1. Benedict Wong. He'd be a lovely bumbling Doctor, like Boris Johnson but without being a Tory. And a Chinaman. This would also facilitate many hilarious puns around Doctor 'Hu'.

2. Mark Heap. Haunted and aloof.

3. Josef Fritzl. This guy is a dude! He managed to have sex with two generations of his family just by building a cellar, imagine what he could do if he had a Tardis!

Assistant: Shall I set the controls for Metabilis 5 Doctor?
Doctor Fritzl: No, set the controls for Germany, 1896, I'm off to impregnate my own Grandmother!
He'd probably even go back in time and abuse himself as a child , partly to make sure he turns out a wrong 'un, but also to ensure he has some kind of circular moral defence as to why he turned out the way he did. 'It's not my fault! I was abused as a child! …By myself! I had to do it, otherwise I'd break the timelines!'

4. Myself, obviously. I'd make a great Doctor Who. I'm excellent at running, shouting and acting morally superior. I've been practising pointing in the direction in which I'm about to go, or while I'm explaining stuff, so I'd bring pointing to the role. Lots of pointing. Dr Who did say after regenerating the last time that he always wanted to be ginger, and I agree with those who argue it's about time there was an ethnic minority Doctor.

5. Wouldn't it be great if the next Doctor was in fact Derek Jacobi, thus it turned out that the Doctor was destined to turn into the Master all along. Derek Jacobi's fucking great.

6. Just bring back Sylvester McCoy, only this time all shockingly muscley like one of those beefy Grandads you find all the time in Newcastle: http://www.cenegenics-drlife.com/

7. It is a national scandal that there are still three McGann brothers who have not been Dr. Who. From mcgannbrothers.org.uk: Joe is currently touring the country playing the lead role of 'Tevye' in Fiddler on the Roof. He is a familiar face on stage and screen and became the 'housewives favourite' after starring in The Upper Hand in the late 80's. He's obviously not lost any of his charm - after seeing him in Guys and Dolls last year, a female audience member was heard to comment, "He can come and do my washing any time!" Honor Blackman would make an ideal assistant, plus, if Joe decided to give up the role it could easily pass down to Mark or Stephen without any need for regeneration, as they all look so similar no-one would notice.

10. Doctor Snuggles. www.doctorsnuggles.com/Characters/Characters1.html

11. Jeremy Irons! Every episode he'd fall in love with a totally unsuitable woman; a bedwetting Victorian au pair, a psychic transsexual cat-person, his own cloned brother, a six year old little girl who's dictator of a jungle planet, just like he does in all his films! Only in space! But he still wouldn't fancy Catherine Tate.

12-19: Clive Owen, Jow Lindsay, Niall Spooner-Harvey, Kirsten Irving, Ian McShane (with Tink and Eric from Lovejoy and Dan from Deadwood as mismatched assistants homoerotically competing for his affections), Sean Lock, Paul Gambaccini, Su Pollard. Okay, I was joking about Clive Owen; he'd be wonderfully brooding, but he wouldn't stay long, and we can't waste those regenerations…!

...and by that I mean
I wander round mistaking you for the positive behavioural patterns of the future when you're really the familiar fucked up habits of my past
you make me want to make myself sick
by lifting heart into mouth like intruding fingers
I'm pissed
I'm in danger of cutting myself in non-artistic ways
I might walk to your house and con trick your Mum into letting me in,
You're a fucking fucking state and you still squat whole wings of my cranium.

In that, if I met the boring rich H.R. cunt you're actually fucking,
there's a tiny chance I might sack him with a paving slab
- ooh, manifold times, until his own mother wouldn't even recognise him, and she's a professional DNA profiler, google reveals,
I'm in danger of making the mistake of thinking love actually means anything in itself
worst of all, of even writing poetry like this

so instead I'm deleting you from phone, facebook, even my events mailing lists for a bit
which, me being twenty-nine is the mature, early-twenties thing to do,
because you make me feel like a teenager again.

After a long and difficult ascent, at the end of a long and difficult quest in search of the secret of eternal life, I reached the top of the faraway mountain and there met the aged sage who, if I were to live forever, solemnly offered me the three binding choices I would have to make....

