1624: False Start

Hello. How was your day? Mine was almost entirely wasted, unfortunately.

I was all set to have a second interview for a job I’ve been pursuing recently. I took a shower, got suited and booted, went to the toilet several times as my stomach became increasingly agitated thanks to the nervousness that comes with a job interview situation, left the house, caught the bus, caught the train, had a sandwich, took a taxi to my place of prospective employment… and then waited.

And waited some more. And then a bit more still for good measure. (Rolf Harris was declared guilty of indecent assault while I was waiting. I knew because the place I was at had the TV on in the reception area, and also Twitter was all over it before the Americans woke up and started complaining about whatever “Hobby Lobby” is.)

The time of my interview came. I asked where my contact was. No-one seemed to know, and it appeared that my contact didn’t even normally work on that site. A call was put in; my contact’s voicemail was reached, a message was left.

The time of my interview went. Still nothing. Rolf Harris was still guilty. Oscar Pistorius was declared free of mental illness, so his trial would continue. (News again. Twitter didn’t appear to notice this one.)

Nearly an hour passed, but I patiently waited. I didn’t want to be the guy who obliterated his chances by walking out of the door when in fact there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the fact my contact had apparently vanished off the face of the Earth.

And indeed there was; they were sick. A member of the recruitment team came down and found me, spewed a string of apologies made from seemingly pure guilt — I didn’t mind, really; there’s nothing much that can be done if someone is ill — and assured me that the interview would be rearranged for another day. I politely thanked them for letting me know, reassured them that I wasn’t angry or upset at the fact I’d travelled quite a way and had been waiting quite a while — I really wasn’t — and indicated that I looked forward to the true main event, whenever it would actually happen.

Then I walked back to the station — I didn’t know a taxi number, and it was only about a half-hour walk, caught a train, grabbed a coffee and a slice of cake, caught a bus and returned home. Now here I am. (Actually, I’ve been here quite a while; I wasn’t out until 11 in the evening.)

Oh well. A wasted day, then, but not one that I feel particularly embittered by. It could be a blessing in disguise, anyway; now I have more time to prepare for the interview. Though I’m sure that even with this blessing, I’ll still wake up on the day of the new interview, take a shower, get suited and booted, go to the toilet several times as my stomach becomes increasingly agitated thanks to the nervousness that comes with a job interview situation, leave the house and proceed much as things unfolded today.

At least things are happening, I guess. Let’s hope they lead to something a little more… conclusive soon.

1615: As Yet Untitled

There was an interesting show on the TV channel Dave recently — yes, the Dave of my inexplicably popular Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave post — that was, conceptually, very simple but managed to work extremely well. The show in question was Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, a peculiar take on the chat show that was supposedly completely unscripted and off-the-cuff.

Davies hosted the show, accompanied by four guests, usually from the world of comedy. And not the newer brand of comedy that I talked about a short while back; the kind of comedians I liked in my twenties and still like now. People like Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon, Ross Noble — that sort of calibre of performer; contemporaries of Davies himself, I guess. Performers who, in their own comedy material, do a good job of speaking conversationally to the audience rather than relying on heavily scripted routines, skits or one-liners. One-liner-centric comics such as Milton Jones, who are often seen on panel shows alongside people like Bailey, Davies and Eldon, were conspicuous by their absence, since their form of wit isn’t really conducive to a flowing conversation.

And this is an important point, because that’s all the show was: a bunch of people sitting around a circular table, drink in hand, and having a conversation. And like any conversation between a group of friends, the topic meandered from one thing to another at a moment’s notice, with all the natural flow and surprising twists and turns of a real conversation. One moment they’d be talking about dieting methods; the next they’d be talking about whether or not you’d grab a magic floating poo if it appeared in the air before you. (Would you?)

