Entertainment For Lively Minds
It's a shiny new podcast... with Robin Ince and Victoria Sponge
Several "firsts" in Word podcast history. We've never had two John Peel impersonators in a live soundclash. We've never discussed Mills & Boon or crab opera. No-one's talked about having a bit part in The Office or the slightly pedestrian plots of 1970s stag films. We've never read a passage from Darwin's The Origin Of Species or found out how the Edinburgh Fringe can be free. And we've never consumed a Victoria sponge cake on air, freshly cooked by Fraser Lewry (see photographic evidence below). Happily these oversights have now been rectified because... Robin Ince has joined Kate Mossman and Mark Ellen in the pod!
Visit our podcast page for more information on the podcast, or stream the latest release below.
Peel off
There should be more of this kind of thing. *Sycophancy alert* I prefer Mark Ellen's.
"...with Robin Ince and Victoria Sponge"
My first thought was "Victoria Sponge? She looks just like Kate Mossman"
Victoria Sponge...
should, quite obviously, be Kate Mossman's nom de plume when she resumes her stalled career as a writer of romantic novels.
Good call Word People!
The Book Club and The School For Gifted Children are fine nights out. Mr Ince is a fine comedian. I look forward to this lovely podcast.
Andy Partridge does a faint Peel impresssion
as intro to their 1979 session - it opens their Transistor Blast comp
Hello, my name is John Peel, on tonight's programme, I'll be playing playing tracks by The Slute, The Slot, The Groan, Exploding Truss, The Blues Bastards, one from The Geckos, uh... Hubert and his Pile-Tones, The Ear, The Nose, The Throat, uh... the Cassowaries From Hell are here; uh, and Inevitable Groin. Uh, a couple of tracks by up-&-coming beatnik groups tonight... Frank and the Sandalmen, uh, and the Goatees. The Goatees, incidentally, will have you trading in your parkas and arrow t-shirts for berets and Sloppy Joes within the twelvemonth, I'm can assure you.
So, on to tonight's first guests, and they're XTC, uh, who are by the way here to answer all allegations that they're 1979's answer to The Barron Knights. Well, see what you think.
I'll see all your Peel impressions
and raise you Stan Webb of the mighty Chicken Shack.
On the second Chicken Shack album OK Ken from 1968, Stan delivers possibly the earliest known Peel impression.
Also heard on OK Ken are the voices of Hughie Green, Max Wall, Kenneth Williams, Chris Wood, Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, Steptoe and Son, and that of a BBC Radio announcer, all of them courtesy of the talented Mr. Webb.
Is this the one where he brought
Horace and Boris, Doris and Maurice?
Yes
It's here:
http://open.spotify.com/album/0vWbfYvuSvXMqJPKVVNWkg
Is intro to track 8, "Remington Ride" the proto-Peel ?
That's the one!
Stan was brilliant and very funny. Before the days of wireless guitar leads, he would wander into the audience mid-solo on the end of a 100 foot curly lead.
Norman Lovett
Also does a decent Peel impression on the Miniatures compilation album.
http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/various_artists_f2/miniatures_f2/
I don't know, you media types...
so plentiful is the office bugle supply that you can use it on a sponge cake (see panel 3 of the Lewry Sponge Triptych)
I fear fraser has made a school boy error
is that icing sugar going onto the sponge? If so it won't pass muster it's should be caster sugar! Well according to the WI and I'm not going to argue with them it would be like arguing wth your mum, you won't win and you might not get any cake either.
looks good yhough :)
http://www.thewi.org.uk/viewNews.aspx?id=13815
They also suggest using raspberry jam
Which, quite frankly, makes them idiots. Freshly crushed, sweetened raspberries are so much better.
you are brave man
Fraser it was all down hill for Tony Blair after he crossed the WI! crushed "fresh crushed raspberries" madness! This is exactly why we lost the empire and had to join EU!
Watch out Hannah
Fraser is after your crown.
Cakes at dawn?
There's only one way to find out..................FIGHT!
Cake off at next London Massive meet up.
Cake
or death?
The sponge cake is fine and that
but I'm still misty-eyed over the pork pie that appeared on Twitter a few days back...
Now I love Mark Ellen's bones...
...and bow to no man in my admiration for his musical knowledge, erudition and general joie de vivre.
But the number of times he cut across Robin Ince, just as Robin seemed to be on the cusp of (another) amusing anecdote, had me tearing my hair out in the car this morning.
I know this is all part of what makes Mark Mark, and I wouldn't really want him any other way - but Mark! Too giddy by far!
Obviously far too many E-numbers in the sponge Fraser...
