'English Rain Hat Boys'

Playing around with the Google Analytics for English Dreaming, English Rain is interesting. I love to see what random phrases typed in by Internet explorers send them hurtling toward this blog. It is strangely gratifying to know anyone typing in ‘Evil Cockney’, ‘Avenue Q Scientology’, ‘MV Magdeburg’ ‘Albanian Freemasons’ or ‘Essex backwaters’ might end up here, However, I cannot help but feel those who happened on English Dreaming, English Rain by entering ‘Best vegetarian sausages’ or ‘Women fondled by men in latex gloves’ would have gone away hugely disappointed. I can only pity the poor souls who arrived by the phrases ‘There’s no aphrodisiac like loneliness’ and ‘Wanking with electrodes attached’.

Among my recent favourite surreal keywords that have directed traffic to these pages are ‘Toe wrestling’, ‘Lime green Adidas tracksuit’ and ‘English rain hat boys’. As glorious as they are, nothing beats the fact that English Dreaming, English Rain is one click away for those looking for ‘Charlie Brooker wanking for coins’ or ‘Badger deterrent’. I may not provide any Googlewhacks, but there are not that many places around where ‘Plinky plink’ and ‘Ernest Shinwell’ or the ‘Great Serpent Mound’ and ‘Mighty Boosh Test Card F’ live together.

A Fuzzball Riot

According to Charlie Brooker this week: 'Musicals are not to be trusted. They're not right.' Having just seeing Avenue Q, I feel he may be right. You should never trust anything that makes you laugh out loud at manifest evilness of bears.

The Bad Idea Bears (who could between them confirm all of Mr. Grasso's suspicions of ursine evil, especially when they end up converting to Scientology) were among the many moments when Avenue Q had me shaking with laughter. The idea of an adult musical inspired by and following the conventions by Sesame Street was always going to be either a glorious fist of furry fun or a slow-motion car crash. It ended up being a fuzzball riot and I loved it.

Anything that relies on the instant recognition of childhood for its hook has to have something more powerful in the tank to last beyond 10 minutes. If the only humour in Avenue Q was knowing that Rod and Nicky are versions of Bert and Ernie, Trekkie Monster is related to Cookie Monster and its human characters are a satire on the rainbow casting of children’s TV, the show would fall flat. Even rather fabulous songs on the universality of racism, heartbreak and sex in the characteristically bouncy style of Sesame Street would not be enough to keep you interested for more than two hours.

What makes Avenue Q not just funny, not just brilliantly staged and performed, but worth watching is that it observes some of the widespread angst of my generation without being poncey. Without any sense of effort, it casually managed to be as deep as your average Enda Walsh play. However, it did this without any annoying hint of pretension and the added bonus of brilliant puppets.

My definition of a brilliant puppet is one that, through the performance of the pupeteer, you forget is rods, felt and stuffing and begin to interact with imaginatively in the same way you do any theatrical character brought to life. Kermit the frog would be a good example of this. When Jim Henson got the little green blighter right, he could do a lot more than teach children how to count.

The Avenue Q puppets stopped being furr and strangely coloured noses within the first couple of scenes. When the emotionally crushed Kate Monster sings: ‘There is a fine, fine line/ Between love and a waste of time’ it works because she is expressing a human experience. She is no longer the bastard child of Zippy from Rainbow and Zoe from Sesame Street; she is simply someone who made a huge emotional investment in the wrong person.

While I laughed lines such as: ‘Schadenfreude? What's that, some kinda Nazi word?’ and lyrics like: ‘Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes/Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes’ two of my biggest chuckles of the night did not come from the libretto. The announcement that Naoko Mori (geek readers will know her as Toshiko Sato from Torchwood) could not continue playing her part in the second half due to her ‘disposition’ dripped such distilled sarcasm you could not help but squirm in discomfort. Even funnier was when a member of the audience sitting close to us announced a little bit too loudly as a banner proclaiming ‘Monsteresorri School’ was unfurled: ‘I know it’s a real word, but I don’t get it.’

Not wanting to confirm Mr. Brooker’s thesis on musicals, but the next one I intend to see is Wicked. It is a show notorious for its satire on spin and the loss of free speech that just happens to feature a green-skinned guerrilla and flying monkeys. Like Avenue Q, it is definitely one not to be trusted.

Spitting out Pure Ridicule and Contempt

If you are long-term reader of this blog you will know that one of my Saturday pleasures is reading Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn in The Guardian Guide. Sometimes reading his material causes me physical pain from the fits of laughter it induces. Although I have come to him late, there is no doubt in my mind that Brooker is astoundingly funny, acerbic, grumpy and pretty spot on.

Brooker is someone I ought to regard as a columnist/comedy writing hero (especially for his role in TVGoHome, Brass Eye and Nathan Barley). However, despite the fact I can praise the man to the rafters and passionately recommend you read his Screen Burn column online or try to catch his TV show for BBC4, I have issues with him. These are not related to his derision of those believing in any element of a 9/11 conspiracy theory as having their brains ‘fluttered off to spaceland’ (which I happily admit is a great line). No, my issues arise when he bothers to comment on US politics.

Why? It is down to the fact that in 2004 he apologised for a line in an article that read: ‘John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. - where are you now that we need you?’ When Mark Thomas caught heat from the US secret services for alleged incitement to kill George W. Bush, (he jokingly offered a cash bounty on his head), Thomas did not get on his knees and say sorry. In a similar situation, Brooker and The Guardian did offer an apology.

Maybe I am expecting too much of my comedy favourites these days. A man who is a recognisable expert at ripping apart the absurdity of Big Brother should probably not be expected to stand up to America’s state employed bully boys. At an objective level, apologising probably marks Brooker out as both as a writer who is both funny and wise. It is just that when someone making a living tossing out diamond-hard insults backs down when challenged, it takes the edge of any purpose beyond mockery. I am all for writers spitting out pure ridicule and contempt, especially when it is done with the verve and panache of Brooker’s work. Yet when you know the guy dishing it out will not stand up and be counted for his use of words, even the funniest lines always ends up tasting like the comedy equivalent of a dirty KFC meal.

‘Wanking for Coins’

I probably should not be allowed to read Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn in public. I laughed so hard by the third paragraph of his column today that there was a very real risk of being banned from Carluccio’s. The phrase that did it was ‘wanking for coins’, though there was also much abusive description of Jeffrey Archer – something that always raises a smile.

I do not particularly want to get banned from Carluccio’s in St. John’s Wood. The walk into Knights Hospitaller territory is a good one for a Saturday morning and the breakfast there is fab. It is the sort of place where other patrons ask to borrow your Guardian because there is a feature on them in it. I probably would not have been too interested in ‘the battle for Elijah’s foreskin’, but given that his dad borrowed my paper to read a report on his circumcision choices, I felt obliged to read the piece. This was probably an error. I would normally never get past a first paragraph that contained the line: ‘I was doing something very important on my computer when my wife, Regina, entered my office.’