Gym'll Fix It

For the first time since 2008, and the first time regularly since... some point previous to that, I have started going to the gym.

The reason for this is simple. I've kind of got fat. Came as a surprise to me, I can tell you.

The sad thing here is that it actually did come as a surprise to me. I was a pretty skinny teenager, and remained so up until my early twenties. In my mind's eye, I'm still slim. When I think of how to describe myself, the words "fairly slim" tend to come to mind, even though they're an utter lie. It's not that it's an intentional lie - it's that I don't feel like a fat bloke. Not really.

It's not exactly rocket science how it happened. My work has, for most of the last ten years or so, involved me sitting in front of a computer. My main hobby outside of work is writing, which involves me... sitting in front of a computer.

Add in the fact that I'm a lousy cook. Well, that's not entirely true - if I put in the effort, I  can cook pretty well. However, I'm unlikely to put in the effort. Even though I've been a vegetarian for almost two decades, I'm far more likely to plump for a pot noodle or a pizza than I am for something healthy.

It's not necessarily that I'm lazy. I'm just not good at this stuff. I mostly started gaining weight when I quit smoking. Throw in a divorce a few years later, and I kept gaining weight over a good few years. My mother, bless her, has consistently been telling me I've lost weight every time I've seen her, in outright contradiction to all visual evidence to the contrary. This is because my mother is lovely.

Just before my thirtieth birthday, I went to the Doctors, as I'd consistently had pain in my hand for a long time. Being male, and an idiot, I put it off until the joint under my thumb swelled up visibly and painfully to the point of nausea. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. It made me feel very, very old.

If you don't know, arthritis is when joints become inflamed - my hand had become particularly inflamed, and I didn't do anything about it other than start wearing a wrist support which actually caused more harm than good. The Doctor told me to start using ibuprofen. I've always avoided pain killers where possible, but I've found that ibuprofen has become my best friend. It was actually designed for arthritis, and God, it's good. I only use it when I have to, but it does work.

Since then, the arthritis has flared up mainly around my ankle and knees. At one point, I developed a click in my knee when I was going upstairs that I swear echoed, and every time I get up from the sofa, it takes me a while to get my ankles warmed up to the point where they'll actually move.

I realised I didn't like hobbling around, and that I wasn't making things any easier by carrying around all this extra weight. I may as well generally be carrying around a full rucksack. On top of that, building up the muscles in my legs may actually help me to take the pressure off the joints. The problem is that running is quite high impact on those joints.

So recently, I've been making more of an effort. A lot of this is down to my girlfriend who has rediscovered her love of cooking, and has been cooking lots of good, healthy food. She's also been encouraging me to eat more healthily generally, but in a very non-pressured way.  It turns out that fruit and vegetables are delicious. I can only assume this will come as much as a surprise to you as it did to me.

My work does have a small gym. It's been taunting me for months, but it didn't help that I felt massively self-conscious. It's one thing to actually be willing to get into the gym, but other people around, getting to actually see how out of shape I am? No. Not good.

So I got over it. About a month ago, I started using the gym. It was kind of scary at first, because I felt ridiculous.It doesn't help that I feel like it's all kind of mystical. The exercise bike, for example, has all these different settings on it, and I don't know what most of them mean. There's something that I can only describe as a big...frame like thing, which has loads of different attachments. On top of that, there are five different dials on the shower. And besides, will I look more strange if I keep the towel tightly wrapped around me when I'm getting changed after the shower, or if I go what the Ancient Romans would call "cock out"? Is it a moment of "God, you're obviously massively uncomfortable with yourself, aren't you?" or is it a moment of "For the love of God, why did you think it was appropriate to take the towel off before putting your pants on?" - I have no idea.

I kept relatively quiet that I was going to start using the gym. Some of the guys at work were very supportive, and one of them asked me a few times if I wanted to double up at the gym, but the fact that I could use it pretty much on my own felt very important, due to the whole 'feeling ridiculous' thing. Being able to be there pretty much alone, with my MP3 player on felt more private, and while I felt uncomfortable, that seemed like a good place to start.

I found it tough going at first. Of course I did. I had to stop a few times on the bike just to be able to keep going and get water, but I did keep going. And then I went back the next day. And the next.

