Dirk Gently (TV) episode #1, AKA "Pilot"

Not so much an adaptation, more of a muse.

Dirk Gently was a series of two-and-a-bit books by the late great Douglas Adams, about a detective who believed that the clues to solving his cases were scattered throughout the entire universe.

Yes, the entire universe. So in searching for his latest clients' missing cat, Dirk isn't so much interested in its trail of paw prints, as what his old friend Richard (Darren Boyd) was getting up to at college twenty years ago.

And yes, that really does help him to solve it.

The spirit of the books is delightfully on display right through this pilot. The whole thing is light-hearted, clever, and cynical all at the same time. In fact, it's a lot like watching a current Doctor Who story, only with more dialogue, and slightly less music over it. After all, the book on which this is loosely based is a reworking of a Doctor Who script, with the eccentric Dirk fulfilling the Doctor-role.

Stephen Mangan accordingly goes his own way with the character, his Dirk being a little more in control of events, and also a little more annoying with it. When he shouts at Richard and straight afterwards hypnotises him, there really needs to be some explanation for his success. After all, how is Richard supposed to relax and trust him now?

In fact, as the straight man, Boyd spends most of this hour deftly upstaging Mangan. There's no mistaking that the two play off of each other very well, in fact everyone turns in a good performance here.

The real let-down about this production is its format, specifically that it's a one-hour pilot. I've read a quote from Mangan that he considers the book "unfilmable", however the recent 6-part Radio 4 serial flatly proves him wrong. You actually could just film the six half-hour radio scripts. (as they did with Hitchhiker) To cram it all into an hour though, well, that's why this was never going to work as a pilot.

And no, the heavily simplified story here doesn't function either, right from the word go. In the very first scene, the presence of something resembling a time-machine pretty much gives away the mystery's solution. That it comes with a self-destruct device, and such a tender and destructive one at that, is utterly stupid.

The swearing is a downer too. Like so many, I got into Adams' work as a teen listening to his radio scripts. What a shame that today's kids are being denied that.

Still, I don't mind a new author riffing on the original at all, so long as it still makes sense. With Adam's legion of contradictory Hitchhiker versions, there's no avoiding that the precedent to change everything was set a long time ago. I do wonder though where they will find material to inspire subsequent episodes, given how rashly the rest of that first book's elements were wasted on Dirk's crammed whiteboard in the background of his office:


Pilots sometimes get the odd scene reshot for the series - perhaps this will be one of them?

One thing which absolutely must go though is the inexcusable "created by" credit:



Oh no you didn't. Please don't try to tell me that it means something other than what it says. Even "co-creator" would be taking too much.

Other than that unacceptable overclaim (have some respect and go uncredited already), I'm looking forward to this fun series.

Review of episode two here.
Review of episode three here.
Review of episode four here.

(available here)

The Simpsons UK

It's taken me a lot of bowls of breakfast cereal, but I have finally caught up with the episodes of The Simpsons that have aired on terrestrial TV in England while I have been living in New Zealand.

Specifically I’m up to 2005 - the year after it switched channels in both countries.

In the UK, The Simpsons' first UHF transmission on the BBC had been a convention of own-goals. Even as early as the 1980s the corporation had bought The Tracy Ullman Show, but sagely cut out all the famous early Simpsons shorts that had been contained therein. Then, when the series proper was made, they let small-time satellite operator Sky buy it. Finally, six years later on 23rd November 1996, the Beeb at last proudly repeated the now ancient first episodes during prime time, to great fanfare.

Although it had been years earlier that I'd been introduced to the series on VHS by Monty, it was at the start of the BBC era that I determined to watch every single episode, in order. Well, since they were being shown in an apparently random order, this meant taping them all for several weeks until the chronologically next one got shown. There are gags in there that you just won't get if you're not watching them sequentially.

Anyway, as it was both from overseas and a cartoon, it wasn't long before the BBC buried the American rubbish away both within and just after children's programming on BBC2.

When they never showed the America's Most Wanted special, I had to later borrow the DVD off of Herschel. Admittedly, this did not turn out to be up to much, but a hipper station would have found a way to include it where it came anyway. Y'know, for the fans.

So, to 2004, the year when the BBC relinquished the most successful TV series ever to smart-mouthed Channel 4. Catching up with these off of VHS, would the transition in presentation notice? After all, the BBC had made quite a spectacular hash of things already.

Well, first of all, Channel 4 launched their run with a couple of their own specially-made programmes.

