I don’t send round robin letters with my Christmas cards. I don’t usually manage to send Christmas cards. But if I did send cards and if I did include a letter, the tradition would be to brag about how my kids are doing so well in school and how gorgeous our new kitchen is.

Failing that, I thought I’d have a quick look back at some of the stuff that happened to me me me me me this year. I thought it might be cathartic. For me. Me me me. (Links to Twitpics where appropriate.)

January

I took part in the first round of the Laughing Horse New Act Competition. I made it through to the quarter finals, which was nice. Thank you to the big gaggle of people who came along to support me. One of those was Michael of the thomyk podcast. Oh yes, I’ve been doing stand-up. Not sure I’ve mentioned that on the blog before. So yes.

I am relying on my Google Calendar, which tells me that nothing else of interest happened in January.

February

Things started hotting up in February when a toffee removed one of my fillings. There followed quite a lot of visits to the dentist and, after the second attempt to install it, a new gold filling. I now genuinely hear a ding! whenever I smile.

February was also the month of a night at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill (acts included this ukulele band); of Twestival, where I met Thom of the thomyk podcast; and of my quiet retirement from the Lib Dem Voice editorial team.

March

Mid-March was the quarter final of the Laughing Horse competition. That time I didn’t get through to the next round. Ah well. The competition is back in 2010 and I’m taking part again. I should probably take a similar perseverance approach to Mastermind – I had my unsuccessful audition in March too.

At the beginning of the month, I went grave hunting not far from where I live and finally tracked down my great-grandmother’s grave marker in an overgrown and badly kept part of Camberwell New Cemetery.

At the end of the month was Barcamp London 6, a geeky unconference held at the lovely theguardian offices in King’s Cross. I gave a talk on politics and twitter. I’m afraid it was rather dull.

April

April was the biggest making-stuff-to-go-on-the-internet month. The first weekend saw the 2009 48 Hour Sci-Fi Film Challenge, in which my team produced the short Pressure Valve in less than two days. As part of that, I met Billy from the internet.

At the end of the month, with Michael on one of his many overseas jaunts, I joined Thom as a stand-in host of the thomyk podcast. In retrospect, that episode talks rather too much about Michael Jackson.

April was also the first and currently last time I played squash. Yes, squash.

May

May was quite a big month. I turned 30 and celebrated/commiserated with a karaoke bash. I do love karaoke. Helen gave me a ukulele for my birthday which, as YouTube will testify, may have been a tactical error.

It was a good Eurovision Song Contest this year: lots of entertainment during the final came from twitter and I won £30 for correcting predicting Norway’s victory.

I did the last comedy gig of my twenties, which was a fundraiser for the film Booked Out. It went well and premiered a New Joke. The month rounded off with a rather fun 40th birthday bash featuring one song from each of the last 40 years.

June

Following an internal reorganisation at work, I changed jobs immediately after June’s European elections. I visited Google’s London HQ for a seminar and hosted a fundraising quiz for the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. The timing of the local election results meant I missed the Liberty AGM, despite having partly joined a year earlier so that Chris would know someone else there. Thanks to a plea going out on twitter from director Ben Miller and star Noel Clarke, I spent a couple of days in Kilburn as an extra in their new film Huge.

Judging from my diary, it was around June that our local pub quiz team formed, a loose collection of regulars and occasional quizzers who would win every week if only the questions were restricted to one particular TV show. And I’m glad it did because it’s given me lots of nice evenings in the pub with a lovely group of people, all of whom I’ve got to know better as a result.

July

Having missed the Greenwich Beer Festival, the Ealing Beer Festival and July’s Karaoke Circus at the 100 Club, July’s best moment was Blur in Hyde Park, a brilliant afternoon/evening/night where I bumped into a whole load of old friends. I also did my first gig outside London, at the Birdcage in Norwich, thanks to host Dan McKee.

Travelling back to the capital by car, I stopped at a service station and picked up a copy of Your Family Tree magazine. I’d never bought the magazine before but I thought the article on podcasting might be interesting. Turned out I was in it.

