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This will be fun: we don’t often get real blizzards in this part of the world. But that, at least, is what the weather forecast is promising us this Friday: a lively storm front coming in from the north west, basically uprooting small trees and dumping large amounts of snow across much of Germany. It probably won’t arrive here until after dark, so don’t expect any exciting videos of German cows being hurled through the air.
Of course, that’s what they’re promising, but that, minus the snow and ice, is what they promised for Storm Kyrill a couple of years ago, and while most of the rest of Germany was ducking airborn rooftiles, down here we got some squally winds and a bit of rain. And the neighbour’s fence fell over. My wife has gone into panic mode and has promised that tomorrow, she’ll be filling the car with enough groceries to last us the weekend.
Every year it’s the same. Every year since I’ve been here, my wife has warned me that winters down here are harsh, and that entire bungalows can go missing until April. According to her, ten feet of snow will just drop out of the sky — whump! — and by the time spring arrives, we’ll be eating each other’s legs just to stay alive.
I should have realised early on, given the complete lack of one-legged people around here, that this was just to impress upon me the fact that I’d moved to real men’s territory after spending so long being softened up by the pampered life of a city dweller; but at first I took her warnings to heart and braced myself for the annual Ice Age. In the event, we would always have a couple of days where the snowdrifts came up to our ankles, and then it would melt, except for a couple of icy clumps that local children would use instead of snowballs.
But this winter is going to be different, of course, and this storm — which will cut us off from the outside world — will only be the start of it.
According to my wife.
I’ve just discovered that in the past hour, my Mispronouncers Anonymous video has been given a front-page feature in the UK and Ireland.
So hello to all my new readers from dear old Blighty and the Emerald Isle, nice to see you. Otherwise it’s a bit of a bugger: it’s OK having a video like this in a place where nobody’s ever heard of Ronnie Barker, but now I’m going to be spending the next week reading about how I don’t match up to the original.
Of course I don’t match up to the original. If I matched up to the original, I wouldn’t be about to head off to teach English to Germans.
Now, see, here’s something I don’t quite understand: While my own web stats are showing a drop in viewing figures since the beginning of October, when a video of mine was featured in Germany, Google is reporting a huge increase. I don’t mind one bit, because I’m making money out of it, but I am now in constant fear of somebody from Google telling me I must be cheating somehow and booting me out of AdSense, losing me ads on this site and my Partner status at YouTube.
Whatever it is that’s happening, since the best way to keep people reading this website is to update it regularly, I’m going to have to keep updating it, which means trying to think of something to say.
Well, the weather is pretty awful today: all grey and chilly and wet, and I’m not in the mood to do anything today. Tomorrow morning, I have to go to the dentist, where I’m going to have a couple of teeth fixed, and then I have to make my weekly awesomevloggers video with half my face paralysed, all for your entertainment.
Apart from that, there’s little to say. But hey — if you’re one of the thousands of people Google says are visiting, do please head over to the contact form and let me have the benefit of your feedback. Or tell me what to talk about.
The gripe first. YouTube have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that videos embedded on other websites (such as this one) should have overlay ads on them. They have further decided (because their wisdom is, after all, infinite) that if a video has overlay ads and closed captions, the closed captions should appear slap bang in the middle of the video. For this reason, and until further notice, I’m just giving text links to my videos.
Anyway. In the past two weeks, I’ve uploaded two videos, one English and one German. It seemed only fair.
The first is Mispronouncers Anonymous, based on a Ronnie Barker monologue. In the original, British actor and comedian Ronnie Barker spoke about a new society “for people who cannot say their worms correctly, or who use the wrong worms entirely, so that other people cannot underhand a dickybird they are spraying”. This isn’t that original, but one inspired by and loosely based on it.
The original, written by Barker himself (although nobody knew it at the time, as he used one of his many pseudonyms and kept it secret even from his closest colleagues), was performed on The Two Ronnies, the BBC’s flagship comedy show throughout the 1970s and 1980s. That show also starred his great friend Ronnie Corbett. The format of my sketch is supposed to echo the show’s format, which always began and ended with Barker and Corbett behind a desk as if presenting a current affairs magazine.
