yer nuthin' but a sex mechanic....

Here's where freeview follies go ballastic. So after work I have a few pints with Joe at the Eaton and at home end up watching Tales of the Unexpected and it's an episode with two great actors Rod Taylor (you know from Time Machine) and Cyril Cusack (you know from Fahrenheit 451 and every worthy Irish production ever). Taylor plays an uppity yank* who picks up Cusack playing a Northern Irish pickpocket who dares him to go as fast as he claims his big beemer can. I won't give it away but the ending as it's... unexpected...but I was struck by the similarity between Cryil Cusack and James Young. If you are from Northern Ireland (or like me from Ulster) you will know 'Our Jimmy' one of Northern Ireland's foremost comedians who made a career out of doing old lady impressions (like Les Dennis but a billion times funnier). wait 'll tel ye...

So because of the vague likeness I had a spurt of late-night Norwich-based nostalgia and started watching Our Jimmy on DVD. I had to text and call The Badbrute, and just as he quoted the 'sex mechanic' bit it came up on my screen. Amazing. He alerted me to immediately watch Babymother on Channel 4, and, my god it was amazing, not for the movie which seemed ok it had Don Warrington in it, but there was a bewildered stringy middle-aged woman trying to sign for the deaf by communicating a London junglist style mash-up and ghetto barneys amazing, it's being recorded for prosterity, or until me and the da brute can enjoy it over over a few beers.

Speaking of that fine brutish man, his new phone-pod allows him to blog pics so check tis fine pic of himself and wee Brian 'enjoying' a hooray for'wankaaas' Pete BB party in the manner of condemned prisoners...

I think James Young is one of the best Irish comedians of a certain type and era (I'm not speaking of our fine alternative stand-up tradition, Ardal O' Hanlon, Sean Hughes, Dylan Moran, Dara O' Briain and god help us Ed Bryne whenver he can stop saying anything other than the 'Kearfone wearhous' ) but the ones that are broadly popular like Richie Kavanagh**D'Unbelievables, Conor Galeen (couldn't find any Web site for him) and Brendan Grace


*apologies to our American friends but can't think of any other way to describe the certain kind to American who has vague Irish roots and comes to Ireland to wreck our heads about how great everything over there is,

my favorite joke about this scernario is of an Irish-American and and Irish guy driving around Ireland and the American complains about the car being too small and how cars in the states are the size of trucks and then the road gets small and winding the American complains about the roads and says how the freeways in the states stretch on like fields and the they come across a Donkey in the middle of the road and the Irish guy gets out of the car and shoots it in the head and says 'These rabbits are getting fucking huge' ....

send in elaborations, i know it's old joke but it's my favorite 'reductive national identity' joke.


**but what's under his white gloves? it is like the ultimate mystery of Irish society why does Richie Kavanagh have those white gloves on all the time, it's like the Irish hand version of V for Vendetta, we will never know what lurks beneath his gloves. I'd like to think that he once cut some semi-naked pictures out of the Sunday World once and his dad found them and he threw them in the fire and wee Richie tried to retrieve them and he burnt his hands and then couldn't wank and then inflicted us all with 'aon focal eile'...it's a just a theory.