meish dot org: life, unfolding

Are you going to be watching the Eurovision Song Contest (final) tonight? Are you going to be watching it in the company of family or friends? Improve the experience by playing Eurobong-a-bingo!

This Eurobingo PDF file contains ten player sheets filled with random Eurovision cliches and phenomena which may be observed during the show broadcast. Simply check off each as they appear - award spot prizes for completing a line, and the first person to complete a whole sheet wins the kitty (or another prize of your choice).

There are also three additional ways to win: before the show begins, add your best guess for each of the quant questions at the bottom of the sheet. Closest wins!

This game has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to adapt, remix and share it, but please leave attribution intact.

Thanks and happy bing-a-bang-a-bingo!

I am not a sport-loving person, but I make one rather large exception every few years for the Olympics and - more specifically - the winter Olympics.

It started in the early eighties.

In 1984, I watched Torvill & Dean’s winning Sarajevo ice dance performance, and was enchanted.

Inspired by their performance, my older brother and I decided to recreate the performance on the slippy tiled floor of our hallway. We swooshed about in socks, and he grabbed my hands and told me to dive through his legs. At no point did he specify that I should attempt this manoevre feet-first, and the resulting broken nose was a humiliating reminder of the universal folly of letting oneself be cajoled into doing stupid things by elder siblings.

Around the same time - and not coincidentally - I started going ice-skating every Saturday at Queensway ice rink in Bayswater, with my friend Jane. If we got there early enough, we could be first to carve up the smooth surface after the Rolba Zamboni had trundled across the ice. For ten minutes of every hour, they would pump out disco music through the rink speakers which we could dance to in a shambolic sort of way. I couldn’t afford lessons, and so taught myself to do wobbly backwards skating and slow, clumsy spins.

But no matter - I had a pinky-purple leotard-like lycra dress with silver glittery raindrops on it and a skirt which flared out when I twizzled around, even if I couldn’t afford the proper thick skaters’ tights, and had to do with Pretty Polly instead. The cafe there served hot chips with vinegar, and I think I even had a birthday party there on year. Maybe my tenth or eleventh?

This was also around the same time that we got a home computer - a Dragon 32, which was terrible for just about everything - but a couple of years later, we finally got a family computer that could do good stuff.

And by good stuff, I mean games.

And by games, I mean more than just text-based adventures (as good as the H2G2 text game was).

Specifically, I mean Winter Games (Epyx, I think), which was the height of computer gaming brilliance at the time, rendered in woeful graphics and required the player to left-right-left-right-left-right to cross country ski or speed skate; leftleftleftleftrightrightrightrightright on the bobsled and luge; time your smacking of the space bar perfectly to hit the targets as your cross-hairs wobbled in the biathlon; mash various combinations of keys to produce camel toe loops and triple salco stunts (whatever they were) in the figure skating, all performed to a jangly 8-bit rendition of “Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker Suite”.

[in German, but you get a great sense of the gameplay]

The game(s) also included a ski-jump simulation. You set off from the top of an impossibly steep slope by hitting the space bar, then hit it again at the bottom to “take off”, then once more to land in an upright position. Not exactly tricky, but sort of puzzling. Why would someone even want do do such a thing? Most perplexing.

In the years that followed, I got into the habit of watching Ski Sunday, which my family were completely bemused by - we were not a ski-holiday type of clan - but tolerated nevertheless.

I just liked watching people do technically complicated things in a seemingly effortless way. I liked the fact it was a solo pursuit, not a team thing. It focused the attention - and the performance pressure. There were brilliant interpersonal battles over hundredths of seconds, and occasional spectacular spills and tumbles. Plus it all happened in stunning apline snowy scenery, with spectators bundled in multiple layers of fleece, sounding cowbells. What’s not to like?

In 1988, I watched the winter Olympics from Calgary, mainly for the figure skating and downhill skiing, if I’m honest, but it was the ski-jumping that got me hooked. I hadn’t realised that the slope was so big and the men and women competing her basically flying. How cool! Can anyone have a go? Where do I sign up? Answer: not in west London.

