Blog address changing

I've moved this blog to

http://thejohnfleming.wordpress.com

So, if you're interested in following it....

http://thejohnfleming.wordpress.com

MORE THIRD REICH THAN LORD REITH

This morning was the first time I’d been inside the new and/or still-being-rebuilt BBC Broadcasting House in London. It appears to have an interior colour scheme of red, black and white. Very clean and trendy, though those three colours feel unsettlingly more Third Reich than Lord Reith. It was also slightly unsettling to see a notice at the entrance of the Radio Theatre declaring:

PLEASE NOTE. Strobe lighting and smoke effects are used in this theatre.

I know I’m knocking on a bit and the various media are allegedly rapidly converging, but this seemed going a little far for BBC Radio, even by the surreal standards of the late Director Fuhrer John Birt.

I was at the the BBC Radio Theatre to see the recording of a debate entitled on the info sheet I Love…? but listed on the BBC website as The Greatest City on Earth. Basically a set-to on whether London, New York, Mumbai or Istanbul was the best city. No mention of Edinburgh, then?

Professor Laurie Taylor chaired a surprisingly feisty debate which included Jake Arnott, writer of the superb semi-fiction crime books The Long Firm (filmed by the BBC) and He Kills Coppers (filmed by ITV)… and the always surprising American comedian Lewis Schaffer of whom more in the weeks to come.

Watching Lewis is sometimes a rollercoaster ride. He’s more self-destructive than a lemming and many are the comedy cliffs I have seen him plunge over. He is Bill Bryson with attitude or Woody Allen on acid. But always charming and I am always surprised by his ability to ad-lib well-thought-out punchlines. A natural for factual-based TV and radio shows. Let’s just hope he figures out what his Edinburgh Fringe show is going to be about before August. He has been doing try-outs for it twice weekly in Soho since (I think) last November. He is a potentially great comedian who is already worth the price of admission. Certainly worth tuning in to hear The Greatest City on Earth – Radio 4 next Monday morning, 12th July, at 09.00, with a shortened version broadcast on Radio 4 at 21.30 that same evening.

The Impossibility of Believing Reality

Last week I went to a comedy club and a woman fell asleep in the third row. Even when the compere started joking about it, she stayed asleep. Because she was deaf.

"What sort of person brings a deaf friend to a comedy club?" the compere asked.

Her friend had no answer. She just laughed.

In 1982, I saw a blind Japanese woman being led to a row of one-armed bandits in a casino in Las Vegas. She sat down and pushed coins in the slot and pulled the handle of her machine like an automaton, staring straight ahead. What possible excitement could a blind person get from not seeing the fruit on the wheels spin round on a one-armed bandit in Vegas? The sound perhaps?

Life. You couldn't make it up.

When comedians seem to be telling a true story, it's often made up. When they seem to be making up a story, it's often basically true.

Who knows what tales will be told at (and of) the Edinburgh Fringe next month? Who knows which will be true?

Five "hot" comedians

I see that, in the US magazine Punchline's list of the five UK comics worth keeping an eye on, one's Irish and one's an Aussie. So that only leaves three - Robin Ince, Janey Godley and Laura Solon.

KILLER BITCH - "Unexpectedly well-made... Resolutely trashy"

The Massachusetts-based Horrorview website - surprisingly well-informed on British culture for a US-based site - has a well-balanced review of the Killer Bitch DVD which starts:

____

“Killer Bitch” is an unexpectedly well-made but ultra low-budget (and resolutely trashy) indie gangster flick that goes miles out of its way to offend as many people as it possibly can; but unless you happen to work for a British tabloid newspaper, it is very hard to take this video-shot flick’s ridiculously cartoonish portrayal of violent working class machismo all that seriously -- despite it playing host to an insidious sexism that borders on outright misogyny at times, relying on knowing humour and a lively sense of the ridiculous in order to undercut its more unpleasant excesses.

The film is simply a deranged, hormonally pumped-up celebration of testosterone-soaked psychopathy that revels in the bloody glamour of working class criminal thuggery and yob culture in all its foul-mouthed and spittle-flecked glory. From unlicensed boxing to no-holds-barred cage fights; from club land brawling to drug-fuelled beatings and brutal gangland hits: “Killer Bitch” is literally ninety fast-paced minutes of feckless punch drunk sleaze, crammed to bursting point with little more than a succession of leery, muscle-bound ‘blokes’ waving their big guns at people and yelling outlandishly overblown threats into their faces (“I’m gonna rip yer fuckin’ teeth out and shove ’em up your fuckin’ arse! ) before pummelling seven shades of shit out of each other while various pouty, pneumatic bimbettes, culled from late-night phone-in porn channel Babestation, stand around with their fake norks out being either shouted at, shagged or shot, and sometimes all three -- but not necessarily in that order!

