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Some good stuff coming up.  We’ll be reviewing new hooliganism flick The Firm later today.  And… well.  More exciting content to follow.

effortlessly cool

Toady I would like to pay tribute to a true national treasure, the one and only James Richardson. For old timers like myself and football mad archivists Mr. Richardson will forever hold a place in our hearts as the man who so casually eased the average British and Irish footie fan into the continental game with Channel Four’s seminal Football Italia.

Leafing through the Italian sports pages and sipping on an espresso with the laid back heir of an off duty James Bond, Richardson was so effortlessly cool that it seldom mattered that Serie A is an essentially slow and defensive league. Quite the opposite in fact. I would dutifully tune in every weekend to be regaled with tales of bitter regional rivalries and footage of strutting, smouldering European players with nicknames like ‘the silver fox’ and ‘the white feather’. It all seemed so glamorous and exciting. Richardson was the perfect host, the quintessential cosmopolitan gentleman until the shows end in 2002.

Going on to host similar programmes on British Eurosport and Bravo Richardson carved out a further niche for himself on Setanta’s Sporting Matters alongside Rebecca Lowe. But it is on The Guardian newspaper’s Football Weekly pod cast that he has truly come into his own. His witty, likeable and self deprecating personality turns Football Weekly into a must-listen appointment every Monday and Thursday, smoothly acting as ringleader to a studio full of jaded sports writing hacks. His star presence was exemplified last year when he was replaced for a few shows by RTE pundit Ken Early. Despite Early’s charm, football know how and undoubted ability to carry off this type of show, without the presence of Richardson Football Weekly felt strangely flat and rudderless.

Beloved to his fans, Richardson aka AC Jimbo exposes the likes of Gary Lineker and Steve Ryder as the humourless company men they really are. I for one cannot bare the tone of Match of the Day, with Lineker especially talking about the basically frivolous sport of football as if he is delivering the eulogy at a relatives funeral. In Richardson’s hands the beautiful game is a noble, ridiculous and intellectually engaging business more than worthy of high brow discussion, and far from the partisan rhetoric spouting nonsense favoured by the tabloid back pages and halfwits like Ian Wright and Jamie Redknapp.

Worth a special mention is Richardson’s double act on Football weekly with Irish sports writer Barry Glendenning. Glendenning professes to favour the Irish sport of hurling to soccer, taking a caustic disregard for the world of football and an outward contempt for the professionals and fans who fuel the modern game. Together Richardson and Glendenning make a perfect pairing, often wilfully spiralling off into discussions on topics like early 1990’s indie bands, who they would ’go gay’ for, and how best to poach an egg. I for one could never imagine Alan Hansen launching into a long anecdote about getting pissed with former Arsenal player Ray Parlour, or the virtues of ‘sumptuous gay Euro disco’.

This is what makes Richardson such a brilliant broadcaster. Listening to a group of blokes talk about football is bloody boring, yet Richardson elevates it beyond the testosterone fuelled tedium no doubt experienced in pubs and football grounds throughout the world on a daily basis. And for that alone Mr. Richardson, we salute you.

If you think that is surprising you should take a peek through that little window at the top...

Yorkshire is often referenced as being ‘God’s Country’. I know I deliberately make a point of saying those two words in a deep Yorkshire accent every time I reach the peak of the M62. Still, Aa’m allow’d t’say it, cos I y’am a bloody Yerksherman! But there is one burrow, just outside Middleham in North Yorkshire, called The Forbidden Corner and that isn’t God’s Country at all. It’s the Devils…or Lewis Carroll’s, but that is almost too easy of a comparison to make for it to be valid.

You see, The Forbidden Corner is an adventure park of sorts, in which are hidden hundreds of carvings, statues, works of art, snickets, ginnels, alleys, hidey-holes, passages, posters, sounds and smells. It was designed as a private garden by Mr. Colin R. Armstrong O.B.E, spread over four acres of land right next door to Tupgill Park. Due to popular demand it was opened to the public and since then it sees thousands of visitors each year.

