The Itch of the Golden Nit – the film that I wrote about
(see this blog post)
featuring myself and the Young’uns singing a song about smelly pirates with hairy knees alongside
Vic Reeves
– is being aired this Saturday on bb c 2 at nine oClock in the morning. I’m not sure whether it’s in 3D or HD, but I hope it is. It would be good to get the pirate’s hairy knees in high definition, plus the finer nuances of our smelly pirate song might be lost if it’s not in surround sound.

DAVE Gorman,
this is your last chance! If you want to collaborate with me in a surreal sketch show featuring my robot friends then you better get in touch with me now, because once this film is aired (featuring
David Walliams
and
Catherine Tate
no less, Mr Gorman) you’ll regret your choice to ignore my invitation! But when the film is showcased it’ll be too late for you to reconsider because then there will be a deluge of offers coming in from other comedians.

The 106th
Young’uns podcast
will be coming soon and will be an Itch of the Golden Nit special. It’s the only podcast that Itch of the Golden Nit fans need listen to. You’ll get all the important information about the film, in spite of the fact that we’ll more than certainly not be featuring an interview with any of the stars:
Miranda Haart,
Catherine Tate, David Walliams, Vic Reeves and the fact that I only remotely know some tiny detail about the thirty seconds that we feature in it. But it will be the best thirty seconds!

It’s strange to think that this will probably be my last blog post as an ordinary member of the public. From Saturday, everything will change. I might have been a bit optimistic about the Dave Gorman/thought for the day thing, but I’m certain about it this time. Saturday will be the first day of the rest of my life! See you on the other side.

The Young’uns Podcast 105 is here.
Click here to download
Click here to listen now.

This week’s Young’uns podcast is a bit of a rollercoaster. In the emotional sense: as the podcast will inevitably have a big build up, only to come suddenly crashing down, leaving you feeling a bit sick and sore. But in addition to that allegorical rollercoaster, we feature an actual rollercoaster on the podcast (so I hope you appreciate the brilliance of that opening sentence; It works on so many levels – a bit like a rollercoaster really.)
Good news Mr. Harding; the audio treats continue. Following on from the roaring – or rumbling – success of the stomach noises item, we take things to their logical conclusion and move on to snoring.
Michael Hughes makes a urinal based observation.
Our special folky guest is
Gavin Davenport.
We’ll be finding out what makes him tick – although we won’t be bringing you the audio of that ticking on this week’s podcast (maybe next time). and We’ll also hear a couple of songs from him.
The Young’uns are joined at the Gate to Southwell festival by Doctor Who and the Daleks.
It’s an unwritten rule (although that’s about to change because I’m about to write it) that the Young’uns must have at least one Indian meal at every festival or gig they do. This week is no exception, and so we bring you the first in a series of reports from an Indian restaurant.
So I hope that all that curries favour with you (and yes that was a deliberate pun).

An Addendum to my last post

As an addendum to my last blog post: it transpired the next day that the potted plant was a gift from Aisha’s flatmate’s boyfriend – not for Aisha, for his girlfriend, Aisha’s flatmate; the story doesn’t get that exciting. The man with the speech impairment was the delivery man, not Dave Gorman or a young gormanesque comedy upstart. I find this hugely disappointing as now I won’t be appearing on the telly as part of a new comedy programme. And I’d spent all last night preparing lines for the show.

My friend Aisha rang me last night in hysterics. She recounted the following tale, which I shall duly recount to you in blog form. If you want, you can recreate her recounting of the story fairly accurately by reading this out loud amongst constant girlish giggles. This is also an important director’s note in case radio 4 are thinking of turning this story into a miniplay. Once I’ve got my foot in the door at Thought for the Day HQ, there’ll be no stopping me. They might even decommission Bellowhead and get the Young’uns to record the Archers theme tune instead.

