Nazi Julie Andrews

Oh yeah, this. Originally printed as a sort of preview feature, you can now read it and reminisce about the days before you'd seen the film. If you're into that kind of thing.

Published in The Student, March 2009

In a plush, mahogany-trimmed office in the White House, ferocious spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi), treats a fresh-faced bureaucrat to a particularly brutal keelhauling - punishment for the heinous crime of being 22 years old. It is this scene, from the forthcoming British political satire In the Loop, that pops into my head as Capaldi takes a seat in a soulless hotel conference suite and rasps, “You’re probably wondering why we asked you here this morning”.

Whereas with Capaldi’s fictional Downing Street psychopath such a comment would typically precede an explosive verbal savaging, today the Glaswegian’s notorious onscreen rage seems to have been replaced with a polite weariness that presumably comes with promoting what critics have already tipped to be the best British film of 2009.

Although the film shares much of the same cast, crew and stark, hand-held aesthetic as its TV counterpart, its creator, director and writer, Armando Iannucci (the man behind Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge), insists that In the Loop is no more than the big-screen ‘brother-in-law’ of his hugely successful BBC sitcom, The Thick of It. Nevertheless, it’s a familiar format for anyone who’s seen the show: Tucker, who again appears to be perpetually on the verge of an aneurysm, dashes back and forth, biting the heads off incompetent ministers and paper shufflers who bitch, sabotage and desperately try to look cool as the government collapses into chaos and farce around their ears. In some cases the characters even seem to be renamed versions of their sitcom incarnations - Chris Addison’s Toby, for example, is essentially a reshaped, though entirely welcome variation on sneering government advisor, Oliver Reeder.

This time around, however, the stakes are raised as an unspecified war looms and a spectacularly ill-advised comment from Simon Foster MP (Tom Hollander) sets in motion the beginnings of an unsettlingly familiar and entirely pointless allied campaign in the Middle East, resulting in some fantastically strained exchanges between characters on both sides of the Atlantic. Iannucci first got the idea, he says, from a spin-off episode of The Thick of It:

“When we did the specials, which were an hour long, we saw the opposition party and it made me realise, actually, you can open it up. As long as you’ve got the world fixed in your head and the character of it, the tone of it, you can actually start pulling out a bit and seeing ‘what’s over there’. And then the story of the war and how the Brits were sort of sucked into feeling a little bit important, getting a bit giddy about going out to Washington and being in the oval office and therefore forgetting what it was they were there to do, that struck me as a funny story - so it was taking those two elements, really. And that therefore made the film have that kind of international dimension, or a bigger canvas on which we worked.”

As Iannucci, Capaldi, and Addison bring In the Loop to the Glasgow Film Festival, the quiet confidence with which they speak about the film is understandable. A wildly successful world premiere at Utah’s Sundance festival saw this bleak, almost worryingly realistic satire of US-British politics snapped up by American distributors, and the buzz around In the Loop has been steadily mounting ever since. Capaldi, it seems, has already settled into the life of a superstar - “There’ll be a croissant along in a minute, and you’ll see it has my name on it”, he gloats.

Watching the film, it seems inevitable that the critical reaction should be anything less than rapturous. At the forefront is that unique brand of dialogue that originally shot The Thick of It to success - an inspired juxtaposition of incomprehensible government jargon and sexually violent invective that, in the film, sees a crucial UN vote on whether or not to wage war figuratively described as being ‘fisted to death’, while the Oxford English Dictionary would do well to include the term ‘catastrofuck’ in next year’s edition.

It’s the product of what Capaldi describes as ‘beautifully constructed’ scriptwriting (a slightly odd phrase to attribute to the most verbally violent film released in years), and as an actor, he says, “It’s a constant frustration because I can’t speak, I can’t put a sentence together, I can’t reach the end of a sentence effectively at all - whereas the writers provide these fantastic lines. So that’s what I often get very worried about – Malcolm’s mind’s very fast and a bit of my mind’s fast but not the bit with words.”

That said, it has always been the case that this team has relied heavily on improvisation - Addison recalls receiving a ‘bollocking’ from Iannucci and Capaldi for early incidences of lapses in discipline and ignoring the golden rule: ‘stay scared of Malcolm’. The cast is now evidently a well-oiled machine but with such an established set of actors being carried over from the TV series, surely those American newcomers draughted in for the film’s transatlantic setting would find the prospect of joining them more than a little daunting (even the big names like James Gandolfini of The Sopranos and Mimi Kennedy of Dharma & Greg). Not so, says Addison, who says of the on-screen dynamic between Zack Woods and Anna Chlumsky, “They were astonishing – it was just relentless back and forth”.

