Socks

Until last night I didn't even know that the Old Joint Stock in Birmingham had a theatre, a hardly surprising gap in my knowledge considering that it's tucked away up the back stairs in a corner of the attic. I'm glad I found out though because that's precisely where I spent an hour or so in the company of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre doing their new show, "On The Telly". Of course given that the company consists of one guy, Kev Sutherland, and two socks "his new show" might be more appropriate.

I am completely baffled by two things about the Socks. The first is the question addressed in this show - why aren't they on television in their own prime time show. They are funnier than anything currently showing on any channel. As funny as anything that I have ever seen. And the second is how on earth anyone can go on being as consistently hilarious. The standard hasn't dropped at all since I first came across them on the internet a couple of years ago. There isn't a single misfiring moment in the whole show. I was quite literally crying with laughter throughout most of the evening as they gave us what was an almost completely new show with just a couple of old favourites thrown in (including the briefest of nods to their classic Halloween sketch.)

Bottom line? Quite, quite wonderful.

DPRK: Spooky Update

Just watched episode one of the new season of Primeval. (For US readers: this is a series where the heroes fight against various horrible time travelling beasties that appear through big glowing anomalies. This parody will tell you all you need to know.)

In tonight's season opener a crocodile-like monster had come through an anomaly controlled by some ancient Egyptian statue. After a bit of a runaround the good guys defeated it. The statue remained in the British museum. In the closing scene we were told that the exhibition was moving on and we saw a crate being loaded onto a lorry.

And no, you didn't misread the title of this post: the place name stencilled on the crate was Pyongyang!