Simian Substitute Site For January 2019: Brainy Monkey Post Production

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2018

Comedy: Happy New Year to one and all! (Now buy a diary.) As has been our tradition over the last decade or more, we saw out the old year with a stand-up comedy show. There was plenty of competition in North London for our business this time round, with Good Ship Comedy joining in for the first time, marred only by their venue's insistence that the show wrapped up at 9.30pm to allow more time for the purchase of booze. Monkey Business could have been on our list too, but after the emotional rollercoaster of their previous NYE show we felt that might be a bit too risky. So in the end the Pals and I settled for the familiar comforts - and, let's be honest, familiar jokes - of Ivor Dembina and his Hampstead Comedy Club, this year temporarily relocated at the Albany pub, as it was three years earlier. It was a splendidly balanced quadruple bill - the verbal dexterity of Dan Evans, the eye-watering filth of Arielle Souma, the too-rude-for-Radio-4 songs of Ant Dewson and the previously-seen-in-late-2016 rants of LJ Da Funk. The twin-DJ set in the upstairs bar leading into 2019 had its moments, but they kept playing music that was recorded before either of them were born, and claimed never to have heard of Janelle Monae. Millennials, eh?

Food and Drink: One of our biggest achievements in the year just gone was the creation of www.bermondsey-beer-mile.co.uk, in which The Belated Birthday Girl and I planned to keep a regularly updated record of all the bars currently operating on Sarf Landan's most fashionable pub crawl. It's been quite the success, I have to say: it's currently getting ten times as many page visits as this bloody place does, with amusingly sharp peaks in the hit count every Saturday, suggesting that Beer Milers are actually using it for real-time navigation. It also comes first on a Google search for 'Bermondsey Beer Mile', despite us putting zero effort into search engine optimisation. The one thing we've been a little behind on is those regular updates, although even then comments from helpful readers have helped ensure that the biggest recent changes have already been documented somewhere on the site. Anyway, early in December we went on another fact-finding mission (hic), and the site's had a bit of an update as a result. The main things we've covered are the new bar from Cloudwater, and the reopening of London Beer Factory's The Barrel Project after a lengthy period of refurbishment. I've also replied to the various comments left during our first six months of operation, and only been rude about one of them.

Telly: The ancient Christmas Day tradition of slumping in front of the telly after a massive feed took a new twist this year, as we found ourselves on Christmas night in a hotel room with a Smart TV featuring the Netflix app. I've only ever used Netflix on computers before now, and it's terrifying how addictive the TV version of the interface is by comparison: you could burn up hours just scrolling through looking for something to watch, and on one occasion we did just that. Eventually, though, we settled for a double bill of Netflix Original productions that overlapped in unexpected ways. The Christmas That Almost Wasn't started out life as a 1966 Italian movie in which Santa Claus is about to be evicted by a Scrooge-type landlord, and has to seek the aid of a lawyer: what could be more festive than that? Well, everything could, which is what makes it prime material for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reworking. Released as a Christmas special as part of their 2017 comeback season, it has Jonah and the bots cheerfully attacking all the obvious targets - the bad dubbing, the worse songs, and the jaw-dropping horror of the special effects at the climax. To be honest, the CGI effects in Netflix's current seasonal offering The Christmas Chronicles also have a bit of a will-this-do quality to them, but that's all part of the tongue-in-cheek approach: taking a similar Christmas-in-crisis storyline to the earlier film, but gently mocking it with every directorial decision it makes, starting with the casting of Kurt Russell as Santa. It's good-natured enough to tickle the same parts of your post-food coma brain as, say, a good Doctor Who Christmas special would: and if you're prepared to cut it the same amount of slack, there's plenty of fun to be had all the way up to the cheeky cameo in the final scene.