Good news for comedy fans everywhere!

~ Inquisitor

Out of the Trees (a sketch show written by Douglas Adams and Graham Chapman, shown once in a dead BBC2 slot in 1975) has been found by the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped, having been taped at the time by Graham Chapman’s partner on an antiquated pre-Beta video system. People have now seen it, but unfortunately I’m not in London – I’d have given a lot to have been able to. And the BFI don’t tour with this, as far as I’m aware. Damn.

Hopefully the BBC will be smart enough to put it as an extra on a Hitchhikers or Python release, because this really does need to be seen – there’s apparently a lot of decent material on it beyond the small exerpts that have survived before, and besides it’s Adams and Chapman.

What’s more, Out of the Trees‘ reappearance after thirty years since its deletion gives hope that all those Hartnell and Troughton Doctor Who, the second Nigel Kneale 1984, Hardwicke House beyond episode two, Not Only But Also, the second series of Dad’s Army and all those lost Beatles/Stones/etc TV appearances that the BBC felt that it had to junk for “cost saving” might just turn up in a barn somewhere. We’ve already come far with this and the currently recovered Doctor Whos, so TV fans everywhere can only hope that this trend towards rediscovery continues.

[And if you have the bootleg tape of the full Hardwicke House – that is, beyond episode one and two – that is currently rumoured to exist, we’re all anxious to hear from you. Just thought it was worth a try.]

Advice for The Sun (they love it, no really)

~ Inquisitor

If you headline a story this way (not the David Gest one):

PERVHUNT.COM

Don’t be surprised if someone checks to see if you own it, finds that you don’t, registers it and then uses it against you (linked to the Sun Page 3 website on an 18-year old model’s leering profile.) Nice one, anonymous Popbitch reader.

And what’s it with the use of that Sarah Payne photo right now? It was even on the front of the Guardian this morning. It’s just a form of crude emotional blackmail really, and this kind of story is too important for that. But with our media climate the way it is, at least we can have a laugh sometimes.

[via Media Guardian diary, 17 November 2006, free registration required.]

Edit: Oh well, qwghlm got there before me. Much more interesting detail (including the link to the relevant Popbitch thread) there.

Al-Jazeera’s famed attention to detail

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Maybe if you’re launching an English version of your popular foreign language news channel, you should make sure that your promotional campaign can spell “satellite” correctly:

Al Jazeera makes a few spelling errors

[Click on the image for the full advert.]

It’s too amusing to excuse such errors, really; if you’re buying a half page in a major newspaper (admittedly in this case the Guardian) you really should know better than to let it go out without a full proof-read. Let’s hope their news quality is much, much better.

“Britishness” at its “best”

~ Inquisitor

Vandalising a WW2 memorial with swastikas and the SS symbol (as well as spraying what I can only assume from the context was JEWS OUT over a few nearby premises.) Wow, they really must love our country, musn’t they? You have to wonder what goes through British Nazis’ minds; it must be some form of obtuse doublethink.

And then there was the Nick Griffin/Mark Collett decision. Collett at least deserves prosecution for his part in maintaining the R*dw*tch hitlist (name starred out for obvious Google-related reasons), and this fact – given by both Channel Four’s Young, Nazi and Proud and the BBC Secret Agent programme – has never been capitalised upon despite R*dw*tch being run by an actual bona fide terrorist group and having caused many violent attacks against those listed on it. The fact that he wasn’t even charged over that is somewhat infuriating.

Admittedly, this government has done naff all against the various ALF/ELF/SHAC hitlists, anti-abortion hitlists, Christian Voice’s BBC hitlist and various others – they seem just not to care. Even the US has done more – these sites were ruled illegal by the Planned Parenthood/ACLA decision over the “Nuremberg Files” – so it’s not like the Home Office couldn’t get it shut down if it wanted to. Why it doesn’t, much like why it doesn’t go after the animal rights versions that cost millions to the taxpayer, is beyond me.

Now, I usually take a free speech position; scumbags are there to be refuted and ignored, not jailed. But hitlists are not valid free speech; they are threats against people and property which the site owners obviously intend to be acted on (in the way the Nuremberg Files greyed and scored out dead abortion doctors, for instance.) They contain information which is not meant to be public, sometimes even things like credit card numbers.

It’s basically terrorism – we’ll list you and you could just get a bunch of thugs wanting to stab you on your porch someday, just for saying “Nazis are bad, mmkay?”. At the very least, it’s much more of a terrorist act than some guy who has the “Attempt To Blow Something Up In A Completely Inaccurate Way Handbook” on his hard drive, which this government seems to find no problem prosecuting. There are some things it’s just impossible to get.

I’ll leave you with an obvious question drawn from the Griffin/Collett trial: since when was “we’ll show those ethnics the door” not racist, anyway?

Added: But Scaryduck does have it right on…

RIP Basil Poledouris

~ Inquisitor

Basil Poledouris, composer of many great film scores (especially for Paul Verhoeven) has died of cancer. Ain’t-It-Cool-News and his official messageboard pay tribute. I guess I will too.

The importance of a good film score can never be underestimated – what would Star Wars be without John Williams’ fanfares? The Omen without the Jerry Goldsmith score? Or a Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood excepted, without Danny Elfman? Completely unimaginable (or in the case of The Omen, just wrong).

And Robocop quite possibly would be undeservedly seen as just a bog-standard B-movie if it wasn’t for Basil Poledouris’s brilliantly bombastic and, most importantly, easily recognisable overture; the perfect music for the material, pushing its satirical intent to the fore. It’s a fantastic score, one of many; in this age of identikit wannabe-Hans Zimmers, he will be missed.

History repeating

~ Inquisitor

One of the most famous denigrating myths about a rock star is Phil Collins divorcing his (second) wife “by fax”; it wasn’t exactly the divorce, but it was ugly and it did end up in the Sun.

Interestingly, something similar has now happened, entirely for real: Britney Spears told her husband she was divorcing him by Blackberry. And, this being the modern era, the video’s on YouTube. Don’t you just love watching history in the making?

It’s a wonder how Britney manages to stage-manage this stuff perfectly: just when her husband is promoting his bandwagon-jumping worthless hip-hop album, and just after she’s had a second kid, she dumps him. And, of course, she’s got interest all over the Internet because Federline has always been seen as a hanging coat-tail; now she’s Fed-less, she’s got promotion for her upcoming album, he’s got promotion for his, she gets the kids, he gets paid off, they’re happy. You’ve got to admire the gall.

One wonders what exactly those fundamentalists are on about when they talk about sanctity of heterosexual marriage, though.

Heads up in the digital milieu #1: 25 October 2006

~ Inquisitor

[The first in a semi-recurring series of good things spotted in the little minutiae of British multichannel TV listings, inspired by spotting an interesting for-cinema documentary on a digital channel soon after release…]

  • “KZ“, a documentary about Mauthausen concentration camp and the townspeople Then and Now, has recently done the art cinema rounds and is already on TV: More4 9:00pm (+1 10:00pm).
  • The first two episodes of “Torchwood” air on terrestrial; I saw it on BBC3 and didn’t actually mind it, it looks promising and is at least interesting: BBC2 9:00pm.
  • Channel Four are having an early Halloween – “Misery” followed by Carpenter’s “The Fog“: Channel 4 11:10pm/Thu 1:10am.

With over 100 channels on Telewest Essential, this had better become a regular occurrence.