Music comes from the sleeve of a Mike Sarne singers album, but salty revelations are discovered along the way. If you have any info about the music, objects, trams in Bath or want to book a trip into the office feel free to let me know in the comments, you’ve all been quiet of late…

Length: 45:48 Played: 259

Oh, the guest is “Carsmile” Steve Hewitt of FreakyTrigger. And I took all the swears out of the rapping so your kids can listen to it and everything (unless they listen to the show backwards in a Dark Side Of The Moon way in which case the only legible words will be the swears. Perhaps worth doing?

Length: 42:32 Played: 1578

It is useful to have a general consensus that the worst film of 2011 was Sucker Punch. There are plenty of reasons why this film is terrible. Nested dream sequences within nested hallucinations. Gratuitous titillating video-game combat sequences which appear to be focus grouped by sixteen year old boys, yet a film that likes to think of itself as in the vanguard of female empowerment. An issues picture where the issue it is complaining about is the mistreatment of women in 1950’s mental asylums – bang on the button there. And of course all of these wild contradictions, all of these mecha-mistakes on narrative cinema, and even the state of current blockbuster cinema is why it really isn’t the worst film of last year. Its also what makes it so fascinating to talk about in a way that, say Scream 4 just isn’t.

I still feel comfortable in saying it was my worst film of last year (even if I got a much more visceral dislike from Confessions), as I cannot say I really enjoyed watching it. And sometimes I really do enjoy watching films other people hate, even I have to check myself when I say how much I enjoyed Speed Racer. But I have to say that all the time I was watching Sucker Punch I was also taking it apart in my head. Saving up the bizarre train rescue sequence, saving up the point and click “collect a key” structure to make some point about the video gamification of movies. As I said last year, the thing that really annoyed me about Sucker Punch was its structure was just like a musical, where the musical sequences were her replaced by over the top CGI combat effect sequences. I will still stand by that, but then I really like musicals. And I had heard that there was a point when there were musical and dance numbers in Sucker Punch, so perhaps I was lamenting the film I wanted to see. I want to see Zack Snyder make an OTT original musical, and why not have samurai swords and nazi’s and machine guns and everything in it, because that is what musicals are. And of course this is the problem.

There is a good chance, a very good chance, that all of the problems with Sucker Punch are laid bare in the movie. I’ve elucidated them at length. But there is also a good chance that the problem is with me. The trailer did say “from the visionary director of 300 and Watchmen”. I’ll go with that, he has a good knack for reproducing comic styles on celluloid. But there is a chance that Snyder is also a proper visionary director, ahead of his time, using this first opportunity to make an original film from his own bonce that stands so far outside mainstream conceptions of good narrative cinema that I, and most critics, could not appreciate it. After all I saw forty silent movies last year, I see too many films anyway and surely I would be the last person to recognise this. I think its unlikely, but maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. But to do that, I have to still say it was the worst film of last year. I want to eat these words in twenty years time!

As ever available here, and on iTunes, and if you have anything to say please feel free to say so after the break. Particularly if you know more than us about the Uigar people and their music (though its got to be said, this is one of the best music selections for some time).

Length: 49:20 Played: 1190

I have been torn about my number two for this reason. Confessions was a film I had a strong reaction against, but was it because I had seen Tetsuya Nakashima two previous films in the two previous weeks on DVD. Both Memories Of Matsuko and Kamikaze Girls had pulled me out of a long standing funk about the paucity of decent recent Japanese films. Pop savvy but fun, moving about the human stories tied into our newer archetypes. Sharp, with strong female leads and stories I hadn’t seen before told in a way I hadn’t seen before. And so I was really rather excited to see Confessions at the ICA, a dark high school tale exposing the pressure of Japanese public schools and the cruelty children to their peers.

Here is a graph of my reaction to Confessions as I watched it. My dislike building arithmetically to an uncomfortable boiling point near the end.

I hated it. And such a visceral reaction came out of me from almost the first twenty minutes. The visual flair from the previous movies had been tamed, the story was not only offensively over the top it also made little sense and was so bizarre that it couldn’t work as a commentary, satire or – well – anything. And yet when I came out, the only thing that could adequately describe my dislike of the film was to say it has Radiohead on the soundtrack. Proper 90’s, mopey, film soundtrack of the disenfranchised teen Radiohead. You know, the Radiohead that Radiohead are embarrassed of.

