Apologies to all regulars for the rather indimidating “403 - FORBIDDEN!!!” sign which has recently been greeting them on their attempts to visit VP. Of course, what I should really be apologising for is a) the abysmal lack of action hereon recently, and b) the fact that one of the aforementioned regulars actually had to bring the outage to my attention before I (or rather, of course, TM) did anything about it. The culprit, if you’re interested, was our hosting company, who are amusingly named “asmallorange”: “aridiculouslystupidjauntynameredolentofthefirstwaveofthedotcom boomwhichmakesyouwonderhowonearththey’restillinbusiness” more like.

Truth is, there’s not an awful lot going on down here just at the moment - but I’m afraid that’s not going to stop me posting a fairly exhaustive precis of my table-tennis season so far in the near future. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with TM’s very amusing appraisal of the new Apple iTab, or whatever it’s called, which was launched by Steve “Big” Jobs earlier today. (I’m sure I’d find it even more amusing if I weren’t far too old to have any idea how the iPad works or what it’s supposed to do.)

“I think it looks like a massive iPhone and that comments like “… it just feeeels right to hold the internet in your hands” make me want to vomit. I’m sure millions of Cult of Apple members of rushing out to buy one to then circle jerk with their friends about how great it is / how better Apple is that Microsoft / and how great / cool they are by virtue of ownership. Well done. You had $499. Now you’ve spent it. So yes, that makes you immeasurably better than me and everyone else who doesn’t have an iPad.”

Final episode of “Gavin and Stacey” last night - as always with these things, there were positives and negatives. We’ll start with the latter:

a) - the winding up of the storyline was crap beyond belief. Despite a low sperm count diagnosed only one episode previously, Gavin mysteriously managed to get Stacey pregnant and they all lived happily ever after. And having shown no inclination to do so whatsoever, Nessa decided on the spur of the moment that maybe she would marry Smithy after all. And, yes, they all lived happily ever after. Ironically playing “Suddenly” by Angry Anderson as background music doesn’t gloss over the fact that it was worse than an episode of “Neighbours”.

b) - for something listed as a “comedy”, it was about as funny as a back spasm*. However, to be fair, “Gavin and Stacey” was never anything more than a silly twee thing which set out with very low expectations but warmed the heart of the nation - trying to wring three series’ worth of comedy out of things like Welsh accents and the eating habits of fat men is always going to have a limited shelf-life, which is why it became essentially a (crap) soap opera by the end.

On the plus side, at least the creators had the sense to end it here rather than letting the BBC convince them to scrape the last iota of gunk out of a fairly small barrel…

(* - I’m also currently wading through the DVD release of “Three of a Kind”, an early ’80s sketch show which launched the careers of Tracey Ullman and Lenny Henry, and it’s about as funny as having your spine surgically removed without anaesthetic.)

As per my endless bangings-on over the last week or so, my wee sister and I went to see Iron Maiden on Saturday night at the incongruous venue of Twickenham, home of English rugby. Luckily, obsessive long-straggly-haired Swedish wrinkly-faced rock codgers won the attendance battle over the braying Hooray Henrys* who usually inhabit the stadium. We were in the “genteel” seats in the second tier of the stand, where the order of the day was an occasional post-modern-ironic Wayne’s World devil hand-sign and a half-hearted “whoooo!” when leather-lunged frontman Bruce Dickinson yelled (as he did on several occasions) “SCREAM FOR ME TWICKENHAM!!!!”. Aforementioned continental Maiden obsessives, on the other hand, were mostly in the bottle-lob-tastic standing (or rather moshing) area; I was reliably informed that some had been queueing outside since long before the doors opened at 1pm to be right at the front (sis and I sauntered in at 8pm and were still enjoying felafel and organic pear cider in the heavily-subsidised music industry hospitality bar when Ver Maiden got started).

The gig itself? Good, although a) the acoustics weren’t fantastic and b) I only knew about 4 of the songs. (The latter fact can’t really in all honesty be blamed on the band.) Oh, and as I observed when posting “Invaders” on Taf’s Tune of the Week, Ver Maiden can’t help speeding up whilst playing songs; it’s amusing to watch the superannuated drummer trying to keep up.

