Benneth presumptiously meanders,

Dear Mantis

Hop hop, here's my rant on the evils of things, and also stuff ( Oh God, here we go).

A recent Cheez-String advert portrays a group of children at an anonymous school running a vaguely Fight Club-esque underground society based in their school's boiler room, wherein they illicitly consume excess amounts of the cheesy snacks. Not only are comparisons drawn between Cheez-Strings and Class A drugs (cos y'know, DRUGS ARE COOL AND REBELLIOUS therefore by proxy so are Cheez-Strings), but a shrill kiddy-voice at the end of the ad announces that Cheez-Strings are, quote, "NONCONFORMIST!".

Ladies and gentlemen, rebellion has been packaged and is now available for sale on aisle five next to the Pringles. Yes, consumers, it's now possible to demonstrate your anti-capitalist ethics by buying consumer products! All the fun of fashionable faux-nonconformism without the hassle of not being able to purchase shiny objects in gaudy packaging! No longer do we need to question the all-knowing, all-seeing godlike benevolence of big business. Big business does it for us! Only in a really shitty, cynical manner! Great!

Also causing me to emit illiterate rants on the evils of corporate greed this month, a Wrangler jeans advert lifts the mime gunfight sequence from series 2 of Spaced, surgically removes the humour, and reshoots it scene-by-scene in a shockingly soulless manner with Wrangler-wearing anonymous actors instead of talented comedians who know what they're doing. It even culminates with one of the actors getting an imaginary knife in the head and another "dead" guy getting up unharmed a few seconds later. This jaw-droppingly tasteless piece of idea-theivery is yet another case of unimaginative marketing scum appropriating other people's intellectual property in order to make a few more quid. They needn't worry about the genuine talents behind Spaced complaining - Wrangler can claim it's an ironic homage to the original sequence, which for me will now be forever contaminated by the memory of this fucking shameful piece of plaigaristic nonce-juice which has systematically sucked all the life out of one of my favorite comedy moments ever. That a comedy like Spaced, - the antithesis of committee-led middle of the road blandness - is now indirectly selling jeans to plebs is a sad, sad thought.

One could accuse me of affecting an anti-commercialist agenda in order to appear cool. What? How dare you doubt my eternal wisdom, YOU TALENTLESS SCUM. Sorry, forget what I said just then. Anyway, I'm not at all against the actual concept of marketing per se. If that was so, I'd end up complaining about an event 900 years ago in which some blacksmith hung a "YE OLDE BLACKSMITHY" sign outside his shop to advertise the fact that it is in fact, a blacksmith's shop, rather than say, a brothel (though maybe "YE OLDE KNOCKING SHOPPE" would've drawn in more custom).

No, it's not the *concept* of advertising that stirs me up into a fit of right-on Ben-Elton-When-He-Used-To-Be-Funny rage, it's the injudicious way in which most advertisers choose to deploy it.

By all means advertise, but do it honestly and for Jesus' sake, make up your own jokes. Don't steal other people's ideas and pass them off as your own, as this will immediately show you up as a cynical twatfuckface who doesn't have enough creativity to do it himself. If you can't come up with your own ideas for shilling your awful produce to the populace, you probably picked the wrong career. Ah well, I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, eh.

In conclusion, everyone else is wrong and I am great and should probably be given loads of money and also a mansion and nuclear-powered helicopter. Stay tuned for next month's edition, where we investigate how to appear to be more of an individual by spending ludicrous amounts of money in order to download tinny ZX Spectrum-style ring-tone renditions of top chart hits for your ugly little mobile phone.

Stay tuned, kids!

PS. I'm aware that I'm actually playing into the hands of advertisers in that I am spreading the word on their products by paying attention to and ranting about them. See? THAT'S how insidious marketing is! Oh no, I have unwittingly become just another cog in the faceless machine of capitalism! Noooo!

Dear Benneth

Oi! Who the fuck said you could use my guestbook to post your own lengthy ramblings? Well, I do actually. But only because this is the most intelligent (if unintelligable) thing I have ever seen in the columns of a guestbook. A noble attempt at faux Mantis ranting there from the young mortal Benneth. Inevitably, your perception is skewed by misinformation, but B+ for effort dear boy.

