John Walker's Electronic House

The conversation went like this:

So here it is. This is the article intended to stop us banging on about how much we love the DS itself, rather than the game we’re supposed to be reviewing. It’s the piece to celebrate one of the best things to happen to obscure videogaming in years. It’s not Nintendo-sponsored puff. It might sound sycophantic, but that’s the cynical earwax that prevents your hearing happiness. It’s a guide to the little handheld that could, defying the naysayers’ predictions of defeat at the hands of the PSP, standing up to the bullying cries of, “Hey, specky two-screens!” We’re getting touchy-feely about the touchy-feely. This is a love letter to the peculiar.

I’ve long wanted to express this. It’s a piece with which I’m fairly pleased.

One of the best comedy sketches of all time, and you’ve never heard of it.

EDIT: Oh for God’s sake, Google, like YouTube, refuses to host this sketch. Nevermind the millions of hours of every television programme ever they seem to have no problems with, this obscure, utterly unavailable sketch, made for a charity using money exclusively paid by the public license fee is apparently unacceptable. So you can download it from here until the BBC announce to me personally their logic for attempting to keep it for themselves.

It’s a Blankety Blank sketch, shown during Comic Relief 2003, and stars anyone currently useful in UK comedy (only missing Mitchell & Webb).

Peter Serafinowicz is a perfect Terry Wogan, such that you forget it’s not Terry Wogan after a while. Then the panel of ‘celebrities’ are made up of the amazing Nick Frost as Willie Rushton, Matt Lucas as Su Pollard, David Walliams as Ruth Madoc, Martin Freeman as Johnny Rotten, Simon Pegg as Freddie Starr and super-pretty Sarah Alexander as Lovely Liza Goddard (and her perfect typography). Oh, and Paul Putner as a chauffer.

Then the contestants are Kevin Eldon and someone I can’t identify.

What makes it so remarkable is the darkness. It’s often silly, and plays on too obvious look-it’s-dated gags like mentioning Betamax, but throughout there’s a constant seam of malevolence that keeps it peculiarly uncomfortable. I suspect the silliness and token spoofery is the Trojan horse by which the distinctly un-Comic Relief moments slip through. This is never better than Su Pollard’s wretched agreement with Wogan’s anti-Communist speech.

It’s a sketch that manages to be very funny, while cruelly condemning the very most awful aspects of British television. Pegg’s Starr captures the awful man’s worthlessness, and Lucas and Walliams tap into why Hi-De-Hi actors deserved the loathing they received. Serafinowicz beautifully demonstrates the cowardly nature of Wogan types when faced with anything off-script, and I love how Rotten’s stereotypical cynacism is in fact the only honest perspective.

Eczemallent.

I’m not dead. But I was in Paris, in a 1940s brothel (Cafe Carmen, formerly Bizet’s house), surrounding by Nazi soldiers, watching a can-can show before the Americans liberated us. You know, the usual.

Ok, listen.

I DO want to start Brian up again, as much of a pain in the arse as it is to make. But we have to sort a few things out.

Drawing Brian takes ages. Other cartoon sites that update multiple times a week make money from this, selling their infinite t-shirts, carrying adverts, etc. In other words, making Brian cuts into writing (money earning) time, and is fairly tough to fit two or three times into a week. So, er, that’s my lame excuse.

What I want is a new site. Nick has built some really excellent code that is the brains behind the operation – a fantastic little device that lets me upload them to the page without any effort on my part, and also automatically archives, etc. It’s superb. But it needs a better website around it. I’m *useless* at making websites. Disastrous. So I need someone to create a really sleek, really professional looking site for Brian to sit within. For, you know, free.

The second thing I want is to see if I can sell the odd t-shirt. I know people want them, and there’s been requests for other similar merchandisey things. I’m all up for that. It’s not as if Brian has a soul to sell… So advice on that, and suggestions are gratefully received. So there’s at least some sort of incentive on my part for spending all the time making it.

So if anyone is willing to dedicate time to making Brian a site, please email me. You’ll need some understanding of Proper Internet Things to co-operate with Nick’s script. If it’s you, then you are the best person of all time ever today.

So I went on two train journeys in the last two days, and nothing of note occurred.

Oh wow, I am The Internet’s Greatest Hero!

And not for just one reason, not three, not fifty, but TWO.

REASON NO. 1

If you score between 55 and 80% on the test posted below, you get the result:

“I imagine you’re the sort that while at school never fell for the “Would you like to join the Pen One Five Club?” joke. You know, after the first time someone did it to you.”

Which led to a moment of pure blissful wonderfulness, where the Internets’ Greatest Draws-er, Charity Larrison, asked me what the “PEN ONE FIVE” club was. Oh yes. YES!

REASON NO. 2

Blaming me directly in the comments below, Masked Dave has posted a Total Eclipse Of The Heart miming video! And as if to try and compete with the astonishing hotness of the girl from the other video, he seems a rather handsome fellow, ladies and the gay.

Oh, if I were the sort to ever write OMG!!!, it would be right now.

EDIT: It seems to be working at random. Something’s up at OKC. If it doesn’t work, wait ten minutes and try again. Or indeed, do something else.

Scanning through the new release lists for the Nintendo DS, spying games I want to bagsie for review as early as possible, I was suddenly struck by…

Well, that’s fairly obvious.

And so a Test was born: The DS Game or Spam Subject Test

Answers are linked from the results pages.

Right, so I’m going to put as much effort into reviewing this as Atari/Sensory put into making it. It’s rubbish. Don’t bother with it.

I mentioned recently how the DS is so very wonderful because it causes developers to have to think. Well, I’m not wrong. But unfortunately sometimes what they think is, “Blimey, we can just stick any old crap on that and use the stylus like a mouse.”

Sigh.

Tim told Kieron, and Kieron told me.

The internet’s latest, and certainly greatest meme: Miming to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

There’s little question that this is what the internet was made for. And this one is definitely the best. And everyone’s in love with the girl.

I do want to make special mention of the scene in Bandits, where Cate Blanchett’s character does the very same thing in her kitchen, which doesn’t seem to be getting the credit it deserves for starting all this.

But then there’s this one:

Give it time – get past the boring bag-on-head scenes, and suddenly it’s WRIST SLASHING FALLING DOWN STAIRS excellence.

There’s a billion of these, and as Kieron points out, the brilliant bit is that it justifies listening to Steinman’s ridiculous rock opera over and over again.

And that eventually leads to this:

I don’t know who Hurra Torpedo are, but I do know this: ALL songs should be performed by smashing ovens with table legs.

It’s always peculiar when trying to install older software onto a modern computer.

Wanting to play Gabriel Knight (thirteen years old), I had a quick go at simply sticking the CD in the drive and seeing what happened. It had a good go at installing, even wrote stuff to the hard drive, but became very muddled by the surrounding technology.

Fortunately a wise man on the internets had encountered the same problem, and thought to create a new installer for putting the program on XP. Hooray for internet people. And so with that it installed itself nice and sensibly, and even pre-set the compatibility settings for the game to run properly.

Except of course it doesn’t. When trying to launch the game apologetically tells me that it needs a display driver capable of displaying 256 colours or more.

How do you break the news to it?

“I’m sorry, I know this must be hard, but you’ve been in stasis for over a decade.”

“Computers run at… look, sit down. They run 32 million colours now.”

“Yes, I know… No, I know. The human eye can only perceive 10 million colours. You’re not wrong. But look, that’s how it is… No, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Look, would you like some time by yourself for a bit?”