(* - My experience of the event wasn’t enhanced by the fact that I stupidly went dressed as a braying Hooray Henry, sporting both a tan and that nice John Rocha brown shirt which you all saw me in at the Realosphereomeet. Everyone - literally EVERYONE - else was wearing a Maiden replica T-Shirt, and I’m sure that the sotto voce “fucking wanker”s that I kept hearing were a direct consequence of my sartorial decision-making. Or possibly the fact that I kept using phrases like “sotto voce” and “sartorial decision-making” in conversation….)

It’s a quiet Saturday night, and I’ve just finished watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. (For those who haven’t had the, erm, pleasure, it’s a John Hughes teen cult film from 1986 or so. Hughes also did “Pretty in Pink” and “The Breakfast Club”, both of which I’ve seen, so I was slightly curious.)

Frankly, it was a bizarre experience. I know that teen tastes are more changeable than most with the passage of time, but “Ferris” just left me completely nonplussed. It isn’t tragic or funny. There’s precious little plot (boy, best friend and girlfriend take the day off school and muck about, teacher tries to catch them but fails, and that’s literally it) and the characterization is non-existent (Ferris is lucky - which is a circumstance, not a character trait - his friend is uptight, and his sister’s angry at his good fortune, and that’s literally it). The acting is particularly abysmal - especially from Mia Sara, who plays Ferris’s girlfriend. She delivers her lines deadpan and stares vaguely into the middle distance throughout - she could be contemplating love, homework, the possibility of interplanetary space travel or haemmorhoids for all we know.

Weirdest of all is the complete lack of any moral compass or message - Ferris, who has rich parents and friends, stands for absolutely nothing apart from “taking it easy”; he’s not even rebelling against anything. All he does is skip school, go to a museum, have lunch in a fancy restaurant, lounge around in a hot tub and sing a couple of karaoke numbers at a parade, then get back in time for tea. He doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs, and he fully intends to graduate and go to college. His actions have no consequences (and we’re not shown what becomes of his hapless friend who has trashed his dad’s priceless Ferrari) - but more importantly, they don’t seem to have any purpose either; nothing is achieved, none of the characters learn anything. And if the message is supposed to be “par-taaay”, then frankly I think I’d have more fun at a meeting of the Folkestone and District Table-Tennis Committee than Ferris manages on his “Day Off”.

The film was reasonably successful (Stateside at least), and John Hughes retains some cachet as a “cult” director, albeit very much of his time; I’m interested to know what our American correspondents made of it. Am I missing something deep, or is it just completely vapid?

A reasonably interesting documentary on Sunday night from the wily Louis Theroux on game farms in South Africa (long and short: Americans are paying lots of money to shoot semi-wild animals in managed environments which isn’t particularly nice to watch, but brings the impoverished community a decent income and preserves many vulnerable species from extinction).

No need to prepare yourselves for a stale-cabbage-smelling windy blast of vegetarian ire; I’m more interested in the programme’s maker than the its subject. As with all Louis’s shows (and similar ones, like the Martin Bashir Michael Jackson travesty), it’s all in the edit. Louis invariably comes across as naive, wide-eyed, gently curious and unthreatening; that’s his schtick. He’s actually a very steely journalist - you have to be in his game - and what you don’t see is him niggling away at his subjects by asking the same questions again and again in the hopes of eventually provoking an angry response. He gets one towards the end of this show, but it was pretty much along the lines of “Why the fuck do you keep asking me the same question?” Even when an angry response isn’t forthcoming, the subjects, more often than not, look incredibly shifty, because they know perfectly well that any sentence fragment can be taken out of context and cut-and-pasted into whatever slanted perspective Louis’s production team feels like adopting in the final version.

Louis’s techniques are pure gold when it comes to disarming and then winding up genuinely evil people like South African nazi Eugene Terre’Blanche or the Hamiltons - but are (I think) inappropriate when attempting a balanced portrayal of a thorny topic.

As for the rights and wrongs of this issue; the hunting park owner, Riaan Vosloo, was very convincing in his arguments. Unabashed about the fact that he enjoyed hunting, he nonetheless obviously respected his animals, pointed out the conservation benefits and compared the free, comfortable lives of his stock with those of animals raised for meat. (In pretty much all farming worldwide, cows, sheep and pigs raised for meat have truly horrible, pain-filled lives - this article from the Independent is just the tip of the iceberg.) Louis, a former vegetarian but now a meat-eater, ended up looking like a hypocrite when he wussed out of shooting a pig - as one farm hand said, you’ll eat the meat but you won’t kill the animal. If we had to kill the meat we ate, consumption of flesh would go down by at least 90% overnight.