Anyway, there was a knock at Aisha’s front door. Upon answering, she was greeting by a man who seemingly had a severe speech impairment. He was making a few noises but was mainly attempting to communicate by making gestures with his hands. As Aisha is blind, these gestures didn’t enlighten her about what he was trying to say. She explained that she couldn’t see enough to interpret his gestures. He seemed perturbed by this, and for a moment he did nothing while he presumably reassessed the situation and devised a new method of communicating with her. However, after a few seconds, he resumed his noises and gestureings, only with added intensity, getting closer to her and frantically waving his hands in her face. She reciprocated by shouting louder at the man, repeating the fact that she couldn’t see him enough to work out what he was trying to communicate.

This is kind of similar to the stereotypical behaviour of an Englishman on holiday when trying to communicate with someone who speaks a different language to them.

“Do you speak English?”

“Je ne comprends pas, Desolé”.

“Dooooo, yooooooo, speeeeeeeek, iiiiiiinnnnngliiiiiiiish!!!!!!!”

I look forward to the day when Aliens come to earth to visit us, but hope they don’t land on British soil. It would be a tad embarrassing for the whole world – watching their TVs expectantly – to hear the British Prime Minister greet our new arrival by saying, “Do you speak English?”
The alien would probably respond with “Bllepy, beepy, bleep, beep bleep beep”, which of course means “I don’t understand, sorry”. The Prime Minister will then nobly step closer to the alien and shout while pointing wildly in front of its face. “Dooooo, yoooo, speeeeeek, iiiiiiingliiiiiiish!!!!!!!!!!!”
I look forward to radio 4 working with me to turn this hilarious idea into an award winning sketch on my new flagship comedy program. It would be handy for me if you could arrange a meeting about this when I’m in the building recording my Thought for the Day segment.

As expected then, this communication method did nothing to help the situation and after a few more seconds, Aisha and the man stopped their fruitless communication attempts while they considered their next move. They decided not to try the same method for a third time – getting even closer to each other’s face and shouting and pointing with even more intensity. Although if this was a sketch on Little Britain, it would of course go on like this for an entire series, with Aisha and the man having individual catchphrases that they would shout at the close of each episode’s sketch; although no one in the audience would understand the catchphrase of the man with the speech impairment, but the viewers will laugh anyway.

The next move that the man made took Aisha aback, and she was unable to compose herself in time to react. The man thrust something into her hands and then walked off. She stood there, holding the object. It was a potted plant. She stood with it for a few seconds, wondering what the heck was going on, but the man had already gone and so she couldn’t ask questions – not that she would understand his response anyway.

We postulated on what the whole thing had been about. The best theory I came up with was that it might have been an odd stunt as part of a new TV comedy show. Perhaps a comedian had decided to film himself doing something completely random to a person like knock on their door, point and shout nonsense in their faces and then hand them a potted plant before walking off. Perhaps he will return to her house the next day with a new gift. Maybe the sketch is based around a kind of anachronistic “partridge in a pair tree” motif. Each day, for the next twelve days, he will go to the same lady’s house and try to ingratiate himself with her by presenting her with random gifts. But there’s an extra layer of quirkiness to the whole comedian’s concept: his challenge is to do this without speaking; he must communicate solely with noises and gestures. Perhaps he was already aware that Aisha was blind and chose her especially, adding another layer of complexity to the comedian’s routine. Or perhaps the whole thing was a beautiful discovery which has added an inadvertent dimention to this comedian’s crazy idea. This is the kind of idea Dave Gorman might entertain, or possibly a Dave Gormanesque upstart. Perhaps one challenge is to see if this strange event will make it on to Google. Dave Gorman will be searching for words like “random potted plant incident” and “blind girl potted plant speech impaired man” in the hope of finding her interpretation of the story on her Facebook page, or maybe the story on a friend’s blog. Well hello Mr Gorman. I’m on to you. I know you’re reading this, and I know what I’m writing is being broadcast on TV, and so I might as well take this opportunity to alert you of the fact that my alien/Prime Minister comedy sketch is copyright, so don’t you even think about stealing it and pretending it’s your own!