The format — such as it was — worked really well, and it played to the strengths of its participants. Everyone involved seemed very relaxed and natural at all times, and this led to some convincing, free-flowing conversations that were entertaining to observe. The audience was acknowledged and involved without the participants playing up to them deliberately, and it really made me want to see more stuff like this — it couldn’t have been particularly expensive to produce, after all!

When I think about it, I guess all Davies and his team were doing with As Yet Untitled were applying good practices from another related medium — podcasting — to television. And it really worked well. Podcasts are often simply groups of people sitting around chewing the fat, usually on a particular topic but sometimes not even having that much focus — Kevin Smith’s podcast is a good example of this — and such was the case with As Yet Untitled. It was nothing more than a group of friends sitting around talking about whatever they felt like — and in the process it managed to feel infinitely more involving, interesting and entertaining than any number of overly manufactured, lavishly produced, completely false-seeming shows like The X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent or My Dog Can Do This Thing With a Ball That is Quite Good. It was simple, raw, pure; it didn’t need to be anything more, and so it wasn’t.

More, please.

1613: A Distinct Lack of National Pride

It’s that time again, that time that comes around every few years, when I’m supposed to care about football. The World Cup.

I do not care about football. I would go so far as to say that I actively despise football. There was a brief moment in my childhood where I sort of liked it — I played for my Cub Scout pack team, who were legendarily awful (worst result, 20-0 to them; best result, 1-1) and I used to talk about playing football with my erstwhile penpal Joanna (a former classmate who moved away and, unusually for the late ’80s, a girl who liked football) — but once I got to secondary school and we started to be obliged to play football in P.E. lessons, my hatred of it started to grow.

And it is hatred. Irrational, burning hatred. I’m not quite sure of the exact source of my irrational, burning hatred for “the beautiful game”, but it sure is there, and despite several attempts over the years to overcome said irrational, burning hatred I just cannot get over it at all. I hate football. I hate everything about it.

Perhaps it was the fact that football lessons in school were an opportunity for the “cool” kids to shine and be praised, whereas it made me feel utterly useless. Whereas — and I don’t wish to sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but I’m aware I sort of am — I was fairly academically gifted compared to my peers at my secondary school, I was not at all gifted in any way when it came to any form of physical activity. Clumsiness and inaccuracy — a hangover from my childhood, where I had such difficulty with a number of things I had to have various forms of therapy and support to get over it — meant that I was a hindrance to any team I ended up on, which meant I was pretty much always the proverbial (and indeed literal) last one to get picked for teams. It was humiliating.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that when I’m around hardcore football fans — the ones who drink beer by the gallon, shout at the TV and raise the roof of whatever drinking establishment they’re frequenting any time something either good or bad happens on the pitch — I feel physically threatened. Nothing has ever actually happened to me — largely because I try and keep myself out of such situations as much as possible — but whenever I’m anywhere near a group of rowdy football fans I feel worried for my own safety. I even feel worried and scared when I hear, from my own home, drunkards staggering back from the pub late at night, singing football songs as they pass by.

Or perhaps it’s just because I resent being obliged to show an interest in something that I despise so. It’s assumed by almost everyone that you’ll be following the World Cup — it was even an informal question at a job interview I had last week (though to the asker’s credit, she did then joke that “the job is yours!” after I said that I don’t really like football; sadly, I don’t think she meant it) — and if you say that you’re not following it, or that you’re not interested, or that you think anyone who doesn’t put a comma in the statement “Come on, England!” is a barely-literate idiot (okay, perhaps that last one is a tad inflammatory, but it’s not wrong, is it?) you get a funny look of confusion at best, disgust at worst.

Either way, fuck the World Cup. I haven’t been following it at all — aside from the unavoidable, endless posts on social media during a match (I usually go and do something else at this point) — but if I understand correctly, the England team (I refuse to say “we”) is at risk of being knocked out shortly, at which point I will breathe a sigh of relief.

Why? Because there are very few things out there that make me feel more like an outsider than the inevitable national hysteria over the national team’s performance. I hate it. I despise it. And now I’m going to go and do something else to forget about it.