Which leaves us with what? The fact that thick-shit American game trophy hunters paying to shoot a tame animal is distasteful. But I don’t need a dissimulating specky vegetarian recidivist to tell me that.

Last Wednesday, the BBC, together with trusty partners the Discovery Channel, sallied forth bravely across the steppes of the airwaves to try to defeat the armies of critical opprobrium and conquer the fertile empire of viewing figures with an expensive portrayal of the life and works of Attila the Hun. A lot of money was obviously spent, judging by the “300″-esque battle scenes - so was it any good?

In short - no. In slightly longer - it was shit. For a start, it was only an hour long (did they spunk too much cash on their heavily-vaunted “historical consultants”?) - and even with this non-feature-length duration, they STILL ran out of plot very quickly. Attila fights a battle against a Roman outpost, wins, muses on whether he can fight another battle, does so, wins, kills his brother (absolutely no historical evidence for this, btw), muses on whether he can fight another battle, does so, wins, has a completely inexplicable non-sequiturial interlude with a dwarf, loses a battle, dies. And that was that. No character development, no socio-economic stuff; just stereotypical effete decadent late-empire Romans set off against gold-hungry hunk-of-meat-gnawing beardy barbarians.

To say that “Attila” was patchy on historical detail would be an understatement of the magnitude of saying that Jade Goody’s autobiography is slightly less good than “Wuthering Heights”. The producers just about managed to get a handle on the geography, but Attila - reputedly a short man of mongol stock from central Asia - was played by a gigantic and very caucasian 6ft 6″ Scot. You half expected him to bare his arse, don some woad and start shouting “FREEEEDOOOM!!!”

So if there was no plot or history, where did the money go? Simple - CGI. To be fair, the CGI was quite good - but only in the same way that the fireworks before the World Cup Final are quite good; you might articulate a half-hearted “woo!” a couple of times, but you don’t really give a shit because you’re hoping (usually in vain) for something more edifying at some point.

The “moral” at the end was particularly rubbish; the spin being that Attila had achieved something purely because of his notoriety-in-perpetuity (which is in fact probably down to some English historical writer - possibly Edward Gibbon - seizing randomly on him rather than any other of the thousands of warmongering, torturing arseholes that the past millenia have blessed us with). And the last line of the piece - “After all - who hasn’t heard of Attila the Hun?” - is nothing less than retrospective application of our cruddy present-day “famous for being famous” culture.

After all - who hasn’t heard of Jade Goody?

(* “Attilla the Hun” is a name replete with pun-portunities; you’ve got ‘TIL / TELL / HUN(gry) / UN-(kind / grateful etc) - which makes my lame effort in the post title all the more reprehensible. Perhaps readers would like to etc…)

No doubt about it, TV seems to be getting nastier; as well as the annual shit-fests of “Big Brother” and “I’m Not a Celebrity” (which people, having now realised that there’s never going to be any shagging, watch purely on the off-chance of a blazing race-row), we have an increasing number of shows where established stars / media figures are out to inflict a psychological roughing-up on contestants for our delectation.

At the light end of the scale there’s “The Apprentice” (although, to be fair, Alan Sugar can barely stop smirking throughout his carefully-scripted cockernee character assasinations). Slightly stinkier is “Dragons’ Den”. The prog’s premise is spurious in the extreme: anyone with half an ounce of business sense a) can easily raise £100,000 without resorting to begging the likes of the ageing, long-jowelled self-deluding “Dragons”, and b) would never consider giving away 50% of their great idea in a million years for such paltry sums if the idea was in the slightest bit workable. (No business has ever succeeded on the back of the five series and hundreds of hopefuls on the programme). So why does it exist? Simple - to satisfy a grubby public craving for seeing someone made to look a fool on camera.

There are others, but luckily, at the moment, there’s only one prog which is genuinely disturbing in this vein, and that’s The X Factor. Thousands turn up for auditions; we never see the majority who are a) there for a laugh, or b) mediocre but prepared for failure. All we see is a) the very good ones (fair enough), or b) the ones who are shit / mediocre, but who spectacularly fall to pieces when rejected. These people are obviously deluded and emotionally vulnerable to be taking it that seriously in the first place; the last thing they need is to be made to look idiotic in front of a slobbering judgemental nation by an utter prick like Simon Cowell - but the public apparently loves watching it. It’s as shabby and voyeuristic as Jeremy Kyle, but worse in that it’s completely one-sided. Not nice at all.