I wonder what will happen next. Will Dave Gorman now focus his next random event on me, or is there yet another layer of complexity to this whole thing? Well I’m ready Mr Gorman! I’m ready for you if you come to my house, make a series of noises and gestures, then hand me an antique washing mangle before walking off into the distance to do a Google search for “man in Hartlepool antique washing mangle”. Be warned though, Mr Gorman, that I am also blind, and so you’d get the same kind of reaction to your gestures that you got with my friend, which may make for a rather repetitive show, unless you’re going for that Little Britain thing. I don’t mind though. If you want to come to my house and do some recording for your new TV program then I’m well up for it. I’ve prepared a few lines to spice it up a bit. But I won’t be happy if I see my alien/Prime Minister sketch on the TV or if I hear you on Thought for the Day talking about racist women on busses!

Two women sitting on a bus: one woman said to the other woman (this isn’t a joke by the way, I don’t want to raise your hopes; this happened on the bus a few minutes ago) “You’ll never guess what I did today”. The other woman started to speak but the first woman cut across her and proceeded to tell her what she had done today, which in my book is cheating. She didn’t even get a chance to guess. Dirty tactics! So I assume she was merely using the phrase “you’ll never guess what I did today” without really thinking about it in any particular detail. Well I’m not the kind of person to let her get away with that sort of phraseological frittering, and now I’ve mentioned this woman’s lazy figure of speech in my blog; that’ll show her! Anyway, if I keep on analysing her whole conversation in as much detail as I have done so far then this blog post will be never ending (to use a lazy figure of speech, because of course it will end. If nothing else, I will die and then it will have to end. Unless I can produce offspring who will continue the blog post after I’m gone, but even then it must, at some point, come to an end. And anyway, what woman would want to enter into a relationship and reproduce with a man who’s unyielding obsessive preoccupation is to maintain a constant, never ending banal blog post. So yes, the post must end at some point. Religious fanatics may make fruitless predictions about when the post’s end will come, but they will inevitably claim that they merely miscalculated when it doesn’t actually happen at the time they’d specified. You’d have thought that before making such a bold prediction and trumpeting it in the media, he would have asked a friend to check his sums to save him all that embarrassment. O yeah, I just did some satire all over your arse – in case you were wondering what that queazy feeling was. But yes, this blog post must end at some point).

The content of the woman’s day was not particularly interesting; not when you compare it to her opening line which has resulted in over 200 words of analysis.

She was talking about a conversation she’d had with a group of girls who she’d just met that day. The anecdote took the form of: “Then one girl said” … “and another girl said …” “and then another girl said …” and so on. This went on for a while and I was beginning to lose interest in this stranger’s tale. But then she said “and then, this coloured girl said …”. Why did she feel the need to specify that this girl was “coloured”. All the other girls had just been described as “a girl”, but this woman obviously felt the need to mention that this particular girl who said this particular thing was “coloured”. The fact that she was “coloured” had no baring on what the girl had said from what I could tell. The whole conversation between these girls sounded dull. All the girls in the conversation were saying dull things, as was “this coloured girl”. It wasn’t even as if “this coloured girl” had said anything illuminating which changed the course of the conversation. She was just as dull as the rest of the girls, who I assume must have all been white, otherwise why make the distinction?

When the second woman heard the first woman say what “this coloured girl” had said, she made a noise that gave the impression that she also thought that the fact that this girl was “coloured” added another dimension to the bland story.

What does she mean by “coloured” anyway? Presumably someone who isn’t white. But why “coloured?” Surely i, as a white man, can be labeled as “coloured” just as readily as a person with a different skin colour to mine?

I remember a poem that a teacher read during a primary school assembly which made this very point:

“When I was born, I was black.
When I grew up, I was black.
When I get hot, I am black.
When I get cold, I am black.
When I am sick, I am black.
When I die, I am black.

