Musically it has been a bit of a strange year, where I finally admitted that the current charts have no relevence to me at all.  I doubt I could name any of the year’s No. 1 singles, with the obvious exception of RATM.   As the year turned I found myself mostly listening to Planet Rock on DAB and then during the year Spotify came along and so a huge proportion of my listening has been catching up with the past.

As a result I discovered artists that somehow passed me by twenty or even thirty years ago – like PFM, Eloy, Tanzwut, Robyn Hitchcock, Telex, Suicide, Assemblage 23, or Kyuss.

Not that I avoided 2009’s new releases entirely, and there was some good stuff.  I enjoyed the new albums by Jay-Z, Depeche Mode, Rachid Taha, Morrissey, Khaled, Amadou & Mariam and Green Day.  My highlight was probably Madness’s magnificent Liberty of Norton Folgate.  I still can’t believe that a band who seemed to exist just to go through the motions playing the old hits live suddenly came out with a masterpiece.

Honorouble mentions to new acts in 2009 like the Dead Weather, Duckworth Lewis Method and Them Crooked Vultures.  I hope they all stay around for second albums.

Hardly saw any live music, but seeing Metallica at the O2 was the best, closely followed by Manu Chao at whatever the Town & Country is called now.

Television

What was on this year?   The thing that stands out was Torchwood – Children of Earth.  Truly scary, disturbing and thought-provoking.  The most engaging programme all year as far as I am concerned.

Jayne and I both enjoyed Being Human and also Life on Mars USA despite Harvey Keitel plainly being far too old for the role of Gene Hunt.   It lacked the smoke-filled atmosphere of the original, the main characters were not as well cast as the original, and it introduced some religious elements I wasn’t too keen on, but I still liked it.  Every episode left me amazed at the streetscene sets.  I am a little bit fascinated by New York of the 70s anyway, which might explain why I stuck with this.

I can hardly not mention the main event of 2009’s television – Dick-I-beg-your-pardon-Nick Griffin on Question Time.  Unintentionally hilarious throughout and one of the few genuine ‘water-cooler moments’ of the year.

Films

Who knows?  I am pretty sure I didn’t set foot in a cinema all year.  I have been going less and less often and enjoying it less each time since about the time mobile phones gto popular and I’m sure that is no coincidence.  District 9, Star Trek, Avatar and Sherlock Holmes looked like being quite fun and I will probably catch up with them on DVD – except for Avatar which looks like one to see on the big screen in 3D.

Events

The main event for me was surely the Labour conference in Brighton.  I had never been to a party conference before and was surprised by how interesting it all was, particularly the fringe events.  Other political events I enjoyed were the fundraiser in Crawley where I met John Prescott, meeting Peter Mandelson when he visited our new factory/offices to officially open them, and going to the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival.

Other notable events were Chrystal passing her driving test and getting a car, Charlie moving out, finally seeing Metallica live and going to London with Jayne to see Manu Chao.  She doesn’t normally go to concerts with me – not since I took her to see the Tubes – so it was great to go to something we both enjoyed.  I was amazed when she made a bee-line for the mosh pit as soon as we got in there.

I have to mention the various times I saw events on Trafalgar Square’s 4th plinth.  Every time I was in town I made sure I had a look to see what was going on and made a special trip up there to see Krypto doing his atheist Thriller dance up there.  The whole thing was a brilliant idea.  Some of the individuals were not to my taste, but taken as a whole it was fascinating.

Otherwise the biggest events were our two holidays.  Having not been abroad on holiday for years it was strange to go away twice in a year and they were both brilliant for different reasons.  The first holiday was our last one with the kids and the second one was our first in ten years without them.

Comedy

This was the year I rediscovered the pleasures of live comedy.  I took Jayne to see Stewart Lee in Horsham and took Frankie to see Collings and Herrin in Brighton, Al Murray, Richard Herring and Alistair McGowan in London and Jerry Sadowitz in Brighton.

I never went to see it live, but Richard Herring’s As it Occurs to me (AIOTM) was a brave experiment which I downloaded every week as soon as it was available and thoroughly enjoyed.  Many is the time Jayne gave me strange looks as I was sitting at the PC with headphones on and suddenly bursting into laughter.

Tech

2009 was the year I finally ‘got’ podcasts and undertook the Herculean task of catching up with all the old Word magazine and Collings & Herrin podcasts.  I even installed the dreaded iTunes just so I could subscribe to half a dozen.  It was also the year I took the plunge with Twitter and found it better than I expected.

