Now, the darker side of Garry Shandling with some episodes of The Larry Sanders Show. In Hank’s Contract, Hank is making a big deal of his contract negotiations.
George Foreman is a guest.
James Karen plays Hank’s agent.
Robin Williams is another guest on the show.
Hank eventually gets one of his demands, and this feels like a callback to Garry’s previous show.
I’m not sure about the Radio Times listing of these episodes, as the following episode is The Flirt Episode, which is listed before the previous episode, but clearly at this time shown in a different order. There’s no indication from the intros I have that one of them was postponed, so it’s a bit of a mystery.
Larry flirts with guest Mimi Rogers leading to his wife Jeannie being slightly jealous.
Michael Richards is upset about being bumped as a guest.
There’s a huge time jump before the next episode, Talk Show. Jeannie is getting tired of Larry’s show getting in the way of their marriage. Guest Catherine O’Hara is a bit embarrassed to be caught up.
In the next episode, Larry finds himself hosting a dinner party at his home by accident. His next door neighbour Martin Mull turns up to see what the noise is.
Before the next episode, there’s the end of Loose Talk, featuring a glittering panel of Linda Smith, Jeremy Hardy, Phill Jupitus, Fred MacCauley and Kevin Day.
Then there’s a trailer – look, it’s a young David Tennant, in Takin’ Over the Asylum.
Then, another episode of The Larry Sanders Show. Hank is losing weight, with the help of weird fitness guru Richard Simmons. Meanwhile, Larry is worried about how he’s coming over with focus groups.
Has one of the best endings of any episode, as the focus group is in a room with one-way mirrors, and Hank is snogging his girlfriend behind the mirror. The focus group are talking when there’s a thump from behind the mirrors, the group stop and look round, and we hear a muffled “Hey now!”
The next episode is A Brush with the Elbow of Greatness. Larry is caught on camera bumping into a woman at the checkout. David Paymer plays a publicity agent brought in to manage the situation.
There’s another chunk of Loose Talk before the next episode. The panellists are Felix Dexter, Jeremy Hardy, Phill Jupitus, Richard Herring and host Kevin Day.
There’s a trailer for The Fast Show.
Then, another episode of Larry Sanders. In The Breakdown part 1 it looks like Larry’s marriage might be over, so people are trying to cheer him up. Phil the writer comes in and says ‘Kathy Ireland is trying on wardrobe.” It’s very locker-room. Artie says “Anything could happen”.
Here’s another episode of A Touch of Frost that I’d forgotten I’d taped.
This one is Nothing to Hide, and it’s a fairly low key story about a young drug addict who’s discovered dead in a public toilet. After the police doctor makes a cursory examination and puts it down to overdose because he doesn’t want to spend too much time in such an insalubrious place, Frost’s gut tells him there’s more to it, and a post mortem reveals the man was kicked to death.
Neil Dudgeon plays Frost’s new DC. He’s actually quite a senior officer, but he was demoted to constable after he punched his superintendent for taking credit for an arrest he’d spent months working on. So he has a bit of an attitude problem through the episode.
Felicity Montagu plays the sister of the murdered man.
Ewan Bremner plays another addict who knew the murdered man.
It’s a fairly sedate story, with few twists. I did feel sorry for the victim, though, when Frost talks to his mother, who’s less upset he’s dead, more angry. “How could we expect any different? Right from the minute he was born he was trouble.” Once again, my theory that all storytelling can be traced back to bad parenting has another example.
There’s another episode following this, called Stranger in the House. It has a very effective opening. A young woman, working late, is slightly hassled by one of the blokes in the office. “We should get to know each other.” The usual stuff. He watches ominously from the office window as she walks to her car, then leaves the office urgently.
The woman is driving, and there’s a car following, flashing headlights. She’s scared, obviously. She stops, the car stops in front of her and the man from the office jumps out of the car and runs to hers. She locks the car, terrified, as he bangs on the window, shouting at her to get out of the car.
Then a masked man sits up in the back of the car. It’s a great piece of misdirection.
