The readers of Bike magazine never took to Bloodrunners as the replacement for Paul Sample's legendary Ogri comic strip. Ogri had been a grimy mechanic riding bikes he'd built himself, and that reflected the self-image of the magazine's readers. Bloodrunners, by contrast, featured fantasy superbikes with impossibly fat tyres and fantasy pneumatic 80s women with impossibly big hair. Ogri was Motörhead*; Bloodrunners was Bon Jovi.
Bloodrunners moved with the times but came up against a readership that was happy where it was. And, it has to be said, Ogri was better than Bloodrunners. Sparrow tried too hard to make the character of Jack Shit iconic (you can't force these things: either it happens or it doesn't), but Bloodrunners did have its charms. At his best, Jack Shit strode across the page like Darth Vader before the fall, taking some of Ogri's hard edge and humour, while the stories exuded a Kings Road hauteur of bikers who never questioned their own superiority. It had glamour, and it was beautifully drawn in a style that complemented the storylines perfectly. And, if it couldn't beat Ogri, it was a damned sight better than Tina Tailpipe.
Here's the second part of my Fringe reviews from this year's festival.
The Suitcase Royale in Zombatland (Pleasance Two, Friday 19 August, £10)
One of the revelations of last year, Australia's Suitcase Royale were on form again with their new show. Their form of comic musical theatre is unique, with surreal tales of the outback set to their own brand of junkyard skiffle. If anything, the music was even better this year, although the tale of a failing caravan park overrun by zombie wombats lacked the human touch of last year's doomed love story. As ever, their rapport with the audience kept a thread of humour and warmth throughout the show. 4/5
Devil's Advocate (Buff's Bar, Saturday 20 August, free)
I saw a couple of the Edinburgh Skeptics' shows last year and ended up writing the quiz for one instalment of this year's Devil's Advocate panel show. Unfortunately, the Skeptics had found themselves in the upstairs bar of Buff's Bar in West Register St, way off the beaten track and completely hidden from view. With no chance of picking up any passing trade, the audience was small and the show was further compromised by the loss of Ash Pryce, whose 'baby' this show was.
The subject this time was 'Holy Books', and of course I'm going to say it was a great set of questions because I wrote them. What followed was an hour of funny banter and intellectual one-upmanship, which was a great way to start the day if you get up at noon. 4/5
The Oxford Imps (Gilded Balloon Nightclub, Saturday 20 August, £10.00)
Improv is an acquired taste. Oxford University's improvisers seem to have acquired the taste from 20-year old re-runs of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?', because they aren't really taking the genre any further than that. As they poured onto the stage doing enthusiastically wacky dancing to the music, I turned to my companion and said, "I hate them already." That distaste grew with the attitude of their compère, who had no idea how to engage the audience other than by grinning and generally acting smug.
Of the troupe of six, only the balding American showed any serious talent, although most of them had at least one good moment. Given those limitations, it's perhaps a good thing that they kept within the comfort zone of a predictable structure, so that the show was an amusing diversion for an hour rather than an embarrassment. But considering the talent that could be seen for the same price, and the far more dangerous and inventive impro on offer from the likes of The Noise Next Door, a tenner seemed a bit steep for a bunch of university amateurs larking about. 2/5
Andrew Bird's Village Fete (Underbelly Balcony, Saturday 20 August, £9.50)
No doubt about it, Andrew Bird is a lovely fellow and an hour in his company is a complete pleasure. His show is essentially his impression of moving back to a village with his young family after living in London, observing the quiet insanity of village life. His observations are spot-on, and he mines a vein of humour seldom tackled by mainstream comics, where the irrelevant minutiae of life acquire a significance that makes the death toll in Midsomer Murders entirely understandable. 5/5
Back by popular demand after a sell-out show last year, Sam Wills justified his reputation with a breath-taking show of silent comedy and naïve clowning. Given that his entire mouth is coveredfor the whole show, his communication skills are remarkable. It's pointless describing it because it has to be seen. 5/5
Translunar Paradise (Pleasance King Dome, Sunday 21 August, £10)
Two dancers with hand-held masks, accompanied by a woman on accordion, tell the story of a marriage cut short by cancer. Sounds like the most awful kind of pretentious Edinburgh show, and it is, but performed with such skill and poignant emotion that it works – so well that many of the audience were in tears. There were times, especially in the third quarter, where I lost touch with what was happening, and some of the tribulations suffered by the couple were telegraphed a long way off, but it retained its power. The accordionist deserves special mention, using her instrument not just for music but also sound subtle yet clever sound effects. 4/5
David O'Doherty (Pleasance One, Sunday 21 August, £15)
O'Doherty's performance was capable and slick, but relied too much on the audience being in on the joke. This was absolutely a show for confirmed fans. As someone who didn't know his material, I was lost at times. This was less of a show and more of an epilogue to previous shows I hadn't seen. He's a capable comic, but this show was a bit lazy and very much over-priced. 2/5
Tom Stade (Pleasance Above, Sunday 21 August, £12)
I'm surprised only two people walked out of Tom Stade's gloriously offensive show. It was self-conscious too, with Stade asking the rhetorical question, "Why d'ya do that, Tom?" when he went over the top, as he did on many occasions. I did feel for the teenage kids in the front row as Stade compared their sex life of their parents, sitting next to them, with that of the couple a few seats along. The young man (about 19) became Stade's partner in crime throughout the show as he built a story of espionage and criminality, killing sacred cows everywhere he could find them and mounting their stuffed udders for entertainment. 5/5
Remember the dark ages of scrambling to find the right lid for your coffee cup before civilisation was brought blinking into the sunshine world of standard lids? Never mind the budget deficit, a double-dip recession and unwinnable wars, my life was on the verge of collapse from the stress of working out which lid fitted my coffee cup at Starbucks.
