Sisyphus

 

As you can imagine, I am also CONSTANTLY being asked for my recipe for human contentment. Well, here that is too. 

Lasagne

 As you can imagine, I am CONSTANTLY being asked for my lasagne recipe. Well, here it is. 

Millionaire Lifestyle

I have since been informed that a thing is not technically enrobed in chocolate if it is not entirely covered.  I'm glad I didn't know that when I wrote this. Because 'enrobed' is a funny word.

Quasimodo

Originally, I played Quasimodo and Simon played Victor. I don't know why it worked so much better this way round, but it really did.

Slightly Off

I still don't know what the truth behind this sketch is, by the way. A little bit of research shows that some of the characters are vinyl decals, and some of them are indeed hand-painted. But I still don't know why they're slightly off (the decals, at least, you'd think would be accurate), or why they don't get shut down for copyright infringement, or why that ice-cream in a bowl with cherries all over it - which looks like it was drawn in maybe the 1950s - still pops up on, for instance, this van I saw the day before yesterday.

Bonus points for fadedness, and presence of Donald Duck's nephews, though minus one point because Stanley absent-mindedly included all three.

Spiny Porcupine

I write the lyrics to the songs in Souvenir Programme, and the amazing Susannah Pearse writes the music. Unfortunately, both of us prefer to go second - that is, I like writing to existing music, and she likes setting existing words. So, when she wins, I often write the lyrics to the tune of an existing song, without telling Sue which one. Then, once I hear her music, I rewrite the lyrics to fit them better. So, for instance, 'Captain Dinosaur' started out life to the tune of 'Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory of the Coming of The Lord'... and 'Spiny Porcupine' was originally written to Jake Thackray's 'Sister Josephine'.

-----

We're on tour! I know you know this by now, but just in case. We've done three dates so far, we're having a fantastic time... and we still have twenty-three to go. Come and see us! Dates and ticket links here. 

Horsebox

"Not entirely horseless, by the sound of it..."

Special Offer

Here is a sketch I wrote, and a sketch I drew.

(I may do more of there. On the other hand, I may start with good intentions, but then quickly run out of steam, and stop after only a handful. It's impossible to say. But I know which way I'd bet.)

Quick stop at the ego massage parlour...

I had rather a strange- but lovely- day yesterday, in which first this happened:

...and then later on, this happened:

Yes, I have henchmen now...

So, thank you very much to the British Comedy Guide (and to you, if you voted for us!) and to the Writers' Guild. And of course to Ed, Lawry, Margaret, Carrie and Simon for Souvenir Programme; and to David Tyler, Rebecca Front and Beth Mullen for Double Acts.

 Now, off to buy some new hats. All mine have suddenly got too small.

Souvenir Programme, Series Six, Episode Three

Possibly should have mentioned this before, but Souvenir Programme is back! It's going out at 6:30 on Tuesdays. The first three episodes are available here, and the next three will go up there too in due course.

Random thoughts on today's episode:

The Pachelbel sketches (One Hit Wonder and Loose Canon. I still give sketches names, even though only Ed and the cast ever see them) were written for Radio Three's anniversary last year, on the condition I was allowed to re-record them and use them in my show too. Susannah Pearse arranged and played the canon, of course, while I sat next to her, miming, and at one point helpfully knocking the music off the stand, as she played, live, on Radio Three... (For non-Brits: Radio Three is the big serious classical music station.)

I do genuinely own all those shirts, and that jumper I bought in the sixth form, which as one of the cast kindly pointed out to me means that it is older now than I was when I bought it. The pineapples on the pineapple shirt are subtler than the ones you're probably imagining.

The first policeman sketch was inspired by Line of Duty, which is why I asked Simon to do a Northern Irish accent, in honour of Adrian Dunbar.

Apparently, the reason we can get away with saying Coca-Cola is made of dissolved children's teeth is that, to prove it was defamatory, they would have to a) argue that a reasonable person might think it is, and b) reveal their secret recipe to prove it's not!

