For me, there is one comedy sketch which stands out as an almost Zen-like example of perfect comedy.
In the first instance, it transcends performance. Almost the entire impact of the sketch is in the script. You could have the whole thing read out by a couple of computer speech synthesisers, and it would be at least 80% as funny as the original.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no flab whatsoever. Not a single word is wasted, barely even a syllable. If it were a poem, it would be a haiku, or a perfectly proportioned sonnet.
The sketch is The Two Ronnies “Mastermind”, here:Mastermind

Observe, every single thing Barker says is a set up, and every single line Corbett delivers is a punchline, without any exceptions, starting with the very first line.
Admittedly, some of the references are now a bit dated, but that’s not a weakness of the script per se, and in any case such references could be updated without compromising the structure or effectiveness at all.

But structurally, and verbally, I truly believe that that sketch is not only the best one the Two Ronnies ever did, but in fact the single best comedy sketch ever written in English. It’s hard, to be honest, to imagine one ever beating it, given my criteria.

I’d be very happy to hear alternatives, however. If there’s anything, by anyone, which approaches the economy, structural purity and performer-independence of that script, tell me.

The first is raw awe. You need only functioning senses to be awed by somewhere with this. Get off a ski-lift ten thousand feet up, where you can see five hundred mountains all covered in snow, and you don’t need to even know the name of the one you’re standing on to think “Wow.”

The second is awe of the imagination. Some places look unassuming, dull even. Being awestruck by them requires knowledge and imagination. Stand in the huts at Bletchley Park, or walk round the Los Alamos National Laboratory or Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, and all you see are non-descript buildings. It is with the knowledge of what happened there that the awe comes.

The third, and my favourite, is when the two combine. You find yourself in a location which is, in and of itself, beautiful or shocking. Add a little knowledge of history and a little imaginative empathy, and one can step back in time.

An example of this is Hardknott Pass in Cumbria, England. The steepest road in the country, with a view to catch the breath, it’s already somewhere special. But a little imagination can put you back two thousand years, in the sandals of the poor old Roman soldiers who manned the fort that was built on the pass. In this rainiest corner of the coldest country the Romans ever conquered, auxiliaries recruited from around the Mediterranean must surely have wondered what they’d done to deserve such a posting. Standing at the fort in a Goretex jacket, microfibre fleece and modern boots, you feel for these people who walked thousands of miles to reach and live in this spot.

Nowadays, however, most technology just… works, in a way I think you really need to be an engineer to truly appreciate. I get a little thrill when I fire up a new bit of technology and discover some feature of it that speaks to me of an engineer in an office somewhere thinking “Really, in order for this object to truly delight its user, it should do this thing, either when the user obviously wants it to, or possibly without even being asked.” And more to the point, a manager somewhere NOT saying “That doesn’t add to the bottom line, so we’re not doing it.”

So since I’m not bitterly disappointed on a regular basis by the technology these days, what does disappoint me? Muesli yoghurt. About thirty years ago, muesli and yoghurt were, to my working class eyes, exotic things. To combine the two? Unheard of decadence and luxury. Marks and Spencers had that vision, producing a pot of natural yoghurt adorned with a little clear tub of nuts and fruit that you could stir in. The very idea! (This was decades before Muller Fruit Corners).

I absolutely loved these things. I’m sure someone at M&S head office found out this fact, because almost as soon as I’d discovered them, they were discontinued.

What has any of this to do with anything happening in the 21st century?

Blogs and podcasts are the M&S muesli yoghurts of the 21st century. You discover one you like. You realise it’s the best thing you’ve ever come across. You indulge in an archive binge, if there’s an archive, and you check back religiously for new content at regular intervals. And for a while, your desire for new content is sated.

Then, one day it stops. Or it slows to a crawl. Or it just… disappears. And you have to move on, trying another flavour, never really recapturing the way these things were.

Roll of disappointment:

Adam&Joe’s 6Music Podcast.

Jon Richardson’s 6Music Podcast.

Tenser Said The Tensor Blog.

Nightjack’s Blog.

Cectic comics.

… and others.

All of this is academic, as I’ve yet to meet anyone who really, truly believes there should be capital punishment. Nobody with the courage of their convictions, anyway, nobody prepared to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Nobody who would give a fully positive answer in my capital punishment referendum.

It’s often pointed out that if we were to hold a national referendum, public opinion would favour a return of the death penalty. Well whoopy doo – public opinion reads horoscopes and thinks Derek Acorah can speak to the dead. Public opinion reads the Sun.  Public opinion is demonstrably as dumb as a rock.

