I fed no animals out of my hand today. Every day I fail to feed an animal out of my hand is a day wasted on this planet. Though I fed myself out of my hand and I am an animal so maybe that counts.
It doesn't count.
Today was an odd little island of a day - in between two mini breaks, but back at home. Nice to be here, but no time to settle in and it meant that I started turning my attention to some of the admin that might otherwise have waited til next week. So half in work mode, half in slouch mode. I counted up the final bit of money from the SCOPE collection and it came to £11,161.25 which is incredible (about 4 thousand pounds from previews and a little over 7000 pounds from the Fringe). Thanks so much for your donations. Almost halfway to the ambitious £50,000 target I set for this year's show. Hopefully the long tour will raise the rest.
If you donated before publication and got your name in the programme and have not yet received your signed and limited edition programme (there's a lot more than usual unclaimed so I think emails have gone missing) then email me at herring1967@googlemail.com with the name you donated under and your address. It's especially signed and numbered so different and potentially more valuable than the one you will pick up at gigs, so do claim the prize that is rightfully yours. Or I will just chuck it in the recycling!
Aside from that I didn't get up to too much. I had a discussion with Dave Gorman on Twitter about the TV quiz show "Pointless". It's a show that I really like and watched a lot in Edinburgh when I could have been going to see experimental theatre. It's pretty hard and I have never seen anyone win it outright and even when people have had specialist knowledge of the final subject they often end up matching with one person. I was really arguing that Alexander Armstrong seems to be making a living fronting revamped 1980s quiz shows. Pointless is a reworking of Family Fortunes, except that you get credit for coming up with the answers that match with the least people rather than the most and Armstrong's other current show "Epic Win" is a more or less direct copy of "You Bet" with some post-modern irony chucked on top. That was really my only point, but Dave wanted to defend Pointless from the accusation of being a Family Fortunes clone, because he felt it rewarded intelligence and knowledge rather than the ability to say the most obvious thing. I agree that that makes it better as a quiz (though I have a lot of time for Family Fortunes - just because the answers are obvious, doesn't necessarily make it easier to do under pressure. In some ways it's more intimidating and easy to miss what should be staring you in the face), and I wasn't knocking Pointless - though I am pretty sure that whoever invented Pointless started with Family Fortunes and worked outwards from there. It was a discussion (and nearly an argument) that Twitter was invented for. Ironically enough it was a pointless thing to even discuss, but ultimately we completely agreed with each other and yet still managed to have a ten or so tweet exchange about it.
Dave and me have a similar competitive streak and love of playing games and I think we both like it when a new and interesting game show comes along and I guess we also both enjoy it when we can pick holes in the logic of a format. I don't like the fact that in "The Weakest Link" you are judged a "stronger" player based on how much money you have banked - a strong player should never bank, having faith in their own skill. The person with the most correct answers who banked the least should be the stronger link (unless they bank after a string of correct answers which has led to the maximum amount possible).
I suspect Dave, like me, would also love to come up with a new game show format. I have tried a couple of times and so far not been successful - though I think I had one that combined the current penchant for people winning money through blind luck with a game that rewarded skill and tactical nouse, but then what do I know. I don't want to host a gameshow and I a surprised that Armstrong is spending so much of his time doing this job when he has comedy and acting (and adverts) to be getting on with. I'd just like to create a gameshow that was good and fun and which was on TV 5 nights a week for 10 years in every country in the world (provided you don't sell the idea off cheap you don't need a pension if you can achieve that). I am sure there is probably some stupid game that I play by myself to pass the time which would be perfect, but I am too stupid to spot it. CNPS?
No.
It was cool to have a night in in my own house, watching some telly. We took a chance on "Monsters and Aliens" which was nearly OK, but unusually for these smart modern cartoons, the humour just seemed to miss most of the time, a bit like (as with many gameshows) someone had seen a successful film of this type and tried to copy it without understanding what made the original good (usually what that thing is is originality, which is why attempts to copy such a successful format will always fail). We also caught up with Dr Who on iPlayer and though I liked the stand alone nature of this episode and it built up some suspense, I haven't really been enjoying this children's programme of late and it seems to be getting a little bit samey and predictable. Ah well. Maybe I should watch some adult telly and stop complaining. I wouldn't mind owning the human sized Amy Pond rag doll though if anyone from the team is reading.
