David M. Green: Purveyor of fine humour

  • Insane about Mad Men (the show. I’m straight.)

    Hello!

    David M. Green. Long time no blog. My apologies, for I have been applying to jobs and universities, filling in forms and submitting things to various places (more will be revealed if and when there’s anything to reveal), so I haven’t been much in the mood to construct a shiny new blog entry. Although, I have had a number of ideas for blogs that I didn’t get around to writing about…

    Channel Ten’s new stock footage show “The Spearman Experiment” for example, the show where “the public” counts down the top 15 of something. Episode One, that went to air September 8th, was counting down the top 15 “Aussie Comedy Characters.” First of all, it’s a crime that none of Shaun Micallef’s characters appeared in the list. At the very least I would have expected “Milo” to make it (although I prefer “David McGahn” and his fictional fictional character of “Roger Explosion”). Second, of the 15 characters, 7 of them were from Channel Ten shows. I reckon Channel Ten should scrap the whole disguise and just make a show called “The Channel Ten Show” or maybe “The Channel Ten Project” or “The Channel Ten Attempt” where they just list reasons why Channel Ten is the best. In fact, why even make it a show? That’s all they should play. You switch on Channel Ten any time day or night and it’s just the station logo with Rove McManus’s voice in a Yoko Ono-esque loop saying “Channel Ten… Channel Ten… Channel Ten…” because after all, they’re just fantastic, aren’t they? Ahh… that’s good satire.

    But to more important things now. Mad Men. Have you heard of it? It’s been on my list of shows to watch for a while now. I’d heard it’s critically acclaimed. So I finally got around to watching it this week. I’d found myself a little burnt out from comedy shows and I needed a nice period drama to get into. Cue Mad Men. It’s a brilliant show. Set in early 1960s New York, it centres on the lives of advertising executives working at a fictional ad firm. I love the show’s visual appearance. And I think they’ve done an excellent job of replicating a ’60s office. Firstly, I don’t think there’s a single scene that doesn’t have the whole lot of them smoking, drinking or being incredibly sexist to the secretaries. I don’t smoke (because I’m not an idiot) and I’m not much of a drinker but watching Mad Men I find myself craving a scotch and a pipe, and skipping off down to the janitor’s closet with Christina Hendricks. And I’d love to go back to New York. What a place… I was there for a mere 4 days back in 2005. I’d really like to just live there. Some day hopefully… sit tight Christina…

    So anyway, if you like a good period drama, don’t waste your time with anything else. Go watch Mad Men. I highly recommend it.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Star of the new Mad Men spin-off about radio advertising: Radioactive Men. Na, not really. I’m okay.

  • God-like Status Achieved at TraxxRADIO

    Yo blog-fans!

    To my utter surprise (and partial disgust) Brisbane-based Internet radio station TraxxRADIO actually wants to re-broadcast the somewhat funny (at times) AM-style talk-back parody show we did back in summer… On The Yacht.

    As soon as Program Director Ruby Tuesday declared his interest, I immediately triple checked we were talking about the same show. In fact we were. It’s not that I think On The Yacht wasn’t funny. Quite the opposite. At its best it’s hilarious. But I think we did such a good parody at times that you could be listening for several minutes before you worked out it’s not a real talk show, and even then you still can’t be sure. For TraxxRADIO’s unwavering dedication (not to be confused with their desperation for programming), I sent them an autographed David M. Green head shot, which they promptly framed and hung on the studio wall. My judgemental expression and sensible hair-cut forever gazing down at and distracting whoever’s on air. Obviously I use the term “head shot” in the G-rated sense. Although the sensible hair-cut extends to all areas of David M. Green.

    So once again join Radio’s Adam, Norman Vine, Dr Kevin Goodall and Tim Wray (in the news room) as they potter on about all things irrelevant Wednesdays and Fridays 7am and 7pm AEST (GMT+10) online at TraxxRADIO.

    On The Yacht: Not commercial. Professional.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Oh ho ho ho yessssss…

  • THE Big Show on Triple M: Reflection

    Greetings,

    Well last night I made my commercial and national radio debut with THE Big Show on the fabulous Triple M network. Due to delays, it went to air almost simultaneously in Adelaide and Sydney around 10:45EST (10:15CST). Melbourne didn’t start until after midnight. Not sure about Brisbane. Anyone hear it in Brisbane? If you missed it, the podcast is now up on the Triple M websites, the Semi-Pro Radio website, and the mp3 is right here.

    So that’s it. We did the show and now it’s over. Special thanks to Triple M, to whoever came up with this Semi-Pro Radio idea, to Alan Miller Fast Voice-overs (the agency we represented), to Miles and Sam “on the pots and pans” and their fabulous recording and editing work and to Tim Lordan, APD at Triple M Adelaide for tolerating us. Overall we’re all pretty happy with the show. For a once-off pre-recorded show recorded and produced with the limited time and resources available to us, it’s pretty good. Good. Not great, in my opinion. Although what do you expect? It was only by the end of the recording session we were getting into it. I hadn’t done radio with Matty B in over 2 years and we’re used to sitting in chairs around a panel, not standing “Nova-style” in a 4 metre squared voice-over booth. Funnily enough, we initially wrote in the show’s description “with David M. Green and Matty B in the hot seat, or seats, depending on budget restraints…” Ironically there were no seats.

