I'm looking forward to seeing Tim Key and Tom Basden in Joseph K at the Gate theatre tomorrow night.
I'm not sure why their Neanderthal characters (from their sitcom Cowards) tickle me so much. I think because they go right to the heart of the British way of communicating. Maybe there are other cultures that insist on putting even the most heartfelt utterances in quotation marks by means of little silly voices and pseudo-catchphrases. I know I do it all the time and yet it has the potential to be intensely annoying. For instance. My life at the moment is spent going back and forth between London and Paris, and I occasionally pop up to my alma mater Oxford too. But whenever I'm discussing my movements with friends you can bet we will never actually refer to any of those cities by name. They will be Londres, The Smoke, Gay Paree, Oxenford, The Ox. Maybe it goes back to Old English variation - the reluctance ever to say anything the same way twice. It's a strange kind of mania for being oblique that can't help being very obvious.
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