English: British politician Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party (2010–) Deutsch: Der britische Politiker Ed Miliband, Vorsitzender der Labour Party (2010–) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I know making facile historical comparisons is pointless but…
Not only had Labour followed a line which increased rather than alleviated the crisis, but even after the breakdown of the Government the party was unable to understand what had happened. Labour propagandists were inclined to look upon the financial crisis as an isolated economic phenomenon rather than as the outcome of a mistaken economic and financial policy pursued by various Governments since the end of the war. The Labour people blamed the bankers of England, America, and France, whom they accused of having conspired against labour and unemployment insurance. But although American bankers may perhaps have been inclined to stave off the “danger” of America’s following Britain’s lead and introducing the “dole” in the United States, few British Labour people asked themselves how the bankers could so easily achieve their ends against a Labour government. Also, Labour directed bitter attacks against its former leaders, MacDonald, Snowden, and Thomas, whom the party openly branded as traitors, yet the Labour party still failed to point out an alternative policy.”
That’s by Adolf Sturmthal, writing in 1942 about the events of 1931.
Hello, there. How are you? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe some sort of cream would help…
I’ve got a present for you. It’s right here. See? You weren’t expecting that were you? Some friends and I made half-hour, full-cast audio horror-comedy shows just for you.
So that’s four presents for you. I’d also like to buy you a drink. We haven’t seen each other in ages. If only there was some way…
Hey! Here’s a thing! We’re performing live versions of those award-winning podcasts at the Leicester Square Theatre on Thursday (25th) at 21:00, and on Sunday (28th) at 20:30. We’re even doing a brand new episode, which has never been seen before by humans!
So, if you were to come along to that, I could get you that drink. Just hang around afterwards and work the work ‘ghoulies’ into conversation and I’ll get you one! Brill!
What’s that? You’re not sure you’ll enjoy it? Well, as someone with the good taste to have enjoyed my comedy in the past, I’m sure you’ll find it almost criminally hilarious.
After all, the West Sussex Gazette said: “IF YOU like your comedy as dark and bitter as the purest black chocolate then In The Gloaming will be just to your taste… Rich with black humour… Mr Tapley is an extraordinarily skilled actor and polished writer with a gimlet wit – but unlike many comedians there is nothing reassuringly safe about his material. Michael McIntyre he is not.” So you’re bound to like it. Unless you’re Michael McIntyre.
Impromptyou said: “Alarming , yet hilarious… I am pretty confident that Nat is a fan of The League of Gentlemen as there was a lot of material that would not be out of place in that series. It was a great show – just the right level of terrifying for a coward like myself.”
And in this month’s Starburst magazine, which only came out yesterday, they called it “Great – good horrific stories realised with superb writing, production values and performances.” And they also say our shows on Thursday & Sunday are “going to be really rather good.”
Not forgetting the fact that we, you know, WON AN AWARD. *cough* 2010 Parsec Award for Best New Podcaster. *cough*
And the fact that the podcasts have featured the vocal talents of Michael Greco (Eastenders), Lizzie Roper (Dead Boss), Darren Strange (Parents), Ruth Bratt (Mongrels), John Voce (pretty much everything, ever), Sally Chattaway, Zoe S Battley, Rachel Stubbings, John Hopkins, Emma Powell and MORE.
So you probably will like it.
And we won’t be preforming this again. And you’ll get to see the first (and only) live performance of the brand new episode, written specifically for 2012.
So please do pop along. and hang around afterwards for that drink…
It’s a format that, just a couple of years ago, seemed irretrievably lost. In the arc-heavy, densely-plotted world of television of the 2000s, the idea that you wouldn’t continue a story from week to week seemed like a quaint anachronism, one of things you were able to do in television’s infancy, but that had been superseded, like a clock to count you down to the programme’s start or actors who hadn’t eaten worms in a jungle.
Shows that were held up as the epitome of the new storytelling - 24, Lost, Heroes – had taken the twist ending to beloved of anthology shows, but used it to drive you into next week’s episode, rather than nastily rounding things off for the audience and trusting they’d come back for more. The showrunner who seemed to be the most direct descendant of Rod Serling – J.J. Abrams – was held up as an example of why shows like The Twilight Zone just weren’t feasible any more.
The 1990s saw revivals of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and the creation of Tales From The Crypt in the US. In Britain we had Murder Most Horrid, which ran for four series and won a British Comedy Award, but it pretty much stood alone*. Hammer House Of Horror and Tales Of The Unexpected had given up the ghost, and there was nothing to fill their shoes.
There were a couple of attempts to revive the format in the early 2000s. It’s diffiocult to know whether or not to count Dr Terrible’s House Of Horribleas a proper horror-comedy anthology series because it’s a spoof. The jokes come mainly from the way in which they parody actual anthology series (and lots of knob gags), rather than from the stories themselves.