'From now on you may only live with one of two pieces of cutlery. The spork – a spoon with three small fork prongs cut into it – or the fnife, a fork with one cutting edge. One means that you can eat steaks, fish, cut things more easily, but can only eat soup or custard with great difficulty. The other means you can eat soup, custard, rice puddings with only minor spillage, but will be forced to tear meats apart with your hands and teeth, to eat lettuce leaves whole. Which will you, the spork or the fnife?

'(Don't forget you can still drink soup out of the bowl though, or mop it up with bread. Basically I'm telling you that if you choose the spork, you're an idiot.)'

'Henceforth, you will only be able to interact with either the bottom or top halves of women, the dividing line being the waist. Should you prefer the waist up, you will be able to enjoy their pleasant conversation, be indulged by blowjobs, play with their jubblies and bagpipe them. Choose the waist down, and you will, foremostly, be able to breed, secondarily to slip it up the tailpipe, yet; you will only ever be able to talk to women in the language of cunnilingus, spelling out letters of love with your tongue, hoping desperately that you are understood.

'(To be honest mate, I don't think girls ever pay attention to anything that comes out of our mouths anyway except when we are lickin' them out – it's the only language they understand, basically, I'm saying, well, we all love titties but it's no substitute for continuing your genetic inheritance, is it?)'

'But hold! A third choice must be made. From henceforth, either everything you say will be misconstrued as racist, no matter how much you may empathise with and love your fellow man; or, nothing you say will ever be interpreted as racist, but inside your heart you will despise those of other cultures; your heart will be twisted with hate.'

'(Actually, that last one's a fucker. Unless you're a racist already. In which case it's easy.)'

'Make all three choices, once and for all, and I will offer you eternal youth. Thus you may choose: A full but finite life, or one lived by halves, but lived into eternity. You will have time enough to become an infinite master of cunnilingus, or else a master of inducing orgasm without touching the vagina; deft at wielding either fnife or spork; to conceal your true beliefs forever, or to learn to live a pure life in the shadow of humanity's disapproval. But whichever choices you make, you will be cursed with missing the other half of life for the rest of your infinite days.

'(Tell you what, give it a few more years of eating soup, cunt or not having to spit every time you see a darkie, and then come back up here again if you want to go through with it. You never know, having gorged yourself in those few years like they might be your last, you'll know whether you can live without it or not. Won't you?)'

...Eventually, my love, I made my decision. That is why I now hold such estimable knowledge and riches, despite my seemingly tender years. That is why I cannot eat the steaks and salad you have so lovingly prepared for me without tearing at them like some Neanderthal. This is why, though I love you dearly, I am cursed never to be able to fully make love to you. You stinking Chinky bitch.

Paddington grows up

Apologies to Michael Bond and Doris Lessing

Via Heathrow Express, from Darkest Peru
Came that lone snuffling son you found scared, just-arrived,
labelled: 'Please look after this bear. Thank you.'

You fed, taught and sheltered him as he grew
Suckled him as he out-mewled your own children's cries;
It must have been a hard life in darkest Peru.

Mr Brown, you felt, may not always have quite approved
of such indulgences, but you never once questioned if it had been wise
to 'Please look after this bear,' never expecting a 'Thank you.'

It was only as claws and fur sprouted, and marmalade was refused,
and Mr. Brown got into genealogy, that you began to realise
bears of such size don't originate from even darkest Peru.

Then that drugs party; atavist fists, bare-fanged zoo.
After bail was paid, those grizzling-glazed-accusatory eyes
yelling 'I never asked you to look after me. Fuck you.'

He turned, and fled, as bears must always do,
just as Judy's stomach began to swell in size.
She's planning to go off and build a school in darkest Peru -
you know what she'll ask.

Weekends I get Tim

Finding Nemo sixteen times

Fishcakes every meal

Alex Horne packed them in for 'Wordwatching', his attempt to 'seed' new words into the English language and OED. Though the whole exercise was of course contrived, and the show format inevitably owed an unignorable debt to Dave Gorman, the gag-rate was unstoppable and Horne's genuine interest - and intellect - infectious. At present Horne combines Gorman and Tim Vine's styles with his own tech- and linguistics-savvy to great effect but when he comes out of their shadows he will have it licked, and TV should sit up and take notice.