August

In August, I continued what turned out to be a whole year’s run of missing beer festivals by failing to go to the Great British Beer Festival. I returned to my former home of Leeds for a wedding and made suitable noises as the taxi drove past places I recognised and other appropriate noises when things had closed down or been built. I also went to see Nick on the Fourth Plinth.

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe and saw lots of shows, highlights being those by Richard Herring, Tim Key, The Penny Dreadfuls, William Andrews and Robin Ince. I also did a couple of gigs on the Free Fringe. One of them I’ll be professional and refrain from commenting on; the other was a last minute guest slot in Alan Sharp’s show, complete with minute or two of new material, which was lots of fun to do and probably my best gig so far.

September

A busy first week in September included Hackney for the Reece Shearsmith’s Haunted House radio recording; a trip along the District Line on a 1938 Tube train with Helen (her video); and Lloyd Woolf’s Buy a Weatherperson a Drink Party, where I met the lovely Anna, Simone and James, and the Chief Exec of the Royal Meterological Society.

Derren Brown returned to the TV with his lottery predictions and, through the inadvertent magic of search engine optimisation, I got thousands of views on my Derren Brown lottery song. This was also the subject of my contribution to the first episode of new podcast The Pod Delusion.

Because of who I work for, the big thing in September was always going to be a busy week in Bournemouth for party conference. My main memory is being press ganged into doing stand-up in a hotel bar for our department’s end-of-conference get together and being slightly put off when the new Chief Exec wandered in halfway through. I talked more about party conference in the Pod Delusion’s second episode.

September also saw the second Plinther I went to see in person: the other Will Howells (no relation). Annoyingly, I had to leave for conference a few hours before Mike took the plinth.

October

Michael took the Plinth in October – an early start to a long day that ended with a rare trip clubbing. The following day I went to Dr Debbie’s very interesting talk on Thatcher. I took a leap of faith and upgraded to an iPhone; a week later I was at Broadcasting House for the recording of the Penny Dreadfuls’ Guy Fawkes radio play fumbling to work out how to switch it off. With Michael off on holiday as soon as he had deplinthed, I made a second guest visit to the thomyk podcast to not talk about Trafigura. In other podcast news, I contributed to the third episode of the Pod Delusion and was guest host of episode five.

I went along to Barcamp London 7 and gave an interactive talk on things that annoy me, which seemed to go down much better than my previous talk. Best moments of October though were Mr and Mrs Morris’s lovely wedding and my first visit to the glorious Karaoke Circus, where, amongst others, I met Paul and Kate.

November

November featured my doomed attempt at NaNoWriMo; a great gig from Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm; Robin Ince’s CD recording; a very funny debut show from Los Quatros Cvnts; more karaoke; more stand-up; a trip to the Bletchley Park fundraiser Boffoonery, where I won a painting; my most recent contribution to the Pod Delusion, on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider; and more. Which might explain why my NaNoWriMo was doomed.

December

Karaoke Circus returned for a brilliant Christmas show at the beginning of December. Lots of great acts though my favourite was Tony Gardner and Ben Miller’s recreation (here it is on YouTube) of Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s awful Little Drummer Boy. I apparently channelled a cross between Sonny Bono and the Boston Strangler for I Got You Babe.

I went to Stewart Lee’s very good new show and the last two episodes of As It Occurs to Me, which – good news – will return next year. I went to Wales and discovered that the Cardiff councillor I was chatting to in the pub is a (very) distant relation. I enjoyed this year’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People and in particular Alan Moore, despite never having read anything he’s written. I went to the Royal Albert Hall for the first time and sang Christmas songs and then it was Christmas and stuff, with my own Christmas message and the thomyk pantomime.

Fillums

At locations as diverse as the BFI IMAX, the Prince Charles in Soho, a local pub theatre and Bad Film Club at the Barbican, this year I saw Watchmen, Star Trek, Bats, Harry Potter and Whatever the Sixth One’s Called, Milk and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. I also went to the premiere of State of Play. Milk is probably the best of those and, rarely, a film that actually changed my behaviour: I don’t think I’d have gone to the moving vigil against homophobic violence in Trafalgar Square in October if I hadn’t seen the film a few weeks previously.

