Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind #7

Six Degrees Of Kevin. Jane Weaver. Marching Powder. Caimh McDonnell.

Mar 12, 2025

Kevin Kline in John Cleese’s “A Fish Called Wanda”.

Back to your regular programming this week after last week’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine Special, and it’s a warm welcome to another edition of Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind from this week’s Kevin, star of stage and screen, Mr Kevin Kline (above), giving off definite Manuel The Spanish Waiter Off Of Fawlty Towers vibes there.

We’ve got wildly enthusiastic recommendations of the music of the astonishingly beautiful new(ish) album by Jane Weaver, and of the writings of the White-Haired Irishman himself, Caimh McDonnell.

And for balance, Marching Powder, a great big sweary rom-com set in the world of drink-and drug-fuelled football hooliganism, containing more “cunts” than… well, write your own punchline.

Six Degrees Of Kevin Kline

You know how this works. Six steps to a Kevin hand-picked by me, from a random starting point hand-picked by the missus.

She’s gone with Melissa McCarthy this week, probably because we’re still rewatching Gilmore Girls, but I’m resisting the temptation to include yet ANOTHER photo of Lauren Graham, so let’s do this.

Spy (2015) - Dir. Paul Feig

Melissa McCarthy → Miranda Hart

Look at them, man. What a double-act they would make. An Abbott and Costello for our times.

Much like the work of Adam Sandler, Melissa McCarthy movies tend to fall into one of two categories, known to afficionados as “good” and “not so good”. This is one of the good ones, a comedy spy movie where she puts in an excellent turn as Susan Cooper, a CIA support agent reluctantly corralled into active service when her partner in the field Fine (Jason Statham, showing surprising comedy chops) is killed.

The show is stolen, however, by Peter Seranifowicz as the randy Aldo who has the hots for Susan.

Miranda Hart was cast as Susan’s remote support agent by Paul Feig after he saw how great she was in …

Miranda (BBC TV) - 2009 - 2013

Miranda Hart → Sally Phillips

Miranda and Gary leaning towards “they will” in their “will-they-won’t they” saga in the series “Miranda”.

If you’ve never seen Miranda, the description online may put you off a bit. I avoided it for years before a Twitter buddy basically threatened me with physical harm1 unless I watched it. I gave it a go, and several rewatches later, my only regret is not watching it sooner.

What if I had died without seeing the greatest exponent of the slapstick pratfall since the heyday of Light Entertainment?

Originally a semi-autobiographical radio show Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop, the very tall, cheerfully eccentric Miranda runs said joke shop with her “tiny friend” Stevie (Sarah Hadland). There is an ongoing attraction between Miranda and her Uni friend and chef Gary (Tom “Lucifer” Ellis).

Patricia Hodge is Miranda’s annoying mum (“Such fun!”), Sally Phillips is phone-obsessed bestie Tilly, forever scrolling (“Bear with… bear with… bear with…”), and many other equally odd guest characters.

Two things set it apart. There’s Miranda’s lack of confidence which has her going to incredible lengths to avoid conflict and embarrassment, which only leads to more conflict and greater embarrassment, played for laughs but also poignant where appropriate.

And there’s the set pieces. Hart is a big fan of slapstick comedy, which is not done very often nowadays beyond children’s television. There are many pure slapstick moments in the show, all done with such enthusiasm and joy that you can’t help but love them, and her.

Febreze me!

I’m Alan Partridge (1997 - 2002)

Sally Phillips → Steve Coogan

Alan - “There’s nothing rude about the human body”.

Sophie - “What about tits?”

Steve Coogan’s magnificent comic creation, the fading, the tone-deaf egocentric TV chat show host Alan Partridge, the polar opposite to Miranda in that he has self-confidence in abundance where none is justified, has been around for over thirty years in one form or another.

To take up the story in 1997, Alan had recently lost his BBC chat show after accidentally killing a man on live television2, and after being kicked out by his wife is now living in a budget roadside hotel, conveniently located “equidistant between London and Norwich”, (Alan’s home town).

Also in 1997, in what we, naively perhaps, call the “real world”, I was working away from home, staying four nights a week in a fairly grim B&B in Solihull in the West Midlands.

So when this came on the telly one evening as I was sitting there with my four-pack of Carling, ham sandwiches and crisps it struck a chord.

Although I should stress that, unlike Alan, I wasn’t living permanently in the Linford Travel Tavern. I got to go home at weekends because the missus had not set up home with her fitness instructor.

As far as I know, anyway. I mean, there was no sign of him when I got home of a Friday evening, and I looked everywhere.

Sally Phillips played Sophie, the cheeky staff member at the Travel Tavern who is incapable of talking to Alan for too long without laughing uncontrollably at him.

Stan And Ollie (2018) - Dir. John S. Baird

Steve Coogan → John C. Reilly

Well, here’s another fine biopic you’ve gotten me into.

Steve Coogan is one of the greatest exponents of the art of playing real people in films.

