Vasco da Gama, episode #3 (or, “Tempest-tost”)

EVERY SERIES HAS THAT EPISODE…

     Yes, every series has that episode—the episode that no-one can quite remember…not even the people who made it. And yes, dear reader, even the singular media phenomenon that was Vasco da Gama had that episode.

      This much we all can agree on: we had a guest star for this one. Okay, we agreed on that after I listened to the episode and asked everybody what they could remember about working with a guest star. The sum total of these reminiscences turns out to be a big old round old zero. Sic transit gloria mundi. I suppose I could make up something about our guest star being a joy to work with, or a pain to work with, just to give the proper air of showbiz nostalgia to the whole thing. I could start some rumour involving guest star perks, or parking spaces, or those little fish called ‘tetras’ that they sell in pet stores, for all that it would matter. After twenty years, there are some episodes of Vasco that I don’t remember being there for.

     Another thing that I didn’t remember was that this episode features an origin story for Science Boy. Since I’m the one who wrote it, I can categorically state that it is completely and absolutely 100% apocryphal and untrue. Science Boy deserves a better backstory than the one I made up for him back in 1992. Now I just have to write it…and then spend the next twenty years forgetting that I did.

     Speaking of forgotten science fiction things, I didn’t even remember that the music we used over the closing credits of this episode was the theme from Lost in Space. What comes back to me after hearing this is that our producer Dave Edwards and I went on a hunt for the cheesiest TV-sci-fi music we could find in CKCU’s record library. Lost in Space seemed about as cheesy as you could get—after all, this was the show with the robot that waved its arms and bellowed “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” every chance it got.

     The problem is that, taken out of context and without visuals to support it, the theme from Lost in Space doesn’t sound like something out of sci-fi. Frankly, it sounds like it should be on a game show…possibly as a contestant.

     Enough already. If I remember any more about this episode, I might not want to give you the link to it, so here it is:

Vasco da Gama, episode #3

     I’ll let whatever you hear speak for itself. After twenty years, it looks like it’ll have to.

 

 

Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in the chains of Friedmanite economics…

Hello, Ladies:

     I greet you all like this to apologize for any apparent sexism in the title of this posting. Blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The quote I appropriated was originally his. If the Confessions are anything to go by, he had a weird way with women. Or is that a way with weird women? My French is too rusty for me to be completely sure.

     Be that all as it may, this week’s episode of Vasco da Gama is about money, so we thought we’d hop on the bandwagon and share a recent quip by our genteel host, The Cousins of Cousins Manor. This one can also be filed under the general heading “Cousins slightly amuses those more noteworthy than himself”. (Click the link and see this posting for another example of this.)

     A week ago (give or take), Cousins family friend Nile Seguin posed a query to the huddled masses on Facebook. For those who really ought to know anyway, Nile is a stand-up comedian in the ascendant, and in the words of Cousins:

He’s funny as hell. No—hold on—is Hell funny? Yeah, I guess if you were just visiting, and you saw all the people who didn’t expect to be there, like Hitler…or Shakespeare…or your ex-girlfriends or something. Or the guy who invented Ziploc bags. You know, the ones with the plastic pull tabs on them that don’t work properly, or come off when you pull on them…if he were in Hell, his punishment would be that he’d have a really bad case of the hiccups—you know, hiccups so bad they almost make you throw up—and there’d be this amazing miracle cure for the hiccups—I mean, like no hiccups ever again—but it’d all be in Ziploc bags…and every time he’d try to open one of the Ziploc bags, the little pull tab would come off, and it wouldn’t open, or it’d open too quickly, and spill everything all over the floor, and the little tab would come off too, so he couldn’t close it again…

…it’d be kind of a blast, actually. So yeah, he’s definitely as funny as hell.

      But back to Nile Seguin. This is the question he asked on Facebook last week:

 

 

     Mr. Cousins’ response was succinct:

 

 

      I’d like to point out that this represents a considerable mellowing of Comrade Cousins’ views on this particular subject. Up until now, he hasn’t been able to mention Friedman or Friedmanites without working a few strategic uses for boiling oil into the conversation.

