Sunday, 29 August 2010
Saturday, 28 August 2010
Soft and warm tones
I realised I haven't mentioned about Mika. He reminds me of Freddie Mercury. I'm a huge fan of Freddie and I don't think no one can be replaced for him though, when I heard his music at first time, they reminded me of Freddie. I reckon he has colourful voice and he has a talent. I actually think his way of composing music is totally different from him and his way of singing isn't similar to him even, but I can't explain why I feel that. He creates catchy pop-songs but it's not only catchy. I don't have enough vocabulary to express about his works unfortunately.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Grandma's House, another article
Meet my Grandma's House co-writer, Simon Amstell: he's a self-obsessed so and soFormer Popworld and Buzzcocks presenter's new sitcom stars a fictionalised Simon Amstell. But it's nothing like Curb Your Enthusiasm, no way, says co-creator Dan Swimer
Dan Swimer
The Guardian,Saturday 7 August 2010Amstell delight: fictional Simon gets used to his fictional mum's front room. Photograph: Tiger Aspect Firstly, by way of an apology, I ought to point out that the reason I'm writing this alone is definitely not because Simon is too lazy and self-important to do something as menial as penning a few words about his latest product himself. It's because he is a "genius recluse" who's much too busy being both reclusive and a genius to go grovelling to Guide readers in a bid to promote his new TV show.
I just hope this doesn't become like the Seinfeld episode where George and Elaine go to the cinema together and find that without their mutual friend Jerry they have nothing to say to one another. Well, I'm aware we don't know each other, and we're both disappointed that Simon (the "genius recluse" – he makes me call him this) was unable to join us, but let's at least try to get through this, shall we?While discussing Grandma's House I might mention other, far better, sitcoms without making comparisons. This is in no way to induce you to believe it to be anywhere near as good; absolutely not. Furthermore, you are way too clever to be fooled into allowing me to create a subliminal connection between some show you haven't seen and a lot of classic sitcoms. To be honest, I'd rather just stick to discussing Grandma's House, as it's so mind-blowingly unique you can't compare it to anything.
Besides, this show's nothing like Seinfeld, starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld playing a comedian whose name is Jerry. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm, about the creator of Seinfeld, Larry David, who if I recall is played by a man called Larry. Nor is it anything like Hancock's Half Hour, Roseanne or It's Garry Shandling's Show. No way. For starters, this is about a guy called Simon who used to present the TV shows Popworld and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. It just happens to feature the actual former presenter of Popworld and Buzzcocks – a guy called Simon – playing the lead character, whose name is Simon. Anyway, you know when presenters become a bit famous and they're invariably given a substandard sitcom which they spend the next few years struggling to make people forget about? Well Simon thought it best to avoid this, so instead we set about writing a good sitcom. It turns out this is quite difficult when you have no experience, unless writing the voice of a talking horse interviewing the Strokes on Popworld counts.
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This was to be our first and only rule: everything committed to paper should feel 100% authentic, rather than existing for comic effect
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------So partly to guide us and partly because it was something inherent in the many brilliant sitcoms we wanted to emulate (but which it would seem crass to mention in this article), we decided to base everything in truth. This was to be our first and only rule: everything committed to paper should feel 100% authentic, rather than existing for comic effect. As rules go, this sounds like a pretty bloody good one, but in hindsight we might have made more headway if we'd added a couple of extra rules like, "Remember to include storylines", or, "Construct the episode from a number of distinct scenes rather than just one long conversation." But you learn as you go, right? Well, no, not really.
We figured that you pitch an idea, they commission the script, you shoot a pilot, and you're away. And that is indeed the process, give or take a draft or 70; a number of table reads; a pilot which flies straight on to the pile marked, "Hmmm, might work with a story"; a lot of arguing; hours – even days – of silence; and some actual crying. All in the space of four years. In our quest for truth, we managed to turn out a show about depression, death, and the pointlessness of existence (while also in our view being funny and brilliant). It tells the not totally untruthful tale of a guy who quits his glamorous TV-presenting job due to an underlying discomfort with himself, while his divorced mum shacks up with the most objectionable man on the planet, and his grandfather suspects he's probably dying.
All this truth stuff can become quite complicated, especially when the lead character is a fairly realistic portrayal of the actor playing him and writing his script. Obviously not everything in the show can have actually occurred in exactly the same way in real life, but that was the rod we made for our backs. So every reaction of Simon's character had to be a reaction we could envisage him having in real life. Otherwise how could we be certain it wouldn't feel fake, and not thrillingly realistic like, say, The Thick Of It? But does it have to be actually true, or just feel true? Does the actual Simon need to have actually said the line, or can it be the kind of thing the actual Simon might say in the situation, were it real? And round in circles you go, until you eventually snap and start screaming at your co–writer that he isn't "him" and vice versa. He's the actual person in front of you, while "he" exists only on the paper that you're screwing into a ball and trying to stuff into his mouth. Ultimately I resolved it by referring to Simon the character as "Simon", and Simon the person with whom I used to enjoy working and socialising as "you". Eventually it stopped being weird to look up from a moment of reading and remark to Simon, "Simon really is a self-obsessed prick isn't he?"
Anyway, we tried our best, we hope you enjoy it, and it's called Grandma's Office. Sorry, House. Grandma's House. It's about depression and death.
