Bad Boss III - They're Taking Over The Asylum!

My thanks to David Kursey, the well known radio broadcaster and pseudonym for this tale, which he will tell in his own words. His boss, on hearing that they'd booked actor John Challis for his show, came up with some ways to make the interview 'non-standard’:

"Now I’m a great admirer of Only Fools and Horses, and my views on it are strong. I rate the early ones best because they’re gritty and real. The storylines are funny in the middle years, and some of the incidental characters really come into their own. But I have a firm belief that John Sullivan should have said “no” the minute popular culture reduced his Peckham to just another Christmas tradition. Trigger became too thick to be real or funny; Mickey Pierce surely wouldn’t still be wearing that hat?... John Challis was there throughout, so this was a good opportunity for me.

My co-host had never seen an episode. (That’s a story for another day.) So the boss decided to motivate…

“You must know it – you know, Del Boy… in the market… wears a hat.”

No.

“Anyway, I think you should split this interview into two parts. For the first five minutes you should interview him as Boycie.”

Oh God.

“Then, after five minutes, reveal that he’s actually John Challis and ask him about what it’s been like to play Boycie: does he get recognised, that sort of thing.”

Oh GOD.

I tried to use the situation to my advantage and asked how, if only one of us knew the series, we could both probe John Challis in character.

“Ask him about the bar… You know… when he fell through the bar. Everyone’s seen that.”

Me: “But he didn’t fall through the bar.”

Bad Boss: "Yes he did – someone opened the bar and he went to lean on it and…”

Me: “That was Del. That was David Jason.”

Silence.
 
“But wasn’t he with him when he fell?”

“No – that was Trigger. That was Roger Lloyd-Pack…”

Silence.

“How about asking about the beard?”

“Uncle Albert – played by Buster Merrifield. Now dead.”

Silence.

“Well, you have to remember you know the series better than most of the audience. I’m sure you can make it work.”

We did. I did. We spoke to John Challis, the actor who’d taken the most insignificant of roles and turned him into an essential part of one of the nation’s best loved sit-coms – probably one of the most instantly recognisable figures in British comedy.

At least to some".



The door is still open for any more Bad Boss stories. 

Birdsong Strictly For The Birds

Over the past two Sundays I invested three hours of my life watching a camera move in ever so slowly on the face of a man who didn't have a lot of luck. By my reckoning he died at least three times during this show. It felt like I'd died many more times.

The BBC's attempt to bring Sebastian Faulk's Great War novel 'Birdsong' to life left me wishing the idea had been tossed into a muddied trench of its own. Abi Morgan (The Hour arrrrggggghhhhhh) adapted the book and decided on a structure that ran two time streams in parallel; Stephen Wraysford's affair with the married Isabelle and his subsequent time spent in the trenches. She elected to discard the other time-line from the book - wisely - that brought the story into the 1970's.

Two time lines were enough, in fact often too much. Just as you were getting your teeth into one story it skipped back - or forward - to the other. We never spent enough time with either to properly get to know the people or what was at stake.What is the one thing we all know? Structure is everything, get that wrong and everything is thrown out of kilter.

Money had been thrown at this. Mucho grande moolah. Crowd scenes of hundreds featured hundreds of real people, no cgi here. The battle scenes were impressive, as were the trenches, this was a production that screamed attention to detail.

But the pace!

If I never see another slow zoom I will die a happy man.

I enjoyed Eddie Redmayne's performance in My Week With Marilyn and when I saw he was heading this cast I was interested to see what he did with the character of Wraysford. What he did was stand very still - a lot - and show no visible emotion at all - a lot. This shot was repeated over and over again whilst a piano theme evolved very slowly beneath.

Yes, the summer sunlight captured in the pre-war scenes was very pretty, as was Clemence Poesy as Isabelle, the fine lady who gives up everything for a clerk. But even this story wasn't properly developed. One minute they are touching ankles in a punt and the next they're bonking while her old man is in Paris. When they run away together they have a brief moment in in the sun but then she breaks the handle on their last cup and their relationship is doomed. We discover later why she really leaves him. But a bit of nicely lit bonking doesn't really convey the emotions of the pair. Wraysford may say she was the the only women he had ever loved but all he does is gazed in to the middle distance with a stupid look on his face.