     Anyway, here was Nile Seguin’s reaction to Citizen Cousins’ comment:

 

 

     Once again, a Cousins bon mot (or, in this case, is it a “mauvais mot”?) has grazed the funny bone of a professional maker of mirth. It’s enough to make a fellow give up his day job—but the ink is already dry on the contract for Jack-of-all-trades-and-Master-of-Arts Cousins’ long-awaited scholarly monograph on how Spike Milligan is more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who (or whatever it’s actually about).

 

     Don’t despair that the seductive life of the ivory tower has deprived the world of a late-blooming comedic voice. Taken all in all, the great compendium of Cousins wit and wisdom is rather more like hit and miss-dom. The run of the mill tends to be of a piece with his impersonation of a Dalek imitating Paul Lynde.

 

 

     It didn’t sound as bad as all that when he did it, I must admit. You really had to be there, I guess.

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #2 (or, “C’mon baby, leitmotif”)

IF I GET MY HANDS ON A DOLLAR BILL…

     You could still get your hands on a dollar bill in Canada in 1992. Examples of our lowest denomination of paper currency remained in circulation, even five years after the introduction of the coin affectionately known as the “loonie”. (It says something about what it means to be Canadian that we’re at ease with the idea of giving money the same name you’d apply to someone on heavy meds in a straitjacket. I try not to think too much about what it says, though. That sort of thing gives me a headache.)

     As you’ve probably figured out by now, Episode #2 of Vasco da Gama is all about money. This is a subject I have lots of experience with…mostly in theory. I used to have a vague notion that money is something you’re supposed to have, and an even vaguer notion that, if you put enough time and trouble into something like, say, making a fully-produced radio comedy show for the spare-time enjoyment of the general public, you really ought to be paid for your time, your trouble, or better yet, both. The pattern that’s established itself during my life in the lively arts suggests that this actually amounts to something less like a notion and more like wishful thinking…if that.

     Well, never mind. I’d have spent any money I made by now, anyway. Back to the subject of patterns…if you’ve listened to the first episode of Vasco (and if you haven’t, by all means do), you’ll notice some patterns starting to emerge. I thought it was important to establish a set of ground rules early on to give the series a sense of continuity—but mostly to give me an excuse for breaking them any time I felt like it. Such is the iron discipline of the seasoned comedy writer.

     But back to the iron discipline of the seasoned blog writer, and therefore back to the patterns. One of them is a standard plot, which can roughly be summed up as “Rob encounters a problem created by people who complicate it by trying to fix it”. Going hand in hand with that is another of Vasco’s emerging patterns—forgetful, easily distracted, but well-meaning late-middle-aged men in positions of authority.

     Speaking of which, you won’t have to listen too closely to hear that this episode’s Mr. Klamm is essentially Mr. Skeffington from Episode #1—right down to the voice. I forget if this was because I wanted to give people the impression that Vasco had a rep company of stock characters who showed up in different roles, or because I’d forgotten that I’d used the voice in the previous recording session. Such is the iron discipline of the seasoned voice actor.

     Iron discipline or not, one voice you won’t hear doing double duty is Mojo, Rob’s perma-stoned doorstop of a roommate. Where else could you slot in a guy whose entire life consists of listening to psychedelic rock music while consuming psychedelic drugs…or anything that looks like it might possibly have some sort of mind-bending properties?

     In case you’re interested (and let’s say for the sake of argument you are), I wasn’t on anything psychedelic when I wrote the scene set in the bank. I just had Gabby Hayes running through my brain. (If things like this don’t happen to you, I feel sorry for you. It helps to pass the time.) When you have Gabby Hayes running through your brain, it isn’t long before you think—or say—to yourself, “Gabby Hayes—running through my brain”. If it’s my brain, the next thing that happens is that you realize you’ve got a Jimi Hendrix lyric. I’ll let the other members of the Vasco cast pick up the story from there:

IAN McKAY: I forget who, but somebody needed a full explanation of who Gabby Hayes was as well as who Jimi Hendrix was.

KEL PERO (née Morin): Yes! I think I needed the explanation. I remember the song, though. At least I know Hendrix.

