SUITS

Suits is a webcomic that I write & draw (and colour and letter). It tells the tale of a group of three men who are hired by an established political figure to fight crime, and are aided by technologically advanced tailoring.

The three of them appear to be effective, but only in a clumsy, crude, rudimentary way. After a series of PR mishaps, their benefactor decides that they need a more feminine touch and hires a woman to join them, a move that does not go over well in the chauvinistic world of private-sector vigilantism.

Adding to their trials is that just as the new girl is starting, a mysterious weapons dealer is apparently having shady meetings with some businessman of questionable repute about a new venture. This venture is a little bigger than a few rifles off the back of a truck - in fact, it's more GIANT ROBOT sized. 

It is to my eternal shame that Suits has been going on at a snail's pace. I started it back when I was at university, and actually finished scripting it years ago - it's unfortunate that I'm a reluctant slow-coach artist. However, I have recently done Part 4, and I'm fairly confident about picking up the pace - just as long as life doesn't get in the way.

Anyway, the main site for it is here. The individual parts are posted below, check it out, and whenever I get around to getting further parts up I'll put it up on this blog.

PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4

Limmy's Show

I can't remember the exact moment during Tramadol Nights that I started whispering to myself "It's over. Comedy is over. There's no coming back from this" but I'm pretty sure it was quite early on. It wasn't so much that the stand-up was mediocre, and clearly padded out with Boyle's 'banter' with the audience, or that pretty much all the sketches seemed to involve someone 'hilariously' being on some kind of drugs that they shouldn't have been that was pissing me off. It certainly wasn't the shameless attempts at controversy mongering that was rife from the first minute to the last. It was just the sense that this was Boyle's vision let loose(he made a big song and dance about Channel 4 giving him more creative freedom) and the best he could come up with was something so tedious and unimaginative. It seems somewhat odd, then, that another sketch show from a Glasgwegian comedian also produced by The Comedy Unit should offer a far more inventive, watchable, and indeed funny show that shows letting one man dictate his vision can be a good thing after all.

It's unlikely that you'll have heard of Brian Limond, AKA Limmy, especially if you don't live in Scotland. In fact, I've realised that my introduction to him was via a short cameo of his in The IT Crowd, playing an unintelligible window cleaner. Look, I even have proof:

Anyhoo, he's been building up quite the portfolio over the last few years, having done shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, appearing in Consolevania and Videogaiden (between them the greatest shows about video games ever made, by quite some way) and having done short pieces for The Culture Show. Probably his greatest achievement was Limmy's World of Glasgow, a collection of podcast monologues from a variety of characters in Glasgow. Many of the characters in World of Glasgow make their transition to TV with Limmy's Show (although some gems are missing, particularly Vijay, a well-meaning asian boy who somehow manages to cause trouble unintentionally).

There's no getting around it: Limmy's Show will never achieve a mass audience (and not just because it currently only broadcasts in Scotland). It's weird, it's offbeat, it strings together memes and motifs out of the most bizarre observations on modern life, and it's very influenced by 1980s culture and music. There are no catchphrases to cling on to. But it has such a different vibe running through it, and such a relentlessly fearless commitment to its ideas and its sense of innovation that it is hard to not at the very least admire it. I've heard a lot of people say they like it more than they find it funny, and I'll admit at times that it can stray too far into being 'clever', but there's more than enough quality gags running through the show as well.

If it's possible to say that there's a recurring theme to the show, it's that it likes to focus on the mundane, and even find the bizarre within. Limmy often turns up and gives us his own worldview, which can be bleak and world-weary, but then these are often offset by (or even lead into) flights of fancy. It often starts off looking like observational comedy, but turns into something very different. Limmy likes playing on our expectations and twisting them around on us.

But perhaps the thing I like about Limmy's Show the most is the pacing. The lesson every sketch show seemed to want to learn from The Fast Show (a seminal programme for me) was that if you have a load of characters who spout catchphrases, then the public will eat it up. The better lesson to learn was in the title of the show: if you keep up a rapid pace (or at least mix it up from time to time) you can get away with a lot more. So whilst there are longer, slower, more cerebral sketches (particularly those involving Dee Dee, a loafer with a wild imagination) they are punctuated with many shorter, sharper sketches. Keeping the audience disconcerted with the variations in pace means that you can catch them off-guard. I always like it when a comedy show surprises me and does the unexpected, and Limmy's Show is very difficult to second-guess. You could be stuck in an extended diatribe on the use of americanisms in British society one minute, then seeing John Merrick dance to David Bowie the next.

