The crowdfunding campaign hasn't raised so much as a penny (at the time of writing this, maybe there will be a surge on the last day having taken it to the wire) because people have misunderstood my intentions altogether. For this reason there are several projects that aren't going to come to life this year but as I said on my birthday, this year hasn't gone too badly. As long as all my current meetings and planning goes ahead I will finish 2016 by directing a play, which is pretty fucking cool. Another silver cloud is that although there won't be a vinyl version of last year's kazoo album there will be a compilation album of live tracks from The Random Saturday Sessions to buy on those fashionable cassettes, it's the future. I will start publicising the cassette launch gig once I have dealt with the small matter of running a stage at this year's Hockley Hustle again. It's nice to be so busy after a shaky start to the year and it feels quite grown up to be breaking up for Christmas by giving a talk about Charles Dickens. If I pull my finger out I should get my film finished too because I have had to put that on hold due to road surfacing works ruining one of my shots. 

This all got me to realising that there's still plenty left that I want to do, whether on a large scale or independently. I used to think that I had to do everything when I was young but while I have always been creative I never really knew what it was I wanted to do. Comedy was always what I gravitated towards and maybe the reason I didn't gain the confidence to have a proper go at stand up was that I was too young when I tried it and therefore didn't have the life experience needed to write comedy. When I compere at gigs I always throw jokes in and I am good at interacting with an audience, but I don't think I could write a decent set. Now that I know there are things I am good at I don't want to be pinned down to one specific area which is why as much as I enjoyed radio (and would do it again in a heartbeat) I wasn't happy at the way it took me away from nearly every other avenue. That could of course be because I was doing so much, at the peak of my radio work I was doing two shows a week of live radio at a total of five hours, which is harder than it appears because of all the planning, and recording another hour to send to the station in America I worked for. With doing the podcast I am not beholden to any of the conventions of radio and can record it when I want, and it can be as long as I want to make it. At the moment I have acquired the discipline to record several shows at once in order to have episodes banked, this sacrifice of a few hours enables me to have a less stressful weekend as it removes the need for any sort of deadline. 

When I was young I wanted to be rich and famous but I am glad that it didn't happen in a way. The rich part might have been nice but what if I had become so well known for something (at one time I wanted to be a children's television presenter and even auditioned for Blue Peter) that I wasn't able to experiment in the more conceptual art/time wasting bollocks side of things? It is a pretty wonderful thing to be able to have an idea and fly with it not caring a jot if anyone likes it or gets it, I think not getting it is a problem as people think I'm being serious when I'm actually being ridiculous and ridiculous when I'm actually being serious. Perhaps I should hold up signs saying 'serious' or 'ridiculous' so that people understand, or would they think that someone trying to do something while holding up a sign saying 'serious' was in itself quite ridiculous. I can't wait until I'm dead and people realise what a genius I am/was*, but it will be too late for me to use it to my advantage.

(*I might have looked like I was being serious when I wrote that, but I was being ridiculous, or was I? It is confusing, no wonder nobody understands).

My blog about clowns earlier this week set me thinking about wanting to do something along those lines, not be a clown myself but create something with clowns as a theme. I do have a comedy sketch written involving clowns that hasn't been made yet (hit the PayPal donate button at the top of the page if you are curious) but that is more circus related than simply using clowns. Some kind of photo project maybe, or something using women as clowns, that to me would be so sexy. It takes all sorts. On the Internet there are photographs of women dressed and made up as erotic clowns, so someone told me, it isn't as if I intentionally Googled 'sexy naked female clowns' and if you think I did then you're wrong. 

Seriously though, there are things that interest me in different areas of entertainment. Puppets for example, either the hand and rod technique used in The Muppet Show or marionettes. Thanks to cheap cameras and the ease of uploading there's also the possibility of making something tangible using hand or even finger puppets. When it comes to puppets though, the one thing that I really would like to do something with is Punch and Judy. I know that there are arguments against Punch and Judy these days because of the fact that he hits his wife and child, although I haven't seen a Punch and Judy show for a very long time so for all I know they might have changed the story. Children today are possibly more sophisticated with their computer games and Snapchat but before all that modern shit engulfs them shouldn't they be exposed to as much old fashioned entertainment as possible, the circus too for that matter. I have somewhere in my files a synopsis for a modern day dark comedy drama with Punch and Judy as the central characters who have now split up. Not wishing to go into detail with this as I don't want it stolen like some of my other ideas, but if you could see your way clear to a donation using the above button then maybe it could happen.

