Thursday, September 25, 2008

Is that the ABC news theme? Excuse me while I do an interpretive dance....

On Tuesday night we went with our friends Adam and Son and some friends of theirs to see hilarious British comedian Bill Bailey. Right from the very beginning when the friendly voiceover told us to turn off our electronic devices (including microscopes and large hadron colliders) because they would interfere with the venue's navigation system, through to the end, where Bill was derisive of my artfully hand-crafted tinselly worm (more on wormy later), then sang Love Song, it was a treat.

My favourite bits? Well, mostly everything..... but here are a few samples - a dissection of Australian TV news themes which involved dancing with rhythmic gymnastics ribbons; discussion about the Large Hadron Collider and the implications of a black hole under Switzerland; an entreaty to go into the nearest branch of UBS and chat about Nazi Gold; a nice happy song about an emo who works in a coffee shop and self-harms using broken plastic spoons; a jazz version of God Save the Queen and the Imperial March from Star Wars; a wry musical comment on the "variation" of tone achievable with a didgeridoo.... (The Man's wondering here if I'm outlining my favourite bits or the whole show.....)

But back to the poor derided worm. Influenced by the gifts left on the stage for Ross Noble when I saw him earlier in the year, I decided that a comedy show entitled Tinselworm deserved a hand-knitted Tinselworm.


I flung wormy onto the stage at the end of the show and when Bill saw it he picked it up and said "Is this the best you can do, Brisbane?" before showing us the "worm" someone in Canberra had given him.
The Canberra contribution was clearly a completely substandard "worm", being as it was obviously a neon-pink store-bought snake wrapped in a sad strand of blue Christmas tinsel. Adam assures me that Bill would have gotten backstage and realised that my worm was clearly superior, and appreciate it in all its hand-knitted glory. In my opinion derision is so much funnier than appreciation, so I'm pretty happy. I just wish we'd broken the "no electronic devices" rule and gotten footage of the worm incident on a mobile phone.... I'll have to keep an eye out on youtube!