Andrew Collins's Blog, page 64

Life as he knows it

Went to the Curzon to catch the first showing of Mike Leigh's Another Year on Friday. It has been garlanded with so many fulsomely positive notices the funny-looking illustration of a tree on the poster is now groaning under the weight of such critical leaves. I am not about to go against the grain. I do actually believe that Mike Leigh is one of our greatest exponents of national cinema. Whether his films are any more trustworthy as a reflection of real life in this country than those romantic portrayals of France that I am such a sucker for, I have no idea. They certainly have a greater sense of realism than the work of Richard Curtis, Guy Ritchie or Spooks. Not that realism is essential for drama. I do not live in Greater Manchester but I'm fairly sure Coronation Street is no more real than the East End of EastEnders – this is not a problem. But Leigh's ambitions are towards real life, just as Ken Loach's are, and Andrea Arnold's, and Peter Mullan's. It is not a prerequisite of national cinema to simply hold a mirror up. Trainspotting bordered on fantasia, but it told universal truths. Atonement and Pride & Prejudice are period pieces, and by their nature at a remove from universal experience of British or English life, and yet both have their place in the canon. But Mike Leigh sits apart from every filmmaker I've mentioned.

His technique, which stopped being the most interesting thing about him years ago, is his own. The immersion of his actors in their characters; the extensive period of improvisation; the creation of a script – credited to Leigh, and Leigh alone – out of that workshopping; the Dogme-like use of real locations, dressed in part by the actors themselves, who by the time of filming actually inhabit their parts; all this goes on under the surface of the final product, but when it clicks into place, it is sublime.

Which is not to say Leigh is infallible. Sometimes his work strays into caricature, such as the yuppie couple played by Lesley Manville and David Bamber in High Hopes (which remains one of my favourites), who are even called Rupert and Laetitia Boothe-Braine, with are bad sitcom names. There's usually one actor who has seemingly been encouraged to take off the safety catch, and the resulting character's appearance provides comic relief, albeit an awkward variety, in among all the social-realist subtlety – Timothy Spall's deluded restaurateur in Life In Sweet, Mark Benton's sociopathic Goth in Career Girls, Greg Crutwell's psychotic landlord in Naked.

I accept these sore-thumb characters as part of the warp and weft of the Leigh universe – sometimes a point needs making more loudly or broadly than others, and of course, the fastest way to pathos is often via caricature: Benton was my favourite character in Career Girls, as teeth-grindingly uncomfortable as his ungainly, tongue-tied, shoegazing presence made me. The most audacious thing about Leigh's last film, 2008′s Happy-Go-Lucky, for me, was not that it was somehow "less miserable" than his usual work (I don't find his films "miserable", incidentally, any more than I find the Smiths "miserable"), but that he had empowered what might have been one of his more extreme caricatures to take the lead. I could easily imagine Sally Hawkins' preternaturally upbeat primary school teacher cropping up as a supporting character in any of his previous films, perhaps to point up the essential tragedy of a more central character, but not here. This was a bold move, and it paid dividends. Frankly, if you find her character irritating in the trailer, you'll probably find her irritating over 118 minutes. Or captivating and fascinating.

Another Year cleaves more closely to realism than caricature. (By the way, I interviewed Mike Leigh for Radio 4 a couple of years ago, and I aroused his ire by suggesting the yuppies in High Hopes were caricatures. He insisted that they were accurate and realistic.) Certainly, the central pair in Another Year, Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent's allotment-tending suburbanites Tom and Gerri, who genuinely love each other to pieces and are clearly made for each other, are about as believable a couple as you will see in fiction this year, or any year. All credit to Sheen and Broadbent, Leigh veterans, for building this grand illusion: when they hug, or exchange a glance, or a cross word, or share a joke, it is as if they have been married for 30 years, which they haven't! Maybe this is a cliche, but their acting is so good it doesn't look like acting. It's entirely possible that actors whose acting is more obviously acting will beat Sheen and Broadbent to some acting awards in the coming awards season. If that is the case, they should be flattered.

You could read Another Year as the story of Mary, played by Lesley Manville but given better material to work with than she had as the braying yuppie in High Hopes: an essentially sad but genuinely optimistic and still attractive middle-aged Croydon divorcee whose options for lasting, shared happiness are narrowing as another year passes. Yes, she's a bit of a comedy drunk, and yes, her desperation and unworldly incompetence are occasionally played for laughs – such as when she parks her new car up on the kerb – but as the story plays out through the four seasons, each one captioned, it is her basic tragedy that is uncovered.

