Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe

This week I’ve been watching Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.

Make no mistake British television satire is in the doldrums. Whether it’s Paul Merton pulling a face for cash or Hugh Dennis substituting penetrative thought for hackneyed impressions, we’re in trouble. Fortunately, Charlie Brooker on his caustic steed is galloping in once more to rescue us from ignorance.

Brooker has been producing and writing insightful, irreverent comedy for the last 15 years. He began behind the scenes, writing on the 11 o’clock show (a televisual college that Ricky Gervais and Sasha Baron Cohen learnt and graduated from). From there, he along with Chris Morris wrote Nathan Barley, a sitcom that prophetically saw the coming of the post-ironic hipster age. After this, he became an established fixture on our screens: first, lampooning television in Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe; then the news in Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, and now any cultural phenomena that pisses him off in Weekly Wipe.

Over the course of the show, Brooker’s spleen is thrown at television news, adverts and programmes. Given the demands of writing a weekly show, he enlists guest contributors who add a whimsical yin to his angry yang. Uniformly, the comedians he gets on are brilliant, which makes the show a unique platform for fresh voices. My favourite is Philomena Cunk, played by the brilliant Diana Morgan, less well-known for being in sketch double act, Two Episodes of Mash. Her role on Wipe is to parody the empty talking heads we see on so many countdown lists. This week she was trying to get her head around BBC’s lavish historical drama, Wolf Hall, describing it as ‘British people in hats sort of talking.’ Another role she plays is that of Grand Inquisitor, lampooning the type of arts shows presented by Melvyn Bragg. In the episode she interviewed an academic on the legacy of Winston Churchill, asking him why he is celebrated as a war hero when he just ‘sat in a hole, directing people what to do like a mini-cab driver.’ She is a more subversive interviewer than say Ali G because with his loud shell suit and glaucoma glasses guests saw him coming; but Morgan’s Cunk is played with such sleight of hand they miss the deceit.

        So turn off the panel shows and turn on Charlie Brooker for comedy with brains, bile and bite.

The first episode aired yesterday and is available here on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05173ym/charlie-brookers-weekly-wipe-series-3-episode-1

Tree

This week I went to see Daniel Kitson’s play ‘Tree.’

Daniel Kitson - or simply ‘Kitson’ to his fans - is the greatest stand-up no one’s heard of. He doesn’t do radio, tv or press because he no longer needs it. Whilst other comedians work in ‘improvised’ anecdotes on chat shows to abet ticket sales, Kitson lets his fans do the promotion. And it works. In a sense Kitson runs a benign pyramid scheme where an individual is so wowed by his performance they tell others to go; in turn they tell others; in the end everyone is made to feel richer by experiencing his brilliance.

Kitson started young as a stand-up comedian. He had a reputation for owning any room. He was as adept at quelling belligerent drunks as he was titillating chin-strokers. It was this accomplished versatility that led him to the Perrier Award for best Edinburgh show in 2002. At this point he could have gone on to be the biggest comic in the land, enjoying the riches that come with mainstream success. Instead he decided to plough his own furrow, sowing hour-long shows with feeling, theme and self-commentary. As the King of Edinburgh took his fight to the mainstream- eschewing the puerile for the philosophical- casual fans deserted, rewarding loyalists who stayed with bewitching lyrical shows of beauty.

Since mastering the stand-up form, Kitson has branched out into storytelling and plays. Humour is still at the core of what he does, but there’s now great pathos too. His show at ‘The Old Vic’ paired him alongside comedian, Tim Key, who plays Sidekick Simon in the Alan Partridge movie. The play begins with Key’s character berating himself on being late for a date. Calling his date to apologise, she reminds him the clocks have changed, meaning he is in fact fifty minutes early. A man laughs from up a tree: that man is played by Daniel Kitson. It materializes that he has been living up the tree for the past ten years to thwart a suburban deforestation plot. You see his neighbour, a bully and a blowhard, wants the tree on the green felled so he can enjoy some more sunlight. Cowered by intimidation but silently resistant, Kitson’s neighbours keep him fed and watered by placing food and water in a bucket pulley contraption. There is a hilarious scene where the two characters take tea using this method.

Obviously Key’s character thinks the other’s sacrifice is nuts and refuses to believe him. I mean: how do you go for a shit when you’re up a tree? Don’t you want to have a shower? How do you earn money? The moody belligerence of Key against the wide-eyed optimism of Kitson is the start of what becomes an odd couple bromance. By the end though, a simple story of resistance becomes a meditation on truth and lies.

The play has just had its run extended so you still have time to get a ticket.
Or: see the kind of stuff he does here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7itrqtMs1qY

ayoade on ayoade: a cinematic odyssey

This week I enjoyed ‘ayoade on ayoade: a cinematic odyssey.’

I’ve enjoyed Richard Ayoade ever since I saw him on Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place, back when I was in university. The sitcom, a pastiche of 80’s television, sends up the piss-poor acting and editing that typified the era. Since then, Ayoade’s career has continued to develop, enjoying mainstream success in Graham Linehan’s ‘The I.T Crowd’ and Channel 4’s ‘Big Fat Quiz of the Year.’ His rising cache in comedy means he can now follow art-house passion projects, adapting Joe Dunthorne’s coming-of-age novel, ‘Submarine’ and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story, ‘The Double’ for the silver screen.  

It is this career as a filmmaker that Ayoade skews in his book. Being raised a comedian – he was President of Cambridge Footlights- means he’s very much the bastard child of independent cinema. Recently joining that world, but not belonging to it, means he feels no pressure to respect it. To nick a Malcolm Tucker expression: he’s outside the tent pissing in rather than inside the tent pissing out. As a result, over the course of the book the whole film industry is golden showered by Ayoade’s warped wit.

The first half of the book is framed as a series of interviews between Richard Ayoade and himself – himself because he’s the only person who has the intellectual capability to understand his answers. Think an interrogation room that pits a likeable cop against an insufferable narcissist and you’ve got the idea of how the book is framed. Here’s one such exchange:

Ayoade: Do you rehearse with actors?

Ayoade: I don’t like to rehearse. I don’t like to do more than one take. We don’t rehearse life, do we? We don’t get more than one take at our existence?

The second half of the book is Ayoade’s advice on how to make it in the film industry. He takes us from how to get a project from page to screen, even giving us a glimpse into his script for a biopic based on the life of Danny O’Donoghue from The Script. Film fans will love the latter section as it boasts a Did you know section of trivia that includes such nuggets as: ‘Did you know Mike Leigh is best friends with Michael Bay? They met through a mutual interest in their own names.’ As someone who goes to the cinema a lot, I got a lot of the references; for those that I missed, I was too immersed in the harebrained satire to care.

Ultimately, ayoade on ayoade is the antidote for people who take film too seriously.