“Yeah”, agrees Capaldi. “They made us feel pretty shit.”

Even still, it’s the Brits that steal the show. Watching Tucker appear in Washington, snarling, cadaverous and sandwiched between two mobile phones at all times, you almost feel like a child about to hiss at a pantomime villain - although the urge to cheer is somehow always stronger. It’s the playing-off of the Brits and the Americans against each other: to a passing tourist who requests that he minds his language, Tucker replies “Kiss my sweaty balls, you fat fuck”, while the anticlimactic return to local constituency politics is incredibly, gratifyingly dreary.

Arguably the most intriguing thing about the world of The Thick of It and In the Loop is the almost uncomfortable degree of believability its creator has built into it. According to Iannucci, this hinges largely on his habit of keeping the audience somewhat blinkered:

“In The Thick of It you never see the Prime Minister - so in this one you never see the President. I think it becomes more real and more believable if you see the people who are really there doing the day-to-day stuff rather the big people who get to go around in motorcades.”

The realism that this affords is what makes a satire like In the Loop so unique; whereas series like The West Wing and Yes, Prime Minister exposed the head of state to the audience, In the Loop retains the impression that, yes, this could well be happening in parallel to the glossy world of press conferences and election campaigns based on hope rather than cutthroat mudslinging.

The only note of caution sounded over the film’s release comes from the issue of timing. The fervent support with which much of the western world has reacted to Obama’s election, and the subsequent wave of optimism over US foreign policy begs the question of whether or not this is the wrong time for a satire of this nature.

“No! This is the right time”, comes the reply from Iannucci. “[At Sundance] the audience wanted to kind of get what had been going on in their heads about the last eight years, I think they were just relieved to see it up in front of them and sort of dealt with; but also there is that sense – and this why we’ve deliberately kept it away from being about Iraq and about Bush and made it more contemporary – there was that sense that it could happen again. Because it’s not about evil, nasty people, it’s all about slightly fragile people making occasionally the wrong decision or not quite having the right courage or convictions and the accumulation of all that, people slightly backing themselves into something.

“Now already we’re getting Hilary Clinton being very bullish about Iran and Obama talking about a surge in Afghanistan, and the Middle East and Israel is all very uncertain. I’m not saying ‘Oh, we’re going to have another war’ but I think it’s quite important that we see that you know how these things happen and it’s not to do with one person pushing a button, it’s to do with the collective atmosphere, really.”

So, depending on how the first years of the Obama presidency unfold, this could well be the film that people look back on and see as one of the defining insights into today’s political climate. For the sake of America, the UK and the rest of the world, let’s just hope not.

No, not him

In which I reluctantly admit I wasn't that impressed by the TV debut of Glasgow's greatest. If you don't have the time or the inclination to read this lukewarm review, the summary is as follows: It was by no means shite but he's not really made for TV. Enlightening, I know. Hit iPlayer and see for yourself - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hk9bb/Limmys_Show_Episode_1/

Published in The Student, February 2009.

The internet is a wondrous thing. Where else would you see a haggard Glaswegian man terrorising little girls over the phone, bleeding from the face and making violent threats against Davina McCall while dressed in drag? Well, Glasgow, but now you can also find such horrors on BBC2 Scotland, thanks to the TV debut of online comedy head case, Brian Limond (aka Limmy).

Over the years, Limmy’s sporadic output of bizarre, disturbing and hilarious three-minute clips has earned him a fiercely loyal online fan base, turning him into something of a Central Belt local hero. He’s always been one to get involved with his audience, often wading into petty bitching wars on his comments boards, so when it was announced last year that he was to dip his toe into the rather stagnant pool of Scottish television comedy, the weight of expectation from his online admirers was enormous. Counting myself among them, I reluctantly admit I was a little disappointed.

For the most part, the sketches in Limmy’s Show are lifted directly from his immensely successful 2008 Fringe show of the same imaginative name, so while this means the quality is generally fairly high, they lack the unpolished spontaneity of both the live spectacle and the appealingly scrappy web videos. The programme often finds itself in danger of coming across as one big in-joke, and when Limmy addresses the camera, you know it’s that formidable online audience he’s talking to. While there’s nothing wrong with the odd bout of crowd-pleasing, the show has a tendency to lapse into nonsensical self-indulgence that may rouse a fond, unquestioning laugh from the cult of Limmy but when you consider this is a pilot, some crucial new viewers could easily lose patience. What’s more, the usually authentic tone of his bitter, indignant rants is occasionally lost in the filter of BBC production and instead we get a visibly strained attempt to seem genuinely pissed off.

