Help Wanted Please

Does anyone remember an 80s pop video where a still photo was taken of the artiste playing every note on a keyboard (in various poses) then these were sequenced together in jump cuts to match the melody?

I need to completely rip it off use it as a reference.

Extra points for direct linking to YouTube.

Life On Mars

My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Or did I just go on holiday to the Isle of Wight, where orange juice is still served as a starter?


(It was actually a lovely holiday, and I had a full-on three-and-a-half decade Proustian rush when for dessert I had some of that neon pink pre-Haagen-Dazs/Ben & Jerry's strawberry ice cream that has been nowhere near a strawberry and is probably full of chemicals that have been banned everywhere else in Europe since before Live Aid, but made me very happy indeed.)

You Know You're Getting Older When...

You see the headline "Pop star Stevens robbed at home" and your first thought is "Oh, no! Not Shaky!"

Little Bit of Politics...

(Also available on b3ta.)

Would You Adam and Eve It?

Dear Early Learning Centre...

Dear Early Learning Centre

My son loves playing with his Early Learning Centre Noah’s ark set. Well done on pursuing that religious angle in these increasingly secular days! He is only 19 months old, but I have already explained to him how this toy celebrates the death of everyone on earth bar one family. He loves it! I expect that in years to come there will be some awkward questions about how big the ark would have had to have been, how Noah could have stopped the carnivores eating the herbivores, and how he could have saved the humble woodworm at all without the Ark ending up looking like Swiss cheese. But for now we are just having fun playing!

I do have one question for you though: I am not David Attenborough or anything, but even I can see that in your ark Noah has quite clearly saved two male lions. Look – they both have manes:

The lion is perhaps the species in which it is easiest to differentiate between the male and the female. It’s not like it’s one of those penguins that even zookeepers can’t tell apart unless they’ve got one anaesthetised in an operating theatre. I thought perhaps that there had been a mistake at the factory and that somewhere else in the country another small child was playing with a Noah’s ark containing two lionesses. But no, the picture on the box clearly shows two male lions:



Are these lions gay? Because I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what the Bible thinks about that. (It’s actually a bit contradictory – vacillating between loving everyone and stoning them to death with little middle ground along the lines of “I quite like Graham Norton in small doses and what they all do behind closed doors is up to them”.) But more importantly, how was Noah planning on continuing the world's population of lions with a couple of bummers? Was he going to try cloning them? Because I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what the Bible thinks about that. (It actually doesn’t mention it, unless it’s buried amongst all those rules in Leviticus about not wearing clothes made from different materials or planting different crops next to each other. The closest I can find is “Do not mate different kinds of animals” (Leviticus 19:18), which is kind of the exact opposite of cloning, so maybe God is in favour of it? I don’t know, but it’s a moot point anyway, as it's doubtful the technology would have been available to Noah, whose main area of expertise was carpentry.)

One more question: what kind of animal are these? The box just lists the contents as a rather non-specific “12 x animal shapes”.

Like I said, I’m not David Attenborough or anything, but given that the other animals on what I am increasingly beginning to believe was just a floating fairy tale are lions, elephants, giraffes, camels and rhinoceroses, I was expecting something a 19-month old would be able to instantly recognise. We think they look like guinea pigs, but they’re the same size as the rhinos! Maybe if you made guinea pigs to scale they would represent a choking hazard, but at their current dimensions I think they will scare my son when it comes to choosing his first pet. If you’re looking for another animal with a distinctive silhouette, what about the kangaroo? (Though this might throw up a few awkward questions about Australia not having been discovered at the time of the Great Flood.)

Yours, for the time being, faithfully

Mr S Vincent

Signs That Work May Be Taking Over My Life #1

Working from home in a job that I love in an industry in which most of my friends also work means that it can be difficult to switch off. Combine this with the mostly welcome freelancer’s dilemma of never wanting to turn work down and I have been busy. In particular I have been working weekends on one project which is about to start filming, bringing a flurry of phone calls about last-minute legal issues and cast and location changes, necessitating some very hurried rewrites.

In short, my work/life ratio has been as unbalanced as John Prescott on a see-saw, but I finally managed to take some time off at Easter and see my niece, who has learnt some jokes:

MY 4-YEAR-OLD NIECE: What do you get if you pour hot water down a rabbit hole?

ME: I don’t know. (Although I did, really.)

MY 4-YEAR-OLD NIECE: A hot cross bunny.

ME: (Laughs) Very good. (Pause) Though maybe you shouldn’t use the word ‘hot’ in the feedline as you repeat it in the punchline. I don’t know what you could use instead though. ‘Boiling’ would be too cruel to the rabbit, ‘warm’ isn’t hot enough and ‘heated’ is just too laborious. It’s a shame there isn’t an exact synonym for hot. Maybe it shouldn’t be water at all ...

MY 4-YEAR-OLD NIECE: I’m going to go and eat some chocolate now.