I found myself drawn to the smaller characters: Tom and Gerri's grown-up son Joe (Oliver Maltman), whose list of demons only stretches as far as being conspicuously single in his thirties; their old pal Ken (Peter Wight, or Brian the security guard in Naked, to white, "The end of the world is nigh, Bri"), also single but heading for a heart attack rather than a long life of loneliness; Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom's bereaved brother, a man of few words but a multitude of home truths; Carl (Martin Savage), Ronnie's psychotic son, who threatens to steal all three scenes he's in with a pent-up dark energy that seems to come from another film, or at least, an earlier film; even Janet (Imelda Staunton), a depressed patient of Gerri's whose story stretches only to one scene at the very beginning but sets a misleadingly grim tone – all expertly played, all vital to the melting pot. Without Sheen and Broadbent, whose characters are surely a heartfelt gift from Leigh to two of his most trusted regulars for all their years' service, we might be eavesdropping on a gallery of rogues and misfits. Tom and Gerri root the film. They centre it. They balance it.

I don't think we should ever underestimate Mike Leigh's skill in keeping this balancing act up. I was fortunate enough also to meet and interview the charming Simon Channing Williams, long-service-medal producer of Leigh's work since The Short & Curlies in 1987, who sadly died last year, and he said that it was always a struggle to get funding for his films, no matter how celebrated, decorated or even commercially successful they became. Even after the Oscar-nominated Vera Drake, he said they had to start again from scratch. (It is significant that much of the funding for Leigh's films comes from European partners.) For all the occasional hints at commercial viability, his films are not easy to watch. They don't have neat endings, or even neat middles. This one has a beginning that almost suggests a different film. Even Happy-Go-Lucky, for all its happy-go-luckiness, was a strange film to sit through – as indeed was Nuts In May, which runs for the most part on a gentle, almost Ealing-like comic energy, but explodes, just as Abigail's Party did, from a comedy of manners and social aspiration into something altogether more Gothic. Leigh doesn't make it easy for new customers. He opens the back door of somebody you've never met and ushers you inside with a shush, saying, "Come and have a look at these people's lives. It might be fun. It might be horrible. But it's what happens inside other people's houses, and it will be painful because you know it also happens inside yours."

Another Year is exquisite. Some passages are painful. There is very little in the way of score. Most scenes are played out in what looks like real time, in full view, which includes the awkward pauses most films have no time for. When Manville's soak, who is at a low ebb, finds herself in social isolation with the brother of her best friend's husband, himself displaced from his home, and they share a cigarette in the conservatory of Tom and Gerri, who are at the allotment, it's heavy going, but it's not the sort of exchange you expect to see in British cinema. You won't see it in Spooks or Coronation Street. You might see it in Ken Loach, or Andrea Arnold, or Peter Mullan, but there it is more likely to be loaded with some kind of threat or meaning or narrative significance. In Mike Leigh it's there to show you that you have not been watching two actors for the last couple of hours, but two people. So rounded and warm-blooded are they, you imagine that they have been dropped into a scene together to see what happens. What happens might not seen significant. It might not "move the story on," as writers are constantly being told a scene must do, but it privileges us to see it.

Having recently seen, and enjoyed, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright (see: blogs passim), a keenly written story of ordinary lives that just happen to play out in sunny California, the difference between it and Another Year is marked. The similarity is that both feature the growing of organic produce. More people will enjoy The Kids Are All Right – it's kind of designed to please, no matter how subtle much of the dialogue and acting undoubtedly are in places – but I prefer Another Year. As an honest depiction of contemporary London life, for me it's up there with Life Is Sweet and High Hopes, and shares cast members with both.

It's life. And life isn't always sweet.

Torch wood

Back in Cardiff for another insanely packed, physically and emotionally draining day of comedy. Richard and I did this for the first time in January; we spent the day recording four, new, exclusive podcasts in a studio at Ty Cerdd, the Welsh Music Centre, within the magnificent bowels of the Millennium Centre for commercial CD release through Go Faster Stripe, and in the evening, bandit-moustachioed impressario Chris Evans Not That One, booked us a gig by which to pay the overheads. In January, we played the bar of the mighty St. David's Hall. It was a ridiculous task to set ourselves: improvise, from scratch, four and a half hours of conversation around loose themes (in that case, The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire (and Water) – see: Go Faster Stripe for details), then come up with a further one hour, six minutes and 35 seconds of topical improvisation before a baying, and paying, Cardiff audience. We managed it, and the results were OK – the gig was particularly enjoyable – but who but fools would attempt to recreate that magic?

