I’ve done 45 pages of my script now. Fifteen more and I have enough. I am hoping I can finish it tomorrow. I am not entirely satisfied with it – I think it’s too far-fetched and not really the truthful look at the lives of comedians that I had hoped to produce – but don’t tell Channel 4 that. It will do for the minute and will be sorted out easily enough if they commission it. For the moment I just have to get this monkey off my back. And when I have done that, I will write the script.
So I ambled my way up North, stopping fairly regularly to work and eat. The cassette thing that connects my iPod to the car stereo is not working any more and so I spend most of my time listening to Radio 1, which is not really created for me and yet I am strangely compelled to tune in (perhaps pretending to be 21 again, though I think even 21 year olds are too ancient to fall into this stationÂ’s demographic). Most of the DJs annoy the heck out of me for one reason or another, but itÂ’s just good to have something on in the background that isnÂ’t too challenging. And itÂ’s good to keep up with the pop charts, even if they essentially play the same ten songs on rotation on this station.
But when you hear a pop song for the fifteenth time then you can discover new treasures in it. One of the ten songs that I like best is the one that samples “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp (who my brother used to play constantly in his bedroom in the 1970s, so maybe that’s partly why I like it). It always mainly makes me want to hear the rest of “Breakfast in America” but I like the new version, even if like the old man I am, I am unsure of the name of the recording artiste (“Gym Class Heroes”? It seems unlikely, but I think I may be correct). I think they have been sharp to see the chorus potential of what I think is just part of the opening verse in the original, but there are also some sharp and poetic images in what I believe the youngsters call the “rapping”.
One bit I heard for the first time today went something like
“If I had to choose between her and the sun,
I’d be one nocturnal son-of-a-gun.”
(I had remembered it as "night-time loving" instead of "nocturnal" but Lyric websites disagree with me)
I think thatÂ’s very close to genius and as witty and romantic as anything by John Donne. Even though there is a part of me that wants to inform the singer that if he actually did choose the woman, over the star at the centre of the solar system and the sun was extinguished then all life on Earth, including his girlfriend, would freeze to death, I still think itÂ’s a romantic image. And itÂ’s probable that he actually means that he would choose to stay out of the sun rather than have it destroyed to prove his devotion.
I am not sure that it’s deliberate, but in each verse he lists a thing that makes him state, “if that ain’t love, then I don’t know what love is”. She gives him alka-seltzer when his tummy aches, he has given her her own ring-tone and so on. Now I am tempted to believe that the writer of this song is aware that these things, although cute, do not actually signify love and that there is a subtext that the singer is merely infatuated and does not know what love is. Maybe I am reading too much into it. Maybe I have listened to it too many times. But it’s a most excellent song and I urge you all to buy it and then write a GCSE essay about it, like I just have.
One of the ones I don’t like and not from a prudish level is the one that goes, “I can lick your ice cream and you can lick my lollipop”. It is a crude and obvious reference to the fact that the man singing would enjoy having oral sex with the woman he is singing to (both giving and receiving in mutual exchange), but the confectionary metaphor is so blatant and unimaginative that I think me might as well sing, “I can lick your clitoris and you can suck my penis”. If that’s what he wants then let him say that. The innuendo of what he does sing is so slight and so artlessly delivered that it is essentially this already. It’s not romantic like a man telling a woman he would have the sun blown up before giving her up. It just makes oral sex seem disgusting and mechanical (which you know, it sometimes can be, but I don’t want to hear that celebrated in a song) and by referring genitals to childhood sweetmeats is a bit suspect and unpleasant.
Anyway, these are the kind of things that occupy my mind whilst doing all this driving. That and wanting to punch Chris Moyles and shake Jo Whiley and tell her to grow up and get a proper job and stop thinking sheÂ’s young and cool and down with the kids and punch Scott Mills and punch JK and Joel and then punch Jo Whiley, just so she isnÂ’t missing out on the beating and because secretly I know I am the same as her and if I didnÂ’t punch her IÂ’d have to punch myself.
