Zany Rich Fulcher will be signing DVDs of Snuff Box tomorrow night, October 11th, at 6:30pm in New York City at Kim’s Video. There’s going to be an event later that night at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade East Village at 11:30 pm, with a screening of a Snuff Box episode followed by a Q&A with Rich. He’ll be on The Jimmy Fallonl Show tonight.
Snuff Box is out on DVD tomorrow from Severin Films.
Who needs Martin Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison, when you can have this roughly cobbled together sequence of prime cuts of Pirate George causing mayhem on Eric idle’s Rutland Weekend Television Christmas Special.
So, here’s one somebody prepared earlier.
Previously On Dangerous Minds
Rutland Weekend Television: Eric Idle’s nearly forgotten comedy classic
With thanks to Neil McDonald
Who needs psychoanalysis when you can own a K-Tel mood ring or mood shirt?
These were the perfect solution for folks who had problems expressing how they feel. Let your shirt do the talking.
It was a little after three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, when the dark green Cherokee jeep, loaded with canisters of propane gas, hurtled towards the Departure zone at Glasgow International Airport. The driver was saying prayers and asking for god’s help, when his vehicle hit security bollards and burst into flames. 28-year-old, Kafeel Ahmed had intended that the jeep would crash through the glass doors, enter into the airport concourse, where it would blow-up, killing as many of the men, women and children who queued patiently for their holiday flights.
It was June 30 2007, and this was the first terrorist attack in Scotland since PanAm Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. Little could Ahmed, or his co-conspirator Dr. Bilal Abdullah, have known that their actions were not to lead to holy martyrdom, but rather to the resurrection of one of the funniest, most popular and successful comedy creations of the last 50 years.
In a hotel room in Budapest, the writer Ian Pattison watched the images beamed from Glasgow onto a flickering TV screen, as the would-be terrorists were arrested, all Pattison could think of was one question: “What would Rab C Nesbitt make of this?”
Fall, present day, the trees are cashing in their savings, and the streets are covered with gold. I meet Ian in a coffee house, in Glasgow’s West End, a background of children and mothers laughing and chatting, and the hiss of an espresso machine. It’s a clear day, and we have a long sweeping view down to the Clyde and across the water to the high rises and tenements of Govan beyond, home to the fictional Rab C. Nesbitt - “the original unemployed man”, whose comic television adventures have brought national acclaim, incredible viewing figures and a cabinet full of awards.
Pattison looks relaxed, toned and much younger than his grey hair implies, and he must be older than he looks for It’s twenty-five years since he first dreamt up the alcoholic, head-bandaged street philosopher Rab C. Nesbitt:
“It was New Year’s Eve,” recalls Pattison, “And I was married and living in this masionette apartment in the north of England. Now I’m an anti-social person and when the front doorbell went, I said to my then wife, ‘That’ll be them from downstairs coming to First Foot, I don’t want to see these people. You entertain them, give them a drink and send them on their way. I’ll go upstairs and you tell them I’m in Glasgow.’
“I go upstairs to ‘Glasgow’, but wives don’t always do what you ask them, and these two neighbors sat there until about 5am knocking back the swally. I was upstairs fuming, wondering what can I do? I just can’t suddenly materialize – I’m in Glasgow!
“So I had a notebook up there, because I used write in the wee room, and I started trying to write something about a Liverpool councilor, but it wasn’t working. Then suddenly, I don’t know why, this mutated into a Glasgow speech rhythm, and in about 10 minutes I’d written the first Nesbitt monologue.
“I’ve no idea where it came from. All I knew about him was he raved, he had a head bandage and wore trainers.””
It was a piece of genius inspiration and Ian passed it on to Colin Gilbert, producer of the sketch show Naked Video. Gilbert liked it, but the actor chosen to play the part, Gregor Fisher, wasn’t so keen.
“There was no inkling of developing the character. I just knew it was a character piece, that is to say you weren’t going from gag to gag to gag. I just knew if it got into Gregor’s hands, I knew what he could do with it, and how he would play it. The trouble was persuading Gregor to do it.”
Anyone who has seen Fisher’s work will know that he is a brilliantly gifted actor, with a warmth and subtlety most Hollywood actors would pawn their looks to possess. I first saw Fisher as an unforgettable, happy-go-lucky, wide-boy in Peter MacDougall’s brilliant Just a Boy’s Game, then a few years later stealing the crappy eighties version of 1984 with a cameo role from under the noses of Richard Burton and John Hurt.
Now Naked Video had made Fisher a household name, on the back of his incredible comic acting, but when presented with a new character to play, he was less than impressed by Pattison’s latest creation.
“Gregor read it and said it was as funny as cancer,” Pattison recalls.