We travelled down to Cardiff on Tuesday afternoon so that we would be fresh and well rested for our long day yesterday. Unfortunately, despite friendly staff, an Ikea makeover, an evil Nespresso machine in every room and good breakfast buffet items, the Cardiff Novotel decided to wake Richard up at 5.30am with a surreal alarm call that made CBeebies come on his telly*. Not a great start to the day, even with an evil cup of capsule-generated, baby-killing Nespresso to follow. (I slept well, thank you for asking, despite two Cobras at Chris's favourite Indian restaurant, and the familiar 3am internal alarm call of the unfamiliar bed and alcohol combination.) Still, somehow, we managed to create four new podcasts, in studio conditions, on the themes hinted at by the new CD's title, War & Peace, Crime & Punishment, which Chris hopes to have on sale within a couple of weeks.

This was my third time in this studio, with its grand piano and futuristic, Unknown Pleasures-style foam walls, as I recorded my audiobook of Where Did It All Go Right? here in 2009 (also available etc. etc.), and once again it was an occasion marked by bottles of water, occasional cups of coffee, that little table, not a whiff of wi-fi signal and men staring at us through the glass from the control room – this time, Chris, Felix and Isaac, who actually introduced himself to us as "Work Experience Boy", as if his job had subsumed his very name – who did us the great honour of providing the occasional burst of laughter that was, unprofessionally, audible in the studio, through the glass. You'll have to wait a couple of weeks before you can hear the results: by turns strained, serious, ridiculous, philosophical, hysterical, grumpy, quiet, loud, peaceful and warlike. This can surely be no way to make a living.

Packing up at 5.30 there was no time for a jacuzzi at the Novotel, and barely time for one evil, developing-world-destroying Nespresso capsule, as I had to run through Secret Dancing in my room, a show I have not performed since August 21 and will never perform again, or at least that's the mercurial plan. The talented Nathan Jay had created some music tracks for us to play out where there would normally be tracks by BAD, the Wiseguys, Mark Ronson and the Sugababes, as we can't afford to licence existing music. I practised to these in front of the hotel mirror. By 7.30 Richard and I were skulking in the kitchen at the Masonic Hall, our dressing room for the night, having wandered, wide-eyed, through the lobby, past portraits of important looking middle-aged men in embroidered aprons, some actual middle-aged men in their civvies, and a stairlift to help elderly or infirm Masons up to their secret chambers. This was a weird place to do a comedy gig, and the room booked had a huge, impressive domed roof, but we made it our own, by constantly referring to it, and to The Da Vinci Code.

And here's the portrait of the Queen, whom the Masons really like, who watched us from the back wall throughout:

Secret Dancing went well, and I remembered what order it all went in, although it was a weird experience after mostly doing it in a dark bunker in Edinburgh; despite being a seasoned stand-up, I have never done a gig that was being filmed for future DVD release and thus all the house lights were up and I could see the whites of even the back row's eyes as they either laughed or didn't laugh, or, in the case of Richard, who sat at the back, seemed to doze off, dreaming of CBeebies, unless he was playing a game on his iPhone, which would be business as usual. Have a look at the Torchwood-loving, Strictly-denying Cardiff nerds we spent two hours looking at:

Here's me, Secretly Dancing, or at least talking about Secretly Dancing, or indeed Secretly Milking (my carefully timed one-hour Edinburgh show lasted about an hour and 20 minutes, as I must admit I savoured this last performance of it):

And here's us, in our Masonic thrones (which did have strange symbols carved into their high backs):

Anyway, the audio podcast itself, Number 138, is available to download here. Thanks to the Masonic Hall, Chris Evans Not That One, Gerald, Felix, Sue and all the crew, all of my Secret Dancers, anyone we picked on, especially Jeff and Bec, Rasputin and London Irish II, and to Phil Jones, Mike Griffiths, and PennyWisePeter for the bootleg photos. It was a long night, and a long day, but all the better for being in a city that has been so kind to us while raining on us at the same time.

*Mr Richard Herring now accepts that he may actually have left his telly on, and that CBeebies may have just started broadcasting at 5.30am, but we may never know. Either way, just in case, he's not suing the Novotel chain, or George Clooney.