Its quite possible that the ubiquity of Radiohead in film soundtracks fifteen years ago, in films like this, has soured me on them forever. But what it has soured me on is the use of Radiohead as shorthand for the angsty teen. For the murderous evil teen depression which is all over Confessions like no teenage who ever existed. It’s a film which starts with a child who is infected with HIV, stabbing other kids with a needle contaminated with his own blood. And then gets darker, sillier and less relatable by the second. There are slow motion bombs, there are handwringing suicides and the tone is so portentous that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a Public Service Announcement. When you finally discover what it is all about, who the real apparent mastermind of the beyond far fetched plot is, if you ever had any goodwill towards any part of the movie it gets torn to shreds. Confessions is a multi-layer revenge story where the dish is not only served cold, but served via clockwork robots made of brown paper and fairy breath. It is that ridiculous – whilst all the while pretending to be IMPORTANT.

Confessions is based on a novel, and I cannot help but think, and want to think, that the problems with the film (the lousy characters, the ridiculous plot) are likely faults of the book. I want to think that because I want Nakashima to bounce back, go back to his previous films which delighted me so much. Because Confessions was toxic to me.

Here see if the trailer works for you…

As ever if you recognise the Pathos Of Spring, or any of the items discussed drop me a line in the comments below. And if you would like to join the growing band of Lost Properteers, feel free to let me know, I am always looking for interesting guests. For the comments just click “more”.

Length: 38:58 Played: 727

Its a very special show this one so make sure you don’t miss it (or at least listen to the first three minutes to decide if you want to miss it). If you recognise the music, or want to enter the competition (YOU CAN WIN SOMETHING WITH THIS PODCAST) either e-mail pb14@soas.ac.uk, or put you details in the comments. We’d love to hear from you as ever.

Length: 48:11 Played: 856

There is also a slightly uncomfortable moment near the end of the podcast where, undoubtedly not for the first time, Aristole and Aristophanes are mixed up and its never quite admitted to us. Well we have recorded proof of our own slip up, and it is one that I daresay Aristophanes would have appreciated for its comedic value.

As ever if you recognise any of the stuff or have anything to say, please feel free to hit the comments and claim your missing stuff.

Length: 35:14 Played: 1014

As ever, if you recognise any of the music, or the items, please let us know in the comments, and keep losing stuff losers, because without your losses, there would be no show. And if you are interested in guesting, feel free to say so in the comments below, the more interesting losers there are, the better the show is. So MJ Hibbett!

Length: 44:28 Played: 1069

As ever, if you recognise any of the music, or the items, please let us know in the comments, and keep losing stuff losers, because without your losses, there would be no show.

Length: 44:32 Played: 1361

This weeks right-wing namecheck is a shout-out to SOAS Alumni Enoch Powell, who loved to holiday in France whilst penning inflammatory speeches no doubt.

As ever if you recognise any of the music, or own any of the items in this weeks Lost Property office and want to be reunited, feel free to drop us a line in the comments (click more for the comments). And general comments are always welcome, if you have lost anything let us know!

Length: 37:05 Played: 1581

Apologies to listeners for
a) getting the manner of Ross McWhirter’s death wrong. He was, of course, shot by the IRA
b) Comparing the Guinness Book Of Records, no matter how obliquely, to Mein Kampf.

As ever if you recognise any of the music, or own any of the items in this weeks Lost Property office and want to be reunited, feel free to drop us a line in the comments (click more for the comments).

Length: 34:00 Played: 1598

In the first edition, Hazel Robinson and Magnus Anderson are the first brave guests, testing out the dumb questions, invading the privacy of lost items and finding out how much you can learn from someone from their make-up bag? Live music from Magnus, Young Adult Horror, the Politics of Space and Ballbuster! The photo shows the items discovered, and please use the comments if you recognise anything, if its your make-up bag or you recognise any of the music.