Pace is a tricky beggar. But this made that other slowly paced show 'Mad Men' seem like it is cut by The Editor Supreme at MTV. There has to be a reason to take things ultra slow. This just made me frustrated and uncomfortable.

If you hadn't read the book chances are you wouldn't have picked up on many of the themes. The characters aren't really people but representations of a changing world. Hence Isabelle, who represent all things beautiful, is literally scarred by the war and is never the same again. 

I know how she feels.

I need to watch something that rip-roars along at a mighty pace, just to rid myself of the feeling of torpor I was left with .

Great 'Bad Boss' Story II

Having written about the Bad Boss who told his producer to "Stop bringing me ideas!" I have been passed a number of other such tales.

Such as:
The Radio station boss who told one of his presenters that time checks were more important than anything else he did...

...the TV producer who told a director lighting was the least important thing to worry about...

...the manager so up his boss's ass that when said boss told him budgets had to be cut and he needed to lose staff he kept his tame monkeys and fired the writer and director - and had no show...

And this little beauty, which concerns an experienced producer of a radio phone in show:

Having spent years putting together sparkling radio shows a new boss arrived. The producer was no longer left to their own devices, each day the topic had to be checked with the boss-man to make sure the subject was to his liking.

Each day the producer would come up with good lively suggestion only to have those topics squashed and replaced by something more aligned to the day's news - but so stale that few listeners were prompted to phone in. After weeks of this the phone-in had all but dried up. The producer complained, only to be told that if they did it the producers way they'd have too many calls.

Any more bad boss stories gratefully received.

A Great 'Bad Boss' Story

Last week I was working with a friend on some TV shorts. She told me a great story that had me open mouthed, speechless and angry all at the same time. Just thinking about it makes me want to  kick ass.

This concerned a boss she worked for at the BBC. Now the hallowed halls of the dear old Beeb are not quite as hallowed as once they were. Neither are all the positions of power staffed by the keenest minds. Cascading down from on high you eventually hit a seam of people who never got beyond 'a little bit of power'. However, some of these people wield it like they're Louis B Mayer but without the insight or sensitivity.

Being a creative force my friend kept taking him ideas until one day, unable to cope with her creative flow, he said these words:

"Will you please stop bringing me ideas. With you it's one after another. We have an ideas meeting on a Wednesday, you know the rules, everyone is allowed ONE IDEA. And I don't want to hear any more from you until you've seen the last idea all the way through".

If she didn't know before that she had to move on - she did - this was the moment that cemented it.

"Will you please stop bringing me ideas!"

In the parlance of the young OMG, WTF. In a creative industry those words should be a sackable offence.


Apparently he is still in the same job. Dear God. 

Golden Globes - Only The Brits Won!

I was in America during the '92 Olympics. It was a surreal experience for a sports fan. In Britain we get to see pretty much all the coverage going. Doesn't matter if a final is made up of a Swiss, a Nigerian, a Japanese, a Pole, a Luxembourger, a Venetian and a Finn we'd still get to see it.

In America the coverage was a little different. Only events that included Americans were televised. No Americans in the event - the event doesn't exist.

I mention this because yesterday morning I woke up to the news on BBC 5Live. When they got to the item about who'd won what at the Golden Globe I turned up the radio. I heard that Idris Elba had won for Luther, Kate Winslett - slumming on TV in a magnificent adaptation of Mildred Pierce - had got the top prize in her category, that this Brit had won this and that Brit had won that and well done to Downton Abbey. And that was it.

Idris Elba, Golden Globe winner for Luther

According to BBC radio If it wasn't British it wasn't worth including. Well, hello! Some of us were interested in the rest of the winners.

Thank God for the internet.

When I logged on and tracked down the information the BBC didn't want to give me I discovered that George Clooney won best actor for his role in The Descendants, which also won Best Drama. That

French black-and-white silent film, The Artist, - fabulous, fabulous, fabulous, really if you haven't seen it you must - picked up three awards - Best Comedy or Musical Film, Best Original Score and Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical Film, for its star, Jean Dujardin.

Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier who appears in the mostly silent film, almost upstaged the acceptance speech by performing several tricks on stage at the Beverley Hilton Hotel, including playing dead. 

On a night that also saw Morgan Freeman honored with the Cecil B. Demille Award for his outstanding contribution to film, it was again the host of the show British comic Ricky Gervais who was causing controversy. Watching the show later I wish Ricky Gervais had played dead - that 'I'm a smug bastard and the funniest man in the world act' is wearing horribly thin. 

Meryl Streep won Best Actress in a Drama for her portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady and therefore got a mention on the BBC. But I'm not sure I heard them say congratulations to Michelle Williams, who won Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn.

Even the fact that Martin Scorcese received a standing ovation from his peers after he won Best Director for Hugo didn't warrant a mention.  

In the television awards, Modern Family won Best Musical or Comedy, Homeland won Best Drama, and Downton Abbey won Best Mini-Series.Claire Danes won Best Actress in a Drama for her role as Carrie in Homeland, Matt LeBlanc won Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for Episodes - where he plays a fictional version of himself. LeBlanc paid tribute to the show's writers, saying they "write a Matt LeBlanc who is way more interesting and fun. I wish I was him." Jessica Lange won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Constance in horror-drama American Horror Story, Laura Dern won Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role as whistleblower Amy in Enlightened.

Kelsey Grammer, who earlier today announced his wife Kayte Walsh Grammer was pregnant with their first child, won Best Actor in a Drama for his portrayal of Tom Kane in Boss, Peter Dinklage won Best Supporting Actor for character Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones (hooray).

Wow all those other ‘non- British’ people won things.

On to the Oscars, the best bit of which is the opening twenty minutes. You can be assured it'll knock your socks off - it's always the best bit and always the bit the BBC chop off so they can show us 'the highlights' of who won what. That's like showing us Match of the Day but editing out the goals. 

I was going to write about the final episode of Sherlock - but I'm still trying to work out the ending. There's lots of clues you just need to be Sherlock Holmes to put them all together.

Jack Benny Broke Up My Partner and I

A writing partnership is a wonderful thing - when it works. I know there are many men and women who climb that hill alone, I've done it often enough myself, but to have someone else alongside is heaven sent. I worked with a partner for nearly ten years.

The most important thing about a partnership - and there are many important things - but the MOST important thing is that you laugh at the same time at the same things. Okay, maybe one has a darker take on things than the other, or likes puns or appreciates physical comedy a little bit more, doesn't matter, what matters is that you share a sense of humour.

If you think of comedy as being like a structure made of fine crystal, whilst one of you is building it the other is throwing rocks at it.

For most of our partnership we shared a sense of humour. He was more intellectual than me, likes to strip it down, find out the root cause of why something was funny, I was more the instinct man but happy enough to peel back the layers and see if there was something we could learn and repeat.

He had a facility with lyrics, I could construct a joke. We laughed a lot, talked for hours and produced some decent scripts. Sometimes we worked in the same room together - though that was sometimes like pulling teeth, most times we brought our separate bits to the table and then put them together.

But for most of our partnership it was a long distance relationship. He moved to the opposite side of the country. We constructed our comedy on the phone. If the Internet had been around at the time it would've made things easy, doing it now with someone else is like writing in the next room. But me and my first partner were writing in the 80, and early 90's. We were only just getting to grips with computers. We'd bash things out on the phone and then write up the scribbled notes.

But if you write in a partnership you must both contribute equally. I'm not talking about every other line, very often who came up with what gets lost as one comes up with something and that something gets honed and changed and thrown out and brought back in a different form until 'who wrote what' is irrelevant. But you must both contribute, both bring the funny. Our partnership got out of kilter. One was doing a lot more work than the other and obviously so. Like a marriage where neither wants to face or confront the inevitable we had no future.