The parrots sketch came out of Silly Voices Day*, and was Lawry's idea. The Save the Children sketch last week did too - that one was inspired by a perfectly nice woman one of the cast once worked with, who had a witch-y voice. I want to say which member of cast, but perhaps I shouldn't, just in case...
(Just in case the woman somehow reads this and is offended, I mean. Not just in case she actually is a witch.)

Ol' Vine Leaves, Baggy Grey, and Pineapples. See? Subtle. 

*It occurs to me this could probably stand some elaboration. Every series we have a Silly Voices session about half way through the writing process, where Ed, the cast, and I get together, and I pitch half-formed sketches which I don't yet know how to make work; and also quite literally get everyone to do silly voices in case that inspires something, which it often does. Other sketches that began at Silly Voice Days include: Basking Sharks, Kirates, the family reunion one with everyone being older than the person before, the slow-talking emergency briefing one, and many more.

You're just in time to miss the last episode!

So... the fifth series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme has been going out!

Featuring this pile of idiots. 

That's... that's definitely the sort of thing I should have been posting about here. Oh dear. Well, the last one was broadcast yesterday, but that does mean that there is now a two day window - today and tomorrow - where all six episodes are simultaneously available on the BBC iPlayer.  On Sunday, the first one will drop off, then a week later the second, then... well, I'll leave you to work the rest of the system out for yourself. Anyway, sorry for being so rubbish at publicity, and hope you enjoy them.

Well, it's here... yes, it's here...

Happy Fifth of February! Here's a little song Susannah Pearse and I wrote in honour of this deeply unspecial day...

(Yes, I know it's some peoples' birthdays. Doesn't make it any more special, I'm afraid. Every day is some peoples' birthdays.)

However, this particular Fifth of February is at least a fraction merrier than most, because today is the launch of the complete and utter definitive A to Z Cabin Pressure CD box set! Here they are, all fourteen of them:

The discs include:

- All 26 episodes (well, technically 27, but I like to think of Zurich as one two-part episode. It's just neater) in correct, alphabetical order.

- A bonus half hour in which producer David interviews me, mainly about odd little references in the show; and we introduce such things as:

- Some deleted clips and scenes, including Martin and Douglas talking about their fathers in St Petersburg, and Martin X-raying the geese at the end of Uskerty.

- The little monologues I wrote just for the audience at the very first recording, in which each character introduces themselves.

- Two specially written trailers for series 2 of the show, one featuring Stephanie, the other Benedict.

- One 'blooper'. I know you wanted more, but for some reason they generally don't really come across in audio only.  But this one does, and it's a good one...

Then there's the 32 page booklet, which includes:

- Casting and transmission details of all the episodes, obviously.

- Strange little doodles, by me, of things like oboes and green bottles and stuffed sheep and cricketers carrying a fire-truck, all around the above.

- A hand-drawn world map of all the destinations, also by me.

- An annotated diagram of the layout of Gerti; including secret location of the asbestos gloves; untampered with armrests; and the captain's seat for the captain to sit in, because he's the captain. Yep, me again.

- The official MJN Air Games Compendium - a list of all the games played by the crew through the show.

- The Rules of The Travelling Lemon.

- The Rules of Yellow Car. Well, the rule.

- The five double page spreads, one for each main character, showing their notebooks, wall charts, manuals or diaries; as published in the individual CD releases, but now in glorious technicolour, which means Arthur's jelly-babies are finally recognisable, and don't just look like weird stones.

- Eleven hidden lemons.

- A page of plot ideas which never made it into episodes, with explanations as to why not.

- A page of my notebook from the writing of Zurich.

- A double page spread of photos of the cast rehearsing and recording Zurich.

- Two high quality staples (used)


So, yes. We tried to pull out all the stops for this. Hope you like it. If you want to discover whether you like it or not, you can do so by buying it from Pozzitive, the BBC, high street book and music shops, or even big bad Amazon:




FAQ

I already have the CDs! Can I get Zurich separately, or are you trying to make me buy the whole show all over again, you gang of twisters?

