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Another afternoon of guerrilla filming for a possible video series of AIOTM. We’re going to get a kickstarter running as soon as we have set up a new bank account (which is taking ages) for our podcast production company, Sky Potato Ltd! (the other businesses called Apple did pretty well, so hopefully that’s a good sign). Once that’s up and running we will be releasing the bits we’ve already done to promote it.
You may have seen me appealing for a high-backed armchair on Twitter (and of course I bought the semi-circular toilet mat last week) and today we were shooting a title sequence that involved those items and two distracted and bored women dancing. As you’ll probably know I heard an untrue rumour about myself that I like to invite women back to my hotel room and make them dance whilst I pleasure myself in a high-backed armchair. If this was true then I wouldn’t have to find a high-backed arm chair and buy a semi-circular toilet mat (though you can never have too many of those), would I?
Of course if I did get off on all these things then getting a film crew and some dancing women in to document my perversion would be the ultimate turn-on for me. But it isn’t. So I just found the whole thing embarrassing. But I still chose to do it.
The crew did an amazing job and I think it should look great. I wanted to pastiche those kind of shows that have scantily clad girls in the title sequence, but it’s a tricky line to walk, because there’s the danger that irony and reality can be confused (though clearly that’s also part of the joke - see above- it’s not real). I notice that Sacha Baron-Cohen successfully got on the the front page of the papers by surrounding himself with women in swimming costumes at his film premiere. Of course he was sending it up too and he had no trousers on and it was very much, I assume, about the character in the film. But then the papers have printed the pics because of the skin on display. As Stewart Lee points out, “there is no such thing as an ironic wank."
So the tone of these titles is very much tragedy. The dancers look sad and are fully clothed, I look disgusted with them and myself. A glitter ball adds a little glamour, but that just makes it all more tawdry. I think it’s going to work as I hoped. And it helped having the very funny comedians Lou Sanders and Hatty Ashdown, who did a great job of giving us lots of different versions of this gag. We might even be able to do different titles each week. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe none of it will happen at all.Though we can, as we are currently, use badge money and good will to put out some bits and pieces. It could be an exciting year if we get this right, but Andrew Rodger and his little team of Matts have done a great job for us on this. So thanks very much to them. And to Rosie for letting us use her studio.
I mean, it’s still a weird life that I lead. Sitting in a small studio, in a mocked up hotel room making it appear that a rumour about me is true, and subsequently actually moreorless doing the thing that I was accused of (I didn’t actually pleasure myself - well not in every take). Sometimes I think I really should have a long hard look at myself, but I am too busy looking at my friends doing ironically sexy and unironically unsexy dancing so I haven’t got the time.
At least I wasn’t one of the crew. Their job was even more tragic.
You’ll be able to see the fruits of our labours soon and I hope you’ll be excited enough to bung us a few quid so we can make loads more - we’ve got some good rewards lined up.
Nice to see a piece on Chortle about Lorcan Mullan’s favourite episodes of RHLSTP. You won’t all agree with him (he misses out at least five of my own top ten). Hopefully it will bring some new listeners and viewers in. Do spread the word if you know anyone who you think would enjoy this odd show.
We’ve not doing any new ones until June now, but we’re releasing formerly pay-to-view old eps weekly on Wednesdays until they run out. Ross Noble is up on Wednesday!