The World According To The Simpsons could more accurately be entitled The Simpsons According To Us, and was the traditional clips show dressed-up as a making-of documentary. Sure enough they trot out assumptions like "Wherever you are, The Simpsons are," without fact-checking. I once taught a classroom full of Chinese people, not one of whom had ever heard of it.

One celebrity fan croons about how great it is that Homer once said the W word in an episode, because in the US it's not rude. Funnily enough, Channel 4 decided to run that particular clip twice.

This programme was followed by The Simpsons Quiz Show, which again featured famous viewers attempting to answer questions about the series. Know what? They ask one question about Homer's use of the W word. Then they show the clip. Then they run the clip a second time. They just didn't do this with the other clips in either of these two shows.

Anyway, really high-brow stuff.

Once the series proper began airing, of course the episodes now had adverts in them, particularly for Pizza Hut who for a while were the series main ‘sponsor’. (Obviously they didn't actually sponsor the show, because it had been made many years beforehand) I must admit that I quite liked watching the British adverts - I also missed these while in New Zealand, and likewise needed to catch up. Presently, the Pizza Hut ads gave way to ones for Dominoe's.

However the episode Insane Clown Poppy (BABF17) cuts into the break right in the middle of a word. When we came back, it was a different scene. We never found out what Krusty was saying.

A few days after that I got to the episode The Computer Wore Menace Shoes (CABF02), which featured the end credits squashed sideways into just over two-thirds of the screen, to enable the visual and audial trailing of whatever was on next.

After that had finished, I turned the tape from 2004 off, to find The Simpsons still in progress on Channel 4 in present day 2010. Now they were squeezing the end credits into only half of the screen. I couldn't ignore the toll that six years had taken on presentation standards.

Later I got onto watching Christmas Day 2004's Alternative Christmas Message, which that year had been presented by the yellow family. Although airing amongst episodes that were several years' behind, this was a brand new almost three-minute sketch made especially for British TV, featuring the five of them making lots of jokes about the way in which Americans perceive Britain.

This felt kinda strange, especially when Lisa delivered a political joke in Cornish.


Still don't believe me? The rest of it is here.


Today I watched the last one - I Am Furious (Yellow) (DABF13). It's the last one recorded because that's the point at which it just became too difficult to chase all over Channel 4's schedules any more.

So I'm abandoning my quest to watch them all in order. There are just too many of them, and life is too short. Sometimes discontinuing a plan is the right thing to do. I really should never have made a resolve that was so subject to the choices of others.

I've enjoyed watching The Simpsons. It remains quality, and always gives me a positive outlook. I'll continue to dip into it whenever I come across it, but my devotion to such a wonderful show is no more.

I guess the BBC and Channel 4 should have just shown the episodes, instead of working so hard to mix them all up.

Worst. Presentation. Ever.

Racing Stripes

Having spent years with this poster on the wall of my classroom, I thought this film was a cartoon:


When it turned out to instead feature live-action talking animals, well, I was singularly surprised!

And I do mean 'singularly' - for this was the only surprise in the whole film.

In fact, this tale of a zebra who wants to be a racehorse is so by-the-numbers that it's hard to find any good reason for being told this story. Express that the other way around, and Racing Stripes satisfies all of expectations of it, but has almost nothing to offer of its own.

There are some bodily-function jokes which don't sit well with the cute factor, and the notion that Stripes has grown up never seeing his own reflection is plain ridiculous, but really so what. If forced to choose between either a good or a bad opinion of this, there's really no benefit to me in choosing the latter.

The makers of Racing Stripes may have played the entire thing safe, but who doesn't like to see animals helping each other out?

Well then.

(available here)

Rock & Chips

If there's one thing which guaranteed that TV miniseries Rock & Chips could do no wrong, it was its pedigree.

Author John Sullivan had created and written the entire Only Fools And Horses universe from the ground up, so when it came to constructing a prequel, he had every authority.

Sure there's now swearing, no laugh-track, and a huge cast of characters to keep track of, but if you believed that the Trotter boys were real, then fitting a new series of events into their already finely-woven history was always going to be both a challenge, and a pleasure.

The locations are familiar. The cast all bring both something old and something new to their parts. And Nicholas Lyndhurst as Freddy doesn't even remotely remind me of Rodney.