ROB VINCENT: I think it was whasisname the assistant tech guy, who had the bright suggestion of putting on Purple Haze under the soundtrack, because people wouldn't get the joke otherwise.

IAN McKAY: Sagebrush and a prairie sky ... Excuse me while I shoot bad guys!

     Well, there’s a surprise spoiled for all of you. I should have put the link to the episode at the top of this posting to keep stuff like this from happening. As long as I’m giving stuff away for free, here are a couple more explanatory notes:

     - For internet listeners (readers? whatever.) tuning in (clicking in? whatever.) from outside Canada, a T4 is the standard tax form for individuals. It’s our equivalent of the American 1040 form, the British Whatever-they-call-it form, the Australian I-don’t-know what-they-call-it-any-more-than-I-know-what-the British-call-theirs-but-someone-from-Australia-will-know-what-I’m-talking-about form, and so on and so forth.

     - And, for those of you who feel like expanding your literary horizons, Mr. Klamm’s name isn’t just an excuse for puns about shellfish. It’s an homage to a character in Franz Kafka’s The Castle, a novel whose protagonist gets swallowed up by an impenetrable, inexplicable bureaucracy. It seemed like a good fit for a story dealing with the fun and frolic that lurk around every corner in the worlds of consumer banking and taxation.

     Oh, and here’s one more of those emerging patterns I was talking about: during the bank scene, Rob can be heard valiantly straining not to laugh as he delivers the line after Gabby Hayes sings Hendrix. This is the first audible example in Vasco da Gama of the in-studio corpsing that made recording sessions enjoyable—and sometimes time-consuming. It came to be known as “Kormaning”—another homage, this time to Harvey Korman, the Carol Burnett Show cast member who was in perpetual danger of collapsing into uncontrollable giggles when paired in a sketch with Tim Conway. (Thanks to Ian for the reminder on this one.) Whenever it happened in a Vasco session, all but the guilty party would immediately chime in with a rousing cheer of “KORRRRR-MANNNN!!!”

      I probably shouldn’t be fonder of those moments than I am of almost any others in the whole Vasco da Gama experience. Such is the iron discipline of nostalgia.

     But enough about that for the time being. The memories are starting to flood back on me. If it’s possible to Korman while writing, I’m about to do so. Time to leave you with that link I’ve haven’t gotten around to putting in yet.

Vasco da Gama, episode #2

     Well, that’s it for now—and if it isn’t, it doggone well oughta be. I can’t tell you everything before you listen to this stuff, you know. There has to be some reason why you’d want to find out what Richard Wagner and Greta Garbo are doing in that bank along with Gabby Hayes.

 

 

 

Truth is beauty, and beauty truth, but truth in advertising often isn’t pretty…

 

     Well, there’s some truth in advertising that’s easy on the eye…as far as I’m concerned, at any rate. This week’s first instalment of Vasco da Gama has a little somethin’-somethin’ (as Sparky tells me the kids like to say) about false advertising…or misleading packaging, at any rate. M’Dear (pictured, in purple dress and flaming red dye job) and I took advantage of the lull in between Funsville’s annual celebrations of Rod Carew’s birthday and Buster Keaton’s birthday to put together a couple of odds and ends for you, on the general topic of packaging and advertising and what have you.

     After exhaustive collegial research and deliberation (that is to say, an evening with a couple of bottles of domestic Asti Spumante and a bootleg DVD of the Dick Sargent seasons of Bewitched), M’Dear and I have divined that there are three basic categories into which the purely inexplicable in advertising and/or marketing can be sorted.

     The first one is something that M’Dear decided should be called “Get out much?” Her rationale for calling it that is that anyone who comes up with stuff like the example we’re about to show you is so out of touch with reality that, in her words, “they must be spending all their spare time staring backwards through binoculars at the damp underside of a flat rock”.

     And with that, on to the example. A certain German candymaker puts out a line of fruit chews, and other crimes against the separate and conjoined concepts of fruit flavours and chewy textures, under the brand name “Mamba”.

     Mamba.

     Let that sink in.