The message of this book is that it didn't take a genius to come up with the idea of a standard-size lid for take-away - sorry, 'to-go' - coffee cups. Wow Einstein, you're telling me that wasn't the work of a genius? No kidding!
Admittedly, 'The Idea Hunter' doesn't get any banal than that, but how could it? It's a formulaic book whose jargonistic language and bland, templated structure makes you want to hate it so much that it's hard to remain objective and recognise any good ideas when they appear. The first 'leverage' (as a verb) is in the preface, 'ongoing' appears on page 1 and we're only on page 5 when the cretinous acronym I-D-E-A makes its painful appearance, followed a page later by 'super-guru'. If you get to page 28, you'll come across the irony-free use of the term "wow-ize". Throughout, we are in the world of the inspirational management mystic - the kind of idiot who gets shown the door in any serious organisation except in America (and even there they went out of fashion a decade ago).
The usual business paragons are here: Warren Buffett, Neutron Jack Welch and Steve Jobs; but the first company to get the sycophancy treatment is Intuit, an organisation whose recent reputation seems to be built less on intuition and more on the old-fashioned and prosaic practice of getting market dominance and squeezing its increasingly captive and unwilling customers for every last cent with the help of well-lobbied regulators.
In some ways, this book lives by the principles it expounds. It insists that the best ideas aren't original but come from using "loose ties", picking up ideas from places that don't have an obvious link with a company's business and doing a lot of talking and reading. This is sensible advice and I won't disparage it.
In keeping with the authors' philosophy, there doesn't seem to be any original research here. All the quotes look like they are second-hand and there is nothing to suggest that the authors met any of the top executives quoted. The arguments follow the standard structure of hypothesis-quote-q.e.d., with little explanation of how to use those examples to advantage. Indeed, it seems to revel in its intellectual shallowness, and it seems the height of vanity to give this method its own trademark.
There is some useful content in here and there is some practical advice later in the book, but its pomposity and grandiose self-importance are extremely off-putting.
Edinburgh's Fringe festival again proved its worth this week, although my two companions and I only had four days to sample what this year's festival had to offer. We've been lucky: there's a lot of cack at the Fringe, but we generally don't get many duffers and there was only one this time.