This probably doesn't stand up well if you haven't seen the earlier series that it prequels, but watched in retrospect it's simply special. All the more so that there are only three episodes of it, and that the author clearly had further places for it to go before his sad death robbed him of sharing them with us.

Thanks so much John Sullivan. For the laughter, the friends you gave us, and for being so true to your word.

Doctor Who: The God Complex

This is one of those stories that I found myself gritting my teeth through needlessly.

Because it kept threatening to go somewhere badly, but never quite got there.

It's written by the guy who turned in last season's awful Vampires Of Venice. It's about faith, a subject rarely depicted with much understanding on television. It contains a muslim who at one point has to crack the absolutely cringeworthy joke "Don't be afraid." It also threatens to descend into tackling euthanasia. It has a pretentious title.

These are good conversations to be having in Doctor Who, but not without delving under the surface, and even then you have to know your subject. Faith is not merely a singular belief in times of trouble, but a whole way of living. For example, it takes faith to believe in what your five senses tell you. Perhaps a better word here might have been hope.

It's set in a building which contains a person's fears, much like Night Terrors a mere two weeks back, but no-one makes the connection.

The Doctor enters the room which contains his worst fear, but the makers cop-out and we don't get to see it.

The rooms can move, although this turns out to be irrelevant.

Like I said, this episode is almost going somewhere.

After last week, there are guest-characters again, but most of them are too shallow to make us feel afraid for them. Lucy and Joe are only really seen in their possessed form, while Gibbis and Howie are comic relief, so can't really carry much drama.

Howie is the Doctor Who universe's latest maladjusted straw nerd, and accordingly goes through the usual ridicule. When Rory - a fictional character who routinely travels through time and space - belittles Howie for believing in a conspiracy theory, Rory comes across as, well, somewhat tiny-minded. This is Doctor Who - just how many other episodes are there about a worldwide conspiracy being true? As Rory has recently been to the Whitehouse and met both Nixon and the Silence, maybe he's protecting a conspiracy?

Aside from the regular cast, that only really leaves Rita, who the Doctor keeps on saying is very intelligent, until she commits suicide. Given what a routine decision this has become in Doctor Who in recent years, the real sense of loss in the following scene is impressive.

Well, there's still the monster to connect with. He/it requires praise to survive, and achieves this by scaring its victims until they find some faith within themselves to withstand it. This is a great moment of revelation. However the idea that the monster then replaces that faith by possessing them and then consuming their minds is muddled, contradictory and contrived, but then this is a series about a body-changing alien travelling the universe in a Police Box.

I'm no expert, but having faith is just not the same thing as praising. I have faith in God's existence and goodness, but I cannot claim to really 'praise' him. I'm not knocking it, but it's always been a mystery to me why other Christians do this.

Accepting that the monster seemed to be feeding upon itself as much as its victims, everything here did hold together pretty well for me in the end. In fact I'd even say the whole thing was pretty well plotted.

The cast are not stupidly praising a monster, but being controlled by it to do so. (yet more zombies) Leaving the eleventh Doctor's worst fear to the viewer's imagination gets by, albeit by chickening out of identifying it. (I think it was River, but a waiting Valeyard would have been awesome) And the direction is absolutely great.

The Doctor's having to break Amy's faith in him is a good development, but really needed to feature him outright betraying her, instead of merely lying so badly.

The final scene suddenly features the Doctor dropping Amy and Rory back home. This isn't that well motivated by the preceding events, and features no reference by anyone to the Doctor's impending death. Which is a bit of a shame after all the episodes this series that have closed by referencing this plot point without needing to. You can read a sub-text in here, but you can equally not. Well, that'd be why it's called a sub-text. I guess I wanted some text too.

That the Doctor has given up travelling with a companion for the same reason before, only to later realise that that decision was a mistake, goes without saying. Literally.

It all felt a bit odd. I suppose that the final two episodes of this series will be written by Steven Moffat and revolve around that storyline. Perhaps my sense of unease is a good thing.

After all, that's how the Doctor must feel.

Torchwood: Miracle Day

"Whichever way you look at it, this situation can only get worse."

I found the first two-thirds of this 10-part epic to be utterly compelling.

One day, people stop dying. They just do. No-one knows why.

The first six episodes then explore the ramifications of this concept in ever more extreme detail. What is death? If still alive, then can a dismembered skeleton still move? Does aging continue? Should hospitals now prioritise treating the healthiest patients first? What consequences will the perpetual taking of antibiotics have? What deterrent can replace the death sentence? How can a war be fought? What becomes of artificially aborted fetuses? Whoops, sorry, my mistake, they back off from that last one.