Length: 34:04 Played: 1634

There were a lot of question marks about Horrible Bosses before it came out. Could Charlie Day make the leap from TV to film, could Jason Bateman redeem himself from plenty of diminishing return comedies of late*, is the room for a mainstream black comedy about murder, could a film with such a dumb title be any good. Well most of these questions were answered no, with the exception that Charlie Day is by far and away the best thing in this. And bearing in mind he is saddled with the worst storyline (the sexual harassment by Jennifer Aniston which is unbelievable, unsavoury and also acutely disturbing in equal measure). Jason Bateman gets lumbered with Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks mode, makes a fist of the workaholic loser bullied by his boss. And Jason Sedaris Sudeikis turns in a repulsive turn as a fundamentally good guy tortured by a dick of a new boss who for reasons only known by the writers, turns into a womanising git for no reason in the plot.

Its this left turn by the film, which wimps out on its Strangers On A Train / Throw Momma From The Train / Why Not Put A Train In This, to concentrate on killing Spacey, and turning Sedaris Sudeikis into a sleezebag which murders the film. It had already shown its sexual politics to be dodgy with the Aniston plot, but at least that is part of the plot. Sedaris Sudeikis is supposed to be a good guy compared to the horrors of Colin Farrell’s boorish, drug addicted boss (the other good comic performance in this film). But the film kills off Farrell, makes Spacey some kind of proper moustache twilling bad guy, waters down any aspect of its premise and leaves you thinking the worst thing you can ever feel at the end of a comedy. More depressed than you felt on the way in. Horrible by name.

*The answer to this is almost certainly no. I did not see the body swap comedy The Change-Up because I had more than an inkling that it would end up on this list.

We step up into a whole new realm of poitnlessness though when we consider Pirates Of The Caribbean IV: On Stranger Tides. Now I have a love but mainly hate relationship with the first three Pirates films. I am somewhat in awe of the sixth highest grossing film of all time being one which starts with a ten minute sequences culminating in an eight year old child being hung by the neck. There is a fever dream quality to the third film which as you marvel at its general awfulness you cannot help but admire. Luckily “On Stranger Tides” is much more conventional. It feels a little bit more like a big budget pilot for a TV series, now centred around Captain Jack Sparrow, his love/hate pirate gal pal and a mixture of old and new addtions to the Pirate canon.

Somewhere along the line, and I was never quite sure where, Geoffrey Rush’s undead Captain Barbossa went from big bad antagonist to slightly slippery best mates to Captain Jack. Somewhere along the line Blackbeard suddenly became the most dread pirate of all (despite not showing up at all for the pirate conflab where Keira Knightly became King Of The Pirates…) Somehow Ian McShane being Penelope Cruz’s father did not seem totally ridiculous. I am more au fait with murderous mermaids, and yet another hopelessly sappy love story with a chinless wonder, that is the way of the franchise. But when we get to the fountain of youth and pirates frankly refuse to act like pirates, well by then I would have walked out if I hadn’t seen it on DVD. I did fall asleep for about twenty minutes. Perhaps it was twenty minutes when some cheeky orphans all got tortured to death on the Spanish Main thus completely confounding my expectations for the fanchise again. However I think it probably had Depp either poking his own eyebrows out with a Kohl pencil or falling over.

You know who I feel a little bad for (ameliorated by the fact they must have got plenty of money): the writer of the book On Stranger Tides. I’ve not read it but the book was very well received in the eighties, and it just goes to show what happens when you sell all your rights on. A fun swashbuckler may turn into a grotesque pantomime…

Tower Heist’s main problem is in its name. Die Hard could have been called Tower Heist. Die Hard IS a Tower Heist. But instead it has a name like Die Hard because that makes it interesting, makes it sound exciting, is intriguing. Who is the John McClane and why is he so Die Hard? In Tower Heist, Ben Stiller’s shafted hotel manager decides to rob Alan Alda’s banker. In many ways it isn’t even really a heist. It is breaking and entering. Penthouse Robbery would have been even more apt, and even less prosaic.

