spinofflive
hugh;aurie

Pop CultureApril 13, 2017

Throwback Thursday: Never forget that Hugh Laurie was in Spice World

hugh;aurie

Longtime Hugh Laurie fan Pete Douglas counts the reasons why the Chance actor and Spice World star remains one of the greats of our time. 

How is it the second week of April already?  I feel like I have only just digested my Christmas pudding, taken the decorations down from the tree,  experienced the empty feeling of having no real summer to speak of (OK that last one is definitely, and quite tragically, true) and yet here I am, staring bleakly into the endless abyss of winter.  

It seems my four year old son is in a similar state of denial about the passage of time – for the past four months all he has wanted to watch is the hit kids movie Arthur Christmas. For those of you unfortunate enough to be out of the festive toddler loop, Arthur Christmas is a British holiday tale which features the voices of James McAvoy, Bill Nighy and the great Hugh Laurie – who provides much of the humour as Santa’s eldest, control-freak son, Steve.  

Watching Arthur Christmas for the 1,097th time, it struck me just how fantastic Hugh Laurie has been in so many roles – and so many ways – for so long. Any tribute can but only scratch the surface of the man, but here’s my humble attempt to sum up some of his career highs, and maybe even the odd low:

Chance

Chance is Laurie’s most recent entry in the misanthropic medical professional stakes, and it’s a good ‘un. He plays Dr. Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist (what that?) who gets entangled in a love triangle with a patient and her abusive police detective husband. It’s a great, languidly-paced thriller that subtly lures you in before managing to surprise you out of nowhere.

The Night Manager

Hugh Laurie won a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for his portrayal of a shadowy arms dealer named Richard Onslow Roper in this suspenseful espionage-hued miniseries. Our hero followed up his victory with a pretty grim, but ultimately hilarious Trump-lambasting acceptance speech, in which he took the award home on “behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere”. Ouch.        

House

Americans didn’t really have too much idea who Laurie was until he grumpily popped up on their screens back in 2004 as the unorthodox medical genius Dr. Gregory House. The titular House hobbles around on his cane, unshaven, snapping at his overworked team that the poor and unfortunate patient in question is not suffering from Lupus (it’s never Lupus – except for that one time when it actually was Lupus, much to the justified delight of Lupus advocates everywhere).     

Blackadder

Laurie joined the cast of Blackadder fulltime for the third season as the foppish twit, and utterly gormless buffoon George, the Prince of Wales (a role he basically reprised in the final season Blackadder goes Forth as Lt. The Hon. George Colthurst St Barleigh). Laurie often stole the show in these two seasons with his imbecilic, parodic skewering of the British upper classes.

A Bit of Fry & Laurie

Working with that other smart cookie Stephen Fry, this late ’80s and early ’90s sketch show was sharply funny and carried on the fine tradition of antecedents such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Two Ronnies. Particularly notable was the protagonists’ willingness to take on the conservative British governments of the day in prime time, often in barbed set pieces. Laurie’s nonsensical young Tory speech seems especially (and sadly) prescient in the post-Brexit era/error.

Writing

Did you know Hugh Laurie has written a novel?  I haven’t read it – and it sounds kind of suspect quality-wise if I’m to be to be perfectly honest – but writing a book just because you can is kind of admirable in itself, don’t you think?

Cameos

Laurie pops up on some strange and unexpected places, including the music videos for Kate Bush’s ‘Experiment IV’, and alongside John Malkovich in Annie Lennox’s ‘Walking on Broken Glass’.

He even appears in a very brief cameo on that Friends episode where they go to England (I’m not sure any episodes of Friends have aged quite as badly as those UK based ones, but let’s leave that for another day). Even more crucially, he made a tiny but crucial turn in that towering masterpiece of 90’s cinema Spice World.

Music

Laurie has shown off his musical chops as far back as the Fry and Laurie days, and even managed to wrangle this skill occasionally into his gig on House, which ultimately afforded him the luxury of recording a couple of really quite decent New Orleans jazz and blues tribute albums.

While Laurie’s piano skills are very impressive, it’s a bit disconcerting when he starts singing in his faux American accent (through no fault of his own). It’s as if that old crank House M.D. has wandered in and hijacked an admittedly excellent jazz club night.


Watch Hugh Laurie do his thing in Chance, exclusively on Lightbox

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

Keep going!
AAVajnIm

Pop CultureApril 13, 2017

How rich-lister Doug Myers bankrolled one of the greatest singles of the 2000s

AAVajnIm

Beer baron Sir Douglas Myers’ many achievements have been revisited after his passing last week. Pete Douglas takes a look at one of the most fascinating and unlikely of his successes – helping bring the great Gnarls Barkley single ‘Crazy’ into the world.      