Each episode is saturated with these worldwide developments, and as the team struggle to find some sort of a pattern to explain events, the stakes just keep on escalating.

That's the great thing about a story with no end in sight yet - week after week our heroes can go up against ever increasing odds. As each episode finished too early for me, I found I was so up for the next one.

Truly, the strength of this series was in the details. How tragic that it's bigger picture was just not up to this.

In recent years, the series' head writer has recycled the same plot several times over. It's usually about a worldwide plague of zombies, resulting in a dystopia through which the main characters are pursued by the government. It ends with one of the main characters operating a machine that handily undoes everything for them, having to kill a relative in the process, and nobody on the planet remembering any of it next series.

Thus, in episode one, as soon as Gwen's father is saved from a heart attack, it's pretty much set in stone how the next nine weeks of zombies are going to play out.

And it's set extensively around hospitals. Of course it is. It's Torchwood.

By episode nine even Rex knows what I'm talking about.

Rex: "I ran the short story through the pattern recognition software identifying key points of similarity of prose styles."

Still, I found those first six weeks - mostly - enthralling. As I say, the range of the whole world's diverse reactions to the situation was breathtaking.

From episode seven however the story shifts its focus onto Jack - an immortal made mortal by Miracle Day - and with it the tale loses its anchor in the world. Padding follows, with Jack and Gwen spending an entire episode being blackmailed into meeting shadowy operatives who then paradoxically turn out to be friendly. An old man who's spent all his years searching for the key to eternal life, nonsensically builds a machine to protect himself from it. When Jack gets shot, they immediately drive him away from the device that can save him. The story is just not holding together any more.

I had been expecting the final episode to open with a character talking to a video camera about how the world had ended. That this didn't happen surprised me, partly because it's another staple of the formula, but mostly because I had accidentally caught a clip of it on the start of the NEXT WEEK trailer at the end of episode 4.

In the final episode, the machine that handily reverses everything turns out to be a part of planet Earth. No explanation is offered for this. Jack's ability to heal himself of any injury turns out to have been the key to the world's immortality, although the population have not been healing like him, just living on. No explanation is offered for this either. And as for how Jack lost his immortality in the first place? Guess.

So much for Everything Changes' retcon of how he had first gained his immortality in The Parting Of The Ways.

The great news though is that the machine itself lives on to be dug out and used again by someone else next week.

Miracle Day is awesome in its execution, has a fantastic cast, and a strong concept driving it, but this doesn't appear to have been inspired by the mystery's solution. There's no way you're telling me that this story's inspiration was the question of what if there were a gigantic machine running through the earth that controlled mankind's biology.

The Americanisation of Torchwood has been very good news for the show, and handled extremely well. This series is loyal to the preceeding three, introduces its new characters well, and rather than simply shifting the action to the US, camoflages it by going global. Torchwood has always wanted to be as good as an American SF show, apparently to the point of selling its soul to achieve this, finally. Now why couldn't you have done that at the start of the first series?

As with the preceding TV season, I'm not expecting a new plot any time soon, but this ride is well worth it, most of the time.

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

It doesn't happen very often, but this is one of those rare Doctor Who stories to feature only the crew of the TARDIS.

Good thing too. I don't usually care much about a character who I've never heard of before. This story on the other hand is extremely heavy-going stuff, because I've been following the lives of the Doctor, Amy and Rory for a year and a half now.

Tom MacRae's script meets one of the most basic time-travel paradoxes head-on - that of causality vs. the protagonists' free will - and comes down firmly in favour of the latter.

Amy: "In my past I saw my future self refuse to help you. I'm now changing that future and agreeing. Every law of time says that shouldn't be possible."

Doctor: "Yees, except sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it, especially if you're bloody-minded, contradictory and completely unpredictable."

Rory: "So basically if you're Amy then."

I liked all of this - the alien world, the characters, the dilemma, the subjugation of the laws of time by the Apalapucians, and of course the Doctor's subsequent wilful breaking of them. Well, up until the story's closing moments when the script chickens out, anyway.

Of course, we've known all along that the younger Amy will survive at the end - it's a weekly TV show. For all the series' bravado, Doctor Who just isn't brave enough to break its own format like that. Farscape happily took on two alternate Creightons for half a series, but obviously this show just isn't in Farscape's league.