I’ve always liked Ben Stiller, but there are occasions when he is happy to settle for mediocre. And Tower Heist is mediocre. Stiller plays a lazy lowkey Ben Stiller type from the early 00′s. Eddie Murphy plays an tired Eddie Murphy type from the late eighties. Matthew Broderick is settling to play the Matthew Broderick type – but those lousy 00′s retired, given up on life type of recent Broderick’s roles. And Casey Affleck, well he’s done Heist’s before in Ocean’s 11 so he is pretty much on as the experienced guy. Oh and the reason for the heist? Well its a pure Robin Hood job, to get their pensions back, so its not a proper robbery at all! So a bog standard plot, relying on star power, so far so Hollywood. With a decent stylist in control of the film, with a grasp on the post recession realities there may be enough to make this a decent, even subversive film. But it is directed by Brett Ratner who can describe a set piece, but not really film one.

I guess what bothers me the most about Tower Heist is that as a New York film, it really could have hit the zeitgeist. If the film had ended with the hotel staff rising up and occupying the hotel then you would have had a film. Admittedly I wanted the proletariat to rise up at the start of the Kings Speech too. Perhaps you can’t judge a film on what it should have been, but you can juxtapose it with what it is – and this is a lazy, poorly made heist which has been cut to death (there are characters in the final act that just vanish). Often with comedies its about catching a bit of magic. Here everything should have aligned, a potential return to form for Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller playing a perfect role for him. And smuggle in a decent piece of proper social commentary. Or alternatively do a few dumb misogynistic gags about a fat woman. They chose the latter.

Both Green Lantern and The Green Hornet were pretty poor films. And it is more than tempting to tie that to the coincidence in their names. And actually let us pin something on it. Captain America is not the Blue Captain American. Batman may be the Dark Knight, but he hasn’t specified his colour scheme in his name. For Green Lantern its unforgivable, there is absolutely no way you are going to miss that he is green. His glow in the dark, CGI pasted on suit (one of the many mistakes in the film) may be designed to have an eerie, alien quality to it, it infact looks like cheap post-production (look in the trailer at how its just a sickly wrong shade of green).

The Green Hornet is even more perplexing, when you consider that Seth Rogen wears a coat which can barely be described as green. The name is flippant, like much in this film, and completely throwaway. What is actually wrong with both of these films is quite different, but I wonder if the slight silliness in asking for a ticket for The Green Wazoo – and stumping up the extra for your 3D glasses – has already knocked the wind out of the average viewer.

So in order of release. The Green Hornet is a stab at a superhero buddy comedy. This could work. But as in any buddy comedy, the ability for the two partners to comfortably communicate is really important. Jay Chou, as Kato, has the moves but barely any of the talk. Seth Rogen is a comedian who needs to bounce off his co-stars, and the only bouncing here is around how little they talk the same language. There are some ideas here which are funny in principle. Rogen is a waster who is given a kick up the arse by the death of his extremely worthy crusading newspaper editor father. Rather than live up to that legacy by becoming a useful member of society, he does it by becoming a rubbish superhero. So far we have a bit of Kick-Ass going on, but he turns out not to be that rubbish merely by the application of lots of money, a sidekick that does all the work for him and extreme amounts of violence. This is a remarkably violent film. The USP of the Green Hornet is that the heroes pretend to be villains to get close to the criminals. There is no pretending here, there is property damage, there is numerous car crimes, there are honest to god murders taking place. With a few jolly laughs afterwards. Michel Gondry creates a few interesting visuals, around something really empty. Maybe it would work as a low budget exploitation film, but it doesn’t work as a blockbuster. An idiot with Daddy Issues is not what we are really looking for here.

Green Lantern has a set of very different problems to Green Hornet. In theory, it is one of the most cinematic heroes available in comics. The power is a ring which creates anything that the hero can imagine. So it is imagination incarnate and in the comics this has often been a boon to artists. Except in the comics, as here, this often boils down to them imagining weapons, modes of transport or something amusing as a gag when its not a life or death situation. The same is true here, all rendered in a garish green which makes the imagined artefacts all blur into a green mess which is particualrly bad if your villain is mainly the cloud from the end of the second Fantastic Four film. A lot of money has been thrown at it, and quite a lot of foreshadowing too, for future films which will not get made.

