The Omid Djalili Show

BBC - Comedy - The Omid Djalili Show
BBC ONE, 9:30pm, Saturday 17th November

The Omid Djalili show starts a six week run on the BBC tonight, having survived the criticism that it may make light of serious subjects such as terrorism with, for example, a sketch called Suicide Bomber School. I am personally a firm believer that comedy can subtly eat away extremist and erroneous views by magnifying them beyond the point at which we identify those views as being our own, but there is always a line below which such comedy will be seen as tasteless and that line is not easily defined. The BBC may, therefore, appear brave to give Omid a Saturday night slot on their flagship channel, but Omid has been staying on the right side of that line in his stand-up routines since he started touching on such material, following the 9/11 bombings, in 2001.

Omid is a serious actor as well as a stand up comedian, his own web site includes a show reel of some of his more serious roles. Perhaps Omid would rather be known as an actor than a comedian but he has always had a natural ability to entertain, my earliest memories of him are from a Baha'i youth conference in London in the mid 1980's where he performed some sketches with the help of Inder Manocha, now also doing stand-up routines. My brother and I did some break dancing at the same event.

That conference was before Omid took on stand-up comedy professionally and so his material has matured a lot since then, but as a long standing fan and admirer of Omid's talent and radiant joyousness, I am very familiar with most of Omid's stand-up routine, some of which is to be repeated yet again for this tv series. Hopefully a prime time BBC ONE airing for this material will be a last stand for some of the older routines and more newer jokes will be developed. The old jokes are still funny to watch, but I don't need to see them performed because I have seen them so many times that they are imprinted in my mind. That said, I do have a desire to see his "Indian bingo caller" resurface, though I doubt that will make it into this show.

The Omid Djalili show starts tonight at 9:30 on BBC ONE and runs for six weeks.

As if there wasn't enough drama...

As many readers will know, my wife Ladan - who is in a minimally conscious state - became seriously ill on the night of 17th October (Wednesday) and I was also shocked the following morning by the news that my good friend Manoocher was in a serious car accident at much the same time that Ladan became unwell. I was contacting Diana (his wife) and other people to find out what was going on. I soon became reassured that Manoocher was doing well and that his manager, Bryan, seemed to be doing a sterling job of looking after his needs. But it was reported to be a very serious accident

A few days into our hospital stay I also had a little car crash of my own, I was driving up toward a junction on an A road where the oncoming traffic can turn across the main carriageway onto a central motorway when the road is clear or the traffic lights display a green arrow. The lights were green for me and I saw a car pull up to the lights in the lane for turning across me ahead. Having two sets of lights green in front of me and knowing I had right of way I proceeded at about 50mph toward the junction but as I reached it I saw that the other car started turning into the road. I have previously seen the results of other accidents at this junction and they have not looked good. Not only was I about to hit a car at 50mph but there were also a bollard and a lamp-post to the side of the road that I have seen other cars damaged by. I have also had a similar accident, many years ago, at 40mph and then I was knocked unconscious for a while, suffered temporary amnesia, and was in a lot of pain for about 5 months. "DON'T DO THAT!!!", I shouted at the top of my voice as I slammed on the breaks unsure that I was going to see another thing in my life, feeling it ironic that Manoocher had just had a car accident a few days earlier. If you have never been in a car cash there is a strange sensation that you may be unaware of, and that is that time almost stands still for a few seconds. I swerved to try and get in front of the vehicle to avoid the passenger who was in my initial line of travel, then realising that, in spite of having had some kind of impact, I could still steer the car I looked for the bollard and lamp post and aimed the car for the kerb such that I thought it would not hit either, but knowing that the kerb was unavoidable. Kerbs can throw a car over or send them into dangerous spins, sometimes into other traffic. One last deep breath. A terrible smell of smoke. The road was louder, but I was sitting, the wind had been knocked out of me but I was still okay in my car, conscious, half on the kerb, the right way up. The other driver admitted it was his fault and seemed thankful that I had managed to manoeuvre such that everyone was okay. The other driver was planning to drive back to Cambridge following the crash so I hope there was no serious damage to his car. It was a very close call, the car is almost certainly a write-off, even though it drives, the side is dented from wheel-arch to wheel arch and the door is bent out of place at the top, but with everything that was going on the last two weeks I haven't taken it to the garage yet. Ordinarily this would have been a frightening event in itself, but under the circumstances I just drove back to the hospital where I spent the rest of the night by Ladan's side, which I enjoyed doing on the occasions I did it in the hospital, I would pray and just enjoy being quietly together through the night. A few hours of near-normality!

It's getting hot here, so wrap up in blankets...

Blog Action Day...


How to Save the Environment at Home

51 Things We Can Do to Save the Environment

The BBC Green Room

Amy Sahba's Marathon Fund Raising

Link: Team in Training

Amy Sahba is the sister-in-law of the best man at our wedding and moved to New York several years ago to work with CNN. She is in training to run a marathon in which she hopes to raise $1,800 toward research into blood cancers such as leukemia, lymphona and myeloma.

This is cause very close to my heart and even closer to Ladan's, with both her and her father having suffered from leukemia in their lifetimes. I have made a small donation myself but have little to give at this time in my life, so I am encouraging others to please support Amy, with however little or much you feel comfortable offering, in her marathon endeavour.

Simply click here to read Amy's donation page and to make your offer. Many thanks!

Google Earth takes to the skies

The latest beta version of Google Earth, available from http://earth.google.com/ has two new sky related features.