     Now, I don’t know much about making candy, much less selling it, but I do know a little something about a planet called Earth. Rumour has it that one of the deadliest, most merciless killers on this particular planet is a certain species of poisonous snake called…

…have you guessed it yet?

That’s right—

it’s called…

the…

Mamba.

     I may hang around a lot with Sparky, and therefore don’t have much experience with what’s considered normal for children, but I’m pretty sure that normal children wouldn’t be thrilled to the gills by the prospect of chomping down on a gobstopper chock full of snake poison.

 

 

     In case you’re thinking something got lost in translation…well, the German for “mamba” is, um…well, as it turns out, that’d be…“mamba”.

     “Die Mamba”, to be precise. Not such a Jim von Dandy piece of der old Image Management by der old Candymaker. I don’t imagine the mamba thinks the whole thing is too good for its image, either.

 

 

     Leaving poisonous snakes and candymakers to settle their differences as best they can, we move on to the next category, which I’ve chosen to call “Stupid—like a fox”. Every now and then, you come across a piece of advertising so bizarre, so boneheaded, that you wonder what the people behind it were thinking. Then you realize that it doesn’t matter what they were thinking. They got your attention. Take this sign outside a clothing store, for example:

 

     Indelicate but not ineffective, eh M’Dear?

 

     No indeedy do it isn’t, M’Dear. You can bet your bottom…uh, dollar, that is.

     Then there’s a third category of advertising—a summum bonum of the ad biz—that sets itself apart from all the rest. We call this one “Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. Let’s face it, some products don’t exactly sell themselves. If, for instance, the product you’re trying to sell is turkey roasting bags, here are your major selling points:

1. It’s a bag.
2. It’s made of tinfoil.
3. You stick a turkey in it and roast it.

     It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. So how do you sell this turkey…uh, I mean, turkey roasting bag? Well, you can either turn tail, admit defeat, and write it all off as a dead loss, or you can do what one company chose to do:

 

 

     I don’t know if I want one, but I sure took a good—what’s the word I’m trying to think of here…it’s right on the tip of my tongue…I can almost see it—before making up my mind.

     The name of the game is product recognition—and recognition is a whole lot easier when the suckers…er, marks…er, customers have their eyeballs pointed at the product. Getting them to do that thing the turkey roasting bag is telling you to do is half the battle won. It all comes down to this: when you need to roast a turkey in a bag—and one day, you may have to, no matter what you think right now—whose turkey roasting bags are you going to remember?

     Yes, you’re right—you’ll probably go to the deli for a sandwich instead…but you can’t blame those lovable rapscallions in the ad business for trying.  

 

     We hope you won’t blame us for trying to find out how many of you out there in Internet Land have run across ads and packages that seemed inspired by something other than rational thought. Jot your findings in the space provided below for comments—we’re always glad to hear from you.

     And, just in case you think we haven’t been responsible for our own share of strange ads over the years, here are some station ID’s done for radio by El Cousins-o (click here and here)…and something with me and Sparky in it.

     As always, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you,

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #1 (or, “Meet me at the back of the blunderbuss”)

    As promised, here is the first episode of Vasco da Gama…well, a link to it, at any rate.

Vasco da Gama, episode #1

     See? There it is. I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to The Cousins Lad, who was there at the time, and knows all the juicy details from behind the scenes. Let ‘er rip, Ricky m’boy.

Uncle Fun  

WHAT DIFFERENCE WILL SIX MINUTES MAKE TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW?

     Quite a lot, actually. Skip to the six-minute mark of the first episode of Vasco da Gama, and you won’t even hear Vasco da Gama. You’ll hear him mentioned once, and you’ll hear a show called Vasco da Gama mentioned a few more times than that, but, if you’re waiting for Vasco himself to show up, you are sure as sherbet out of luck, Jack.

     Why is this?

     Think about it: the show’s called Vasco da Gama, and for the last four-fifths of its first episode, its title character is absent.

     I repeat…

  WHY…

                 …IS

                           …THIS???

     The answer’s simple— in fact, it’s so simple you’d expect to encounter it meeting a pieman en route to a fair and saying “let me taste your ware”. You see, Vasco da Gama isn’t a show about Vasco da Gama—it’s a show about making a show about Vasco da Gama.