When you arrive you are thrust into this little world with nothing but a map, which serves no real purpose other than to show you what you might have missed. In many ways its like being born all over again, such is the mystery and reality of everything there-in. In front of you lies many different paths, you choose one and you are presented with even more little paths. Some lead back to whence you came, others take you off on a wonderful journey. You go over and underground, into castles, through bushes and around fountains. You reach the bowels of Hell and you climb back out through a series of dark paths with whispering chasing you through corridors and thunderous knocks on doors as you reach them. The whole time you have this sneaking suspicion that the eyes in those paintings are following you…and that ‘cobweb’ really was somebody tapping you on the shoulder.

The Forbidden Corner has this amazing ability to turn you into a child. All those warnings from your mother that you finally heeded with age and wisdom go flying straight out of the window as you sprint and dart from room-to-room quickly forgetting that it isn’t real. Unlike a theme park, nothing is sold or presented to you. You aren’t suckered in by shiny lights and big-tops. Instead, you have chanced upon this garden. You have sat under the moonlight and waited for the bell to toll midnight and you are stolen away down the rabbit hole and through the back of the cuboard into a very real, made-up world. And the whole time you are bliss-fully unaware of the fact that at some point you are going to have to go home and pretend to be a grown up again.

The Forbidden Corner is proud to call itself ‘The Strangest Place in the World’. Now, that isn’t strictly true. Stratford-upon-Avon will always the strangest just because the geese fly backwards and all the people are made of cress. But perhaps that isn’t what the slogan means. Perhaps it is the strangest place because of its magic ability to make you believe again all of those things you spent so much time un-believing from your childhood. I certainly know its made me believe again because every night since I got back and I have cracked my head on the back of the wardrobe expecting that I can pass through it.

If you would like to book tickets to visit ‘The Forbidden Corner’ you can find their website here.

photo by Zach Klein @ thatotherpaper.com

Released in August of this year, stand up comedian Patton Oswalt’s brand spanking new DVD My Weakness is Strong is without doubt the funniest thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Although Oswalt has flirted with mainstream fame for a while now, appearing in films like Ratatouille and Magnolia as well as TV shows such as The King of Queens and Reaper, this stand up special should by rights propel him to at best superstardom and at worst Bill Hicks style cult idolatry.

Oswalt is very much at the forefront of the American alternative comedy scene alongside true originals such as Zack Galifianakis and Maria Bamford, emerging with a unique take on post modern existence and peppering his act with references to obscure fan boy trivia and music. But what makes My Weakness is Strong so superb is that it is expertly well honed and streamlined, leaving behind the meandering, scattershot approach of his perhaps better known contemporaries David Cross and Brian Posehn.

The truly great comedians of our age like Richard Pryor, Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle all have one thing in common, the ability to make the ordinary extraordinary, to delve into the minutiae of life and somehow elevate it. Oswalt has that self same gift, turning a story about texting his wife or seeing a rat in his back yard into an existential treatise on life itself. In this instance Oswalt’s esoteric style very much separates him from the new brand of ultra filthy first person confessional comics currently so popular in America. People like Jim Norton, Louis CK and Doug Stanhope are undeniably funny but ultimately use comedy as a kind of weapon to bludgeon their audience with brutal and graphic self truths. The difference is perhaps comparable to the disparity between listening to American alt rock band The Twilight Singers and then popping on The Dead Kennedys, they’re both good but operating on completely different levels.

Like a lot of great comedians Oswalt is also a damn good straight actor and is taking his first lead role in Big Fan, a Taxi Driver-esque character piece written and directed by The Wrestler screenwriter Robert Siegel. I for one can’t wait to see Oswalt flex his acting chops in a movie with such great pedigree. And let’s hope he doesn’t take the route of other great American comedians such as Eddie Murphy and turn his back on comedy for the far more lucrative world of shite Hollywood films about talking animals, people in fat suits and wise cracking cops.

Having produced the finest stand up comedy show for years, for Patton Oswald the only way is up.

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