There’s a serial rapist in town, and no leads. Frost is under pressure to find him. WPC Wallace is assigned to the case with him, as they don’t have a dedicated rape unit. She’s played by Caroline Harker, who looked so familiar to me, so I wasn’t surprised to learn she’s Suzannah Harker’s sister. There’s a very strong family resemblance.
Gavin Richards plays a creepy cab driver who’s suspected of being the rapist, after he assaulted a young girl in his cab.
Brian Bovell gives a nice performance as the husband of one of the victims, distraught after his wife tries to commit suicide.
After this episode, recording continues for a short time with Michael Winner’s True Crimes. Not, curiously, a retrospective of his movies. The tape ends during this.
There’s a slightly creepy Nokia advert where a man picks up some discarded flowers, then scrolls through his phone list of women’s numbers to find to give them to. It can’t have done much to dispel the idea that, in the mod-90s, the only people who had mobile phones were unpleasant yuppie types.
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Regular readers of this blog might have come to realise that my tastes in film and TV are not particularly highbrow. I admit my tastes run to comedy, fantasy, SF, rather than, say, German intellectualism.
But I like to make an effort, as I obviously did here, when Wim Wenders dips his toes into the world of Science Fiction with Until The End of the World.
Now, how much of an effort I’m making might be clearer when I admit to you that I watched this film whilst also playing Spider-Man on the PS4. So some of the deep subtleties in this movie might possibly have passed me by. And watching it on my small laptop screen, in a digitised VHS recording, might mean any visual allure the film might have would not really come over very well.
But all I can say is that I was far more moved by the cut-scenes in Spider-Man than in anything the movie had to offer.
But what, exactly does the film have to offer? It’s a strange one, to be sure. The first hurdle it has to overcome is that it’s a work of science fiction, a genre that’s quite hard to get right if you’re not steeped in it. As we saw from examples like Dennis Potter’s Cold Lazarus, writers and directors who don’t have a natural feel for the genre usually end up making something that clunks a bit. And I got a bit of that here. Some of the sections where the science fiction elements actually started to be important to the plot, rather than just be set decoration, felt like they needed just one more pass by someone who can fake the science. Like the modern Star Trek writers who, when they needed a sciencey sounding plot device or piece of dialog, would write TECH in their drafts, and the team would get the science advisors to write some technbabble dialog that, although bullshit, was at least consistent with the way science is spoken on the show.
I wonder if co-writer Peter Carey, much better known as a literary novelist, was supposed to be the point man for the science fiction stuff. After all, his novel Illywhacker was the winner of the Best Australian Science Fiction Novel in 1986, although Wikipedia describes it as ‘magical realism’ which might explain a lot. It’s also described as ‘picaresqe’ which is literary shorthand for rambling and plotless, and is a word that came to my mind watching this film.
Let’s discuss the film itself, and bear in mind I could be getting any parts of the plot wrong because I was paying too much attention to webbing up bad guys.
Solveig Dommartin is the lead, as Clare, the kind of woman who would ‘wake up in some strange places’.
She gets in her car, which has an ‘online map service’ – something which did exist in some form in 1991 when the film was made, but wasn’t widely available. Even by 1999, when the film is set, it wasn’t widespread. I remember visiting the Smithsonian museum in 2000, and finding an exhibit describing how GPS worked, present by my then-boss Douglas Adams.
This supposed navigation system only seems to consist of unreadable large-area maps and pointless nagging.
Another vaguely unhelpful map screen.
She gets stuck in a traffic jam. There’s some kind of emergency with a nuclear satellite that might fall to earth, I think. Once again, the satnav is being as helpful as it can.
So she drives off the road. The satnav can’t cope with that, although I can’t quite understand why it’s showing static. In 1991, nobody really knew how video worked on computers.
Off the main road she’s suddenly in the middle of nowhere, so it’s deeply unfortunate when she has a car accident caused by the only other car in the road. This next section I have an excuse for not understanding, because all the dialogue is in French, and there are no subtitles. I’ve no idea if this is deliberate on Wenders’ part, or, more likely, Sky didn’t realise it needed subtitling. So I was vague about who these guys were, or why, when they all ended up at a hotel, one of them had a huge bag of money that he emptied out over the bed.
