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Mitch's Podcast:
not sure what to tell you...
Monday 5th January 2009
So I weighed myself once, got 20 st 7, which would have meant I'd lost all my Xmas weight in one week, which seemed faintly improbable, as between you and me, while I haven't been eating like it's still Xmas I haven't exactly been obeying the letter of the Weight Watchers law either. But I should have quit while I was ahead, 'cos trying again I got a reading of about 21 stone, which would mean I'd put MORE weight on or last week's reading was off to begin with.
Of course it's entirely possible with my wibbly scales that neither of these reading is correct anyway, but in any event it's clear that henceforth we're back on the wagon proper, points counted and logged and everything.
who?
Monday 5th January 2009
A lot of people are asking me for my thoughts on the casting of Matt Smith as the next Doctor Who (oh alright, the next The Doctor. Happy now?); my initial reaction is that I'd never heard of him and he looks about 15. Of these two thoughts, the first is irrelevant and so is the second. I don't pay that much attention to the telly these days (I think I did actually see that Philip Pullman thing he was in with Billie Piper, but neither it nor he seems to have made much of an impression) and his youth makes no odds when the whole point of The Doctor is that he looks centuries younger than he is. Looking 879 years less than your age really isn't that different to looking 867 years less than your age. Besides, by the time he actually starts he'll only be two years younger than Peter Davison was when he took over.
My next reaction - apart from surprise that it wasn't Paterson Joseph after all - is that the fact that he looks about 15 aside, it's actually a less radical choice than many of us were expecting; they're going from a young skinny floppy-haired white bloke to a very young skinny floppy-haired white bloke. Some of the most effective recent casting decisions have been the most audacious (not many people would have thought of Daniel Craig for James Bond before it happened) so in that regard it feels a bit of a letdown, but here's the thing...
I've come to trust the DW gang in most respects. I mean, five years ago, as far as anyone who wasn't working on putting New Who together was concerned, Billie was just an also-ran pop starlet turned slightly icky child bride. Who knew she was going to be one of the best actresses to come out of British TV for twenty years? So if Steven Moffat says he's the one and RTD concurs, I'm not going to argue. Besides, like I said, I haven't seen enough of him to assume he isn't.
Re-watching the interview on Doctor Who Confidential (which I stayed in to see before hurtling off to Cardiff, appropriately enough) I notice encouraging things. It's an interesting face, chiselled and yet somehow squashy, like someone left Heath Ledger's waxwork out in the sun. When you get a look at his eyes (who the hell was lighting him?) there's a hint of the old-soul-in-a-young-head thing you really need from a Doctor, and he has extremely expressive fingers. And looking at the PR shots of him standing in front of the old Police Box, he kind of looks right.
Anyway, congrats to the young snipe. I'm already 15 months older than David Tennant anyway, so the idea of being thirteen years older than the incumbent Doctor Who doesn't terrify me in the slightest. Honest.
it goes on...
Saturday 3rd January 2009
(with illustrations)The "Ben & Mitch" story has turned up - reprinted more or less verbatim from the Sun article - in the Daily Star now. This is lazy journalism on so many different levels of laziness it's actually quite hard to calculate. I notice, however, that they've reprinted the lyric without permission...
Sod that, have a look at this instead: it's the MySpace page of a family friend who's just finished his illustration degree. I really like his stuff; he's got a definite touch of the Jamie Hewletts going on but with a more obvious hip-hop influence. He's done a few CD covers and DJ posters already. I reckon he should get into graphic novels...
should auld acquaintance etc etc.
Friday 2nd January 2009
(whatever that means)So, happy new year and all that. I've given up marvelling at the increasingly sci-fi-ish sounding year numbers we're now living in, and I've even (at Clara's increasingly forceful insistence) given up feeling ever older as each year passes, even if I will be thirty-nine in less than three weeks (sigh).
Hope you had a good one... Clara and I spent - as far as we can recall - our first New Year's Eve apart ever; I was in Birmingham at the Glee Club, having a pretty good time and being handsomely remunerated, which is a good thing, January being the most expensive month of the year, even if you're not skint at the top of it, which we almost invariably are.