I was wondering if anybody had found a hack to make it feel like you were flying a plane over Google Earth scenery, and I was pleased to find that Google have done it themselves. If you hold down CTRL+ALT+A (according to their instructions) you launch a flight simulator, choose your aicraft from two available, choose a starting point, and you can take to the skies. I have tested it by crashing into some trees in Venice. Details on all the controls are here.

On my computer CTRL+ALT+A didn't work, something to do with having a British keyboard layout, but using the right hand (as opposed to left) CTRL with A (no ALT) worked instead.

There is also an option, which I have not tested yet, to explore space. You choose a location on earth from which to look at the skies and then click the sky button, from there you can explore our solar system and much of the known universe beyond it.

Extrapolate and Laugh

Lately a few things have happened to me which I felt would be well placed in a comedy, with just slight alterations to the course of events. A couple of weeks ago I went to pour tomato ketchup along side some chips on my plate, noticed it was a little runny, casually closed the lid and shook the bottle, only to have the lid fly open and the ketchup follow it out of the bottle and onto the walls, appliances and furniture in the kitchen. I am sure this has happened to most of us, but I seem to be having a season for these things.

I am not very good at having fresh fruit in the house, I either eat it all on the day of purchase or leave it to rot in the bowl. Somebody told me about Sainsburys new range of frozen fruit, conveniently frozen fresh fruit, cut to edible chunks where appropriate. I keep some in my freezer and eat it when I feel like having something fruity. Recently I decided to get frozen blueberries for the first time, having enjoyed many blueberry flavoured foods through the years. They were a little blander in taste than I had expected but still refreshing. The fruit was all I had eaten that afternoon and I was about to leave the flat when I wondered if I should brush my teeth, I remembered that I was out of tooth-paste and headed for the front door, I had a sudden change of mind and decided I could squeeze something out of the tube if I tried, so I went to the bathroom and beheld my mouth in the mirror, a bright glowing hue of blue. How embarrassing it would have been had I walked out of that door without cleaning my teeth and mouth!

As most readers know my wife is in a nursing home and from time to time we have a doctor or a consultant come to see her for something. A few weeks ago we were expecting a consultant and I was washing some jugs in the sink having just given Ladan a fruit drink. All the sinks in the care home are low so that wheelchair users can reach them easily, which also means that any splashes are aligned on the trousers to appear that an accident has been had, especially when your trousers are a light beige colour, as mine were that afternoon. How ironic it would be, I thought, if the consultant would arrive just after I have managed to splash water onto my trousers, I quickly grabbed a hair dryer to start drying them off when there was a knock at the door and the consultant walked in with a nurse. Ladan was up in a chair near the bathroom and the chair has wheels so I quickly positioned myself behind the chair and moved Ladan with me, in her chair, as I moved around the room to keep my trousers hidden. After a short while I was asked to get something that was on the other side of the room, I kept my body turned away from the guests as I walked to the drawers, then quickly moved into a new position concealed behind Ladan's bed when nobody was watching and handed over the item. Several minutes later the water had dried enough that it was no longer visible and I noticed this. I looked down several times, trying to be subtle, to check I was right about this before proudly coming out from behind the bed to let my dry trousers be seen again.

Last year I was given a very nice pair of shoes by a relative and recently they started deteriorating. A few months ago the front of the sole had come loose from the rest of the shoe and I fixed it with super-glue. Many years ago I went to have shoes fixed under similar circumstances by a shoe repair specialist and he did exactly the same thing for four times the money, so since then I have resolved just to do it myself when required. More recently the same thing happened with one of my shoes shortly before I had to attend an interview. It would be embarrassing to attend an interview with shoes that were falling apart but I used super-glue before heading out and was optimistic that they would stay together, there was no time to get a replacement pair of shoes, even though I had now accepted that my sentimental attachment to this pair of shoes was no longer justified. I went to the interview, there were two people conducting the interview and I was behind a desk, there were some other people sat waiting further down the room, too far away to hear us but close enough to see. As the interview neared its conclusion I went to bring my feet forward and failed. My foot would not move. I used a greater force and my foot still remained fastened to the floor, not only was the sole glued firmly to my shoe, it was now fixed firmly to the floor too. I tried to look completely focused on the interview while I used more and more force to try and kick my foot free from the floor, eventually my foot flew forward and the people sat in the distance were sending some very strange looks in my direction. The interviewers seemed not to have noticed anything. I got some new shoes pretty quickly after that, I couldn't help imaging the scenario of a boy trying to impress a girl on a first date and, after a lot of kicking around under the table, walking out of a restaurant with a carpet tile stuck to his shoe.

Fingers crossed, I'm back again.

Somewhere at the end of December/start of January my laptop was balanced on Ladan's bedside while I attended to something for her and one moment later it was on the floor and the screen had gone off. I tried to resuscitate it several times but it remains in a severely disabled state unsuitable for blogging.

Ladan's kind and generous uncle Shahram said that I could have his old notebook computer and finally, as of a few days ago, I have it. It took a while to make it work well but... all staying good, I'm properly back in business.

I lost a lot of personal data including email and a huge mp3 collection, as well as some projects I had been working on, so if I haven't replied to something for months then you will know why.

Among the lost data was some recorded material for a Baha'i podcast I was about to launch, I was excited about it having kept my Baha'i blog up to date for the best part of a year without fail, but, alas, the flaw of being a one man show hit me when my computer gave up.

Some of you may have noticed some Internet presence on my part, but it has been from numerous computers and I wanted a solid platform from which to get back into blogging. Now I have it, so, without further ado, I'm off to give a Ladan update on our main blog...