Embedded the video above for convenience, because it’s too brilliant to be absent from your dash, and everyone should watch it!

themausoliam:

One increasingly drunken evening, my good friend Shaun Lowthian and I were lamenting the lack of comedy we’d been performing since leaving Uni.

‘We could put on a show’ he said.

‘Definitely’ I agreed, my eyes hazy with Guinness.

Then Shaun, presumably still drunk, went and booked us a into the Not Part of Festival in Manchester. We had a slot to do a show, that didn’t have a title, a theme, anything. We had nothing but a deadline.

Long story short; we did it. We decided to base it loosely around the theme of radio. This video was written and filmed as an intermission for the show, but alas I couldn’t edit it in time.*

The idea was to make a fake educational film from the 40s. I struggled for a long time to think of what it could be, and then, when I wasn’t even trying, the idea came soaring into my mind almost fully formed when I was in the shower.** Bittersweet when that happens.

We had about 6 hours to film it all, as that’s all my friend/professional cameraman Martin Waine*** could spare from his real job. Most of those hours were spent running from location to location, trying to make a very small group of people look like many different people, making places look like they were from the early 20th century.

Anyway, you have enough back ground, here’s the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUxH5jAucRU

*I was so underprepared for that first show (as I’d spent line-learning time trying to edit the film against the clock), that I spent the interval learning my lines for the second half. Nevertheless, it was a barnstorming success and here’s a link to a throroughly undeserved review http://www.largemanchester.com/radio-now-in-technicolour.html

** I do most of my best thinking in the shower. The downside is I end up an enlightened prune.

*** One of his more successful videos can be found here http://www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/film/1772/2-20