Basically, Limmy's Show is unlike any other show currently on British TV right now, and I can't really think of many shows like it from times past either. You can get the 1st series on DVD, and the 2nd series is currently on BBC2 Scotland right now. For those of us stuck down here in England, iPlayer will do the job, and most of it appears to be on Youtube as well. Still, I think it deserves a national audience, even a minimal one. C'mon BBC, you managed to find a time and place for Still Game and Chewin' the Fat in England, why not afford Limmy the same luxury?

10 Minutes at Alexandra Palace station

So I took the walk from Wood Green up to Alexandra Palace rail station the other day, up the hill along Station Rd. Just missed the train, much to my ire. I could've probably run for it, but I've got this weird principle about not running for public transport - especially when I'm probably not going to get on the train. I mean, it's quite a run from the top of the station.

Anyway, the service from Ally Pally has improved quite a bit over the years, and for some reason First Capital Connect run a really frequent service during the day (yet not so frequent in the evening) which meant that I only had to wait for 10 minutes for the next train.

10 minutes.

10 minutes, when you have nothing to do but wait, can be a long time. Especially on an exposed, open platform like Ally Pally. I mean, there's nothing particularly unpleasant about the place, but there's definitely nothing pleasant about it either. It's just so... bleak. So grey, so dull, so meh. Now I know most suburban rail stations in London fulfil those criteria, but the size of the station, the number of tracks running through it and to the side of it, it all adds a sense of scale and majesty to the level of mundaneness that seeps out of the place. Thanks to it all running through a trough through Haringey, you get minimal sense of the surrounding environs as well - it's its own little world, its own enclosed empire of humdrum.

I think people know this, because there's rarely all that many people on the platforms, which seems odd considering there are four operational platforms at the station. Given how crowded the line always is, there are very few people ever at this station. Perhaps people don't like standing in the oppressive enclave, the boredom punctuated frequently by the violent rush of express trains seemingly too close and too energetic.

And because I had 10 whole minutes to waste, and nothing else to occupy them with, I ended up thinking of all the times I've ended up at this concrete hole, and all of the times that I've waited here.

Like all the times when I'd get dropped off on Saturday mornings after playing football for school because there were no stations near whoever we were playing, and because Ally Pally was usually on the route home for my mate Dave, so his dad kindly would drop me here. Waiting on that platform, usually in school uniform (stupid pre-match attire regulations), usually despondent after a heavy defeat - a feeling amplified by the misery of the surroundings (and by the extra-long waits at the weekend on that line).

Or the times I'd have to wait at the station, because Ally Pally is the last stop before the line branches, and for some reason I'd consider it better to wait there than to miss a train at Finsbury Park even though the arrival time would be the same, probably just to trick myself into think that my journey was actually making progress.

Or the times that I'd waited on that platform drunk, what with our Rugby League team having occupied a residency at The Gate just opposite the main entrance to the station. I'd usually be a bit more cheery waiting then, not least of all because I was intoxicated which helped by to phase out the bleakness. It was either the station, or the walk back down the hill and a long bus journey. The station doesn't seem so bad then. Some good times.

It's weird how your sense of nostalgia can get tied up in places like this. Nothing particularly momentous ever happened to me in this not particularly momentous place, but even so it took very little to trigger a sense of remembrance. It's not even a question of remembering events either - I don't think I could even tell you about a specific time I waited at the station. It's all a memory of feeling, of experience, of things happening with no consequence at all. It's just a place where nothing happens, except waiting, and yet my life has intersected with it on so many occasions. Life is a series of nothings punctuated by the occasional something, and both have to happen somewhere - I guess Ally Pally is an accumulator of nothings. Perhaps when enough nothingness builds up, your brain converts into a something.

Then a train came. I got on it. Yet more nothingness for the collection.

It Begins...

What begins? Who knows?