BLUES BASKETBALL With four consecutive appearances in the BUSA final and a record fourteen straight Varsity match wins, there is a lot of pressure on the Men’s Blues going into the 2003-2004 season. This impressive record has made the Blues Oxford’s most successful team and, as a result, the annual Varsity match between Oxford and Cambridge is one of the highlights of the sporting calendar. In addition, the Women’s Blues won the BUSA Shield, recording only one loss during the regular season. The Men’s Seconds likewise had an extremely successful 2002-2003 season. Highlights included winning the BUSA Trophy competition and an emphatic Varsity match win despite Cambridge having home court advantage. With the departure of many key players, notably Sexton and Henderson, the Blues will be relying on a lot of new faces this season. Nevertheless, Blues Captain Graham Ewen is confident that, with players like Gomes, Card and ex-Shropshire Warriors star Dan Woodbridge, the Blues will have another successful year. They will be taking on old adversaries in the BUSA Premier League but by far their toughest test will come against reigning champions St Mark and St John. The rivalry between these two teams is as strong as ever, having met in the final for the last two seasons. Their first encounter of the new campaign will be on 29 October when the Blues travel down to Plymouth to face the Marjons once again. This is a big year for me and OUBBC. Judging by the talent on display at the trials, a fifteenth Varsity win and a place in the final eight appear once again to be imminent.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

RUGBY WORLD CUP Wales 41 Canada 10 Blues prop Kevin Tkachuk scored a seventy-first minute try as his native Canada collapsed to a 41-10 defeat at the hands of Wales in their opening fixture. The Canucks had been completely outplayed by their opposition when Tkachuk’s success offered a flicker of hope in an otherwise disappointing display. Things had looked decidedly promising when Bob Ross kicked a drop goal to give Canada the early lead. Yet Wales recovered and, despite the loss of Colin Charvis to the sin-bin, it was the Welsh, clad in their changed white strip, who took command through tries from Sonny Parker and Gareth Cooper before the interval. Further tries followed, with Iestyn Harris impeccable with the boot for all five of his conversions. Yet, from the Oxford perspective, it was Tkachuk who stole the show. Introduced in place of injured captain Al Charron on sixty minutes, the twenty-seven year old made the most of his opportunity on the global stage, flinging himself over the line after some good work by the Canadian forwards. Tkachuk was delighted on a personal level, but disappointed with the result as a whole. “The try was quite an exciting moment of my life but I must admit at the time it did not matter much as it was much too little too late,” he told Cherwell “More than anything I believe the result displays the unfortunate truth about how much the gap has widened between the amateur and professional countries at the World Cup. It does not get any easier with this Friday night’s match against the All Blacks so we must continue to persevere, work hard and probably most importantly enjoy every moment of it.” Meanwhile, Charron, whose problem is a reoccurrence of a serious knee injury, is doubtful for the forthcoming match: “I’d like to play against New Zealand but we have got to do what is best for the team,” said Charron. Should the Canadian skipper be ruled out, Tkachuk may be in line for a starting place. Elsewhere, former Blue Simon Danielli scored a seventy-ninth minute try as Scotland stuttered to an unconvincing 32-11 victory over Japan.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

BLUES RUGBY Worcester Warriors 26 Oxford 26 The Blues bid to regain their Varsity title looked decidedly promising on Monday night, as they forced an away draw with the Worcester Warriors at Sixways. Worcester, currently lying top of the first division, fielded a relatively strong side which included nine senior players as well as members of their development squad, while a series of minor injuries as well as World Cup commitments meant several key players were missing for the visiting team. Oxford were very quickly behind, as a combination of good passing by the Warriors and bad defence by the Blues led to two quick tries. Worcester winger Birchall’s pace exploited the narrowness of the Oxford back line, and after the first of several missed penalties for Oxford, Worcester fullback Hylton made it 14-0 in fourteen minutes. Far from beaten however, the Blues kept the pressure on, and their patience was rewarded when captain John Allen finished off a well-executed backs move with a powerful try. Having stopped the rot, Oxford’s defence seemed less shaky, and Adam Slade made an excellent tackle in the fortieth minute to prevent a third Worcester try. Fly half Jon Fennel’s last minute penalty ensured a creditable half-time score of 14-8. The Blues started the second half in style, with a quick try after a superb forward drive by winger John Bradshaw. A successful conversion would have handed Oxford the lead, but the score remained 14-13 as pressure on the Warriors’ defence increased. Another penalty took Oxford in front, before an excellent wide move in the sixtieth minute led to John Allen’s second try of the match, converted comfortably by Fennel. With the score now 14-23 to the visitors, the home side stepped up a gear, and a textbook dummy by Worcester winger Garrard gave Neil Mason an easy try. The conversion put the Warriors within two points of the Blues, when poor tackling by the Oxford defence gave Worcester captain David Officer another five points. Now three points ahead, the Warriors conceded another penalty, and Fennel’s conversion levelled the scores at 26-26. After a chaotic last few minutes, Worcester kicked for touch to take the draw. Far from being complacent, OURFC Chairman Martin Jackson was already focussed on progress and potential in the lead-up to Varsity: “We are testing the team at quite a high level, especially since a lot of players are new to the Blues squad. Our next match against Leicester will be vital, as they are also shortly playing Cambridge, so we’ll know where we are and what we want to do. A few silly mistakes cost us the game today.” However, with two consecutive draws against First Division teams, and an unprecedented sponsorship deal with Aggregate Industries, the atmosphere is optimistic.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

PLAY THE MAN by James Mumford & Patrick Malone Broad St/Trinity College Wednesday 22 – Saturday 25 October Top Oxford drama is self-conscious, wary, defensive and probably insecure. Clever people stride carefully into the empty theatre and set about constructing art, watching the detail, treasuring a precious considered subtlety. They have generally acknowledged values: innovation, sensitivity, progressiveness, vigour. A Cuppers judge this year told the wide-eyed freshers, inverted commas gestured with her fingers, “We want to get away from, you know, the stereotypical ‘Oxford Shakesperean actor’ thing”. And the thesps do flee from it, spiking their hair, choosing challenging scripts, masturbating on the Playhouse stage. Modernist plays flood our studio theatres. They want tightly formed creations of intricate intimate quality, the hand of the thinking artist prominent at every stage. They seek freshness and grit, and, in general, glad I am of it. Play the Man is not typical Oxford drama. The whole production hinges on a sense of significance, of moment and importance, buzzing with zealous, religious fervour for the gravity and immensity of the story it has to tell – that behind the burning at the stake on Broad Street of the Protestant martyrs in 1555. It begins on the street itself, where the audience stands around the Actual Place of Burning Real People. Then after three minutes, despite all the hype, that’s it for Broad Street, and we trundle into Trinity’s Durham Quad, where the rest of the play takes place. The script, written by James Mumford and Patrick Malone, both students here, is for the most part like a Shakespeare history play without the poetry. The dialogue is uncomfortably inconsistent, leaping from authoritative antiquated rhetoric (“Look around, Sir, the Abbey tells its own story this evening”) to jarringly modern banter (“It’s a gamble they hope will pay off”). The action, similarly, cuts from Renaissance-style history (figures of importance pace around, wring their hands, recite long political speeches) to scenes of intimate human interest. Acting, consequently, tends to lack subtlety. But the writers have lent so much thought to the overall dramatic impact and structure of their play, to the significance of every event and the development of each character, that rough edges of psychology and language are smoothed over by sheer energy., momentum and ambition. Each awkward moment is saved by rushing into something else; missing delicacy in the acting is papered over with sudden and convincing emotional extremes. Ned Dalby, as Cranmer, is particularly commanding. The direction is exciting and the staging meticulous. Despite everything, they pull it off. Some top figures at OUDS will scorn this cod, hamming B-grade RSC, but those who temporarily relax their drive for art will genuinely enjoy the fruits of an exciting, worthwhile project.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

THE OXFORD REVUE vs THE CAMBRIDGE FOOTLIGHTS Playhouse Tuesday 21 October Only
Is comedy the new Peruvian sloth manufacture? No. Is it the new masturbation? Unlikely. The Oxford Revue steer a mostly judicious course between two poles of comic crapness: vacant surrealism and trite ribaldry. As a result they are very rarely crap.
As director and co-writer Leander Deeny points out, like the stench of an embarrasing parent slowly going off in the fridge, the spectre of Monty Python remains, for both Revue and Footlights, hard to dispel. And, yes, it’s in evidence here. But The Oxford Revue have some nice, if contrived lines (guy with cold feet to fiancee: “What if we’re too hairy, and we shave, and we get stubbly, and I grow it back, and you don’t, and we stick together like velcro?”). They have some nice ideas (tearful son phones up dad for advice while adrift in the Pacific Ocean). And they have at least one great comic actor (Daniel Harkin, terrific as a useless boxer).