It’s difficult not to drift into spoof sometimes, though. Particularly in its titles, Murder Most Horrid often made fun of the conventions of the murder-mystery. The League Of Gentlemen Christmas Special (much like The Simpsons‘ Treehouse Of Horror series) are all the more effective for having a stock bag of horror cliches to play with.
In In The Gloaming we made a conscious effort to avoid spoof, but sometimes the comedy relies on your awareness of the genre, and your audience’s awareness of the genre. Even so, listening back, there’s one joke in ‘Dead Skinny’ that only works as a take on the old ‘disappearing shop’ bit (and which, in retrospect, The Simpsons also mocked in their ‘Monkey’s Paw’ episode.)
Reece Shearsmith as Papa Lazarou. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The third series of The League of Gentlemen was a comedy-horror anthology series, tied together with the motif of the crashing van, and it was an interesting development from the more sketchy format of the first two series. BBC Three also had a go at the format with Spine Chillers, which I never saw (2003 was something of a ‘lost year’ for me. I am reasonably reliably informed that it was much like 2002 and 2004).
And that was pretty much it for a decade. Not only was it not attempted, but it was thought of as impossible.
I first developed In the Gloaming as a series of shorts for Comedybox in 2007/8. When that inevitably went the way of all sites that were producing internet comedy (and not allowing you to embed the videos) during 2008 that was one of the projects that sank with it.
After doing Tonightly I reworked it as a television pitch, and took it to a few TV production companies in the autumn of 2008. Everyone thought it would be far too expensive (which may well have been a nice way of saying, “We saw Tonightly. No thank you.”) and it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone was looking for.
At around the same time I went to a BAFTA screening of Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set, which had a Q&A after it. At that, he mentioned that he was working in something like Tales Of The Unexpected. I gave a grim chuckle. Horror anthology series seemed dead in the water. (Which would be an episode where a businessman in a yacht rescues a drowning man far out at sea, only to discover that he’s his exact doppleganger…)
There was a place, of course, for the anthology series. On the radio. BBC Radio Seven (what is now Four Extra) had revived The Man In Black with none other than Mark Gatiss in the titular role. So, in 2009, we decided to do In The Gloaming as a series of audio podcasts. We had great casts (Michael Greco, Lizzie Roper, Darren Strange, Ruth Bratt, John Voce, Rachel Stubbings), and we won some awards, but, for too many reasons to list here, we only managed to do four episodes.
Fast forward two years: Black Mirror is filming its second series, Happy Endings will be coming out next year, and there are brand new episode of In The Gloaming live in London.
It’s a great time to be a horror-comedy fan.
And I can finally use the sign-off line I never dared use on any of the podcasts:
“You won’t know whether to piss yourself or shit yourself.”
Good night. Mhwah ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!
* Incidentally, my father-in-law played a Chinnery-esque butcher in an episode of Murder Most Horrid. You can see him here:
Given all of the hoo-hah that has surrounded his altercation with a constable last week, Bowler is apologising again. Like he did after calling that nurse a ‘fat-faced ultradiv’.
English: United Kingdom’s Deputy Prime Minster and Lord President of the Council Nick Clegg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dear Nick,
Hi! Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to make a video for me. This must be really important to you. Thanks. Really.
I’ve voted for the Liberal Democrats in general elections more often than I have voted for any of the other parties. In 2001 and 2010, I duly put my cross next to the Liberal Democrat candidate for MP (in 2005, I had just moved house and wasn’t yet on the electoral roll at my new address). I have never voted for either a Labour or Conservative candidate in a general election. Nor will I.
In 1997, I didn’t vote for Labour because they had abandoned Clause 4, and, apparently, all other principles as well. Their record as venal authoritarians desperate to dismantle the NHS and anything that survived of the public sector, always ready to try to outflank the Tories on the right of any issue meant that there was no risk of my voting for them once we’d all seen how they intended to use power.
So, in as much as I’ve been anything (on a national level) I’m a Lib Dem voter. Hello!
Thanks again for the video. I suppose it’s only fair why I let you know exactly why I think it’s not an apology, and to reiterate that I shan’t vote for you again (and explain why).
First, let’s clear something up. This is not an apology.
Or at least, it’s not an apology for the right thing. Voters like me are cross because you broke your pledge on tuition fees (and also, lest we forget, a manifesto commitment to get rid of them altogether).
When someone’s cross with you for breaking a promise, you don’t apologise for having made that promise in the first place. That isn’t the dishonourable part of your conduct. What was dishonourable was not doing everything that was within your power to try to keep your promise.
The problem people have with your behaviour is not that you made unrealistic promises (or, let’s say,fully costed manifesto commitments). It’s that you abandoned promises you freely made, in order to win some internal battle with the members of your party, or because the appeal of a ministerial car was too great, or simply because you just never believed the promise you made.
There was every opportunity in the drafting of the Coalition Agreement for you to make tuition fees a red line (although, as we’ve seen with ‘no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS’, you’ve got quite a flexible attitude to how linear those lines are, and what colour they appear to you).