Meanwhile, this makes me happy. As does this.
I'm Ben, He's Mitch
Tuesday 30th December 2008
Furher to the story in the last entry; I suppose you're nobody in British showbiz until The Sun has done a story about you and managed to get even the most fundamental facts wrong...I'm a "hit" and I didn't know it
Monday 29th December 2008
... according to the Telegraph, anyway.Many thanks to Helene Parry for alerting me to this; meanwhile here's the clip itself; I hadn't actually seen it myself as they've managed to tag it "mitch ben" which usually winds me up something rotten but I'll overlook it on this occasion as this is quite nicely done:
post-xmas weight
Monday 29th December 2008
could have been a lot worseI'm back after having blissfully little to report over Christmas; I'll do a longer entry later but just to let you know; I weighed myself and I'm now 20 st 11, so I've put four pounds back on this week. A small price to pay for a few days not so much off the wagon as only dimly aware of the wagon's existence. A week and a half back on the straight & narrow will soon sort that out.
quick weight thing
Monday 22nd December 2008
20 7 again, so same as last week. Much as expected (been a bit chaotic).
Gotta go now, late as usual.
wahey and uh-oh
Saturday 20th December 2008
December 20th? I demand a recount!On the wahey front; Das Übertelly arrived this morning, in a box the size of an upright piano which scared the hell out of Clara. It's only a 37 incher (madam) but 'cos it has really good speakers it's almost as wide as a 40". TV programmes look good (once we figured out how to connect the HDMI cable) and DVDs look fantastic (I set out for my gig this evening leaving Clara and Greta staring in rapture at Finding Nemo). I feel a Lord Of The Ringsathon coming on. It only remains to affix Das Übertelly to the wall bracket we bought separately (what could possibly go wrong?).
On the uh-oh side of things, Christmas has completely caught us on the hop this year, even by our own standards of vagueness and disorganisation. We managed to squeeze in about three hours of Crimbo shopping this (yesterday) afternoon - the first we'd done at all - between waiting for the courier guy to turn up with Das Übertelly and me buggering off to Coventry; It's now 3am and I'm busy ordering stuff on Amazon, realising I've just ordered the wrong thing on Amazon, trying to cancel the thing I've just ordered from Amazon and being told it's too late despite Amazon's own estimate that it won't actually be shipped out until Monday... Bah. But not humbug.
postcard from the edge
Wednesday 17th December 2008
... and we're not talking U2 hereThanks to those of you who have sent appreciative emails re. the A Christmas Carol podcast. Glad you're enjoying it.
On Monday afternoon I went to the BBC Radio Christmas drinkies at Kettners in Soho; various last-minute go-offs at home meant I only got there for the last hour or so but as it turned out that was probably enough. The room wasn't really big enough for the numbers attending and it was all shiny surfaces which made for an unpleasantly echoey acoustic for chatting in. Still, caught up with a few faces I'd not seen for a while, including Ian Pattinson, the genius who for years wrote most of Humphrey Lyttleton's between-rounds gags for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue; he confirmed my (and indeed everyone's) suspicion that they really DON'T have a clue how, or even if, to continue with Clue now Humph's gone.
After that it was off the The Comedy Store to do the Cutting Edge "Review Of The Year" show... The "Edge" as those of us who perform in it call it, is a sort-of topical sort-of improvised sort-of stand up comedy game show sort of thing which has been running every week at the Store for years. I only do about four or five a year but I always look forward to them as a, they're fun to do and b. if the Store is full (and it was heaving on Monday) it can be very remunerative (the fee is a "door split", so the more people turn up the more we all make).
I won't be so vulgar as to put a figure on it, but suffice to say that Monday's winnings gave a big boost to the plan Clara and I had made to give each other that Big F__k-Off Widescreen Telly we've wanted for years as a mutual Christmas pressie.
Ho ho ho indeed.