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 This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here. 

The latest episode of The Random Saturday Sessions is here.

Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.

Picture from Elizabeth Street

I might have saved my blog about the new version of The Muppet Show until today if I had realised that today marks twenty five years since the death of Jim Henson. Most of this afternoon was spent on YouTube looking at some of his less well known works. If it wasn't for YouTube then a great deal of material, not just Henson's but an assortment of obscure interviews, radio shows, films, and sketches, would probably not have seen the light of day. It is a pity that such a service wasn't available when the BBC were busy wiping tapes to make room, thus ruining history by recording over Top of the Pops, Doctor Who and countless others. 

To the layman who only knows about The Muppets, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock, it is worth looking into the early work and the development of characters that eventually became world famous such as this early version of Cookie Monster or what could be Kermit the Frog with a few adjustments. The most interesting find was a short film from 1965 called Time Piece, at just over eight minutes long it is a film that doesn't seem to go anywhere but you can't help watching just to make sure, a bit like the feeling that anyone who watched Christian Marclay's 24 hour long film The Clock will remember. 

Jim Henson was lucky to live in an era where you could try anything once and be allowed to be creative. It has been reported recently that he never intended to make a full time career in the puppet business which makes me wonder what direction his work would have taken had he not died so young. Films such as Labyrinth and the later series The Storyteller moved him away from the light-hearted work that he had become known for. Part of me wishes I had never known this because it is obvious that The Muppets were treated as extended family and something he cared about, to think that he died unfulfilled creatively is another tragedy altogether (and something I am scared of happening to me). Once he had sold The Muppets to Disney he would have had the luxury of enough money to experiment just as he had all those years ago, and with technological advancements improving all the time there is no telling what he might have achieved. 

No podcast this week.

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May housekeeping 

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The Sunday Alternative is a free weekly podcast. I am aiming to start making this podcast in a studio with live bands in session. This will cost at least £50 per episode so please give whatever you can.

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@SteveOliver76 

Picture from The Bottom Wiki

After my marathon sleep yesterday I was up rather early this morning, and although I could have done anything I wanted to, I chose instead to do very little. Mandi had volunteered to go into work for a few hours (rather than the standard double time that everyone gets for Sunday work, she gets double and then some, I can't remember if it is double time and a half or something like that) which gave me the peace and quiet to enjoy being ill. I took Jack for a walk and then made myself some breakfast, had a shower to help me feel better, and did the laundry. Apart from that I had a very enjoyable day doing nothing.

I went to bed before Mandi last night and she didn't change the clocks so she was late for work, not that it matters on Sunday overtime of course but she did feel a bit of a buffoon. Clock change day is confusing enough for the nation as a whole without waking up with the clocks wrong. I don't feel as if I lost an hour of sleep because I was so well rested, but then again I doubt anyone ever really feels deprived of an hour in bed seeing as the clocks change happens on a Sunday when getting out of bed is optional. The time on my phone couldn't be changed, which I was surprised at considering that a smart phone should really do it automatically. In the end I had to go through all the different international time zones and find one that matched British Summer Time, so my phone now presumably thinks we are in West Africa. Being up early and having nothing to do felt like such a luxury, especially when I checked the time and realised that in 'real life' it was actually an hour earlier.

The box set of Bottom got another good dent made in it today, I am now on the second series and it's interesting to see how it became more of an ensemble peice (the characters Spudgun and Hedgehog became more of a fixture in the second series which slightly altered the dynamic between Ritchie and Eddie). As for special guests, one particular episode, Parade, saw Julia Sawalha, Robert Llewellyn, Carry On actress Patsy Rowlands, and Chris Langham. A good supporting cast for a sitcom but it feels strange seeing Langham in anything these days. He was one of the original cast of Not The Nine O'Clock News, a writer for Spike Milligan and on The Muppet Show, and for many years a 'nearly' star until his roles in Help and as one of the original cast members of The Thick of It made him a household name after thirty years on the sidelines. Just as awards and accolades were about to be thrown at him, he was arrested by Operation Ore for downloading and possessing child pornography and imprisoned after a trial. Aside from a few small parts he has not worked since and received the same airbrushing that all sex crime celebrities do, apart from one which is something I find strange. Langham was cleared of the accusations of sexual assault and had to sign the Sex Offenders Register because of the porn offence, despite his protestations that he did it purely for research and to make sense of his own childhood abuse. I am not saying we should put offences involving children into a grading system, nor am I calling for Langham's forgiveness, but Pete Townsend carries on with his career and has never been called to account for committing the same crime for the same reason/excuse. Is it fair that there seems to be different rules for different people?

