Vasco da Gama, episode #18 (or, “The last one…the last I’ve got, anyway”)

     This isn’t the last episode of Vasco da Gama. But, it’s the last episode of Vasco I’ve got.

     There was one more episode in the series. I have no idea what became of the original master tape. I can’t even remember whether anybody made a copy. I do know that it was meant to wrap things up, while leaving the door open to restart Vasco, whenever the inspiration struck.

     Inspiration hasn’t struck—or maybe it has struck, and it’s still on strike. It’s been 20 years, so it probably won’t hurt to tell you how it all ended.

     Rob quit.

     The fictional Rob, that is—the real Rob and I have worked together many times since then. No—Fictional Rob quit the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom-within-a-sitcom, and went to live (and work, I think) at the Home for Waywardly Sarcastic Boys where he was raised. I seem to remember that it furnished an excuse for me to do a take-off on Bing Crosby in Going My Way as the priest who ran the place.

     That’s about it, really. Since Fictional Rob hasn’t come out of his fictional retirement yet, I’ll tell you a bit about the second-last episode of Vasco—but this time, after I give you the link to listen to it.

Vasco da Gama, episode #18

     There isn’t much to tell, really. Something goes awry; Rob goes in search of the cause of the awryness; Rob soon wishes he hadn’t. You can hear the series running out of steam. We all sound like we needed a break from it.

     20 years later, we’re still on break. If we had started Vasco up again, the series would have sounded rather different. “Less Vasco” was the generally-agreed-upon starting place for the changes. There also would have been more scenes with Mojo and Franklin Roseboro, the deli owner who first appeared in Episode 15. It’s just too much fun to write—and play—characters with a penchant for lateral thought that zigzags and doubles back on itself.

     Another of these changes would have involved constant change. The “Vasco” sitcom would have had a new executive producer every episode. Like Number 2 in The Prisoner, each of these temporary bosses would have imposed a new, inappropriate, and ultimately impracticable set of policies and procedures on Rob, MacSnoopeigh, and the rest of the Vasco team.

     But that’s all speculation. As I said, Vasco was running out of steam. Everything has its time, and that time must pass. As for my time, it’s going to be a little occupied in the next few weeks, so I’m giving you a well-deserved break before disrupting your Wednesdays again with a short series of audio oddities. That’ll start on April 2.

     In the meantime, keep watching this space. Who knows? Maybe I’ll tell you that a new series of Vasco is in the works.

     Well, probably not.

 

 

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #17 (or, “Foiled—curses again”)

     MacSnoopeigh as Macbeth? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

     Here’s another “true confessions” moment. Although I affect a veneer of Culture (pronounced “kul-chuh”), it remains a True and Undisputable Fact that, in my entire culture-veneered lifetime, I have only seen one version of Macbeth. It was Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version, so that’s bound to colour my idea of what makes for a good remount of what superstitious actors (are there any other kinds of actors?) still refer to as The Scottish Play. It probably doesn’t help my staging concept that I can’t remember anything about Polanski’s Macbeth other than a cauldron filled with what appeared to be regurgitated Welsh rarebit and a trio of naked witches. You’d think, this being Polanski, that the witches would all be 13-year-old girls. Polanski’s witches were definitely of age—they all looked like they’d just celebrated their twenty-ninth birthdays—if they’d been born in a leap year, that is.

     I’ll leave you to figure out what that means, and the mental picture it’s bound to conjure up, while I move on to a few mercifully brief notes about this episode of Vasco. It’s a continuation of the theme of the previous episode—everybody uses a stretch of unexpected downtime to talk about the role of bad luck and curses in their lives. In this case, the downtime is caused by circumstances that are a little less like fiction than I care to remember. I should remember it, with the amount of coffee I drink. According to something I just read on the internet, drinking a lot of coffee increases your long-term memory. I find the internet very useful for handy tidbits of information like this. For instance, did you know that, way back in The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight, the Chicago Cubs had a costumed mascot?

 

     I didn’t say it was a good mascot. It looks not so much like a bear as a cross between a porcupine and a throw rug. I can see why they gave him (her? it?) the boot after just one season. Still, The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight was the last time the Cubs won the World Series, so maybe that has something to do with the unceremonious way they ditched Porcupine Throw Rug Bear. See how useful the internet is? If I’d known that back when I was writing Vasco da Gama, I’d have done an entire episode about The Curse of Porcupine Throw Rug Bear.