I'm afraid that Dawkins story
unavoidably reminded of this brilliant Doonesbury cover
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/products/enlarge.html?isbn=0836218582
The creation of the Victoria Sponge in words
Photo 1
A true Victoria Sponge uses cream sourced from a Royal herd of Jersey cows descended from livestock owned by Queen Victoria. In 2009, Queen Elizabeth donated four of these cows to Mudchute farm where they can milked by special appointment.
“My first thought when I saw the cows was the many mouth watering ways that I could prepare their various cuts of meat,” admits Fraser, seen here spreading the end result of his milking expedition onto the bottom layer of his cake.
Photo 2
Raspberries are among the most dangerous of all English fruit, bursting full of vitamin C and unstable, reality destroying anti-matter particles, many of which are unknown to science.
“When handling raspberries there exists the very real possibility of wiping out whole timelines and dimensions, which is why you must always wear gloves when preparing them,“ warns Fraser, who was once fined by Camden council for briefly removing Saturn from the space-time continuum while attempting to perfect a Bakewell tart recipe.
He continues:
“I crushed the raspberries with a special rolling pin which absorbs rogue ghost neutrinos that can undermine the natural sweetness of the fruit and potentially unravel the laws of physics.”
Photo 3
“When it comes to selecting the best sugar I rely on the experts,” says Fraser.
He is referring of course to his personal swarm of Harrods ants, recognisable by their dark green exoskeletons and world renowned ability to locate the sweetest granules of sugar for their human overlords.
“Some people find the price of the ants off putting but you can’t argue with the results,” he adds.
“They are tireless workers and usually by morning they have acquired enough good quality sugar to perk-up a decent cup of coffee.”
I think what I love about the Word
is that despite being allegedly a pop culture mag the Editor and the Reviews Editrice have never heard of Harlan Ellison, but seem to know all about Schopenhauer. This suits me fine, being no stranger to Ellison but no Schopenhauer scholar ...
Was pleased to see the Ellison rant mentioned in the 'cast had been blogged here though http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/?q=content/harlan-ellison-free-content
Yours, off to dust off his copies of "Shatterday", "Ellison Wonderland", "Dangerous Visions" and the great "Deathbird Stories"
http://www.islets.net/collections/deathbird.html
(one of those books you find you've bought again 'cos it never got returned)
Confession
I have no idea who Robin Ince is, though he sounds like a nice chap from the discussion. I think I'd only heard of Ricky gervais of all the people he mentioned. Am I missing something?
Richard Feynman
You might be if you haven't read any of Richard Feynman's books - they're great. I went to see Robin Ince's show a few years ago, and was suitably intrigued by his mentions to go and track one down. The obvious one is probably 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman', which is a sort of autobiography, though there are others. He was a Nobel-prize winning physicist who, among other things, worked on developing the atomic bomb and was a key figure in the inquiry into the Challenger space shuttle disaster. If that sounds a little dry, he was also an amateur safecracker and bongo-player... I was never big on science in school, or anything like that, but I've found myself utterly engrossed in all the Feynman books.
I ended up having a chat with Robin about this after the next gig I went to - he was indeed a nice chap, with a genuine enthusiasm for his subject matter.
Seconded
The enthusiasm with which Feynman approaches everything in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman is brilliant. I haven't read anything else by him, but Tuva Or Bust by his friend Ralph Leighton, which is about his and Feynman's attempts to travel to Tuva, is worth a go.
I shall give it a try!
I shall give it a try!
You might want to put this in Something for the Weekend ?
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
The extraordinary Messenger lectures by Feynman at Cornell shown in the 60s by the BBC and published as the "Character of Physical Law". Needs Silverlight but worth it imo.
[edit: And to my delight, having last seen it when it was first shown on Horizon, Google has "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" as well:
]
Robin Ince is great
I saw him supporting Ricky Gervais at Hammersmith Odeon (or whatever that venue is called this year) a while ago and really enjoyed his set.
He also appears in the bonus features of at least one of Ricky's stand-up DVDs.
This is less funny however, due to Ricky's bizarre bondage fetish. He trusses Robin up using packing tape and generally humiliates him in other ways.
It would have been interesting to hear what Robin thought about this somewhat disturbing aspect of Ricky's humour.
How does one open a conversation about bondage?
"So Robin, do you like to be tied up?"
"Jesus, not you as well"
"Robin? Robin??! Come back Robin!"
That sounds like
as good a place as any to start. ;-)
Personally I would have just come right out and asked him:
Robin, has Gervais now become so powerful that people simply can't say no to him and must endure all manner of indignity if they want to stay within the inner circle?
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