By no means does all this mean it’s a bad show. It’s certainly no criticism to say that it’s reminiscent of a more twisted version of The Armando Iannucci Shows; there’s a similar blend of observational grumbling and off the wall surrealism, except rather than subtlety and social awkwardness, it’s apparently driven by Limmy’s numerous psychopathic fixations. It’s when the creator displays his talent for comedy and morbidity that the show comes into its own; there’s a brilliantly harrowing series of nightmares involving domestic accidents, some spontaneous toddler-punching and I can think of no other comedian able to get such great results simply from sobbing at the camera, ‘it’s mum, she’s had her head kicked in’. The end result resembles the worst tourist video Glasgow’s ever had and it’s undoubtedly worth your time, if a little off target.

No sleep 'til deadline

So it looks like I'm continuing the trend of posting a string of completely unrelated articles for the sole reason that I like the thought of having a semi-regularly updated blog. If you can call one update per month semi-regular, that is.

This is basically a diary of the night before every academic deadline I've faced over the past year, reformatted to make it look like I'm giving advice. I'm not. It's useless but hopefully mildly entertaining.

Published in The Student, February 24th 2009:

The following is not recommended. The quality of your work, your mental wellbeing and your personal hygiene will suffer: but sometimes these are the things you must sacrifice if you want to get that assignment in on time.

1200hrs: GET UP! GET UP! GET UP! Kiss your pillow goodbye, you’re not going to see it until well into tomorrow. Slap yourself into consciousness, hastily scrub the most visible and most odorous areas of your person and pull on the first thing you find in your laundry basket – after 24 consecutive hours of panic and mental anguish, you will look and possibly smell like death, so don’t kid yourself. Today you are the Jack Bauer of Medieval poetry / property law / rabbit medicine and your equipment is as follows:

- One massive, sturdy bag: The sheer volume of information you’re about to compact in your skull is terrifying and you’ll need to be able to haul a ridiculous number of books from A to B.

- One memory stick: Nothing equals the unbridled dread of losing an entire day’s work half an hour before the deadline. The more paranoid can also periodically email drafts to themselves with increasingly hysterical subject lines that will inevitably become simply ‘aarrgh’.

- Enough money for supplies: what you lose in sleep, you must gain in junk food and repulsive energy drinks.

- Your toothbrush: With the amount of sugar and caffeine you’ll be cramming into your face, your mouth will eventually feel as if you’ve been licking a dusty cat.

1300hrs: As you clamber through the library turnstiles, you should feel that familiar gut-punch of impending doom. Embrace it - this distilled fear may be the only motivation available to you. So, first things first, find your favourite corner of the library and entrench yourself in it. The slightly space-age new fifth floor is invariably mobbed near submission deadlines, so don’t be afraid to employ your skills of intimidation. Sure, it may seem strange to fix someone with a feral glare and growl until they move - but have you ever actually tried it?

Territory gained, blitz the catalogue computers with every keyword you can think of. All the genuinely useful books will be taken, so now is the time for frantically scanning the indexes of books that have been in the library since Appleton was a person and not just an architectural wart. You can compensate for a lack of knowledge and respectable sources with the illusion of enthusiasm and ‘innovative’ use of texts that on the surface seem entirely irrelevant to your subject area but are actually an essential part of ‘placing the issue in a broader social and interdisciplinary context’. Max out your loan limit, bury yourself in a fort of books and skim and cite continuously for a few hours, because there’s no time to read.

1500hrs: By now you may be wishing you had some of those study drugs everyone’s whispering about. I’m not going to condone their use because people tend to throw around phrases like ‘Class B’, ‘unconfirmed side effects’ and ‘the law’. If you choose to take the medicated route, that’s your call but the rest of this guide is based on doing things the hard way. Push on.

1900hrs: Alright, stop. Your brain is beginning to take on the consistency of a fine foie gras and your eyes appear to be looking at one another. It’s time to eat. If you leave the library now you might be tempted to make a break for it and set up camp in the Pentland hills, so it’s probably best to stick to the café. As you stare mournfully at your baked potato, screeches of ‘cheese and ham panini!’ tear out of the kitchen and shudder through your brain. Block it all out. Go to your happy place. There you will find a rough, half-baked plan for your assignment. Don’t let it escape. Race back upstairs and batter out an introduction and a sentences for each of the digestible chunks you have broken it into. Now sit back and make a smug noise.

