Of all the ways to even attempt an accurate description of the complex character of Noel Edmonds, none have so perfectly and succinctly pinned him down as Vic and Bob's portrayal, in 1993's Smell of Reeves and Mortimer. Their great skill is using warped non-impressions to perfectly capture a person's essence, through one beautifully observed trait, and their Noel, mouth agape in eternal hyste...
2018-09-24 08:26:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Been watching Sharp Objects. Is it just me, or do the constant flashbacks seem a bit... unrelated?
2018-09-22 12:13:54 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a particular cliché in film and television that rings truer than the rest, that is, the social hierarchy of the highschool male. Almost always, unsporty, flailing nerds fester at the bottom, with the popular jocks spitting at them from the top, with that Venn diagram of 'sporty kids' and 'bullies' usually a perfect circle. It's true in The Breakfast Club, and it was true for my schoo...
2018-09-16 14:46:52 +0000 UTC View Post
It's a miracle I've gone this long without tackling the works of Danny Dyer, who's one of those celebrities that embraces their stereotype so hard, they've become an actual cartoon. I've often wondered what genuine Italians make of Gino D'Acampo's Super Mario accent -- “Mama mia! I've dropped-a the spaghetti!” but speaking as a real British person, Dyer seems like the offensive creation of an enem...
2018-09-07 08:34:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Finally got around to editing some highlights from the Ultimate Warrior's reality show featured in this post from a few months back, if you want to see a man scream himself into a such a vivid shade of red, it passes beyond the visible colour spectrum.
2018-09-05 11:16:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In the summer of 1962, a flurry of monster sightings at the famous Loch inspire a group of volunteers to band together and keep watch on its waters.
That's more of a log-line than a blurb, but I want to take advantage of serialising and reveal surprises to the audience at my own pace.
Men of the Loch is a Patreon exclus...
Whoopi and Ted. Bruce and Demi. Gareth and Norman. But amid the early 90's landscape of wonderful celebrity couplings, there were none quite like Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold. In many ways, they were the Kim and Kanye of their time, a true Hollywood power couple virtually printing money, and wearing their brashness like wrestling heels, as exaggerated versions of their true selves that, in hindsight, ...
2018-08-28 10:44:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I couldn't stay away. I think we all knew, once I watched the Hulk Hogan episode and realised how gloriously stupid a show it was, that I'd be coming back to Baywatch. But it ran for so long, and the episode guide is a wonder of earthquakes and sea monsters and bungee jump contests...
2018-08-18 23:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
As a nine-year-old boy, I was right in the sweet spot when TMNT hit, or rather, TMHT, with the H for Hero, as the very word 'ninja' was banned in the UK, lest us delicate British dandies timorously trickle wee-wee into our knickers. A franchise built around bloodless beat-downs, its wild success caused headaches among the censors for a nation where nunchucks not onl...
2018-08-10 15:19:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Now that Jangle's concluded, I thought I'd quickly address what happens with the $5 tier going forward.
There are a lot of things I want to write. I'm surrounded by notebooks and word files and scraps of paper with enough ideas for books, screenplays, and miscellaneous media to see me releasing work until my 5,000th birthday. It's like the hideout of John...
Reincarnation is a nice idea, and out of all the afterlife possibilities, it's the one I most hope is real. What better than a chance to respawn and try again if, say, you completely fucked up your life by trying to be a writer, subsequently condemning yourself to an empty existence of failure and poverty? But everyone's always Cleopatra, and never some nameless serf who shat themselves to death on a ...
2018-08-01 07:02:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Baby Boomers get a lot of flak for knocking today's privilege-guzzling, smartphone-owning youngsters, while having spent their own twenties doing monstrous lines of coke off the bathroom sink of the three-bedroom house they bought for about a year's pay. But on the other hand, look what they had to put up with.
2018-07-22 10:19:49 +0000 UTC
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Of all the things I've covered on here, Bibleman may be the first actual propaganda. Though it claims to be an exciting live-action superhero story, that's really just a Clark Kent level disguise, on something that exists solely to spread the Christian message to its audience of the type of children who'd get whipped with a belt if they were caught sneaking down to the basement to watch Batfink 2018-07-13 16:38:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Preview of something I'm working on. I'd simply DIE if I couldn't share this clip immediately.
2018-07-06 15:28:36 +0000 UTC View Post
On the surface, Shaun Ryder on UFOs seems like one of those celebrity Madlibs shows Alan Partridge might pitch into his dictaphone. Brian Harvey on The Crusades, Steve McFadden Bought an Alpaca Farm; hey, what if we got that slurring chap from the Happy Mondays to figure out Roswell? Now, I've watched a lot of paranormal TV over the last few decades, from the haunto...