But then, I guess that's a good thing. Having two Amys on the regular cast of a Steven Moffat-led series would probably have led to lots of smut about threesomes, not that it needed to, so perhaps we're better off maintaining the status quo after all.

Darn it.

Clash Of The Titans (1981)

In an era when more and more old movies are being re-released in 3D, is it too much to hope that the original 1981 version of Clash Of The Titans might be next?

While I admit the story made little sense to me, the amount of trouble gone to to lay image over image over image is a thing to behold, and in 3D would surely dazzle even more so. When so many perspectives hit your eyes in perfect focus in the 2D version, you already feel as though you're watching this through a Viewmaster anyway.

So many of these shamelessly stop-motion monsters, despite being the definition of unconvincing, are also enthrallingly-crafted. They are this film's unique beauty. If you've seen Mary Poppins and had no problem with the meshing of cartoons with live-action there, then you cannot possibly criticise this.

So come on Hollywood, muck about with the depth on all these stone snakes and giant velociraptors too. Hey - it's not that long ago that you were proudly gushing on the posters how you thought this film looked 'spectacular'.

Skip the Channel 5 logo though. That already stands out way too much.

(available here)

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

They say your fears can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. In 8-year-old George's case, this is literally true.

He's scared of tons of things. So every night his parents tell him to metaphorically lock his fears in the cupboard. Well, George does that literal thing with them.

By the time the Doctor and friends have shown up, George's fears have taken on a life of their own, and have begun to suck in and terrorise the other tenants of his surrounding housing block.

As in The Eleventh Hour, Matt Smith is an enchantment to watch as he befriends a young kid before completely failing to help them.

Night Terrors wrings out its horror content with the patience of a full-length movie. Once Amy gets turned into a doll though, the fear is broken by the safety of waiting for her inevitable reversal just before the end. It would have been scarier if she had remained human.

As is often the way, the story's resolution doesn't really deliver on its earlier wonder. Just how can all this possibly be happening? The answer is simply that there's an alien who can do it. Both this explanation and the perception filter are such broad plot-devices that they can pretty well solve any mystery. It's a shame when such a well-executed episode as this gets most of the way through and then suddenly gives up.

Still, if you can accept these elements' reappearance along with yet more zombies, then this is a great episode to watch on Halloween.

Herschel's Vegas Wedding

Herschel looked at me very seriously, and took a long drag on his Superman™ candy stick.

"There comes a time in an old klown's life when he wants to stop rifling through the pack for an ace, and just find the other joker."

Couched somewhere in that metaphor, Herschel was telling me that he had at last found that special 54th card in his life, that he and she were shortly to be wed, and would I do him the honour of being his best sidekick? (normal people call this role the 'best man')

Well of course I said I'd be honored. As well as the day out, the free lunch, and the excuse not to take pictures all day (the exclusive rights had been sold to Hey-Hey Magazine), the whole deal included a free weekend trip to Vegas! Yes, VEGAS!

Herschel: "Everyone! We're all goin' tah VEGAS!!!!!"


Fig. 1: Las Vegas, which we never got to. Instead this photo was sourced from wikipedia.

Come the day of travel (the day before the ceremony), the car Herschel had sent to pick me up seemed to be taking quite a while to get to Heathrow Airport. Things were making less and less sense. Then we passed a HOLLYWOOD-esque sign on a hill that didn't say HOLLYWOOD, or even WELLYWOOD. What the giant white letters actually spelt out was...


Fig. 1: Basildon. Source: Facebook.

Yes, Basildon.

Finally the vehicle stopped, and as I climbed out of the car, I was greeted by Herschel and his intended with the excited declaration "Hey-hey - welcome to Bas Vegas!!"

Bas Vegas. Two parades of shops and a Travelodge. It was even smaller than New Zealand's Roto-Vegas. I didn't say it to the happy couple, but I now admit that I was inwardly thinking "Eurgh".

With a CBD this small, keeping the stag night separate from the hen night looked to be a challenge. I had earlier protested that for about a million practical reasons it was advisable to hold the stag a week or so earlier rather than just the night before, but Herschel insisted that such close-shave timing was "a dependable rule of komedy". I don't know, it was almost as though he wanted to wake up the next day handcuffed to a hangover in Cuba or somewhere.

Anyway, not to let my friend down, I dutifully rounded up the other blokes staying overnight at the Travelodge for tomorrow's big day. We were: the Mexican Bee, Bicentennial Man, the Street Cleaner (you may remember him from such underground superhero movies as The Street Cleaner), Zippy, George and Comic Book Nick.