Most importantly, they have masses of bacchanalian energy, which when all else fails (as very occasionally in this production, it does), carries them through with aplomb. As a result they are the one thing that really matters: laugh out loud funny. Who cares if the sherpa is a bit gammy in his left leg in cold spells at the end of the month if he gets you to the top of the mountain? Still, the Revue could do with finding some new things to take the piss out of. Embarassing parents, homophobia, hermaphroditism – all wholesome stuff, but easy. And they make it look difficult. Perhaps the best emblem of this production is its (brilliant) prank of writing to the BBC with a set of intentionally crap sketches. The laughter here (like all the best laughter) is somewhat nervous. Look! They’re taking the piss out of student self referentiality! Ha ha ha (wait a minute, what about…?) Because what’s really holding these people back is the feeling that somewhere, at some point, they’ve sat back and self-conciously racked their brains over the need to produce something called comedeeeeee.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

Charity by Sara Kreindler OFS Tuesday 21 –Saturday 25 October A Pembroke musical about financial crises? The irony got out of its seat and gave me a good slap round the face when I entered the theatre. Sara Kreindler, a loquacious Canadian studying at Pembroke, has written both the book and score for this show. Her talents composing are never thrown into question throughout the piece, but a plausible narrative unity is lacking here. The curtain opens on the meeting of a foreign aid charity. Its members are trying hopelessly to organise the most important event of the year, the Charity Ball. Conflict soon arises, as the committee splits into two, hurling abuse at each other through the camp medium of song. But ultimately, this is a story about that ol’ chestnut Love. More specifically, of Anita (Reina Hardy) and Ben (Richard Power). These two insecure, inexperienced souls refuse to admit their powerful attraction to one another, rendered paralysed by their shared fear of rejection. Anita worries that her strength and intelligence will alienate any man (how out-of-character for a girl to think that), whilst Ben contracts verbal dysentery when speaking to the opposite sex. Power plays Ben with an endearing humility and diffidence. Although his character is shy and unforthcoming, Power has a tremendous presence on stage, combining the naivety and ingenuousness of Jack Lemmon with the zeal and tenacity of a confident leading man. His voice is as strong as his acting, making him the highlight of this production. The relationship of Suzy and Trevor is explored, too. This is where my initial delight at the show turned to an uneasy dislike. Alice Shepherd, in the role of Suzy, lacked the necessary qualities to convince us of her character’s dissatisfaction with the sweet, but unexciting, Trevor. Suzy does not want her lover to be so thoughtful and caring. I began to cringe as Suzy launched into her lamenting “Why can’t you be wrong for me?” number; I’ve heard girls complain about guys being too sweet enough times without hearing it committed to music. Stop bloody complaining! Ahem. A bit about the staging. The OFS is set up in traverse, to accentuate the polarisation of the charity board: radicals against moderates, men against women. This opposition is achieved well, where many of the songs, whether politically- or ardently-driven, feature a tête-à-tête between man and woman. Christine Chung plays the femme fatale, Mavis, with seductive intensity that inveigles poor Trevor into her arms. And in ‘Farewell’, the intertwining of Anita and Ben’s vocals strongly suggests a gradual intimacy between the two. The music itself, however, is somewhat repetitious from song to song, with little stylistic variation. Vocally, the male leads outshone their female counterparts, most significantly, in their enunciation. Kreindler is very lyrically skilled, and the songs have a verbal playful quality. But on leaving the theatre, I was not sure what I had learnt from the show. Was the political element really necessary to drive the amorous plotline forward? Does charity really help us to change ourselves fundamentally? I was not convinced.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

The Garden Party by Vaclav Havel BT EARLY Tuesday 21 –Saturday 25 October Written in an unstable political climate by the now-President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party is a play written by a young man with ferocious talent. Director Tom Gatti’s production is both entertaining and timely, getting electric performances from the cast and making the most of the play’s rich symbolism. In our age of corporate officespeak, where one thinks outside the box, empowers the consumer and squares the circle, the prescience of The Garden Party (written in 1963) makes for a great hour and a half at the BT. We see young Hugo Plantek (Beau Hopkins), solitaire chess aficionado, being sent off by his bourgeois parents to the titular garden party of the Liquidation Office. Once there, he takes naturally to the buzzwords and newspeak of central government, and talks his way to the top, over the heads of charismatic smooth-talker Maxy Falk (played by the director) and the President of the Inauguration Office, who ends up half-naked crouching down looking up at the exultant Hugo on his side of the desk. Written around the time that Beckett’s best work was behind him, and Stoppard’s best lay ahead, Havel’s play belongs to the continental Absurdist tradition. Unlike some modern productions of the best of that tradition, Gatti’s production never flags under the potential tedium of constant wordplay. This is very much a play about words, about the power that command over words can have in fuelling a passage to further power, and of the emptiness of words used without substance, but the play is never too clever for its own good. Nonsense phrases are delivered with such terrific conviction (above all by the mesmerising Falk), that we only realise the ludicrousness of such phrases as “catch a rabbit and you have it” and “without the warp, you will never bury the wolf” a couple of beats after we take them in. From the folksy psuedo-wisdom of Hugo’s self-affirmingly middle-class parents to Hugo’s later brilliant engineering of the Liquidation of the Inauguration Office, words exercise a strong hold over all characters, even though they may well be utterly meaningless. The play never loses “the human touch” (in the phraseology of Maxy Falk) for all its witty dialogues, and its presentation of the play’s interpersonal relationships are involving and even warm. We witness love blossom, like the proverbial moss, between two bureaucrats before their dedication to their task gets the better of them. And we wish the best for Hugo as he falls into a completely different world, one which he blags his way to the top of, before the play reaches its almost inevitable conclusion. Forty years on, The Garden Party has not suffered from the passage of time; rather it is reinvented through its evocation of New Labour and contemporary managerial nonsense. Though we are a considerable distance from Communist Czechoslovakia (two concepts which are both seemingly long gone), the power of buzzwords and arbitrary institutional logic still hold sway over the modern world. Gatti, his cast and crew have brought the criminally over-looked work of Havel to Oxford, in a production that speaks clearly to us while faithful to Havel’s original concerns.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

Panic Room Odeon George St. Friday 17 – Thursday 23 October It’s always worth watching the opening credit sequence in a David Fincher film. Unlike most directors, he understands the subliminal artistic potential of these initial moments. Just think of the superbly jittery start to Se7en. Panic Room’s credits similarly function as the movie’s overture: a montage of New York skyscrapers recalls the beginning of Clare Dolan or, more recently, Vanilla Sky (the close-up of the modern cityscape’s concrete bastions as ironic short hand for human insecurity); the names of the cast and crew slide in huge letters over these grey surfaces, foreshadowing the rigid contours of the panic room around which Fincher’s camera later circles. The tone is tight, clinical, as such paving a perfect path for the movie. But it’s precisely this cold discipline which ultimately lets the film down. Because Panic Room is really nothing more than a brutally efficient genre piece, admittedly with much fun to be had along the way. It retains the self-conscious playfulness of previous effort The Game – it’s unmistakably a Fincher film. We’ve relocated from Tyler Durden’s squat in Fight Club, from the dingy tenements of Se7en, to an enormous uptown brownstone; but the atmosphere remains just as dark and claustrophobic – if not more so, given the static location. The camera prowls through rooms, glides round corners and, in one neat move, plunges down a stairwell. I especially enjoyed the burglars’ initial break-in, as the lens squeezes through a keyhole and burrows through walls, giving visual voice to the breach of Meg’s (Jodie Foster) home. As always, Fincher makes his camera speak. References to other films abound. Meg and Sarah (Kristen Stewart) form a strikingly androgynous pair, calling to mind the shaven-headed Ripley and her charge Newt from Aliens (Fincher’s big-screen debut being Alien3). It’s difficult, too, not to remember Agent Starling’s nervous, sinewy determination in The Silence of the Lambs. When initially looking round the property, Sarah trundles over its floorboards on a scooter, echoing Danny’s tricycle-powered exploration of the empty hotel in The Shining. There’s even a dash of Home Alone in the mix. Still, I doubt whether, without the constant sawing of cellos in the background, my palms would have got quite so sweaty. The first half hour is slow; the narrative lurches from one set piece to another. You get the feeling that Fincher, like the burglars, spent much of the shoot rubbing his chin and wondering what to do next. Nor does David Koepp’s lame script help, with its incoherent blend of comedy and horror. It does manage, however, some effectively knowing lines. “It’s a very emotional property,” the estate agent says to Meg. How right he is. It’s ironic, then, that, although edgy, the film itself is never “emotional”. We don’t get to know any of the characters, least of all Meg and her daughter: one’s claustrophobic, the other diabetic; that’s it. Consequently, it’s left to the visuals, soundtrack and intrinsic panic-factor of the set scenes to get us going; at no point do we really care about the characters themselves. I’m sure it’s possible to dredge up some thematic content to Panic Room – mother/daughter relationships, voyeurism (CCTV cameras feature prominently), the invasion of privacy. But in the end it amounts to little more than high-grade multiplex fodder. The difference, merely, is that it’s Fincher who’s feeding us.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