The new product that had the biggest effect on me had to be Spotify.  I also played with Ning which has possibilities.  The non-event for me has to be Google Wave.  So far I just can’t work out what to do with it.

What next?

The next year could see some major life changes.  There is a fair chance we will move house, and a major reorganisation at work is likely to see me in a different job before too long.   There will be a general election, probably in May, and I expect that to be a real experience.

I am making no firm predictions nor resolutions.

Personally I am just tired of the reading out of stories written by the pre-teen versions of C&H.  Unfortunately they seem to enjoy them and will probably continue, but it is a finite supply they have and it will run out soon, so I’ll just ride the wave.

Having said that, I quite enjoyed the version of the story The Thriling Three that Richard did on his other podcast, but that was more for the acting and business around it.

The disappointment was really that the whole thing felt a bit flat.  The last time they went to Brighton was one of mah favourite podcasts and I was hoping this one would be another high point but, for me, the reading out of old stories and the 70s paper version of the profanity app took up far too much of the time.

It was good to see the secret dancing demonstration though, in fact I thought Andrew Collins did very well on his own for somebody who is not a natural live performer.  He is actually a lot better looking in real life too.  Most photos I have seen of him are ones taken from a crappy webcam on his laptop.  It is quaint in a way, how he has to wave a laptop around to take a photo.  Maybe I should have taken the opportunity in the Q&A session to ask if he has heard of normal digital cameras…

It was not a bad night out. At one point I really was crying with laughter – unfortunately at the bit you really should laugh at. So not bad – just nowhere near as good as I had hoped it would be.

Part of the problem may be overfamiliarity as a result of following both twitter feeds, having both blogs on my RSS reader, and listening to both podcasts – sometimes you hear things that you have already encountered in several stages of development over the past week – but more often it means you get lots of interplay between them and references that would otherwise go over your head so in most cases it is positive.

I guess it was just my bad luck that one of the few episodes of the podcast that didn’t do it for me was one fo the few live ones and the only one I have been to.

Very surprised to find that there was a support act.  Even more surprised to find that it was a German stand-up.  Relieved to find that he was funny.  (Henning Wehn the self-styled German ambassador of comedy to the UK)Stewart Lee’s act was, as I had expected and hoped, uncompromising, unconventional, challenging, and provocative.  I think Jayne preferred the more straightforward comedy style of Herr Wehn – Lee lost her a bit when he was talking about wanting to see Richard Hammond decapitated – but she enjoyed it a lot more than Gilbert Gottfried on the DVD the other night.

I shan’t even attempt to describe the show now, but thoroughly recommend it.

Any regular visitors here will know that I do enjoy comedy, but I didn’t really enjoy this one much.  For a start Gottfried has a style of delivery that on the irritation scale is up there with Pasquale.  It can get to be a bit wearing.  This is one of those DVDs where you keep glancing at the timer on the player, hoping it will not go on too much longer.The defining aspect of the whole performance is that nearly all the jokes have either a sexual or scatological subject or contain lots of bad language, and most of them tick both boxes.  The regular visitors alluded to above will know that I am not offended by bad language.  Far from it.   I just like it to be strategically and sparingly deployed for maximum impact and amusement.

It is like jewels (bear with me here).  A single precious stone that is well set in a good ring can be beautiful, impressive and classy.  Wearing a whole suit of diamonds as you sit in a car encrusted with rubies might be expensive, but will never fail to be tacky.  In the same way, a prolonged and inventive story with a a well-timed expletive dropped towards the end has more punch than a string of swearing.  Used well it is big and it is clever, here it is merely dull and it devalues the currency.

But, of course, there are exceptions, and it all depends on context. The Thick of it (which I have never seen – really) apparently makes a feature of the cumulative effect of swearing, and Gerry Sadowitz , who I saw earlier in the year, has made swearing an art form as part of his stage persona – and I really do hope it is just a stage persona.

By coincidence, after watching this I saw Richard Herring on Newsnight, discussing offensiveness in comedy with Paxo and I think he may have made a similar point, but with more hair.

This is what I actually wrote about Dirty Jokes:

Gottfried has a ‘marmite’ style of delivery: you either love it or hate it. With a permanent squint screwing his eyes closed and often keeping his hand over them anyway while barks out jokes it can be difficult to see beyond that to the material.  I don’t like marmite by the way, and find Gottfried’s delivery annoying, having seen him in short spots on the TV before.

