• Homepage / News
• Online Music Store
• Blog
• Music Stuff
• Video Stuff
• Photo Gallery
• Amazon Store
• Podcasts
• Press
• Biography
• Gigs
• Contact Details

Subscribe to
Mitch's Podcast:

shame on me

Tuesday 14th April 2009

I did weigh myself this (Monday as far as I'm concerned) morning; the bad news is I've gone up another pound (Easter).  The worse news is that nobody (so far) has emailed to tell me off!  Come on, guys, I'm in danger of slipping badly here and if I start to suspect I'm unsupervised I may well end up undoing all the good you've helped me do so far...

End of whinge, and I don't want to sound like I'm blaming anyone else for my current staying-on-wagon difficulties (although I probably am), and it's a Bank Holiday so you've all been off doing fun things (I tend not to notice Bank Holidays; when you're self-employed with no school-age kids they don't really make any difference) and it's no-one else's responsibility when it comes down to it...

Bollocks, ignore me.  Good Easter was it?

[ Fixed link ]

planet of the vin diesel box-sets

Sunday 12th April 2009

As is the custom nowadays, didn't see Doctor Who until after the kiddies were in bed.  We never see it go out live anymore; this is of course purely in order that we might vet it for scariness before we let Greta anywhere near it, and NOT because she would inevitably talk all the way through it, possibly resulting in me going a bit The Shining on her ass.

Well, it sort of WAS Pitch Black on a bus, wasn't it, but by no means the worse for that.  Michelle Ryan seemed to be going for the same kind of aloof sexiness as Diana Rigg in The Avengers, but, like Diana Rigg in The Avengers, generally came over as unbearably smug (you still wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers, mind you).  DT just reminded me how much the show and the public are going to miss him (no pressure, young Matt).  Weird that Lee Evans went for a slightly variable Welsh accent when there's been a preponderance of genuine (and frequently incongruous) Welsh accents throughout New Who.  Nice that he got a proper Lee Evans moment with the fire extinguisher. 

Didn't see it in all its HD glory, unfortunately; the V+ box can record in HD but it eats up so much disk space that it stops working properly until you delete whatever it is you've recorded.  Hope it gets repeated on the HD channel - the desert location looked wonderful but - sorry - kind of CG-ish...  Not sure the Mill boys couldn't have produced an equally convincing desert, but then the DW gang wouldn't have gotten their Dubai jolly (not that there's anything particularly jolly about Dubai - went there myself once.  Once.)  

Meanwhile, Waters Of Mars, eh?  Like the title.

[ Fixed link ]

Stuck with an Orange mobile...

Friday 10th April 2009

As my Twitterers will know, I'm on something of the horns of a mobile phone dilemma;  my little Sony Ericsson is, I fear, in a decline. It's started to switch itself off at random intervals, for no immediately discernible reason and at least once with disastrous timing.  It's patently not long for my pocket and I'll need another one shortly.

The recent demise of my old Palm LifeDrive leads me to wish to replace my ailing phone with some sort of smartphone/PDA thingy rather than just a phone phone-type phone. Right now I'm using my iPod's calendar function as my diary which is a bit dodgy as I can only read it; I can't amend it until I get home and make the necessary alterations on my iMac's calendar and then back up the iPod, if you follow (and I understand if you don't, or choose not to).

The thing is, being an iMac user I've decided I would like to suck it up and finally go for the iPhone if only because I KNOW it'll sync up with the Mac.  I know other smart-phones and Palm-tops can be made to sync up with Macs, like my old Palm LifeDrive, but it's generally by means of some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and gums up your hard drive for ever, like my old Palm LifeDrive.

However...  I appear to be signed up to Orange for the rest of my life and thus far, one can only (strictly legitimately) use an iPhone on O2. I know I can always bail on Orange and switch networks, but possibly not for free and probably not without changing my mobile number which I'd be very reluctant to do - I've had the same mobile number for 12 years, during which time I've had six different addresses and six different landline numbers - it's the main way people in the "business" know how to get in touch with me and changing it now would be a major hassle.