I'd never met Nick before, although we had been aware of each other's work in the comicbook field for a couple of decades, to the point where he had once drawn me into a strip. Anyway, it was like meeting an old friend.

The Mexican Bee appeared to be a fan of the 1960s TV series The Prisoner and would continually quote the jury's chant from the last episode Fall Out of "I! I! I!" Or maybe he was just a highly agreeable Scot…

Iron Man, Ant Man, Elmo and the eleventh Doctor never made it. Slackers.

Anyway, we found a Pizza Express on the edge of the desert (the A1235), and several hours of male merriment later all retired back to our rooms at the Travelodge. Indicating Herschel's kphone (in fact just a yellow oversized rubber iphone), I said that he could call me at any time of the night if he wanted to talk or anything. I don't know what goes through a klown's head on a night like that.

I know this goes without saying, but the following morning, Herschel was nowhere to be found.

There was no answer from his room, and when the cleaners showed up we found it empty. I tried calling his phone, and it duly started ringing from on top of the room's DVD player. Either he had mistaken it for the remote control again, or he had deliberately left it behind.

Oh dear.

Kairologically, we were two hours away from the ceremony. The Travelodge's packed breakfasts suddenly came in very handy as I had to organise the lads from last night into search parties to head out to every part of Bas Vegas, barring wherever the girls were, to look for him. None of those many websites that I'd read on "How To Be Great A Best Man To A Clown" had prepared me for this duty.

There was a completely unexpected moment when, as I was exiting the lobby, Herschel's phone rang in my backpack, and it turned out to be the bride calling him. This I navigated by making a wheezing groaning sound, and generally pretending to be Herschel with laryngitis. I thought I was doing quite well, right up until the moment when I discovered that she had been watching me across the car park the entire time.

As she marched indignantly up the curb towards me, I put the disconnected kphone back in my bag and I remember thinking "Ah well, I'd better make a clean break, admit the truth and apologise."

In the event she cut my confession short by telling me that she had just had poor Herschel on the phone, he had laryngitis, and just where did I think I was going, when I was supposed to be helping him to prepare for the ceremony in under two hours?

Before I could answer, my own phone started to ring, so I made up a lie about being Budgie-Man and headed back towards the front of the Travelodge to answer it. Could this be Herschel? No. The search parties were starting to report in.

Bicentennial Man was the first, yet was hard to coax a straight answer out of. He had scoured Bas Vegas' shop(s), from whence he clearly had some information to impart, but insisted upon improvising around it and dropping into famous comedy voices. I think he started out doing Igor from Count Duckula before moving on to (I think) the genie from the Alladin movies. Somewhere around about the point when he got onto doing Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in The Road To Bas Vegas I gleaned that Herschel was not in any of Bas Vegas' several shops.

Then came the very loud call from the Street Cleaner, who it turned out was actually standing masterfully on top of the Travelodge behind me. No visual contact from up there. Really, he's so loud, I don't know why he bothers with the phone. Still, he won't be bothering with it any more since at the end of his call he managed to drop it. Now he has no powers, no weapons, and no phone.

The Mexican Bee had been checking out the bars, from where he initially seemed to have some good news for me. The conversation went:

Me: "Have you found Herschel?"

Bee: "¡Aye-aye-aye!"

Me: "Really? You've found him?"

Bee: "¡Aye aye aye!"

Me: "That's great! How is he? He's not planning to call the whole thing off or anything is he?"

Bee: "¡Aye aye aye!"

It turned out he was trying to select a fish from the tank for breakfast, and counting how many eyes each them had.

Zippy and George were over at MFI purchasing a desk with a covered front so that they could get around more easily, but still hadn't actually seen Herschel himself.

And finally, Comic Book Nick was at the arcade. "Alas, sensors indicate negative lifesigns of the Bozo derivative. Worse, I have had the misfortune to make visual contact with a 'Defective Comics Pinball Madness' game, which features a generic composite backglass depicting Paul the aardvark meeting Rik. Since this event is patently impossible, even within the alternate history of the issue #100 back-up strip The Five Defectors, I must conclude that this is a lazy attempt to reboot the classic franchise. Worst. Backglass. Ever."

So it was all up to me. As indeed I should have realised from the start that it had to be. I was his best friend, and now I had to prove it by out-psyching him and figuring out just where in the sprawling metropolis that was Bas Vegas' entertainment district he would have gone. And all the time the clock was still ticking.