That said both Green Hero films do share a number of flaws beyond genre and colour. Both lead actors are known for being slightly glib wisecrackers elsewhere. Both are reluctant heroes at best, and certainly not the best at what they do, Green Hornet is outshadowed by Kato and Green Lantern by all the other Green Lanterns. But fundamentally, when searching for character motivation for both leads, they went to the superhero box of motivation and came back with “daddy issues”. Here is my tip to screenwriters – if you don’t know why your hero is a hero, non-canonical daddy issues is a rubbish way to go. Just ask Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. Which was also rubbish, and about as rubbish as both of these films.

The lead in the anime is irrepressible, full of life, working through petulant comedy to a rather moving denouement around responsibility. The live action film she is dour, upset much of the time and the whole thing reaches a crescendo of unbearable melodrama and syrupy strings. Perhaps I should have been a bit more buyer beware about this DVD, and maybe I should have just done some of the research I did now. It turns out that the anime is a very loose adaptation, the film is much more accurate to the book. Do I care? Of course not. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a terrific movie, Time Traveller is the opposite. Sure its a source I know little about, and a tone of Japanese films that I rarely dig into. But it didn’t stop it being one of the most disappointing films I saw last year.

There are three big problems with Season Of The Witch, only one of which is that the Donovan track the film is named after does not turn up in the film. Nic Cage, in phoning it in mode, is a real problem in the film. As a world weary knight, who has seen it all, returning disillusioned from the crusades, there was a real chance for more crazy Nic to turn up. In particular, the trauma of killing no end of innocent people would leave any knight cynical, prone to a quip and also a fervent non-believer in all things biblical and supernatural. Ron Perlman, as his sidekick, gets the tone just right. Cage just plays it dour as he transports a suspected witch across country to try to solve a curse. Clare Foy plays the witch, locked in her little travelling cage, and plays the ambiguity well. Except…

The main problem with Season Of The Witch is the pre-credit sequence where a witch is tested, classic style, with a good dunking. The standard dead body is them examined later, at which point the corpse comes to life, beats up the clergyman and proves firmly that in the medieval world of the film, witchcraft is definitely real. Its a nice way to start the film, a good jolt to the system. But then removes what is the basic conceit of the film -is Clare Foy a witch or not? We know she is a witch because if the film has already established that witchcraft is real, why would she not be? It makes no sense to the film to establish the reality of witchcraft to not use it. Thus stripping the film of its central tension. Is this young girl being needlessly tortured? Well no, because she really is a witch.

Season Of The Witch should be a schlocky bit of fun, but a combination of Cage not getting in to it, and this stupid lack of suspense leaves it as one of the dullest films of last year. Cheapish CGI, and a real lack of any driving suspense don’t help. Nothing highlights how poor this film is than the twenty minute sequence where the party has to cross a shoddy rope bridge. Bernard LEvin present Now Get Out Of That did this king of thing in a much more exciting way. There is no suspense, no cinematic magic, it whole films ends up feeling considerably longer than a season.

Oh and Nic Cage fans – note that the other possibility for this list Drive Angry – survives due to an excellent bad guy, a nice turn from Amber Heard and proper use of exploitation 3D (stuff is thrown at the screen). Nic himself is pretty poor in it.

With this cast, and James L.Books directing, number eleven promises an intelligent, revisit of romcom staples with an attractive, likeable cast. Does this plot description (thanks IMDB) look interesting?

“After being cut from the USA softball team and feeling a bit past her prime, Lisa finds herself evaluating her life and in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis competes with her current, baseball-playing beau.”

In the forgettably named “How Do You Know” Reese Witherspoon just about convinces as the softball player, and in the comparison between her success and Owen Wilson’s pro-baseball players success there is a really interesting bit of gender politics. Completely missed in some business about toothbrushes. Paul Rudd, America’s favourite underachieving schlub, is the third point of this triangle, who appears to be taking part in a completely different movie with Jack Nicholson. Now Jack isn’t just phoning it in here, there is a yoghurt pot an a piece of string for his evil corporate machinator who is about to sacrifice his own son. Think James Murdoch.

And I did think James Murdoch unfortunately. And there is no way I am going to root for James Murdoch in a romcom. Or for that matter a pampered, spoiled baseball star. So I didn’t want our heroine to end up with either of the options, and quite quickly got a little tired of Reese’s softball player too. Sure I can understand why she is disappointed with being cut from the USA team, but every player knows that is a possibility. The problems of an amateur / professional sports player are pretty outside my experience, and are not made vaguely interesting here. The worst thing about “How Do You Know” is that it squanders so many good ideas and turns it into one of the drabbest romcoms in years.