Step back, though, tafkass, and consider what might be the alternative? I’ll tell you - “Deal or No Deal”, where a room full of strangers engages in an infinitely-grimmer puke-tastic hour of group empathy and mutual arse-licking - “You really deserve this, you’re such a fantastic person (etc)” - based not on good deeds or genuine love and affection, but on opening boxes containing random amounts of money. Hitch your strides back up, Cowell - you’re still in business.

I was privileged to try some of Duchy Originals’ organic wholegrain mustard at the weekend, and it’s an excellent product - the balance of sweetness, tang and heat is perfect. My condiments to the chef. However, I couldn’t help dropping my jaw at the price tag - a whopping £2.15. Most own brand wholegrain mustards come in under 40p, and even “premium” brands like Coleman’s or Maille are well under £1.

Consider this; Duchy Originals is Prince Charles’s commercial venture, and most of the produce is grown on his estates in Cornwall; so essentially, the land (or at least his privilege of administration) belongs in spirit to the nation. So shouldn’t he be distributing the fruits of his labours (or even better, the profits in hard cash) gratis to his loyal subjects, rather than ploughing them into the hopeless cause of young pikey improvement that is The Prince’s Trust? At the very least, we should all be entitled to a free B&B at Clarence House once a year. I’d possibly even settle for a go on Camilla.

I’m very proud of the fact that I run a broad comedy church; there isn’t much funny stuff shown on British terrestrial telly which I won’t watch and derive some enjoyment from(*). I’ve regularly championed stuff like Stressed Eric, The Glam Metal Detectives and Monkey Trousers which everyone else thought was appalling. But last night something completely unprecedented happened; I had to stop watching a programme starring a comedian I quite like before the end. The effort in question was Lead Balloon, starring Jack Dee.

It’s an absolutely rancid cack-hole of a programme and I can’t for the life of me see how it got recommissioned, other than thanks to the profile of its star / co-writer (Dee). The first episode of series 2 was attempting to derive humour from the fact that Dee and his atrocious plummy wife can’t cope at home without their stereotypically surly Eastern European maid / home help / whatever they’re called, who has quit her employment for some reason. The couple do very little all episode but sit on their Heal’s sofa sipping Chablis braying about the fridge being empty, or the washing-up not being done. Is that funny? Surely the kind of moneyed Islington twattish couple Dee’s asking us to identify with are in fact the sort of people whose faces you’d never tire of pummelling?

Dee’s stand-up is excellent; like Jo Brand, he’s made a career out of fairly mild observational humour coated in a veneer of “nasty” (in Dee’s case, the miserable “pit-bull” persona, in Brand’s case, the man-hating bulldyke - which she’s not, obviously). But writing sitcom is FAR, FAR harder than stand-up, and in “Lead Balloon”, Dee’s creative limitations are laid horribly bare for everyone to see.

I’ve already pointed out that the show’s premise is a lame copy of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” - but at least the American show has some originality / humour in plot-lines and character development. Lead Balloon, on the other hand, is about as funny as a used prophylactic. In your half-eaten veggie-burger. With a split in the end.

(* - apologies to LZ for preposition position) (**)
(** - apologies to Pal for after-post asterisk / brackets combo. Oh, and again.)

First we had the excellent “Curb Your Enthusiasm“, a semi-autobiographical comedy based of the life of Seinfeld creator Larry David. Then the slightly less excellent “Extras“, a semi-autobiographical comedy based on really-famous-now-but-it-hasn’t-gone-to-my-head star who never misses an opportunity to be publicly self-effacing, Ricky Gervais. And now this week, “Lead Balloon” has started, a semi-autobiographical comedy based on the monosyllabic malcontent gruntings of quite-dull-in-real-life comedian Jack Dee.

Come on lads, there must be SOMETHING else you can write about apart from yourselves? A lanky half-crazed hotel manager and his useless Spanish helper? Four completely different students living anarchically together?… nope, both been done…. Maybe a couple who’ve left the rat-race and are trying to be self-sufficient? Damn, that bastard Briers already bagsied that one… actually, I see what you mean. This whole “subject matter” malarkey is tougher than I thought.