But let’s have a referendum, by all means. Let it be simple, and feature just two questions:

1. Do you favour the return of the death penalty?

2. If you voted YES to Q1, do you volunteer to be the first innocent person executed?

YES votes only count where there’s a YES to BOTH questions. Anyone else obviously isn’t really, truly in favour of the death penalty in all respects. Anyone voting YES/NO is a fantasist, who believes that you could build a system where you’d only execute people you were “sure” were guilty, as though our existing system doesn’t already make “sure” people are guilty before it jails them for life. People like Stefan Kisko, or the Birmingham Six, or the Guildford Four, or Colin Stagg. You know, people who are definitely guilty.

Either that, or someone voting YES/NO is a person who wants the death penalty back, but only if it applies exclusively to other people.

In the unlikely event the YES/YES voters win, we will of course round the lot of them up and execute them, as per their request. The referendum can then be rerun, safe in the knowledge that the IQ of the nation has just doubled.

Not much is certain in a society with the death penalty. It’s hard to know whether it would be applied equally across races (probably not). It’s hard to know whether it would act as a deterrent, ever (probably not). It’s hard to know whether it would save public money (probably not).

One thing is certain, however – certain beyond any possibility of sensible argument. It would be administrated by fallible humans, and sooner or later, an innocent person would be killed by the state. I don’t volunteer to be that person. Do you?

A few decades ago, it was a cliche that in his late thirties or early forties, a man would grow a pony-tail behind his bald spot, start wearing leather trousers, buy a sports car and have an affair with a younger woman, all in a bid to recapture something he felt he’d lost or missed out on. This was understandable, because men in those days generally left home in their teens and put away “childish things”, either to go to work or university, and never went home again. They entered the world of work, marriage, fatherhood and responsibility, and wouldn’t question it at first because everyone else would be doing it. Then at some point, when they’d been doing it for about 20 years, a number of things would happen at once. They’d reach a plateau in their career and see no prospect of further advancement, their hair would start going grey or falling out, and their parents would begin needing their help to do things. It would be brought home to them forcefully that this, their one and only life, was slipping away from them, and they’d react badly.

But the world has changed. Consumerism and advertising has extended adolescence well into the thirties – it’s more socially acceptable to simply play around. In the 1980s the concept of a videogame with an 18 certificate would have been ridiculed, whereas now such things are commonplace, indeed, bestsellers. Meanwhile rampant house price inflation sees men in their twenties and thirties still living with their parents. With no jobs for life, the idea of a career plateau is laughable. People in their forties are less likely nowadays to be worrying about whether to put their parents in a home, and more likely to be trying to keep up with their tweets from Thailand or Canada or Spain.

Mid-life crisis was something that happened to men who had been forced by society to grow up quickly. But society doesn’t do that to men any more. If anything, it encourages them to behave like teenagers until they’re physically incapable of continuing. On that basis, I predict that the incidence of mid-life crisis will fall dramatically over the next decade. Bad news if you’re a Porsche dealer…

It seems the Japanese way is a bit different. Someone up high says “Is this possible?”, and because they’re culturally conditioned never to say “No”, they say “Yes”. “Good,” comes the answer, “Have it done by August.”

The British response would be “There’s no realistic prospect of finishing the design by August, much less procurement, installation, commissioning and handover. March next year if you’re very lucky.” And then the stops would be pulled out and it would get delivered by January.

The Japanese response is “OK.”, and then everyone runs round in circles like headless chickens duplicating work and doing 18 hour days… and the project gets delivered the following May, because of the inefficiencies of the process.

Apparently, the Japanese idea is “think while running”. This is to say, given a task, they start work first, THEN work out what they’re going to do.

I’d love to see an orienteering competition in Japan…

And here’s another. Gantt charts work like this…
Here is today’s date. Here’s the start of the project.
Now we guess how long it will take for:
Development, design, bid document preparation, bidding, selection, detailed design, procurement, installation, commissioning, handover and startup. That gets you an estimated end date. Then you start working out how you can pull the end date so it’s closer to today.

The Japanese do it differently.
Here’s the day we need the product – a day in the future.
Working backwards from there… commissioning, installation, procurement, detailed design, bidding, bid document, design, development… ah. The plan indicates we should have completed the detailed design phase last week… How do we complete the detailed design by the end of this week, given that we don’t even have a developed process or an outline design today?

 For now, this is supposed to be some sort of online diary or description of my deepest thoughts or something, so here it is:

 Right now, my problem is motivation. I have stress paralysis. I have too many things to do, not enough time to do them in, I know they have to be done but I can’t even decide how to start thinking about what order they need to be done in, let alone actually doing them. Usually what it takes to get me out of this mental state is a sudden, seriously stressful event. Given that it was a sudden, seriously stressful event that put me in this state in the first place, I’m not sure whether the normal rules apply.

But enough of that. More later if I can be bothered.