That was the year that Finn Matti Nykänen won gold medals in both ski-jumping events.

I cut out pictures of a man in flight and stuck them on my bedroom wall. What an idol.

I hadn’t kept up with his colourful career since then, but it transpires that he’s become quite the tragic once-successful now-struggling sporting characte - the George Best of ski-jumping, only more so.

This excellent article by Barney Ronay contains a glimpse of the man behind the headlines, and is definitely worth a read, if only because any article with a standfirst like Matti Nykänen was Finland’s greatest sportsman, winner of four Olympic golds. Since then he has stabbed someone in a finger-pulling contest, worked for a sex phoneline – and found God - surely deserves further attention.

It also provides insight into how Nykänen remains a national hero of sorts, in his native Finland.

Nobody in Finland is excusing Nykänen’s worst transgressions; but it is perhaps to their credit that Finns appear willing to forgive this strangely home-made, ne’er-do-well kind of national hero. Finland is fascinated by the turbulence of his decline, but also sympathetic to his plight.

There was even a sense of a Nykänen revival in train before his latest explosion. In the autumn of 2007 he came out of retirement, then won the ski-jumping-for-veterans International Masters Championship the following year. And last year he moved, tentatively, into a new career as a celebrity chef.

[...]

Perhaps it is this wistful quality that has endeared Nykänen to his people: the man-child ex-superstar athlete with his look of rampaging bewilderment, his middle-aged puppy fat, and his inability to engage sensibly with the world beyond the icy slope and the jump ramp.

Fascinating story. Complete character. Unbelievable sport.

So, in short, the summer Olympics are good and everything, but it’s the winter Olympics which really get me excited. It contains so many more sports and disciplines that I’d like to have a go at myself. Curling! Biathlon! Luge FFS! Who wouldn’t want to have a go at the luge, really?

OK, maybe not. But I’ll certainly be watching it and all the other sports on telly when the Vancouver winter Olympics start in a little over a month’s time.

I. Cannot. Wait.

More snow! More crazy sports! More skintight lycra! More cowbell!

If the usual Christmas televisual extravaganza over the next few days doesn’t tickle your fancy, then you could do worse - much, much worse - than taking an hour out of the commercialised, overhyped seasonal frenzy, making yourself a cup of tea (and go on then, possibly a mince pie or two, too), putting your feet up and watching the wonderful Time Shift on Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films which was shown on BBC Four last night (only available to view on iPlayer for another few days, and only if you’re in the UK, sorry no longer available online, sorry).

The documentary is a delight from start to finish. Lots of archive footage from the Small Films collection (Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Bagpus, Ivor the Engine et al) plus interviews with children’s writers and illustrators like Michael Rosen and Lauren Child.

It also features plenty of gentle, revealing conversations with Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin themselves (and their families), talking about the various inventions, models and hacks, the process and craft of making the films, the secrets of their loving creations and - perhaps most wonderful of all - the socio-political background of the stories and the character concepts. And the famous shed.

Oh, the shed. There has never been a more inspirational shed than Postgate’s, in my opinion.

In the Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith has a wonderful writeup in today’s paper:

Oliver Postgate, who died last year, concocted a perfect little world in a garden shed. It was the sort of shed you open warily, knowing an avalanche of stuff-which-will-come-in-useful-sometime will flood out. My husband had a shed like that. It contained, among much else, a sea-going compass, which would come in useful if we ever had a yacht. The Clangers, who communicated in the melancholy swoops of a swannee whistle, lived there. The ear of faith can interpret what they are saying, and the BBC was ruffled to decipher in one such swoop: “Dammit! The bloody thing’s stuck again!”

Bagpuss slept there, too, in a cardboard box. The Clangers were pink in order to rise to the challenge of colour television, and because that was the colour of the wool that Joan Firmin, the wife of Postgate’s partner, Peter, happened to have handy. Bagpuss was pink because the proposed marmalade stripes went squiffy in the kiln.

