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NOW IN A HIGHLY COMPRESSED FORMAT WITH VISIBLE LOSS OF QUALITY
When I get distracted by other things, and forget to write blog entries, I like to throw a video decoy, to draw attention away from my indiscipline. So it’s back to what I will hatefully refer to as “the vault”, to dig out the stuff that I wrote for 3 Mobile Phones, before they focussed their attentions on ripping apart cartoon animals.
FIRESTARTER & WATERBOY : THE DINNER DATE
The love-lives of Superheroes are notoriously complex – Spiderman has that whole “responsibility” thing going on, Superman also has that whole “responsibility” thing going on, and The Thing keeps accidentally doing the Invisible man up the arse while he’s fucking Batgirl. With great power comes a sharp decline in getting your fingers dirty.
PAUL AND TOM
We never really knew the target audience of 3, although you can imagine the endless fun we had saying that we had a target audience of 3, lol, etc. When we asked their people who were buying the phones, they shuffled uneasily and muttered that they weren’t at liberty to talk about that sort of thing.
So, we had to guess who we were writing for. As the initial 3 packages were £60 or £100 a month, we guessed that the kind of people using the new, frankly hideous phones (with a less than 12-hour battery life) would be early-adopting idiots who had to have the best of everything, with scant regard to the cost or quality of the service.
So, the “skinny” with Paul and Tom was, they’re best friends in a race with no other runners. And they’re competitive. DVDs, Hi-Fi, Home Cinema, they’re both constantly attempting to outdo each other in every aspect of their lives. Lampooning your own audience – very big, very clever. Worked for Nirvana, and there was nothing self-destructive about them.
It worked – this early episode was used in a TV advert. (We were given strict time limits of 30 seconds to begin with, hence us both talking very quickly.) Hearing your own voice in the break of Big Brother isn’t such a bad thing, and getting texts asking “was that you?” was testimony to my poor voice talent.
Forty episodes later, we were running out of ideas. Draw a list of things to be competitive about, and when you get to the 30-40 mark, you start writing things like “extreme novelty socks” and “cocktail cabinet globes”. In one episode, Paul spent the whole sketch dreaming about making his future-baby piss in Tom’s face.
In a moment of hysterical blandness, I wrote this episode – The Wardrobe – and was aghast when it was approved. It’s one of the rare moments when I’m not voicing the only insufferable dick, Simon takes a break from voicing a long-suffering submissive quasi-gay partner, to voice a long-suffering insufferable dick.