She’ll Suck Your Thumb

Poster for Blur: No Distance Left to Run

BBC 2 showed the Blur documentary “No Distance Left To Run” last night and being a great believer in using technology to improve your life, I had videoed (I have no usable term for saving on the Hard Disk of my V+ box that is quite so quick) it to watch this evening.

The documentary is a mix of four talking heads, Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave, interviewed separately and then spliced with footage old and new and hung around the concept of the mini tour of the UK which finished with an awesome headlining slot at Glastonbury 2009 and two big Hyde Park gigs.

It was a good insight into what it must take to be in a band with four individuals who have their own lives. By no means as depressing as Radioheads Meeting People is Easy film it did have some similarities (Alex James sitting in front of a camera doing radio idents with the slow realisation that this was going to be a soulless exercise was almost exactly the same as in the Radiohead documentary). It was also clear that these were four friends, four very different personalities, who had been through it as young men, had been incredibly close and then as lives progressed and pressure built up around them, slowly disintegrated.

The film though, was ultimately redemptive. They had got back together, not to make money or a new album but to be friends on one last adventure. This adventure culminates at Glastonbury where Damon breaks down and cries just before singing This is a Low and afterwards declaring how happy he is to be with his friends playing music. And then, finally, finishing with the magic of a Glastonbury crowd singing Tender right back to the band. It was good to go back to the nineties for a while, Oasis v Blur for number one, Brit Pop and Indie discos, it was good to revisit Glastonbury but I’m reasonably happy to be back in 2010.

I’ve thrown in an early version of the song Sing from the bands first album demoed when they were still known as Seymour and the video to Beetlebum, a song that reminds me of wandering into the large Virgin megastore in Cardiff to buy the single – I don’t know what is there now…

Eddie Iz Running

I used to be a fan of Actor, Comedian, Transvestite Eddie Izzard.  I remember watching his Live at The Ambassadors VHS, which began to wear out after it has been passed around all of my friends; it was fantastic (It is the only release which hasn’t been converted to DVD at the time of writing).  Comedy about nothing in particular, no cruelty, no real politics just funny, funny stuff.  I even bought a jacket that looked like the one he wore at that gig (I was an odd 17 year old).  I would even say that his speech patterns had an impact on my conversational style which remain in a milder form today.  So-Yeah…

I went to see him as part of the Unrepeatable tour in the Bristol Hippodrome which was even better than Live at The Ambassadors.  He had really begun to hone his act and knew exactly where his strengths lay and it was clear from this show that he was going to just get bigger and bigger.

Definitive Article, Glorious and Dressed To Kill were released  on VHS/DVD and I bought all of them, each one a step on from where he was before.  Pure, consummate comedy genius.

However, I then went to see his Circle tour in Cardiff and it was basically a Greatest Hits.  I remember everyone leaving the show and complaining about the price of a ticket to see routines that had already been performed and consumed a hundred times in our living room.  We had gone to see new material, things that would mark us out from those that hadn’t bought a ticket and been unable to see the show.  We felt ripped off and I began to lose faith in him.  I bought the Circle DVD when it came out and by that time although he had clearly developed a routine that was not just a rehash of previous videos, it did not seem to reach the same heights of previous work.

I have since then had diminishing returns with Mr Izzards output.  I hardly smiled when I watch the latest DVD, Stripped, and I’ve only watched Sexie once.  I’m not sure why this is, maybe I have seen so much of his output that I know how his mind works and I get to the “funny” bit before he does,  I find he is over reliant on surreal ideas and strange names these days without any central core to what he is saying – although i appreciate he is trying to educate as he goes by hanging the stand up on various stages of history – but for me it no longer works.

However, I was able to put all this to one side when I watched “Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man.”  This was the Izzard I knew from my youth, funny without trying and yet still clearly angry and upset about the death of his mother when he was only six.  The documentary is in three parts (one yet to be broadcast) and follows his Sport Relief attempt at running 43 marathons in 50 days.  As he says “I’ve run before but mainly for buses!”  He spends 5 weeks preparing and as he is an out of shape 48-year-old with flat feet makes you wonder how he will achieve this.  He is easily distracted and doesn’t seem to really listen to anything that experts might have to say to him, he only really seems happy when he actually starts running and it is just him and his determination, a drive which is fuelled by his personal demons from his youth, to follow through with this madcap scheme.  It is a fascinating insight into the man and what makes him tick and he really comes alive in the presence of other people which makes him seem like a charming and likeable bloke.

I want to see the film Believe, a documentary about him (although it feels a little bit like an ego trip on his behalf), but it is going to have its work cut out to beat this piece of, essentially, feel good TV.

Oh, and if you like you can donate to sport relief here (which was the main point in his running all of those marathons).