Thursday, 24 December 2015

The Queen's Speech

In keeping with the spirit of Christmas, I won't be sending any cards this year: I've just bunged a couple of quid to some charity so I don't have to bother writing and sending a bunch of generic greetings. And I can tell you that I gave to charity instead, and you can bask in my generosity, knowing that the gap on your mantelpiece is actually paying for some dog-food or something!

However, I realise that this might disappoint some people, so I'm reviving another Yuletide tradition: the annual report from the family, photocopied and slipped inside a Christmas card, full of details about how amazing my family is, and all the cool things we did in the past year. 

Only I don't have a family, so it'll be the fragmented selves that torture my daily life with their nihilism, suppressed violence, frustrated desire and existential despair!

Happy Winterval!

I thought it might be nice to offer a selection of cards, so you can cut out and keep them. If you want. Not really too bothered at this point.

Anyway, it's been an amazing year for the Vile Arts! Our chief critic and primary consciousness (not forgetting his physical manifestation) was homeless for two months at the end of the summer! 

Not only did this give Gareth the chance to tell everybody about his situation, it led to some hilarious misunderstandings with members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who insisted that he wasn't really homeless - in much the same way as they aren't really serious about smashing the state! Quipped GKV: 'it just goes to show that I'll never really be destitute, just as long as I don't conform to some hideous stereotype of poverty!'

This did have a happy ending though: Gareth has been admitted to study at Glasgow University. Although his thesis concerns comic books and theatre, he's out-sourced some of the workload to other members of the Vile Collective. Consequently, Mad Cyril has submitted a first draft of All Dramaturgs are Bourgeois: Conversations between Diderot and a Lap Dancer

Speaking of Mad Cyril, we're delighted that his series in Japan - Gor Blimey - has been recommissioned for a second series! After he got banged up for a few months - don't worry, Yewtree wasn't involved! - Cyril became a celebrity in the Far East, with images of him throwing a bin through a sushi shop window making the national news! 

Anyway, Cyril got his own show out of it: based on that Channel 4 racist classic, Banzai, it encourages viewers to gamble body parts on the outcomes of a series of competitions. The highlights of the last season included a whelk eating contest, a 'who loves their mum the most' shoot out (with Babs Windsor and Katie Price as the mums, no less!) and a Feed the Japanese Mick Jagger Lookalike with Mushrooms phone-in! 

We even got Shaun Ryder to do some indents, saying bits out of Performance. Rumour has it that Guy Ritchie wants the film rights.

Stay tuned for more news (or check out YouTube to see Mad Cyril's trailer for season two, which features lots of flashing colours, psychedelic flying dustbins and Cyril's catchphrase Do You Want To Get Sucked In).

Criticulous, meanwhile, has been keeping a low profile. With The Vile Arts going academic, he's been locked in the CCA cleaning cupboard until he can explain what research as practice means.

He did manage to escape for a couple of appearances though: who can forget his routine on The Limmy Show? Apparently, even though he just stared at the camera and explained how he was rejecting existentialism on the grounds that having a body was a form of essence and therefore its humanistic manifestos were inherently contradictory, no-one seemed to notice it was him and not one of Limmy's sketches!

Apparently one BBC producer said that he might as well take over the writing for the entire series, since Limmy was still trading on the goodwill from his old on-line videos, and they were squeezing his comedy into a medium that undermines its humour already! 

Criticulous is already promising an epilogue to his Trilogy, although his original concept - an intimate performance that is a mimetic version of a date - has been rejected by Creative Scotland and around seventy-six women he asked in the CCA in one evening!





No comments :

Post a Comment