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I had an emergency question about which film or play you’d like to see the Muppets do a version of, with maybe one human actor. I wasn’t the first to think of this. I believe Ricky Gervais had done something similar on his podcast years ago, which is fitting enough because my initial idea was to have Twelfth Night with him being Toby Belch. The question is doing the rounds on Twitter now and I have no doubt that whoever started the thread came up with the idea independently. It’s an obvious place to go.
But on watching Muppet Christmas Carol for the third time this holiday (on my daughter’s insistence) I wondered if a better question might be: Muppet Christmas Carol - you can keep one muppet but all other characters replaced by humans (unless human already) - which muppet stays?
There’s a lot of fun to be had with this as a notion, because just as Michael Caine plays Scrooge exactly right in the film by playing it straight, it would be remarkable to have just one Muppet in a serious all human version of the piece and seeing how everyone coped. A few people were keen to keep one or other of the Marley brothers, which would be even funnier in an all human version as there would be no need for two ghosts. I noticed for the first time that Lew Zealand does his fish boomerang act right near the start of the MCC, which would be a fun detail to slip into an all human one. Though the Beaker scene will always be my favourite in MCC, so I’d love to see him make it through to the all human version and have everyone act as exquisitely against him as Caine manages. It’s one of my favourite moments of cinema.
Anyway, I always feel that an emergency question that someone else can come up with is somewhat devalued, especially when I am not even the first to ask it. I don’t ask the questions that other people dare not ask, I ask the questions that no one else would even think of asking.
I only put on a tiny bit of weight over Christmas, but three days of my fitness pal and I have shed almost 2kg (and am 1.5kg down on my pre-Christmas weight). It’s good to start before the New Year, as Richard Osman observed on Twitter today, if only not to be one of the crowd starting on the same date. But it’s gratifying to realise that it’s possible to get back on track pretty quickly.
I have very nearly completed my year without chocolate and booze but I don’t think I will be going back on the 1st January. Catie is doing Dry January, so I might as well join her for that, though worry that one of us has to be drunk for this relationship to work (and basically it’s her - if she actually sobers up and realises what she has married then things might end pretty quickly). I was 100kg this time last year and now I am about 88kg, so even though I was under 83 in June, I think that’s still a pretty successful year, especially given how few fucks I’ve been giving over the last four or five months.
But I give some fucks again and am setting my sights to a month’s time to see what I can achieve with some properly healthy living.
And so the endless yoyo keeps dancing until the string is finally frayed so much that it all falls apart.