She goes on to relate some early characters in his life:

[Bertrand] Russell later resurfaced in Bagpuss as Professor Yaffle, a self-opinionated old bookend with Russell’s very dry, thin voice. Postgate, whose own voice was soft, warm and, somehow, knitted, voiced all the characters himself, so we know for sure how Russell sounded. Professor Yaffle, by the way, had to be nailed to the floor so that he wouldn’t fall over and dent his dignity.

Her review also contains one of her most delightful turns of phrase, in describing the relationship between Postgate and Firmin:

“…one of those happy conjunctions, like Flotsam and Jetsam, in which people who are individually surplus become jointly glorious.”

Well put, and something many of us can only aspire to.

If you haven’t already got it (and if you can find a copy) I strongly recommend Oliver Postgate’s autobiography (Hardback in stock at Amazon) which came out a decade ago and I’ve read a couple of times since. So many details. So much obvious affection and curiosity about making characters come to life.

Postgate remains one of my biggest inspirations - not because I am a film-maker or have even a fraction of his talent, but because he was a creative tinkerer. He and Peter Firmin used wool and meccano and pulleys and string and wire to make things work; they experimented with techniques and subverted children’s storytelling with politics and humour and silliness that was in no way patronising; their love for what they did (and how they did it) was obvious and infectious to a whole generation of creative tinkerers, like me.

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(Images in this post are screencaptures from the BBC Four documentary)

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In case I don’t get a chance to post again in the coming days as the year ends - heartfelt felicitations of the season to you and yours. Be safe and happy.

(In this scale good = “Blimey, I didn’t know they were British” and bad = “A British equivalent of Dick Van Dyke”)

John Mahoney (Frasier) Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Without a Trace) Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl) Idris Elba (The Wire) Damien Lewis (Life) Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck) Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) Hugh Laurie (House, MD) Robert Pattinson (Twilight) Gabrielle Anwar (Burn Notice) Joseph Fiennes (Flash Forward) Ian McShane (Deadwood) Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) Louise Lombard (CSI) Minnie Driver (The Riches) Dominic West (The Wire) Kevin McKidd (Grey’s Anatomy) Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman) Kevin McKidd (Journeyman) Eddie Izzard (The Riches) Mark Addy (Still Standing)

Of course, it’s not for a British person to say whether a fake American accent is convincing or not, because we don’t have the natural ear, so this is more of a list of British actors playing Americans on TV ranked in order of whether their accent is convincing enough to the non-native ear to suspend belief or confound expectations of an audience who have previously heard them speaking in a different way during a performance. See: Lovejoy, a bit of Fry & Laurie, Eastenders.

News today that Bob Dylan has been approached to provide a voice for in-car satnav systems.

This is disturbing, because I find him the most awful mewly mumbler and can barely understand him in normal speech, let alone when trying to figure out which lane I need to be in to get off the westbound M4 onto the northbound M25.

I can’t imagine many worse voices for the job, actually.

In fact, if you’ve ever listened to the superlative Guy Garvey’s FInest Hour on BBC Radio 6, Sunday nights at 10pm, or online via iPlayer, you may well have heard Sir Bob of Dylan doing a trail for his Theme Time Radio Hour show (which follows GGFH), in which he manages to sound exactly like Eric Cartman from South Park. It’s uncanny.

In other news today, a Tory has compared parts of “broken Britain” to Baltimore in The Wire.

As Stringer Bell might say: dat shit jus’ wrong.

Big Brother started again in the UK last night.

I won’t lie: I think it’s nonsense. I haven’t watched it since the very first series back in 1999 (?) (when it had the feeling of new curious sociological phenomenon, and everyone was genuinely riveted by the Nasty Nick leaving the house development) but since then it’s buzzed away vaguely at the back of my summers, without any particular attention from me, like a tired wasp against a windowpane.

Why would I want to watch the tedious antics of a bunch of people of limited intelligence and entertainment value who I neither know nor care about? I can do that every day on the bus.

Working in media, however, I can’t fail to have some residual awareness of what’s going on, and it’s become clear that in recent years, to try and revive the tired audience and keep users hooked throughout the long stretch of nightly updates throughout the summer, they’ve fiddled with the format, and introduced a series of gimmicks.