Not at all. Both series 4 and Zurich are available to buy separately, like so:





What about the booklet and the bonus material? Can I get that separately?

I don't think so, no. But that's fair enough, isn't it? That's what 'bonus material' means.

Will it be released in America? Or the rest of the world?

It's definitely going to be released in America, we think in April. I don't know about the rest of the world. But you can always order it from Britain and get it shipped to you.

I am young, and have never even heard of CDs. Are they those things Victorians played on gramophones, in their zeppelins?

That's right, yes. You can of course also still get all of Cabin Pressure by download, from iTunes or wherever else you get your music.

Why are you using Amazon links? Don't you know they're the baddies?

Because they tend to have the cheapest price, and it seems unfair not to point at the cheapest price. Also, because they're the single source most likely to have it in stock. The BBC shop, for instance, is currently sold out, even though it's the day of release. But you are of course welcome to buy it from whatever shop your taste and conscience dictate.

Is this the longest blog post you've ever written?

I don't know. It's right up there, isn't it?

Don't you feel bad that it's essentially just a huge long advert?

...Well, I didn't. But now I do. There's the song, though! Don't forget it started with a song!

We'd already heard the song.

Oh, leave me alone.

Three things.

- Radio 4 are repeating the first series of Souvenir Programme on Thursdays at 6:30, starting today. Today's includes the Three Guards sketch, and The Man Who Makes The Noise of the Tardis.

- Cabin Pressure has been nominated for best comedy and also, pleasingly if slightly confusingly, best comedy drama at the BBC Audio Drama awards. I will find out which it is - if either - on January 26th.

- It's also time for the comedy.co.uk awards, which are voted for by the public. If you should feel like voting for either CP or JFSP, I certainly won't stand in your way.

Two things

Hello! I'm on holiday, but just a note to say firstly,  I have many incredibly important opinions about sea otters to share with you in today's Observer ; and secondly that the first episode of the new series of Souvenir Programme will be on BBC Radio 4 at 6:30 this Tuesday. Hope you enjoy one, or the other, or even both.

Hello, remember me?

I bet you're really sick of looking at Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Sorry about the silence, I've had my hands a bit full of writing and recording the new series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is now DONE, and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 starting next month.

(In the meantime, you can buy the first series, and pre-order the second, on CD here:


   )

…but this is very bad manners, to disappear for the best part of six weeks, and then just hit you with adverts; so here's something else: a sketch from the new series which I really like, but which we can't use, because a good friend sorrowfully broke the news to me after the recording that it's got a lot in common with a bit of stand-up Ricky Gervais used to do. So, here it is, for your eyes (and no-one but the studio audience's ears) only, as a sort of DVD extra…

THE KING’S MEN

FX                                 HORSE GALLOPS UP TO GATES.

KNIGHT                       (LAWRY) Watchman, ho! Raise the alarm! The Vikings are invading! Summon the King’s men, they must immediately ride out to battle!

WATCHMAN               (JOHN) The King’s men?

KNIGHT                       Yes!

WATCHMAN               Oohh… they’re not in.

KNIGHT                       Not in? What do you mean, not in?

WATCHMAN               They’re out.

KNIGHT                       What, all of them?

WATCHMAN               Yep, all of them.

KNIGHT                       Well, where have they gone?

WATCHMAN               They’re, um… Well, I’ll tell you what they’re doing. They’re trying to put an egg back together again.

KNIGHT                       …An egg?

WATCHMAN               Yep.

KNIGHT                       Why?

WATCHMAN               It got broke. Fell off a wall. Very nasty.

KNIGHT                       An egg?

WATCHMAN               Yep.

KNIGHT                       And the King has sent… all his men?

WATCHMAN               Yep. And all his horses.

KNIGHT                       His horses? Why?

WATCHMAN               To get ‘em there faster, I spose. I can’t imagine it’s to help fix the egg.  

