We've been back from America for a month now.  I can't believe how fast the time flies.  Time flies like an arrow, they say.  But they also say the fruit flies like a banana.  I imagine they do.  I'm on the train right now, sitting at a table with a guy with floppy hair who's reading a copy of Metro.  It's Sir Alan Sugar.  He's a stroppy fucker, isn't he.  Ugly bastard, too.

 

As well you know, I'm utterly skint.  Tommy and I have become hermits in order to preserve what little money we do have, along with the joyous fun of completing our holiday DVD, which some of you will now have sat through in all its two-hour-and-ten-minute, two hundred and fifty-six kilobyte-per-second glory.  I hope you enjoyed it, despite the fact that it's actually twelve times shittier quality than the DVD version. 

 

It was a labour of love, that DVD.  If you can imagine a two-and-a-half-week stretch of time whereby every evening, after coming home from work, you knew you had six hours of further work to do.  Though, yes, it's creative and so, to a certain extent, you can do what you like with it, you really are still bound to certain constraints.  I couldn't, for example, take myself away into a little corner with my laptop, beautifully rendering space monkeys which I then could have composited over certain scenes of Oklahoma, turning our travel documentary into a sci-fi.  That would have been nice and, perhaps it would have relieved the boredom, but really, it's not the done thing because it defies the genre within which we worked.

 

There are a few things we agonised over.  For a start, we didn't know whether to pixel out Tommy's arse.  At first, we decided not to because I didn't know how to do it.  Being me, of course, I found out how to do it and understand completely how it's done now and, wanting to illustrate that I can now pixel out peoples features, I rather thought it would be quite funny to apply such an effect to Tommy's arse.  He, however, considered it funnier to leave the posterior unobscured.  I relented considering, you know, it is his arse, after all.

 

The second thing we agonised over, long and hard, was the swearing.  In particular, the scene in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Tribeca, Manhattan, when Tommy was very, very drunk after a long night out on the tiles in the super-fashionable meat packing district.  It was about half-two in the morning and Tommy was, as Tommy is in these types of occasion, very, very loud.  Tommy is very contrary.  He likes to be.  Especially when he's drunk, so if you're telling him to be quiet, he'll shut up.  I called him a cunt in the hope that it would take his attention off of being loud, which, to an extent, it did because he then started saying the word quite a lot.  But unfortunately, he did so very loudly and the scene in question features Tommy striding drunkenly through the corridors of the hotel in the dead of night (though such a thing never truly exists in New York) chanting that marching song ("we don't know what's going on, someone said 'just run along'" with only one word as its lyrics.  That word, of course, is cunt.

 

The decision was, clearly, whether to include the scene at all - that was a given, really: it was much too funny to leave out - and whether to bleep the offending expletives out, much as we did in the Iceland DVD.  Considering he says the word more than sixty times (count 'em!) we felt that it was far more amusing than it was offensive, and, though I quite liked the idea of bleeping it out just to show that we can, we decided to leave it all in.  We felt that the audience would understand that we are not degrading women by using a word that is the most abrasive synonym for the female genitalia.  It is not meant to be disparaging to anyone and was just meant as an illustration of quite how drunk we were and how silly we get when we're in that state.

 

 

 

 

Thirdly was the 'is Donna bulimic?' scene.  We come across as downright nasty in some of that scene and I also make a comment of which I would be embarrassed if it weren't so funny.  "Is Donna bulimic," asks Gemma.

"Nnnno, have you seen her?"

You see, it's nasty, but it's funny.  It's probably funny because it's nasty, really, but also just because it's funny.  By this point in the holiday, though, we were so annoyed with Donna's apathy, lethargy and depressive mood that we felt that she was single-handedly ruining our holiday.  This, to us, was unacceptable and so we were picking up on everything she was saying and doing.  Why was she wearing a scarf in the baking Oklahoma heat?  Why did she wear a coat on a beach in Malibu while other around us were sunbathing in just their trunks or bikinis?  Why did she spend half-an-hour in the morning spraying her clothing with Febreeze and stroking the screen on her phone where images of her cat were playing?  Why did she only drink water?  Why did she so resent tipping?  Why did she complain about the frequency of having to purchase fuel?  More to the point, why the fuck did she come on the holiday? 

 

So, behind her back, we realised, on camera, that she does go to the loo after every time we ate and not just when we were setting off in the morning.  And she took ages.  And she always waited for Gemma to go first, and until she came out.  There really is a strong batch of evidence to say she may be bulimic and this was discovered on-camera.  Because we're fairly honest people, we addressed this to her when she returned and the reaction was also seen on-screen, but if you're anything like us, you won't have been entirely convinced.  Now, if she is suffering from an eating disorder, then she needs help and she needs to disclose that fact in order to get help.  I'm not saying that taking the piss in the way we did was at all a service, I will freely admit that we weren't being very nice, however when or if her parents watch the DVD, perhaps it'll sound alarm bells.  Perhaps Donna's dad'll end up on our doorstep threatening violence for being so unpleasant to his daughter, but whatever, I hope that if she needs help, she gets it.  I, though, am fucked off.  I'm exhausted.  I have completely run out of sympathy for Donna.  I have tried and tried and tried again over the last eight-and-a-half years that I've known her to help her out.  I've given her advice, I've held her hair back when she's been sick through drinking too much, I've given her somewhere to sleep when she's incapable of so much as standing.  We rushed to her place and brought her to ours when she felt very low; in short, we've been there for her.  A lot.  But it never makes a difference for one reason and one reason only: she won't help herself.

 

So I'm done.  For now, at least.

I just don't have the energy to carry on wracking my brain, being concerned for her.  She won't do anything to help herself, so why should I bother to try to help her? 

 

So, for realism, to get this point across and because of my awfully witty remark, we left that scene in.  Rightly or wrongly.  It was the only scene we were very close to deleting.  But, unfortunately, being pissed off with Donna was an integral part of that holiday, and so it's there.  It's slightly uncomfortable viewing as well, which is great, because it does what I always like stuff that we do together to accomplish.

 

It provokes a response.

 

The last thing we agonised over and, in fact, had an argument over was on the warning screen at the beginning, for it was added afterwards.  I wanted 'enjoy' to have a full stop.  Tommy wanted an exclamation mark.  Tommy won, obviously.  I saw the use of a full stop to be more me.  He saw the use of the exclamation mark to be more him.  I'd done the credits on my own, but he'd done the larger portion of the editing (except all the fiddly technical bits, that's my domain) so we decided that he should moisten my dryness and use an exclamation mark.  I'm still not happy about it.  It should be a full stop.  I hate exclamation marks at the end of a gag, it's like saying "geddit!".  But still, it's a very minor detail, so I shouldn't be so concerned, really. 

 

Right.  I'm actually in the office now, so I'd really better go.