16 people in the house
A secret house next door to the real house
Cultural exchange with a contestant from another country’s Big Brother
A rich side and a poor side to the house
A king (or queen) of the house
Tasks which involve endurance
Tasks which involve ridicule
Tasks which involve backstabbing
Tasks which involve nudity
Fake evictions
Double evictions
Surprise evictions
Twins
Couples
Ex couples
“Famous” people

All have which have conspired to mean that

a) the format changes so radically every year that the rules can be somewhat hard to follow (if you bother at all)
b) the show is less reality TV and more prolonged gameshow. It’s a residential version of the generation game, mostly, combined with elements of the infamous Milgram and Stanford prison experiments.

To save you the bother of watching this year, I’ve managed to source a top-secret list of all the gimmicks involving format, tasks and contestants that they’ll be employing this season to try and keep audiences interested:

1. They are all actually horses
2. Half of them are blind and the other half are deaf
3. They are all left handed
4. They can only talk in rhyme for three weeks
5. One of them is a secret Libyan
6. Two extra housemates have been hiding in a secret compartment under a trapdoor beneath the fridge for the first eight weeks, only coming out at night to nibble on leftovers
7. They must all answer to the name Trevor
8. The house is built over a plague pit
9. There’s no toilet
10. They’re not broadcasting it at all this year, so all the housemates are gurning and preening and backstabbing for nothing
11. A 1 ton bomb will go off if anyone mentions J___ G_____
12. All the beds will be replaced by sandwiches for a week
13. They must all follow a macrobiotic diet
14. An additional housemate will be introduced, who will refuse to speak to anyone
15. One housemate must volunteer to die or they will all be killed
16. They must end every sentence with “TWIIIIIIIIING!” on Thursdays

That should keep them watching.

Or not.

It’s the Eurovision Song Contest final tonight and, as tradition dictates, we’ll be drinking cocktails and eating ironic snacks with a bunch of other gluttons for punishment enthusiasts in front of the performance.

I’m not a betting person, but if I were, here’s where I’d be putting my money, in no particular order:

Representing Armenia: Inga & Anush - Jan Jan (Nor Par)

This song means “new dance” - you can see people doing the new dance in the video - and as a result, it’s got exactly the kind of catchy melody, beat and repetitive chorus which makes it the very best/worst kind of earworm.

A warning to you: I listened to this a bunch of times earlier in the week and as a result I’m now entering day five of the earworm. Round and round and round it goes in my head. All day and all night. This is either an indication of its sheer cheesy genius, or that I’m a bit stressed and anything could have the same effect.

In any case, I have a special place in my heart for Armenia, after spending so many years frequenting the Deli-from-helli. On further consideration, perhaps “Nor Par” means “You want butter, lady?”

Ethnic influence: medium
General ability to find the country on a map: low
Catchiness: high
Meaningless lyrics: medium/high
Overall Eurovisibility: high

Representing Norway: Alexander Rybak - Fairytale

I think this manboy must be in the Norwegian equivalent of High School Musical, because he’s got exactly that kind of wholesome toothsome quality. Mind you, there’s no denying that he can play the fiddle, and he does so with gusto in this ever-so-slightly shouty ukranian-inspired stomper.

Ethnic influence: medium
General ability to find the country on a map: high
Catchiness: medium
Meaningless lyrics: low
Overall Eurovisibility: medium

Representing Portugal: Flor-de-lis - Todas as ruas do amor

This won’t win, but it’s a sweet song, performed by a group of musicians not using a backing track, who can genuinely play (here’s an acoustic version, just to prove it) which isn’t the point but it’s nice to see anyway.

Ethnic influence: high
General ability to find the country on a map: medium
Catchiness: low
Meaningless lyrics: low
Overall Eurovisibility: low

Representing Iceland: Yohanna - Is it True?

Really quite pedestrian, but it’s got all the makings of a winner because it’s well-written, well performed, not too challenging and memorable. The fact that the singer is hawt won’t go amiss either.

