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Peter Baynham - His Own Bit

Started by tony peanuts, February 25, 2004, 05:27:19 PM

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tony peanuts

Just re-discovered these 2 transcripts of Peter Baynham's "His Own Bit" column from the old Comedy Review magazine lying in a dusty old forgotten folder on my PC at work.  I've put these up before on the boards but that was in The Long Long Ago, before they crashed, so I guess those threads have been lost.  
Anyway, here they are again so enjoy them and know that I love you.

Incidentally, for anyone who doesn't know, there's another one of the these articles already on the site here, so read that too.  

--

From Comedy Review #4, June 1996.


It SEEMS that the talented Welsh writer has given his entire column over to an unknown airline short story writer.  Just call us the salvationists and redeemers of otherwise abandoned genius...


On March 18th, British Airways Cabin Purser Andy Jacobs died, aged 41, in a fire in his house in Hounslow, Middlesex.  His wife Susan and son Mark, 14, survived the blaze.  Andy had many interests, but his consuming passion was writing; he would often fill lonely hours in foreign hotels writing short stories.  Tragically, Andy never saw his work published.  Susan sent me this tale, his last, asking if I knew anywhere it could be printed, as a memorial to her husband.  I have volunteered this month's column space so that Andy Jacobs can finally be published, albeit in death.