I looked around me. Shops. Bars. Cinema. Travelodge. Car park. Whoa - back up there, cinema???

My initial rush of hope was crushed as I entered and realised that the film playing was Johnny English Reborn. Grimly I recalled how, years ago now, Herschel, Harrison and I had all gone to see the original movie in this series, only to come out sobbing at its crushing lack of humour. Throughout the film, Rowan Atkinson had been repeatedly presented with two alternatives, of which he would reliably select the wrong one. But then he'd do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. (I could go on) Literally, in the entire film there is only the one joke. Afterwards Herschel had demanded his money back. He had been deadly serious, yet the angrier he had become, the more the assistant had convulsed with hysterics. (he gets that a lot)

So, was it just possible that Herschel had got up early and come to see its less-than-promising sequel, and was even now sitting through 90 more agonising minutes of the same? Sadly, there was only one way to find out.

So I said to the sales clerk, "Excuse me, have you seen a klown entering this morning?"

To which he memorably replied, "What sort of klown?"

Dang, so now I had to buy a ticket myself. Using my last note. To a Johnny English sequel. I felt dirty.

So I showed him a picture of the queen and he gave me a comp. (sucker)

Then I got to the escalator and saw the sign "Dogs must be carried on the escalator". Took me half an hour to find one.

Then I got into the theatre, and was relieved to realise that my twenty pounds had been well invested.

Dotted around the seats were about five people with the appearance of having just got off of a long-haul flight (a vaguely Asian-looking guy at the back, for example). However in the middle, unmistakably silhouetted against the bottom of the screen, was Herschel's distinctive wild-haired outline, albeit drooping. Dear God, what had Rowan Atkinson done to him?

As the hapless MI7 agent proceeded to wink at the wrong Chinese man in spectacles, I slunk quietly up to Herschel and sat down. I've never seen him looking in a worse condition. Coughing, spluttering, barely able to put any words together into a sentence. Tears had streamed down his face smearing his klown make-up, and his hair had gone as white as Einstein's. Umpteen plastic cups surrounded him, and down his front he had probably scalded himself when spilling that great big stain of… coffee?

I looked again at him, and realised for the first time that he was shaking. With a massive effort, and hyperventilating, he hissed words at me in an order that managed to make sense.

"This… film… is…. GOLD!"

Now I realised. He wasn't crying, he was laughing. With dumbfounded horror, I pieced together what had happened.

Last night Herschel had snuck out of the Travelodge and spent the entire night camped in here, watching the same movie over and over again, until it had broken him. In addition, with the bars shut, he'd OD'd on machine coffee, and was now more hyper than Yakko Warner commentating a horse race. The mixture of caffeine and having to locate humour in a film where there was probably little to be found had, to him, been lethal, and transformed him into this insanely happy wreck.

There was no way he could get married in this gibbering unrecognisable state of mind, which wasn't something many couples said in Bas Vegas. There was only one thing to do.

I had to get him back to normal. I had to make him miserable again. It was my duty as his friend.

Dragging him back to the Travelodge via the DVD shop, I sat him down, starved him of coffee, and put on the film's straight to DVD spin-off Johnny English Meets Monsieur Hulot. Starring Dermot O'Leary as Johnny English and Alexa Chung as Monsieur Hulot, the timing was deadly. Having been through such a massive overnight high, the caffeine-free Herschel was now beginning to hit the corresponding low. The downhill gradient in his spirit was swift.

"This O'Leary clown is a genius! Just look at the way absolutely NOTHING is happening around him!! Hyuh-hyuh-hyuh-hyehh-hyehh-hyehhh, hyuh-hyuh-hyuh!!!"

"Now see, putzette here is funny because she kind of looks like Hulot from the back. I can see where they were going with that, if only they hadn't invested so much of it in her waiting in the lift."

"Waaaitaminute, both Hulots finally reach this end of the corridor.... and Cloneboy tries to dewig the wrong one AGAIN? [screams at spinning ceiling] EUERGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"

I poured Herschel drink after drink from the mini-bar. He kept trying to stand to pace up and down, but I wouldn't let him, enticing him back to the floor with handfuls of chocolate cigarettes. Eventually, while the masked Dr Hulot was at length trying to amputate the wrong one of English's eyes for dissection (it was the director's cut with extended bleakness), this deadly cocktail finally sent Herschel to sleep. At this point I secretly dyed his hair green again and gave him a klown makeover. He never suspected a thing.