This functional family

Much praise has been heaped upon Lisa Cholodenko's new film The Kids Are All Right, which I saw at the Curzon last night. Possibly too much praise. It's a really refreshing, smart, naturalistic family drama, whose comedy is rarely on the nose, and whose central performances are deft and convincing and warm-blooded. Oscars are tipped, especially for Annette Bening who plays the "dad" of a two-mom lesbian couple – the more sensible, short-haired breadwinner, at any rate, which may be a sexist way of viewing the "dad" but that's how I read it – and for Mark Ruffalo, who gives the turn of his career as the vain, self-satisfied but still appealing sperm donor whose seed created a child for both moms. When Mia Wasikowska's off-to-college but seemingly virginal eldest turns 18, she is entitled to know the identity of her father and when she and 15-year-old brother Josh Hutcherson seek Dad out, without their moms knowing, the fuse is lit for a) some entertaining mild comedy of manners, and b) trouble.

Despite the knotty problems ahead, it's a breeze to watch. Bening and Julianne Moore do more than just play a married couple, they just are one. Their gender and sexuality are not as "issue" here. They bicker and twinkle and bump along together like any married couple. This ought not to be profound, but this is a mainstream Hollywood movie, for all its indie signifiers and credentials. That it's not a film about lesbians – other than both parents have been artificially inseminated, which serves the story – is its abiding strength.

That it was co-written and directed by a woman is far more significant, in that the number of female directors working in America has traditionally been miniscule. Certainly, you can name a few, but you'll run out pretty quickly. I haven't seen Lisa Cholodenko's other films, but I know she hasn't made one for a number of years. It's the star power of her cast that helped this one to fruition, but hey, whatever means are necessary. Moore and Bening choose pretty carefully, and their names bestow a certain quality to the work before it's started. (Yes, I know Moore does the odd cash job, like Jurassic Park and Hannibal, but she even brings a touch of class to those.) It seems ridiculous that there aren't more female directors working in American film. Many more seem to make a living in TV. So to have had two smart films this year from women – this one and Nicole Holofcener's Please Give – is worthy of comment. It shouldn't be. But don't shoot the messenger.

Anyway, The Kids Are All Right is more than alright. But it's not quite as good as you may have been led to believe by critics starved of this sort of film. There is much to recommend it, but for me, the story goes down a cul-de-sac and has nowhere to go. That said, the final scene is brilliantly subtle and says a lot without saying too much.

One thing needs saying: the trailer for this film gives way too much away. Key plot points are shown, and key gags, too. This spoils the experience of watching the film. If you haven't seen the trailer, avoid it. See the film instead.

Bristol Hippo Drome

We had a lot of fun at the Bristol Old Vic Studio last night, our first ever gig in the round, which is both a theatrical and geometric term, and made us feel like we were in the monkey court on Planet Of The Apes. The photos are now in. Thanks to TheEyeCollector for the lead pic. Any additions gratefully received. The venue staff were very strict about no photographs, and our new friend LondonIrish, easily identifiable in the first audience pic below, was among those ticked off for whipping his phone out during the show. This actually made it feel more like a theatre show, rather than just two blokes talking bollocks to each other.) Thanks, Bristol. Just have one railway station next time, right? You don't need two.

These pics just in, from Amarando:

Jam in

Bristol Old Vic is throwing a festival of improv, with theatre and music and comedy and … me and Richard Herring. It is called Bristol Jam, and we encourage you to have a look at what else is on. In the meantime, we were in the Studio, not the main theatre. Although we think we could have sold enough for the theatre, the Studio was at least totally sold out, and a really cool space. We did our first ever live podcast in the round. I saw Neil Diamond in the round at Birmingham NEC, as it was, in about 1989, and it was a blast. But it's weird to perform this way, conscious, as you are, about the people behind you. We made the most of it, especially during the now-traditional second half, when we record the actual podcast, during which we opted to move around, a quarter at a time, every 15 minute, so as to spread ourselves out over the full circle of the audience.

It was a lovely audience, by the way. Even though, during my solo stand-up 20 mins in the first half, a gentleman literally stole the punchline to my Edinburgh-honed Britain's Worst Serial Killers routine! It's not the most difficult punchline in the world, but he was certainly precise in his preempting of it. I wished him no ill-will; instead, I simply gave him my mic. It wasn't meant as an aggressive gesture, and the gentleman in question very magnanimously came up to get merchandise signed at the table after the show in the bar. This is why stand-up is so appealing to me, this highwire act between pontificating and dealing with the vagaries of what might happen in the the relationship between you and the audience, and ultimately, why I am relinquishing the responsibility by giving up stand-up.