'Flying High'
A Short Story by Andy Jacobs


"Bing bong.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding."
   Jane Morris slowly and cool-ly turned the pages of her newspaper.  Occasionally, she glanced around the departure lounge of Heathrow Airport at the other travellers waiting to travel their weary journeys: French, Italians, Chinese, Americans, Germans, Indians (even a few British here and there!)  If anywhere in the world could be described as truly international, it was here: Heathrow Airport.  It was as if representatives of all nations had been called together to one place.  How appropriate that her newspaper was The European!
"Bing bong.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding."
Jane cool-ly closed her newspaper and stood up.  She looked stunning in her business suit (a skirt one).  Her long blonde hair was like liquid gold.  Her legs were long and slim as she walked along the concourse.  Someone very close to those legs (perhaps between them, the lucky bugger!) would have heard the 'swish swish swish' of her silk stockings as she walked along the concourse as her thighs rubbed together.  Swish swish swish swish.  Her stiletto heels made a 'click click click' sound on the concourse (one click for every time a heel hit the ground) as she walked along.  Her eyes were 'to die for'; crystal, wistful blue, like blue, blue oceans.  
   She quicked up as she passed a place selling croissants.  Click swish click swish click swish.  She saw a woman in a yashmak biting into one of the French pastries.  She wondered if somewhere else in the world there was a French woman eating a typical moslem dish.  It made her giggle.  
   "Bing bong.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding.  Would passengers for Flight BA103 to Delhi please proceed to Gate 12 where the plane is now boarding."
   People of all nations hurried back and forth.  How like bees.  
As Jane Morris was clickswishclickswishing along the concourse, Cabin Purser John Morris was busy settling the last passengers into their seats, ready for take-off.  He was handsome, with luxuriant brown hair.  His eyes were brown; such a dark brown they were more like black, the colour of Bournville chocolate.  They mixed with the whites of his eyes like powdered chocolate sprinkled on a cup of capuccino in a pavement café in Milan or Rome or France or Florence.  International eyes.  You could say.  As he did what he was doing, he occasionally gazed through those international capuccino eyes out at the other aircraft taxing about on the runway.  Strange, even after all those years as a Cabin Steward, planes still looked to him like birds.  
   Jane Morris was still running along the long concourse, clicking and swishing.  She was thinking about the first time she'd met the man she was to see in a matter of moment's time...
   "Tea or coffee, madam?"
   The voice had jolted her out of her reverie.  She'd been looking out of the window of the plane at the clouds beneath and thinking how they looked like cotton wool.  Sometimes a bit of land would poke through – God had better get his sewing kit out!  'It never rains up from the clouds', she had been thinking when the voice came from out of the ether.  She'd looked up – into chocolate brown capuccino eyes.  He was gorgeous.  Drop dead gorgeous.  Those eyes!  How she wanted to drink from them with her own ones.  
   "Tea or coffee, madam?" he repeated.  
   "Is the coffee..." she said, looking coolly at his eyes, "...capuccino?"  
   "Um, no.  I know they say that we in British Airways are bubbly, but not so much that we can make coffee go frothy with our bubbliness to make capuccino!"
   She laughed coquettishly at his joke.  Drop dead gorgeous – and seriously funny!  Was she dreaming?  
   "Am I dreaming?" was also being wondered by him.  Her laugh reminded him of a tinkling piano from a play.  Her golden blonde hair, her blue blue blue eyes, her shape which even in a sitting position you could make out was great.  Her legs.  Look at those beautiful legs!  'To die for' legs.  Not just 'to die for', actually.  These were 'to kill for' legs.  'To die between' even.  Yes.  What a place to die.  Down there in a mossy wet grave.  Oh, yes.  
   "What's your name?"
   "Jane."
   "Pleased to meet you.  I'm John.  John Morris.  Tell me – what's your favourite film?"
   "The Blues Brothers."
   "The Blues Brothers?" he exclaimed.  "I love The Blues Brothers!  We had a Blues Brothers party at Christmas for our staff Christmas do.  We all wore the hats and the dark glasses!  It was seriously funny."
   Jane laughed her coquettish piano-play laugh.  But John turned from seriously funny to plain serious.  
   "Mind you, it was terrible what happened to Belushi.  Tragic.  Tears of a clown, I guess.  The painted smile."
   She was in rapture – here was a funny, handsome, tender, intelligent man with some similar tastes to her.  A taste for the kitsch.  
   "Do you like Bjorn Again?" he said.  
   "Yes.  Seriously funny.  Why?"  
   "I've got two tickets for their gig tonight.  Do you want to come?"  
   "Yeah.  Sure.  Thanks."  
   "And maybe afterwards..."  
   "Yes?"  
   He stared into her eyes, using his.  
   "I'll buy you a capuccino."  
   "Bing bong.  This is the final call for passengers for British Airways Flight BA103 to Delhi.  Please report to Gate 12..."
   Clickswishclickswishclickswish – stop.  She nearly dropped her copy of The European.  
   As she boarded the craft, she saw him.  He still looked as handsome as he had back then.  As the time they'd first made love.  As the day she'd fallen in love whilst looking at him by the light of the fire bright shining bright lighters they were both holding up at a Cranberries gig.  As the day they'd got married.  She sat down in her seat.  He approached her and fixed her with his capuccino eyes.  
   "Tea or coffee, madam?"  
   "Oh, leave that to the cabin crew, John", she giggled.  "You just concentrate on relaxing from your job as a famous novelist."  
   He smiled and sat down in his seat next to her.  She gazed happily out of the window and watched Flight BA103 as it taxied up the runway and took off for Delhi.  
   "I'm so proud to know that our son John is a senior Cabin Purser on that plane.  Maybe one day he'll be a novelist, too."  
   On board Flight BA103 to Delhi (which Jane Morris wasn't on), Cabin Purser John Morris (Junior) looked out of the window, through his capuccino eyes (as dark brown and nearly as black as his father's) at British Spaceways Flight BA1000; a vast Space Rocket-plane lifting off from Gate 13 on its way to Mars on which he knew his parents Jane and John Morris were going for their second honeymoon.  
   On board the Rocket-plane, Jane smiled at her husband, John Morris Senior, and opened her copy of The European, which was dated 10th March The Year 2046.

tony peanuts

From Comedy Review #5, July 1996.



What have Stephen Hawking, Tony Hancock, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Best and Bob Dylan got in common?  Ah!  Yes, indeed!  There's a question for you...[/i]

Hmmm... Hancock and Da Vinci are dead... Dylan sounds like Hawking... Best, in his natural state of inebriation, looks like Hawking... Hancock and Dylan are miserable bastards...
   Give up?  These are the top five people incorrectly deemed by Drunken Blokes Talking Shit in Pubs to be 'geniuses'.  