With the cab due to arrive in a matter of minutes, I half-woke him up, got him to stagger downstairs in the lift, and successfully hurried him past the lobby drinks machine, despite his protests for "juss one more esspressso".

The cab picked us up with no hitch at all, got us to the church on time, I thrust $1,000 of Herschel's Monopoly money into the happy Indian driver's hands, and before you knew it we were sitting at the front of the church realising that neither one of us had the faintest idea what to do next.

I glanced at the pews behind, which now contained the smiling faces of the Mexican Bee, Bicentennial Man, Zippy, George and Comic Book Nick, doing his best not to look too unimpressed. (someone really should have gone back to help the Street Cleaner get down) Even my mum was there.

Now Herschel was starting to get a few ideas about maybe intentionally leaving, ostensibly because he was about to stand up in front of so many people without having rehearsed his script.

But… was that his real concern, or was it just an excuse masking a deeper apprehension? Well, I wasn't going to push him one way or the other. He was about to make one of the biggest decisions of his life. He had to make this call alone, in whatever way he saw fit, and whatever his choice, I had to be there for him.

With his intended heading down the aisle to all the organ music and everything, we retrieved his kphone from my rucksack and hastily used it to access the church's wi-fi and scroll through wedding vows. He was muttering things like "'In Sickness And In Health'?? Oh suuure, why not just give me a tenth season of Scrubs to perform?"

Looking for some legal wedding vows that included jokes, Herschel broadened his search string to 'legal apps for klowns'. As with all things legal, it was a minefield. His oversized index finger was swiping through imortgage, ilease, icopyright and even iheartilyendorse, but it was all just too late.

The reverend - an aging sideburned crooner in shades from Memphis - motioned us to stand and come up to the front. We did exactly as asked, despite the padre's wearing stripey boxer shorts instead of trousers. (the vicar had obviously been battling his own farce that morning, which we chose to respect)

Everyone was welcomed, the first hymn was sung (somewhat enthusiastically by the minister), and after literally a word about mercy, the vows began. But Herschel was still preoccupied with punching away at his phone to find an app that allowed him to klown-up his promises. Those literacy classes were really paying off.

Finally the crunch came, as the vicar slowly read out the whole of the question to him. Yes, THE question.

"Say there, Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofski," [that bought us a few more seconds] "whah, will you promise tah love, cherish and protect her, whether in good fortune or in adversity, and tah seek with her a laaf hallowed by thuh faith of Israel boy?"

Herschel gaped at his phone, and at the top of his voice exploded:

"iwill??!??"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Herschel Krustofski got married.


"Vivaaaaaaaaa, Bas Vegas,
Vivaaaaaaaaa, Bas Vegas,
Vivaaaaaaaaa,
Vivaaaaaaaaa,
Bas Vegaaaaaaaaaas!!!"

[finish, cheering]

"Thank-yuh, thank-yuh ver' much."

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I often wash my hair in the bath, which involves closing my eyes, leaning forwards and submerging my head under the water.

Since I obviously do this alone, beforehand I take the plug out, just in case I unexpectedly pass out or something. In such an unlikely event, the water should drain completely from the bath. It's only sensible.

Sometimes, after sitting up and breathing again, I wonder whether I've actually sat up, or have merely passed out underwater and dreamt that I have sat up.

How do you tell whether or not you are in a dream? For me, dreams often involve something surreal happening, which I will think is perfectly normal. So I have to second guess myself, and objectively challenge a few aspects of the very ordinary bathroom around me. Is the shampoo bottle singing? If it is, can I recall it ever having done this before?

This morning I surfaced my head as usual and noticed that the bath water was still running out of the tap and into the bath. The bath had become overfull, and the excess water was now piling-up higher than the edge of the bath. The surfeit mass of wobbly water had a hard wall to it, so none of it had spilt over yet.

Clearly this was impossible. Clearly I was dreaming. Clearly I had to wake up very very quickly indeed.

I tried to sit up again. Well, I thought I was already sitting up so it was difficult to straighten up further. I tried to wake up. I couldn't.

I figured the water in real life would be just above my head, so I tried to perceive that, and after partial success began to focus on lifting myself up above the water level again.

Anyway, almost immediately, I did wake up. In my bed. It actually had been a dream.

The whole thing had been a dream.

Hence the phrase, to die bathing.