Thankfully, Head of the Comedy Unit, Colin Gilbert was on hand to quietly help matters along. Gilbert is a legend in TV comedy, with a long list of ground-breaking shows from Nesbitt to The Limmy Show, Still Game and Gary - Tank Commander on his long and impressive CV. Indeed, Gilbert with his white hair and beard and twinkling eyes is a polar bear disguised as a man - he may look nice and cuddly, but underneath you know there is this formidable energy just waiting for its moment.
“Colin quietly insisted, and Gregor tried it 2 or 3 times, and by the third time, I think Gregor began to think maybe I’m wrongish, and we never thought any more about it. But when the show went out, people picked up on this drunk character, largely because of Gregor’s eye-catching performance.”
Rab C Nesbitt returns to BBC 2 for 6 weeks from Wednesday 5th October at 22:00 hours
The full interview with Ian Pattison and more from Rab C Nesbitt, after the jump…
Matt Berry (The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace) and Rich Fulcher (The Mighty Boosh) discuss their dark BBC3 cult comedy series, Snuff Box, swearing, and how such an insane TV series ever got made in the first place. Snuff Box is now out on DVD in America from Severin Films with a bonus CD of Matt Berry’s excellent original soundtrack music.
Ok, so it’s just the sofa section of the show’s opening, but as a huge fan of both The Simpsons and Ren & Stimpy I just had to share this. Those two shows were the high watermarks of the 90s golden age of mainstream animation, and very influential on an entire generation of young, impressionable minds. So in a way this is the cartoon equivalent of the Beatles jamming with the Stones - but much weirder. A lot of people won’t like this (and some would say it’s a good fifteen years or more since both were at their peak), but it’s still great to see John K’s dark and twisted take on America’s first family. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I detect a subtle swipe at the character’s roles here, and Is that a hint of bitterness I can taste in the his rendering of their front room in such gloomy colors?
You can see a lot more of John Kricfalusi’s work at his blog.
So I’ve been trying to sum up how I feel about Occupy Wall Street and the media coverage (or non-coverage) of the demonstrations the last few days, when I found this clip and realised that one of the most brilliant poets of the last hundred years had already summed it up perfectly. Of course.
I was gonna say that the oldstream media has been over for me since 2000, when I saw some peaceful protests badly misreported on TV and in the papers. I wanted to mention how my obsession with this summer’s “Murdochgate” sprang from a desire to see the established news channels I detest so much crumble, to lose all respect with their audience through their refusal to cover a story with such huge significance. I’ve been struggling to express how we don’t need validation through a mainstream that has always ignored us or deliberately misrepresented us, that people shouldn’t worry too much, the message is getting out there loud and clear.
But fuck it. Gil Scott Heron beat me to the punch (hard) thirty years ago.
This incredible recording of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as a spoken monologue with no music and some ad libs) is from 1982. It was performed at the Black Wax Club in Washington DC, as part of a documentary film on Scott Heron called Black Wax. His voice is a thing of rich, easy-going beauty but his words are like dynamite. Yeah, the times and technology may have changed, but this is still so prescient and just so damn relevant it’s amazing.
Gil Scott Heron died only four short months ago, and it’s a real pity he can’t be around now to see the people of his home town out on their streets and taking direct action, how he can’t be there himself to rally the crowds with this incredible monologue and share his no doubt sharp-as-a-pin insights into politics and society. It’s true - sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. But we DO still have this recording, and I hope that everyone, including all the people involved with the protests in New York, gets to hear it.
Because the revolution will NOT be televised.
You see, a lot of time people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say
“aha the revolution is being televised”. Nah.
The results of the revolution are being televised.The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.
What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.
After the jump “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Black Wax monologue) transcribed, plus footage from the fantastic Gil Scott Heron “Black Wax” documentary/live film.
Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig In The Sky,” a woman with a banana and one weird tagline: “If you feel it, peel it.”
Paging Dr. Sigmund Freud.
James Brown mistakes William Castle’s Homicidal for an Alfred Hitchcock film in this 1969 clip from the Mike Douglas show. Rod McKuen tries to clarify things while Joan Rivers looks on.
Homicidal was a knock-off of Psycho. Hitch saves Brown some embarrassment by not correcting him. Class act.
Here’s an segment that aired in 1969 from the short-lived Vancouver Television music series Where It’s At.
Hosted by local deejay Fred Latremouille, Where It’s At had a pretty hip format for the time - a little smarter and penetrating than most music series of the time…a rock and roll 60 Minutes.
Featuring The Grass Roots, The Beach Boys, Spencer Davis, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jon Lord of Deep Purple, 1910 Fruitgum Company, Tommy James & the Shondells, The Seeds, Eric Burdon, Frank Sinatra Jr. and more.
The Grass Roots discussing Moby Grape and The Bosstown groups (Ultimate Spinach, Earth Opera, Beacon Street Union) as examples of bands killed by music hype still applies 42 years later.