     Unfortunately, another of the effects of drinking a lot of coffee is that your mind tends to race off onto other topics, or just off on tangents, before you’re finished dealing with the first one. Whatever it was…was it a topic, or a tangent? I need another cup of coffee to help me remember. While I’m getting that, you should click on the link and listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #17

 

P.S. I’m pretty sure I had something else to say, but one of the things I just remembered, thanks to my last cup of coffee, is that I’m out of coffee. Time to go to the store. Hope I remember where it is.

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #16 (or, “Vasco 16, Audience none”)

     Congratulations, Dick Irvin. And, if you ever happen to listen to this episode of Vasco, my apologies.

     Okay, so what does that all mean? Let me tell you. (Non-Canadians take note: none of this is likely to make any more sense to you when I’m done explaining it. Canadians under the age of 30 may have their troubles with it as well. Bear with me.) Dick Irvin is a retired hockey broadcaster, honoured for his efforts in covering the exploits of the Montreal Canadiens (not to be confused with the team that currently masquerades under that name) with a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and, as of a week or two ago, an Order of Canada. (This is a good year to get one, since an Order of Canada is now available with a side order of onion rings or poutine.) Over the years, I’d come to appreciate two things about Dick Irvin: 1. the way his droll sense of humour provided an all-too-necessary counterpoint to the tedious hyperbole that characterises the broadcasting of what are essentially scaled-up children’s games; and 2. the way he began to resemble Bela Lugosi as he got older.

     And this is why I’ll never get invited to Dick Irvin’s house for dinner. Stuff like this is why I never get invited to anybody’s house for dinner. Would you want to pass the mashed potatoes to a wiseacre who thanks you by saying “hope there’s no garlic in ‘em, Count Dickula”?  Okay, I do get invited to dinner, but only when my wife is invited, and then only on condition that she sit within ankle-kicking range in case something like “hope there’s no garlic in ‘em, Count Dickula” should slip out of my mouth.

     The fact I don’t have a filter for thoughts like this means that ideas like a vampire hockey broadcaster are just too good to pass up. In the cable-access TV station that operates in my subconscious, there’s a show called Count Dickula’s Hockey Crypt, where guests talk about things like why zombies are vulnerable to a two-man forecheck, and how you can tell whether a werewolf is growing a playoff beard. When it came time to do an episode of Vasco about legendary curses, it was inevitable that Count Dickula found his way into it. Because I’m no more in control of my fictional characters than I am of the impulse to call non-fictional people things like “Count Dickula”, I really wasn’t expecting The Curse of Dickula to dominate the episode.

     I’m lying: yes, I was. You need a little running time to let anything like what you’ll hear starting at about the halfway point of this episode spin out of control. By that, I really mean that it starts out of control, and spins even further out of control from there. Usually, I’d try to spoil something like this by describing it, but I think that the best thing is for you to grab a crucifix and a stake, click on the link, and listen (if you dare) to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #16

     My only regret is that, if he ever hears it, Dick Irvin will hate me. He'll curse my name, and wish me dead. In fact, he’ll probably wait until both of us are dead and curse me then, to avoid getting stuck with long-distance charges for cursing me from beyond the grave. That’s unfortunate. I’m pretty sure imagining him as a vampire means that, on one of my deeper and more disturbed mental levels, I’m hoping that Dick Irvin will live forever. Based on the quality of what I’ve heard from the broadcast booth since he’s retired, I could think of worse things to wish for.  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #15 (or, “Enter Marvin Fantastic”)

     With this episode, Vasco da Gama begins a new, and darker, phase. Sure, it’s still basically ridiculous and silly, but now the tomfoolery has undertones of hostility…that is to say, hostility other than the basically ridiculous and silly hostility coming from Vasco himself.

