Basildon Bond
I went to the movies twice. One time I saw Casino Royale. Daniel Craig makes a good Bond: thuggish yet intelligent, but not too intelligent. Bond films used to be all about the Bond girls but now it’s all about him, stepping out of the sea in his Speedos, Torso of the Year. So as we left the cinema, we were all just discussing his body. Mat thought his tits were too big (not something you often hear him say), and Dave didn’t like his lower lip; Amanda, however, was enamoured of the whole package. She was predicting that Speedos and dinner jackets will soon become extremely fashionable - though possibly not as part of the same outfit.
My other visit to the cinema was to see a Japanese horror movie called Hausu, or House, from 1977. It wasn’t quite as packed in the NFT as Basildon had been for Bond, but there were enough people in to make me wonder about who the Hell we were, these weirdos who’d turned out on a cold Monday night to see a film in which a girl gets eaten by a piano and a man is turned into a bunch of bananas. Were we insane? Or was it just the film that was insane? It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, setting a tone of hysterical kitsch which just gets more and more hysterical until it erupts quite naturally into horror. Of a sort. The special effects look like a child’s scrawled over the print with crayon. If you saw this as a kid, you’d remember it as a bad dream. Though it is in fact a good film.
My sitcom script was returned to me by the BBC. Well, the SAE I sent them was returned to me, only it proved to have someone else’s script inside it: appropriately entitled Lost Hope. The day after I got this I got a text from Mat saying I had ‘a letter’ from the BBC waiting for me at home. I became foolishly excited, thinking that they might actually have decided to commission my sitcom. This lasted for about three seconds, until I realized how terrifying that would really be, since I’ve only written the one episode. Then Mat texted to say that the letter was ‘script-shaped’, and I went all the way back to disappointment again. It was, in fact, my script, with exactly the same rejection letter they’d given to Lost Hope. Only the name had been changed. So I sent Lost Hope back to its author and figured, as I shelled out for second class postage, that on some cosmic level, the BBC now owes me…
It owes me 75p.
My other visit to the cinema was to see a Japanese horror movie called Hausu, or House, from 1977. It wasn’t quite as packed in the NFT as Basildon had been for Bond, but there were enough people in to make me wonder about who the Hell we were, these weirdos who’d turned out on a cold Monday night to see a film in which a girl gets eaten by a piano and a man is turned into a bunch of bananas. Were we insane? Or was it just the film that was insane? It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, setting a tone of hysterical kitsch which just gets more and more hysterical until it erupts quite naturally into horror. Of a sort. The special effects look like a child’s scrawled over the print with crayon. If you saw this as a kid, you’d remember it as a bad dream. Though it is in fact a good film.
My sitcom script was returned to me by the BBC. Well, the SAE I sent them was returned to me, only it proved to have someone else’s script inside it: appropriately entitled Lost Hope. The day after I got this I got a text from Mat saying I had ‘a letter’ from the BBC waiting for me at home. I became foolishly excited, thinking that they might actually have decided to commission my sitcom. This lasted for about three seconds, until I realized how terrifying that would really be, since I’ve only written the one episode. Then Mat texted to say that the letter was ‘script-shaped’, and I went all the way back to disappointment again. It was, in fact, my script, with exactly the same rejection letter they’d given to Lost Hope. Only the name had been changed. So I sent Lost Hope back to its author and figured, as I shelled out for second class postage, that on some cosmic level, the BBC now owes me…
It owes me 75p.
posted by martin at 1:56 PM
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