Following on from the idea of Magician Battles that Pauly posted in May, more battle ideas.

Firstly, and I’m amazed this got missed last time, although it’s not really a Magician Battle:

Blessed vs. Baker in an “Insane-off”.

Brian Blessed and Tom Baker are two of the most insane people in the public eye.  They are fantastic.  There’s no stopping Blessed – it’s like someone gave him a theatrical role to play years ago, and he couldn’t switch it off.  I remember hearing about an event where he was supposed to give an after dinner speech, but instead he just stood on the table, ran round the room a couple of times, straight out the door, and was gone.  You know, if I’d have been there, I’d have felt I’d got my moneys worth from that.  I know someone who used to get scared when he was on the telly.  He did a very good phone interview with Christian O’Connell for the excellent XFM Breakfast Show recently.

Tom Baker is much the same.  Just a wild look in his eyes, and whoosh, you never know what he’s going to do next.  And the voice.  If I was granted the skill to do one impersonation, perfectly, it’d be Mr. Baker.

Right, I’ve gone on too much about that.  The other “Battle” we’d like to see would be:

Jonny Ball vs Sylvester McCoy, Umbrella Jousting.

If Jousting wasn’t possible, we’d settle for Umbrella Fencing.  We’re not unreasonable people.

Jonny Ball is about to return to our tellys on Channel 5 with some anorak based game show.  But hey, it’s Jonny Ball!

Seeing Dave’s last entry made me think about the way the word “antigeek” is written.  Now, I reckon that it should generally be treated as a normal word (i.e. lowercase unless at the start of a sentence) although in reference to this website it should probably *always* be lower case.

It doesn’t actually matter though, does it?

Well, Dave suggests that we blog things from last weekend so here’s something that made him laugh – my idea for another in the ridiculous Tampax Kompaq series.

[woman] make yourself at home in my music-room, I’ll just go and get changed into my concert dress

[man] ok

[woman walks off-screen; he wanders around a bit]

[man] can I play with your viola?

[woman] sure

[man] can I have a go on these bongos?

[woman] of course

[man] what about this slide-whistle?

[woman] yup…  [beat]  Slide-whistle?  What slide whistle?

etc.

Um, yes.

Must try to Blog the things we said we would, before they are forgotten.

This is a conversation between pauly and I from the weekend, that imho would fit perfectly into the AntiGeek sitcom, which doesn’t exist, but which was an idea linked in with the whole Anti-Geek thing when it was born.

Talking about Lazer Quest and Quazar:

D: “I used to love Lazer Quest, the few times I’ve ever done it.  I used to stand out though, because I’d always forget and turn up wearing a bright-white t-shirt.”

P: “I’d always remember, and turn up dressed as a pillar”

Well, Banged Up With Beadle came to a close this week. Once again there were various technical faults (though not as numerous as in previous weeks) but I think the highlight was seeing Jeremy getting obviously more drunk as the show progressed. To be honest, I’m still trying to fathom the point of ITV2 – if it’s to show repeats of old ITV1 shows then they should be honest about it. At the moment it seems to have a bit of an identity crisis – competing with Channel 5 here, showing extensions to ITV1 programmes there.

One thing I can’t believe has escaped this blog for so long is QVC favourite Rob Locke. He was first noticed by Dave a few years ago (when he was slightly more portly) and he’s fantastic. Always enthusiastic about the products he’s demoing, he nevertheless always seems to put his foot in it by dwelling on a not-so-good feature, going off on a bit of a tangent or just breaking something! He really is entertaining to watch, and his recent shoehorning into conversation the number of times he goes to America and publicity for roblocke.com is excellent. More of him please!

Yes, yes, still alive. Blah. Just not in the flat much at the moment, as predicted… lots of travelling & staying away. And no cost-effective / not rubbish internet access easily obtainable. What I need is something that gives me real-time access to my emails, with a decent keyboard so I can type stuff and that isn’t hideously expensive. The Blackberry looks interesting but I think availability is limited at the moment, it’ll probably be pricey and I’m not fully convinced by the keyboard. Ah well.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about Game On, the computer games exhibition currently on at the Barbican. Went last weekend amid the usual Sunday tube engineering works (woo!). The website talks rather impressively about rooms set aside for in-depth looks at various aspects of computer gaming but I felt that depth was somewhat lacking. For sure, there were loads of games that you could play and there was certainly a very impressive collection of old consoles, computers and related artefacts but it all seemed to be displayed as “here’s a thing”, “here’s another thing”, etc. Some more detail would have been nice.

The playable games and arcade machines are certainly a plus though – it was great to see some bizare consoles of the past too. And there are other nice touches – the Grand Theft Auto 3 display is nicely put together and gave an interesting insight into the development of the game. Overall though it seemed that the exhibition lacked direction – it was somewhat overambitious. Rather than focusing on a couple of aspects and really exploring in detail it felt more like they collecting all the “stuff” about computer games they could find and then split it up roughly by theme. And a 2.5 hour timelimit from when you buy your ticket simply seems unnecessary.