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Reefer Madness

Friday, February 10th, 2012

The war on drugs has come to Linköping.

Cannabis use is on the increase which means that local tutting and hand-wringing has gone into overdrive. The chief of police has taken action. Serious action. Serious action in the form of a big article in the local paper to inform us about cannabis. Östgötacorrespondenten, a newspaper, generally not read by teenagers, but pawed over by their over anxious parents and teachers, has joined the top cop at the forefront of this war on drugs.

There’s a photo of this hardened law enforcer, looking concerned as he surveys a cupboard full of drug paraphernalia. He stares into the abyss of the cupboard, ready to slam the doors shut again and lock away this hell – but it’s all there, the evils of cannabis, for us to see – I know that while many of the good burghers of Linköping will find the sight terrifying, anyone who been even close to a university halls of residence will immediately recognise the contents of a first year engineering student’s room. It’s all there: The bongs in Rasta colours, a T-shirt with a big marijauna leaf on it and of course, the ubiquitous picture of an alien with a spliff saying ‘Take me to your dealer’

Corren have helpfully give the reader a guide to the warning signs as to whether you own child is using cannabis and I am going to share these tips for the readers of The Local and particularly the readers of The Local who were not around 85 years ago, in 1936, to get swept up in the hysteria of Reefer Madness.

Here’s what to look out for if you are worried about your kids:

Has their taste in music changed?
Remember how they used to dance around the room to The Gummy Bears and Astid Lindgren? And now, since they started gymnasium, they listen to guitar or electronic music, or reggae, or hip hop, or Sean Banan?? That’s not proper music! They are clearly junkies!

Are they tired or moody? This symptom is also know as ‘being a teenager’

Do they like skateboarding?
This is the telltale signs of drug abuse. If your child enjoys a sport that gets them out of the house, keeps them fit and creates a social circle of like minded people, stop them now! As my friend James pointed out, skateboarding is a gateway sport.

What worries me most is that I have felt very tired recently, and not only that, I have started listening to totally new genres of music – I was rather moved by a baroque piece I heard on the car radio last week. Luckily, I can’t skateboard, but I did buy a woolly hat from the local skate shop.Will people start seeing me as ‘one of them’?

I haven’t been exposed to any drugs here in Linköping, but I’m worried that suspicious fingers will start to point. … so I’m tempted to start smoking hash, just to deal with the stress of all this suspicion.

Meanwhile, the other main news in the paper was that Linköping plans to build an enormous greenhouse. What will be grown there is being kept a tight secret, but it doesn’t take much to add two and two together and see that the kommun is planing to cash in on the latest teenage cash cow.

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Back in my drug free reality, The Tuesday Chinwag had it’s premiere on Tuesday in Stockholm. You can read more about me and it here in this article on The Local. Come along next time! The last one was a hoot!

You can also follow me on Twitter @BenKersley

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, Film, Gigs, LinkÃ¶ping, moans, Stand Up, Stockholm, Sweden, Twitter
Posted in Comedy, Lagom, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up | No comments »

Miss me?

Monday, June 20th, 2011

So, I haven’t been around The Local for a couple of months… but like an absentee father who disappears for long spells, then turns up again for Xmas and birthdays, I return full of enthusiasm and good cheer, whether you care or not!

Miss me? Probably not. But I’m here witha few gaps to fill in about what I’ve been up to for the last few months. Basically… I’ve been busy! So, sue me!

The tour with Danny finished in style with a couple of great gigs in Lund and Malmö. We had lots of fun and although we maybe didn’t revolutionise the stand up scene in Sweden, we had a few laughs along the way. It would be disengenious not to post this review that we got for the gig in Linköping:

Otherwise, I’ve started working part time for a voiceover company called Online Voices. So, if you need any voice, in any language, I can probably help you find it. They do radio commercials too and I wrote this bum example (For this I studied drama at university?). The comedy is rolling on – a few business gigs here and there over the summer (read Jönköping and Östergötland) and I’m getting my homepage re-jigged at the moment with a view to getting myself out there a little more. Which reminds me – don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

What else? Oh yes… I’ve been popping up in your homes on a Friday night, making you hungry.

So, I’ll be back again soon, with tales from the road…

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Tags: Blogging, Comedy, Corren, DJ Danny, Gigs, Lagom, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up, Sweden, Twitter
Posted in Comedy, Lagom, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up, Tour 2011 | No comments »

Twelve Steps

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

I got booked for a gig at Globen on Saturday night.

In my head, I was half way to Stockholm, picturing myself performing in front of 15000 people and meeting Sweden’s elite hockey ‘A Lag’… The illusion was shattered when I found out that it was actually Globen Linköping, a small hall in town run by the Temperence movement NBV. I readied myself for a much smaller audience and a totally different ‘A Lag’.