And it's working pretty well. I've been going a minimum of three times a week, and am aiming for four times a week most times. It gets so much easier, and just over a month later, I'm burning twice the amount of calories than I was when I started, and I've started adding in a little bit of weights and stomach crunches.

I even bought some new trainers for more general wear, so I now have a pair specifically for the gym. It probably says a lot about me that, along with comfort and fit, my main requirement for trainers was 'not something that a twat would wear'.

The scariest thing? I've found that I actually enjoy it. The weight hasn't started dropping off yet, but my ankle and knees are definitely hurting less, and I'm feeling some actual muscle in my legs, and if I squint, I think I'm losing a bit of the gut. I'm also drinking more water and eating more fruit at work. The weight will come. I know this.

I know myself too well to be able to feel comfortable saying that I'm going to be able to keep this up for the long-term. But last week, I missed a session due to a lack of towels, and I ended up actually feeling quite anxious about it, and felt so much better the next time I actually went into the gym.

Fingers crossed, this will help. Fingers crossed, I'll be able to keep it up.

I think I deserve a beer now.

Motion Blur

I was sitting in the pub, quietly sipping a pint of ale when Blur came in and sat at the table with me.

"Did you see it?" Damon asked, his eyes shining with an excitement that belied the aged skin around it.

"What, you guys at the Brits?" I asked. "I actually did. Well done, that was a good show."

"Yeah. Yeah, it was. And did you see that we're on the Olympics closing concert as well?" He asked, nudging Alex James.

"I did. Congratulations. You must be very excited."

"We are." he said. "We're totally excited. We're not messing around this time. No new stuff. Just wall to wall, balls out, classics."

I realised that I wasn't going to get to drink my ale in private, so I put it down and attempted to properly engage with the conversation.

"No new stuff?"

"None."

"I thought you wanted to write, like, new stuff all the time. Like opera."

A glimmer of sadness formed in his eyes, and he briefly looked like a little boy lost in a man's set of clothing. Much like Richard Hammond. "All I ever wanted was to speak to God," he said. "He gave me that longing."

Then he focused and the sadness was replaced with anger.

"No, not this time." he said.  "I didn't want to do it this time. The Olympics, they asked me if I would, right, but I didn't want to. Alex wants us to - "

Alex interrupted him. "I have this great idea for a new chorus. It goes 'Doo doo doo doo doooooooo....I'm loving it'".

"Shut up, Alex." Damon said. "But we're not doing it this time. We're concentrating on what works."

"That's good," I said, beginning to look for my nearest exit. Damon was looking a little bit manic.

"And do you know what the best thing is?" He asked.

"....no, Damon, I don't know what the best thing is."

"It means we win."

"You win?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding his head. "We win. You saw The Brits. You saw Noel Gallagher. Reduced to duetting with fucking Coldplay. He didn't even win Best Solo Male Artist."

"So?"

"It proves we were best. Nineteen Ninety Four, 'Country House' versus 'Roll With It'. We won then, but people thought we lost the war. Everyone was all 'oooh, Oasis, they're brilliant', but look at them now. Where are they now, eh? Nowhere, that's where."

There was a dangerous glint in his eyes that scared me.

"Do the rest of the band feel the same way?" I asked him.

"Who cares what the rest of the band felt?" he responded angrily. "Noel Gallagher, right,  didn't even win best solo artist, and then everybody cheered for us. We won. Like we should have won all the time."

"Damon," Alex said, "Wait. Think about this. If we lose all the anger at Oasis, we can just have fun again. We can project a nicer image, and maybe get corporate sponsorship, like McDonalds. And McDonalds is brilliant, isn't it Damon?"

"Shut it, cheese-fucker." Damon growled. I couldn't help but raise my eyebrows as Alex looked sadly at the ground.

"Maybe you're being a bit obsessive." I tried to say to Damon.

"Everyone's going to be saying how brilliant we are at the Olympics, while Noel Gallagher is sat outside with a piece of card saying 'I used to be relevant, why did I ever argue with Damon'. That's what he'll be doing. While I walk out as the fucking God of Brit-Pop."

"Look, you need to calm down" I said, as Damon continued to raise his voice.