1612: “Box Set” Implies Boxes Are Involved

If you’ll indulge me a moment, I need to complain about something. It’s not anything particularly important or relevant to the world at large, but it has been bugging me recently.

I’ll preface this by saying that I accept that language is in a constant state of flux, as much as many of us may not like the way it is changing on a seemingly daily basis thanks to the fast-moving nature of Internet culture. I accept that words and phrases change their meaning as time goes on — there are probably hundreds of words and phrases we all use on a daily basis that would have meant something completely different fifty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. That’s fine.

What I’m not so cool with is when there’s an obvious attempt by someone (or a group of people) to change the meaning of a word or phrase to something that really doesn’t make sense in the slightest. There are a number of examples of this in modern parlance, but the one that is bugging me in this instance is the use of the term “box set”.

What does that term mean to you? To me, it means a box of something — usually some form of “complete collection”. In the case of DVDs and Blu-Rays, a box set would include multiple discs and encompass either a complete season or a complete run of a TV show, or perhaps a movie and discs of special features. In the case of music CDs, a box set might collect together a band’s singles or albums, or, again, provide a collection of tracks that you might not be able to get in another way. Even books can come in box sets — I used to have a box set of The Lord of the Rings that, rather than splitting the whole story into three volumes, split it down further into its smaller constituent novel-size books, making it seemingly much more digestible. (I still never made it all the way through, but I made it further than I probably would have if I were trying to plough through three volumes of several hundred pages apiece.)

The key thing all of those have in common is that a box is involved. They’re a physical object. They’re a box, containing a set of things. A box set. Do you see how that works? Pretty straightforward, no?

And, then, do you see how utterly stupid it is for digital TV services to refer to both video-on-demand and channels broadcasting a show’s complete run back-to-back as “box sets”? There is no box involved. There is no physical object involved. It is not something you can collect and own; it is not something you can keep. They are not even the same thing. They are, respectively, a complete series available for video streaming, and a complete series being broadcast back-to-back on live television. Granted, the term “box set” is much more concise and people probably know what it means. But that doesn’t stop it just being bloody wrong, all right?

I get the feeling this is the work of some marketer who thought it would be a jolly smashing idea to attempt to rebrand the term “box sets” from its increasingly irrelevant meaning with regard to physical media. After all, if physical media is on the way out, why not take a term that’s becoming obsolete and try to use it differently?

Because it’s dumb. Stop it.

1602: Search Terms

It’s been a long time since I pored over my blog’s stats — largely because I don’t particularly care about them, since I’m writing more for myself than anyone else — but it’s occasionally interesting to take a peek at the search terms that show how people have arrived at this ‘ere site.

For the longest time, my blog’s most popular post was this one, which features animated GIFs of stickmen doing various offensive things to one another. People would show up at my blog through search terms like “stickman sex gif” and the like — why on Earth were so many people searching for this sort of thing when there is far better porn available on the Internet? — and this, consequently, led to that post being consistently popular. Alongside that, some things I wrote ages ago about classic PC games Divine Divinity and No-One Lives Forever proved consistently popular, as did my guide on how to play Kairosoft’s mobile game Pocket Academy.

It’s only been fairly recently that those consistently popular posts have finally fallen off my top search terms — although, looking today, Pocket Academy is still there. Instead, we have a few newcomers.

First up was this post, in which I bemoaned the repetitiveness and utter stupidity of “[brand] sponsors [programme] on [channel]” bumpers on commercial TV channels — specifically, the infuriatingly asinine “Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave” campaign, which features a middle-aged, bearded man speaking with a funny accent and saying painfully unfunny lines clearly written by a bored advertising executive who was apparently once told by someone that they were “really funny” more to shut them up than anything else. Since said advertising campaign is still running on Dave, it seems there’s a certain degree of interest in this campaign — search terms include people asking who the guy is (I have no idea) and, so far as I can make out, why the fuck it exists.