Luckily, the film also has a voiceover, provided bu co-star Sam Neill, so some of this is explained. Dommartin’s other co-star is William Hurt, who she meets while making a video phone call with a public videophone that offers the least amount of privacy you can imagine.
Their ‘meet-cute’ is her helping him because he’s got something stuck in his eye. I’d be astonished if this wasn’t a reference to Brief Encounter.
She gives him a lift, and it was bugging me in this scene what the stuff around the windscreen was. Is it unconvincing snow? But it was never snowing. I’ve now realised that this must be because she’s had the windscreen repaired after it got smashed in her earlier accident. Because windscreen replacement would obviously involves tons of white foam in the future, rather than sticking with old fashioned contact adhesive.
When she drops off William Hurt, she goes to find her old lover Sam Neill, a writer. It’s at this point that I remember the writing credits for the movie – the movie in which Solveig Dommartin is in a love triangle between William Hurt and Sam Neill – and the story was by Wenders and… Solveig Dommartin. You go, girl. (Also, her real hair is much nicer than her Angelica Huston cosplay wig.)
Hurt has stolen some of the money, and Dommartin searches for him, finding him in Berlin with his family, then the next day somewhere else. At one point she’s using ‘the Bear’ which appears to be some kind of search engine that has a title sequence.
The movie meanders around a bit before ending up in Australia. Flying to meet Hurt’s parents, there’s an electromagnetic pulse that destroys a lot of electronics, and although they land the plane without power, there’s more travelling before they get there. So much travelling.
Hurt’s father and mother appear to live in a Bond Villain’s abandoned underground lair, which helpfully explains why their electronic equipment is unaffected by the EMP.
Hurt’s father is played by Max Von Sydow, a scientist who has been working on a device to record what people are seeing, but also how their brain is seeing it.
It’s an attempt to bring vision, or at least the memory of vision to blind people, using a kind of VR helmet to record the images and the brainwaves.
His mother is Jeanne Moreau, who has been blind since childhood. The experiments are to try to let her experience vision in some way.
I think I zoned out of a lot of this. But Moreau dies (she was already very ill) and von Sydow is very sad. He also dies later, as the film meanders on more. Dommartin ends up working on a space station. Then the film ends.
I understand there’s a five hour director’s cut of this film. I’m not desperate to see it.
After this, there’s a bit of another movie, The Children of Sanchez starring Anthony Quinn. The tape ends during this.
On this tape, some episodes from the second series of Sean’s Show, Sean Hughes’ very meta sit-com that sits in a similar category to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. This isn’t a criticism, by the way, I like them both.
For example, when he can’t open his flat door because his hands are full, he just walks around the front of the scenery wall.
But then he lampshades it when a floor manager opens the door. “We’re not doing any of that post-modern stuff this series so stay out of the show we’re making it more conventional, higher ratings. We want thick people to understand it this time around.”
“I took a year off to read Ulysses. Great book. Well, the preface is, anyway.”
There’s references to the previous series. “Still not dry – oh, it is!”
Despite them all dying at the end of the first series (there was a flashback) the same supporting cast return for this one, including Michael Troughton as Barry.
“For higher ratings have the Golden Girls around for dinner.”
The wine bar has a couple only policy, so Sean brings his date.
Which is embarrassing when he meets Barry’s sister in law.
By the way, the band playing in the background of the wine bar, who we never see in close up, is Jarvis Cocker and Pulp.
In the next episode, Sean is visited by an old teacher of his, played by Brian Cox.
Maria McErlane makes a guest appearance.
In the next episode, Sean meets a girl at the petrol station. They do Summer Loving from Grease to no real benefit. Sean Hughes isn’t a very good singing, and there’s no subversion of the original song – it’s just done straight. It just seems a bit pointless.
“You ate all my Ready Brek!”
John Benfield from Prime Suspect plays a policeman.
“They’re doing Doctor Who next door we could borrow the Tardis”
Jesse Birdsall plays a prisoner.
Meera Syal plays Sean’s new girlfriend Trudi.
Also an appearance from Vinnie Jones.
Before the next episode, there’s the end of an episode of The Secret Cabaret, featuring David Berglas talking about debunked psychics.
