There’s an article in Empire Magazine about a certain film about Magicians. It’s quite large so I have chopped it up a bit…

Hope that kind of made sense.

How busy is David Mitchell doing to be in March and April?

We went to the recording of the pilot for The Unbelievable Truth was back in June. It was alright. I was rather tired and hung over as we had got married the day before. There are three recording dates available for the full series so click on my link and see for yourselves.

It’s coming… soon. It’s a pilot, it’s for the radio and it stars a certain Mitchell and a certain Webb. It’s Daydream Believers and you can get tickets to go see (and hear) David and Rob do that radio thing what they do. Click to the BBC tickety world of joy!

Or phone the number at the bottom of this trailery picture thing.

I have ordered four as we are taking the Blog Children.

I don’t know how he fits it in, what with the Peep Show, Magicians, Bonjela adverts, That Mitchell And Webb Sound, That Mitchell And Webb Look, Mac adverts, Best Of The Worst and Daydream Believers…

Join Angus (BBC1′s Have I Got News For You, BBC3′s Nighty Night) and two teams of top celebrity guests as they attempt to tell fact from fiction in a series of hilarious rounds. Team mates have to remain poker faced while: revealing personal stories previously known only to their closest friends; being put through their paces in a quick-fire lies round; and explaining their real or invented relationship with a mystery studio guest – all with the ultimate aim of discerning the truth from the fiction in this brand new show! Doors Open: 19:00
Studio Location: Fountain Studios 128 Wembley Park Drive Wembley London HA9 8HP

I may pass as there are other things David shall be doing that sound more up my alley…

You can get tickets online and tell me all about it though.

We have more news, via an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters. Or something. Anyway…

Keep ‘em peeled over at That BBC Tickets Site because several M&W related projects (all of them in glorious radioness) are being recorded over the next two months or so.

Daydream Believers is a radio sitcom pilot from David and Rob that has been around for a bit and is finally (almost) ready to be unveiled to the masses (i.e. a horde of comedy nerds and confused posh types who go to everything Radio 4) at The Drill Hall. It will probably almost definitely take place on 19th March. Which is, calendar fans, a Monday.

The Drill Hall: Home of comedy and a refreshing beer.

Bleak Expectations is a ‘Dickensian radio comedy series’ which from that description alone has me intrigued. It is created by Mark Evans aka one half of Bachman & Evans aka That Man Who Co-Wrote Some Of the TMAWL sketches. He is also the same man as the man who was at the various ‘practice’ gigs for that very same sketch show, and was usually to be found marking the scripts with coloured pen when people in the audience found things amusing. Or not. That shoul be unveiled, listened to and indeed applauded at The Drill Hall (our spiritual home) in the last week of March (probably and almost definitely 23rd, 26th and 30th) in three blocks of two episodes. You can’t go for a wee during recordings there, as I found out to my horror once, but as it’s a double episodey thing I am sure they’ll have a short break.

The Drill Hall does very refreshing beer.

The biggie to look forward to is the return of That Mitchell And Webb Sound. Probably the best radio comedy since Little Britain when it was funny, it returns for a surprise third series and is being recorded over three dates that span from the beginning of April to the middle of May. Dates may change so I’m not going to mention them until it’s all confirmed as fact.

I am officially triple excited now.

Beer?

News? What news? Well, Peep Show is just over halfway through its filming and the next big thing will be a certain long-awaited comedy radio piloty thing. Stay tuned for sprecifics when I know them… As I may have mentioned already, the return of That Mitchell And Webb Sound is coming up too. I don’t know how they fit it all in. It looks like that show is going to begin (and end maybe, depending on how quick they rattle through it?) at the end of April. I shall be lurking outside The Drill Hall any day now just in case…

and now a word from a certain Mr Jez Osbourne, in reply to the hoo-haa about a certain advert for computers in The Guardian. You know, the article by that Zoe Williams I posted the other week. Anyway:

‘Zoe, my God you nailed it sister. Your article touched me greatly (Worse than not-funny, January 31st) in the way that it devastatingly pointed out that comedians sometimes get offered money to do acting in adverts (by The Man) rather than acting in TV shows (also by The Man, but better). As a musician, I’ve always been mindful of the pitfalls awaiting the artist who actually earns money from making or performing music. If anyone offered me an advert I would probably laugh blood in their face and then pelt them with tomatoes (I’ve borrowed your wicked Vorderman joke – tomatoes!) It’s the same for you as a writer: yeah OK, so you get paid by the paper that gets money from the advertising that you hate this week, but you brilliantly maintain your artistic integrity by ensuring that everything you write is so difficult to understand. “We’re still chasing a dream, but we want it to be a wonderland whose distance we can count in units”. I’ve spent most of the day trying to figure out what that means, but the point is that it’s highly moving. I love it that your writing is so obscure. “Sixty percent of advertising is more creative and wittier than 90% of mainstream situation comedy”. Completely impenetrable except from within the head of the writer. That’s real art. It takes me back to the heyday of The Modern Review. They too used to chuck in references to Orwell, Kant and Nietze whilst basically chatting about TV or fashion and it always made me feel like I was clever, or they were clever, or either. Here’s to you Zoe! I’ll never be Bowie and you’ll never be Burchill, but at least we’re making a living (well, you are). Love, your new fan, Jez x’

In tribute to people getting a bit too angry about artists doing adverts, here is some angry art:

Oh yeah, Magicians should be out in May. Probably.