Stefan Golazewski (the edgy one out of Cowards) has lost weight, lost his glasses and turned into a self-deprecating superman with a show about a lost love that could have turned schmaltzy if his default position was not cutting. It was a pretty good little show (nominated for a Fringe First) that could tour arts venues as easily as comedy, though I feel he went a little overboard in his efforts to set the scene of 'Walthamstow, 1998', with blaring club music and shit-for-brains teenage mates. After all, he did go to Cambridge, you know (didn't they all?) I was reminded of the 1996 South Park episode in which they discover a man who has been frozen in ice since 1994 and attempt to make him feel at home with Ace of Base records.

I don't know which University Cool Fun (shit name) at the White Horse, 12.30pm, again Free Fringe go to but they were quite good for students. The host was excellent at improvising and holding their comedy-schedule conceits together and the girl was (though I hate this word) quirky in a non-annoying way with her daft, don't give a fuck if you like this xylophone story. However, the stand-up slots from the Asian guy and the long-haired guy were uninspiring, the latter even doing the tired old schtick about coming out to your parents as not gay, which I came up with eleven years ago only to realise it must've already been done. Their improvised topical sketch fell on its arse but at least they were taking risks.

Pappy's Fun Club you probably know already, or will do soon. They're BBC3 or R4 bound because they're ebullient, can improvise within a storyline that's actually funny, and are basically like the Mighty Boosh, but with actual jokes and personalities. That are funny.

I don't think I need to tell you anything about Mark Watson except to say that his show was called something like 'Mark Watson makes the world substantially jealous that it's not as funny, successful or genuinely nice as him,' and that that's what it does. My favourite standup, and he's not even particularly 'dark', or 'twisted', and although he swears sometimes he certainly doesn't have to - the ten year old on the front row was as charmed as the rest of the mixed (700 capacity!) audience. I predict he'll soon enjoy 'An Audience With' many more...

That's not to say I didn't enjoy Steve Hall, of 'We Are Klang' who aptly played his anecdotal show 'Vice Captain Loser' to the half-empty Pleasance Portakabin in the pouring rain. He described how one punter had rushed in mistaking the venue for a Portaloo and had almost sprayed half the audience, and his anecdote of how 'saving himself' to see his girlfriend in Australia meant that he only had a wet-dream on the plane resulted in two walkouts. Yet it was still a gentle show for all that and my favourite parts were the touching characterisations of his father and his eccentric behaviour of giving a Nazi salute whilst saying the names of TV celebrities, even in intensive care. I understand Markus Birdman's show 'Sympathy for the Devil' was about his coming to terms with his difficulties with his vicar father so this seems to be a catchy trope this Edinburgh. One I can't join in with; my Dad has nothing interesting about him at all, apart from the occasional illiterate malapropism such as: 'I had a depraved childhood.'

Project Adorno shared a filmic/electropop show with musician Steve Lake, 'Tales from the Cutting-Room Floor' at The Vault, 5.45pm. I'm a fan of their understated lyrics and underproduced, 1980s style synth backings which celebrate the banal. Their set, with them dressed as Thompson Twin-like civil servants in front of static shots of London, redolent of Patrick Keiller's 'Robinson' films, thus fitted their engaging first piece about an all-encompassing, neverending Government investigation. The ear-splitting volume flooding the small cavern-like venue didn't. And it stayed up for Lake's piece about East End gangsters, accompanied by much-looped footage of amateur actors playing the parts. I'm afraid the predictable story of vaulting ambition and the unconvincing femme fatale didn't justify the the energy Lake put into screeching through this overly long sequence. Adorno's finishing piece on Eric Satie featured interesting anecdotes about the composer and his contemporaries, with catchy if none-too Satie-influenced music which was still unfortunately up too loud. Apparently this will be remedied!