So why thirteen? Well thematically there are a few films which crop up together, which means there will be ten entries – with some nice joint entries to try to decide exactly why the colour Green is so bad for films.

So lets start with the first of the joint entries: coming in equal at twelve is a pairing which includes a film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.:

12: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Midnight In Paris

I have been here before. The standard Woody Allen isn’t as good as he used to be gripe, which as been made all the more evident by the recent Woody Allen comedy retrospective at the BFI Southbank. I have a long gestating piece on why Zelig is a masterpiece waiting to come out, which is also a nice counterpoint to why Midnight In Paris is so bad.

I feel a little bad for Owen Wilson here – because he is easily the best Woody surrogate in twenty years. His own verbose laconic style makes a great alternative mouthpiece for Woody’s own delivery,its just that the whining weedling he has deliver in Midnight In Paris is so lumpen that even his charisma has trouble. I don’t deny that the magical realism of Midnight In Paris is a fun little short story puffed into a parade of the worst kinds of impressions and a moral so banal that when it is spelled out to the audience the third time you want to take up home trepanning.

“Hey Zelda”
“Hey Scott – That’s F.Scott Fitzgerald, my husband”
“Does that make you Zelda Fitzgerald?”
“Yes, you should meet our friend Pablo. He’s a painter. Pablo Picasso. HE’S REALLY FAMOUS IN CASE YOU DON’T GET IT.”

Alison Pill’s Zelda is great, Adrien Brody’s Dali is a good one scene gag, but what is left is all rather hollow. Perhaps Woody feels the only way the audience will get his conceit is if he spells it out over and over again. To which I say, yes – everyone looks back to a golden age. For me its those 70’s / 80’s films you made which they have just been showing at the BFI.

However Midnight In Paris is acres better than “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger”, Woody’s 2010 effort which got a UK release in 2011. His fourth London based film, following up Cassandra’s Dream which elsewhere I have identified as one of the worst films ever made, and certainly one which excuses Dick Van Dyke from ever being teased about his English accent again. Now “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger” is nowhere near as bad as Cassandra’s Dream, but its still an hour and a half of actors vainly looking for a movie. It plays like a low octane Husbands And Wives, with plenty of soapy moral dilemmas thrown in. Let’s look at some of these dilemmas:

-Should the failed author steal his dead friends manuscript? (Note, dead friend turns out to only be in a coma…)
-Should Naomi Watts have an a affair with Antonio Banderas?
-Should Lucy Punch’s bubbleheaded actress be sued by the entirety
-Should Freida Pinto be a bit more aggressive when negotiating character points in her movies.
-Should Antony Hopkins retire PROPERLY.

I cared not a whit about any of these people, their predicaments did not seem in any way real, and I could see why Nicole Kidman dropped out of the sorry affair. There is another writ large message, this time around fate and fortune telling which is pretty much explained by the films title. Basically its a waste iof everyones time. Find anything of note in this trailer, and maybe you’ll find something in the film – I’ll be surprised.

I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instuments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument.

For me it was the Theme To S-Express. I knew drum machines existed, I knew sampling was going on. But hearing the cut and paste of S-Express suddenly suggested that my tape recorder was not just a way of listening to music, it was also a way of making music. I crudely stitched together my own extended version, interpolating bits of Pump Up The Volume, and latterly made a frankly tedious twenty two minute version of Beat Dis which barely held its own beat for twenty seconds. The beat franlly was the annoying bit, if I could get that to match up it sounded fine, but I couldn’t add my own samples over that beat, it would cut out when I tried to add a speech from Ripping Yarns.

But I had seen the future of pop and was insanely excited about this new sound. Then as soon as it happened, this sampladelic revolution got subsumed into Acid House, dance music and the wit and joy of finding vocal samples seemed to vanish into single hooks. The Jigsaw of S-Express had its moment in the sun then vanished. The KLF were doing some things like it off of my radar, but even when they got big, they were inventing their own lunacy.