Deep into the second season of the greatest teen soap of them all, Dawson’s Creek, the show’s main antagonist Abby Morgan gets drunk, hits her head on a pier, falls in the water, and unceremoniously drowns. It’s one of TV’s oddest tragedies, because it’s not really treated like one at all. Jen tries vainly to jump in after Abby and save her, the party they are at carries on obliviously, and after a quick farewell episode the verbose crew of Capeside carry on over-explaining and under-acting on all their many, many feelings like nothing ever happened. This has always struck me as odd, because in real life even supposed villains usually receive a proper send off, and some recognition of their achievements.

I thought of Abby when multi-millionaire rich-lister Sir Douglas Myers passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Along with his death came a torrent of tributes outlining the innumerable achievements of his life. Between his creation of a vast fortune via the success of Lion Nathan, for whom he acted as CEO of for many years, to his contribution to higher education via the various scholarships and funds he set up through his life, there was a lot of ground to cover.

However, like quite a few people of a similar age and outlook, my own views of the man during his life were not quite so glowing. Myers was key player in The Business Roundtable – an absurdly named right wing think tank which was formed in 1985. The Business Roundtable was kind of like King Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable, if the Knights had eschewed their values of courage, honor, dignity, courtesy, and nobleness for a goal of pushing economic reform along as fast as humanly possible.

Douglas Myers circa early 80s

Sir Douglas Myers acted as chair of the Roundtable for a number of years, during which he was also a friend of Sir Roger Douglas, and played an advisory role in pushing the deregulation and free market ethos which became known as “Rogernomics”. When I was really little, other kids at school would ask me “Are you related to Roger Douglas? My dad says he’s a bastard.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t, but I’d still dutifully waddle home and ask Dad the same, who in turn would make a throaty “yuck” sound like a cat coughing up a furball, which I think in modern parent-to-child discourse translates to “HELL NO”.

I also remember some historically bad takes, such as a 1998 opinion piece where Myers stated that there’s no real value in public libraries (rip my heart out and throw it on the ground while you’re at it, mate), and when he deemed the implementation of a youth minimum wage during the Clark years as being the start of “a death by a thousand cuts” for the reforms he’d helped kick off and champion for so long.

However a brief note in one of the obituaries piqued my interest:

Sir Douglas also helped pay for the production of the Gnarls Barkley single Crazy in 2006.                  

Whaaa?

Surely this was a mistake.  Maybe the folks at RNZ are further upping their digital game by cleverly popping in the odd bit of fake news, to keep things fresh and unpredictable? Maybe some digital editor is just a really big Cee Lo Green fan, and wanted boost his Spotify plays in some misguided attempt to get their freaky gold-suit-wearing hero to come tour here when his new record drops?

But actually, and almost miraculously, it’s true. By 2006 Myers had sold his share in Lion to brewing giant Kirin and had plenty of cash to play with as he wished in business interests away from beer. Apparently, after his son Campbell showed an interest in music, Doug Myers took the opportunity to invest in the startup of an independent music label, based out of New York, called Downtown Records. (Campbell Myers himself would eventually work at Downtown as Director of Business Development between 2009 and 2010.) Early on Downtown picked up the duo of former Goodie Mob member Cee Lo Green and then up-and-coming producer Danger Mouse, who would go by the moniker Gnarls Barkley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFpafSBKpk

Gnarls Barkley’s debut album St. Elsewhere was proceeded by the single ‘Crazy’ – which became a huge hit. In the UK alone the song became the first song to go to number one based on downloads alone, stayed top of the chart for a record nine consecutive weeks, and was so ludicrously popular that the record company decided to delete the physical single and remove it from record stores so people would “remember the song fondly and not get sick of it.” Unlike many of the tracks you might find on a list of longest running number one singles list, ‘Crazy’ was also unusual in that it didn’t suck. It topped both the Village Voice and Rolling Stone song of the year polls, and Gnarls Barkley picked up two Grammy awards at the 2007 ceremony.

Mind-blowingly, Doug Myers was there at the Grammys. In this excellent 2007 Sunday piece, the legendary Mark Crysell chats to Myers about the experience (around 5 minutes in) – where Doug raves about getting to meet “The Sting” during his reformation performance with The Police. As Doug’s slight Sting confusion suggests, he was no hipster, despite his musical success. In Paul Goldsmith and Michael Bassett’s book The Myers, Doug’s daughter Jessica notes; “Dad is not hip, and has never been cool…He has the worst taste possible in music, like Willie Nelson”.  

My Mind Being Blown By the Greatest NZ Business Fact of All Time

Hey, I bloody love WIllie Nelson!

These revelations make me wonder – maybe the world isn’t such a terrible place after all? If someone whose outlook I pretty much despised throughout my twenties is at least partially responsible for a song as great as ‘Crazy’ existing, maybe there is hope?  Perhaps people of all creeds, colours, and political outlooks can join together behind a movement of obese, high-pitched, star wars memorabilia-wearing pop, and dance together towards a brighter future?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq5WXj7hZiI

We can only hope.


The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Listen to all the music you love on Spotify Premium, it’s free on all Spark’s Pay Monthly Mobile plans. Sign up and start listening today.

But wait there's more!