We had a terrific gig. The audience – all around us! – were patient and charming. And the staff at the Old Vic were professionalism personified. Particular props to Jay, and to Barny, and to Chris, who organised the whole thing. We had a lovely time. And I must namecheck John, who, after the podcast recording was over and we launched into an unrecorded Q&A, actually explained the cryptic crossword clue I had thrown out earlier, and explained the answer: TUNGSTEN is also known as WOLFSRAM, which will make sense when you've listened to the podcast.

So, I say hats off to Bristol Old Vic, for looking after us so well and treating our ridiculous load of old nonsense as if it were improvised theatre, which it wasn't. And to keeping the bar open after we'd finished, which is something the otherwise exemplary Bloomsbury in London doesn't do. It was nice, as ever, to commune with the excellent nerds afterwards, many of whom had become part of the show, and some of whom will feature on the podcast, which will be available here when Orange Mark decides it will be so.

Too much perspective

On Thursday evening, I found myself in the National Gallery, in London, after the National Gallery had closed at 6pm. Not only was I being led through the bowels of the gallery, and through doors that could only be opened with an electronic dongle-style pass, I was there to be given a private, one-on-one, guided tour of some the most significant works in the Sainsbury Wing's Renaissance collection by my own academic – Professor David Ekserdjian, Professor of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester (and also a Trustee of the National Gallery) – accompanied at all times by our own security guard. This is not how I normally spend a Thursday evening. But I am in the midst of making a documentary for Radio 4, and when you are doing that, you find yourself in unusual places at unusual times doing unusual things. (Actually, a lot of the time when making Radio 4 documentaries you find youself in tiny studios, but it's nice to get out.)

The documentary, which I won't go into too much detail about for fear of undermining its impact when it's broadcast in December, is about 3D. But not just about modern 3D – Avatar, Sky Sports etc. – it goes back to the very roots of man's obsession with creating the illusion of 3D. And guess what, a good place to start is the Renaissance, where artists and architects like Lorenzo Monaco, Piero della Francesca and Filippo Brunelleschi were changing the face of art by introducing perspective to what were still essentially religious works that came with their own rules. The Coronation Of The Virgin, a 1414 altarpiece which Professor Ekserdjian talked me though on our private view, is a clear early example of a sort of primitive attempt at "realism" (check out the sloping floor tiles) after centuries of "flat" depictions. You can view the picture on the National Gallery website, which I know they're very proud of. Anyway,  it was a privilege to be talked through such beautiful and important pieces by a man who knows more about the subject than anyone I've ever met, and the posh fun wasn't over yet.

Yesterday, I found myself on the train to Exeter, there to visit the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, housed at the University of Exter. It is also open to the public, and full of lovely artifacts relating to the earliest days of what became cinema, but, thanks to the magic of Doing A Radio 4 Documentary, we were allowed to go backstage, where a treasure trove of Victoriana – optical toys, mainly – was laid out on a table for us to play with, while Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, Dr John Plunkett, guided us through them. Once again, a privilege. I got to play with an actual Victorian stereoscope circa 1850! It really was amazing, and one of the earliest forms of what we know today as 3D – the illusion of 3D, naturally, but so is Avatar, of course.

After spending much of this year talking bollocks with Richard, or being locked away behind my laptop trying to form sentences, or failing auditions for TV, it's so bracing to be out and about, doing things I might not ordinarily get to do for people who might appreciate them, and above all, to be talking intelligently to intelligent people who know loads more than me about the subjects they know the most about. There's less money in making radio programmes than there is in playing at telly, but it's all so immediate and intimate, and I love trying to describe what in this case is a totally visual subject for the radio. (By the way, I realise Richard Herring is a super intelligent man, but we don't get to be intelligent together in public, we only get to be idiots, which is fun in its own way, and we'll be doing it in Bristol on Wednesday, which I am looking forward to immeasurably.)

Anyway, visit the National Gallery duing its opening hours; it's free. And if you're in Exeter, drop in at the Bill Douglas Centre – which is indeed named after the great British filmmaker, upon whose own collection it was founded. It's also free. We should make the most of such places. The Tories may be cutting Arts funding with their big, indiscriminate axe, but museums and galleries can avoid the bigger cuts by remaining free. Do not let these places go. Use them.

And I'll keep you posted on when this documentary goes out.

