As for official cannons, we don't have any - we only like artillery in movies. (AKA an intro to episode one of 'The Film Show')

In most cases, panel show pilots are a chance to try out a new format or test the chemistry of the contestants without ever showing the usually sketchy results to an audience. However, in the case of The Film Show, ours also serves as the beginning of the series. This might seem, like dancing to distract your opponent in a chess game, a strange move, but most of the elements present in later episodes, such as our tendency to stray into tangents, crop up here, so it is definitely worth including as part of the official canon. Indeed, the inaugural Film Club film is one that, due to his mild obsession with that particular motion picture, James mentions on a regular basis throughout the series. Indeed, not an episode goes by without him bringing it up or finding a tenuous link so he can crowbar it into the current discussion. It was because of this very fanaticism that I selected Die Hard as the focus of our first show.

Despite having only known James for a few months (we met when he responded to my advertisement for writers and performers to help create a regular sketch show), I already knew that the 1988 action film was a particular favourite of his. How? Well, how do we ever deduce these things? In some cases, it’s the frequency with which certain topics are mentioned. In others, it’s a shrine in their wardrobe. As for James however, it was particularly obviously – because he had written an entire article about it. This piece alone convinced me to devote the opening show to it. After all, in the extreme off chance that conversation would dry up, he could simply paraphrase his paragraphs. On reflection, it’s highly likely that a significant amount of the discussion missing from the show was just that. Thank heavens for technical difficulties then.

Ah, yes, the technical difficulties. What with the system crashing, tracks refusing to play, and broken mics forcing James and Chris to cosy up to each other and share, it certainly is a chaotic episode. However, every cloud has a silver lining (whoever coined this idiom clearly wasn’t a weather forecaster – they disappointingly never drop it into their reports). Ours, however, was only evident a year later when I decided to embark on a one-month editing marathon to whip the old shows into shape (and by ‘shape’, I of course mean ‘podcasts’). If episodes 1 and 6 had remained intact, I might never have thought to reunite with my comical colleagues to record a couple of all-new retrospective conversations to kickoff each show.

Well, I use the plural ‘colleagues’. In the event, although both were invited, only James turned up. Despite this setback, we decided to press ahead anyway – after all, those partial shows needed some sort of explanation to what the hell people were listening to. If it weren’t for us ignoring the heat of a small stuffy studio and getting out some vaguely coherent thoughts, the first words of the pilot would be ‘and looks very very camp’ – and if that’s not an inauspicious start, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, as it happens, producing the initial necessary introductions proved just too darn enjoyable (I’m not sure if using the phrase ‘recreating the magic’ here would set off my cliché overload alarm, so I’ll simply say that doing them reminded me of how much fun we used to have). As a result, we went on, and completed the series of six by recording a further four. Incidentally, our time spent trying to be funny in an immensely hot room provided me with an idea for another podcast, but that’s a blog for another time...

CORRECTIONS:

*My Batman costume does not have nipples on it. Those protrusions are simply my own poking through.

*Neither Back to the Future or Star Wars can rightly be hailed as the best trilogy of all time. No, that honour clearly goes to the Gingerdead Man series.

*Chris at one point claims that horses give birth to calves. This is obviously nonsense - everyone knows that baby horses are called ‘horselets’…