When you were born, You were pink.
When you grew up, You were white.
When you get hot, You go red.
When you get cold, You go blue.
When you are sick, You go purple.
When you die, You go green.

AND YET YOU HAVE THE CHEEK TO CALL ME COLOURED!!!”

So there you go. Surely this blog post is a contender for a Thought of the Day item on radio 4’s Today program? at the very least I should get an appearance on Pause for Thought on radio 2. I’ll edit it a bit so it’s radio friendly; take out the more rambly parts and the word arse, and then once that’s done it’ll be a poignant, socially observant item, perfect for sentimental radio features like Thought for the day or Pause for Thought.

THE END!

The new summer series of the Young’uns podcast is here:

This week, we speak to Michael Hughes as he gets his feet eaten by fish; Mike shamelessly flirts with a woman cooking bacon just to get an extra rasher; we attempt an interview with a none-moving statue; are the Young’uns gay? We reveal all – possibly to each other. Plus: an escaping infirm cat, stomach noises and top tips for perverts. “But what about the folk?” (Well, if you insist.) There’s also recorded material taken from the Young’uns at Hardraw, Liverpool and Peterborough.

You can download the podcast
here
or stream it
Here
or for you flash fans out there

Subscription options will follow soon, (such as downloading and subscribing to the podcast in Itunes) to follow soon.

In the first David Eagle’s Pick and
Mix
(which you can listen and download here)
I mentioned that I would write a blog post about some of my favourite DJ’s in an attempt to hopefully introduce you to some quality audio experiences and also so that you will no who to blame for my DJing attempts. So here goes.

December 2001: A trail came on bbc radio 1 that consisted of lots of different tracks all woven into one another and over the top of each other in a 30 second mix, advertising a program to be broadcast on Christmas night by 2 Many DJ’s called Hang the DJ. At the time, I’d never heard of
2 Many DJ’s, also known as Soulwax, but I was compelled to listen because of the trail.

That Christmas had the potential to be really depressing for me; in 2001 I would have been 16, and my dad decided that this meant I was now old enough to learn that he and my mother had been lying to me all these Christmas’s and that this Santa bloke who I’d been trying my hardest to be good for all these years didn’t actually exist?! Fortunately my disillusionment with life was tempered by the 2 Many DJ’s show.

It certainly didn’t disappoint. I sat by the radio and listened to the whole thing enraptured. It was the first time I’d come across the concept of the “bootleg) as it was labelled: Mixing the vocal of one song with the instrumental of another. Nowadays it’s common practise and has spawned many a pop hit but it seemed really innovative to me back then.

I remember my girlfriend at the time ringing me up to wish me a merry Christmas. She’d bought me loads of presents–a lot more than I’d bought her–and I am ashamed to say that rather than saying “thank you, merry Christmas” and engaging in conversation, I told her I was too busy to talk because I was doing something really important. I think she felt a bit put out at the time but I’m sure that if she’s reading this blog post now, she’ll willingly forgive me the transgression considering that “really important” thing led to the concept for David Eagle’s Pick and Mix which has obviously helped make the world a better place.

I recorded the mix on a couple of c90 cassettes. I’ve uploaded that original recording for you here. The whole mix is there, apart from the few missing seconds from turning over to the next side and changing the tape. I hope those missing seconds haven’t lost us some precious moment of genius, but I don’t remember thinking so at the time.

Click here to Listen.
Click here to download.
Or you can access the flash option if you’d rather stream it from this blog so you can enjoy listening while looking at the photo of my face.

I’ll release the next David Eagle’s Pick and Mix sometime this year but the main priority will be the Young’uns Podcasts, the first of which will be here by the end of this week / beginning of next week.

I hope you enjoy the mix. Listening to it again ten years later still brings me back to that Christmas, sitting by the radio in ore, telling my girlfriend to piss off … O the memories!