Social notworking

I am not on Facebook. I used to be on MySpace, but quickly tired of it. I was enthusiastic about Friends Reunited, which Facebook seems to have replaced, but cancelled my membership when they sold it to ITV, which was the end of it anyway. I am on Twitter, and have been since May 2009, although I admit I am tiring of that. But I'm not against social networking per se. It is a thing of our age, for better or for worse. Anyway, you don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or any of those social networking sites to know that The Social Network is a fantastic film, nor more than you need to go horse riding or carry a gun to know that Rio Bravo is a fantastic film. (I watched Rio Bravo again recently; it is a fantastic film.) Indeed, I rather suspect it is being enjoyed more by those who aren't caught up in the whole Facebook thing. Chiefly because it's not about Facebook; it's about ambition biting hard and falling out with your friends.

My love for Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network, knows few bounds. Clearly, I worshipped at the feet of The West Wing – even after he'd left, actually, as the show continued in his image – and gave Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip as many chances as it needed. I loved the dialogue – and the emphasis on dialogue – in A Few Good Men and The American President before I cared enough to remember the name of the writer. And I enjoyed Sports Night, the show Sorkin wrote before West Wing. Charlie Wilson's War is fine, although it made me wish he was still writing The West Wing. The Social Network makes me glad he's not still writing The West Wing.

Last week I went to the Curzon to see Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and was so let down. This week I went to the Curzon to see The Social Network for the second time – that's how good it is. You know you're watching a Sorkin movie from word one of scene one, in which Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is being dumped by his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) in a Harvard bar: both talk like Sorkin characters – wordy, clever, withering, quick – and yet, they are utterly distinct. This is his skill – he's like David Mamet in that sense; his dialogue crackles and few of his characters come off stupid, but the subtle nuances are there for a good actor to conjure with. It's all too easy to forget David Fincher in all of this Sorkin-love, but the performances of the actors in this film are a lot to do with him and the way he directs them. Known as a flashy, tricksy director, probably because of the stylish nature of Se7en and Fight Club and not helped by the ornate and effects-driven Benjamin Button, Fincher proves here that he's an actors' director, and a writer's director.

Warning: this film will not make you like 21st century Harvard nerds. It will help you despise them. Its depiction of Harvard will not dispel your notion, based upon countless other American movies, that the caste system of fraternities and societies, especially at the socially elitist Ivy League schools, is as poisonous and destructive as our own class system (which is at least having the common decency to mutate and change with the times). Harvard has its Final Clubs, which as I understand it are basically secret societies – much of the first scene of The Social Network is about Zuckerberg wishing to elevate himself socially by gaining access to one of these Final Clubs – and we see the kind of initiation ceremonies that seem so foreign and frankly pathetic from the outside, when Zuckerberg's slightly less socially inept best friend Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, joins some elite club or other.

But from this unpleasant and alien world springs our story, the story of how one nerd who'd been dumped started a website, drunk, in 2003, that gave him the idea for Facebook (or "the Facebook" as it's incongruously called at the beginning of its life). Although Zuckerberg is clearly a whiz, some might say a computing genius, he's not nice. The way he's written by Sorkin and played by Eisenberg, he seems to glean almost no pleasure from anything that he achieves, merely a more hardened layer of smugness and a heightened disdain for the rest of the stupid world. Garfield's character, Saverin, is much more worldly and approachable, which is why, as the Facebook grows from Harvard to other elite universities and eventually worldwide, he's out there trying to sell it. When Zuckerberg is forced to attend a pitch meeting or, as the story gets nasty, a series of lawsuit depositions, he is a liability. It's a while since I saw a mainstream Hollywood movie whose lead character is such a dick. (Whether Zuckerberg is that much of a dick is open to question – he keeps himself to himself, and rarely gives interviews – although I found it interesting that the film company's press notes included, in full, the recent New Yorker profile by Jose Antonion Vargas, which you can read here, and should.)

Many very positive things have been said about The Social Network – that it is a story for our times, like it or not; that it is a modern classic; that it is going to be all over the Oscars – I concur with these things. It's intelligent, bracing, involving, original, beautifully paced and carefully acted. Because the dialogue is so flashy, it is, I think, incumbent on the actors reading it out to do so without flashiness, and to make the brilliance of their words sound casual. I would imagine this is very difficult. Eisenberg, Garfield and Justin Timberlake do this, as does Douglas Urbanski, who hilariously plays Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, in one key scene and I understand is a non-actor. Fincher moves with a sure eye around the campuses of Harvard and the suburbs of Palo Alto, his camera still for all those meetings around boardroom tables, so that we feel we are witnessing actual events. God, this film could be so boring! People at laptops? People at meetings? People at more laptops? A fleeting glimpse of girls in their underwear dancing at some unattainable party? Then back to people at meetings? It is not boring. It is one of the least boring films I have seen all year. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, now that is a boring film.