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Simon Amstell Newsletter
simon amstell and dan swimer* have written a situation comedy.
simon amstell is acting in it.
while this clearly sounds like a terrible, terrible thing to have done, it may end up being something you regard as a good thing. really.
it is called grandma's house and can be seen on BBC2 monday 9th august 22.00.
this is a trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl92LeadNVs
if you are a facebook person, this is a facebook thing.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Grandmas-House/140518655965947
Grandma's House on BBC2
Amstell's in the house
Simon Amstell takes on his first acting role in Grandma's House, which starts on BBC2 on Monday. The acerbic presenter talks to Lisa Williams about playing a version of his ‘idiotic' self, why he needed to leave Popworld and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and why his mum will love the new show
Published: 05/08/2010SIMON Amstell's mum might be cross to see that he hasn't eaten his greens. Instead, he has left them in a neat pile at the side of his plate and, as I walk in to meet him, he greets me saying: “Hello. Would you like some spinach? Or a mushroom?”
It's that kind of oddball humour which has made him famous. Sacked from children's channel Nickelodeon for being too sarcastic, in 2000 his superbly sharp tongue found a happy home on Channel 4's Popworld.
He and co-presenter Miquita Oliver broke the mould for TV interviews at the time by refusing to ask guests the standard questions about their music, preferring instead to tease the pop stars, and make them take part in silly stunts. Simon's ranged from the childish (asking Britney Spears to lick a battery, offering Gwen Stefani a piece of cheese) to the more controversial (flirting with reggae star Beenie Man), and some acts, such as The Kooks, refused to return to the show.
After six years on Popworld, Simon became the host of pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, taking over from the similarly acerbic Mark Lamarr and taking with him Popworld writer Dan Swimer.
While Never Mind the Buzzcocks was a new format for him, Simon found the cutting humour was the same (he made Preston of The Ordinary Boys walk out from filming after joking about his then wife) and quit after three years.
During our meeting, the most offensive thing about him is his vegetable dodging, otherwise the 30-year-old is gentle and self-deprecating, looking out cautiously from a mop of dark curls.
He was there to promote Grandma's House, a new family sitcom which he has co-written with Swimer. Set in a family house in Gants Hill, the suburb on London where Simon grew up, and exploring the eccentricities of a close-knit family, it will draw inevitable comparisons with the Manchester-set Royle Family.
“Will it?” asks Simon.
“It's probably just because it's in a living room the whole time, but we venture to the driveway as well, you do see a driveway,” he jokes.
On a more-serious note, Simon says the shows are quite different because Grandma's House has “more conflict and probably more story", but he acknowledges that a comparison with the Bafta-winning Royle Family is not such a bad thing.
“It was probably one of the last good ones, right? Or am I leaving something out?” he asks.
I mention Outnumbered and My Family.
“No, The Royle Family is the last good family sitcom in my mind,” he says mischievously.
Simon plays himself in the series, but he's not saying how closely his on-screen relatives resemble his own.
“I don't want to go into specifics because I quite like the idea of people wondering,” he says, thoughtfully.
In the first episode, he announces to his mum, played by The Thick of It's Rebecca Front, that he wants to leave his presenting job on an unnamed vitriolic television show to pursue something more meaningful.
The comedian admits that this reference is thinly-veiled.
“With both Popworld and Buzzcocks, I felt we were about to start repeating ourselves,” he says.
“Is this the more meaningful thing? I suppose so; I've always wanted to do something like this. Also, I realised I'd been taking the mickey out of pop stars for about eight years or something and I slowly realised that every time I was really just having a go at myself or my father or something. It feels a lot better for the soul, actually, attacking yourself rather than attacking innocent bystanders.”
Simon swears that the version of himself in Grandma's House is “quite close to me ? upsettingly so.”
He goes on: “When we were writing it, we realised we needed to take everything that was awful about me and put it into the show and so it's essentially me. Even when we'd finished it and I bought some new clothes and I thought ‘I won't be that idiot any more', I'm still that idiot.”
Some of the “idiotic” behaviour we witness in the show includes him refusing to warm to his mum's new boyfriend, Clive, played by Rebecca's The Thick of It co-star James Smith, and saying “what are you telling me for? I'm only 12,” when his grandad tells him he's got cancer.
His grandad, poignantly, is played by Geoffrey Hutchings, who died last month from a suspected viral infection.
Simon has only fond memories of Geoffrey, describing him as “very funny, and a fine actor”.
“I tended to shout and scream a lot if I was doing an emotional scene, or I'd meditate a bit to try to relax myself, and I saw, in one of the rushes when we were editing, Geoffrey saying to one of the guest stars: ‘Yeah, that's going to help',” he recalls.
Geoffrey's experience as an actor and the talent of the whole cast, including East is East actress Linda Basset, who plays Grandma, was helpful for Simon, as he admits he was nervous about taking on his first acting role.
“It was very scary and that's one of the reasons why I needed such a good cast, because then I'd be good at it maybe, with them around, or they'd detract from my ungood acting,” he says.
It would appear that Simon's self-effacement is also, like his onscreen cockiness, an act. But he claims that, in Grandma's House, in which he whines about being lonely and offers his thoughts on being Jewish and gay, he is his true self.
“I don't know if you could get much closer to exposing who I am. I think it's all there. There's nothing missing, to the point that I got a new therapist the other day and I thought of just sending her a few DVDs and telling her not to ask me any questions,” he says, joking, or at least, I think he's joking.
Watching Grandma's House will certainly be interesting for Simon's family, too, who might spot some of themselves in the stories on screen.
Simon's mum is a fan already.
“My mum likes it, but my mum likes anything on television, so she would have liked to see my face going ‘ra ra ra',” he says, pretending to growl.
But just wait until she finds out about the greens.
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