The Mission Continues!

They're back, after a year of contractual difficulties, The Dr. and Hutchback resume their journey towards the greatest Television Show never written. Thus time in Glorious Screenplayorama...

Drowned in Laze

A Tennessee summer in Nashville after a winter and floods unheard of in living memory and now the slow ooze of slippery heat leeches the will to stay sharp from The Doctor's Mind. Mrs. Doctor has been unable to suffer the stupidity by osmosis that is The South since we landed here, but your good Doctor has been faithfully fighting it off in an effort to be relevant to the modern world.

But it is relentless, the will in America to be bigger and cheaper, the rush to go backwards, as if they have left something worthwhile behind. There's a lot of room for comment and satire, but satire that is over the heads of those you satirize is a good way to get a punch on the nose for your smart ass opinions.

How do we drag the great white fat population with us when they need dragging? The Doctor and Hutchback are busy creating satirical Kargyraa, three voices at once. A big bass note of dumb, a winding middle voice of reality and a shrill top note of insanity.

The Dark Night - Inception and Bloat

So, another film from Christopher Nolan. A Blockbuster with the big cheeses and fresh new cheeses and one particularly old over-ripe cheese. I heard before going that everyone wanted to work with him and after The Dark Knight he could probably have made any film he wanted. He did. I don't know who else would have wanted to make it. Unnecessary layers and levels that would have had the crickets rubbing their legs in joyous despair had it been a Shyamalan film. I went as deep as the snow filled layer before being overwhelmed by the pointlessness of it all.

The idea works, in his childhood the Doctor read a sci-fi novel where there were murders in dreams, and it needed two people to enter the dreamscape, both dreaming at the same time. Damned if I can remember the title of it. Anyway, this film is as bloated as Tom Berenger, who proudly joins the ranks of smoothly expanding former leading men, pioneered in the modern age by William Shatner (with James Spader doing his best to look like his son). Presumably this look is required to stay in the secret society formed by Orson Wells.

Farewell Tony Hart

Yes, it was Tony Hart that gave Dr. Nostrum's his first break in the entertainment business, in his very first solo series too, also occasioning (now there's a word that always looks wrong) the purchase of a Video Tape machine, by Ma and Pa Nostrum, to record the young Dr.'s breakthrough moment. We were the first house on the street to have such a machine and none of the neighbours were invited round to see it, seeing as we were a somewhat anti-social family.

Anyhow, the familiar strains of 'Marguerite' began and after several dull but worthy pictures passed us by, there was young Dr. Nostrum (aged 6) Art Work, peering at us through the magic of the television screen for at least 6 or 7 seconds. I would have worn the tape out watching it over and over again had the machine not broken within a month. In my memory the drawing was a beach scene, depicting some stick like figures floating precariously above their sun loungers in the late afternoon sun, but according to my mother it was a precocious work of great merit that would have stood the test of time had it not been chucked in the bin immediately after the show was filmed.

I had some history, you see, having had a piece exhibited at the Royal Academy aged 4, but I can't credit that with any furthering of my ambition as I don't remember it and my parents didn't keep the picture or any record of it ever actually happening. Readers of the blog may notice uncorroborated stories from my childhood here and there - the most odd being the place of my birth changing over the years, my mother never being easy to pin down, the only constant being the day.

I digress. Tony Hart, then, had given me my first taste of fame and my journey had begun. I remember him fondly (perhaps not as fondly as he looked like he might remember the many small boys he helped reach for the star) especially his white line paintings on huge brownfield sites, they linger like the Chalk Hill Drawings except in the sense that I can't remember a single one of them, just that he did them. In truth I preferred Wilf Lunn.

But Tony brought us Morph, in much the same way Tracey Ullman gave us The Simpsons, and made it through Mr. Bennett's complaints, then went on to Hart Beat which strangely became a cop show in later years.

So, goodbye Tony. I hope God has a white line painting machine for you to join up all the constellations for us in the heavens. I shall keep my eyes peeled.

All Talk 48 - Passing Exams and The Trouble With Modern Poetry

DR. NOSTRUM

Some people I tell, in the music business, or, whatever, just talking about things, um, some people are actually impressed by the fact that, you know...

HUTCHBACK

That you can add.

DR. NOSTRUM

...no, by the fact that I did Economics.

HUTCHBACK

But you didn’t do Economics.

DR. NOSTRUM

Well, I did do it.

HUTCHBACK

You did it for about..

DR. NOSTRUM

No, no, I did it, I took my exam in it and everything...

HUTCHBACK

Did you?

DR. NOSTRUM

...A level. A level Economics, I got a U or, er, a D, you know, but.. but..

HUTCHBACK

And they’re very impressed!

DR. NOSTRUM

No, no, the comeback was; at least you did it. And I was thinking, well, I suppose so, but...

HUTCHBACK

You could have done anything and got a U in it.

DR. NOSTRUM

Well, no, I didn’t get a U, I got a U in something else, but that’s.. that’s cos I wrote songs, instead...

HUTCHBACK

Okay

DR. NOSTRUM

...which they obviously didn’t like...

HUTCHBACK

No...

DR. NOSTRUM

Biology, I wrote songs.

HUTCHBACK

No, they don’t like that. There aren’t many songs in Biological text books.

DR. NOSTRUM

Imagine if you could have written songs though, for your exam, and got an A.

HUTCHBACK

Mm. They’d have had to have been very good, biological songs.. (has an Epiphany and sings) “Your knee bone’s connected to your thigh bone.” It’d have to be of that caliber, but more about “your platelet’s connected to your red blood vessels and all that business...

DR. NOSTRUM

Yeah

HUTCHBACK

...and that’s how you create Adenizine Tri-phosphate.”

DR. NOSTRUM

You’d have to be, I mean you’d have to be pretty smart to pass all your exams in meter and rhyme, that would be an achievement.

HUTCHBACK

Yeah

DR. NOSTRUM

I suppose the only exam where you’d do that is in poetry and they probably don’t even do that any more.

HUTCHBACK

No, I don’t think there is Poetry A level.

DR. NOSTRUM

No. There was some poet on the radio saying about, you know, people bemoan the lack of meter and rhyme in modern poetry, but, you know, “they’ve got to get with it cos that’s so old fashioned.”

HUTCHBACK

“Man”

DR. NOSTRUM

And I was thinking, isn’t that poetry, and what they do now is, well, I suppose it’s still called poetry, but in fact it’s just speaking. Really.

HUTCHBACK

It’s just a load of words, stuck together on a fucking page.

DR. NOSTRUM

It is really.

HUTCHBACK

That’s the problem with modern poetry.

DR. NOSTRUM

It is. I mean it has it’s own internal rhythm, but it’s unfathomable unless you can hear the person speaking who’s written it.

HUTCHBACK

But that’s the point. Everything becomes worse over time.

DR. NOSTRUM

It’s just words.

HUTCHBACK

Everything becomes worse over time – that should be the subject of this post; how everything becomes worse.

DR. NOSTRUM

And we got that off the front of a BNP leaflet.

HUTCHBACK

Oh yeah. Forgot about that.