Last chance to see

On November 3, 2010, I will be performing Secret Dancing for the final time. If you are in or near Cardiff, you can come and see it – tickets are available exclusively through Go Faster Stripe here – and many of you are booked to do so already, without realising what a historic night you will be part of. Richard and I are doing a day's recording in Cardiff for our second podcast CD, provisionally entitled War, Peace, Crime and Punishment (hopefully available in time for Christmas), and a live podcast gig in the evening. But Chris-Evans-not-that-one had the harebrained idea of doing Secret Dancing as the support act and filming it for a future Go Faster Stripe DVD. This seemed too good to pass up, and Richard has magnanimously handed over the whole of the first half to me.

We hope that this will be a nice surprise for all those who have already purchased a ticket. I have performed Secret Dancing, the full show, 19 times, 16 of those in Edinburgh. Like Stewart Lee says in his book, it feels like a good idea to draw a line under what was an experiment, and by committing it to disc, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I've had a lot of fun, but I am not a stand-up comedian, and although I was keen to pursue this one, just to find out if I could perform my own solo show at the Fringe, I still feel something of a fraud, and have not paid my dues, and I cannot realistically spend every evening doing so like professional comedians do, so it would be insulting if I continue to jump the queue and "dabble". I have loads of writing work to do anyway, so performing the show one last time, in a city that has been very kind to it before [see: pic, taken at St David's Hall last time Richard and I were in town], seems poetic and apt. I hope we get as many enthusiastic volunteers at the end – we'll have to see whether the modest camera crew will encourage or discourage volunteers!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it, and I hope that my decision to lay the show to rest will make Cardiff more of an "event". It will certainly be a packed day.

We think our gig in Bristol is sold out, but worth checking, if you're in the vicinity. I won't be doing Secret Dancing there, as Richard and I will be sharing our pre-interval duties, and I'll only have 20 minutes to play with. I might do the Mitfords if that seems like a popular option. If not, I'll do an excerpt from Secret Dancing, the bit about moving to Surrey.

In other Go Faster Stripe news, my audiobook, Where Did It All Go Right?, has been reduced in price to £10, so if you haven't bought it yet, now might be a good time. I've had some really nice responses to it, and people ask me if the other books will come out as audiobooks, to which the answer is: it really depends if we sell enough of these, which we haven't yet. It's clearly a niche product. We probably should have done it as MP3s, which would have meant less discs, and less packaging, although for my first and possibly only audiobook, I'm rather pleased with the way this one feels. It's a beautiful item. Anyway, plug over.

Norman service

I grew up with Norman Wisdom, who has died, aged 95. His films seemed to be on an endless loop on TV when I was a kid; they formed part of my comedy education, alongside the Carry Ons, the Doctor films and various other gentle oddities like Nearly A Nasty Accident, What A Whopper and The Iron Maiden. Outside of the Keystone Cops and all the old Mack Sennett/Hal Roach silents and two-reelers which were also on telly all the time, I pretty much grew up thinking that Britain was the centre of the comedy universe. And in the 50s and 60s, it pretty much was. (I actually made no distinction at the time between old and new, American and British, black and white and colour – hey, everything was in black and white in our house until about 1973 anyway – if it was a film and it was a comedy and it was on telly, me and my brother Simon were there.) If I had comedy heroes in my childhood, they would have been Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Sid James, Kenneth Connor and Norman Wisdom. All dead now, of course. But still alive.

If you look them up, there are about a dozen classic, mainly job-based Wisdom comedies in black and white, from 1953′s definitive Trouble In Store (the one in a shop) to The Early Bird in 1965 (the one on the milk round). I remember seeing Michael Bentine's The Sandwich Man on TV, a sort of loose comedy compendium made in colour in 1966, in which Wisdom plays a boxer, and it felt a bit weird. Weird to see him in colour, and weird to see him playing a small part. Also, it seemed such a melancholy film, out of sync with the merry world of Wisdom, in which slapstick mayhem was never far around the next corner.

Norman played the fool, with his ill-fitting, half-mast demob suit and pulled-down cap, always on the verge of hysterical laughter, or so it seemed, but capable, like all the best clowns, of conveying almost heartbreaking melancholy. I'll be honest, as a kid, I found those bits harder to take. I preferred it when he was falling over, or into things, or off things, or leading a brass band down a blind alley, or rounding up an entire police force with his father's police whistle, or just bringing chaos into the life of Jerry Desmonde (who was already dead by the time I saw him – he passed away in 1967). Once I came of age, and discovered Spike Milligan and Monty Python and Mad magazine, I put the innocent silliness of Wisdom behind me, but he made an indelible impression on my young soul. I'm sad that he's gone, although he lived a long life, loved and even worshipped as a God for most of it. He was pratfalling to very near the end. That might have seemed desperate or tragic in others, but not him, oddly.