It seems I’ve become a source of information on certain types of games and types of entertainment, too. Someone arrived today looking for a map of the Endless Road dungeon in Demon Gaze (while I am playing Demon Gaze right now, you won’t find any maps here, sorry), while another person wanted to find out which of the in-game races had the most HP. (I have no idea there either.)

Alongside that, there are just plain bizarre pairings of search terms, the oddest of which is kiss x sis and doctor who, an unholy fusion of a somewhat ecchi anime and the classic, resurrected BBC sci-fi series from which this blog takes its name, but which I do not.

Then there’s the person asking “is bovril good for you” — I have no idea, sorry, though with how salty it tastes, I doubt it — and “waiting for the phone to ring” which, I assume, led them to this post, or possibly this one.

It paints an interesting picture of the people I am somehow attracting to this site — or at least, the type of people that Google feels is appropriate to send over here. Everyone is welcome, one and all; I can’t promise you’ll find what you’re looking for, but hopefully you’ll stumble across something fun in the meantime.

1600: Clover and Socks

As some of you will remember, we got a couple of new(er) rats a while back, initially to give Lucy Rat some company after her cagemate Lara died, and then to keep each other company when Lucy passed away not all that long afterwards.

It’s been interesting to get to know Clover and Socks since we’ve had them, as they have markedly different personalities to Lara and Lucy. While Lara was a lazy rat who enjoyed attention and Lucy was an energetic psychopath who also enjoyed attention, both Clover and Socks are much more reserved. Scared is perhaps the word, although it seems to be the strangest things that set them off — certain noises and certain sudden movements will send them bolting for the nearest piece of shelter, but with other things they’re absolutely fine.

I’m not sure if they’re actually proving more difficult to “socialise” than Lara and Lucy were, because in retrospect it was relatively late into both of their respective lives that they started coming out of the cage of their own volition, exploring, responding to stimuli and, indeed, doing absolutely anything for a prawn cracker or piece of lettuce. Socks and Clover, meanwhile, are both willing to come out and explore a bit — Sock in particular likes climbing up on top of the cage where she has a Lego house in which she can hide — but they’re not yet willing to be picked up or petted with any reliability. It’s a shame, but hopefully they’ll come around eventually.

They do both have very distinct personalities that they exhibit when they’re not running for shelter, however. Socks is curious, cheeky and keen to run around — both of them will run on the wheel we originally got for Lara and Lucy, but Socks does it with far more regularity — while Clover is a little more timid and careful about what she does for the most part. I say “for the most part” because there are times when she’ll skitter around the cage, dig a big hole for no apparent reason and then look out as if to say “…what?”

Rats are very interesting pets to have and, despite the fact they have a slight tendency to keep antisocial hours — Socks and Clover both tend to get up and be most active when Andie and I are going to bed — they’re good company. They’re not the same kind of pet as a dog or cat, of course — while those animals will happily wander around and come and see you when they damn well feel like it (although most dogs, in my experience, are attention whores even more than cats are), rats are a pet you have to actively engage with due to the fact that they’re — in most cases, anyway — not free to just roam around your house at will.

It’s kind of a shame that they’re not in some ways, as it’s fun to see them wandering around on the floor. And it was some “out of cage” time that gave me the fondest memory I think I have of Lara in particular: it was back when we lived in Chippenham, and we’d let them out for some reason — I forget exactly why, perhaps to clean them — and I was upstairs doing something on the computer. Suddenly, I felt something on my feet. Thinking it was just an itch or perhaps a fly or something, I moved my foot, but then looked down only to see Lara trundling around on the floor of my study; she’d climbed all the stairs in our Chippenham house — which must be like ascending a mountain for a rat — and come to see me, presumably by following my scent.

I miss Lara and Lucy, particularly as Socks and Clover are yet to come out of their shells enough to interact with us a great deal. But I’m sure we’ll become friends eventually, and then I’m sure we’ll have some fun, silly stories with them, too.

