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John Finnemore’s souvenir programme s9 is the perfect special interest because it gives you all these little mysteries to unravel, and then it turns out the answer is “the meaning of life is joy”

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Proving the point of the sketch by having Melody Can’t Park In The Dark stuck in my head right now

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(x)

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You can register for the ballot for free tickets to the next recording of JFSP here, for the next three hours.

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John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme series 9 transcripts are up!!

https://jfsp9.neocities.org/ Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Wilkos!

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Sound Heap

I’m launching a new podcast and I’m really excited about it. It’s called Sound Heap and the idea is that John-Luke Roberts hosts a selection of clips of the week’s best podcasts. All of these podcasts are, of course, made up. 

https://podfollow.com/1569675977

John-Luke improvised the podcasts with over thirty different comedians, each of whom would do ten-minute excerpts of half a dozen different ideas over the course of an hour on Zoom*. We then took those recordings and whittled them down to just the absolute gold, and put a voiceover over the top to tie it all together and contextualise it. Paddy Gervers and Rob Sell at Torch & Compass wrote us some jingles and a theme (the rest of the music is from the Epidemic music library), and we made it sound like a real podcast - we’ve made the chatcasts sound like chatcasts, the documentaries sound like documentaries, and so on.

What’s exciting is that blend of the loose, spontaneous comedy and the tight, edited production. It’s a best-of-both-worlds, cake-and-eat-it approach that allows funny people - people like Mark Watson, Josie Long, Kevin Eldon, Katherine Parkinson, Bilal Zafar, Sooz Kempner - to just be funny, while also taking out the thinking-out-loud footsteps that are sometimes necessary in improv to get from one good bit to the next.

Podcasting has overtaken Radio 4 as the dominant home of UK audio comedy, in volume at least, but the BBC still sets a benchmark that independent podcasts can struggle to match, for fairly obvious reasons; a Radio 4 comedy with a budget of ten thousand pounds an episode can afford actors and studios and sound designers, of course, but also to pay writers and producers for the time to think and craft the programmes. Few independent productions can match that for resources and cut their cloth accordingly - sitting and chatting with a friend for an hour and cutting out the dull bits doesn’t take as much time, effort, or resource as writing a sitcom or sketch show, rehearsing it, recording it, and editing it. And even the resources that come from the BBC (or Audible) don’t particularly speed up the time it takes to do that, which is why single-authored audio comedy runs in series of four to six episodes every twelve to eighteen months.

Sound Heap attempts to bridge that gap; we asked very little time of our guest comedians, no more than they’d take to do an interview podcast. And they did no prep - we emailed them the titles of the podcasts we were thinking of doing the day before but they were under no obligation to think about it until John-Luke started the “podcast”. But then we did what we’d do for a funded production - whittled and edited and mixed. (We received funding from the lovely people at Auddy which meant that everyone got paid, but we would have done it anyway; it would just have been Paddy and Rob making music when they had time, as a favour, rather than us being able to pay them. And it meant that John-Luke and I were able to fence off time to make it, rather than squeeze it in between paid jobs; as I said, the main thing a budget buys you is time). I think there are lots of very good funny-people-chat podcasts, but they’re not a particularly adventurous form of audio, and having grown up on the produced silliness of The Goon Show and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it’s been brilliant to find a format that allows for that sort of structure and sound design to be placed on afterwards.

I keep telling people, “I can’t think of anything like this”, and I stand by that. The sheer range of voices means we’re not asking you to suspend disbelief and accept a comedian as two different characters (apart from John-Luke, and we are asking you to suspend your disbelief in other ways...). And that allows us to jump from parody documentary to parody chatcast to parody solocast, with sound design accurate to the genre, in a way that provides maximum variety - it’s a sketch show! - in a way that’s quite rare. But as I was typing this, I was thinking of something Armando Iannucci said to me when I interviewed him for a documentary, about how when he joined the BBC Radio Light Entertainment department**, there was a sort of “set” way of making radio comedy: 

“One or two people went into a room and wrote something - they were probably men - and they would come out with a script, and a producer would say ‘Oh, very nice, very nice’ - I hated that phrase, ‘nice’, in my head that meant ‘not funny’... A studio would be booked for two or three hours, and actors would come in and read out the words from the page, and then sound effects would be added, or indeed played in live, if someone had access to a horse or anything like that nearby. And then if it was a thirty-minute programme, maybe they’d record thirty-one minutes to be on the safe side, and then they’d cut things down.”

 - Armando Iannucci, The Frequency of Laughter, 2014.

