(Satire)

Thom C drops us an email to alert us to Guido Fawkes' blog suddenly embedding music videos (don't worry, we're not going to retaliate by suddenly throwing adverts for Total Sport Film Politics all over the place.

Guido is championing Billy Ruffian, who have written a song in support of David Davis and his 42 day stunt. Sort-of.

Let's not quibble that they seem to have confused John Stuart Mill with Hayley Mills, and instead ponder why the song - sung from Davis' point of view:

Canada can detain for just one day,
And it's two days for Germany and the USA,
Russia has five, Italy has four,
So why do we require 38 more?"

"There's no argument for it, mine's the argument against,
I want the voters to come down off the fence,
I've gambled my job and my political future,
Mr. Brown debate with me on any day that suits you."

Trouble is, of course, that Davis has happily supported - and, indeed, continues to support - 28 days, which is equally random and - a quick tap of the calculator suggests - 24 more than Italy.

The other question, of course, is the awkward question of what effect this has on the people of Haltemprice and Howden. With Davis only campaigning on one issue, either they're going to have to vote for a man with no manifesto commitment to indicate how he might represent their wishes in Parliament on other questions of the day, or else will have to withdraw from anything other than votes on 42 Days. Either way, the constituency is being denied proper representation - is effectively disenfranchising a large swathe of the North-East really the act of a defender of individual liberty?

The comment on Guido's blog includes an entry from Billy Ruffian:

Just to clarify, I wouldn't exactly say we're Davis supporters - we're made up of two wussy liberals and an anarchist.

They steal a Tony Hancock gag:

What about Magna Carta? Did she die in vain?

That's from the Half Hour, Twelve Angry Men, where Hancock exploits the legal system in order to boost his own personal finances by extending the jury deliberations. We'd like to think using the appeal from a man who was interested in justice, but only up until it started to cost him, was intentional. But we're guessing not.

Radio One More Time: Fun At One

It's the happy, happy sound
(Fun... at one)
Of Radio One

Perhaps one of the oddest, but tenacious, slots on Radio One was Fun At One. As the name suggests, it was an attempt to inject some "fun" at one o'clock in the afternoon. It's not entirely clear if this five minutes of official "fun" was intended to undermine the dj by implying that the rest of the time Radio One wasn't very much fun at all, or merely offered a chance to recalibrate our level of what the Radio One of the day saw as being "fun". It might also have been an attempt to balance out the 12.30 Newsbeat slot - offering a jelly and cream of light entertainment in return for the bread-and-butter of world affairs and a two minute interview with Owen Paul.

In this case, "fun" was actually defined "a substantial but unsatisfying chunk of an old comedy production". Since this came at a time when the network had managed to get through a decade and a half without making a single proper comedy programme, producers were forced to rummage back in the dusty cupboards of the Light Programme, undermining the cutting edge youth sounds by throwing in five minutes of hairy old comedy. I swear in 1983, they interrupted the latest chart run down to play ten minutes of a back episode of The Glums. Laugh? It was like giggling was still on the ration.

Incidently, Southern Sound took the concept of Fun At One, and based its entire Sunday afternoon programming around it, when the End of The Pier Show it promised the IBA when applying for the licence (live comedy and entertainment) was replaced by a more budget-friendly End of The Pier Show which consisted of Sean Bolger sticking on one of those commercial remakes of Hancock's Half Hour that were released on LP in the 1960s, and disappearing off for a Sunday Roast.

Of course, Adrian Juste made frequent calls on the BBC Record Library's spoken word section during his inexplicably long-running programme on the shows. Juste's role - we suspect awarded by himself - was to be the network's joker; having only a couple of hours to fill each week gave him plenty of time to prepare old comedy clips to sprinkle over his show the way firecrews cover blazes with foam. And, like a firecrew's foam, these would also drain all the oxygen away from the spark, too. Juste had two ways of destroying any comic potential in a piece - one way was to cut out one half of a two-hander, and fill the role of straight man himself (here, all his lines would be delivered in a "oh, I'm about to lose it in a minute" style which was one part Knockout-era Stuart Hall to two parts pre-eruption Mount St Helens); the other would be to try and skim out any preamble from a monologue, thus rendering little more than a punchline and a canned laugh.

When tiring of pre-recorded bits, rather than using the time to actually play records, Juste would instead resort to overlong shaggy dog stories. These, for some reason, he decided couldn't just be reduced to their punchline, even although they were just as "amusing" like that: I Left My Harp In Sam Plank's Disco. See?

Curiously, during Gary Davies' era of attempting to update lunchtimes on Radio One, dropping Fun At One merely opened up space for him to introduce a feature that involved a long shaggy dog story the punchline to which was a pun on a current pop song. It might have been no funnier than Ron Glum using Bisto to hide Pa Glum's parson's nose (allowing Ethel to visit him while Pa's toe was stuck in the bathtap), but at least it had a slightly more contemporary feel.

Still wasn't much fun, though.

Borrell washes his hands of Pete

ContactMusic suggests that even Johnny Borrell has a breaking point:

British rocker JOHNNY BORRELL has given up his quest to help PETE DOHERTY kick his drug addictions, claiming the troubled singer refuses to help himself.

And you can't imagine the effort Borrell has put in, trying to persuade a man caught in a serious addiction to break from the chains of chemical dependency:

"I did once say to him that if he fancied having a cup of tea and watching Hancock's Half Hour or something, I'd be up for it, but I wasn't into smoking crack."

It's hard to see what else he could do. If only Borrell had been able to get to Kurt Cobain and sort-of-offer a cup of tea and maybe a quick DVD, how different could things have been then?

We can hear you, you know, muttering that if you had the prospect of sitting slurping a cup of Typhoo on Johnny Borrell's sofa while he took off his shirt and played you The Blood Donor you might well take up smoking crack instead. You're not helping, you know.

"I can't help him. I don't think anyone can. You can only help yourself. You can inspire people but you can only help yourself."

This is odd, because earlier in the article:

Razorlight frontman Borrell credits Doherty with helping him beat his own heroin habit several years ago and he was keen to return the favour.

We're not quite sure how Doherty was able to help Borrell when you can't actually help someone else. Unless it's different with crack and heroin.