Yes it’s that teeny tiny trailer again. It’s all I have!

Thanks to a little bird who supplied me with some big news.

The Mitchell And Webb backlash continues… Have no other comedians ever done adverts? Bah. I don’t find the ads particularly funny but I don’t think they’ve sold their souls to the devil either. All publicity is good publicity or is that not true?
Anyway…

From The Independent:
Thomas Sutcliffe: Cool plus cool just leaves me cold
Published: 02 February 2007

It must have seemed like the perfect marriage. On the one hand, you had Apple’s latest ad campaign, which personifies the long, sniping war between Mac and PC with two characters – one uptight and nerdy, the other handsome and relaxed. On the other hand, you have a British sitcom – Mitchell and Webb’s Peep Show – which depends on the odd-couple partnership of an anally retentive worker bee and a laid back, hop-head grasshopper. So, the thinking must have run, why run a big casting call for a British version of the ads when you can just piggyback on an established franchise. The demographics look just right and these guys have good comic timing anyway. It’s a double win surely?
Except that it isn’t – once you’ve got past the novelty of watching the first couple of ads. There’s nothing really wrong with the theory, which predicts that cool multiplied by cool should stomp all over the opposition, but, in practice, an odd kind of polarising effect takes place. Rather than amplifying each other, they cancel each other out – so that both parties turn out to have something to lose from the combination.
Obviously, Apple will have no problems associating its competitors with Mark, a flustered neurotic prone to panic attacks. But do they really want to identify their own product with a hedonistic, klutz-like Jeremy? The dynamics of Peep Show aren’t geek versus hero, but a combat between two very different kinds of inadequacy… and if Jeremy were a computer, he would almost certainly be boasting about his unrivalled ability to surf porn websites. He would also be very difficult to wake from sleep – which, as it happens, is a problem Apple has been having with some of its newer laptops.
At the same time, Mitchell and Webb find themselves performing lines that are sadly underpowered compared with the excruciating embarrassments they contrived for their television series. There’s nothing here to compare with the sequence in the sitcom where Mark discovers that his last strawberry yogurt has been used as a sexual lubricant by his flatmate. And while it’s true that they probably get more money for the ads than they ever did for the original series – there’s still a sense that the characters they created have been pulled out of true to meet the requirements of the marketers. A capsule version of Peep Show in which Jeremy’s swaggering self-assurance turns out to be justified has rather missed the point of the original. As does an ad which fails to grasp the merits of Mark’s exasperated, embattled traditionalism.
The ads have been greeted in some quarters as a classic instance of comic sellout – which seems a little naive, given the long and lucrative connection between comic talent and advertising. And it may also miss the point about exactly how kudos flows between celebrity and product these days. It used to be the case that only the star had anything to fear – their own glamour potentially tainted by association with the banal or the everyday. Certain products were usually exempt from this dread – thanks to their own association with leisure or glamour – but there was always the possibility of pollution, of talent brought low by contact with the domestic or the mercantile. And in almost every case the celebrity was assumed to be conferring some grace on the product – which was one of the reasons why the notion of selling out arose in the first place.
These days, things aren’t quite that simple any more. For one thing our expectations of adverts are much higher than they used to be, so that it’s far from inconceivable that a commercial break will deliver more wit and pleasure than the programme it interrupts. Ad campaigns can even take on a life of their own – as was recently demonstrated by the return of Johnny Vegas’s double act with a knitted chimp. There weren’t many complaints then about the debasement of a comic talent – only an appreciation of the invention with which the back story had been filled in – and admiration for the funny, self-referential way in which it acknowledged that fame can always be used to lever a hard sell, even the entirely fictitious fame of a stuffed woollen monkey.
For another thing, quite a lot of products now have fanbases just as devoted as any celebrity – which means that brand associations can cement a career in place – rather than weaken it. Appearance in a Nike ad is not simply an exploitation of sporting success – it is as much the final confirmation of it as a gold medal or a world record.
In this case, I have a suspicion that just as many people will be dismayed that Apple has condescended to use mere television stars, as will feel that Mitchell and Webb have sold themselves short.

A little bird (not meant as a sizist sexist piece of terminology, honest) tells me that those Mitchell and them Webb folks will be recording a new series of That Mitchell And Webb Sound (for them radios) sometime involving Easter at some place where we went before and talked to them and took those pictures and stuff.

Oh yes. Officially excited now.