It came as no surprise to see that Brokeback Mountain has got rather a lot of Oscar nominations today! That’ll keep the Religious Right of America in flouncy moods for a while…

Best Director: Ang Lee
Best Actor: Heath Ledger
Best Supporting Acotr: Jake Gyllenhaal
Best Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Music (Score)
Best Cinematography
and of course…
Best Picture.

Go, cowboys!

Un-Oh! I don’t want to start crying again…

Look what’s finally getting an airing on BBC2, months after its premiere on that BBC Three Channel thing…

11:20 on a Monday night? Morons!

The weekend was a mostly drinking weekend. I went to the old work’s belated Christmas do on Saturday night in a Polish restaurant named Patio, with a theme of chintz (lovely cushions and placemats), ‘eat eat eat’ (a Polish version of my Belgian relatives who take polite offence if you don’t eat a lot) and cabbage, with a smidgen of “calm down dear” (Photo of Michael Winner on wall behind my seat) and pancakes. It was very nice indeed and the food was surpisingly not just cabbage with a side order of cabbage as I had been led to believe (vegetarian is not a trendy thing in Poland but it turned out OK)…
From The Independent Food Guide:
Patio
5 Goldhawk Road, London W12, tel: 020 8743 5194
A trained pharmacist, Ewa Michalik switched careers in 1991 to cook with her husband at Patio. She still makes people feel better, only now she does it with smoked-salmon blinis, chicken Walewska and plenty of vodka.

The next day we went for lunch in the regular Pub Quiz pub aka The Haven Arms in Ealing who have a pubby website! Click on their name! It was a Sunday lunch (nut roast again!) with a twist… We played obscure boardgames that took a while to make any sense. Considering I was mostly baffled it was impressive that I managed to win one of them. I then eventually left there and trundled off into town to the place where I work for their belated Christmas do…

…at the Barley Mow. As usual! Our locl pub did us some snacky food and I ate far too many chips and strange cheesey things. People drank a lot and talked bollocks as you would expect in a pub and a good time was had by all. I was a bit tired from my hectic weekend so I was one of the first to go home (well, it was gone 9 and I am an old git!) but not before I had used my marvellous digital camera…

Now that’s what I call scary!

Back from the dead after that unfortunate incident with a plane full of heroin stored in Virgin Marys and fake Nigerian priests in a jungle in an unspecified location after miraculously surviving a crazy plane crash in the middle of a ridiculously convoluted conspiracy thingy, Boon is returning to our screens. And he’s got that loveable geek who always gets involved in complex kerfuffles while remaining pretty much an outcast among her former rich kid mates, one Veronica Mars! They’re in a film called ‘Pulse’ which will probably be shit but I hope not!

I have just been informed that they are in fact actors who go by the names of Ian Somerhalder and Kristen Bell. That telly box gets me all confused.
The plot, as desribed at JustJared’s blog is as follows: A website which at first appears to be merely a scary hoax with an irresistible marketing ploy turns out to be run by a sinister and deadly force. As more and more people tap into the site’s frightening images of the dead, the supernatural force controlling it begins to dominate the lives of the people that log on.

Spooo-Kay! Although it sounds like ‘The Ring’ for the Blogger generation.

We still love that warm-up person from Friday’s ‘That Mitchell And Webb Look’ who goes by the name of Lucy Porter. Not just because she was almost the only one on ‘The Comic Side Of Seven Days’ who ever made us laugh and not because she has done at least two fantastic warm-ups at the Beeb and not even because she left us a nice message yesterday…

“Hey you, delighted you enjoyed `That Mitchell and Webb Look`, i`ve done a lot of warm-up gigs, but that was the funniest thing i`ve seen for a long time. If BBC2 don`t commission it i think we should go round and poo on their doorsteps. Now i know what you look like (gorgeous and sparkly), so give me a shout at http://www.lucyporter.co.uk/contact.php if you ever want to come to one of my gigs or anything else that i`m supporting/ doing warm-up for. Big love, lucyx”

Sadly she is not always dressed as a mermaid but I can confirm that she does have a slight whiff of the ocean about her.