I’m writing this blog post while pretending to be writing something else. I’m at a training course and I think the woman at the front doing the talking is very flattered and impressed that I am furiously typing notes about what she’s saying. She may also be quite taken aback by my furious note taking because she may be aware of the fact that what she’s saying is a load of bollix. In some respects though, I am making notes about what she’s saying because I’ve just made the observation that what she’s saying is “a load of bollix”. I’ve also made a reference to what seems to be the whole premise of her talk for the last ten minutes which is about the importance of being “110 % pacific”.

I’m confused. She wants me to represent more of the pacific than the pacific itself? But not just me, she wants everyone in the room to be 10 % more pacific than the pacific itself. Has she any idea what she’s asking us
To do? Firstly, she’s completely disregarded the makeup of our human bodies. To turn flesh, blood and bone into ocean is no small feat. Secondly, if we somehow did manage to make ourselves more pacific than the pacific itself then what about the wider provocations? Such a mutation would undoubtedly cause terrible damage to our planet: earthquakes and tsunamies galore”. I doubt many of us would survive such an ordeal; not that any of the pacific people would enjoy this form of survival anyway, knowing that we’d destroyed our friends and family and billions of other people just because of one errant, maverick woman’s baffling instructions at a team leaders’ training course.

When this training course first started it seemed fairly prosaic. Firstly, we played a game where we had to associate each day of the week with a certain temperature and colour. You could try playing this game at home if you like, although you may not get the full impact of the game because we were privileged to have a properly qualified teacher – sorry, learning facilitator (they’re not teachers apparently; they don’t teach us, they just facilitate our learning. At least they’re honest about the fact that they don’t actually teach us anything.) I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of the game was meant to be, unless it literally was simply to make me aware that my colleague Phill associates Monday with a dark grey -10 degrees Celsius, as opposed to Fridays’ golden 25 degrees Celsius.

We’re making people redundant left right and centre: policemen, army staff, council workers; massive household businesses are going bust, yet in spite of all this we can still find enough money to employ none-teachers to facilitate the learning of the tenets of team leading by playing a game where we associate days of the week with temperatures and colours?!

The learning facilitator has just announced that she’s handing out feedback forms so that we can give our opinion about the training day. Maybe I should write this blog post on the form. Of course, I won’t; I’m far too nice – or coward is – to do that. Besides, she’s quite attractive in an odd sort of way and I don’t want to scupper my chances of getting with her. I’ve been making little jockey comments all through the training course in a bid to impress her, but I don’t think she’s noticed. She doesn’t seem to register them as jocular comments, treating them as if I’m saying something serious, taking the comment literally and then making a basic remark in her cooing, patronising, bored voice.

There’s something about that voice though that intrigues me. She can’t sound that bored all the time? She’s fairly young, in her early thirties. She must get excited sometimes. Maybe I can excite her. She sounds so bored that during one of my many drifting off moments I started wondering about how excited she might sound during sex. Is that odd? Of course it is, I didn’t need to ask. I wonder if she’d still sound bored or if she might perk up a bit. I could do some role-play with her. We could sit in a room (that we pretend is a classroom) as she goes through her tedious, nonsensical training garbage in her bored voice. As time goes on I seduce her with saucy quips that relate to what she’s saying in the training. At first, she treats me with indifference and keeps going with her talk, but in time her voice begins to get a bit more excited as she becomes increasingly aroused. I continue to taunt her with more saucy witticisms as she attempts to focus on the material of the training course and revert back to the bored voice. But it’s no use. She can’t help herself. She eventually gives in to temptation and … Shit! I’m writing this on her feedback form!

What the heck? I’ve just come back to the reality of the situation to hear the bored-voiced woman telling us that we must be “110 % reliable. Hang on, does that make sense? We have to be 110 % pacific and 110 % reliable? I’m now 220 % confused; we can’t be both; that’s mathematically impossible. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m on a course that’s just a bit too advanced for people like me with my primitive mathematical assertions and my inability to listen to the learning facilitator without fantasising about having sex with her.