If you’re a sullen, pimply fourteen year-old, who’s been driven half insane by inveterate sexual frustration and incessant nocturnal emissions, then this just might be the best film you've ever seen in your life!

____

The whole, lengthy review continues on:
http://www.horrorview.com/movie-reviews/killer-bitch

Malcolm Hardee Randiest Fringe Comic Award ?

I'm almost prepared to start a Malcolm Hardee Randiest Fringe Comic Award at the Edinburgh Fringe from 2011 but I might take some persuading on who the judges would be and the title isn't quite right yet. All suggestions gratefully received.

Malcolm would most certainly have approved and the whole idea of the Malcolm Hardee Awards (2005-2017) is to keep alive the true spirit of the Fringe (and Malcolm's memory). Testosterone, unreliability and rampant egos are the basic building blocks of the Fringe.

The Fringe has got far too respectable for its own good.

The Malcolm Hardee Awards this year will be presented during Nik Coppin's late night "Shaggers" show on Friday 27th August.

Mr Methane act blown off course in Italy

Mr Methane was performing in northern Italy at the weekend, by the Lakes, and was unable to demonstrate some of the more spectacular parts of his act because of high winds.

The irony. The irony.

www.mrmethane.com

FARTING RULES AT THE BBC

Mr Methane - the world's only professionally performing flatulist - tells me that, four or five years ago, there was a "three fart rule" on BBC TV children's shows - you could have no more than three fart jokes in any children's TV show.

Is this still the case?

What has the the world come to?

Another great British tradition under attack...

Once you've had three fart jokes, what is the unacceptability of a fourth?

KILLER BITCH - There's no accounting for (bad) taste...

There have been a lot of news features on the Killer Bitch movie, sight unseen, but very few actual reviews of the full film.

First there was the GoreZone 5-star magazine review:

"This is Grand Theft Auto meets I Spit on your Grave... A violent 21st century British pantomime for the MTV generation… A middle finger in your face attitude… This is a must-see… This film is in a league of its own and has to be seen to be believed… You may read this review and think the film sounds vile, disgusting and morally depraved and you’d be wrong - you forgot to add bloody fantastic as well."

Then there was the 1-star review from the News of the World:

"This is the shoddiest excuse for a film I've seen in my life... Highlight, of course, is the Reidernator's much-vaunted sex scene, where he's channelling the passion and intensity of Beethoven (the giant St Bernard)."

Now there is the 4-star review from the AVmaniacs.com website:

"A bad taste ultraviolent black comedy, loaded with cursing, screaming, yelling and a higher body-count than even most films it could be compared to… If sunny nihilism and anti-social behaviour (not to mention blood, biceps, big boobs, and a topless midget!) with a Cockney twist floats your boat, hunt down KILLER BITCH."

If you can get a 5-star review and a 1-star review for the same movie, you know you must have done something right somewhere...

www.killerbitch.co.uk

KILLER BITCH, crime and Citizen Kane

I was talking to one of the Killer Bitch cast yesterday and (as one who knows) he came out with the legendary line: "I've got no money at the moment and xxxx xxxxxxx ain't got no money either. The bottom's fallen out of Crime."

Has Britain fallen this low? Sir Francis Drake made England great by robbing Spanish ships of their gold and the East India Company built Queen Victoria's glorious British Empire on the heroin trade.

We live in difficult economic times. Or do we? Opinion varies.

A recent report said organised crime caused "an estimated £30 billion a year in social and economic harm" to the UK. I'm not quite sure what "harm" means in this context. Presumably it means there is a £30 billion black economy underpinning the 'legitimate' economy. But it's all guestimates on guestimates. A recent report by the Association of Chief Police Officers claimed the UK underworld economy is now worth around £40 billion a year.

I'm more concerned that fake DVD production is now reckoned to be worth £300 million in the UK. I had vaguely hoped Killer Bitch might be fairly immune to this because I had hoped that the people most likely to rip us off were actually involved in the movie in some way - and therefore highly unlikely to rip us off. I had, however, reckoned without the international nature of modern movie rip-off-dom.

Still, I am filled with hope for the future of Killer Bitch because Michael Deeley, the highly-regarded head of British Lion Films reportedly said, when his company released The Wicker Man in 1973, that it was the worst film he had ever seen. Years later, the equally highly-regarded Cinefantastique magazine devoted at entire issue to The Wicker Man, famously calling it "the Citizen Kane of horror films", while the Los Angeles Times said it was: "Witty & scary! No one who sits through it to the end is likely to find it easy to shake off."

Likewise, no-one who sits through Killer Bitch with an increasingly dropped jaw and open mouth is ever likely to forget it. Bland it is certainly not.