KNIGHT                       It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to for an egg.

WATCHMAN               True, sir, very true. But it’s a special egg. We’re all very fond of it.

KNIGHT                       Are you.

WATCHMAN               Oh yeah. We even gave it a name.

KNIGHT                       Right. Well, in that case, send a messenger after them with all speed, while I rouse the townfolk!

WATCHMAN               Aren’t you going to ask what name we gave it?

KNIGHT                       No! I’m trying to protect the kingdom from Vikings, I don’t what to know what you call the egg!

WATCHMAN               Humpty.

KNIGHT                       Humpty. Humpty the egg.

WATCHMAN               Not finished yet. Humpty… Dumpty.

KNIGHT                       Oh, so the egg has a surname?

WATCHMAN               It’s not a surname, really, so much as a nick-name. On account of his comical shape.

KNIGHT                       What shape?

WATCHMAN               Egg-shaped, sir. Did I not mention he was an egg? I thought I had.

KNIGHT                       Right. So you’re telling me that the kingdom has been left at the mercy of the approaching Viking hordes because the king’s entire military strength, human and equine, have been dispatched to reassemble an egg-shaped egg, which has fallen off a wall?

WATCHMAN               Could be, sir. Or, it could be that I’m not really the watchman at all, so much as a Viking advance guard instructed to stall you from raising the alarm by telling you whatever old nonsense comes into my head.

KNIGHT                       Zounds! Are you?

WATCHMAN               …No, sir. Just messing about. It’s the egg one.

                                      

Why don't you get yourself a little trophy?

More good news - there is to be a second series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme! We don't know precisely when yet; but we do know that there will be six episodes this time round. Which means that, along with series four of Cabin Pressure, I now have twelve half hours of radio comedy to write. Gulp.

Also, the lovely people at the British Comedy Guide Awards have voted C.P. best radio sitcom of 2011, and J.F's S.P. best radio sketch-show. Thank you, them!

John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme - Episode One

Right. This is it, then. The one thing I have always most wanted to do in comedy is write and perform my own radio sketch show, and… now I have. I really hope I haven’t messed it up. (To find out if I have, and if so how much, listen to Radio 4 at 7.15 on Sunday nights, or go here.) It was always specifically a radio sketch show I wanted to do - much as I loved TV comedy growing up, it was listening to things like On The Hour, People Like Us and Harry Hill’s Fruit Corner on the radio; and cassettes of things like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Pete and Dud, that really made me wish I could find a way to be allowed to do that when I grew up, as opposed to, say, a proper job. There’s something about the idea of a gang of people clustered round a microphone trying to make the audience and each other laugh that I particularly loved - in fact, we recorded this show round one central mike, rather than the usual method these days of having one each, more or less entirely (whatever I might have said to the cast at the time) so that I could pretend I was in The Goon Show. 

There’s no theme to the show - I felt that if I was going to write every sketch myself, which I was egomaniacally keen to do, I couldn’t really afford to restrict myself to one subject area or even style. So, there are sketches, like Before You're Thirty, which, if not exactly satirical, at least have a point to make; there are sketches like To Rerecord Your Message which come entirely from character, and there are sketches like Three Guards, which are just silly and fun. I hope. Also, there are no returning characters. The rule is that one sketch can return up to three times in an episode, but nothing appears in more than one episode… with the exception of the stories at the end. 

The stories at the end are something I’ve been doing on the live sketch circuit in London for a while, and started as a parody of the great ghost story writer M.R. James, and in particular an audiobook of his stories read by Derek Jacobi, which I urge you to download if you like that sort of thing. Jacobi reads it perfectly, and part of reading it perfectly is that he - I’m sure deliberately - invests the narrator with an incredibly pompous cosiness which I find very funny. As I’ve written more of them, the style has widened out to be a bit John Buchan, a bit H.G.Wells, and a bit R.L.Stevenson - in fact any of those writers between about 1885 and 1939 who wrote stories in which chaps who only ever refer to one another by their surnames are reluctantly persuaded by other chaps at the club to tell tall stories in which, despite their apparent modesty, they feel able to say things like this (from a Buchan short story):

‘I learnt to walk in the Himalayas, and the little Saxon hills seemed to me inconsiderable, but they were too much for most of the men.’