Due to illness there is no edition of The Sunday Alternative this week.

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March housekeeping 

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Every penny that I receive via the PayPal button will be used to fund future projects such as podcasts, short films, comedy sketches, documentaries, and more. They will be made available for free online and I will not personally benefit financially. All help is greatly appreciated.

steveEoliver@gmail.com

@SteveOliver76 

We’re doing a sequel
There’s no need to disguise
The studio considers us a buyable franchise
We’re doing a sequel
The studio wants more
While they wait for Tom Hanks to make Toy Story 4
(‘We’re Doing A Sequel’ – Bret McKenzie)

It was inevitable that the success of The Muppets in 2012 would spark an interest, but there was a worry that another Muppets film wouldn’t be as good. I wrote at the time that the post-Henson years weren’t brilliant, The Muppets Christmas Carol being the last great Muppets vehicle. Half-arsed attempts were made in the intervening years to keep the name alive, but nothing happened that made people sit up and take notice until the release of the 2012 film. You had to imagine that the gang hadn’t worked together since 1992 for the last film to work, and it did work due to the fact that it was written by people who genuinely loved The Muppets and wanted to do it justice.

The Muppets shouldn’t really be squarely aimed at children, neither should it be squarely aimed at grownups, and this has been the problem with the Muppets during the wilderness years. Since the Disney Company took over they haven’t exploited the full potential of the Muppets, keeping them in the public eye for seemingly no other reason than because they had paid a lot of money for the privilege. The straight to DVD ventures such as Kermit’s Swamp Years was aimed at small children who might not even have known who Kermit the Frog was. Jim Henson couldn’t get The Muppet Show made in America because he was associated with children’s television due to Sesame Street, and he couldn’t convince anyone that adults would watch a show that starred puppets. It wasn’t until he found a backer in the UK that The Muppet Show saw the light of day, broadcasting in the not entirely child friendly 8pm time slot on Sunday nights. My dad tells me that this was the talk of the workplace on Mondays, and he was unable to join in due to my fear of The Muppets that used to mean it got switched off. There were no means available back then to watch programmes again if you missed them. I am no longer scared of The Muppets.

The Muppets played on this affection held by people of a certain age, using clever back references and pulling at the tear ducts right at the end with a beautiful rendition of ‘Rainbow Connection’. Maybe this helped to bring The Muppets to a whole new generation of fans, or maybe it reminded the grownups how much we loved them in the first place, maybe a bit of both. What is certain though is that the film was a huge success and as the opening song says, making a sequel is how they do it in Hollywood.

Once again they have managed to make a ‘proper’ Muppets film that Jim Henson would have made. Drawing on the past for inspiration while keeping an eye on the future of the Muppet machine, Muppets Most Wanted is a classic Muppet film through and through. Starting right at the end of The Muppets, the gang wonders what they’re going to do until they realise that the camera is still rolling, prompting Statler and Waldorf to glumly predict the inevitable; that a sequel is on the cards. This kicks in the opening song and dance number ‘We’re Doing A Sequel’, brilliantly satirizing the fact that Hollywood can’t let a good idea die with the line “And everyone knows the sequel’s never quite as good”. Sadly, this is the case as the film does have its slow moments. The slow moments are outweighed by classic Muppet brilliance thankfully, sending the gang on a world tour to capitalize on their recent success. The world tour is actually a con trick that will see the Muppets accused of a series of daring robberies, the theatres all being next door to museums and banks. Ricky Gervais plays the role of Ricky Gervais David Brent Andy Milman Bertram Pincus Mark Bellison Dominic Badguy (“pronounced Badgee, it’s French”), who convinces the gang to take The Muppet Show on tour. Badguy is working with Constantine, an evil Russian frog who not only is the world’s most dangerous frog, but also shares a resemblance to Kermit.

Although it would have been easy for the filmmakers to simply pull a spare Kermit puppet from the props cupboard and stick a mole on his face, they actually made a puppet that was intentionally slightly different. The eyes are the biggest giveaway, along with his eleven point collar being shorter in length.

Escaping from a high security Siberian Gulag, Constantine swaps places with Kermit by ambushing him and gluing a mole to his face allowing him to be captured and re-imprisoned. With clever use of green concealer, Constantine manages to pass himself off as the Muppets beloved leader to carry on with the tour and the master plan to steal the Crown Jewels. The tour doesn’t really matter, with Constantine (who everybody thinks is Kermit) allowing the gang to have creative freedom to do what they like on stage. The Electric Mayhem do a four hour jam, Gonzo does an indoor running of the bulls, and Miss Piggy sings a collection of Celine Dion songs. Dominic has been bribing newspapers to write glowing reviews, giving the gang the incentive to carry on performing at venues in Berlin, Madrid, Dublin, and London.