    I think it’ll be obvious to anyone listening with a basic understanding of radio that some of the talk breaks were quite edited. 2 whole talk breaks weren’t recorded simply because we ran out of studio time. Another sketch we recorded wasn’t edited because we ran out of production time, and other things that were recorded, edited and ready to go were then cut due to their content and further time concerns. I can now personally appreciate why Tony Martin demanded 7 production hours for every 1 hour of “Get This.” For a comedy show, you need a lot of time, even if just to listen back and redo little things (which we didn’t really have a chance to do, although hindsight is 20/20 and with a pre-recorded show there’s always the temptation to go back and “fix” EVERYTHING. In a way it’s easier to do it live…).

    Most disappointing for me personally was the loss of an entire minute from the Smiddy soundboard prank call. I feel like a bit of a jerk now, as on the show I introduced it as “the greatest prank call in the history of the world,” a wild and totally unjustified claim I know. The original was 4 and a half minutes and that version was legitimately too long and dragged a little, so I cut it down to 3 minutes. The 3-minute version is very funny. Certainly a lot funnier than the 2-minute version that went to air. But thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can hear the 3-minute Smiddy soundboard prank call right here. Hazaa!

    I guess a big problem for THE Big Show was the fact that we simply had too many ideas. We really packed the maximum amount we thought we could get away with into each 3-minute talk break (evidently more than the maximum as it turned out). If we were doing 5 shows a week we’d probably spread the ideas we had over a whole month. We didn’t leave ourselves any time to potter along with some laid-back banter. We didn’t want to take the risk and waste a talk break. We only have 1 show, only the BEST. The end result is a very fast-paced show (probably too fast, even for Alan Miller’s Fast Voice-overs!). I felt we needed a little more time to introduce and explain and just chat. We could have spent another whole talk break doing impressions of those clips from The Lawnmower Man. I love the quotes “His mind is like a clean hungry sponge!” and “You gonna do some, uh night-mowing?” They’re hilarious! We should have made a bigger deal about those, instead of brushing over them so quickly. Not to mention the incredible coincidence that Pierce Brosnan’s character in that film is named “Larry” and we mashed it together with clips from Channel 7’s “Larry The Lawnmower.” Can you believe that? I couldn’t believe it when I noticed that, AFTER I’d already started writing the sketch.

    But all in all a truly incredible, amazing, RARE priviledge. We made a comedy show for Triple M! And there’s plenty more where that came from. We’ll be back on-air somewhere in some form eventually. No doubt about that.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Mind like a clean hungry sponge.

  • THE Big Show: It’s Freaking Hilarious!

    Hey!

    I went into Triple M Adelaide yesterday to sit in with Sam (our extremely dedicated producer) while he put the finishing touches on all our sketches and segments for THE Big Show. Poor Sam. He’d just got back from his European holiday the day before (no doubt to escape the huge workload thrust upon him by the Triple M production department) and he had been at Triple M catching up on the backlog of work since 5am! I got there at noon and I was supposed to spend an hour with him going over the show. I ended up staying for 3 and a half hours. Laughter was abundant.

    I gotta say, it sounds fantastic! Kudos to Sam and Miles in production and Tim Lordan, the assistant programme director for their time and advice and excellent work in bringing our ideas to life. Until now, we were all thinking “well, we’ll give it our best shot and hopefully it’ll be good” but now that I’ve heard how it all sounds it’s “Oh my God! It worked! It’s great! This is amazing!” But hey, I don’t want to over-sell it… You can decide for yourself. Tune in this Sunday August 30th 2009 at 10pm on Triple M in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or online. It’s Semi-Pro Radio. This week it’s  THE Big Show with David M. Green, Matty B, Tim Wray, Nick Godfrey & Adam Navarro and I can honestly say it’s some of our finest and funniest work to date. And we had a damn good time doing it!

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Look out for the Larry the Lawnmower sketch…

  • THE Big Show! That’s… 3 Ms

    He-he-hey!

    What’s up? No time to wait for you to answer. Get a load of this…

    You can hear the audio fruits of last week’s recording day in the form of “THE Big Show” on the tree that is the Triple M network in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide this Sunday August 30 10pm-midnight as part of Semi-Pro Radio! We reveal some ridiculous movie trailers, weird stores and what some people have carelessly left lying around Triple M. Plus Nick’s tips on avoiding Swine Flu, a trip down That’s Sexist lane, prank calls with a Smiddy soundboard, lawnmowers coming out the back-lot and some other junk we managed to throw together at the last minute before we were shown the door!  THE Big Show! It’s funny (51% new material).

    It really has been a fantastic experience. If nothing else it’s been an excuse to catch up with Matty B again, whom I haven’t seen since he last left Adelaide to return to Sydney about 18 months ago. He came over for 2 weeks and the whole team (Matty B, Nick, Adam, Tim & myself) all met every couple of days to discuss, write, plan, analyse, nit-pick and then record the show (in between just hanging out and wasting time). In a way it would have been easier if we were doing 20 shows, but because we’re only doing it once, the pressure’s on to make it the best…

    There’s still some finishing touches to make before it all goes to air in a week’s time. I’ll post more soon.

    Kind regards,
    David MMM. Green