In the next episode, it’s a Rashomon-style story. Sean and friends wake up in hospital and can’t remember what happened the night before. Michael Sheen appears as a mugger. This was only his third credit in iMDb.
Also appearing, Anita Dobson.
Also also appearing, Shaw Taylor
That’s the last episode on this tape. Following this, there’s part of an episode of News York, one of Laurie Pike’s shows about US TV channels, this one covering a local news channel. The tape ends during this.
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First on this tape, it’s clearly Christmas on Sky One.
My pet hate on Star Trek is funny foreign foods.
Keiko is teaching children about the wormhole, when Vedek Winn comes in, and tells her she’s teaching the children blasphemy. I love Louise Fletcher, and she’s great as Vedek Winn. Always so measured and calm, and twice as scary because of it.
Chief O’Brien is investigating the strange death of one of his engineers in a power conduit.
Tensions on the station are getting high, as Winn encourages the Bajorans to take their children out of school. Then someone sets a bomb at the school (which was luckily empty at the time).
O’Brien’s new assistant appears to be conspiring with Vedek Winn to do something bad.
Vedek Bareil, a more Federation-friendly Bajoran religious leader, comes to visit the station.
As a result, he’s almost assassinated. This is good stuff.
It’s episodes like this that give me some understanding why DS9 is held in high regard by many. I think my only problem with it is that I’m seeing all these episodes out of order, and not really appreciating any long term plots.
After this, recording switches to the end of Les Lives, a five minute spin-off of Reeves and Mortimer that I never knew existed.
Then, Newman and Baddiel On The Road To Wembley. A look at the preparation for their Wembley Arena show. Introduced by David Baddiel saying how enjoyable the process has been. Of course, I’m watching it looking out for signs of the apparent friction between the two. Haven’t spotted any yet.
The work in progress gigs show a few cracks. “Never get actually pissed off on stage with your partner” he says, on stage.
Wow, I genuinely didn’t expect honesty here. “Writing comedy with someone is a very divisive and difficult thing at the best of times. And when one of you is a psychotic and the other one is a very difficult person who always thinks he’s right, then it becomes a hundred times more impossible.”
“Me and David both end up always directing a lot of it, which is one reason why most people won;t work with us. People only tend to work with us once.”
I can’t tell if he’s just joking here. “I felt I did the majority of the work in the last series, and yet we have to, sort of, because it’s kind of even handed we have to share the benefits half and half.”
Sean Lock is a guest on the show.
This really isn’t sugar-coating things. During a phone interview with Radio 5, the interviewer first asks David if he’s really an “outgoing bloke who sleeps with a lot of women” (he’s not) then asks Rob Newman “Rob, you don’t go for David’s sex gags?”
Talking about having to have some distance from each other after the tour, David Baddiel says “If possible we would both go to separate poles for a while.”
I’m genuinely surprised just how much ‘warts and all’ stuff got into this. Here’s the whole thing (uploaded by someone else).
And finally on this tape, a true piece of history: Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era. I love Smashie and Nicey. Don’t you mate?
The show opens with the two DJs bursting from the office of the FAB FM controller Johnny Beergut. This is a reference to former Radio One controller Johnny Beerling, but a bit unfair, since it was Beerling’s successor Matthew Bannister who was responsible for the mass resignations of a lot of the old-school DJs Smashie and Nicey were based on.
Some celebrity cameos, as Smashie and Nicey race to the press conference, including Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman on a Zimmer Frame.
David ‘Kid’ Jensen gets punched in the face and falls down the stairs. I wonder if he does his own stunts?
There’s some genuine pathos in Mike Smash’s recounting of his miserable childhood, playing the recording he made of one side of a conversation so he could have someone to talk to.
Interspersed with Super 8 footage of his father being generally awful to him (as also played by Paul Whitehouse). I guess it was inevitable he’d become a DJ. Or a serial killer.
The sheer amount of detail and effort that’s gone into this programme is amazing, even more impressive when it’s not even dwelt upon. I love the artwork Dave Nice has in his house, and it’s mostly just backgrounds. I particularly like the green face painting. My grandparents had the painting of the green Chinese woman in their house, so it has a strong childhood pull for me.