"Hawking?  Bleedin' genius.  And the way he battled his disability..."
   Stephen Hawking currently holds the number one slot in the Drunk Blokes Talking Shit in Pubs Say He's A Genius Top 40.  This is based on a) the fact that he wrote a best-selling book on science, b) he wears glasses, c) he talks like Hal, the mad genius computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and d) everyone says he's a genius (which, as we shall see, appears to be the main qualification for being a genius).  
   But what's the actual evidence?  Well – like me, you bought A Brief History of Time because everyone else was buying it and because you thought it would contain some amazing stuff about Time.  Maybe even some colour pictures showing the History Of It.  You started reading the book, and found the first few chapters quite exciting because it was all about black holes (which, admittedly, are great) and "knowing the mind of God".  
   Then you got to the second chapter.  
   Stephen threw in a few basic (for him) bits of maths to introduce you to the concept of quantum physics.  He drew a diagram or two.  You became alarmed: more calculations; a more complicated diagram showing the universe shaped as a Kotex sanitary towel; some more numbers (big bastards this time); and then – ohgoditcantbetrue – a graph!  "What the hell am I doing?" you wondered.  "I've just spent £6.99 on a Physics text book with a picture of Plug from The Beano on the cover!  Ah, well – plough on."  
   Halfway through chapter two you put the book down for a breather and switched the telly on.  It was Back To The Future.  You never picked up A Brief History Of Time again.  
   Don't be ashamed.  Nobody has read beyond halfway through chapter two of A Brief History Of Time.  Not even the publishers.  I'll prove it – go and get your copy and go to the page after the last one you read (page 36).  Yes, that's right – a crude crayon drawing of a lady's sexual parts.  Why?  Hawking knew that nobody would get this far.  Read on – the rest of the chapter (pages 37 to 41) consists of an old Berni Inn menu and a long, crap joke with the punchline: "That's a long way to tip a Rarey".  Chapter three consists of the maintenance manual for Stephen's voice simulator; chapters four and five are blank; chapter six is actually chapter two of The Rats by James Herbert; chapter seven is the Please Read Carefully leaflet that comes with Aller-Eze hay fever pills.  Chapter eight – more childlike cartoons of genitals (some of them rather disturbing, with eyes and little hands); chapter nine – the words "I'm a bloody man, but you can call me Anne" over and over again for 31 pages; and for chapter ten he cleverly switches back to impenetrable made-up bollocks about Space-Time, just in case you jumped to the end to see how it finished.  
   So – Stephen Hawking a genius?  Well, in the sense that he made millions by getting us to buy 500 pages of balls that took him fifteen minutes to write, yes, fair enough.  

"Hancock.  Genius wannee?  Destroyed him in the end, mind."
   The more I hear this one, the more I'm convinced it is exactly shit.  Yes, Hancock was one of our greatest comedians, but his 'genius' was primarily for saying sequences of words, written for him by Galton and Simpson, in a grumpy way whilst wearing a fur hat.  People who say that it was Hancock's 'genius' that ultimately drove him to suicide are people who don't seem to understand that there's a difference between genius and severe suicidal depression in an Australian hotel bedroom.  Anyway, Leonard Rossiter was better.  Oh no?  Come on, I'll take you all on.  