1596: Efforts

Trying to stay positive. Got up early today, went for a swim before doing anything else (only 25 lengths, alternating crawl and my laughable excuse for a breast stroke, but you have to start somewhere) and then took the bus (the bus!) back. (I managed to find all the Obsidian Mushrooms in Demon Gaze during the bus journey back, which treated me to some enjoyable scenes with catgirl maid Pinay, so it was very much worth it.)

Got back. Applied for two jobs, nearly applied for a third before I realised I’d already applied for it last week, took delivery of our new table (it’s humongous, and it has metallic animal feet, because it clearly belonged to an old lady before ending up in the British Heart Foundation shop), attempted to assemble new table, was mostly successful, did some work, played some Game and Wario (the freebie game I got with Mario Kart 8, which I will almost certainly write more about tomorrow evening after a night of multiplayer fun) and… that’s about it, really.

I feel like I’ve got quite a bit done today, and, as usual, it can be attributed at least partly to getting up reasonably early and getting started on things before I have to do stuff. I think this every time I get up early, then I go and get all depressed and find it hard to get out of bed until immediately before I have to start work. (Also our new bed is really comfy.)

As I say, trying very hard to stay positive right now, but it’s a challenge. Too much is unknown. Several of the jobs I’ve applied for won’t be letting me know one way or another for two or three weeks, and by then that’s the time I will really need to have a new job sorted and ready for me. But I guess there’s not a lot I can do about that. As time ticks on, it becomes more and more likely there’ll be a gap between my current job ending and my new one starting. I just hope it isn’t too long.

In the meantime, I just have to keep doing what I can in order to stay as positive as it is possible to stay under the circumstances. I have to be grateful for the things I do have, rather than upset about the things that I don’t have — even if the things that I don’t have could cause potential difficulties. I can’t think about that, though. I have to assume that things are going to work out all right. I have to assume that things are going to be fine, and that by this time next month, I’ll be wondering what on Earth I was panicking about.

Hmm. Well, it’s going to be a challenge, but I guess I have no option but to try right now, huh?

1595: Other Side Up

A sense of low self-worth tends to coincide, oddly enough, with those times in your life when things aren’t going all that well. The time when your actual worth is lower than it could be, in other words.

I’m going through one of those phases right now, and it sucks. There’s only so much I can do about it in the short-term, though. But there are probably at least a few things I can do, starting with outlining all the things that are causing me stress, anxiety and depression right now. This isn’t for the benefit of any of you kind enough to read my self-indulgent ramblings: I’m simply hoping it will prove to be something of a cathartic exercise, or something.

Okay. Number one on the list of Things That Are Getting Me Down is the lack of job. I still technically have a job until the end of June, of course, but after that I’m on my own. Far from making me feel relaxed, though, I just feel incredibly awkward about the whole situation. I’ve pretty much been cut off from the rest of the staff — partially voluntarily, since I didn’t really trust myself to contribute meaningfully to staff meetings when at risk of bursting into tears at any moment — and am being largely left to my own devices. With the site’s shift in editorial direction, I don’t have to worry about news stories, either, so that takes a bit of pressure off, but it’s still a bit of a weird situation.

The main thing causing anxiety in this instance is the fact that I don’t yet know what I’m going to be doing after the deadline of the end of June is up. I have a few applications in, but I’ve only heard from one so far, and that was a rejection. I have some more positions I need to apply for, but I also have to contemplate the possibility that I might not get any of those, which might leave me in a position where there doesn’t appear to be anything worth applying for. What do I do then? Aim lower? That doesn’t sound right, but it might be the only option.

My issue, as I’ve pondered on these pages once or twice in the past, is convincing employers that the work I’ve done for the past few years is directly relevant to something that is… well, not directly related. I am good at writing about video games. I am good at writing in general. However, I worry that there’s still a certain amount of “stigma” around professional games journalism, like it’s not a “real job” and that, when attempting to apply for a position at a “real” company, I’ll be judged negatively for the hard work I’ve put in over the last few years.