I'm fairly sure I can persaude Orange to give me a Blackberry, and I'd be perfectly happy with a Blackberry, were it not for this connectivity issue.  I've found conflicting accounts on the net and had conflicting advice on Twitter, so here I am asking for yet more conflicting advice; does anybody out there know - really KNOW - how well you can sync up a Blackberry with a Mac?  And do they REALLY sync up, or is it just a botch compromise using some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and etc. etc. etc.

Mind you, my old pal and comrade Emma Kennedy informs me by Tweet than come July there will be Orange-friendly iPhones available.  Can anyone confirm this?  If true it may be worth my while hanging on till then.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[ Fixed link ]

sorry

Tuesday 7th April 2009

[ Fixed link ]

hello and ow

Sunday 5th April 2009

Well I'm back... Actually I've been back since Wednesday evening, but immediately upon my return I had to throw myself into Now Show songwriting duties (our return flight was delayed by four hours; thought I'd get the whole evening to work but in the event I didn't get in until knocking on for 10pm); then Thursday itself (the bit I was awake for) was devoted in its entirety to recording The Now Show; then Friday, being the first real day "back in reality", was spent trying to nail back down the various bits of hell that had broken loose in our absence, and ascertaining just how much financial chaos you can actually plunge yourself into by disappearing for five days (surprising amounts, it turns out) before going to Cranleigh Arts Centre for a restoringly good gig, then on Saturday we persuaded the in-laws to come over and babysit while we ran round performing some very overdue errands, of a kind that simply can't be performed with two little girls in tow, pausing only to make an offer on a house we liked the look of, then hurrying (rather too quickly, according to a member of Her Majesty's Constabulary - oh well, it's just money... and points) to a gig at Soho Ho, which was nearly cancelled as a result of a restaurant a few doors down Frith Street bursting into flames shortly before showtime.

This is why it's taken me three days to get round to blogging.  But here I am.

If the tone of this blog thus far has been surprisingly chipper given that content-wise it's been something of a catalogue of hassles, that may be because I still haven't stopped grinning since I got back from Méribel.   I wasn't sure what to expect from this trip at all, but I know I didn't exepct to have quite the best time I've had in years, if not ever.  From the moment we arrived we were spoilt rotten; we had our own little hotel apartment ( a real boon if you have kiddies - we were in a "family room" in Malta about 18 months ago, which is fine in theory but as soon as you've put the kids to bed you're stuck in there with them in darkness and silence), we were on permanent freebies at "Evolution", one of the best restaurants in town, we had free ski passes for every day of our stay and Greta and I had free private ski classes.

I'm not sure which will seem less probable to you; little three year old Greta learning to ski or enormous thirty-nine year old me, but we both did, and by our third and final day of classes we were doing proper skiing down a proper mountain and everything.  Really.  There are photos.

Better still, Clara - who learned to ski as a kid - got some decent skiing done in the afternoons (being chummed down the slopes by various comedy pals of ours), while I looked after the girls. I was so glad of this; I had a horrid vision of Clara - the only one of us who could already ski - going all the way to Méribel and being stuck minding the kids all day while Captain Incompetent here hurtled about injuring himself and others. 

I'm still a bit annoyed that I didn't have the gumption to take the week off from The Now Show and spend the whole week in Méribel - the Altitude festival was, if anything, just really kicking into its stride when I left. 

The festival itself is a gloriously freewheeling affair; I found myself doing kids' shows, shows in French (more or less) and live games of Just A Minute (as part of the wonderfully oxymoronic "Stars Of Radio 4" evening).  Tuesday night saw what was by any objective measure the "big deal" gig of the festival; a full set from KT Tunstall and her band, for the finale of which she got all the comedians there present - including Marcus, Andew Maxwell, Andre Vincent, Nick Doody and myself - to join her on stage for Suddenly I See.  It was my first gig as a back-up dancer and while I can't even begin to imagine how it looked from the audience's point of view, there were a lot of cameras and phones in the audience so I wouldn't be surprised if it turned up on YouTube in the near future.

Earlier that evening I got a quick interview with KT which I'll incorporate into my next podcast. She was extraordinarily friendly and voluble, considering she was the only genuinely famous one among us. 