"Leonardo Da Vinci.  Now that man was a genius.  He drew designs for a helicopter 400 years before anyone else, y'know..."
   Leonardo is the undisputed king of the Turn His Hand To Anything, That Lad category of thinking drunk's genius.  And he certainly was bright – the business with the helicopter seems especially impressive.  Except... except, having designed the revolutionary flying machine of the future, why didn't he then go and build it?  This glaring omission seems to annul Leonardo's greatness more or less instantly.  Actually, some believe that he did build the helicopter, but then just sat in his studio looking at it thinking: "What the fuck is that?  Mona?  What do you reckon?  A wasp – could be.  I know, I'll keep my paints in it."  
   Others say he got the design mixed up with his famous 'naked man in a circle with two sets of arms and legs' drawing, resulting in a grotesque, unflyable craft with the fuselage of a modern helicopter but, instead of rotor blades, some poor spreadeagled nude Italian with a metal pole bolted to the base of his spine spinning around at high speed.  All the while, Leonardo is sitting inside the helicopter screaming: "It won't fly!  Why won't it fly!"  
   Fact: Leonardo also made plans for a ship that did away with having to sail anywhere by being so long that while one end was still tied at the quay, the other end was at its destination thousands of miles away.  Mad as a box.  

"George Best?  Genius.  That's why he pissed it all away, because he was so brilliant.  Two sides to every coin, they say."  Uh, no.  

Bob Dylan?  Spokesman for a generation.  Poet, singer, genius.  Voice like sand and glue.  Shit these days, mind..."
   Now this is tricky, because at one time, His Bobness (as a certain type of twattish Q Magazine hack would no doubt call him) really was the dog's boobs: a brilliant writer with a great voice (yes it bloody was) and a stunning flair for mad, apocalyptic imagery.  It's only in recent years he's lost it and started singing like his nose has grown lips.  But genius?  Hmm.  This is the man who wrote, at the height of his powers: "Depart from me this moment/ I told her with my voice."  
   See, boyos, I think this 'genius' word is bandied about a bit too much.  It's a word we use when we can't think of a more accurate superlative, such as 'quite good at sport' or 'knows a word that rhymes with hollyhock'.  Real geniuses tend to be people you've never heard of, in that annoying way like when they get people on This Is Your Life who actually deserve to be there.  To my mind, there is only one well-known genius.  And that's Richard Jobson.  Richard Jobson.

butnut

Thanks! I hadn't seen the first one before. This line made me wet myself:

QuoteDown there in a mossy wet grave

I'd seen the second one, and the one that I think might be on this site, which is an analysis of lazy comedy.

On a related, but slighly askew note, is there any news on that cartoon that Baynham had scripted, about vivisection animals? I remember ages ago some guy posted here claiming to be working on the animation and had met Baynham himself.

Darrell

QuoteChapter eight – more childlike cartoons of genitals (some of them rather disturbing, with eyes and little hands)

These are bloody wonderful!

Godzilla Bankrolls

He's quite fond of his Hawking/A Brief History Of Time material, isn't he?

I haven't seen the first one before, thanks Tony!

tony peanuts

Quote from: "Beloved Aunt"He's quite fond of his Hawking/A Brief History Of Time material, isn't he?

Yeah, I've heard him do the same joke somewhere else but I can't for the life of me remember where.  Was it on one of the radio 1shows?

weekender

Um, can't remember on that one, but I enjoyed those reads, thanks.

benthalo

The Hawking stuff crops up in his guest spot on the first TMWRNJ.

Ben Ordinary

I have issues 1,2,3 and 5 of Comedy Review  (not to mention a selection of Deadpan's - a L&H cover taking pride of place on my wall). Along with Graham Linehan's columns for Neon, these must surely have been the best "column at the back" style articles.

Actually, whilst digging out  these Comedy Review issues I've found all sorts of odd stuff  - a few Neons, the 3 issues of The Box (and all of Cult TV), Raw magazine (when it became a dedicated Britpop magazine in 95), Sweet FA, Spit comic, Max Overload (computer game tie-in comic) and even Zig and Zag's Zogazine!

Godzilla Bankrolls

Did he use the Brief History of Time bit on one of Iannucci's Radio 1 shows? I'm sure I heard it on the radio.

alan strang

Quote from: "benthalo"The Hawking stuff crops up in his guest spot on the first TMWRNJ.

Also, the description of Bob Dylan sounding like "his nose has grown lips" - he used that on Armistice.

They all seemed to do little columns for the Weekend Guardian at the time, didn't they? Iannucci, Baynham, Herring, Schneider - even Rebecca Front did at least one.