"You know what my last concert is going to be? It's going to be us doing a concert on Noel Gallagher's grave. We're going to dance all over it and sing Song 2."

"I'm going to leave now," I said.

"Woo-hoo, Chris! Woo-Hoo."

As I left, Damon continued shouting "Woo-hoo", getting more and more out of breath.

Alex ran up after me. "Look, I just wanted to say..." he said. "...I don't fuck cheese. I just really like it."

"I know, Alex," I said. "I know."

Review: The Woman in Black

The movie of "The Woman in Black" is far from the first time this story has been told. Susan Hill's novel has previously been a well-received TV adaptation and the second-longest running play on the West End (behind Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap").

I went to see the stage version last month. If you're in London, I cannot recommend it enough. It's a superb, old fashioned ghost story, and elicits some genuine jumps from the audience. This is particularly impressive considering it's performed with a very small cast. It also (along with the television version) takes liberties with the original novel. In the book, the main character is an old man who tells the story about his youth. In the play, the old man is looking for advice from an actor who helps him to tell his story.

This version is far more stripped down and straightforward, which is good, because the story is fairly simple. A young lawyer goes to a remote area to work on the paperwork of a recently passed woman. While he's there, he starts being stalked by a ghost. To give much more away would be to do you a disservice.

It's not quite as strong as the stage play, but it's still a fairly fresh movie and belies it's 12A certificate by being genuinely quite frightening in places. Some may say that the jumps that are elicited are "cheap", but that's only fair when it's in a movie that doesn't have anything else to offer. The jumps in this are the punchlines to the increasing tension created by each scene - in fact, some of the moments that work best are the ones where you're expecting something to happen and nothing does.

Daniel Radcliffe is good in it, playing a man recently bereaved. He constantly looks pale and drawn out, and actually has to carry a lot of the film almost entirely by himself. In silence, no less.

To give you an idea how well this suceeds, it can be compared favourably to the movie where John Cusack spends a night being haunted by a hotel room ("1408", based on the Stephen King movie of the same name), which was interesting but flawed. Radcliffe comes off better here than John Cusack did. And I say that as a John Cusack fan. And, for that matter, a Stephen King fan.

The film looks beautiful throughout, internally and externally, and it uses darkness better than any movie since "Rec". The cinematography, the design, the lighting - all excellent. Great work by all involved, and all brought together well by veteran Horror director James Watkins.

The only major issue I have with it is that it kind of falls betwixt and between the 12A and 15 rating. It feels like it occasionally wants to be more unpleasant than it is, and I'm not massively keen on the slightly tacked-on ending. While I like the narrative turn, I think the choice made softens what should be quite a hard blow, and that felt possibly a little too intended not to upset anyone too much. It's a shame, because the ending could have been so, so effective, and it's slightly neutered.

Otherwise, though, Jane Goldman is the real star of this one. After Stardust, Kick Ass and X-Men: First Class, she's become the queen of adaptations. "The Debt" was, I believe original, and she cowrote a solid screenplay there, but I'm now massively interested to see if she can turn out something completely original and entirely in her own voice.

Overall, it's mostly successful. It's nice to see the new Hammer Studios working well with the kind of material that the original studio made its name with. Hopefully, there will be more where this came from.

The Knight in the Library

The forgotten characters sit quietly in the library. They look at each other occasionally with sad and sometimes hopeful smiles.

They are afforded privileges based on age and popularity. After all, an older, popular character has lost more than a minor character in a recent novel.

Once, some of them were loved. Once, some of them inspired people. Now, they sit there, gathering dust.

He is one of the oldest of them. A Knight, who was one of the group that inspired the Knights of Camelot. One of the group who fought alongside of the original King Arthur, but one who had failed to be recreated the second time around, and who had just grown progressively more forgotten.

Every day, he comes in, and sits patiently, hoping to be remembered. He does not complain. He does not feel sad. He is a Knight and Knights have dignity.

Also, every day, he gets to see her. The ancient African princess, who is beautiful, wise and kind. She makes every one of his days better, and the endless purgatory worthwhile. They don't talk much. Nobody talks much after so long. But they always find something new to say each day, and they always make eye contact, and he can always make her smile.

