Blue Ocean Tragedy

I first heard this song in a wonderful, slightly insane TV comedy called Gilligan's Island. It was a sort of crazy American version of the standard marooned-on-a-distant-island plot, back in the days before GPS and all kinds of high-powered communications devices. I think it went something like this:

The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship

The mate was a slightly flighty type,
The Skipper brave and sure
Five other people sailed that day
Upon the ocean blue, upon the ocean blue

The weather started getting rough
The tiny ship was tossed
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost

The ship set ground on the shore of this
Uncharted desert isle
And here's a list of all that ditched
On this deserted isle, on this deserted isle

[I'm sure I've got the list wrong, they can't all be women.]

So this is the tale of our castaways
They're here for a long, long time
They'll have to make the best of things
It's an uphill climb

The first mate and the Skipper, too
Will do their very best
To make the others comfortable
From their tropic eagle's nest

So join us here each week, my friends
You're sure to get a smile
From seven stranded castaways
Here on Gilligan's Isle

Do forgive me if I've got any of the lyrics wrong. It's been a long time, and sometimes, your neural net makes the wrong connections, influenced by the many other events that have impinged upon it during the intervening years.

Mandoon

Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire has got to be one of the funniest things around right now. It needs to be made into a DVD quick so that you can get all the juicy goodness in ONE package. For at the moment, it is YouTube which is hosting most of it. Probably illegally.

This show is all about a hero. And his kinky girlfriend. And his malfunctioning warlock other friend. And the big oafish Journey to the West kind of servant friend who hits the wrong people with his weapon. And so on. It is otherwise hard to describe, unless you like snorting food.

In other news, not so funny at all, there's been an outbreak of swine flu, this season's version of SARS. I remember writing this huge document on contagious disease protocols in a boarding school setting back in 2003. Somewhere out there, someone probably ought to be dusting it off and looking at it soon.

A Real Hoot

Yes, that was Alan Ayckbourn's comedic interlude, Relatively Speaking, which I just caught at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. It's an old play (first staged in 1965), yet simple and hence timelessly Brit. That kind of farce never dies, mock as you would. Here's an outline, courtesy of the BBC.

Ah, I wish I were young again! Sigh. I remember the days I used to have season tickets to such things.