     Most (though not all) of this was the result of the introduction of a new regular character—the newly-appointed executive producer of the “Vasco” show-within-a-show sitcom, Mr. Marvin Fantastic. This was partially an addition, and partially a retrofit. MacSnoopeigh was never a strong enough adversary for Rob; plus, it was inevitable that as incompetent a producer as MacS. would start to feel pressure from his superiors. Marvin Fantastic was the embodiment of that pressure, as well as a chance for me to work out some frustrations about real live broadcasting boardroom types that I’d recently been dealing with.

     Here’s the background on the frustration. It was about this time that Vasco was starting to Attract Attention in Other Quarters. That is to say, we had started to pester people in Other Quarters until they paid attention to it. One of these pestering efforts led to a long and happy relationship in the back shadows of CBC Radio Two (as it now is; CBC Stereo, as it then was). Before I move on, this is the right time to say a public “thank you” to Shelley Solmes and Gary Hayes for liking Vasco enough to invite us on a real live show about real live arts and culture and everything, and later, to put up with many years of me popping in to do occasional pieces in an even sillier vein.

     But anyway—before meeting (name-dropping alert—but it’s high time I spread the gratitude around to where it’s due) Shelley, Gary, Lorne Elliott, Bryan Hill, Shelagh Rogers, Eric Friesen, and a few others whose names I’m sure I’m forgetting, I had a bad run of dealing with CBC people who would soon be in the No Longer Working Here for Fairly Obvious Reasons department. One of them was a chap whom we sent a tape of the show, and who sounded enthusiastic about our little group’s potential on radio, but said that…

…wait for it…

…seriously—it’s a lulu…

…he’d “have to see us live on stage, and were we performing anywhere?”

(or words to that effect.)

     Take a moment; get yourself a hot beverage and a snack; sit back down, and think about this. We sent a RADIO executive a fully-produced RADIO comedy show, made with the possibilities and limitations of the medium of RADIO in mind, with the hope that it would give him (and us) some idea of how ready we were for real live nationally-broadcast RADIO, and his sole defining criterion for the specific matter of whether we would make good-sounding RADIO was what he thought of how we looked on STAGE.

     As I said, he wasn’t at the CBC much longer. He also didn’t sound anything like Marvin Fantastic, but Marvin’s basic attitudes are drawn from him. And that’s all I feel like saying on the subject, because, twenty years later, it still makes me want to put my fist through a piece of drywall. Hopefully, Mr. “If you want to do radio comedy, I have to see what you look like on stage” is now in some Home for Aged Broadcast Program Planning Failures, sipping clear broth through a leaky straw, and wondering Where it All Went Wrong. Marvin Fantastic, on the other hand, lives on forever: his Don’t-Know-Anything-Don’t-Care-That-I-Don’t-and-It’s-Your-Problem-If-I-Don’t-Not-Mine kind will always be with us. All you have to do is turn on a radio or a TV, or go to the movies, to see their handiwork. Or better yet, save yourself the trouble, click the link below, and listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #15

 

 

 

 

P.S. As you’ll hear from the closing credits, this episode has an alternate title: “Tune…Turn…Drop…”. It’s an example of karma catching up with my big mouth. The previous episode, I’d alluded to the show being recorded on something called Stunch Nev-R-Fade Recording Tape, as a sort of backhanded gibe at the quality of the half-inch masters we sometimes had to dig out of odd crevices and corners of the studio to make our final mixes. That was Episode 14. It wasn’t until we listened to the final mix of Episode 15 that we discovered that the master we were using—the only one available—had several blank spaces on it, causing the sound to drop out intermittently. We didn’t have time to fix that, but we did have time to re-record the credits, with a punning title lifted from Timothy Leary, and another nod to fabulous Stunch Nev-R-Fade for displaying its usual consistent level of inconsistency.



 

 

 

Happy New Year, Auld Lang Syne, and all that razzmatazz, rigmarole, and rot,

     I’ll keep things brief here—we’re all off to a candlelight Christmas Eve service at Funsville’s Eastern Orthodontist Church (their motto is “the tooth shall set you free”). 2014 is already shaping up to be a momentous year—for the makers of 2014 calendars, if no-one else.

