The Adrenalini Brothers is coming to POP UK – Sky channel 616 or Freesat 603. Tune in from this Saturday 9-11am and every Saturday from now until the end of time! Or until the end of the licence. Or until your eyes wither into little raisins… whichever happens first
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In this episode of The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers, they get lost in the forest and find a lovely little house with three steaming bowls of porridge on the table…
Trivia: Daddy Bear (who I voiced) was inspired by deceased cockney comedian Mike Reid and had a much lower, thicker accent. He originally said “We just needed an ‘oliday” but this was considered confusing for a non-UK audience. He also originally said “Ow, me bonce!” when he hit his head on the bus roof, but this was changed because the studio in Canada thought he was saying “Ow, me balls!”
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Following the progress of Mark’s heroic journey into the Amazon jungle…
“Great Excitement! I have discovered the bones of another explorer and I do believe he was French! The fool!…”
I found these notes the other day as I was packing up to move house. I went to university with Mark Huckerby, and we used to pin silly notes to each other’s doors when we should have been writing essays. It’s probably the reason we started writing comedy together. Nick Ostler decided to get in on the action too when he noticed how much uproarious fun we were having, sitting alone in our separate rooms, scribbling and sniggering to ourselves.
We were at university when email was still a new thing. The only internet-enabled machines were in the university library and our main use for it was, again, to scribble stupid notes to each other and cast ourselves as the heroes in epic dramas. I sometimes wonder whether the advent of the internet would have given our writing a boost or completely scuppered our chances…
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I found this note the other day, tucked away in an old box with some souvenirs. The corners of the page were greatly yellowed and it looked like someone had burnt the edges so I knew it must be really old.
” The journal of Mark’s exploration of the Inca Amazon jungle with his trusty companion and pack-lugger Dan…
June 1st 1867
The heat is oppresive (sic) and indecent sweat coats my private parts, however the trip proceeds well with Dan’s pungent stench reminding me of the barbarous working class I plan to annihilate on my return to England…”
Click on the picture to read the full journal entry.
Read more of Mark’s obsession with his private parts and the barbarism of the working class soon!
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I’ve recently splashed out on a new computer to replace my aged, groaning PC which was one of the machines we used at Pesky for The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers. The new one has a fast (although loud) graphics card and more memory to play with, which should help me get acquainted with After Effects and 3D packages (I’m starting in Blender, mainly because it’s free, but also because I used it a while ago and always enjoyed piddling around with it). Having been faced with the task of re-installing all my software (Flash, Photoshop, Final Draft, antivirus, Steam, new drivers, Notepad++, Audacity and Lame, Blender, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, CCleaner, 7Zip, Skype, Deluge, KeePass) I found I needed an Office suite, mainly for word processing, but also the occasional expenses/income spreadsheet. I always used to use OpenOffice, but Googling around led me this time to LibreOffice, which is a spinoff of that product. There’s an interesting story behind the difference between the two suites – told here. If you haven’t got time to read it, the short version (from Wikipedia) is that “On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called “The Document Foundation”. The Document Foundation created LibreOffice from their former project in response to Oracle Corporation‘s purchasing of Sun Microsystems over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open source project, as it had on Sun’s OpenSolaris.” Which basically means OpenOffice is dead, and the developers are all working on LibreOffice.
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Usually when I see a sheet of paper tacked to a wall I expect to see the heading “Polite Notice” and for the note to actually be a fully-justified (in the printing sense) passive-aggressive diktat. But this note, on the wall near my girlfriend’s house in London, is the very opposite – cheerful, admiring, heartwarming. I miss the horse too. It was life-sized and gentle, with an expression that told of some horsey inner wisdom. Another one appeared very briefly, up the road a-ways… this one had gold wings. I think it’s gone now.
I just realised I used the word “diktat” in that paragraph purely because I saw it on the back cover of my copy of “Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke”, which arrived fresh from Lulu’s printers today.
I highly recommend it! You can buy it here.
Furthermore, having seen the video of lovely old Dick Van Dyke telling the story of his rescue to Craig Ferguson, I now can’t help but picture Jon and George from numbers 41 + 13 as porpoises!
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I just walked up to the village Co-op to get some beer and a packet of crisps. Not the healthiest diet for a man of my age, but I figured I’ve done a good day’s work and intend to be working for a while longer and I deserve a goddamn beer (Co-op own-brand Czech lager) and some goddamn crisps (Smiths squares, grab bag, but still only about 40g). I have a thing about queues in shops – especially Holland and Barrett – long queues seem to form right after I’ve entered a shop and I suddenly find several people materialise there before me in a previously empty place. There’s obviously a far-reaching covert organisation ordering its minions to mildly inconvenience me.
I brought my own bag to hold the stuff but have always found it difficult to judge the orchestration of the transaction and bagging operation. I usually end up trying to do them simultaneously and find myself unsuccessfully juggling shopping and wallet, worse if combinations of notes and coins is involved, and even worse if the weather is cold and I’m wearing gloves, coat and hat. I’d given the man a tenner and fished in my pocket for a twenty p to make the change easier for him to handle, but I was holding a glove and the bottles were difficult to manoeuvre into the bag and clashed together, threatening to topple over. The man at the till, perhaps wisely, didn’t help me – I think the combination of own-bag, lager and crisps sparked off some nexus of shopkeeperly prudence, some muscle-memory pounded into him over and over again by his steely but wise mentor.
On the way back I passed the bus stop, where I saw a woman who looked like the sloughed-off husk of a pupating Brian Dennehy.
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Here’s some nice graffiti on the wall near my girlfriend’s house.
And a nice message of appreciation from local people.
Nice!
The “bring back the horse” refers to the stencil-art horse that was there before.
The flower boy has come and gone a couple of times, like the horse before him – the last time it was blank (ostensibly because of an accretion of lesser, “cat-piss graffiti” around the image) somebody left a note cut out from a newspaper column asking for the artist to identify him/herself – so they might be given a larger spot to paint on.
Sorry about the crummy quality of the picture – my Nokia C7 camera seemed really keen to focus on the pebbledashing, not the note.
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I went to The Grenadier for Sunday lunch the other day, a lovely little pub tucked away off Knightsbridge. The food (roast beef) and the beer (Timothy Taylor Landlord) were fantastic.
Apparently the Duke of Wellington’s Grenadier Guards used as their officer’s mess and it’s supposed to be haunted by some shade or other… this enormous King Charles spaniel certainly seemed to think so – he/she was fixated on this sideboard for hours. Although the cutlery and condiments were on top of the sideboard so… could have been a sausage.
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To celebrate the 84th birthday of Sir Roger Moore today I thought I’d post this pilot show I made with my buddy Olly Smith in about 2003, using audio recorded in the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo! That recording session is probably the most nervous I’ve ever been… except maybe my driving test.
The show is a little rough around the edges – bearing in mind it was pretty much the first animation of any length I’d done at the time, and I was self-taught!
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