If you’d been born in France in the late 1700’s, would you have stood up to be counted in the French Revolution? Back then, that was the norm. Nineteenth Century Russian and French novels endlessly depicted revolutions led by students. But, today, people seem to think students are mainly obsessed with stirring up apathy. What’s happened? Could it be that today’s students are already the establishment figures with the very views which, in the Old Days, students used to oppose? Some say so, but I think that’s tosh. What about the 1969 Riots at Columbia University in New York when the student body overthrew and occupied the buildings? Or the Anti-Apartheid movement which helped free Nelson Mandela from prison? Or Tiananmen Square in 1989, when hundreds of students rebelled and many were killed. Each time, their voices were heard. Each time, they made a difference. Dear reader, radicalism is a state of mind! It’s a choice! It takes strong beliefs and the guts and energy to do something about them. But many of the Big Issues aren’t there any more, or seem to have been fixed. The Vietnam War ended a quarter of a century ago. Nelson Mandela met the Queen – no doubt the high point of his life. And China is creeping towards democracy. So, what’s there to fight for? Alert! Alert! That’s the danger. Things go wrong when we’re not watching. What about the rise of racism? Or Government’s willingness to trade your freedom in the name of other outcomes like reducing crime, or just “for your own good?” Where does the reach of the State end, if no-one’s saying “stop right there!” Some say the dominant forces on campus are anarchists, pot-heads, or just kids having a laugh. Yet those involved in student government generally come from the opposite end of the spectrum. They’re often future lawyers, politicians, and bankers. But, guess what? They always HAVE been! It doesn’t stop you sticking up for a better world. A passion and vision are a world apart from the cold, calculating, focus-group, statistic riddled politicking. If we don’t get more of the first, you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll get more of the second. It’s also about reclaiming the meaning of “Common Sense” – a political term ever since Thomas Paine wrote his pamphlet and started the American Revolution. Today “common-sense” solutions proposed by the government are often the opposite. If we – you and I – had a conversation and looked at what affects your life; I expect we’d come up with some uncommon common sense solutions. Solutions so right they demand your attention. Have you the courage to stare back and say “Yes, I’ll see this through because it’s right.” Common sense solutions make sense way beyond politics: like prescribing hard drugs to people who are already registered addicts and treat their addiction instead of criminalising it. Like giving 16 year olds the vote, because they pay tax to a Government they can’t elect. Like not making it a bankruptcy issue to go to college. Like remembering that Government is there to SERVE the public, not RULE it. So, don’t look at the railways and see only the delay. Don’t think of healthcare and see only the waiting lists. Don’t be a teacher who looks at your students and sees only hassle, a meagre pay-check and performance indicators. Looking beyond the problem is the only way we’ll find visionary solutions. You’re a student. Use the space to be radical. Expand your mind. Demand to talk about society’s problems. If you’re happy with the status quo, that’s great! The status quo has rarely been better. But even then, it’s worth defending. And if we take it all for granted, we lose it to political managers who’ve forgotten how to lead, because they haven’t needed to, because we haven’t demanded leadership from them. “It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph,” said Edmund Burke 200 years ago. It is true today. So get up and do something. DO SOMETHING. There are no impossible problems, if you and I demand the right to find the solutions.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003 