Indeed , your claim in your ‘apology’ that you “couldn’t keep our promise” appears distinctly shabby, if not an outright falsehood. You say that there was no money available, but there was money to cut the top rate of income tax, to cut to corporation tax, to send a Gove Bible to every school in the country, to fund the Olympics (£6.2 billion).
Frankly, the Conservatives wouldn’t have been able to govern without your help. I don’t believe you couldn’t keep your promise. It’s just not the sort of thing that appeals to Orange Bookers. No, it’s not that you couldn’t keep it, but that, given the option, you wouldn’t keep it. And you didn’t.
Imagine, for a moment that we’re all a big family. You’re Daddy. The Tory party are Daddy’s new boyfriend, Eric. And the electorate are children. If, for example, you promise that next year we’ll all go to EuroDisney, but then you get together with the Eric, and say “Sorry. Money’s tight. Not only won’t we go to Eurodisney, I was wrong to think we ever could. What’s that in the drive? That’s Eric’s new yacht. I’m sorry for promising we’d go to EuroDisney, but I’m not going to feel guilty about it. Stop dwelling in the past, when we didn’t even have access to a yacht.”
Your answer, in this video, is to promise not to make any more promises like that. Your response to having betrayed your principles is to offer to have fewer principles, to state that you will do your best as a party to believe in even less, to achieve even fewer things. Let’s hope that this promise turns out to be as easily broken as those you have made before.
Let’s quickly look at the apology itself.
There’s no easy way to say this. We made a pledge. We didn’t stick to it. And, for that, I am sorry.
Which is so filled with sophistry that it made me quite angry. The “for that” could, clearly, apply to either of the preceding statements, depending on whether you read it as:
We made a pledge – we didn’t stick to it – and for that I am sorry.
Or:
We made a pledge. We didn’t stick to it, and for that I am sorry.
The balanced way in which you read it makes it clear that it’s intentional that it can be read in two ways. Because, of course, deep in your heart of hearts, Nick, you don’t want to apologise for breaking that promise.
This whole little video seems like a dirty little attempt to brand the social liberals who make up much of your party’s rank-and-file (or did) as wildly romantic, impractical dreamers.
We can all see why it’s necessary to do this: your party’s uniquely democratic structure means that they get to decide your policies. Much better for everyone if they just learn to go with what you say is pragmatic, achievable, sensible. Much better if they cease to aspire to a better Britain at all.
You said that you “owe it to us to be up front”. Well, Nick, I’ll offer you the same courtesy. I don’t see that as an apology at all, just as a backhanded rebuke to the (many) members of your party who believed that higher education was important enough for the lives of young people that it should be available to all, no matter what their circumstances, free at the point of use.
I wasn’t sure I could have thought less of you. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
You finish with a statement of what your party believes in. That is, until it’s easier for them not to believe in it any more…
The other day I went to see the delightful Rachel Stubbings in her show Stubbing Out Problems (3:00, Underbelly Daisy, Bristo Square). It was excellent. A real treat. And afterwards we made this:
If you happen to be up here, other things that are very worth your time (bearing in mind my character comedy predilections) are Marcel Lucont’s Gallic Symbol (22:25, Underbelly Cowgate), Anna Morris’ Dolly Mixtures (15:20, Voodoo Rooms French Quarter), Josie Long’s Romance & Adventure (18:00, PLeasance) and Battle Acts (00:30, Three Sisters, Maggie’s Chamber).
But I thought you were going to be there the whole month. Weren’t you in some kind of show?
Well, yes. But that’s another story for another time. A time very distant in the future.
However, if any of you would like to see me while I’m up there, I’ll be one of the regular presenters of Crunch The News!
But what’s Crunch The News?
I’m intensely glad you asked. It’s a daily topical comedy show with all sorts of wonderful guests. Guests like Josie Long, Nick Doody, Joe Wells, Kate Smurthwaite, David Mills, Michael Legge, Hils Barker, all together with real life political people. And it’s hosted by people like me, Danielle Ward and John-Luke Roberts. It’s on at 12:20 at the Voodoo Rooms every day, and it will cost you exactly £0 to get in. It’s going to be amazong.
Yes, amazong.
I’ll also be around and about the place doing various other gigs from the 8th to the 23rd. So, why not pop along (to Edinburgh) and see me. That, too, will be amazong.
Here are some of the gigs you could come and see me at, if you’re feeling so inclined…
8th – Spank! (midnight at The Underbelly)
9th – Crunch The News!
10th – Crunch The News!
11th – Crunch The News!
16th – Crunch The News!
17th – Crunch The News!
18th – Crunch The News!
20th – Jim Smallman’s Group Therapy (13:00 Just The Tonic at The Tron)
22nd – The Super Serious Show! (20:55 Assembly Rooms)
There are more, but I’ll fill those in when I find my diary! See you all in Edinburgh!