Dave Nice as Napoleon
As well as the production design, the care that’s gone into the archive footage is astonishing. Here’s Nicey on Blue Peter with Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton. The matching of the footage is perfect, as is the matting of Trace’s hand – you can just see a bit of fringing around the hand if you freeze frame it, but it’s near flawless.
Equally well done is Nicey dancing with Freddie and the Dreamers. He’s perfectly synchronised, he has a shadow on the floor, all the blur matches, and they even interact when Freddie does his jump and kicks Nicey in the crotch. It’s fabulous work.
Watching the show, I’d thought that the Freddie and the Dreamers clip was a separate programme to the Blue Peter clip, but no, it’s all from Blue Peter, and the original clip is on YouTube.
More brilliant Nicey art, Warhol this time.
Another fabulous bit of editing and compositing, with the Beatles this time. As Nicey turns his head, you can still see George Harrison’s face through the large lenses of his glasses. And the cringey questions he’s asking fits perfectly with the pauses and embarrassed shuffling of the band. I wonder if it took a lot of research to find the clips for this.
Smashy made an appearance on Dixon of Dock Green. What I love about this clip is that the added footage of Smashy carrying something in and tripping over matches perfectly with the actor slightly stumbling over his line, as if he was put off by the trip. Just beautiful.
And particularly exciting for me was his sole appearance on Doctor Who.
The superimposed titles also match perfectly – I suspect all these titles were all generated for this clip to help the matching, but it looks perfect to my eye.
Even the stuff without any compositing looks like genuine footage of the time, complete with scratches on the film.
I fear this whole entry will tail off into lots of pictures of film dirt.
They used a photo from a photoshoot outside Broadcasting House, for the launch of Radio One, for this picture of the Radio Fab launch. Smashy replaces Kenny Everett from the original.
I don’t recognise who Dave Nice replaces in the original picture, so I checked on Getty Images and it’s Pete Drummond, not a name that’s familiar to me.
I love the armbands
Some of the Top of the Pops appearances are great
“Sometimes we championed things that needed championinging.” “I remember one episode in ’74 we devoted entirely to black music. There was a lot of controversy about that one.” “You would not believe the complaints that show got.” “Even some black people complained and it was a show devoted to them.” This is how you do a blackface gag.
I love the Deptford Dralons ads. How long ago were Alan Freeman’s Brentford Nylons ads? My gut tells me they were around in the early to mid 70s. This one places these pre-decimalisation, but pre-decimal money is just funnier on its own, so I’m not quibbling.
The many young men that keep being glimpsed in the backgrounds of shots around Nicey’s mansion and quickly duck out of shot are a running gag. Slightly edgier today than it might have been on broadcast.
Another brilliant bit of editing and compositing is when Nicey replaces Bill Grundy for the infamous interview with the Sex Pistols.
John Peel makes an appearance
Lovely to see the Nationwide titles.
They got actual Michael Barratt to present this item, about Smashy not dealing very well with the breakup of his marriage to Tessa, paralleling Tony Blackburn’s similar on-air breakdown after his wife, Tessa Wyatt, left him because he had an affair.
The Dave Nice Video Show was clearly the Kenny Everett show, although I don’t think Kenny’s show was quite as horribly sexist and racist as these clips are. I think we can assume that this is what the show would have been like if Nicey had been the star, and not a reflection on Kenny Everett. I hope.
Their inclusion in Band Aid is another perfect bit of compositing. Here’s some selections.
With an appearance from Sir Bob himself
Now Smashie is doing Noel’s House Party
Katie Puckrick from The Word interviews the pair. I’m glad they got her to do it, and not Terry Christian.
They won’t let Tony Blackburn into the party.
And another appearance from Alan Freeman. Are they calling him ‘Flaff’? I can’t make it out. It’s definitely not ‘Fluff’.
Nicey’s appearance on Comic Relief with Angus Deayton didn’t go well.
I can’t quite see who’s on Smashie’s mug. Is it Benny Hill?
Having the black commissionaire shake Smashie’s hand and completely ignore Nicey was a nice touch.
This really is a thing of greatness. But I always loved Smashie and Nicey. I wish I still had my Comic Relief tape they did one year. There was some brilliant material on that
Credit spot: This was directed by Daniel Kleinmann, who would, in a couple of years, become the titles designer for the James Bond series, starting with Goldeneye.
Here’s someone else’s upload of the whole thing, so I apologize for the slightly poor quality.
Judging by the crappy theme tune arrangement, here’s more episodes from the final series of Quantum Leap. Now I’ve recovered from rewatching the finale, let’s look back to better days.
First on this tape is Liberation. Sam leaps into a woman attending a women’s liberation rally, complete with some bra burning. In the absence of a mirror, a man takes a polaroid and gives it to him/her so we can see what she looks like.
Al is truly awful. “Chicks in cells. Talk about a major fantasy.”
Sam’s husband is unhappy with his wife and daughter having independent opinions. When discussing a possible promotion at work, where a man and a woman are up for it, he’d rather give it to the man ‘because he’s got a family to provide for’ and ignoring that the woman also has a family. “If I did give Evie promotion I could save a lot of money on salary.”
The women of the family are certainly reading the right books.
There’s a nice scene, where both candidates for the promotion are having dinner at Sam’s house. He urges Evie to speak up, and when she does, the other man either ignores her ideas or laughs it off. When Sam’s husband asks “Why didn’t you bring up these ideas at the meeting this afternoon?” “I didn’t think anyone would listen.”
Of course, the central flaw with much of this is that it’s the man (Sam) who’s solving all the problems of sexism. And the climax, where Sam has to defuse a potentially violent situation by trying to appeal to rule of law to stop the women’s rights activist shooting the chief of police, feels a little off. The activist ends up in handcuffs, shouting angrily, rather suggesting that she wasn’t the ‘right kind’ of feminist. I feel this episode is trying to be on the right side, but it drops the ball a bit.
The next episode is Dr Ruth. It’s a bit of a gimmick episode, as Sam leaps into the body of Dr Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist.
Having a celebrity leap means we get a rare look at Al in the waiting room with the real Dr Ruth.
I really don’t buy Sam being so embarrassed at discussing sex, which seems like it’s just there for the laughs.
And boy is Al still awful. We get a two minute litany of euphemisms for breasts from him until he’s able to say the word itself, and we’re supposed to think this is progress for him.
Sam is helping a woman who’s being sexually harrassed by her boss. But he claims she was obsessed with him and he tried to let her down lightly.
But of course he’s lying, and goes back to assault her. Lucky Dr Ruth gets there in time to put the boot in.
I like the way they make use of having been in the waiting room for the transition to the next subject – rather than seeing Sam leap into a body, we see Dr Ruth changing into the next leapee – who doesn’t look like a nice person.
However, I don’t have the next episode on this tape, Blood Moon, so we skip forward a few weeks (snooker meant we skipped a couple of weeks in the schedules) for Goodbye Norma Jean.
Bloody Hell, Al is being horrible AGAIN. Leching over Marilyn swimming naked. Ugh.
Nice to see the Griffith Observatory.
There’s some famous faces from Marilyn’s past, like Peter Lawford.
And director John Huston – not the best resemblance.
Finally on this tape, Return of the Evil Leaper. There’s a reprise of the first Evil Leaper story which, I confess, I can’t remember.
Neil Patrick Harris plays a bad guy in this.
Alia, the Evil Leaper, arrives, along with her hologram played by Carolyn Seymour. She really did have a varied career in the US, she pops up in everything.
The story involves a college fraternity. I hate college fraternities. I blame them for everything bad about today’s America. Exhibit A.
We see the waiting room again.
In the end, Sam and Alia, the Evil Leaper, leap together.
First on this tape, episode 10 of Between The Lines series one, Nothing to Declare.
Nicky Henson is a Chief Superintendent retiring, using his speech to complain at political correctness. Nothing changes.
Keith Allen is a customs investigator who was observing what he claims to be a meeting between drugs squad officers and drug traffickers.
Allen’s associate is played by Paul Higgins. I couldn’t place him, but I knew I’d seen him in something else. He was suspect copper Derek Hilton in Line of Duty.
We see part of the scam that’s being investigated – People trying to get into Britain are taken in a container, and they are forced to swallow drug packets as part of the cost. It’s all a bit horrible.
All in all, this was a rather depressing series, wasn’t it?
Never mind, though, here’s something to cheer you up. It’s an episode of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge. It’s actually the first episode, and his first guest is horse rider Sue Lewis, played by the peerless Rebecca Front.
Alan brings out her horse, and asks her if she’d jump a jump. She explains she can’t, as it’s a concrete floor and would damage the horse’s legs. “Please don’t break my legs” she says.
The next guest is the new host of This is Your Life Keith Hunt, played by Cornish curmudgeon Patrick Marber.
“I’ve just been told that Roger Moore is at Chiswick Roundabout”.
Alan brings on Hunt’s son. But because of custody arrangements he can’t come within ten feet of him. And it’s birthday, which Keith has forgotten.
“Can someone clear that shit away? It’s in my picture.”
Doon Mackichan provides the music as Shona McGough, which starts off like this.
And ends up like this.
“This is interesting, a lady drummer. Close your eyes it could have been a man.”
The show concludes with ‘An Audience with Roger Moore’ as they wait for the arrival of the actor.
The next episode opens with Alan talking about critical reaction to the show. “I looked up moribund in the dictionary.” I didn’t realise that this might have been inspired by an actual event featuring, who else, Noel Edmonds. And I saw this retweeted by someone into my twitter timeline just yesterday. Because that’s how Twitter works.
His first guest is Playboy’s agony aunt Daniella Forrest, played by Minnie Driver. I’m not sure this part really gets away with Alan’s appalling transphobia, though.
Alan meets another man named Alan Partridge, Petty Officer Alan Partridge, played by John Thomson.
The magnificent David Schneider plays magician Tony le Mesmer.
Hollywood couple Tanya Beaumont and Gary Barker are the next guests.
I like the bit where Alan brings on a photocopier, because Gary used to repair photocopiers as a job. “I don’t do that shit any more.”
Finally, Alan straps himself to the wheel of death, as Tony le Mesmer throws daggers at him.
That’s all the Alan Partridge on this tape, as we leap forward to Christmas. There’s a bit of Eastenders, a trailer for The Addams Family, and a long trailer new dramas The Buccaneers and Dangerfield.
Then, a festive episode of 2point4 Children. Bill has gathered the family to ask about why the phone bill is so high. It’s an interesting point in time scene. First, daughter Jenny has been calling her boyfriend long distance, which is a plot point from the mists of time. But son David has been connecting his computer to ‘the internet’ and receiving Christmas greetings from all over the world. Bearing in mind this was Christmas 1994, it’s understandable that none of the family understand what he’s talking about. I love this collision of venerable and utterly new. Wikipedia suggests this might be the earliest mention of the Internet in a UK comedy.
Not that the practical details of ‘the internet’ are necessarily convincing. When we see David on his computer, he’s concerned because he’s talking to someone who ‘dialled me up’. And whoever it is, it knows who Bill is.
And whoever it is offers Bill some Christmas wishes.
And it’s able to do whatever she asks for. Including something Rona asked for.
The lovely Liz Smith appears as a relative.
When they family realise that the Bill the computer was looking for was President Bill Clinton, they make a quick exit to France, and the show ends with a song and dance number in what looks like the Noel’s House Party set.
After this, a trailer for The Lenny Henry Christmas Show. There’s also trailers for Midnight Movie and Dick Tracy.
Then, there’s a whole movie, The Addams Family which isn’t marked on my database, probably because this was just a run-on, and I already had the movie recorded elsewhere, as seen on this tape.
Following this, there’s a trailer for Gorillas in the Mist.
Then, a news bulletin, leading with the end of a hijack of an Air France plane. It wasn’t the best rescue, since many of the passengers were injured, although all the hijackers were killed. The pictures of the assault are quite scary. A pilot climbs out of the cockpit and falls to the ground, and as the commandos try to breach the door at the front, the stairway slides back, leaving one of the commandos just hanging on to the door. It shows the actual chaos of real life, as compared with the slick operations we see in movies.