I was privileged to be in the same room as Norman in around 1993, I think, when Stuart and I were invited to a light entertainment reception at the BBC on the back of our first Radio 5 comedy series, and felt very much like interlopers or competition winners. We were in awe of the big stars who attended in the Council Chambers, which seemed impossibly grand – I mean the likes of Wogan, Parsons, Jacobs – but it was Wisdom who made the biggest impact. He will have been a sprightly 78 then, but it was still a delight to see him take the tray from a waiter and prance around, giggling, serving us all drinks. What a treat.

Gawd bless him. And if you have kids, show them On The Beat or Trouble In Store, made over half a century ago, and see if they laugh. I hope they do.

Crypto fascist

A few weeks ago, while on holiday in the wilds of the west of Ireland, I found myself out of wi-fi contact. Nothing. Not even a light dusting of 2G. It was, once I was over the shock, frankly blissful. (Ironically, I had to use the "Internet cafe" of the local Post Office before the week was out, in order to rearrange a flight and print out the boarding pass, but the act made me feel like a slave, not a master of the technology.) Anyway, I fell hungrily on printed media, otherwise known as books, magazines and newspapers. The experience took me back to my childhood, when we'd stay in a farmhouse in North Wales, and want for nothing more than a holiday special or a puzzle book. It could rain all it liked.

So, for the first time, I turned to the Times crossword. (It was hit or miss whether there'd be a Guardian in the local newsagent of a morning.) It's a famous crossword. A member of my family once told me, proudly, that he'd reached the stage whereby he could complete it on the train journey to work. Having subsequently attempted to get into the Times cryptic crossword, I am even more impressed with his achievement.

Back in London, I bought a Times Cryptic Crossword book – Book 13 – as I'd decided that my brain was big and clever enough to crack the code and really start to enjoy the process of untangling those convoluted, misleading bundles of words. The book seemed ideal: I wasn't going to start paying £1 a day to Rupert Murdoch just to do the crossword each day – and nor am I interested in doing them online – but you get 80 in the book, for £5.99. Good value. Also, the solutions are at the back, and my noble plan was to use this to help me get inside the mind of the crossword compilers. I'd fill in anything I could, and then, one by one, take the answers from the back and work out the route to each one backwards, as it were.

This seemed a stimulating plan. I enjoyed it. Richard Herring mocked me, as did others who heard about my notion via the podcast, but I persevered. I didn't really want to read a book about how to crack the cryptic crossword. My approach seemed more honest and hardworking.

It has failed. I'm 20 crosswords in now, and, after a misleading great leap upwards, I'm back down to getting around five answers per crossword. Five! Out of about 28! This is rubbish. Some of the answers I was simply never going to get, as the words themselves – sometimes names of literary characters, or foreign shrubs – are not familiar to me. I know the cryptic part should get you there, but if you've got two or three component parts and their construction leads you to a word you've never encountered, you lack the confidence to fill the letters in. And can thus not progress with words that lead off that word.

By the way, I have bought a smart propelling pencil. It almost cost as much as the book. It is now permanently hooked inside the book, at the page I've reached, and I am enjoying clicking the lead into the nib end as it gets worn down. Unfortunately, it's getting worn down not by me filling in answers I've got, but by filling in answers I have had to look up. I was hoping to have improved exponentially by now. I have not. My brain is obviously not cryptically tuned.

I brought the subject up on 6 Music, and threw a few unsolved clues out to the Lauren Laverne massive over the airwaves. Naturally, a number of people cracked them, and explained them. Among these clever folk, @TheEponymousBob, via Twitter, provided us with some bespoke, music-based clues, which we've been throwing out daily. I got today's but it was easy; plus, you know it's a band name. Most days, I'm sorry, I haven't a clue.

I'm tempted to burn the book and move on with my life. I considered chucking it into the Irish Sea on the ferry home, but I couldn't quite extinguish all hope. Maybe I should persevere. It still seems wrong to read articles or books explaining how to do it; I'd much rather teach myself this skill. There are many things I can't do, but these tend to be physical, or musical. I thought I could teach myself to solve cryptic crosswords. But I'm pretty sure I can't. Hey, I'm only human. Unlike the Pope, I am fallible.