2018-07-05 09:16:20 +0000 UTC View Post
With the least name value of all the 'artists' featured on Past Laugh Regression so far, I expect this piece to get less hits than a video entitled 1 Piers Morgan 1 Cup. However, I've committed to rooting out the laff-makers of my childhood, so here we are, and for reasons of untoppable horrors that will soon become apparent, this is the final part. Unlike the solid structure of the ...
2018-06-27 07:30:32 +0000 UTC View Post
The last time I wrote about the Ultimate Warrior was in the 24 hours immediately following his death, which came as the sudden ending to his emotional WWE homecoming. I had a lot of feelings at the time, and a lot to say about the character that had meant so much to me as a ch...
2018-06-18 07:31:46 +0000 UTC View Post
The very title Russ Abbot's Madhouse conjurors images of cruel Victorian asylums; scream-filled corridors, where wailing patients rhythmically smash their heads against filthy walls, their desperate pleas for mercy scrawled with human effluence. If anything, such pictures are more palatable than the truth, though by the end of this piece, we may all find ourselves yearning for the ice-baths, ...
2018-06-09 08:45:12 +0000 UTC View Post
My constant trawl through terrible TV and weird, forgotten documentaries will occasionally throw up clips unworthy of a deep dive, but still worth sharing. For those not keeping an eye on Twitter 24/7, I'm going to stick them up here as extra bonus content.
First up is a thing I first saw in 2001, which stayed with me ever since, wherein celebrity 'gangster' Dave Courtney gets the hump with the magician at a child's birthday party.
Like a lost League of Gentleman sketch, t...
As much as this is a story about Jimmy Stewart, more than that, it's the tale of oil magnate, adventurer, and heist-architect, Tom Slick. An oil man literally called Tom Slick is so on-the-nose, it sounds like something from The Dandy, but Tom Slick was real, and exactly the sort of man I want to be. That is, super rich, and spending my time and resources on crazy shit. Slick's money, a...
2018-06-01 07:59:43 +0000 UTC View Post
In this series of fictional pieces, we'll look at the moments that almost happened, but didn't. At least, not here. While this is how it went down in our world, let's move one world over, on the day Bobby Davro was put in the stocks.
“...comedian ...
Imagine Knight Rider, but instead of David Hasselhoff, it's Hulk Hogan, and instead of a car, it's a boat. Cars drive on roads; boring concrete roads where there are hardly any boobs or butts; but boats live on the water, which is where you find women in bikinis. With boobs and butts. That's clearly the entire thinking behind Thunder in Paradise, from the tit-obsessed minds behind
It was inevitable in writing this series that I'd end up covering Davro, king of the eighties; our Eddie Murphy. While many of the comedy faces from that era were double-acts, Bobby Davro walked alone, and those two words were more than just a name; they were a brand. In Bobby Davro On the Box, Bobby Davro's TV Weekly, Davro's Sketch Pad, the titular Davro, and fina...
2018-05-07 09:21:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I've always unashamedly loved the Carry On films. Not in an ironic way that takes a jokey jab at my wokeness, but with the same purity I adore Chris Morris or the League of Gentlemen. Partly it's nostalgia, as the comedy of my childhood, each film is a comfort blanket of familiar faces; but also, it's a series that genuinely makes me laugh more than just about anything, even now. The Carry Ons are whe...
2018-04-28 14:53:30 +0000 UTC View Post
The immediate realisation on revisiting Baywatch for the first time in 25 years, is that they might as well just be naked. I'm no prude, but with everyone slow-mo running in those high-cut, atom-thin swimsuits, I suddenly feel like I'm at Burning Man. You can practically see the lot, starting with the opening title sequence, which is essentially a two-minute soft-porn rock video, with slow, l...
2018-04-20 09:08:11 +0000 UTC View Post
There's been a lot of discussion in the last couple of years about shifting notions of masculinity, with angry comments in The Sun from fathers worried their sons will grow up to be Danny La Rue because their John Lewis dinosaur pyjamas didn't have 'boys' written on the label. This sparked a random memory in me, of the moment when I first became aware of macho ideals. Thanks to imdb,...
2018-04-12 07:58:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometime in the late 80s, my mum found me loitering in the kitchen. The last she'd seen of me, I'd been happily sat in the living room, watching The Wizard of Oz.
“Are you hiding out here because you're afraid of the witch?” she asked, with the giveaway sound of cackling coming from the other room. Of course, she was right. For many generations of children, Margaret Hami...
2018-04-05 17:06:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Comedy has always been very important to me, and as is probably evident through the showy-off nature of my work, I'm a frustrated performer at heart. Maybe the Patreon will give me enough cash to buy a camera and some editing software, to take my nob gags off the page and into the 20th century. Even as a small child, comedy was what I liked, and I was very aware that I could make adults laugh; though ...
2018-03-28 11:32:42 +0000 UTC View Post