     Keeping things on this personal (to say nothing of self-interested) note, I thought I’d share with you the results of a parlour game we play at the Fortress of Funitude each New Year’s Eve. Those present take a slip of paper and write down a personal prediction for the upcoming year. It’s not something you intend to do or hope to do—it’s more like something that you know is going to happen to you, whether you like it or not. Call it a combination self-fulfilling prophecy and reverse resolution. The slips of paper are tossed into a hat, which is passed around so that the predictions can be read aloud by other members of the party, to the accompaniment of whatever heckling seems appropriate. Then we all chew up the slips of paper, hand out drinking straws, and shoot spitwads at a picture of Norman Vincent Peale. (Nobody’s sure where the last part of this came from, but it makes us all feel better.)

     Here, then, without any further ado (and without any further adon’t), are the best of our personal predictions for 2014—well, the ones I copied down before they got used for target practice, at any rate.

 

 

     …and I won’t, either.

Uncle Fun

P.S. Mebbe not, but I might.

Sparky



Vasco da Gama, episode #14 (or, “The (Un)making of Vasco”)

     Happy New Year, everybody.

     Good—that oughta hold you all for the next 364 days or so. If it sounds like I’m marking time with that one—well, marking time is a big part of what this episode of Vasco is about. Hot on the heels of the sitcom cliché of the Christmas episode, we opened a new calendar year (1994, I think…yeah, that sounds about right) with another cliché—the fake ‘making of’ episode. Looking back, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to give the Vasco listeners (both of them, and their friend who sat through half an episode once when he was visiting one of them from out of town) a glimpse at how the actual show was put together, instead of something about the fictional “Vasco” sitcom that it revolves around.

     Now I can rectify that situation (somewhat). Here, in as much detail as I care to go into, and more than you care to read, is a breakdown of what went into the making of an episode of Vasco da Gama. The first thing that you need to know is that the show originally aired every other week, on Friday. Our studio time was on Wednesday evenings, starting at 7 PM; we used one week’s session to record the script, and the next to edit the vocals down, and add sound effects, music, and whatever else we needed to add.

     So far, so good. Here’s what our bi-weekly schedule looked like:

WEDNESDAY #1

7:00-8:30 PM—The Vasco team slowly filters into the studio. Sometime in here, a read-through of the script occurs. Or it doesn’t.

8:30-10:00 PM (generally speaking)—The episode is recorded, usually in sequence, with stops and starts for retakes. The frequency of stops and starts has little to do with whether there was a read-through of the script.

10:00 PM(ish)—Some of us go home; the rest of us decide to get an early start on the editing for next week.

10:10 PM(ish)—After listening to the first few minutes of what we’ve recorded, we decide to call it a night and make a fresh start on the editing next week. 

WEDNESDAY #2

7:00-9:00 PM—The group that had the studio booked before us is running late, or has just shown up, or needs to have something ready for first thing tomorrow, or something. Sometimes whoever’s in the studio hasn’t even booked it. It doesn’t matter: they can’t be budged, so off we all go to the pub downstairs until they’re gone.

9:30 PM (maybe)—We’ve given that other bunch an extra half an hour, just to be on the safe side. They’re finally gone, so the editing can begin.

9:45 PM—The first snafu of the editing session. As usual, it’s a doozy. Off to the pub again to clear our heads and figure out what to do about it.

10:30 PM—Empty glasses, a sense of guilt at leaving a job unfinished, and a sense of frustration at being given the cold shoulder (yet again) by cute servers at the pub sends us back into the studio to finish editing the vocals.

12:30 AM (on a good night)—The vocal tracks aren’t quite edited, but it’s almost last call. Back to the pub.

1:00 AM, 1:30…who knows at this point?—Back to the studio to finish the vocal editing. There’s only a minute or so of the show left. How long could that take?

3:45 AM—Well, now we know.

3:45 AM ‘til sometime after dawn—What goes on at this time is basically a blur. Sound effects get made, or recorded, or both, or something; music gets selected, and recorded, or edited, or something; more snafus happen; eventually, all of that, plus the vocals, gets mixed down into something. Whoever’s still awake by this point sleepwalks home to face a day that’s already half begun. Every now and then, one of us gets halfway home with the finished tape of the show before remembering that it has to be back at the station if it’s going to be broadcast.

     Guess making a fake “making of” was a better idea, after all. Anyway, now at least you know you’re better off by clicking on the link and listening to… 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #14