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fairytalesandfandoms · 2 years

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Fandot Listenalong Day 1 - Abu Dhabi

Today’s question: Who is your favourite character?

Obviously like, it’s no secret that Douglas is my favourite. And I do love all the characters for different reasons (except perhaps Gordon, booooo), but if asked to pick a fave I’d choose Douglas every time. Not only is he witty and good at problem-solving and voiced by the brilliant Roger Allam, but there’s other stuff which I wrote about last year and never posted because it all felt a bit silly and personal and so on. However, I might as well copy it and post it now if people are asking about favourite characters.

(under a cut due to spoilers for later episodes, also the aforementioned being personal about it)

“As a lot of you may have noticed, I apologise a lot. A LOT. Now we don’t have time to unpack all of the reasons for that, but it can be broadly said to be caused by anxiety and similar Brain Nonsense. Ever since I started listening to Cabin Pressure years ago, I have desperately wanted to have Douglas’s wit and confidence (even if it’s more of a front than we first think). Unfortunately, this is only one of the many, many things that make me way more of a Martin than a Douglas. It ends up in a loop of me wishing I was like Douglas, which makes me more like Martin, which makes me annoyed at myself and wishing I wasn’t so much like Martin and more like Douglas, and so on in a self-perpetuating Martin spiral that I cannot escape.

However, after ages of wishing I could stop apologising, or at least do it less, I hit upon a solution last week [this was written in December 2020, so really it was last year] when I was finally going through all the Cabin Pressure episodes. When writing a work message on Teams to a colleague, I thought “putting all that ‘sorry to bother you but please’ preamble sounds like a Martin thing, not a Douglas thing”. So I... didn’t. I was still polite about it, but it was now more along the lines of “could you send me that thing we talked about the other day”. And the world did not end, and I was not fired, which seemed like a miracle.

Which got me thinking, if I considered whether a thing was ‘a Douglas thing’, then maybe that could help me cut down on the apologies. (Obviously, not all Douglas Things would work for this, but I thought I could start on the apologies first and then NOT go on to steal Talisker.) To be honest, it was kind of like... allowing myself to not always apologise. Overriding my brain’s default apology program, which felt quite cool and daring, for me, like singing loudly in choir when we did a song I liked. So there I was for about a week and a half, pleased that I’d found a brain hack that seemed to work at least once.

And then, Zurich. 13-11 minutes from the end, to be precise.

When Douglas said to Martin ‘well, there’s nothing to stop you doing that [pretending to be him]’ I was like, How is this happening??? Can Douglas see inside my head??? Oh God, can John Finnemore see inside my head, from years ago when the episode was written??? (please no) And then we find out he learnt it from this Rory guy! And it’s pretending for ‘only the first couple of years. Then it becomes part of who you are. That’s why you have to pick your model carefully. You of course have picked terribly well.’

You hear that? That means if I keep at it I might be able to get this. And also... that I picked terribly well. From the man himself. And it would be an honour for that to be a part of who I am, or will be.

And now I’m crying just thinking about it and I love them all so much”

#cabin pressure #fandot listenalong 2021

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templeofshame · 4 years

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Do/would you get satisfaction out of a famous person you like on twitter replying to/ liking a tweet of yours? I personally don't get the attraction of trying to get a notice, when someone I admire likes my tweet I'm like oh cool, but it's not gonna change my mood. Idk if that makes sense?

If I say something I think is clever or funny or thoughtful or something, getting a response from someone I like is a form of validation. I don’t personally understand the appeal of saying things for the purpose of getting “noticed,” but I like it when people interact with stuff I post in general, and if it’s someone I don’t expect to respond that I think is cool, that’s a little bonus, I think? But it’s not gonna be why I post, I just like people liking what I do. I like getting asks and likes and reblogs/retweets from strangers too, and I used to post a fair amount about seeking the approval of a random Portuguese (I think? I forget) woman who is the only person who interacted with my TMI twitter.

It’s also nice sometimes when someone with more of a platform interacts with something more substantial, like a link to a podcast, and gives it a boost that way; I’ve gotten that from Joe Iconis I think twice. (One time he said a bunch of complimentary things about me, and I ended up joking about him sending me some old demos, and he did. That whole interaction means a lot to me.) And it was kind of exciting when John Finnemore responded to me on Twitter once. Honestly, I even appreciated Aimee Mann liking my tweet at Red Vines. So I guess the answer is yeah, it feels nice to have someone you respect unexpectedly validate you. It’s nice to feel seen and appreciated. But it’s a different level if it’s ‘oh cool, I didn’t expect Aimee Mann to see that tweet’ versus ‘Joe Iconis is being really nice to me publicly and I don’t know how to handle it !!!!’

(Dan has responded to a couple things I said in ls chats years ago, and I didn’t feel validated or seen by that, but I was glad to hear him spend a second on a topic I was interested in. So that’s a pretty different feeling to me.)

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edmorrish · 7 years

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John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme - Series 6, Episode 2

Here are some production notes for series 6 episode 2 of JFSP. Which felt like it also had to be a show 1 - because the actual first show felt slightly not of the series; it was, after all, a ‘special’.

No running jokes this week, which is unusual on the whole; in the first thirty episodes of JFSP (including JF,A), only four didn’t have any running sketches or callbacks (and three of those four episodes were in series five). As a show we have always had an aversion to using the same characters every week; when the show started in 2011, most shows were like that, so we consciously decided to be different. We obviously have returned to various characters over time (and have done twenty-six Since You Ask Mes in those thirty episodes), but I do think that the audience finds it extra satisfying when there’s a sense of narrative in a sketch show, especially if you didn’t promise one; it’s like an surprise treat on top of the excellent sketches. The trick is not to use the same type of runner each week, I suppose - last week we had the recurring turkeys; the episode before that, a two part sketch with the Train Driver and the Train Manager; the show before that had Lawry trying to steal the show (succeeding when Ranjit broke down); before that, John had three Overthinking sketches… As long as each sketch feels like it could be the end of the joke, rather than just being a set-up to a pay-off, I think it doesn’t matter. After all, we only revealed the connection between the sketches in the Time Travel episode (series 4, episode 6) at the end…

Anyway, on with the sketch notes.

Kissing

The music was added afterwards, as usual (to allow me to edit it as I wished, cut back on the laughs, and make the timings work). It’s, yes, the same “grave public service announcement” music that we used for ‘Pub Chat’ (series 3, ep1) and Romantic Gestures (series 2, ep2). It’s such a fine line between being repetitive and being consistent, isn’t it?

Phone Number

No cuts in this, I think.

Evil Voices

A product of our annual ‘silly voices day’, where the cast get together and make stupid noises for John’s amusement/inspiration.

Just What I Wanted

This was the sketch I referred to in last week’s blog - originally it was about Christmas presents, but when it went down so well that, after cutting it, we changed ‘Happy Christmas’ in ‘Happy anniversary’ and VOILA brand new sketch. This is also one of those sketches where it doesn’t matter how much the cast rustle their scripts, because there’s loose paper in the scene. If need be, you can actually mask rustles by adding paper FX, rather than having to try and snip them out.

Self Driving Cars

Since handing this in, I’ve been keener than usual that David Attenborough doesn’t die, and that there are no self-driving car accidents. Because one of those on the day would make this sketch unbroadcastable with practically no way of fixing it. All real-life references are a risk; a 2014 episode of Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully featured a character wondering aloud “if Leonard Cohen is dead yet”. Luckily, he lasted longer than the show did…

Bright Ideas

An experiment, if you like. We recorded two bits of stand-up for this series, but it was hard to place them; if they went at the start of an episode, are you setting people’s expectations for a stand-up show? But if you put them in the middle, does it need to be explained that this is stand-up? This bit, however, explains why it’s stand-up, not a sketch, as it goes along - so felt like an inverted sketch rather than not a sketch, so could go anywhere, we think.

We recorded it twice, once without a script (to get a looser feel; it had obviously been rehearsed extensively at John’s tryouts, but it’s not the precise wording that matters, it’s the beats of the story), and once with. This isn’t particularly innovative in itself - for example, this is the entire script for a forty-minute recording of 2013′s Andrew Maxwell’s Public Enemies:

However, while Andrew’s style of bullet-point scripting held throughout the whole half hour, this bit of stand-up had to sit amongst other, tightly-scripted sketches, and we felt the loose nature of it didn’t quite land in context, so we went with the scripted version.

Waterloo

Pretty much unedited. A bit of ‘outdoors’ atmos added afterwards. Not sure it would have benefited from anything else.

Best Child

As I’m sure I’ve written before, at the end of each series, before going into the edit, John and I sit down with a pile of post-it notes with all the sketches written on them, and arrange them into shows, keeping the songs apart, the Since You Ask Me sketches apart (obviously), spreading the talking animals between the shows, and so on. I compile these running orders in ProTools, to make sure they’re approximately the right length, like this:

Then editor Rich Evans and I edit out the fluffs and bits that don’t work or we don’t need, add FX, and if we need to lose sketches or swap sketches around to make timings work, John and I do that at the end*. All of which is simply to flag up how ludicrous is was that, after finishing the paperwork for series five I texted John to ask why we hadn’t used Best Child. John didn’t know; we both loved it. The best guess we have is that we dropped the post-it note while compiling the show and, well, out of sight, out of mind. Which is pretty stupid but, on the other hand, it meant we knew we had at least one banker for this series already written…

(The series five version had a much harsher punchline than this which I personally preferred, but when we opened a recording with it we think we slightly upset the audience, and it took a couple of sketches to recover their goodwill.)

Since You Ask Me - Spiderman

We aim to keep these to under eight minutes, because we have a 28′ time slot, and spending more than that on one sketch feels like it’s too much. So we cut everything that doesn’t get a laugh and/or isn’t necessary for the story to work. This usually leaves us over 8′, but we do our best. This one’s at least under 9′.

We cut a bit about them bribing the porter into telling them about Parker, and then a call back to that - which explains why Finnemore and co. are waiting for Parker as a gang, but he goes upstairs alone. (For the record, Calendar was on the phone, hearing about the first of the shipwrecks; Henderson, meanwhile, had been sawn in half.) I decided you wouldn’t notice; was I right?

John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme can be heard at 6.30pm on Tuesdays on BBC Radio 4 until the 31st January, and at any point before then on the BBC Radio iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mk97n

*For the record, Rich hates it when I change the running orders at the end because it messes up his lovely sessions, which look like this:

#john finnemore #souvenir programme #radio #sketch #comedy #jfsp

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