Mainly though, let’s be honest, these sketches are a homage (rip-off) of the Round the Horne or ISIRTA tradition of ending with a daft gang-show ‘play’: an opportunity for the cast to do even more than usually stupid voices, and me to do even more than usually stupid jokes and puns - and let me straight away acknowledge the glaringly obvious influences of Police Squad, Mark Evans’ Bleak Expectations, and Stephen Fry’s famous ‘Letter’ sketch: ‘Of all the hideous disfigured spectacles I have ever beheld, those perched on the end of this man’s nose remain forever pasted into the album of my memory.’  

What else? Well, since people seemed to like the notebook photos when I blogged Cabin Pressure episodes, here is the page of my notebook in which I came up with the ‘Tardis Noise’ sketch - which I did, as I often do, by writing something that annoys me in the middle of the page, and seeing what happened next. Two things I find interesting about what happened in this case - firstly, the false start with the princess who wants to be a police dog handler, which is a perfectly decent starting point, but didn’t seem to go anywhere. Had I written it, that one would have been a more straight-forward attack on the Follow Your Dream thing that annoyed me in the first place, whereas the Tardis one isn’t really about that at all, it’s a character-driven story. Secondly, how late in the construction of the sketch the Tardis noise itself entered the picture - for most of its development, it seems to have been a sketch about dodgem cars. 

That’s it. I can’t quite believe my luck in having got the chance to do this show; I’m really proud of it; and I very much hope you enjoy it. 

Stuff I'm doing, have done, will do, or have seen.

So, I haven't posted here for ages, and now I'm here it's just to plug things and show off. This is not, I realise, the way to win friends and influence people. Sorry. Still, here goes.

Firstly. The reason I haven't been here this week is that I have been filming a pilot for a TV sitcom, which, if it gets made, will be incredibly exciting, at least for me. But what a big if that 'if' is.  Also, I have fallen in love with two of the cast. This is pretty awkward, as you can imagine,  but what can I say - the heart wants what it wants.

Secondly. My sketch show is about to start on Radio Four! It's called John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, it begins on Sunday at 19.15, and I really hope you like it. I will try to do a blog for each episode, the way I did for Cabin Pressure.

Speaking of which... thirdly, Cabin Pressure has been nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. Hooray.

And now, as a small reward for making it through all the self-promotion, here is a sign from the pub we filmed in on day two.

The five kisses / censorship of the five letter place you're not allowed to put a pet in is pretty good, but the exclamation mark before 'pet' is twisted genius. And don't tell me the author is a native Spanish speaker. It's not upside down, it's in the middle of the sentence, and there's none at the end.
Can you ?explain that XXXXX

Extra Souvenir Programme try-out this Saturday!

Hooray, the venue have confirmed - there WILL be an extra try-out date for my sketch show: 5pm this Saturday (the 27th) at the Albany, Great Portland Street, W1W 5QU. (I know, matinee! Classy, huh?) Better still, I'm trying out a new way of taking bookings that doesn't involve massive booking fees: go here to book.

By the way...

My Radio 4 sketch show, John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, is being recorded on the 16th August and the 6th September at Broadcasting House. The tickets for the first recording have gone now; the tickets for the second haven't been released yet, BUT free tickets for the try-out show this Saturday, 13th August, at the Albany are available here. Come along!

UPDATE

Ooh. Those went quickly. If I know you, and you would like to come to either of the recordings, please email me on my personal email. If I don't know you, but you came to two or more of the Albany try-outs, applied for tickets to the recordings, and didn't get them; email me on cabin pressure (all one word) at john finnemore (all one word) dot com, and I'll see what can be done. No promises...