The Penny Dreadfuls are a Victorian-themed sketch troupe who I've seen before and rated highly. Their show is an hour-long adventure, one part League of Gentlemen to one part League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The gags, characterisation and timing were tight, the Magic Lantern show entertaining and this was an obvious and promising pitch for TV or even film. However, with some lines muffled by false moustaches or a failure to raise their heads and enunciate to the elevated back rows, and with some of the action taking place so far forward on the stage so it was similarly invisible to the Gods, their stagecraft in a large venue evidently needs work. Once this is sorted I'd love to see fill a period music-hall venue or pub.

Josie Long I found eminently slappable. Many of her observational routines were over-egged and her enthusiasm for accumulating learning is not as infectious as she thinks it is, for many of us know what she's marveling at already (there's no excuse for not having heard about Hieronymous Bosch until you're 24). On the other hand, she over-relies on ridiculing the uneducated via a 'stupid Essex hairdresser' voice, who it later turns out is based on her sister. Charming! Still, her gags about obsessively collecting frogs and her self-doubt stemming from her parents' divorce, especially one about her Mum saying a couple was 'two or three... Well, that's probably why your marriage didn't work out Mum', made me warm to her. If she played down the self-conscious 'quirkiness' (the reason I don't rate Will Hodgkinson) I would do so more.

It was a shame that I didn't find anything to replace Fat Fat Pope's weird and dark comedy on the Fringe. Noble and Silver have been sadly absent these last few years. Perhaps Tom Basden and Tim Key's show 'Freeze' may partly fill the gap later on in the fest, but I suspect it'll be up to me to do so myself next year. I also sadly missed out on the innovative Dan Antopolski, the acerbic Glenn Wool and Simon Munnery as Elizabeth I in 'Walter and Raleigh' at the Udderbelly due to time constraints.

Now I must decide whether I want to take my own show, and maybe an Utter! show too, up to Edinburgh as part of the Free Fringe, the format of which seems to be working, or instead economize even further and cane the Camden Fringe in 2009. Guy J Jackson's one-man storytelling show at the latter was strange, mysterious and amusing, though it will not be everyone's cup of tea. The Camden Fringe's organisers the Etcetera theatre seem to be putting a lot of effort into promoting it as a cheap alternative to Edinburgh. But they need to institute something like the Perrier/if.comedy or Fringe First awards. And really, even in the jaws of a credit crunch nothing will top the sheer vibe and variety of the festival - or the fact that Edinburgh's a much nicer, holiday-oriented and less hot place than Camden.

What do you think, dear reader?

Edinburgh 2008 Blog

After some umfiddleum kerfuffle about whether I was going to have anywhere to stay and the competing attraction of instead getting off at Berwick-upon-Tweed and pacing depressed up and down Hadrian's Wall, I ended up staying at an old University friend's house. It was great to have my own bed and to stay in a civilised, non rock-and-roll flat, with the realisation that there is an Edinburgh which continues as normal throughout the festival proving very grounding. It was even better to see him again as I'm often so busy doing my own silly things that I don't have time to realise just how much I miss the quality folks I haven't seen for sometimes years. School? Best years of your life, but only if you didn't go on to Cambridge!

Anyway, the shows. First I must plug Liz Bentley-on-Sea, 9.30pm at the Sweet Swimming Pool, Apex International Hotel, Grassmarket. It's a show in and around the pool featuring Liz's twisted tales, songs and poems delivered in her disingenuously, alternately butter-wouldn't melt/cheeky style. There's also a live rebirth featuring the slightly sick thoughts of a foetus. After that at 10.38 precisely, Liz has bagsied the pool for a cabaret performance from special guests including Hegley, Long, Rachel Pantechnicon (now finished) and me (now finished). The show does require the audience being game, both for the eccentricity of the venue (and its acoustics) and performers, and for taking part and even jumping into the pool to get the most out of it. Unfortunately, on the night the Scotsman was in, they weren't really. If you are, you'll have a great time and even, if you bring your cozzies, a free dip.

Tom Bell and Ed Weeks' 'Powershow' started off well with their double-act rapport based on their exaggerated personalities (Ed conceited and vain, Tom lovelorn, pathetic and indie) working very well in some new sketches. 'If you freeze smoke, does it turn back into wood?' But as the Powershow conceit, of the show coming alive, kicked in it all went a bit Footlights tour show, leaving me wishing we were back in sketch mode. The kind-of adlibbing during their Powernap, however, was hilarious and I would recommend it.

