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An historic day for the family. The kids watched Back to the Future for the first time. The three year old is maybe a little young for it, but he managed more focus than he does for many films, but the six year old is just about ready, if you ignore the occasional use of the word “shit” (which she has to do in real life anyway). They were a bit confused by some of it, but also intrigued and though it’s not a perfect introduction to the logic of time travel (Marty changes enough in the past to ensure that he and his siblings would never be born regardless of his parents getting together and it seems highly unlikely that the successful Mcflys would live in the same house as the original ones - also what of all the time lived by the Marty who had the nicer family, where has he gone?) it does better than most attempts.
I was doing the last Twitch of Fun for a little while tonight - 30 episodes feels like a good first series and a break will not hurt me anyway - but was leaving the contents up to fate. I hadn’t planned anything beyond having picked up some possible news stories and hoped the puppets would provide. And there was a fair amount of invention. There was even some time travel of Law Fox, which I don’t think was directly inspired by BTTF (because if it was I’d surely have thought to call him Law J Fox). I had been thinking about not bothering having him in this week, but the adapted puppet was sitting next to the original one in the box and I just suddenly thought - What if they met?
This is the extraordinary thing about this show - the creativity (and lack of) happens right in front of your eyes. You can actually see nearly all the comedic ideas and technical skill developing in front of your eyes, because I give the episodes little thought and certainly no rehearsal.
I also tried a puppet foursome on a whim tonight, being pretty sure it wouldn’t work, but it was actually OK.
The puppets asked me questions I didn’t want to answer and wheedled things out of me a bit. I think season two might get a little darker. If Ian Twitch recommissions it.
Or if you have 35 hours to kill you can watch
the whole series here. You will have a few weeks to catch up.
If a different comedian was doing this I think it might have got a bit more heat from reviewers and stuff, but it’s a complex thing to get into and you have to adapt to accepting it on its own terms. But you can’t deny that it is inventive and reactive. Thanks for the 250 of you who have watched it all the way through live every week (and the 600 of you who dip in). I don’t think the audience has either increased or decreased since July 2020, driving that it found its people straight away and that there are no more people out there who might enjoy it.