This is an irrational and probably completely incorrect assumption, of course, but as I said, I’m simply spouting off the things that are causing me anxiety right now.

Unrelated to the work issue is the fact that I’m just generally feeling pretty shitty about myself at the moment, particularly with regard to my body image. I’m painfully aware that I’ve put on loads of weight over the last few years, and I can’t shift it. When I get depressed, I often turn to comfort eating, and it’s a difficult habit to break. Right now, I’m making a conscious effort to try and eat more healthy things wherever possible, but sometimes you just want a chocolate bar or a cookie.

I can feel the additional weight translating into unfitness, too. I get breathless, my legs ache and creak, and I feel crappy most of the time. I need to get up, about and being active again, but I know that for a good while after I start doing it, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to be difficult, I’m going to be gasping for breath and I’m going to feel like I’m not making any progress. And the prospect of that is putting me off doing it in the first place — which, of course, is making me feel worse about myself.

I think I need to try and ease myself back in with something reasonably “easy” like swimming, and later graduate back to the gym and running and the like when I’ve built a bit of strength back up. I feel like a useless lump at the moment, so I don’t know how long that is going to take, but I feel like I probably should start on this sooner rather than later. This week, perhaps; I already joined the gym in town shortly before we moved, so I just need to try and get into some good habits, getting up early and going in the morning.

If I can stick to that, that solves part of my semi-conscious objections to indulging in regular exercise and the like. My main issues are that I get too ambitious too quickly — deciding I’ll go to the gym every day every week, for example — and then lose motivation quickly, and also that I feel like taking time to do exercise is time that I’d rather spend doing literally anything else. I don’t really enjoy exercising while I’m in the state I’m in at the moment; it’s demoralising, embarrassing and painful. I need to work through that pain, somehow.

All of the above, then, is conspiring to make me feel monumentally crap. I wish I could say that I knew things were going to be okay, and I have plenty I should be grateful right now — not least of which is the fact that Andie and I now own our own house, and with a little more work on it, it will be very much how we want it. But there are more immediate concerns weighing on my mind before I really feel like I can relax and enjoy that, and I need to figure out how to address those sooner rather than later.

1594: The Changing Times, As Seen Through the Lens of Challenge TV

Challenge, for those of you not in the UK, is a digital television channel whose programming consists almost entirely of gameshow reruns from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. There’s the odd bit of original programming and occasional repeats of more recent stuff, but for the most part it’s about enjoying old gameshows.

One of the most interesting things about rewatching old gameshows in 2014 is pondering the sort of people who are on them — specifically, their jobs. In the older stuff you get on Challenge — stuff like Blankety Blank, 321 and any number of other shows with wobbly cardboard sets and LCD readouts of the participants’ scores — people tend to have very straightforward jobs. “I’m a plumber,” one contestant will say. “I work in a shop,” another will say. “I’m a newsagent,” another will say.

Compare and contrast with the sort of contestants you get on today’s shows — best exemplified by Challenge’s repeats of shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Catch Phrase and The Chase — and it’s a very different situation. “I’m a management consultant,” one will say. “I’m a business development manager,” another will say. (Andie informs me that this is the new name for what we used to know as “salesmen”.) “I’m an information technology technician in an educational establishment, specialising in campus-wide distributed network solutions,” another will say. (I made the last one up. Sounds convincing, though, doesn’t it?)

Notice the difference? That’s right, modern jobs all have utterly meaningless titles. Rather than being a straightforward description of what the person actually does, modern job titles obfuscate the person’s true purpose behind layers of doublespeak, presumably in an attempt to make everyone seem more important than they actually are. It’s probably the same reason that Asda has a “Colleagues Entrance” instead of a “Staff Entrance”, and why Waitrose employs “partners” instead of, you know, people who work in a supermarket.