I had also really enjoyed Ginger and Black's Comedy lab (or whatever it was) pilot, and their downbeat cynical musical storytelling is in my neighbourhood if not right up my street. Getting the audience to pretend they were a children's party was amusing but not as funny as acting with actual children. The show was a little one-note and I wonder how long they can get away with this, as their forays into an S&M backstory for Ginger weren't overly original. They need to think about where they can take their (presently similar) personas in the future and where the conflict is going to come from. I'd definitely book them for a party though.

Richard Sandling and Stuart Goldsmith's 5pm Free Fringe Sketch Show at the Canon's Gait started off hackneyed, with a sketch about Roman Catholic child abuse, but the on-stage rapport between the two lifted the show as they made a virtue of their origins as stand-ups. The more they took the piss out of each other and the sketches themselves the better the show got. I didn't get to catch their solo shows but they should definitely continue the double-act as, though there was nothing absolutely groundbreaking in their sketches, these were well-written and tangential enough to provoke thought as well as laughter from the healthy audience.

After that, the show from PBH, founder of the Free Fringe about a journey he took from London to Edinburgh solely on local buses (celebrating his acquisition of a Freedom Pass) did not live up to the promise of the concept. PBH is an amiable man who got through a lack of preparation, of jokes about and of photos of the places he'd been by injecting old songs and enthusiasm whenever the pace of the story itself lagged, which was too often.

A bigger disappointment was the much-hyped '2 episodes of mash' at the Pleasance. Mentions of Chris Akabusi and other bygone celebrities, comedy Welsh accents and purposefully-crap Powerpoint/Paint slides do not make for a good show, especially when delivered in a manner that was presumably meant to be downbeat insouciance but seemed merely uninterested, with Dan Wilkinson turning away from the small audience to render his lines inaudible, when the duo should have been doing their all to make them feel special.

Tom Bell hadn't really yet decided what his 2.55pm Free Fringe show's format was to be, though I'm told he sorted it out in following days, with piles of jumble for the audience to sit on whilst they do paintings during the show (which only detracted from his imaginative stand-up on the day I went). The show doesn't really have much to do with reaching 27, 'The Age of Rock Star Death', and anyway, I feel more rock star now that I'm 28 and I don't give a shit about anything except money.

Umbrella Birds' GYM, written by Mark Watson's wife Emily Watson-Howe and featuring a cast of talented female character actors, was the best and most seamless sketch show I saw. Although, to those who saw the same ensemble's debut WC last year, which was performed in actual ladies' toilets, it will largely represent more of the same - in fact I believe certain characters turned up again in GYM - given the high quality of the jokes, situations and acting this is no bad thing. The injection of unexplained magical realism tickled me (does 'The Monster' represent infertility? Body dysmorphism?) and though I suspect the show would have worked better in an actual gym, and may well do if it tours, the Pleasance is presently the only venue in which it can attract the audience it deserves.

I ought to say a word about the Pleasance's dwarfing all the other venues in Edinburgh, compared to when I was up there with Fat Fat Pope in 2000/1. Though I would have loved time to go and see more shows at the Udderbelly, Stand, Bongo, Sweet etc if you're only there for a few days and have to pack shows in back-to-back the Pleasance has it stitched up. Yes, it makes it tough for smaller shows without professional management to get a look in, but I did go and see most of my shows there, and most were good, so they are at least doing something right. 

Starting off promisingly with the quotidien life-rebuilding of a man who has lost his memory and the ocd-like routines he must build to protect himself from the depredations of a memory-eating information-shark, the mystery romps along redolent of vintage Eco. With the introdcution of the love interest though (and we know who it is right from the start), The Raw Shark texts seems to be gearing up to be made into a Hollywood Blockbuster, becoming derivative of Jaws, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and, in its 'was it all a dream all along or was it all just mentalism all along?' twist, a bit like life of pi.