I have bared witness, of course, to both of said commercials - and my initial reaction was very similar to Benneths, only taller and more insectoid. What I question, however, is his assertion that Spaced is in some way the 'antithesis' of commercialisation.

I would have said that Spaced revolved exclusively around principles of cultural post-modernity to the extent that when stripped of its pop-culture conceits that the remaining comedy skeleton would simply blow away in the wind. That unlike, say Father Ted, when removed from the comfort of its initial context - either by the onslaught of time or by supplanting its intended audience for one of a less pop-knowledgable generation, that the jokes just wont stand. Analytical of pop-culture it may be, but in some way extraneous to it? Hardly.

That said, from time to time, it IS fucking funny.

Spaced presents for the comedy analyst an interesting paradox. There exists a line of thought amongst the few people in the world who really give a shit about comedy, that the low budget aesthetic associated with classic British sitcoms of the seventies and eighties is somehow essential to the nature of those shows. Their argument is that the essentially theatrical elements of the primarily dialogue based comedies of that period, are heightened by the non-reality of the sets. Or rather, that the non-reality of the sets deter the esthetics from detracting from the script. Conversely, they argue, the high gloss cinematography and widescreen antics of shows like Friends, or Two pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps detract from the mechanics of the sitcom format entirely and are largely responsible for a decline in the quality of scripts. This is rather a radiocentric argument, but for the most part a valid one. Then along comes Spaced.

Spaced, for most people, is something of an ambassador for an entire generation of youth oriented pop-sitcoms that heavily feature field removed film-effect video and relatively expensive location sequences. By ambassador, I mean its the only good one.

If all you had to go on was Smack the Pony or Six Pairs of Pants, then one would indeed have to assume that the current generation of British comedy was exclusively shit. But Spaced, while conforming to the parameters established by these shows, actually stands out as being valid - actually of some importance to the expansion of the comedy lexicon, all be it in a hit and miss sort of way. Why? I'll tell you.

Let us take the example of the 'mime gunfight sequence' mentioned above. The sequence in question (for readers who are unfamiliar) places the main characters of the show in a dangerous confrontational situation, from which they escape by pretending to shoot their aggressors with 'finger guns'. The comedic conceit of the scene being that the aggressors comply in pretending to get 'shot' by the guns, but also retaliate with their own imaginary weapons - resulting in an all out Pekinpah/Woo style gunfight. The important thing to note about this particular scene is that it is FUCKING BRILLIANT.

The 'gunfight' despite being a one-gag sequence in a rather silly sitcom about ordinary people, is one of the most expertly implicated shoot outs in television history. The director, editor and actors are all so very well versed in the many different forms of cinematic gun battle, that what ensues, despite having raspy vocal gun noises for a soundtrack, surpasses in technical achievement the majority of gunfights in modern hollywood films. All the conventions and cliches of Ringo Lamery are ticked off one by one in a battle sequence that, so far as post-modernism goes, vastly outshines anything in The Matrix.

Lampoonery in comedy is a delicate issue. Most shows (Spaced included on occasion) usually believe it is sufficient to simply mention or mimic another media commodity in lue of an actual joke. This is, of course, not true. What the makers of Spaced have done with this sequence, however, is apply an extremely complex and multi-leveled syntax to an extremely stupid and childish thing, thus elevating it to a whole new level. In essence, the writers have fully incorporated the mechanics of visual storytelling into the very body of the joke its self. The framing, the editing and the composition are as much a part of the comedy as the timing. It is quite literally ALL in the delivery. In so doing they genuinely elevate the mechanics of television comedy to a new level, in much the same way that Q Milligan or Monty Python did the first time they integrated pre-filmed sequences into studio sketches.

To be honest, Spacedonly manages to do this a few times over the course of its run, the rest of the time it thinks it can get away with mentioning The Phantom Menace a lot, in lue of content - or framing a shot a bit like one in Evil Dead. It always does this extremely well, but unless you yourself are a cinematographer, this isn't much of a substitute for actual jokes. A few more sequences like the aforementioned gunfight, however, and all this dead money being pumped into the esthetics of dead sitcoms might actually prove justified.

Just thought I'd mention that.