It’s a trend that’s grown over the last ten or twenty years in particular, and it’s not a particularly positive change for the use of clear English. There seems to be a mistaken assumption that using the longest, most complicated and fiddly words possible to describe something makes it sound more “formal” and “intelligent” — it’s the same reason why people in suits incorrectly use “myself” instead of “me” when they’re trying to impress clients or superiors — but I’m pretty sure that most of us are wise to this little trick by now. Any time someone starts “myself”-ing at me, I just want to shake them and say “speak like a normal person! Do you talk to your friends like that?”

Actually, talking about this conjures up a number of fairly amusing mental images, the first one of which that sprang to mind was — don’t judge me — a management consultant having sex and breathlessly gasping that “the copulation between myself and yourself is approaching its conclusion, please prepare the personal cleanliness solutions for the removal of errant ejaculate from those areas in which it was unintended to fall”, by which point he would have probably already jizzed all over her tits anyway, rendering the entire statement moot and the pair of them sitting in slightly uncomfortable silence, both wondering why he can’t just say “I’m gonna cum” or “unnnnnggggghhhh” like a normal person.

[glances back at how this post started and where it ended up.]

I, uh… sorry, I don’t know what happened there. That sort of escalated quickly, didn’t it? Oh well. It’s late, all right? My brain is wandering to weird places and I apparently need to get some sleep.

1592: Funnymen

I really enjoy a good bit of stand-up comedy — emphasis on the good — and so it was with some delight that I recently discovered the work of Louis C.K.

Louis C.K. is someone whom I’d heard mentioned before — mostly by my American friends — but I’d never checked out his material before. I’m always oddly wary of American stand-up — I think it’s because I’m conscious that a number of stand-ups from the British Isles have struggled to make an impact in the States, so I find myself wondering if the reverse is true, too. Past experience — the best example I can think of being Bill Hicks — has demonstrated that good American comedy can very much still be funny on this side of the Atlantic, though, so I’m aware I’m being irrational; it’s just one of those things.

Anyway, Louis C.K. is extremely funny. I’ve watched two of his stand-up shows on Netflix and the first episode of his TV show Louie to date, and all of them have had me properly laughing out loud. He seems to strike a good balance between shocking — his discussion of the words “faggot” and “cunt” during the opening section of one of his shows is a particularly good example of this — and witty, intelligent, observational comedy with just a touch of cynicism. Meanwhile, Louie appears to show that he’s a good character actor, too, with some wonderfully deadpan scenes throughout — my favourite being “…can you stop smiling exactly the same way at me every time I look at you?” “…No.” — coupled with just the occasional dip into absurdity. I’ll have more to say about that when I’ve watched a few more episodes, I’m sure.

The reason why discovering Louis C.K. is such a pleasure is because I feel UK comedy isn’t in a particularly good place right now — at least not the stuff you generally see on TV. There’s still stuff like Dara O’Briain and Russell Howard being shown on repeat-centric channels such as Dave, of course, but the main face of British comedy right now appears to be Russell Kane, whom I just simply don’t find particularly funny. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or simply because I don’t like his style, but I find the show he comperes — BBC Three’s Live at the Electric — fairly excruciating to watch, not only for Kane’s sequences, which are by far the strongest element of the show (which isn’t saying much) but for the truly dreadful, painfully unfunny sketches and skits that punctuate the format.

Louis C.K., meanwhile, has a style that I very much like. There’s an air of seemingly defeated cynicism about a lot of it, with occasional crescendos into furious anger about something or other. He never seems to take it too far, though; the rants tend to stop before they become too preachy, and any tension built up through the yelling is usually defused nicely by a pithy comment or a reminder of what he was talking about beforehand. It’s a style I really like.

Anyway, if you’ve never checked out the comedy of Louis C.K. and you’ve been meaning to, I’d encourage you to do so at the next opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve seen, and I hope there’s more material out there to discover. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying the Louie series.