Blog of the week in my weirdest week in a while is ‘Forever Blue Skies’ by Lever and not just because it sort of mentions me without knowing I am me. From yesterday on there:

Lucy don’t like my Cheese
We showed up at BBC TV’s Studio 8 last night for the filming of the comedy show pilot for “That Mitchell & Webb Look”…
Who? David Mitchell. Robert Webb. You know, the guys who did “Peep Show” and “That Mitchell & Webb Sound” on Radio 4… Ah, never mind.
The stand-up comedy chick, Lucy Porter, kept the audience amused inbetween the filming and the VT runs though when she asked where we were from, Yours Truly shouted out “Farnborough”… to which she asked my name, age and what was my favourite cheese! She was impressed with the speed of my answer to the cheese question but admitted she didn’t like my choice so we weren’t gonna work out.
Oooh, put-down. Methinks she performed a swift psychological profiling, equated the rapid reply of “Gorgonzola” as the fromage du soiree for a potential heckler/psychopath and ditched me quicker than an anthrax inhaler. Last year at the Comedy Club, when Paul Merton wanted suggestions for the ad-libbing of a sketch, I shouted “doggy style” and they ran with it.
But no, she was funny and great with the less dangerous members of society, picking out Thor’s beard, a bookshop manager and a lot of students from the audience for a bit of idle banter on the joys of living in Elephant & Castle, what the scientist Michael Farraday did and her hatred of “The DaVinci Code” and lack of passion for chart music.
So the show was good fun, it was interesting to see the filming and the sketches, especially the alcoholic snooker commentators (“ooh, that’s a bad miss”), the caveman cop show, the reluctant German SS officer discussing the cons of having a skull for a regimental badge (“Well it’s better than a rat’s arse!”) and the bizarre quiz show NumberWang!!
It’ll be great if the series takes off on BBC2 sometime…
…though I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d not worn a bright red t-shirt and said “Port Salut” instead?

Thanks, Lever…

Thever.

Oh dear. Another Britcom film starring people we love that looks very very unfunny…

Information? Sure…
Plot Outline:
A mockumentary that follows three couples as they battle it out to win the coveted title of `Most Original Wedding of the Year’.
Cast:
Olivia Colman (Look Around You, Peepshow, That Mitchell And Webb Look)
Jessica Stevenson (Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead)
Martin Freeman (The Office, Shaun Of The Dead)
Mark Heap (Spaced, Look Around You, Big Train)
Felicity Montagu (Nighty Night, Alan Partridge)
Julia Davis (Nighty Night, Big Train)
Robert Webb (That Mitchell And Webb Look, Peepshow)

The trailer looked piss poor, mind…

NextWave. From Marvel Comics. By Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen. Issue 1 is out in the shops right now. Best comic of the month. Easy. It has a giant lizard monster in purple underpants ready for a big fight…

It has a snotty rich English monster hunter who doesn’t get on very well with the Americans…

It has a humanoid robot with bizarre social skills…

It ends on a cliffhanger!
What’s not to like?

Here’s a masterclass in low standards of journalism in the tabloids. Which is, of course, not a thing that should surprise any sensible person but this got me particularly pissed off. The stupid little digs in language like ” Limp-Dem MP” are totally unneccesary and the headline is, unsurprisingly, completely misleading and homophobic. The idiots who choose The Sun as their news provider will lap it up of course…

Gay MP hangs around loos
by MICHAEL LEA
Political Correspondent

Flushing pride … Hughes’ name on plaque (circled)
GAY MP Simon Hughes has his name on a plaque at public toilets he opened in his constituency.
He performed the official ribbon-cutting ceremony at the lavs in Elephant and Castle, South London.

Bachelor Hughes, 54, — who revealed he was gay this week — was honoured with the polished plaque on the loos in July 1994. The “facilities” are even painted in Lib-Dem yellow.
The Bermondsey MP caused a storm when he told The Sun he was homosexual a week after he denied it. He was left in the dark yesterday during a power failure in Manchester, where he launched his leadership challenge. The Lib-Dems are picking a leader from Mr Hughes, Sir Ming Campbell and Chris Huhne. The leadership campaign has been rocked by Mr Hughes’s admission — and rival Mark Oaten pulling out over revelations he had sex with rent boys.

… and now we return to our regular programming….

Can we just get on with the politics now please? Yes, Simon Hughes lied about being gay or at least bisexual but is it anyone’s business except his? He didn’t have a betrayed wife, didn’t pay a prossie and doesn’t have any disadvantaged love children out there who feel mistreated. He’s just a politician who stupidly believed the media had no business in knowing the details of his private life, until he was pushed into talking to one of the least friendly newspapers in the country before they did an ‘exclusive’ on him.

‘That Mitchell And Webb Look’ is a most brilliant comedy pilot. As good as ‘Little Britain’ which we saw being made too. We are comedy nerds, what more can I say? Well, I can say “Oh that’s a bad miss” or “that’s Numberwang!” but these phrases will not mean much to many people for now. Almost every sketch was based on the radio series but since that was rather excellent that’s not a problem. They have transferred to the telly format well and it will undoubtably be a huge hit. It features the usual gueststars you would expect from their previous work, including Olivia Colman (Pam Bachelor!) and Paterson Joseph (Johnson!) which made us all happy and tingly inside! Particular highlights include of course Numberwang! and the snooker commentators… and the party planners, and the makeover show, the skull helmets, Big Talk and everything else. All brilliant, all funny and I am still a bit too excited.

We love these people.