As someone who loves 'unspace' so much I'm saving up for a house in Luton, and who is also seeking to self-replicate his will to the exclusion of the rest of humanity's I'd say this page-turner was well worth a look, despite the gash denoument.

Edinburgh reviews coming up soon if anyone gives me any indication they read this shit at all!

My sketches

Review: Byzantine Art Museum, Andrea Ioannou 5, Ktima, Pafos, Cyprus.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=964466&id=639468707

Now most people will agree with me when I say medieval religious art is always good for a cheap chuckle and this place is no exception. No cameras are allowed so my A-level Art skills were put to the test (see picture, in folder 'The Breathtaking Art of Richard Tyrone Jones' on Facebook or, if you're reading this on myspace, hopefully appended to this blog).

Firstly look out for the Lamentation from the Church of the Transfiguration, Drymou, featuring a cyborg Jesus with fifteen ribs. There's also a lovely quilted Lamentation which looks like it's a fuzzy felt composition. Pictured is my sketch of the graphic-novel-like St Nicholas of 1768. Very well-defined cheeks. Also pictured, my biro impression of St. Mark's lion which honestly looks like a perturbed Michael Ball in reality. (I later saw on telly, in Greek, a local News article about some new iconoclastic trend in Greek religious art – apparently some rotters are trying to take all the animals out of the icons. This will only add to Cyprus's stray cat problem. Perhaps this is why Mr Michael Ball lion is so worried). I note all Cyprus's St John-the-Baptists resemble wild men of the forest.

Best of all however is a sixteenth-century martyrdom of St. George 'the Penoliatis'. This really is quite ridiculous and drawn-out. In one panel the two torturer figures (who remain consistent) are quite clearly flaying him with cotton wool. In the next they appear to be roasting him a nice floating ox. In the next, George, seemingly at liberty, gazes upon two little statues, one of which is diving into an unseen swimming pool. In the next, I presume he's supposed to be being burned at the stake, but it actually just looks as if he's just been put in a big pink dress. This obviously did not prove fatal because in the next, much faded frame George appears to be about to be tickled on the arse with a big feather. Next he's tied to a pole between the two effete torturers in poses akin to those of two mechanical figures from the Prague Astronomical Clock, holding two mallets. I imagine they whacked him every twelve hours, emitting a cute 'ding' sound.

Next he's underneath a big balloon in between two mountains of pink blancmange. It made me fancy some then and it makes me fancy some now but I don't suppose I shall get any. In the next he's being turned on the wheel over a bowl of what look like about fifty shark's fins, but is actually being held down on the wheel by a flying winged figure. Perhaps the blancmange in the last picture was actually Angel's Delight and its owner has come to wreak divine revenge on those who have eaten his pudding. In the next frame George is finally, at long last, being cut in two with a saw, but the artist has obviously just copied the picture of him between the two men with mallets and then just drawn a thin red line down George's middle as if he's been cleanly sliced in two by Goldfinger's laser. He's still standing up straight even though the saw has reached his sweetmeats; his two halves really should by now be peeling down a bit.

I realise I probably need a professional hagiographer to explain it all to me, but the cumulative effect is as if Paul and Barry Chuckle have been left in charge of torturing St George to death, one imagines by a Roman Centurion who left them with the strict injunction 'and no Daliesque visual flourishes!' and in the last, now lost, frame returns to brandish a fist and growl 'grrrrr!' in a comic manner, chasing them all the way into the Rennaissance.

There is also a homely ethnographical museum just opposite with all the usual crap you've come to expect.

Cheap accommodation in the Pafos region is provided by Tyrone and Gloria Jones, in a clean and spacious 2-bedroom apartment which sleeps up to six, situated in the nearby village of Peyia. Prices start from £205 per week. They can be contacted on 01902 678761, 07956 917921 or on gloriajones06@yahoo.co.uk, or I've got some leaflets. You never know, I might start some writing retreats up there in a bit.


PS. Has anyone written these jokes before?

'Waiter, waiter! There's a fly in my soup.'
'Yes sir, and….?'
'Well, when I order fly soup, I expect to get more than one fly!'

'Doctor, Doctor! I feel like a pair of curtains!'
'Well go on then, treat yourself, after all you've only got a month to live.'