David Lee Nelson… Status Update (Beehive pub, Grassmarket, Thursday 18 August, free)
This was a rather odd show, which wasn't sure if it was comedy, philosophy or therapy. Nelson used video interviews with himself followed by live commentary to take us through his personal relationships, using anecdotes such as his then-future-ex-wife buying him porn for his birthday. The long pauses were probably intended to add poignancy to his story, but they tended instead to suck the energy from his performance and failed to counteract the effects of an excellent lunch at the same venue. 2/5
Colin Hoult's Inferno (Pleasance, Thursday 18 August, £12/14)
I saw Hoult on a whim last year and insisted this year that my companions come and see the man who gave me one of the highlights of 2010. Hoult's stock in trade is a series of realistic, damaged characters, all played with frightening realism and who presume that the audience understands and approves of their world-view. Last year, each character had his own slot in the show; this year a new set of characters merged and returned throughout the performance, engaging with the audience and allowing catchphrases to emerge. My favourite was the Welsh poet, listening by the wall to his neighbour – who is more successful on "the YouTube" – entertaining his friends and acolytes and "playing Monopoly and Twister and eating prawns straight out of the packet… who eats prawns straight out of the packet? Perverts, that's who." Hoult seems to have made a few changes after some bad reviews at the start of the run, but despite a couple of misfires I still found him utterly wonderful. 4/5
Tim Key, Masterslut (Pleasance, Thursday 18 August, £12)
A brilliant show from a master performer, who managed to keep a big theatre laughing without telling any obvious jokes. He used projection to enhance his show without ever losing contact with his audience, relating surreal and often meaningless stories from the life of a loser where logic collapses in on itself. Most memorable was the scene where he dived into the on-stage bath while allowing the screen to take us on a quest for a submerged can of Carlsberg, after which my companion (who had foolishly caught a thrown towel earlier in the evening) had to dry him off. Did the meaning of life emerge from any of this silliness? I hope not: neither from mine nor Key's life, but I didn't care one jot. 5/5
Shakespeare For Breakfast (C Venues, Friday 19 August, £7.50)
Gotta get up for this one. After King Lear last year, Macbeth got the treatment for an audience fighting the combined assault of hangovers and croissants that are more stale than a workingman's club comic. Here the Scottish play is re-tooled as an episode of Glee, with Duncan reduced to head boy of secondary school. As ever, there were cringeworthy moments and cultural references that went over my head (did Ross really have a monkey in Friends? Three simian seasons, apparently. How did I miss that?), but it's always a romp and the actors were excellent as usual. 3/5
Amused Moose semi-final (Bongo Club, probably £10 though I can't remember how much it cost…)
…but I do remember that it soaked up three hours of an afternoon that otherwise would probably have involved too much red wine. It's difficult even to name the comics, since I've lost my playbill and the website is so shit that it would have looked embarrassing in 1999 and even makes the lame name look professional. I mean, "Amused Moose"? And don't get me started on the fact that the two intervals were five minutes long while the queue for the understaffed bar was ten minutes. Fortunately, none of this detracts from the fact that this was a cracking afternoon's entertainment, with some quality acts giving ten-minute excerpts from their shows. DeAnne Smith deserves a mention for her warmly engaging show that constantly undermined the traditional relationship between performer and audience, ending with a 'Dear John' letter to the audience: "I love you, but I know you want to see other comedians and, to be honest, I'm seeing other audiences…"), but the clear winner for me (and the audience) was Canadian comic Tony Law with his laconic performance about how to be a comedian. Was that post-modern comedy? I think it was. 4/5
It's just such a shame that this was the prelude to Doctor Brown (Underbelly, Friday 19 August), which was the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen at the Fringe. I just don't have time to describe how rubbish this show was. I could have done better myself, except that I wouldn't have imagined anyone would pay to see such lame and irrelevant garbage. You've got to be seriously drunk to enjoy this crap, although some of the audience were, especially that annoying woman at the back who was even more annoying than the young man sitting next to her who tried to seduce me before the show. As I walked out I commented to my companions that I could have spent an hour looking at my own arse in a mirror and had more fun. 0/5
Janet Street-Porter's column in yesterday's Independent On Sunday was a logical car crash, except that her intellect seems to have had a head-on collision with itself.
In celebrating Father's Day, she begins by praising parents as "unsung heroes" and ends by concluding that the solution to society's ills is for government to take on the responsibility that parents are seemingly incapable of exercising for themselves.
Having criticised politicians for blaming society's ills on parents, she then suggests that the solution to boozy Britain is to regulate the price of alcohol, which is mostly an attack on adult drinkers who can't be trusted to regulate their own alcohol intake. Grown-ups, who should be left to make their own decisions, will thus be penalised for the government's failure to police existing laws to prevent under-age drinking. Who suffers? The poor. And if those parents are irresponsible alcoholics, the only effect will be more money being extracted from adult drinkers by the government, leaving them less to spend on their children.
Street-Porter seems unable to make a point without contradicting herself. Having stated that "the vast majority [of modern teenagers] drink exactly as I did at their age," she then states in the very next sentence: "The simple reason why many kids drink today is because drink is everywhere." So, if it wasn't a problem then, why is now? Why do we need to "impose a strict price per unit of alcohol, a move demanded by every important medical body in the UK"?
Medical organisations have no expertise in this field. They might know about the medical effects of alcohol, but they are not remotely qualified to pontificate on how pricing affects behaviour, still less on whether treating adults like children is sound social policy. Her article is shot through with the absolute belief that parents are incapable of looking after their children and that the government needs to step in.
Having urged politicians and commentators to get off parents' backs, Street-Porter then urges them to leap right back on our backs with more heavy-handed, micro-management regulation of individual behaviour. She starts by lambasting those who criticise parents and ends by joining their ranks.
Bloodrunners by Andy Sparrow