One day the movie To Be or Not To Be came up in conversation. A wonderful Jack Benny comedy from 1942, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co starring Carole Lombard in her last role. It tells the tale of a polish theatre company during the early years of the second world war. Occupied by the Germans the players have to resort to a boring Hamlet rather than the zesty satirical stuff they'd been producing. In it the hammy actor played by Jack Benny adopts the identity of a Professor in order to discover if he is a spy - if you haven't seen it, find it, it's wonderful. Another member of the troupe impersonates Hitler.

My then partner insisted that Benny played Hitler. I said no, he played the Professor. No, he played  Hitler!

For the first time in our relationship things got nasty. He insisting that Benny played Hitler, I said no  he didn't. A real nasty argument ensued. And we never really made up after that.

Benny centre, 'Hitler' to his left.

It was a stupid argument. What did it matter who Benny played?  But he went his way I went mine. Whilst the Jack Benny argument wasn't the cause of the break up, like I said we'd been heading that way for some time, it's the moment I look back on and remember as the first time we really didn't agree and couldn't find a funny way out. It was the no way back moment. We didn't trust each other any more.

On such small things our stories often turn. It's not the BIG moments that reveal the most about characters. It's often the small inconsequential things that bring everything to a head.

Bob Holness - Gentleman

Alan Coren, Bob Holness, Sandi Toksvig.

Bob Holness, the broadcaster, actor, presenter and one of the nicest people you could ever meet has died.

He was the long-time host of ITV's Blockbusters, a game that required contestants to chose a letter and then get a question associated with it. The phrase "can I have a P please, Bob" became a national catchphrase. After three pints in the pub grown men would slam down an empty glass and announce "can I have a pee please, Bob" then troll off to the gents. As the game was played by teenagers they also latched onto, what could be construed as a drugs reference, the phrase ' can I have an E please, Bob'

Bob and I shared another phrase, "less is more".

In 1996 the BBC asked me to revive the panel game, Call My Bluff. It had been a staple of the BBC2 schedule for years with erudite, witty folk explaining the meaning of obscure words. I had always loved it. The revival saw the game transfer to a lunchtime slot on BBC 1. I knew immediately that I wanted Alan Coren to captain one team, and the series producer of the show suggested Sandi Toksvig. We were set. But who was going to host it. Actually, host is the wrong word and if I write about a show that was all about words I should use the correct one, who was to Referee it. Robert Robinson had been the referee for much of its TV life but he was considered wrong for the resurrection.

A hundred names were thrown into the pot. The first was Bob Holness. Whoever was mentioned after Bob could never compete in terms of experience. Bob had enjoyed a long and illustrious career as a broadcaster. His biggest claim to fame, aside from Blockbusters, was that he'd been the first actor to play James Bond. I see today that many sources are saying he was the second actor. I dispute this. The only actor to play the spy before Bob was an American who played a spy called Jimmy Bond. I therefore stand by the fact that Bob was the first to play James.

Bob was our man; smart, articulate, warm, avuncular Bob Holness. But it soon became obvious that in this game of words the referee's role is best kept brief. The duties were : the introduction of the teams and then the summing up, in just a few words, what the panellist had taken a lot of words to describe. Bob's easy way with words led him to use too many in his summaries. In fact they were going on and on. I had a word, "On this show, Bob, less is more". This worried him, he thought that by contributing less he wasn't really doing his job, shortchanging us.  I assured him less is more. It took quite a few shows to get there - and every time we met I'd say 'less is more' but he cut back and cut back and soon it was just right. It seems a silly little thing but every show needs a kind of internal balance. When we got there we knew we had it.

Bob was a gent. I enjoyed our many conversations, I enjoyed his company and his stories. He wasn't funny as such but had a lightness of touch and warmth of personality that drew you to him. It was always a delight to be in his company.

The writer and broadcaster Stuart Marconie stared a rumour that Bob had played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafterty's Bakers Street. Gullible jocks picked up the ball and ran with it. Soon a hefty wodge of credulous folk embraced it as a truth. I don't know what Raphael Ravenscroft, the true saxophonist on the record, thought. I do know Bob thought it was hilarious. 

Whenever we bumped into each other after that he'd say "I know, I know, less is more'. Then flash that fabulous smile and do that thing that came so easy to him - laugh.