     Okay, now I’ve got to explain that, I suppose. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, someone came to you and asked you to write a sitcom. You with me so far? Now let’s say they told you the sitcom had to be about Vasco da Gama…you know, the Portuguese explorer who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope…maybe you read about him in school or something. Fair enough. Okay then—here’s where it starts getting a little complex—they want it to be as much like a certain other “classic” sitcom as possible. I won’t spoil things by telling you which one…let’s just say that Vasco is supposed to have a best friend named Norton.

     Oh yes—and there’s one more thing that’ll make your job as the writer of the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom an absolute paradise on earth and a joy surpassing even the most heavenly of joys.

YOUR STAR THINKS HE ACTUALLY IS

VASCO DA GAMA.

     And he could actually be Vasco da Gama, for all you or anyone else involved with the show really knows. And that’s Vasco da Gama, from minute six to minute thirty. Well, sort of. Back to that in a second…or six minutes…or however long it takes you to read what I’m about to write.

     So, those first few minutes of Vasco da Gama give you the pretext for the show, without yet giving you the show’s premise. The premise, like the pretext, is pretty simple-minded: something goes wrong with the making of an episode of Vasco da Gama, and it’s up to the show’s head writer to fix it…or, more likely, to find out why it can’t be fixed.

     Something did go wrong with that first episode of Vasco da Gama. Because I was the show’s writer, I had to help fix it. Because I was the show’s writer, I was also responsible for it.

     Here’s what went wrong: the show, as originally recorded, ran six minutes long.

     There’s that magic “six minutes” again. Twenty percent of our allotted half-hour of air time. One minute out of every six we were about to offer up to the unsuspecting audience was superfluous. We had two options: open the show with an announcement—“special offer to first-time listeners of Vasco da Gama—20% more show!” or start cutting. The first option wasn’t likely to endear us to the show that followed us on The Mighty ‘KCU’s broadcast schedule, so out came the razor blades and grease pencil (for those of you who grew up in the digital age, that’s the analog equivalent of a left-click-and-drag and a CTRL+X).

     The easiest way to do this was to find six consecutive minutes that could be cut without making things more confusing than they needed to be for the listener—simple enough to do in this case, because the second half of the show was a series of stand-alone sidetracks from the main plot. In the end, the choice came down to a pair of scenes, either one of which could be jettisoned without their absence being noticed.

     Thus it was that our pilot episode became a Pilate episode, as we happy few who remained in the studio at some ungodly hour (I forget exactly who, or what hour), were forced to wash our hands of six minutes of perfectly good (well, reasonably good)—and already edited—material. The Barabbas we pardoned was an extended jag on the ambiguous labelling practices of a certain peanut butter manufacturer. Cast member Kel Pero (Kel Morin as she then was), recalls the genesis of the whole thing:

We were on a break in the unicentre, and Rick was talking about how Squirrel brand peanut butter only said "Extra Smooth Squirrel" on its label. He riffed about how confusing this could be to, say, new Canadians whose English was perhaps uncertain--they'd see the label, see these little creatures scurrying around everywhere they looked, and would figure, "Hey! I could make that myself!"

I refused to believe that the label was so . . . potentially misleading. I knew that we had that brand of PB at home, so I remember right there ringing my parents, while we were on our break, and saying to my mother, who was watching something on TV with my dad, "Would you please go and get the peanut butter and bring it to the phone?" My mother was pretty used to odd requests from me by that point, having raised me and all, but this one still struck her as extra-strange. Nevertheless, bring the PB to the phone she did.

"Okay," I said, "now read the label out loud to me."

"Extra . . . smooth . . . squirrel," she said.

Laughing almost unto barfage, I conceded the point to Rick. And, as I recall, a sketch was born out of that.

     Well, that’s probably as much as you need to know for the time being…and then some. If you haven’t already clicked the link at the top of this posting and listened to Episode #1 of Vasco da Gama, now’s the time for it. Sit back, put your feet up, and by all means enjoy a nice squirrel—um, peanut butter—sandwich while you do. Unless you’re allergic to peanuts—in which case, by all means don’t.