Look at me now! (Illegally)

When you’re bullied as a child, you might dream of one day becoming famous, and being able to give a big ‘Piss you!’ (that was probably the rudest word I knew in primary school) to all the people who picked on you; to appearing on TV, winning the lottery, curing cancer, and raising two fingers to those who thought you were nothing.

When I skipped a year of school, moving up to Year 6 from Year 4, a few of the 10 year olds didn’t like having a 9 year old in their class, wearing glasses and answering questions like some annoying Hermione Granger/Harry Potter hybrid (though not smart enough to realise that it’s not pronounced Her-mee-own), and took it upon themselves to make fun of me, and/or push me around. The stupid thing was, being born on September 12th, I turned 10 after a few days, and was already taller than most of the year, so it never got too bad, and when, one day, the ‘ringleader’ forgot his consent form for a Year 6 trip (which I wasn’t allowed to attend, technically being a Year 5), I kicked him in the cock and told him that if he or his friends bullied me again, I’d kick him in the other one. This anatomically-inaccurate, yet anatomically accurate and unprovoked attack got me 10 minutes of hard wall-facing, but the teasing stopped. RESULT.

But now, bully-who-had-such-an-impact-on-my-life-that-I’ve-forgotten-your-name, get ready to be kicked in the other one good and proper…

I’M GOING TO BE ON TV!

That is right. Admittedly, you won’t be able to watch it unless you’re living in the Netherlands or Luxembourg, but even so…TV!

On Monday I’m off to record 15 minutes for The Comedy Factory, a stand-up show featuring 4 acts, hosted by Najib Amhali (one of the biggest selling Dutch comics) and broadcast on RTL 4, the most-watched channel over there. The show ran from 1999-2006 and had an amazing line-up of comics, both Dutch and International, and is now back for a new series, so it’s wonderful to be asked to take part.

It’s being broadcast in June, so I’ll have a clip to post here soon after, although I’m sure there is a clever way to watch online or via catch-up, but as I don’t yet know what it is, or whether it’s legal, I shall reserve comment.

If you happen to be in Rotterdam, tickets for the show (and for the warm-up gigs on Monday) are available here and here - it would be lovely to see you.

I’m now off to choose my walk-on music and try on my new suit. Let’s hope they fit.

Stay fly,

Chris x

“White Rapper” AND cult asian following OR indian fans. Or ‘How to confuse an entire tube carriage’.

A couple of weeks back I was in Camden Highlight on Friday & Saturday. On the Friday night, the front rows were taken up by 50 or so Asian guys and girls, on a matchmaking event organised by The Tantric Club (underwhelminglySFW), and they were lovely, well-behaved audience members.

At the end of the night, I chatted to a couple of the guys about hip-hop and headed off to Camden Town in time to make it down the Northern and Piccadilly lines to catch the last Westbound District line train. As I got up to change at Euston, a group of 8 Asian girls saw me and shouted:

“Chris! Oh my god – Chris! It’s that guy from tonight – Chris!”

 

“Hi”

 

“Oh my god, you were amazing – your rapping is incredible -”
“Yeah, you’re such a good rapper!
“Oh my god, that rap was like, amazing”

“Aww, thank you!”

 

“Can we get a picture?”

 

“Yeah, sure”

 

*All throw gang signs*

 

“Thank you Chris the rapper!”

 

“Thanks guys, and cheers for coming!”

And with that, I dashed off to make my changes, smiling. It’s nice when people let you know they’ve enjoyed a show, it’s even nicer when they do it outside of the venue, and it’s even even nicer when they don’t once mention the word comedy, or funny, or hilarious, and instead confuse a busy tube carriage into thinking that this strange looking gentleman who none of them recognised was in fact a gangster rapper with a sizable Asian following. 

Ballin’.

 

A Virtuoso Musician’s First Day Nerves – 60 Second Sketch!

Last week I filmed a sketch that I’d written with my improv group, Racing Minds. This is it:

If you enjoy it, please like, comment and share it amongst your friends – it’s in a competition to win money and mentoring, which we’d dearly love (and need).

Thank you x

First Rehearsal

Here’s a sketch that I wrote for Racing Minds, the improv troupe I’m in. It’s only 60 seconds long, so enjoy, and if you like it, please do share it amongst your friends!

Strangers on a Train.

Let us start with a song:

Monoliths by Lotus Plaza.

I like this song a lot. I was listening to it on the way back from a gig in Watford, when a small group of perhaps eighteen or nineteen year-olds got on the train and sat next to a fifty-something year-old woman. For the next twenty five minutes they chatted together and ate quavers, passing round bags and laughing, the woman included. I had my headphones in, so didn’t hear what they were saying – on purpose, as it seemed a shame to ‘discover’ what there were actually discussing – but it was a pleasure to see them all getting on.

