The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Elegy for the colour-bleedy late-night American sitcom

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I’ve been thinking very hard about the US network TV sitcoms that were all over our four-channel screens in the 1980s, mostly on ITV (not ITV1, not ITV8+1 – just ITV) consigned to the night-owl slot. Many of them were funny. Best remembered for the triumvirate of one-word titles –Soap, Cheers, Taxi – there was one to enjoy (well, mostly) practically every night around midnight, like Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, Police Squad, Barney Miller and its short-lived spinoff Fish (starring Abe “That Cadaverous-Looking Bloke Who Played Tessio in The Godfather” Vigoda). Most of these shows were shot on video, which after the disastrous NTSC-to-PAL transfer process made them look as bleedy as a “magic painting” in an old Rupert annual.

But at some point around the end of the ‘80s they seemed to just stop. Or at least they stopped being funny and I tuned them out. Apart from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld – and, I suppose, maybe one episode out of every six of Big Bang Theory, The Wonder Years, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or Golden Girls – I can’t think of any in recent decades that have been anywhere near as entertaining as those » Continue Reading.

None Eightiesier?

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The checklist:

The sounds:

A full orchestra of multiple Yammy DX7s multiply plinking dee-ex-sevenily.

A whackjob snaredrum that makes you wince on every backbeat.

Faux bakerstreety alto sax break in the middle because the verses and choruses have got a bit boring.

The images:

Big hair

Big shirts

Extreme chest exposure

Big trousers hoisted up to navel level

Rolled-up sleeves

Pale pink and powder blue colourways

Pointless set design featuring weirdass geometric black and white shapes

Lame-o jerky animation inserts whenever Rod’s lame-o jerky dancing begins to pall

It’s got the lot! Can you do better, reader?

Every Day He Writes the Book

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What’s the matter with y’all? The Costello autobio has been available for 16 hours and not a word about it so far.

There’s a Kindle sample up.

It looks proper interesting like (despite a couple of copy-editing howlers, but that’s standard practice for rock ‘n’ pop ‘n’ rollers’ memoirs, it seems).

Is “relative pitch” a thing?

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I don’t have anything like perfect pitch. If you asked me to hum octaves of a 440-Hertz A, I’d be way, way off. But I do know which songs that I can hum in my head are in the same key. For example, it just struck me that the guitar lick just before the vocals come in on the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” is very similar to the intro to “Honky Tonk Women”. I wasn’t listening to either; I just summoned them up in my head. Humming both, one after the other, I could sense – somehow I just knew – that they were in the same key. So I checked. Yep, they’re both in G.

I applied this, um, skill once when I realised, only in my head, that the vocal for Cher’s “Believe” (hi, Bob!) can be laid perfectly over the instrumental track of “Be My Baby” (which she had sung B/Vs on when she was 16, fact fans). I didn’t have to listen to either. I just knew. It seems I don’t remember tunes alone, but also the keys they are in, so I can compare them against other remembered tunes and pick out ones that » Continue Reading.