In fact, one of the most enjoyable features of the whole stay was the evident rigour with which the Arsehole Filter had been applied; at any sizeable gathering of comedians there's always at least one who can be relied upon to make an utter tit of himself and ruin the mood, or go off on some cocaine-and-ego fuelled rant against some fellow comic (often in the room at the time) or something along those lines, but on this occasion everyone there was one of my favourite people on the circuit. Over the course of the festival more and more people I was genuinely pleased to see turned up, and no-one with so much as a hint of uh-oh about them appeared.  In fact the person I was most surprised to find in such universally respected company was me. 

While my mind has nothing but fond recollections of my stay, my body's not so sure. Skiing has a way of exacting its revenge upon you in a slow and stealthy manner; just down off the mountain, you're buzzing and exhilarated and very alive.  The next morning, you notice bruises you don't remember incurring and bits of you have started to seize up; the only cure is to get back up the mountain.  As soon as you head for home, thus depriving yourself of daily mountain therapy, your body starts to go into a steady decline...  since we returned, every morning I've been slightly stiffer and achier than the last.  It's wearing off a bit now, but I find I still have Skiers' Arse - alarmingly steely buttocks which could crush a man's skull but which are quite incapable of climbing stairs.

In any event, I've promised Marcus I'll do whatever I can to help him bring attention to next year's Altitude. This year already saw (I'm told) a marked improvement attendance-wise on last year, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the festival gets the audience it deserves.  It's immense fun in a heartbreakingly beautiful place, which is not a bad combination.

[ Fixed link ]

hello and goodbye (for a bit)

Saturday 28th March 2009

Hi all,

Sorry I've been a bit absent this week, and it's not about to get any better I'm afraid... I've been especially busy these past few days as tomorrow (well, later today now) the family and I are off to Méribel in France for a few days (as you'll know if you're a regular), and this has required a lot of running about getting things sorted.  I'm not sure what net access I'll have so I may not blog again until Wednesday or Thursday.  In particular I'm pre-excusing myself from posting my weight on Monday, so there.

I may still get the odd tweet off, for the Twitterers among you.

Thanks for your support and patience; I'll see you in a few days, ski-related disasters notwithstanding.

[ Fixed link ]

weigh day again

Monday 23rd March 2009

20st 12, so two more pounds gone.

I actually ate hardly anything for the whole of Friday and Saturday this week (my "ill" feeling having evolved into a "sick" feeling, for some reason) so on the one hand, I might have expected to have lost more, but when you actually eat NOTHING for a while, your body goes into "starvation mode" and your weight remains much the same (while you yourself feel sluggish and dreadful as you're essentially "running on empty").  As it is, I reckon two pounds is about fair.

I THINK I'm finally over this illness, but we'll see.  Hope so; thoroughly bored with it.

[ Fixed link ]

a plea

Friday 20th March 2009

Sorry it's been a while, I'm still a bit ill and such energy as I have I've been conserving for the unavoidable stuff like writing Now Show songs and driving to Cheltenham.

The other reason I've been slightly putting off blogging is that I have something to say which I've not been looking forward to saying, as I know however I phrase it it's going to come over as graceless and mean-spirited, but here goes anyway...

From time to time, aspiring - or perhaps accomplished but as-yet unrecognised - comic songwriters email me funny lyrics they've written.  Since The Now Show came back a couple of weeks ago this has picked up to the point where I'm now receiving one of these emails at least every other day, sometimes more often than that.

Here's the bit where I put my Git Head on, apologies in advance...

PLEASE STOP SENDING ME FUNNY LYRICS.

I'm sure a lot of them are very good; I say I'm sure because I haven't read any of them.   Some of the senders explain in their emails that they'd be interested in writing for me, some others simply want my feedback, but here's the thing; I'm not reading them.  Because I can't.