I’m doing some new jokes at Rise of the Idiots in Balham tomorrow, alongside some excellent stand-ups (so come along if you’re near and free) and I opened tonight with some new ones that will be going into my hour for Leicester, which worked nicely, so it’ll be fun to tell them in full context.

In other news, if you live in/near Nottingham, I’m doing a preview on February 1st – details here.

My thoughts are drained and I need to take my contact lenses out. Night.

My Top Three Teas.

Let us begin at the beginning, so as not to cause an anti-climax.

English Breakfast Tea, particularly Waitrose’s own brand, is the best kind of tea. The name is misleading, like breakfast cereal, Tropicana Ruby Breakfast juice and Belvita Breakfast Biscuits, it is well suited to any time of day. I have mine strong and milky, which can sometimes confuse people, as these may seem like opposites – specifically strongly brewed (2 or 3 minutes with a bag, 7 or 8 minutes with leaves, and I much prefer leaves when I have time for them), with a lot of milk, so it’s the right temperature to drink straight away. I like it in a big mug, and I don’t take sugar. I have it when I wake up, usually in bed, and then one or two more cups during the day.

Tea is great. While I also like coffee, tea is usually cheaper at service stations, pubs, cafés and cinemas (The Lexi cinema in Kensal Rise does a nice cuppa), and so it’s economically superior, especially if you get a two-person pot.

Tea number two is a Darjeeling and Assam blend, made by my girlfriend’s mum. It is the king of ‘relaxation’ teas. I wouldn’t have it in the morning – it’s too delicate – and I wouldn’t have it in the evening – it’s too caffeinated – but in the afternoon, with a biscuit or cake, it is the bomb, as far as teas can be ‘the bomb’.

Tea three is Twinings’ Lemon and Ginger, a cracking caffeine-free tea that I like in the evening – it’s nice and warming, and has more flavour than chamomile, while inducing the same sleepiness. In fact, I’m drinking some now. A bonus with this tea is that if you add some honey and a slug of whiskey, you get a delicious cold remedy/soother/warder-offer (depending how you want to justify it), and it is yummy.

Those are my top three teas. Yours?

Learn From Your Mistakes.

Yesterday, I was told that a friend of mine had done something very silly. As far as I’m aware it wasn’t entirely their fault, and it’s not something I would expect them to have done, but it upset me to hear about it, and to know that it happened.

There’s not a whole lot of use dwelling on it, but if things had turned out differently, a lot of people would be very unhappy right now.

People value life to many different degrees, affected by the many different factors in their own lives – there’s no defined amount that a human is worth (although, check out The Yes Men‘s excellent swipe at Dow Chemical) – but this got me thinking.

There aren’t many home console video games where you have just one life, a single 1UP to play with, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. People need second chances. They need to be able to jump over a gap to see if that’s the way to complete the level, before hitting ‘restart at checkpoint’ if they mess up. They’ve paid for the experience, you can’t just punish them for not timing their button presses correctly by ending the game for good. People like being able to mess up.

There are many mistakes that we can make, safe in the knowledge that there’s a safety net. These help us to learn, to grow, to gain skills, to gather stories. These things make us who we are.

Some mistakes, however, you only get to make once.
Some mistakes you don’t get to learn from.
You know what these are – don’t make the mistake of making them.

No Use Crying.

Today, I saw a child pull a pint of milk onto its head. Not in a ‘pull a pint of Guinness’ way – I imagine that milk on draught would dirty the pumps terribly; cows’ udders must be regularly flushed with line cleaner – and not in a ‘pint of milk in a glass bottle’ way.

I was getting some milk from a supermarket shelf, while a four or five year old boy next to me was standing on tiptoes, grabbing at cartons of the white stuff. His accompanying adult told him to stop playing, yet he carried on flailing his arms, trying to reach the 2.27l bottles, clearly suffering severe teat-withdrawal, even at his advanced age. As he did this, it was quite clear to me that he was going to knock one of the smaller ones off the shelf, possibly onto himself, and that I should intervene. Unfortunately, the combination of my blue shirt, and the worry that I might accidentally knock the container onto his head myself, therefore becoming the aggressor in the situation, meant that I got all UN about it, and simply stood by as a pint of milk bounced onto, and then off of, his bonce.

He let out a muffled yelp, looked at his dad, looked at the milk, and then kicked it away like a petulant footballer; the bottle skimmed along the aisle and came to rest against a stock cage, where one of the floor staff picked it up, glanced down the newly installed milk bowling lane, and carried on working.

