Becky got some free tickets to see the filming of Omid Djalili’s new show, on BBC in the autumn so we trundled off to Wood Lane (where there was a Tardis outside the audience entrance!!). We saw two episodes being filmed and whilst the format is quite traditional (stand-up interspersed with sketches), his talent as an actor made the sketches and his stand-up material had me in stitches for much of the show. Yes, the content could be seen as quite close to the mark (wherever the mark happens to be, probably somewhere near Edgeware Road for one joke referencing the recent london bombings…) but is always carefully thought out and usually very funny. Ethnic catchphrase was a popular skit, pandering to sterotypes something chronic or challenging the pomposity of political correctness, or whatever – it was FUNNY!! His take on the news getting the ‘view from the middle east’ by talking to some obsessive, hook-handed jihadi before cutting to the weather is hilarious yet strangely accurate at the same time (surely, it has to be noted that groups of normal folks going about their business are usually absent from the media, in favour of those banging their heads and screaming…?). This is obviously material he has prepared well; in the HBO films below we see this expanded to see Al-Jazeera getting the ‘view from the Christian west’ by speaking to some redneck Ku-Klux-Klan leader – yee haw! Of course, not all his material is so contraversial; some of the sketches are proper old-school humour, verging on the Russ Abbott (I’m thinking the caring skinhead and over-involved parent here, two classics).

Supported by Patrick Monohan (an incredible standup who I’ve seen before in Bristol and who just could not say Djalili – hilarious!!) who did the warmup and anything else the floor manager wanted. Also spotted was Ian Stone working in the wings on Omid’s material; I saw him in Bristol too, amazingly funny bloke (and very quick to deal with hecklers so beware, if that’s your thing).

Omid on HBO in the USA (if you like this, you’ll love the show as many of the jokes make an appearance in episodes 4 and 5):

And there’s plenty more on YouTube

I was up in Manchester this week and saw the theatre where a new opera called Monkey, journey to the west is showing (more here). Had I known in advance, I would have tried to get tickets, Monkey being one of my favourite TV shows from childhood; I used to watch the adventures of Monkey, Pigsy and comrades avidly. The story itself of Monkey itself is a very old story of origins, with lots to be learnt throughout (but with plenty of martial arts along the way!). The music for this opera version was composed by Damon Albarn (yes, that Damon Albarn of Blur and more recently Gorillaz) and from what I’ve heard on the Alan Yentob documentary the other night, sounds amazing. What’s really mad is that Damon apparently knows no Mandarin and had never composed an opera before so had a rather, erm, ‘novel’ approach to the lyrics and also to the musical composition, involving a communist five-pointed star… The artistic director is Jamie Hewlett (co-creator of Tank Girl) and his style is perfect for this update of what is a really old Chinese story, portrayed using a mixture of live action and animation, telling tales of fantastic myth and legend.

The music review by Alfred Hickling in Guardian Unlimited wasn’t great but the review by Kitty Empire in the Observer was much more positive. There’s some video from the BBC here.

It’s a shame but looks like OxfordArchDigital may be in some trouble; the business has been put up for sale by Haines Watts, a firm of accountants. Whilst the company may not have had a huge impact on the cultural heritage sector in terms of sales of its software, it has done some sterling work and I for one have been impressed by their training services and work on projects such as the FISH Interoperability Toolkit (although it seems to have quietly been left to fade; the heritage standards domain no longer works and the only reference to it in cyberspace is now a paper by Edmund Lee). Hopefully, OAD will continue on one form or another; it’s demise would be a loss to the specialist archaeological computing sector.