2000hrs: Have a quick wander round the main study areas and see if you can find a friend in the same horrific situation. As the saying goes, a problem shared is a problem halved – this couldn’t be less relevant here (unless your friend wants to write half your essay for you) but it’s nonetheless quite gratifying to see someone else stuck on the same, rapidly sinking boat. It’s never a bad thing to have somebody to keep pace with, so after a brief duet of bitching and moaning, get your arse back in gear.

2200hrs: Time to tear yourself away from the library. Head to Nicolson Street and stock up on anything caffeinated. Aim for enormous cans and bottles emblazoned with explosions, predators and names like Tropical Painforest, Eviscerator (Strawberry Flavour) and RRAAMMPAAAGE. Solids are probably also a good idea. Go for sweets, lots of sweets. And nuts. And raisins. Basically anything that will act both as a source of false, fleeting energy and as something to fidget with rather than any real sustenance. A wise man once said to me ‘Leave that sugar python alone, you will never tame it’. This is generally good advice but tonight he can just shut his wise face; you need all the sugar you can get, so seize that sugar python with both hands and ride it. This experience is all about the suspension of good sense in exchange for results, so expect to find yourself eating like a seven-year-old locked in a Woolworths Pick ‘n’ Mix section (RIP).

2300hrs: This is the turning point in your coursework ordeal. Head to the north side of George Square, swipe your matric card at the Hugh Robson Building and descend into the depths of The Bunker. Down here, time does not exist. Natural light? Fresh air? Not a chance. Round the clock access, strip lights and endless rows of PCs we can do. Welcome to your new home.

0100hrs: You can almost feel an air of mounting despair in the room, as those with a fighting chance at sleeping tonight gradually filter out. It’s not just its status as a windowless, subterranean hell that gives The Bunker its name, it’s also the fact that the atmosphere is reminiscent of refugee camps in those futuristic war films, in which a mother wails over her ailing child and a headcase with an accordion heralds the apocalypse. One thing prevails: you are all in it together.

0300hrs: Pee break. That’s right, even your toilet visits are scheduled. Male students have the upper hand here, since it’s harder to fall asleep at a urinal than it is to nuzzle into the comfort of a cold, dark cubicle. Alright, cease peeing now. Go back downstairs and aim for halfway by 4am.

0600hrs: There is no escaping the fact that it’s now officially tomorrow. This thought alone should be enough to put the fear of God into you but if not, run upstairs to find the central campus basking in sunlight, while the living start their days. The conviction that you will one day rejoin them should give you a lift.

0700hrs: Pee break number two (it turns out caffeine really is a diuretic). The Bunker’s toilets look like a set from Saw and you are now hopelessly tweaked, so don’t be surprised if, when operating the hand-drier, you find its unholy roar somewhat unsettling. Remember that toothbrush? Use it.

0800hrs: ‘Who are these people and why do they look so healthy?’ The Bunker is now filling up with people in tracksuit bottoms, fresh from the gym and loaded with colour-coded notes and cereal bars. Resist the urge to spit at them, let their conventional sleeping habits and high marks fill you with a jealous rage, and then channel it all back into your work. With your body now building up a resistance to caffeine, this weapons-grade spite will be the fuel for your sprint finish.

1100hrs: Now would be a good time to check that word count. More often than not you’ll find that you’ve spent the past two or three hours in a state of autopilot and that you’re now surprisingly close to your limit. Who knows what you might have written? You were thinking about time travel and feverishly eating pistachio nuts. The best policy here is to assume it’s eloquent, perceptive and methodologically sound, just don’t get caught up in proof reading. You have one hour to conclude, hit the print button and sprint to wherever your submission box may be.

1200hrs: Congratulations, you made it. You now resemble an extra out of Dawn of the Dead, so expect to find yourself staggering around campus, freaking people out with your slack jaw and vacant gaze. With classes now a ridiculously unrealistic option, you have the choice of either wandering homewards and slipping into comatose oblivion for a day, or gathering your coursemates for some celebratory drinks. A word of warning, though: sleep deprivation and irresponsible drinking make for a very, very strange kind of inebriation. You may want to wear a helmet.