And then, five years later, when I wasn’t looking for it I heard Little Fluffy Clouds. A song which has a laconic bubbling up beat under the longest strongest intro sample I had heard in ages. And that is before we get on to the frankly astounding Rickie Lee Jones sample.

“They went on for ever and they when I we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds and .. they were long and clear and there were lots of stars, at night. And when it rained it would all turn, it, they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere, that’s, its neat because I used to look at them all the time when I was little. You don’t see that.”

The secret of a good sample is for it to be compelling, fit the song and withstand constant repetition. This one does more than that, for all of its stoner simplicity, its seeming near idiocy, the American pastoral nature contrasts nicely with the previous very English sample. The beat isn’t anything special, the tune is pretty unremarkable, but the playful cut and pasting of the sample yet again shows endless possibilities if you find some interesting content. Compared to much of its parent album (the fantastic Adventure Beyond The Ultraworld) Little Fluffy Clouds is positively stuffed with content. But even by itself it seems laconic, laid back – the very essence of ambient house. I loved it and still do.

And the song is about its own method, Layering different sounds…

Rickie Lee Jones, her of the sample, didn’t love it. Annoyed that the track made her sound, well, stupid and or stoned she sued. And since she makes up the lions share of the song, Bog Life settled out of court. I do feel a little sorry that Rickie Lee Jones’s extensive musical career may have a highpoint represented by sounding a bit. On the other hand, perhaps she should be proud that The Orb found this obscure sample and made it into this track. After all, not many of us could give such a good response to the question.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”
“Mainly grey.”

Every now and then another jigsaw ambient track pops up to impress me. Nothing will ever blow the doors down like The Theme To S-Express, or perfect the form such as Little Fluffy Clouds. And I still believe I could make that brilliant bit of bricolage. And then to get myself in the mood, I listen to the Orb again. Which stops me, I could never beat it. The Theme From S-Express opened that door, Little Fluffy Clouds perhaps closed it. The problem with near perfect art is that it sometimes stops any form of imitation.

“You might still see it in the desert.”

You can see the shape up there and it almost completely mirrors the movements of the FTSE share index this year.

So the City Road FTSE Index 2011 it is.

START
3pm: The Old Red Lion
4pm: The Island Queen
4.45pm The Narrowboat
5.30pm The Wenlock Arms
6.20pm In and Out of the Eagle
6.30pm Bavarian Beerhouse
7.30pm The Prince Arthur
8.15pm The Reliance
9pm Mason & Taylor

Its physically the longest ever (near two miles!!!) and has the most pubs – though in and out of the Eagle is just that. Its also likely that a few may be shut.

A nice bit of variety too from German reliability to flaky pub falling down nonsense. As ever I shall be your host, demanding a salt beef sammich.

So come join us, on this architectural adventure, you don’t have to drink, you don’t have to do every pub. You do have to have fun! See you there. Or follow it on twitter on #FTcrawl2011

Which village has a graveyard like this?

Its Royston Vasey, and this is The League Of Gentlemen Christmas Special. A transition point for the series which started as a series of sketches linked by a common village, the Christmas Special was the first without the canned laughter, and was a lot more ambitious in scope. Its Christmas Eve and the local vicar is about to get three visitors who will tell spooky stories with a very unsettling ending. It was a highpoint of the year 2000 Christmas season and you can revisit it all here. Just watch out for the yellow snow.

http://video.uk.msn.com/watch/video/christmas-special-2000/12g281baf

Sketch shows are tough for Christmas specials because, well, there is nothing special about a set of sketches. You could do it so that all of the characters are doing something Christmassy, but that is still a bit scattershot. Luckily all sketch shows have at least one Scroogelike character for us to laugh at, and have other characters take them through their life in a Ghost of past, present and future way.

So who had a Ghost Of Christmas Past like this?

Of course this was not Tennant’s special, but his old Doctor Who companion Catherine Tate, essaying her second most popular character “Nan”. And I wonder how many people watch Nan’s Christmas Carol with a similarly curmudgeonly grandmother last year. And had to explain what popular beat combo Madness was doing there, and how something quite so broad and self referential got a nice Christmas Day slot.

You can watch it here, though I don’t recommend it!