STILL FISHING WITH JOHN

yet another clips show

lurie and waits

08/01/08/// The phenomenal success of youtube has seen TV programme creators desperately grasping for a piece of the action, enabling them to foist cheap, often free, content on us in conveniently bite-sized, attention deficit  friendly portions. Lenny Henry has a new BBC show entirely devoted to this and on the first of these his old Tiswas mucker Chris Tarrant presented a clip of Tom Waits and John Lurie from the wonderful Fishing With John series. It was a poor quality copy and you could just make out Waits putting a fish down his trousers (the "punch line" of the clip prompting much canned laughter). Leaving aside Henry's excruciating Tom Waits impression the most dismal thing about it was that the BBC either deliberately degraded the image into grainy pixilation or they quite literally ripped the file directly from the internet. They could have just gone and bought the DVD of the whole series and taken a perfect quality clip from that. Of course they could have bought the whole series from John when he offered it to them (and all the other British TV stations) back in the 1990s. "We already have enough fishing shows" he was told by at least one broadcaster thereby demonstrating that they had entirely missed the point. In any case it reminded me of how good that show was and prompted me to put on Queen of All Ears for the first time in a few years. Monsters Over Bangkok is playing right now and it still sounds great.