One thing about a Two Ronnies sketch is that the punchline is always pretty lame, or predictable, or both; but the other thing about a Two Ronnies sketch is that the punchline isn’t the important thing — it’s everything that leads up to it that you’re supposed to enjoy. Monty Python’s Flying Circus took that approach one step further by abandoning all pretence at having a punchline at all, and simply segueing straight into the next sketch.
Several people have asked me how many takes I needed. The surprising answer is that I had a couple of false starts, and did the whole thing straight through twice. However, I cheated: if you think I look a bit shifty, it’s because I’m reading off a script I taped up right next to the camera… so I’m not looking directly into the camera. If I had a few thousand euros to throw away, I’d get a bigger camera and an autocue.
If you want to see them in action, here’s a typical sketch, introduced by a much older Barker and Corbett in a retrospective recorded shortly before Barker’s death in 2005. Barker is the one playing the barman, and at one point does what only he can: rattles off at bewildering speed a long, complicated and surreal list.
The other video was borne of my frustration with the state of German comedy and the state of German bureaucracy; its title translates as Joke of the Week.
I’m always amazed at how Germans approach comedy, which is that to be funny, it has to be way over the top. If Ronnie Barker had been German, he’d have had to have worn outsized spectacles and a spotted bow-tie at the very least. Almost every successful German comedian I have ever seen on mainstream TV has had a funny accent, worn ridiculous jackets or pulled hilarious faces.
Once, I was attracted by one show that looked superficially very much closer to what I’m more used to: some comedians sat behind a desk talking about the week’s news. I thought it would be Germany’s answer to Have I Got News for You, which is a panel game; that is, a sort of quiz where the questions are just there to introduce a subject about which the contestants could spontaneously make jokes about. Well, it was anything but: after the first five minutes it was so obvious that the whole thing had been carefully scripted and rehearsed, it just wasn’t any fun. They weren’t making jokes, they were reciting lines, and it was awful.
So this video came into being. There’t not a lot to say about it, except that yes, the joke is supposed to be unfunny. It’s actually a typical German joke.
Indeed, this morning I read in the funnies section of our paper a joke that was even worse. So here it is:
“Our house got broken into last night.”
“Oh, no! Did you catch the burglar?”
“My wife did, and now he’s in hospital.”
Yes, that was the joke in its entirety. But it’s funny, you see, because it was together with a lot of similar offerings in a box headed “JOKES”, so you know you’re supposed to laugh.
A few days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported that the new Bond movie Quantum of Solace is “full of blunders”.
Now, that should be an interesting story, I thought. After all, Bond movies are pretty much all the British film industry have left these days, except for romantic comedies starring Hugh Grant and Rowan Atkinson, and even Bond movies are actually made with American money. To have the ultimate in British movies riddled with embarrassing errors would be somehow British, carrying on in the fine tradition of what Stephen Pile called “heroic failures”, like Eddie “The Eagle Edwards, the Advanced Passenger Train and Blue Streak. One more multi-million-pound disaster: we’re good at those.
One of my guilty pleasures in life (which is, I freely admit, extremely tame as far as guilty pleasures go) is to look up movies on the International Movie Database and read all the goofs. For example, in Hot Fuzz, Nicky Angel’s ammo belts keep disappearing and reappearing; Patriot Games is full of bewildering geographical errors that make it unwatchable for anyone who has ever spent more than a day in London; and the whole plot of the 1998 X-Files movie revolves around bees pollinating corn, which they do not do in the world inhabited by you and me.
So what hugely embarrassing blunders can we expect to see Daniel Craig ignoring? Well, as it turns out, in terms of egg on faces, Quantum of Solace is a huge disappointment. Probably the biggest goof is that the temperature in La Paz is 46°F; that is, about 8°C. All the mistakes are so inconsequential, you have to be a bit obsessed even to notice them.
My favourite on the list is the revelation that in a particular chase scene, one of the cars involved is a Vauxhall Corsa with Italian number plates. The “goof” in this case is that outside of the UK, Vauxhalls are rebadged as Opels. Honestly, who watches a Bond car chase and notices the makers’ badges?
The Telegraph lists a grand total of six factual and continuity errors, which for a Hollywood blockbuster is pretty much error-free (by contrast, the IMDb lists 58 errors in the classic Gone with the Wind). That a story could even be made out of this is ridiculous enough, but the statement that film critics say these six mistakes “spoil the film” tells you, I think, pretty much all you need to know about film critics.