joys of the internet.

Tom Coates rather liked it at the London preview. As did The Londonist. I link to these so you know it isn’t just me who’s banging on about the damned thing – even people who’ve seen it seem to be enthusiastic.

Deletetheweb hostees – looks like I’ve done something terrible with email. Sorry. Will sort as soon as I can.

[update: I think it’s just forwarded addresses. But that’s most of them. Drat. Working on it…]

[update 2: Personal email should be back up. Mailing lists are still patchy. Bear with me…]

Worth mentioning: two things that cheered me up today. The first was talking to Gareth on the phone. It’s going to be tricky for me to get to his Edinburgh show since it’s on at lunchtime (Saturday, maybe?), but this afternoon he sounded completely jazzed about the whole thing. He’d obviously just had a rocking performance, his audiences have been reasonable-to-large (no mean feat), and he’s clearly enjoying himself immensely. A three-starred review in The Scotsman sounds a tad rough, but… it’s in the Scotsman, for heaven’s sake! Good effort, and it’s terrific to hear Toppy sounding so happy.

Secondly, the Scotsman also reviews Joss Whedon’s Serenity, playing in the film festival prior to its release next month. To say the review is positive is something of an understatement, and that’s a major relief. Did I mention I’m a fan of Firefly? Oh, I did.

For some reason I’ve not blogged much about the new series I’m making, which is a shame because today’s been probably the least encouraging day so far, and now you’re all going to go away with the wrong impression of it. It’s not a nightmare gig, I’ve just had ‘one of those days.’

The series is a(nother) children’s make&do show, of the sort I should probably avoid on the grounds of CV atrophication. However, the production company is lovely, the rest of the production team is a Top Bloke, and there are interesting aspects to the gig. Notably, the budget is tiny. OK, all TV people these days complain about squeezed budgets, but this… woah, boy. I’ve made similar shows in the past, but for those I had five times as much money. ‘Minor scaling back’ doesn’t start to cover it, and one is hence pushed into somewhat radical solutions. Of which more anon, since it’s fun working out what they might be.

One consequence, however, is a somewhat compressed schedule. Which presents a problem when things don’t quite go to plan, since there’s not a whole bunch of leeway involved. So, today, with filming three weeks away, we should have been confirming crew for studio. Frustratingly, we weren’t in a position to do that. The immediate knock-on effect is minor, except that I’m supposed to have another production chap start tomorrow and… well, I’m not sure either of us know if he’s turning up or not. He’s a laid-back sort and I’m sure it’ll be fine, but I dislike relying on people’s good natures like this.

The second difficulty could perhaps be referred to as an ‘imbalance of ambition.’ This is, by its very nature, an ambitious show. We’re putting as much effort into the content as we have on any previous series we’ve made, but there are fewer of us and fewer weeks’ prep, so we’re spread rather thinly. Item ideas are ahead of where I’d expected (Gavin is something like a genius when it comes to making games out of cardboard and yoghurt pots, and if he can dream it up I can usually make it work). Scripts are doing OK, though by the nature of the show they’re fiddly to redraft, and that worries me since time is short. But props… woohooo that’s scary. We’ve a mountain to climb, and we’re only just starting to see a plausible way around it. My gut instinct is that it’s touch-and-go on getting everything done, and I’ve made a genuinely ridiculous number of series of this sort: my gut is usually right.

So now isn’t a good time to be discussing fairly-to-seriously major additions to the format. It’s not that our commissioner is making ridiculous suggestions. Far from it, I like her a lot, think she has some great ideas, and find her approach refreshing. But my best guess is that we’ll come seriously unstuck if we try to do everything that’s currently on the table. So that’s going to be a nice phone call tomorrow. ‘Sorry, you can’t have that’ – never a good opener.

…and then I came home to the most hilariously huge bill from the Inland Revenue. Oh, I laugh now, now I’ve worked out why it’s nigh-on double what I was expecting. Still, it’s another major thing to sort out, and suddenly there aren’t enough days in the week, let alone hours in the day.

So, not the best day ever. I’m going to bed.

Thankfully not mine, which I’m sure is something of a relief to all concerned. No indeed – dear Gareth, currently playing Edinburgh dontchaknow, has a podcast up. I was initially skeptical that it was, technically, a podcast at all, but it has an RSS feed and everything. L33t!

You can also find the feed on the iTunes Music Store here, which since Gareth’s site is on my server means, I assume, that I’m now serving stuff for Apple. Or something like that.

Is the show any good? Yes. Gareth and his chum Zog discuss weird noises made by F1 cars, and petrolhead websites including the perennial favourite SniffPetrol.com. It’s nicely hacked-together with samples and stings and all that, and they’re rather engaging as a pair. It’s the sort of double-act that could grow, and I hope they keep at it and give themselves time to settle into it. Also to develop the show’s format, since the interjections by Violet and Tycho (Gareth and Violet’s eldest son) are probably the most charming parts. There are a couple of minor technical blemishes – Zog is very quiet at some points – but they’re only noticeable because it’s otherwise a thoroughly professional production.

In general I remain to be convinced that podcasts are anything other than amateur radio shows run by people who shouldn’t be on the radio. Given that, I’d rather have more Radio 4, thanks all the same. Nevertheless, there must be many podcasts that are worth one’s time, and Gareth’s might fit into that group. We’ll see how it develops.

Posted here for my own reference for the next time it happens; occasionally, the icons on my Mac refuse to drag anywhere. Which is a bit weird. Binning the cache and preferences files listed in this post, then logging out and logging back in again, solves the issue.

Oh, and trashing QuickSilver‘s prefs fixes the problem where it disappears as soon as you invoke it. Yes, I have filed a bug report about that.

Shock! Mac OS X isn’t completely hassle-free! Gasp!