I do wonder whether viewers back home in Iceland will be watching with half a hope that they don’t win, though, because then they’d have to shell out to stage the event next year…

Ethnic influence: low
General ability to find the country on a map: high
Catchiness: medium
Meaningless lyrics: low
Overall Eurovisibility: medium

Representing lots of other countries: A dozen or more songs which sound like below-par eurotechno (Greece, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Finland) or like they’ve been lifted from a musical soundtrack (Malta, UK, Poland)

I wish there were more entries like this, though (from 1979):

Or of course this, the classic:

Dear everyone-I-know and everyone-on-the-Internet and everyone-in-the-media-especially-at-the-place-I-work,

You were right about The Wire.

Mos def, dog.

I watched the entire first season marathon-style* over the last two days of this bank holiday weekend, and am eagerly awaiting the delivery of S2 & 3 so I can spend even more time sitting on the sofa with a cat on my knee and less time thinking about moving house.

I don’t mind saying I was wrong to have previously shunned it for being merely - and I’m quoting myself, here - “people swearing and mumbling poisonously at each other”. That may well have been an accurate description of the first 15 minutes, but obviously there’s more to it than that. Sometimes they shout, too! And there are guns! And beeyatches! And bits which are possibly funny or possibly serious but I can’t quite figure out which! And actors who do brilliantly with accents, with the occasional teeny slip-up. Sorry.

But it’s good! I love it!

Please feel free to tell me you told me so. And no spoilers!

love,

Meg
x

PS The fucked-up dreams full of street slang with a thumping hiphop soundtrack, and the overwhelming temptation to call everyone rude words and to insist that they re-up my tea and move the stash of custard creams before I consume them all - this is normal, yes?

* Meaning “in several long sittings” rather than “with band-aids over my nipples and dressed as a Womble”

Inspired by Dan Meth’s US sitcom map, which places a load of sitcoms on a map of the US, I’ve knocked up a UK-centric version, which covers sitcoms, soap operas, drama and comedy/drama serials and a few children’s TV series.

Now, this list has just been drawn up off the top of my head. It’s not exhaustive, either - I ran out of room in the South East, so I might have to do another one for that area.

In the meantime, if you can think of any others which are set in specific places, then please do share names and locations in the comments below, or as a note on the image on Flickr.

Updated to make it bigger and to include many of your fine suggestions. And Catweazle.

1. Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen makes not entirely irritating film shocker)
2. Robots (VO artiste who’s who)
3. Eagle Eye (Shia Le Boeuf and Billy-Ray Thornton in risible action thriller. Not dis-similar to The Net, or Phone Booth)
4. Body of Lies (Lots of mumbling, plus bad facial hair (Di Caprio) and bad accents (Crowe))
5. Dangerous Liasons (Wigs and social complexities)
6. W (Truth is stranger than fiction, plus special bonus appearance by Noah Wylie)
7. The Secret Life of Bees (Almost exactly what you would expect)
8. A Bunch of Amateurs (Horrible ensemble Brit Com starring a plank of wood as Burt Reynolds)
9. Ballet Shoes (sweet BBC seasonal adaptation of Noel Streatfield book)
10. Burn After Reading (Engaging Coen brothers caper)
11. Rachel Getting Married (AKA is this film STILL on?)
12. The Sea Inside (Javier Bardem, mumbling hotly)
13. Primary Colors (electioneering fascination)

Telly, and other things:

1. QI XL (3 episodes)
2. Dexter s1 e1-4
3. The Wire s1 e1-3
4. Greys Anatomy (1 episode)
5. Gossip Girl (2 episodes)
6. Flight of the Conchords (s1)

Things I opted not to watch:

1. High School Musical 3: Senior Year

PLUS! Bonus tip for international air travel:
You must never, ever look at yourself in the bathroom mirror at 40,000 feet, after 6+ hours in the air. There’s something about the combination of lighting, dehydration, stress, fatigue and having to stand 6″ from your bedraggled reflection that will make you feel even worse than you look (as if that were possible).