Monday 21 February 2011

Pontius Tank Commander



Now who'd have thought it. Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, relishing driving a tank down the high street. I say relish, more a rich ale gravy to be frank. I say frank, but that's a whole other flavour.

Don't know what I'm on about? Don't blame you. Be a good sport and pop on over to the Red Nose Day site if you feel like doing a bit of good, or check out the Walkers Crisps site if you're still in the dark about Al's pie.

In the spirit of PWI (that's "Precipitation with Insight", dude.) we have uncovered the secret ingredient in Al's pie. Check out the Funtrak site to be fully appraised of the Funtrak Mini-Tank phenomenon (where you'll discover that they are sometimes used as a paintball tank - when they go by the name of the Funtrak Paintball Panzer - and are the invention of former RAF Flt Lt Phil Parsons - I don't think he did the pie bit though).

The real mystery here, though, is why a Flight Lieutenant of the British Royal Airforce would dirty his hands with tanks? Best left to the brown jobs I would have though. Actually, even that's no mystery, when you see this video (even without the paintball you can see that the Funtrak Paintball Panzer is a bit of a scream - you might want to turn the volume down a bit):



(Not a great deal of uncovering going on here - I've loved these babies since I got to bomb around in one at the War Museum - you'll have to get your own link, this post is becoming a lot more complicated than I meant it to be.)

Tanks for reading.

Thursday 17 February 2011

And news just in...

Lou Morgan has this...

Half a World Away


Managed to get my hands on a copy of Rod Rees's new novel The Demi Monde: Winter. Read it, loved it, told my mates and went hunting for more - it'll be a year until the next volume is out and my hunger must be sated.

There's the website (natch) and the author's blog and a couple of other 'can't-wait' ers who've also been trawling, so if you're one of them (...no... one of 'us'... no... "...one of the Kept..." geddit?) post me a comment and/or we can follow each other's progress blog-to-blog.

There's loads of, what look like, clues to the overarching universe it's set in, but I've lately taken to keeping tabs on the reviews (particularly over at Amazon - oh, oh just spotted some new ones while I was grabbing that link! Now if I can just... finish... this blog...). Here are some of my faves:

"Part Matrix, part Escape from New York, with a dash of Film Noir and a whole host of imagination."

"Despite the contrived concept, Rees makes the book work: the world he's created is a psychopathic nightmare, while Ella, by contrast, is a touchingly vulnerable heroine whose quest is fraught with both physical and psychological dangers."

"Complete nonsense, of course, but incredibly entertaining."
Kate Saunders The Times Saturday Review (can only find this on the Demi-Monde's own blog)

"What a fabulous book… The Demi-Monde is an unstoppable, deadly serious computer game, a replica of the real world where players experience lethal role-playing and war-gaming… An outsider is thrown into this mix and somehow has to stop the evil escaping from the confines of the game... Devote some quality time to reading `Winter' and you'll be rewarded with a captivating new world, one of smoke and mirrors which closely resembles our own - but don't expect things to turn out quite as you know them."
Rowena Hoseason (Via Amazon)

"Occult Stalinist Nazi Vampires.... ... plan war against Lesbian Supremacists."
P.G. Harris (Via Amazon)

"It is the first book in a series of four which I did find a little irritating."
a hopeful reader (Via Amazon)

My favourite is "Occult Stalinist Nazi Vampires.... ... plan war against Lesbian Supremacists." - if that doesn't make you want to read the book it's reviewing I don't know what will!

On balance though, taking every review into account, the general consensus is… undecided (albeit with a healthy 4-5 stars average over at Amazon). No one's taking it lying down though. It's Marmite for the soul, is this one.

There are the evangelists (of whom I am one) and the detractors (of whom there are some), but I can't think of anyone who's not bothered either way (although "a hopeful reader" does seem to think it'll all turn out to be as big a waste of time as "The Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" or one of those other tiresome stories that just can't seem to limit themselves to one volume).

On Team Boo I've read at least one review by someone who could just possibly be the biggest arse since Keyra Agustina, while on Team Yay there's only really Tex who's cottoned on to the depth of Rees's concept. Having mooched about on the web I've found a short story set in the same universe and loads of extra stuff on the demi-monde website (also the DC universe stuff, but that seems to have been removed).

Note: I've not included a link to the short story or the DC website. Can't do everything for you.

As soon as I can get a minute I'm going to give it a second read, I suspect it''ll yield a bit more every time, so I'll post anything I notice this time that I didn't notice last time and see if you got there first. 

Let me know how you get on.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Format Rights


Just heard the Americans have remade the very British "Skins". Got me wondering about a London based remake of "Mad Men".

What you'd call it, I don't know. The "Mad" of the title refers to Madison Avenue and, since the whole point is not to set it there, the most likely British model for an early 60's creative ad agency would seem to be Collett Dickson Pearce, whose offices were on the corner of Howland Street and Whitfield Street. Hmmn. Maybe I'll leave the name for later.

While we're on the subject of offices, I gather CDP's were a little less than opulent than Sterling Cooper (maybe even less than Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price). It's the usual problem with making glamourous TV set in the UK - everything's just that much smaller, and usually less impressive.

Not so the glittering British talent though, eh? What about the cast? Try this:

Jason Issacs (Lucius Malfoy) - Don Draper (Jon Hamm)
Malcolm McDowell* - Roger Sterling (John Slattery)
David Jason (no, really - think about it) - Bert Cooper (Robert Morse)
James Buckley (Inbetweeners) - Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser)
Sam Janus (Game On, Eastenders) - Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks)
Claire Foy (Little Dorrit, Upstairs Downstairs, Going Postal, The Promise) - Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss)

* I did think Keith Allen (Lily Allen's dad, kids) would be great, if you didn't mind losing the white hair, but there's something about McDowell that makes me wonder why he's never played an ad man before. That mix of charm and sleaze, perfect.

Well, that's how I would do it, if I were to follow the US pattern of re-casting like-for-like and just adjusting the cultural references. After all, why would you buy the format rights to a TV show (that would be Television Programme in the UK - note the double 'm' and the 'e' at the end) and then make something that wasn't in the same format?

Of course, you've always got the option of just setting it in the same universe (in Comic, sorry, Graphic Novel-speak) and having this British agency inhabit the same world as Lane's former colleagues. Characters from one show could pop-up (that's 'guest' in American) in the other. You might get some realistic British accents in "Mad Men" then.

And, in all fairness, some realistic American accents in… whatever the hell we were going to call it.

Answers on a postcard please.