Could this possibly be my most worrying (and perhaps most telling) blog post of them all?

If you’re still not bored of reading rants about training courses then
check out a previous post on the issue.
There isn’t any sexual content in that one so you can relax.

I was in the news agents the other day with a friend. (Not the most exciting opening sentence to a blog post but don’t be fooled, this story will be epic.) My friend needed to buy a pint of milk because he’d ran out of it and he wanted to make tea and eat serial and do other things that generally involve the need for milk (I told you it got more exciting.)
I waited for my friend in the queue at the counter as he went to get the milk. There were a few people in front of me and as we were in a bit of a rush – eager to get back to make tea and serial and do other things that generally involve the need for milk – we decided that I should wait in the queue while he quickly got the milk and then joined me in the queue with the milk. (A truly genius time saving master plan I’m sure you’ll agree. This blog is the place to come for time saving tips, although my best time saving tip for you would be that if you’re really serious about saving time then you should probably stop reading this time wasting blog.)

I heard my friend announce that he’d got the milk. This was perfect timing as we were next in the queue. This is when my blindness came into effect and thus an ordinary milk purchase got a bit unusual – teats up you might say, if you are the type of person who is sad enough to make milk based puns. I heard the shopkeeper say to the man in front of me, “So that’s one pint of milk”. “This must be Ben” I thought. I assumed he must have got the milk and joined me at the front of the queue. As I owed Ben a little bit of money, I decided that I was going to pay for the milk, so I said “I’ll pay for this” and handed the shopkeeper the money.

I then discovered that the man in front of me wasn’t Ben but a complete stranger. He made some kind of protestation in a very shocked voice. The shopkeeper, assuming that I was a friend of the man, accepted my money and handed the pint of milk to the man. The man went to protest again but his phone rang. He answers his phone and as he walked out the shop I heard him say, still sounding completely shocked, “I don’t believe it; the strangest thing has just happened to me!” His voice faded into the distance as he proceeded to tell his friend about the complete stranger who insisted on buying him his pint of milk.

There’s a very tiny chance that he’s reading this blog, but just in case he is I thought I’d provide him with an explanation of what happened. I thought you were my friend. Perhaps you should be my friend; you owe me a pint of milk mate!

What an exciting bank holiday weekend: One royal wedding and a dead Taliban leader. And a new YouTube clip of the Young’uns performing live!

For me, a great Young’uns gig isn’t really about how well we perform musically because I’m always confident that we’ll do that reasonably well; it’s more about the bits in between the songs that dictate whether I feel a gig was great or not. In fact, one of my favourite gigs we ever did was one where I had a really sore throat and was for all intents and purposes unable to sing. So we just talked. It had the potential to be a really stressful and bad performance; I’d been gigging for the last four days and was feeling really ill. We had to stop some songs halfway through because I just kept coughing really loudly while the other two fruitlessly attempted to compensate and cover my coughs. But the bits in between the songs – which was about 90 % of the gig – were amazing. We ended up telling anecdotes about things that happened to us on tour and the audience seemed to love it, laughing hysterically. Nowadays this is how are performances tend to be, only with a bit more singing than in that gig, but that potentially hideous gig was a major influence on how we now perform.

Here’s a bit in between the songs that someone kindly put on YouTube. I was hoping to be telling this story all the way through the summer run of festivals, but I think the YouTube clip’s kind of buggered that up now.
So I thought I might as well help perpetuate its buggering up powers by putting it up on my blog. So here it is; some accordion related toilet humour.

Right then, I’m off to try and write this joke that’s been brewing in my head for the last few days. It’s something to do with Bin Laden and refuse collecting but I can’t tell you at the moment until I’ve ironed out a few of the finer nuances of my amazing joke. I think you’ll be very impressed by it though.