The good news is that, after a while you get used to it.  It doesn’t get any better but at least it doesn’t get any worse over the approximately 50 minutes of the main feature.  So having got that out of the way I could concentrate on the content.

This is essentially just a string of jokes of the man-goes-to-the-doctor or salesman-calls-at-farmhouse type, nearly all stuffed full of ripe language, reaching its climax in a ten-minute version of the notorious ‘Aristocrats’ joke.

It didn’t really do it for me for two reasons.  Firstly the over-use of bad language reduced its power. A well-timed swear word in a routine can be a beautiful thing, but when the whole act is full of them that power is diffused. It goes without saying that if you are at all easily offended then this will be offensive to you (so why would you even watch a DVD called Dirty Jokes?), but if you are not then it could well get to be tedious.

Even worse than that, half the jokes were familiar to me, some of them I can remember hearing at school in the 70s, and even then they were old.  I will freely admit that my personal preferences are for the more anecdotal comedians, but I can appreciate joke-tellers.  I just find it hard to appreciate them half as much if I have heard all the jokes.

There are some glimpses of a more versatile performer in the show – the impersonations of other comics are quite good, and there are some small diversions that add something to a couple of the jokes, but such moments are far too rare.

All that goes out of the window for the finale though. The Aristocrats joke more or less depends on you knowing it already, and it also depends on being as crude, offensive and disgusting as possible.

On a more positive note: the extras are good. For me they are better than the actual show.  There are ten or eleven extras.  I watched the first two, where Gottfried is just talking to the camera and being more anecdotal, rambling and inventive. Even the voice and mannerisms are scaled down to a less irritating level.  I expect I will watch the remaining extras quite soon, and may even return to them one day.  I do not expect I will watch the main feature again though.

So if you are in the market for some laddish, unsubtle, un-PC and sweary jokes that you can easily repeat down the pub get this.  Otherwise, try one of the many other comedy DVDs out there.  Just remember that when you do tell these jokes down the pub, most people will probably have heard them already.

Another positive thing to note.  I can’t recall any racism in the routine, except the standard Jewish stuff that Jewish comedians tend to do.  On the other hand there is some very suspect discussion of homosexuality in there.

To give some idea of the nature of the performance, this joke from the start of it is one of the least offensive, and one of the few that made me laugh.  If this doesn’t do it for you then – seriously – don’t touch this DVD with a bargepole because unfortunately it doesn’t get any better than this.

I tattooed “I love you” on my penis.  When I got home and showed my wife she said “don’t try to put words into my mouth!”

Most amazing of all, on Amazon when I look at the product page for this it says that most buyers also bought the Black Books box set and offers a deal on buying them together.  I really can’t see a lot of common ground between them.  It is like buying Titanic and Planet Terror together.  They also reckon there are only 3 copies left in stock, so somebody must be buying this stuff.

I’m sure Stewart Lee will be a lot better on Friday!

Zoe & Robert

It has been a big weekend, with two late nights.  On Saturday Jayne and I went to the middle of nowhere for a family wedding and then tonight I took Frankie up to London for some live comedy.The wedding was my cousin Robert, who is also my godson.  I don’t think I have every done anything godfatherly which seems to have been the right thing to do as he has turned out to be an admirable young man.  I am basing this opinion his friends.  He moved from his village in Essex to Surrey quite a while ago and most of his old crowd from Essex turned up at the wedding as well as all his new gang from Surrey.   They were both lively crowds and I figured Robert must be doing something right to have made so many good friends.

The family photo

Not only that, but you could tell he was truly happy with his new wife, Zoe.

It was good to see that part of the family again as well.  The way things are I very rarely see my cousins, in fact I don;t think I saw Robert at all since his Dad’s wedding ten years ago.  I do’t think we are a particularly close family…  its not that we don’t like each other, just the opposite, we just don’t live in each others’ pockets all the time.

I know it will not be so long until we see everybody again.  For a start, Jayne and I intend to have a big party on out 10th anniversary to renew our vows.  This is to make up for the fact that we married almost in secret with no family there at all.

Jayne didn’t fancy two late nights in a row, so I took Frankie up to London to see the comedy night at the Lyric, Hammersmith.  I decided to drive there because it has been a while since I drove in London, also to avoid the depressing late-night train scenario.  It worked well on the way home – only took an hour to get back from Hammersmith, door-to-door.

