Monumental News

Just learned that Count Arthur Strong will be presenting a third series of Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! on BBC4 commencing in late December. Regular readers will know how important Count Arthur Strong is to any decent person's ethos.

Quoting from the invaluable promotional email:

On BBC Radio 4

First things first! In case you missed the first two episodes, the highly acclaimed second series of Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! is being repeated on BBC Radio 4. You can hear Count Arthur Strong every Tuesday at 6.30pm. Tune in this evening!

This is the perfect opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the Count in preparation for the Third Series of Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! This will air on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am every Friday from December 28th.

So, over the festive period you'll have the chance to hear the grand finale of Series 2 at 6.30pmon Christmas Day, followed by the much anticipated first episode of Series 3 at 11.30amon December 28th. And that's not all! Count Arthur Strong will be making a special guest appearance on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours on Christmas Eve at 12pm.

This is the news the world has been waiting for. There are few things better than Count Arthur Strong.

Other news from the Count's email bulletin:

• the Series 2 box set of Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! will be available to pre-order through the Count's website
  
• The 2007 tour of Count Arthur Strong - The Musical?has been extended into 2008
  
• The Komedia Brighton performance of Count Arthur Strong - The Musical?on January 27th is to be filmed for later DVD release. Tickets are now sold out, but keep an eye on the website for news of the DVD release!

Here's Count Arthur Strong's Infanet Web Site

Addled Offal

Great News!

BBC 7 has begun airing Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!, and you can hear it over the internet at the link above.

Currently it's Episode one of six, with successive episodes appearing every Thursday. I believe, from the description, that this is the first episode of series one (there have been 3 series so far, with another radio series due late this year or early next).

I really like Ed Reardon's Week, but I think I may like the good Count even more, making him perhaps the funniest comic creation on radio.

I also can't wait to see his show Count Arthur Strong: The Musical? Since I'm in the US, I'll probably have to wait for the DVD release, due sometime this summer I believe.

More Count Arthur Strong:

Wikipedia
Official site

A Serious Side to Nostalgia

Nowadays nostalgia is a paltry thing. TV, notoriously, builds itself on nostalgia for incidents that happened just a moment ago. In commerce, nostalgia moves product, while harkening back to a time when "product" referred mainly to the result of mathematical multiplication.

Oh, how I long for the days when nostalgia had force. During the American Civil War, "both physicians and laypeople viewed nostalgia ... as a deadly disease that might kill a man outright." Modern psychiatrists have contextualized it a bit:

In the official military medical history of that war, just one page is devoted to “homesickness,” a diagnosis that he said probably equates to major depression. Severe cases were termed“ nostalgia,” characterized by disturbed sleep, poor eating, and erratic behavior and that sometimes resulted in death. The only cure, said the doctors, was to send the unfortunate soldier home.

There are thousands of cases of nostalgia as a horribly debilitating physical condition recorded in the medical records of Union troops.

Nostalgia has a history that stretches back further, as the term was coined in Switzerland in the late 17th Century. Since there were so many Swiss mercenaries, there were lots of them to exhibit this "homesickness," as they thought it was then. "Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his 1768 Dictionnaire de la musique that it was forbidden to sing a ranz des vaches [a herdsman's song] near Swiss soldiers in foreign services, because they became homesick [nostalgic] and risked to die."

Then the concept of nostalgia splits into many war-borne shrapnel splinters (shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD, depression, abjectness) and the name "nostalgia" into moods (Alpine tourism, Romanticism, longing for the detritus of youth, and enthusiasm among the aging for having "those damned kids endure the stultifying mores we grew up with") that evoke what we now consider nostalgia.

It's a fascinating topic and quite a serious one.

To make it all a bit less serious, I should point out that the Titan of misapplied nostalgia, Count Arthur Strong, begins a new series of his towering wireless program Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! this Friday on BBC Radio 4. I generally don't exuberate over character comedy (a loose category, anyway), but Count Arthur always finds a way to make me laugh. I hope he has a few more good series in him, since the sitcom end of the writing has created a well-populated comic world for Arthur to ricochet around. I'll be listening.

George W Bush: Republican. Good Riddance.

Initially I thought I'd write a post detailing similarities between Count Arthur Strong and George W. Bush (believe me, there are plenty: hubridity, vainglory, near-Tourette's, utter lack of insight, meanness, idiocy, and more). But I like Count Arthur and do not want to sully him with the taint of Bush.

Instead, it's time to not only celebrate Bush leaving the Presidency, but to point out how much will not be leaving us: modern Republicanism. Bush is the distilled essence of Republicanism. (Even more than sainted Ronnie: Reagan raised taxes, for instance, and Bush held firm to his Republican roots and didn't.)

Bush will be soon be gone, thankfully. Republicans will blame him and not their philosopy for the stench he left over the country. But, in reality, he did mostly what they wanted, and got the country that we get from doing mostly what Republicans want.

• Shovel money to the rich.
  
• Do nothing to increase middle- and lower-class incomes.
  
• Continue to lower taxes even when the deficit explodes.
  
• Only worry about the deficit when the entire economy is on the line and we need to spend money to dig us out of the hole.
  
• Don't think through foreign crises with the brain: instead apply shibboleths about "toughness."
  
• Find some trivial culture war bullshit to yell about so you can whip up the base.
  
• Call a stupid person's stupidity "authenticity." Elevate that "authenticity" to a homespun instinct for dealing with big issues. (The fact that so many Republicans still revere Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber shows how deep this strain runs).

We will be rid of Bush very soon, thank God. We will have to deal with Republicanism for years to come. It's a pox on our country and I doubt we'll eliminate it. There's a good chance we won't even survive it.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, Bush. Republicanism: same tomorrow as it ever was.

Count Arthur Returns!

I must note that BBC Radio 4 has begun a new series of Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!

There are few things better.