Hello to all my new subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here. Today’s book recommendation is for my paid subscribers. I’ll be back in the bookshop on Friday, and I’ll tell you all about it in the full free Receipt from the Bookshop. In the meantime, Book Club selection for September is this - discussion thread opens at the end of the month. If you enjoy reading my work please consider a paid subscription to access everything - it’s still the cheapest one out there and yet the quality is distinctly okay! You can interview me for that promotion here and celebrate my one year on Substack here. All Shares, Restacks and Recommendations are really appreciated. Now let’s get to it…
We were watching The Muppet Show again the other week; Gilda Radner was the guest star and even I had to Google who she was. Married to Gene Wilder for a time! Why wasn’t Gene Wilder ever a guest on The Muppet Show by the way? And seriously, why can’t The Muppet Show be resurrected successfully in its original formula, which was perfect and would have current celebrities lining up to be on it. They caveat is that they have to be true celebrities for it to work. Big time, serious Hollywood actors, not Love Island contestants. The Muppets have standards and so do I…
Anyway, the Gilda Radner episode is fantastic, but my favourite sketch by far is the ‘Melodrama’. It begins with Miss Piggy hanging off a cliff, being taunted by Uncle Deadly. Mwahaha, so far, so excellent. The hero arrives - a character named, very heroically - Wayne. He’s got a flowing shirt and high hair! He’s here to rescue Piggy! But wait, doesn’t he recognise this evil villain? Wasn’t he once a … flamenco dancer he’d seen performing in Kansas City? (“You saw my act??”) This is the moment you realise how hysterically funny The Muppet Show can be, because the writers were absolute masters of this sort of thing – the curveball around the loaded set-up. I imagine the joke coming towards us on a conveyor belt, and the set piece already had the cut-out to accommodate it, you just didn’t know that was what the gaping hole in the wall was.
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