The plot tips its hat to The Great Muppet Caper in many of the heist sequences, especially with a Muppet being set up and imprisoned, only for the baddies to be beaten in the end. Musically, the film’s soundtrack once again mixes brand new songs with some cleverly done covers, ending with a re-working of ‘Together Again’ (sang as ‘Together Again, Again’) from The Muppets Take Manhattan. It was also good to see appearances from Muppets who hadn’t been seen a great deal in recent years; Scooter, Rowlf, Wayne and Wanda, Lew Zealand, and several ‘whatnots’ from The Muppet Show.

Ricky Gervais is someone who has never before put a foot wrong creatively, responsible for such gems as The Office, Extras, and Derek among other things. He has always had enough integrity to turn down unsuitable roles, (apparently being offered a load of low standard film roles after the success of The Office), until his recent inexplicable car advert. The Muppets have a long history of being a sought after guest spot, look at the guest list of The Muppet Show and the people who made cameos in the films, even the less good efforts. It is entirely understandable that Gervais would jump at the chance to appear with The Muppets because you just don’t turn that sort of gig down. There was a worry that he would take over things and turn the film in a Ricky Gervais vehicle with his sometimes overbearing presence. Thankfully, despite his limited acting range he does take a back seat and allow the Muppets to take centre stage.

Here’s to the next film.

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I know it is only February, but this could very well be the movie of the year. Since Jim Henson died, The Muppets haven’t really had a place in popular culture apart from nostalgia. Muppets Christmas Carol was the last great piece of work, and was a fitting tribute to the great storyteller. The Muppets have drifted in recent years, not quite relevant enough to set the world alight with new product. Muppets From Space and Muppet Treasure Island were alright but not what you’d call classic Muppets. There were made for television, straight to DVD efforts in the form of a Wizard Of Oz remake, and two Christmas features; It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and Letters To Santa. The final indignity was being forced to duet with Olly ‘David Brent’ Murs on The X-Factor last year.

The Muppets however, was a return to form that Jim Henson himself would be proud of. Without wanting to ruin the story, it dealt very cleverly with exactly the problem I outlined in the last paragraph; that The Muppets are old news. With clever nods to the past, including Mad Man Moody’s car showroom with Sweetums working there. We also saw a return of characters that hadn’t featured heavily for a while, Link Hogthrob, Lew Zealand, and even Wayne and Wanda made appearances. The story of the theatre needing saving was the plot to It’s A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, so seeing the set from The Muppet Show recreated wasn’t the treat that it should have been. What they did seem to do though, to their advantage, was ignoring most of The Muppets output from the last few years. We were led to believe that the gang had lost touch with each other and hadn’t worked together for years, hence ignoring the recent output as they have sporadically worked together with varying degrees of success. I wondered what was going through the minds of the young children watching, as they all seemed to be accompanied by 30-something parents like myself. We 30-somethings were obviously the target, which is perhaps where Disney have been getting it wrong all this time, aiming at the usual Disney market when they should have been aiming older. Nostalgia is pretty big business, and it is something that by its very nature cannot go out of fashion.

The writers of this film were obviously fans, and cared deeply about the Muppets as a brand, and certainly made a film out of love and affection for a part of their, (and our) childhood. There were clever jokes and knowing references oozing from every pore of The Muppets that were put there for the 30something fan, not for the children in the audience who seemed to be getting a tad fidgety towards the end. Emily on the other hand, had the benefit of an education when it comes to Henson. From a very early age she was watching Sesame Street, before graduating to the Muppets, Fraggle Rock, and right up to date with Bear In The Big Blue House. She understood the references to the old films, although she wasn’t as emotionally attached to it as Mandi and I were.

As we edged towards the climax of the film, the entire Muppet cast performed the legendary song ‘The Rainbow Connection’, the song that began the first cinematic outing The Muppet Movie. This was the first ‘eye swell point’, in which the tear ducts began to do their work. It wasn’t the strongest point, that came immediately before the end as the gang left the theatre. I won’t give anything away, but Mandi and I had tears running down our faces at this scene. It was a beautiful moment of classic Muppets that no adult can ever watch without crying, guaranteed.