She likes to see him. Some days, that's all that matters.

Today, he waits, and she does not come.

He looks around the library, but she is nowhere. He talks to the world's first detective (a fat Chinese man who laughs a lot) and he talks to the golden calf (that spoke to Eve in the garden and became so popular that God himself got annoyed) but neither of them know why. But neither of them care as much as he does.

The Knight has only rarely spoken to the Librarian. There has never been any need. But today, he clears his throat and enquires after the princess.

"Oh, her? Got rediscovered", the Librarian says. "Some fantasy writer sort of updated her, and the book came out this week. Very good reviews. There may even be a movie. You won't see her back again."

The knight thanks the librarian, and makes his way back to his normal chair, where he sits and waits.

He looks at her chair, but it is empty.

He waits.

And waits.

Waits.

And waits.

Patiently.

Reverting back to childhood

Do you remember what you were into when you were twelve years old? Are you still into the same things?

I've discovered plenty of new things to be enthused about in the last twenty years, but I'm still very much a fan of the things that I liked then. I still like Sherlock Holmes, I still like Doctor Who, I still like Transformers, I still like comics, and I still like wrestling.

Yes, I'm not kidding about that last one. I'm a huge wrestling fan and have been since I was twelve. I'd heard about Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior and the Legion of Doom and Jake "The Snake" Roberts, and it all seemed very exciting and over-the-top. When my parents got SKY for the first time, I became hooked very quickly.

It's particularly weird getting to do something new with regards to something that's become a big part of your life. It's a bit like when the new series of Doctor Who started in 2005. You kind of start a new relationship with it and it leads you to re-evaluate things a little.

With wrestling, the relationship changed firstly because I started finding out about what went on behind the scenes. It opened up a whole new avenue, as I got to learn that as big and over-the-top as things were on-screen, they were often as petty and sleazy behind the scenes. I was fascinated.

This ended up leading me to the point where I spent a while working as a Ring Announcer for British wrestling, and got to learn a load of the technical side about the shows and got to chat to a lot of wrestlers. It was a little like being a stage-hand for a magician.

But throughout the years, I had never seen Hulk Hogan live. I didn't see much of him as a kid - he was retiring when I first started watching, and he occasionally turned up for very short runs. For various reasons, I hated him with a passion as I began to learn more about the industry, but in recent years (and, not coincidentally, as he's become less relevant), I've begun to appreciate how well he does what he does.

So, strangely, it was the opportunity to see Hulk Hogan live that led to me going to the Impact! Wrestling show at Wembley Arena on Saturday. Even when my fellow London-based wrestling fan friends couldn't make it, and my girlfriend didn't fancy sitting through three hours of wrestling (and who can blame her?).

It was partially in acknowledgement to my twelve-year-old self. The idea that, twenty years later, the things I enjoyed then, I still enjoy now. Not everyone gets why I like it, and that's fine. There are even people that assume that I'm a bit weird because I like it. That's fine too.

Having never seen him, even on television, the twelve-year-old me would have done anything to see Hulk Hogan live. In the same way that I would have done anything to go and visit the set of Doctor Who, or wander around Baker Street.

I don't know if I enjoyed things on a much more simple level then, and if I constantly try to revisit that. I didn't like things in a complicated way. I didn't have any sense of embarrassment of being a fan of things. Maybe it was a more pure enjoyment. Maybe not.

But for one night, Hulk Hogan finished a night of entertainment by shamelessly pandering to the crowd. He ran in to save some goodies from being beaten up, but before he did so, he looked at the crowd. "What should I do?", he seemed to plead as he looked around questioningly. The crowd responded by roaring approval, so he pointed his finger at the baddies, then beat them all up. He went to celebrate with the guy he'd rescued (James Storm), and left him to bask in the adulation of the crowd. But Storm made clear that the crowd wanted to see Hogan. Hogan looked round, as if he was unsure. So we cheered more, and then he ripped off his shirt and posed for us all. For ten minutes straight. And we all loved it.

For one night, I regressed to being twelve years old. The only important thing was that Hulk Hogan beat up the baddies, then invited us all to celebrate with him.

And all was right with the world.

