The Corpses Do Dallas
Many people are fascinated by how a SOTCAA piece gets written. Other people have jobs.
The working hour starts early at Corpses House - a small sparsely-furnished Soho office rented by Corpses Joe + Mike4SOTCAA. Invariably Mike arrives first, having conveniently spent the night with several prostitutes - giving them advice on the sociological ramifications of their trade. Mike is the firstborn son of Dr Jonathan Livingston Scott phd, the man who put the 'So...' in Sociology, so he knows wherof he speaks.
The day begins by switching on Channel 4, seething at The Big Breakfast (a valuable psyching process which dictates the amount of swear-words used in any given SOTCAA piece), and vaguely wondering whether Joe will make it into work. Joe meanwhile is hanging around a tube station in Hendon waiting for people who might not need their travelcard as much as he certainly does. The success of this venture tends to depend on vulnerability, tiredness and the knack of convincing someone that 'travelling' is a mere state of mind unfettered by the need for tickets or passes so please, let go of it, please, no, look, you're twisting it, it'll be no good to either of us if you do that - look over there!! - Planet Of The Apes!! Gotcha. Ha ha. This last trick never fails and Joe is on his way.
Initial delays over with, the SOTCAA boys crack open the cheese and onion brevels and discuss their previous day's work. This doesn't take long.
Their secretary-cum-runner, Caroline, brings in the previous day's e-mails. After deleting the usual kind missives from enraged students correcting their belief that 'I'm Alan Partridge' wasn't really that good with some entertaining composite swear-words, there's little left to hold their attention so they decide to do a bit of work.
The Corpses' articles are written 50-50 between them. The working method is quite unique. Firstly they decide what needs to be said over coffee, Dairylea triangles and ridiculous crisps, then they stay up all night shouting about it. Both still fuming, they depart to their respective rooms (or counties if it's a weekend) and write their own individual versions of the article. Then they swap over. Mike sends his to Ben Elton, Joe sends his to Richard Curtis. Through the slow process of elimination (and some unnecessary interference from Geoffrey Perkins) a composite article somehow filters through.
Finally It's time to put the finished piece online. And so, using a neat piece of PC software called FTP Pro, The Corpses order a large stuffed crust pizza and eat it while vaguely wondering what all the buttons are for.
Lunchtime is spent on 'Forum-duty', wincing at the sheer ignorance of 'other people'. Mike composes an on-the-spot 300-word essay on the state of the media. Sadly, in his haste to make his feelings known, he mis-spells the word 'cathartic' and uses the word 'bums' twice. This allows five people with no opinions at all the chance to slip in and say "Ha - learn to spell, you idiot, and why should we take anything you say seriously if you're just going to swear?" The five people in question have little or nothing to offer the world. They'll eventually marry distant relatives and beat their children. Three will have heart attacks before they're forty. The other two will be killed on the roads attempting to argue with traffic for the sake of it..
After some swearing and fussing over whether it really was Danny Wallace they saw out the toilet window buying temazapam off a man in a dress (it wasn't!), it's Yorkshire Grey time.
Invariably they take the scenic route past Broadcasting House just so they can pass the drunken tramps splayed out over the steps at All Souls Church and make the usual joke about it being a 'sad comedown for such a promising team of Radio 1 DJs'. Somehow, unlike Jack Dee, this bit of amusement never seems to get any less funny with age.
Upon arriving at the Grey, the pair make a crucial decision:
or 'How Do They Write That Stuff They Do?'
Being proud comedy trainspotters The Corpses have to compensate in this area by going further down the pub than most other people. So, in practical terms, once they arrive at the pub they immediately need to go down the pub. And so, after what seems like an age descending into the very heart of publand, they eventually reach the ultimate in pub experience - with gallon-glasses of lager, pints of wine, six-foot-long sandwiches and a jukebox playing The Very Best Of Jesus Christ for two quid a shot. In these auspicious surroundings all pub conversation is dutifully recorded by a stenographer and later passed as State Law. The peanuts are stuck to the breasts of a real nude lady (often Meryl Streep or Cher) and the dartboard has a central nervous system. The whereabouts of this pub are a closely guarded secret - it's very much a spiritual level rather than a geographic location. To get there one has to really really really want to go down the pub above all other things. The Corpses found it by following Nev Fountain around with a divining rod.
After a couple of swift halves of holy water and some dancing peanuts, The Corpses head back to the office.
The afternoon is taken up in the SOTCAA viewing room on 'Rushes-Duty'. In the time it took to drink their halves the second post has yielded the long-thought-destroyed off-cuts of every single comedy show ever broadcast. Making copious notes as they go, they thrill to the "Don't want no Pakis at Nelson Mandela House" scene from 'Only Fools And Horses', the infamous "Tell that black loony left bitch to get my coffee immediately" session out-take from Series 2 of 'The Man from Auntie' and the 'stop nicking jokes from our books' line from The Goodies.
Caroline meanwhile has the enviable task of HTML-formatting all the copy sent over by sub-Corpses Bent Halo, The Mumbler and TJ. She still tells the sorry tale of how she was once trapped for three days within the <TR> of one particularly long David Quantick transcription with her feet caught in the Blockquotes.
Late afternoon, and time to water the 'Brass Eye Special' article. It's quite an impressive sight now - its leaves are starting to blossom and it might be ready for publishing soon. It's kept on the window sill, directly in the sunlight. Next to the potted history of the Savile transcript.
The day is at an end. Mike and Joe are tucked into bed by their girlfriends who read them some bedtime stories with nice happy endings.
Their dreams are perfectly edited. Their nightmares are field-removed.
It's a hard life, but someone has to do it.
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Scene 2 Int. Day
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