We like to kick inanimate objects when we feel wronged by them. It’s a masochistic urge to show the thing, and anyone watching, that we’re still in charge, even if the action of kicking results in more pain and potential embarrassment. I’m sure that the kid hadn’t only just learnt this. Babies throw food against walls when they run out of patience trying to find their mouths, toddlers hurl favourite toys into the sky and onto the ground, while this young chap had clearly developed a fine sense of foot-eye coordination, and was putting it into practice, unleashing his fury on the mammal-boob fluid and sending out a warning to those in the vicinity. Had he been further down the dairy section, it might have been a pot of custard, and could have discovered the properties of non-Newtonian fluids with his little toe.

The Codpiece – Big in 2013.

They say fashions come and go in cycles. This year, I’m hoping a 500 year phase will come full circle and bring back a long forgotten accessory that I feel deserves a resurgence.

The codpiece. A humble cock cover; a shlong sheath; an anaconda adornment; a hose hood, and many other terms that they most definitely didn’t use in the 15th Century branches of Codpiece Warehouse.

For the uninitiated, a codpiece (in Middle English, cod meant scrotum) – plural, codpies – is a flap, pouch or pocket that could be found on the front region of trousers, covering and somewhat accentuating the genital area. They came about as 14th Century fashion changed – previously, men wore hose on their legs with linen drawers covering their willy and bum. As hemlines of doublets rose, the area became a little draughty and prone to public display (see below); hence, the codpiece was born.

“Alas! some of them show the very boss of the penis and the horrible pushed-out testicles that look like the malady of hernia in the wrapping of their hose, and the buttocks of such persons look like the hinder parts of a she-ape in the full of the moon. And moreover, the hateful proud members that they show by the fantastic fashion of making one leg of their hose white and the other red, make it seem that half of their privy members are flayed. And if it be that they divide their hose in other colours, as white and black, or white and blue, or black and red, and so forth, then it seems, by the variation of colour, that the half of their privy members are corrupted by the fire of Saint Anthony, or by cancer, or by other such misfortune.”

- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Handy for storing VD Ointment, loose change or Pedigree Chum.

By the 1540s, codpieces had reached the peak of their extravagance, becoming opulently shaped and padded tumescent tunic tumours. They snuck onto the armour of the time, too, despite the orb of bulging ballbag presenting a pretty obvious target for any macists (mace-wielders) on the field of battle. Henry VIII had a marvellous one. Unfortunately for lovers of baby’s arm baskets, by 1590, they shrivelled and vanished, dropping off clothing like liquid nitrogened warts, rejected even by charity shops.

To our modern eyes, the gentlemen of the past, parading round with their privates in pouches, may seem a tad silly, a wee bit uncool – why on earth would we want to bring this back? Allow me to demonstrate:

Three reasons, there (the middle one is Sex Machine from Desperado/From Dusk ’til Dawn). Look how awesome they are. They’re worn by murderers. They let you spray people with your willy-gun. They look like giant nappies/incontinence pads.

Imagine wearing one. Wandering into a room, all the men-folk gathered round a strumpet, a bold trull squawking about her luxury vajazzle, demonstrating how the light glints through the clitoral chandelier of stick-on glitterstones…and then…BEHOLD! A bejewelled bellend of Magellanic proportions, circumnavigable only by the bravest of adventurers, its heavenly girth illuminated with twinkling, gilded script, lit up like a petroleum Christmas tree, blinding the occupants with a magnesium burst, filling the room with joyous envy.

Then sit back and hand out your card.

Unfortunately, nowhere sells them, and none of my back issues of Seamstress Quarterly seem to contain a pattern. Still, I suppose we have jockstraps and poster paint, and where there’s a willy, there’s a way.

The Codpiece is dead. Long live the Codpiece.

Milquetoast

A week or so ago, Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival launched their website, and with it, listings for all the shows that will be taking place. In a move that is sure to delight all Leicester-based lovers of comedy shows with semi-archaic words for titles, one of these shows will be mine! (I’m actually doing three shows, but this is just me on my own - details of the other two are here).

The show is called Milquetoast (definition here) and this is the blurb:

“We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world” - René Magritte.

This is not a show about fear.
The debut hour from Leicester Mercury nominee Chris Turner (as heard on BBC Radio 2).

Contrary to the blurb, it is a show about fear – that copywriting quirk is a tip of the hat to Magritte’s famous pipe - and parts are inspired by some of his thoughts and works. The full show will be written by mid-January, and I’ll be previewing it in a few places in the run-up to the Leicester show, so it’ll be all ready and stage-worthy.

The show is on Sunday 10th of February, at the Criterion Pub in Leicester, and tickets are £5 or £4 for concessions, available here. It would be lovely if you came.

Details on the LCF website here. Details on my solo show page here.

That’s all for now, Merry Christmas!