David Cameron and the British Film Industry

This is a routine I performed at Working Title Comedy at the Big Green Bookshop on January 20th. It went down well, but because it's topical, it's one I may not reuse any time too soon - so I thought I'd stick it up here.


David Cameron said the British Film Industry should concentrate on making commercial successes. Because they're obviously not managing to do so without his help.

It reminded me of a quote by the famous screenwriter William Goldman - he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, the Princess Bride...films like that, and he said "When it comes to the movie industry, nobody knows anything", and what he meant by that was that everyone's trying to make a hit, and they're trying to, but everyone makes mistakes.

But I went back to the book where he wrote that, "Adventures in the screen trade", because I was aware that sometimes quotes leave off half of what was actually said. Like in Richard III, where the line is famously "Now is the winter of our discontent", meaning now, things are bad. But what he actually says is "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York", meaning that things were bad, but are now good. And I looked at it, and it's the same thing. William Goldman didn't say "When it comes to the movie industry, nobody knows anything. William Goldman actually says "In the movie industry, nobody knows anything...except David Cameron. He does."

Back in the eighties, Stephen Spielberg made a run of three of the biggest movies made at that point in time. Jaws, ET, Indiana Jones....then he made 1941, which was a complete flop. If only he'd spoken to David Cameron before making that film, and he'd have said "No, Stephen, know your limits and make Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Michael Cimino made The Deer Hunter for the studio United Artists, one of the oldest, most respected film studios in the world, and he followed it up with one of the most expensive films of all time, Heaven's Gate, which ended up being terrible. Left with no options, United Artists gave it a huge, expensive promotion campaign to try and
recoup their massive losses...if it wasn't a hit, the studio would go under, but try what they might...it made no money, and thousands of people lost their jobs.

If only they had called David Cameron. He would have said "Michael, I respect your intention to fulfil your artistic calling, but this film needs a very special dog."

John Travolta, in the mid nineties was in the worst career period of his life. He'd just finished making "Look Who's Talking Now"...(the dogs were talking)...and things were going badly enough that he was grateful for the work. Then, he bumped into David Cameron, who said to him "Have you seen Reservoir Dogs? You should get in touch with the director. Sure thing there, mate". And the two of them remained friends for years, and Travolta had a second spring....and then they fell out and we got Battlefield Earth.

If only he'd continued to listen to David Cameron.

We can presumably look forward to films like "Four Weddings and a Terminator", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Predator", "Don't look now, but Justin Bieber is right over there" and "Corialanus 2 - The Dark of the Moon".

The British Film industry has responded in kind to David Cameron, and they've said "What David Cameron needs to do is to just make more jobs and just fix the economy. Rather than tell us that we need to make more commercial films while his government kills off the UK Film Council and blocks a Pinewood Studios extension.
Arsehole."

Real Life Simulations

The first of them were basic in form. They can't have been any more than about twenty pixels. They had limited functionality and limited needs. They lived in data memories and fed on commands.

Everybody was told that these things had been invented. As if they were somehow ours to do with as we pleased. And every time they evolved, we were told that the programming had become more complex. Because, obviously, we were making enormous technological leaps forward every single year. And we all believed it, possibly because we wanted to believe it.

My first one was simple enough to catch and fit on a keyring. An LCD display and three buttons. When I was younger, I had sea monkeys, and because they seemed to be a kind of powder, I believed that they'd been made, not simply reanimated on contact with water.

I was never good at feeding them. Not when they swam around in the water, or when I just had to press a button. They had a volume control that, now, seems like an exercise in cruelty. All we did was stop them screaming from hunger. And then we reanimated them with a battery and made them go through it again.

As they evolved, we found more complex ways of keeping them captured. Restricting the data they fed on to CDs and transferring them to files which could be opened and closed at will. We could feed them so many more commands and give them what seemed like a happier life.

I stopped feeding one once, just to see what would happen. He looked out at the screen, slowly becoming less mobile and begging me to help. I'd just override his commands, confusing him. I watched him, over the hours, starve to death. And then I laughed with my friends about it.

If you asked me, I'd swear I didn't know that they could feel pain. But deep down, I knew. I knew and I laughed with my friends about how it turned green and died.