Jesse Armstrong has confirmed that
he is not co-writing a Lee Atwater script with Chris Morris:
@RJF92 Not Chris and I - I've written a script for Adam McKay.
This rumour was started on IMDB, the discussion thread for it
is here. Sounds like an interesting project regardless. In the last update, I also pointed to this excerpt from
an interview Film Ireland conducted with Chris Morris:
‘You get the small pets and lock them in a hot box, then see which one survives. At the moment they’re rattling around and shrieking quite a lot. In a month’s time or so I’ll kind of know which one I’m doing. One of the pets is a little, invisible shriek radio pet. If I open the box and the others are dead, I’ll know it’s a radio idea I have to do.’
It now seems likely that this 'radio pet' is
a collaboration between Chris Morris, Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade:
Noel Fielding and Richard Bacon discuss new Chris Morris radio showIntriguing news, and thanks to James Christopher (@JCBeermat) for passing it on. To be frank, I can't stand the comedy of Noel Fielding. He thinks he's incredibly surreal and wacky, yet peddles nothing but pedestrian, by-numbers whimsy about, y'know, spiders and monkeys and that. He can't even manage to keep a straight face when he performs, so assured is he of his own manic, rock star craziness. Richard Ayoade has never been a popular figure on the
Comedy Chat forum either, given his lack of range. Like Fielding, he lacks gravitas, and is hard to believe as a performer. This did eventually work in his favour in The IT Crowd, with the role having been written to take advantage of his
shortcomings talents. So, yeah... what a weird bunch of emotions this news inspires, given that a return to radio/audio is something I've personally been lusting after for a decade now. I try and approach things with an open mind, so we'll see how it sounds when it eventually finds an outlet - in the interview, Fielding mentions that they don't quite know what to do with it, and raises the possibility of releasing it as an album.
By now, I hope you've caught the second series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, which was absolutely
superb. Chris Morris script editing again, which seemed to consist of a series of chats with Stewart Lee, and a submitted line that was used in the series (the one about little statues of Napoleon in Dentists' fish tanks.) The
DVD of the second series has now been released although with suprisingly sparse extras, particularly when compared to
the first series. Regardless, it's a must-have purchase... a really special comedy show, and easily the greatest things Stewart Lee has ever done. Don't miss it.
If you want to hear some discussion about it, then
it's been covered extensively in my @ComedyChat podcast, and the discussion thread for the second series is
here.