Bye bye, 2009

Turns out I’ve done rather more than I remembered. And that was quite cathartic, if a bit egocentric. In retrospect, 2009 was a much more positive, productive year than I’d given it credit for. And as for 2010 – well it’s up to us, isn’t it?

Two weekends back, I took part in the Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Film Challenge 2009. The name gives a pretty good summary of the objective: make a science fiction film from scratch in 48 hours.

There now follows a very laborious discussion of how we made our film. If you just want to watch it, I’d skip to the end…

On the Saturday morning, Simon and I joined the hoards at the Apollo cinema in Lower Regent Street for a briefing and to be assigned the three elements we would be required to feature in the film (mainly to prove that it really had been made that weekend).

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot us fleetingly at the beginning of this video about the challenge made by the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival team:

So the three elements I skilfully plucked from the metaphorical hats were:

• Title: Pressure Valve
• Line of dialogue: “I do not speak your language and you don’t speak mine”
• Prop: Five ring doughnuts

The other teams, some already laden with equipment, dashed off. Simon and I did what any sensible person would do faced with turning those three things into a film: we went to the pub.

We quickly threw together a basic concept and some key lines of dialogue (aka punchlines), inspired by our prop and the knowledge that we had no decent location in which to film (having spent most effort in preparation on choosing a team name), and then finalised the overall storyline. Matt joined us for lunch and we then headed to Covent Garden to try to source some key props, including the doughnuts. We bought a dozen in, er, case we needed, er, spares.

Shopping done, we jumped on a train back to south London and our own mini-Pinewood (i.e., my flat). Once there, I grabbed my laptop and started writing. An hour or two later the script was drafted, and that version is pretty much what we handed in at the end, save for some tweaks from the cast (they will insist) and some cuts for time (to which we shall return shortly).

Simon and I popped to his for recording equipment and to gather some more props and then we began the small task of converting a tiny corner of our garage into a secret government lab – a government lab so secret that it is based in a garage, apparently. Then Matt and I donned our costumes and at around 7pm Simon called action on the first scene.

We shot the garage scenes in order. With only a breeze blocked wall to film against, the camera angles had to be more 1970s sitcom than sweeping vistas. We recorded the scenes from several angles, ending with many takes of the final shot of the film (I think we ended up using the first). We wrapped the first day’s filming around 11pm (sorry, this is going a bit Andrew Pixley) and left the set intact in case we needed (and had time) to reshoot anything. Simon and I went back to his where he ripped the footage onto his computer and assembled a rough version of the opening.

Sunday began with more editing before we shot the two remaining scenes. Simon arrived with his voiceover (the first of two scripted) recorded and treated. We worked on fitting various shots together. These mostly worked, despite our fairly blasé attitude to continuity, and the first scene was completed by the time our one extra actor arrived to record hers. Looking at the running time so far, my main concern was now that we would run over our five minute maximum.

Filming in a car sounded like a fairly straightforward task but this scene ended up taking several hours. Disruptions included road noises, aeroplane noises, sirens, a car parking behind us causing big continuity problems, and, most significantly, my forgetting my lines and/or corpsing.

When we final had the scene in the can, we reviewed the rushes (as they say in the business) and decided that it would work better shot slightly differently and as one long take. We had fewer problems this time and managed at least two successful takes all the way through.

As it was a single shot, Simon didn’t have to do much editing on the scene – just trimming the start and finish and adding our flashback effect – but the one take also meant there was no scope to cut lines if we overran. We therefore chose the second, shorter take, despite some sound problems and a tiny fluff in one of my lines.

Assembling the final scene, we threw out my last line, a section of Matt pacing around, Simon’s second voiceover (the only bit of the script never recorded), and a second flashback – probably a whole page of the script in total. We had to cut back a little further so the action we had filmed still made sense without these parts. That still left us a fair few seconds over so we went through looking for any moments we could remove. We trimmed the title card, overlaying it onto the action; we reduced the beginning and end of the car scene; we shortened some shots; and finally we excised four seconds from one of my speeches, covering it by cutting to a new angle.