That way of making radio comedy is only sustainable with a budget. For people trying to make things without the backing of a commissioner, you need to find ways to do things for, essentially, free. This limits the amount time you have, and the creativity that you have time to apply. And then I remembered what Armando went on to say, immediately after that, in the same show:

“...so On The Hour was a sort of reaction to that. It was a kind of experiment in looking at doing what was fundamentally a sketch show, but seeing if we could do it in a different way so that it didn’t sound like all those sketch shows. So it was about, if we were recording a thing that was meant to sound like a news report, actually recording it like a news report, which is get three or four people to play the parts of different characters, give them the gist of the funny stuff they’re meant to say but ask them to say it in their own words, have someone ask them questions, and so on. So you end up recording about an hour and a half of these three interviews, and then, like any news editor, going away and cutting that hour and half of stuff down to a report that lasted three or four minutes. It was asking, ‘what is the style of the joke we’re trying to tell would it be improved if we did it in that style?’.“

- Armando Iannucci, The Frequency of Laughter, 2014.

So, in trying to create a new production style that straddles the low-fi independent production methods of making original audio in 2021 and the high standards set by the greatest of audio comedy down the years... we’ve ended up copying a Radio 4 show from 1991.

Sound Heap is available wherever you get your podcasts; the first episode is out next Wednesday, 2nd June.

*Actually Cleanfeed, but we used Zoom so they had eye contact.

**My former employers.

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It’s not Ironic, it’s bigoted

I have worked with so many male comics and writers who thought it was HILARIOUS to respond to my pitches and jokes with “ironic” sexism. “Shhh, the men are talking.” “You know about that? But you’re a woman, and it’s not cooking.” “Your jokes are funnier when you smile.” Etc.

Usually I didn’t say anything, because it sounded like an old man who wouldn’t be working much longer choking out an attempt at a joke, and I felt sorry for him. It was embarrassing to see. But sometimes I would bother to say something about it - always something withering and funny. Because saying the truth - “That’s not funny, it’s just sexist. You just poked your dirty old man fingers into a wound that gets refreshed all day every day. And you have never done shit to fight it, it just seems like a fun punchline. And really, more than a punchline, I think it’s just the first - and maybe only - thing you think when you look at me. ‘WOMAN! IN COMEDY! MY BOYS ROOM! WOMAN!’ The same way my dottering racist grandpa has to comment on the skin color of every non-white person he sees. Get a real fucking joke,” - wouldn’t be funny. 

See, we always have to be funny - and some of them thought that our funny replies meant we thought what they said was funny. It’s wasn’t, it isn’t. You’re not “clueing us in that you know how hard it is for women” you’re being sexist for a laugh. Remember that - you are being sexist for a laugh. You should at least know that that’s who you are.

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How To Tell If You Are In A Jane Austen Novel

found on the-toast.net

• Someone disagreeable is trying to persuade you to take a trip to Bath.

• Your father is absolutely terrible with money. No one has ever told him this.

• All of your dresses look like nightgowns.

• Someone disagreeable tries to persuade you to join a game of cards.

• A woman who hates you is playing the pianoforte.

• A picnic has gone horribly wrong.

• A member of the armed forces has revealed himself to be morally deficient.

• You once took a walk with a cad.

• Everyone in the neighborhood, including your mother, has ranked you and your sisters in order of hotness. You know exactly where you fall on the list.

• You say something arch yet generous about another woman both younger and richer than you.

• You have one friend; he is thirty years old and does business with your father and you are going to marry him someday.

• You attempt to befriend someone slightly above or slightly below your social station and are soundly punished for it.

• A girl you have only just met tells you a secret, and you despise her for it.

• You have five hundred a year. From who? Five hundred what? No one knows. No one cares. You have it. It’s yours. Every year. All five hundred of it.

• There are three men in your life: one true love, one tempting but rakish acquaintance, and a third distant possibility — he is courteous and attentive but only slightly interested in you. He is almost certainly the cousin or good friend of your true love, and nothing will ever happen between you two.

• A woman who is not your mother treats you like her own daughter. Your actual mother is dead or ridiculous.

• You develop a resentment at a public dance.

• Someone you know has fallen ill. Not melodramatically ill, just interestingly so.

• A man proposes to you, then to another, lesser woman when you politely spurn him. This delights you to no end.

• A charming man attempts to flirt with you. This is terrible.

• You have become exceedingly ashamed of what your conduct has been.

• A shocking marriage of convenience takes place within your social circle two-thirds of the way in.

• A woman in an absurd hat is being an absolute bitch to you; there is nothing you can do about it.

• You are in a garden, and you are astonished.

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More Any Stupid Questions - Acast.com/anystupidquestions

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You can download Any Stupid Questions from Acast.com/anystupidquestions.

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A very silly response to JFSP very silly self-referential bit of Ep.706

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For the latest from the world’s most unstoppable media juggernaut, visit theonion.com.

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Yourself

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Did You Know?