There’s 24 Hour Party People where he inhabits Tony Wilson, head of Factory Records and the man who put New Order and the Happy Mondays on the map, The Reckoning, an unnervingly accurate portrayal of the paedophile Jimmy Savile, and what may be his finest hour to date, in Stan And Ollie where he literally becomes Stan Laurel.

John C. Reilly is equally brilliant as Oliver Hardy in the film, which depicts the duo’s 1953 tour of Britain and Ireland as their film career winds down. There are re-creations of the classic sketches and of course The Dance, set against a fairly grim post-war Blighty, and not shying away from the duo’s marital and other issues.

An excellent and moving love letter to perhaps the funniest comedy duo ever.

Cedar Rapids (2011) - Miguel Arteta

John C. Reilly → Sigourney Weaver

He was punching in seventh grade and he is punching still.

A simple everyday tale of an underachieving insurance salesman (Ed Helms, Jr.), still in his eyes technically engaged to his seventh-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver, above).

John C. Reilly plays his buddy. While this isn’t the best film you’ll ever see, it isn’t the worst either, and passes the time nicely for 1h and 29 minutes, shorter than the average football match (even without extra time or penalties).

Dave (1993) - Dir. Ivan Reitman

Sigourney Weaver → Kevin Kline

A charming satire in which Kevin Kline plays a Presidential lookalike who is called upon to impersonate the Prez for real when the Big Man has a stroke while having sex with an intern.3

Sigourney Weaver is the First Lady. I won’t spoil the ending by revealing whether or not the two of them get together in the end.4

This Week I Have Been Mostly…

Watching - “Marching Powder” (2025) - Dir. Nick Love

“Hi!” “Very.”

I’ve always admired Danny Dyer for naming his daughter after him (albeit spelt “Dani”). I wanted to call Daughter #1 “Toni” but I was outvoted by the missus and I’m not enough of a geezer to have put me foot dahn, so there you go.5

His latest film Marching Powder is a throwback 90s-style rom-com featuring Danny Dyer as Jack, a middle-aged football hooligan and druggie who is given six weeks to sort his life out by a well-meaning judge, or face a prison sentence. ,

His wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) still loves him (and fair play to her for making the line “Are you gonna fuck me then, ya fat cunt?” actually sexy) but is fed up with all the broken promises and disappointing fathering and also gives him an ultimatum.

If you’re looking for any deep sort of statement on what it means to be a violent middle-aged druggie, then you won’t find it here - the nearest it comes to any sort of real social comment is when Danny’s mates show disgust when he gives up drink and drugs, and that’s played for laughs.

And there are many, many more laughs in this film, which is its saving grace and the reason it exists.

What we have here is a very funny cartoon rendition of working-class life in London in 2025, a kind of sequel to 2004’s The Football Factory (from the same director / star team and featuring some of the same supporting cast) with a nod to morality and Doing The Right Thing.

It’s basically Carry On Up The Nostrils. And that is a fine thing to be.

Reading - “The Stranger Times” by Caimh McDonnell

The self-styled “White Haired Irishman” turns his hand to urban fantasy.

I won’t say that much about this book, other than that I can thoroughly recommend it , mainly because I’m only halfway through it.

But like all Caimh McDonnell’s previous books, it keeps you reading / listening, is well plotted and the characters are all three-dimensional.

There are currently four volumes of his paranormal Stranger Times series in print, all of which the missus swears by, with a fifth coming out in time for Christmas.

The setting is the offices of “The Stranger Times”, a newspaper specialising in weird stories that couldn’t possibly be true. That isn’t the point though, as the editor Banecroft explains to new assistant Hannah (who he refers to as “new Tina” after the last incumbent of that role who managed to put up with hm for more than five minutes on the grounds that the post-Tina turnover of staff is so great that there’s no reason for him to learn all their actual names).

The point is that they are reporting what people have told them they believe to be true, and the readiness of folks to believe almost any old shite imaginable is what is interesting.

But when the newspaper staff begin digging into a series of murders, it becomes apparent that not all of this far-fetched nonsense is made up…

Well worth a read for fans of Ben Aaronovitch, Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt, and laughing loads.

Listening To – “Love In Constant Spectacle” by Jane Weaver (2024)

Jane Weaver has been making music for more than twenty years and it’s about bloody time everybody heard her!

Her music incorporates elements of folk, psyche and electronica. If you’re looking for a soundalike then the equally underrated 1995 album Disgraceful.

In her time she has sampled Hawkwind and been sampled by Coldplay, which is definitely the correct way round to do it.

This album is full of songs that drop straight into a regular, insistent, almost Kraftwerk-like beat immediately, which is where they stay for the whole track, but with insistent melodies and enough going on musically, with odd instrumentation coming and going all the time, so that you never think of it as simply a groove.

Play it all the way through twice and it will be embedded into your brain permanently.

Love In Constant Spectacle - Jane Weaver

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