Getting there was another matter.  The plan had been to get up there, grab something to eat and then go to the show, but we ended up getting there just in time for the start.  I had forgotten that traffic in London on Sunday evening is worse than Crawley during the rush hour!

It all worked out in the end though, and it was worth all the hassle to see Al Murray live.  Also on the bill were Wilson Dixon, Naz Osmanoglu, Alistair McGowan and Richard Herring.  They were all good, although the problem I am having with Alistair McGowan is that I don’t always get the joke.  Since I stopped watching TV much I find that I don’t recognise half the impressions he is doing, but I’m sure they are as spot-on as the ones I do recognise.

All in all a good weekend.  I don’t feel very relaxed though.

After that I saw that he was on tour and got tempted to buy tickets for one of the Brighton shows in November.  A bit steep at £30 a pop, but he is a legend… fortunately I couldn’t buy any.  I think it is sold out.  However, the attempt had got me in the mood to see some more comedy so instead I got some tickets for this Sunday at the Lyric Hammersmith – Al Murray and Alistair McGowan!  Hosted by Richard Herring, and half the price of Izzard.  Even better than that, the Lyric doesn’t charge a booking fee – it just gives you the option to make a donation to their youth theatre thing.

Brings back memories.  It must be twenty years ago that I volunteered to help out in their youth theatre and ended up painting scenery and operating a bloody great follow spot during the play.

Jayne doesn’t want to go out on Sunday, so it looks like I’ll be treating the boy again.

When Father Jack was going to meet the bishop, Ted coached him to just say ‘yes’ and if any question couldn’t be answered with a straight ‘yes’ he was to say “that would be an ecumenical matter” because it sounds like you know what you are talking about and nobody will ask you to explain further.  As a result the Bishop thought that Jack was some sort of religious expert full of wisdom.

I’m wondering… is there a similar phrase that politicians out of their depth can throw into any interview situation to make them sound like they are a deep thinker?   Bonus points for examples of politicians actually using such phrases.

I can’t bring myself to say anything about the show itself – I just get a mental image of Sadowitz doing his impersonation of somebody getting home after a show and writing a review on the internet…   Frankie seemed to enjoy it.  He has always lapped up all the stand-up comedy on TV and DVD but I don’t think he has ever seen a stand-up comedian live (going to see the Little Britain stage show doesn’t count) so I was quite pleased to be able to treat him to see a proper comic, especially one who ranked so highly in the poll of the top 100 comedians.  (Number 15.  I will be taking Jayne to see No. 41 later in the year)

What I don’t understand is why I don’t go to Brighton more often.  It is only just down the road, closer than the centre of London and easier to get to, wilfully bohemian and cosmopolitan, full of shops, bar, cafes and restaurants that don’t belong to a national chain.  Must make an effort to go more than once every couple of years.

Having said that, I’m going to the party conference in Brighton next month.  Maybe I’ll be sick of the place after several days of politics there.

On the Capitol website you can choose your seats, and so I chose a couple right in the front row, almost in the middle.  It is unusual to find such good seats still available when half the place is already booked – but this is comedy.  Perhaps the front row will sell first for a concert, but bands tend not to pick on people in the front row and rip the piss out of them like comedians do.  I don’t think Stewart Lee is that sort of comic, and I hope I am right.  I certainly wouldn’t choose front row seats for the Pub Landlord.

Anyway, after choosing my seats, it was time to pay, and there was the unavoidable administration charge/online booking fee to add on top.   It was 70p – flat charge for the whole booking.  Because I opted to have the tickets posted rather than pick them up there was another 30p to add on, so there was a toal of a pound added on the whole transaction.

I am enormously impressed by that. Only a pound.  It was totally avoidable, but I was happy to pay it as it seemed reasonable enough.  The normal routine now is for venues or agencies to make tickets only available online and then to charge several pounds as a booking fee. Per ticket.  If tickets for a concert are £20 you can easily pay more than £50 for a pair, and this practice is widely detested.

We all know that it does not cost several pounds to process a ticket order, and it doesn’t cost more to post 2, 3, or 4 tickets than to post 1.   In fact by booking online you probably incur less administration than turning up at on old-fashioned box office in person and making a clerk take time to serve you.   No wonder everybody sees this as a rip-off and just a way for more profit to be made.  With the Capitol, the charge feels proportionate and so I will go along to this show without the chip on my shoulder that usually accompanies me to concerts and shows.

The big venues could take a lesson from the Capitol in that respect.

1. reminded by seeing his picture in a leaflet the BHA gave me in Trafalgar Square