foilarmsandhog

Sketch Diary - Newsreader speaking at a Funeral

Added 2023-01-13 11:08:58 +0000 UTC

This sketch had many many different versions, I won't bore you with the details, but our best sketches usually do. Each version adds another batch of jokes to the pot, and much like cooking stock, you let it cool off, wait a day, trim the fat, and then light the fires again. You're boring them with the details Conor. Sorry. I recently started making soup, just so you know. One success one abject failure: I used a recipe on the first, the second I was like "Recipe? Purlease, i am an artist! I do not deal with mundanities as temperatures or times, I beseech the ingredients to bend to my will!" ... by hopelessly overcooking them beyond flavour it would seem.

Sketches are a bit like that... you need to get the balance right, you mostly need the correct ingredients and you don't want to overcook them, or they come out flat and everyone complains

So, how to cook Tiernan? Well... this recipe took a while. The thing about Tiernan is, he doesn't work as well in a vacuum. Tiernan needs to be surrounded by people who set his world in our reality. Whether its a confused interviewer, annoyed date or perplexed mourner, Tiernan needs to be juxtaposed with normality to be funny. We couldnt figure out how to do that for such a long time - the answer on fourth attempt seemed so simple... extras! Where could we get extras at 24 hours notice though? Duck is on holidays and it seemed like our regular crew of actors are a bit overqualified.... hmmm. TO THE COSTUMES ROOM! We'll cook up our own. Now here is the fine line we must observe. If we remember back to earlier in the paragraph... class? CLASS? pay attention now... we needed Tiernan to be contrasted with reality. So, these people need to be real and behave real, so a bunch of people in ridiculous wigs isn't going to wash. I need to wash the costumes, but that's another matter. "But won't the extras ll just look like us?" I can hear you say. Well, yes.. but it's a small rural town... and as Anne Flanagan would say " We're a small island nation".

The performance of these cap wearing (disrespectful) and moustache donning (take that Foil) needed to be just right. I took my lead from the lads - subtlety is not my strongest acting suit.... Those of you who watch our videos will perhaps observe over the years that I have improved, but the lads still top me in this department - and subtlety was required. The looks of the congregation are going to have to be maintained for 2 mins... if they have a face on them like they just ate some of my second attempt soup in the first 10 seconds, then there's not going to be anywhere for them to go. You can't look on the verge of intervening for 2 minutes and do nothing, unless you're me cooking soup without a recipe.

Once we cracked that particular nut, we were all set, just missing an ending. Foil suggested the boxing announcer and we laughed. Sometimes thats all the discussion you need. We knew we'd have a longer than normal shoot, so we wanted to get it on camera early. The set was fun and surprisingly easy to put together as you can see. I was all for trying to rearrange the furniture to show the other side of the church, when Foil pointed out that we could just reflect the image in post! Jokes on him though, as now he's blessing himself with the wrong hand, the heathen.

I'm really glad this sketch went down well, as we had a lot of fun doing it, took some interesting risks, and it appears to have paid off. We can't forget one of the reasons we started doing sketches, which was to figure out how to be funny on camera. This week was a good lesson.

Class dismissed.

Arms

ps: a potato can thicken a soup but make sure you don't- oh who am I to give cooking advice.