Rohan Unni, Rob Stone, and Tim Vogel get their wits tickled by the Chuckle Brothers Much like Marmite, the Brothers Chuckle are entertainers you either love or loathe. They played the Oxford Apollo with their sell-out success Raiders of the Lost Bark to high critical acclaim. They boast celebrity fans including Elton John, Stephen Gately, and Right Said Fred’s Richard Fairbrass. They have extraordinary mullets. Like battered Mars Bars, foreign football managers, and a hatred of the French, the Chuckle Brothers are a national heritage of which we are all proud. Christened in Rotherham as Paul and Bartholemew Elliot, their father was a “famous” comedian, Gene Patton, who toured the country with a dynamic and irrepressible charm resonant only of the true greats – Bernard Manning, or indeed John Inmnan. Their whirlwind success began with the dizzy heights of Butlins as performing Redcoats, and they went on to win the auspicious New Faces award in 1973. From then on the roller coaster of stardom rocketed ahead, seldom inducing any impromptu vomiting. And in 1987 the awe-inspiring Chucklevision was born, the brainchild of two unassuming geniuses. Accompanied by their two elder brothers – “the Patton Brothers” – we met them in their dressing room, whilst they were rigorously warming each other up for their performance. The age and wisdom in the contours of Paul and Barry’s faces hit you instantly. One wonders how such giants of comedy have triumphed for so long, as their humble and reticent demeanour stands opposite to their on-screen personalities. The Brothers are nonetheless welcoming, and we happily discuss their smash-hit tour. It soon becomes apparent that the chaos and high drama that characterises Chucklevision is absent in the brothers off-screen. Barry (the smaller one) is the more garrulous of the two, whilst Paul is happy to sit quietly and let his brother speak for him, chipping in every now and then. Watching their show afterwards, The Chuckles were right to point out the substantial presence of adults in the audience. The brothers are clearly beloved of all walks of society, and their unique physical humour had the twentysomethings in the crowd moist with pleasure. Despite the impact of Chucklevision, fortune has not always grinned on Paul and Barry. Their hit television quiz To Me…To You was pulled after three years at the top, the mention of which instantly incites an embittered reaction from the pair. Apparently the new grand fromage at the Beeb did not see the show fitting in with his own vision of the channel. Thousands of angry fans of all ages (see above) vociferously complained about this travesty but, as Paul fumes, “once someone has made a decision like that, they cannot go back on it without looking like an absolute arse”. Within ten minutes the Chuckles start to relax, and their ejaculations flow more freely. Barry admits to his devotion to Rotherham United, and Paul casually nurses his ever-decreasing mullet. They reveal their intimate relationship to “Jonathan Ross, a great friend of ours”. However, upon being asked about the current state of British comedy, they were quick to pooh-pooh “the long-haired gippo” Ross. “He can often be funny,” Barry grudgingly concedes, “but he has a tendency to rant about nothing”. Interesting point, Barry. But are there any other comedians you admire? “I do quite like that Lee Evans, for his visual humour. He has a very versatile body.” The Chuckles are evidently fans of visual, rather than observational, humour, as exemplified in their own comedy. “I don’t find a lot of comedy today funny, it’s just observation.” Good observation. On speaking to a number of Chuckle enthusiasts after the show, mixed reactions were uncovered. Mike Estill, aged 5, thought it was “really good fun, I loved the music and dancing”. Joe Sayers, aged 7, thought “the voices were wicked, and it was well colourful”. Lisa-Marie Stafford from Summertown, aged 6, found “the driving narrative thread through the performance effectively incoherent”. Nonetheless, having spoken with the substantial student contingent in the audience – of which Oriel provided a worryingly high proportion – the Chuckles’ claims of adult adoration were confirmed. Mr I. Barlow (New College) leader of the Chuckle Undergraduate Movement (CUM), defended the often risqué elements of the Chuckles. “Marlowe, Van Gogh, the Chuckle Brothers – geniuses who weren’t appreciated in their own time”. This is certainly a contentious comment, and perhaps not wholly founded. But, as Paul was swift to mention, “we’ve been going strong for thirty years. That’s no one-hit wonder, staying power is everything”. But despite such disappointments, the Chuckle aspirations of world domination are not rooted only in television. Barry, again, revealed the highly confidential information concerning their planned occupation of the Christmas number one slot. He says “If Bob the Builder, or Phil Collins can make it, we must have a good chance”. We were then graced with a short rendition of their latent vocal talents of the all-time classic, “Glad All Over” – soon to be in petrol stations everywhere. As the Chuckles finished their warming-up exercise, consisting of each shouting “To me…to you” louder than the other so as to really psyche themselves up, our impressions had been modified. Our typical scepticism had been vanquished by their professionalism and total commitment to their individual genre of physical comedy. “We are the only ones in our field who perform at such a consistently high level,” boasted Paul, fighting Barry for the soapbox. “In all our years of experience, comedians fall by the wayside without any public recognition. Barry and I, on the other hand, are loved by all ages, not because we exploit our sex appeal, but because we remain true to our comedic roots. And that’s the secret to our enduring success.” Touché, Brothers Chuckle, touché.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003