On Saturday evenings at roundabout 6pm on BBC is my favourite new TV show. It’s called Walk on the Wild Side. The premise is very very simple. It’s people doing funny voiceovers on top of lovely nature footage.
It’s the shorter simpler ones that work best for me I feel like some of the longer, more involved ones just unravel a bit sometimes.
Perhaps I love it because it reminds me of Animal Magic from my childhood:
Or maybe I love it because it’s just bloody brilliant.
Aside from “Alan” the other sketch that has me in stitches are the scratching badgers (if you’ve not seen it that will mean nothing).
I listened to almost every single episode of Chris Morris’ genius-like radio show Blue Jam when I was on holiday.
It can put you in a very strange place. But it is absolutely amazing. Some of the writing is incredible. Yes it’s undoubtedly in odd taste (I’m sure some people would say incredibly bad taste), but it stands alone in my mind as a kind of fucked-up mutoid love-child of Derek and Clive, Monty Python, the set from an early 90s chill out room, and a warped psycho-therapist.
Here’s a kind of montage of a bunch of bits from YouTube. The video isn’t supposed to move, it’s a radio show :-)
From a DJing perspective the musical selection is fantastic too. That’s the thing you don’t pick up from these isolated clips, you don’t get a sense of the sonic journey.
These YouTubed snippets don’t really do it justice. You need to get transported into the whole 60 minute experience for it to really seep into your brain like is needs to.
If you think you might be a fan there’s an excellent comedy forum with a strong Chris Morris bent over at Cook’d and Bomb’d.
The only thing that I think you can legitimately get hold of is the Blue Jam CD that they put out on Warp. Which is good. But marginally less good than the stuff that was on Radio 1 IMHO.
Oh and you can still get hold of the DVD of the Show JAM which was the telly version of the show. But again this isn’t as good as the radio stuff IMHO. The pictures reveal a bit too much and some of the oddness is knocked off. Plus I loved the interplay between the music and the words that a 1hr radio show gave them the space to play with.
There’s lots of snippets from Jam around on YouTube if you want to check it out. And in spite of having just said that it’s not as good as the radio there are undoubtedly moments of genius…
And it still does have that strange sense of melancholy that I love so dearly…
The sense that you’re not quite sure whether to laugh, cry or peel off your skin with a rusty penknife.
Lots of ad-folk look very serious in their profile pictures in magazines like Campaign. I thought I’d provide a glimpse beyond the borders of the photographs to suggest a different side to them.
I spent my Sunday afternoon making this. Sophie said “why?”.
I was really just using it as an excuse to learn a bit about how iMovie 09 works. And as soon as I stumbled across the beat matching feature I knew I had to do this.
Well that’s not strictly true. But I was looking at my stats when I noticed some unfamiliar activity…
That’s not strictly true either. But I did get some traffic from this lovely blog http://whythatsdelightful.wordpress.com/ which is written by Graham Linehan which was a name that I recognised. And it of course because he’s the writer of Father Ted and the IT Crowd amongst other things.
It’s an inbound link that made me feel cool. Maybe that’s a bit sad. But it’s true.
Graham’s blog is nice and has lots of funny stuff in it (as you might expect). It’s where I found this…
that they put out on 
which was the telly version of the show. But again this isn’t as good as the radio stuff IMHO. The pictures reveal a bit too much and some of the oddness is knocked off. Plus I loved the interplay between the music and the words that a 1hr radio show gave them the space to play with.