In the case of those who want to write for me; my deal with the BBC is that I write and perform the songs for The Now Show, not simply that I come up with them by whatever means present themselves...  it's Mitch Benn original compositions they're paying for and it's Mitch Benn originals that I'm contractually obliged to provide.  Even if the terms of the deal allowed for me to "sub-contract" other writers, frankly they're not paying me enough for me to pay anyone else, and besides, if the resultant song were wholly someone else's work I'd be morally obliged to pass on all the money, and then there's no point my being there.   So even if I wanted to "hire" someone to write "my" songs I couldn't, either legally or ethically.

There's another, even bigger problem which also concerns those who just seek my input or advice...  It's very sweet of you to ask, but sending me your funny lyrics - especially while the Now Show's on - actually makes my job, which is never easy at the best of times, considerably harder.  I'll explain:

I can only write about what's in the news, and at any given time there are only a few stories which are in any way good candidates for the funny song treatment, and most weeks at least a couple of those will have been "bagsied" by Steve and Hugh for the week's big themes.  So I'm left with maybe four or five possible stories a week if I'm lucky, and out of that I have to get three songs. 

The hardest part is coming up with the comic "angle"; what aspect of the story to pick up on and make the focus of the song.

Now if, while I'm in the middle of this process, someone in all eagerness and innocence sends me the words to this great song they've written about one of the big stories in the news - I've now lost that idea from my list of potential songs.  I can't use the sender's lyrics (see above) and, worse, while a minute ago I might yet have had that idea or one very like it for myself, I now can't go anywhere near it.  Even if the sender wouldn't mind me using their idea at all, I can't do this (see above again) and I can't come up with something similar because now that's plagiarism.  Even if the BBC never finds out, I'd know (and the sender would know when something very like his idea comes out of the radio a few days later). 

So the result of the sender's actions - and I'm guessing by and large the people who do this are fans - is just me being required to find three funny songs from a pool of three or four news stories rather than four or five.  Exponentially harder.

It's got to the point now where I'm not even opening any email with "idea for song" or such like in the subject bar.

Now please, those of you, don't feel hurt by this, and whatever you do, KEEP WRITING.  Send your lyrics to the BBC and try to nick my job out from under me, send them to ad agencies, send them to cabaret artistes who DO use writers, get up on stage someplace and perform them yourself, just don't send them to me.   There's nothing I can do with them and I'm not going to pass them on to anyone else.  I'm ugly but I'm not stupid.

Sorry to be such a sour old bastard, but you see my point, don't you?

[ Fixed link ]

weigh-urrgh

Monday 16th March 2009

21st dead, so 3 pounds gone this week, but that's what a couple of days off your food sweating under a duvet will do for you.  It's all to the good I suppose but I'd rather not employ that particular technique again in the foreseeable future.

Feeling better today, if not quite 100%.  Just has well, I have lots to do (so off he goes to do it).

[ Fixed link ]

the last real journalist

Saturday 14th March 2009

Just a short one as I'm a bit under the weather and the schedule for the next few days is kind of heavy-going. The closest thing I have to a night "off" in the next week and a half is Wednesday, and since that's when I'm generally up till the occasionally not even particularly wee small hours writing Now Show songs I'm not sure that counts.

I've just been watching Jon Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer (click here for the background on this - it's worth it)...  it's possibly the single most exciting and impressive thing I've seen on TV in years. Fair play to Cramer for taking it like a man but Stewart had him so utterly nailed there wasn't much else he could do other than leap over the desk and strangle him. 

The fact that it's taken Jon Stewart - a man who doesn't even consider himself to BE a journalist - to point out the effective complicity of US financial punditry in the wholesale robbery and squandering of billions of innocent people's dollars, and the rancid hypocrisy of these same pundits now decrying the "profligacy" of Obama's stimulus proposals, or, worse, blaming small investors and mortgage holders for their own misfortune when it was the advice they themselves had been giving for years which led those investors into trouble, should give the rest of the US news business some serious thinking to do. 

It should also give those who clamour for our own news media to go down similar paths (I'm looking at you, the Abolish-The-Licence-Fee crowd) some VERY serious thinking to do.

Why is it that a man who describes himself as a comedian fronting a comedy show is looking a lot like The Last Real Journalist In America?

Lap it up (there's some fruity language, but rightly f__kin' so):

[ Fixed link ]