The film now dead on five minutes long, all that remained was for Simon to master the DVDs and then for us to get a copy to the church cinema on time. The DVDs were finished around midnight on the Sunday, resulting in this breathless 12seconds video:

We did it! #sfl09 on 12seconds.tv

I had taken the Monday off work to make up for not having had a restful weekend and so delivered the film to the Sci-Fi-London team with an hour or two to spare. And this morning, I went back to the Apollo and saw it on the big screen. There’s something quite cool about seeing yourself on a cinema screen, even if you are hamming it up. (Once all the films submitted are online, I’ll post up a link.)

So after that deeply insightful behind-the-scenes romp, you’ll be left wondering where this magnum opus is. Wait no longer. The Middlemen present Pressure Valve:

Update: Read about the making of another entrant, the Pink Bear Club’s Kromwell’s Theory on Robin Fry’s blog.

Thank you to Lord Bonkers for drawing my name from his hat and thereby selecting me as one of the winners of a copy of the Taking Liberties DVD. And thank you to Jonathan Calder for running the competition.

I didn’t get to see the film at the cinema, so I’m looking forward to it!

Jonathan at Liberal England has been blogging valiantly throughout the summer about the BBC’s Summer of British Film season. This week the genre is horror films, kicked off at the weekend with an excellent documentary on BBC Two. In addition to the films mentioned in Jonathan’s post, selected cinemas put on limited showing of what is arguably the best British horror film of them all: The Wicker Man. So Mr Nimbos and I pottered along to the Trocadero last night to watch it.

A tale of pagan worship, sexual repression and a missing child, it’s a dark film, but not without its share of light touches: Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie, dumfounded as the denizens of the Green Man Inn spontaneously sing about the buxom daughter of the landlord; Christopher Lee in a dress; a schoolteacher explaining the symbolism of the maypole. Woodward’s portrayal of the pious Howie faced with temptation and debauchery is a masterpiece – although that doesn’t stop Lee stealing scenes when he appears. There is satire of religion generally and of Christianity in particular, as Howie is challenged to explain why his faith is more well-founded than the islanders’. The climax, the swaying and contrapuntal song counterpointing the shocking action, is both bleak and unpleasantly upbeat, leaving entirely unresolved the question of whether the islanders’ beliefs turn out to be correct – a definitively British finale.

For fans of The League of Gentlemen (the TV series, not the film), there are some very recognisable moments. Oh, and Britt Ekland prances around naked. Did I forget to mention that?

Bit of stream of consciousness listy catchup.

• Enjoyed Eurovision. Went to a fun bash in Lewisham. Not too keen on the winning song but the outcomes were mostly fair despite the predictability (due to shared cultural backgrounds of different countries, natch) of some of the voting.
• Busy busy busy last week. Helped Andrew set up running blog here. Sponsor him online.
• Sprained my ankle. Grr.
• On Thursday, I was shooting video at a LibDem reception for IDAHO day. You can see some of Stephen Williams’ remarks on YouTube here.
• A day off on Friday – yay! Waited in for cable repair man. Had a slot somewhere between 8am and 1pm – he turned up after 2pm. Lucky I took the whole day off… Finally have cable again, but reckon the guy who came around a week earlier could have fixed it.
• Followed the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill debate on BBC Parliament (Freeview) while I waited. A shameful Bill pushed through mostly by Labour MPs (including many on the payroll vote), although introduced by a Tory. New online campaign against it at: ourcampaign.org.uk/foi
• With cable back, caught up on The Apprentice.
• Also with cable back, and therefore broadband restored, got slightly addicted to online Scrabble. My username is whouk if you fancy a game.
• Went to see Magicians and John Shuttleworth on Saturday, both of which I enjoyed although wasn’t bowled over by either. My brother texted to warn me not to see 28 Weeks Later.
• Have been spending too much on eBay.
• Followed a very nice birthday lunch on Sunday with more online scrabble, this week’s Doctor Who (fairly good) and gentle trip to Sam Smiths pub.
• Sad about Cutty Sark. Contribute to the restoration here.
• Wordpress 2.2 is out. Will upgrade soon.