The event was a theatre festival where participants could try out different styles of performance. I ran a workshop in the morning and performed a 30 minute set in the evening. There was a party atmosphere and although the NBV venue is, by definition, ‘alcohol and drug free’, I couldn’t help but see the irony as the teenage contingent ran around with eyes like saucers, high on soft drinks, chocolate and sweets. They would have all been a lot calmer with a stiff drink or a toke on a joint inside them. I worry for the youth of Sweden when I think about their future dealing with obesity and rotten teeth having been exposed to so much sugar at such a young age. Kids in the UK and US are offered a much wider range of stimulants.

Before the gig I looked around the venue a bit to find out about what NBV do. From what I could gather they offer clean activities as an alternative to drink and drugs. However, one activity on offer struck me as wholly inappropriate. If I were a recovering addict, the last thing that would take my mind off my previous addictions would be ‘line dancing’. Not only would you have the instructor barking on about ‘having a couple of lines’ before you could enjoy the dancing, which to me gives a mixed message, but also, having already memorised twelve steps it would be a bit much to deal with any more steps.

The gig went well and I even got asked for my autograph. I’m gonna be big amongst the sugar-crazed youth of Linköping.

In other news, I had my first article in Swedish published. Had some help with the translation of course, and as usual, it’s just me moaning about the lack of culture in Linköping. But it is in Swedish. In a Swedish quality newspaper. And even if I say so myself, I feel quite proud about it. You can read it here in Corren

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, Gigs, LinkÃ¶ping, politics, Press, Stand Up, Sweden
Posted in Comedy, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up | 1 comment »

A CCCC review!

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Saturday night was showtime. Anders ‘Ankan’ Johansson, Linköping’s second most famous comedian (after Tage Danielsson) was back on home turf with the LKPG HA HA! gang in support.

I found the build up to the night quite stressful as this would be the first time Ankan had performed live in Linköping and the press had become interested. (When I say ‘the press’ I don’t include Linköpings Posten, whose editor asked ‘Who is Anders Johansson?’ …. Bear in mind Anders is so big he has an Östgötatrafiken bus named after him! Out of interest, Linköpings Posten lead this week with an article about the new manager of Biltema – That’s real news!)

The night was a success and Anders was not only a nice bloke through and through but was also brilliantly funny onstage, his act comprising of offhand observations turning banality into hilarity. His big finish was an inspired ten minutes about a battery operated, remote controlled bird he had bought from Netto – A ridiculous purchase made funnier and funnier as he added layer upon layer of humour.

Well, the night got a nice review – a CCCC in Corren. The CCCC was for the whole night and not just the headline act, which serves as a stamp of approval for all the work that I and the rest of the gang have done. Have a read, but be warned, I did a routine about how Corren’s reviewer gave Big Comedy an extra ‘C’ because Johan Rheborg took off his clothes and I was willing to do the same for a good review. For some reason they used that picture – It’s not the main pic online, but it made the front cover of the printed paper. Read the review here

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, Gigs, LinkÃ¶ping, Review, Saga, Stand Up
Posted in Comedy, LinkÃ¶ping, Review, Stand Up | No comments »

Yes Box

Monday, May 10th, 2010

There was a column in today’s Culture section of Corren about the over use of English in Swedish commercials. Personally, I’ve got nothing against the use of English in Sweden, what I can’t stand however is when English is used completely wrongly. The Tele 2 Cheap/Sheep pun, for example, the ‘…and that’s it’ when listing things or the unintentionally hilarious ‘Yes Box’… It’s so cool to speak English, eller hur?

Sweden, or the language purists at least, should just accept that language is a fluid thing that changes and adapts. Let the English words be assimilated into Swedish. No English speaker stumbles over the smorgasbord of ‘foreign’ words such as bungalow, cul-de-sac, doppelganger, ravioli, jamboree, algebra or feng-shui.

At the moment, there’s nothing more irritating than a young Swede augmenting his sentence with a few phrases badly regurgitated from MTV or whichever World of Warcraft forum they are members of. They accentuate them with a flick of the backslick and an arrogant air that suggests they were the first person to discover the exotic language of English.

It ain’t so exotic, Anders! They even speak English in Billaricay, Essex.

My friend Palle took exception to my laissez-fair stand point on language and told me that Swedish should be protected. I feigned agreement, then over the next couple of minutes pretended to forget the Swedish for window, armchair, pavement (fönster, fåtölj, trottoar). Apparently, French words that entered Swedish before the 20th century don’t count. Sound like snobbery to me. Or as they in modern Swedish: Vilken snob!

As though to negate the polemical punch of the column, there was a short report about a night I am putting on in Linköping in June with one of Sweden’s top comedians, Magnus Betnér, where he performs his one hour show in English. Is that what they call sweet irony? Yes Box!

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Tags: Betnér, Comedy, Corren, Gigs, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up, Sweden
Posted in Comedy, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up | 24 comments »

Late night politics

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Had a great gig last night at Konsert och Kongress in Linköping, performing to about 300 doctors, nurses and medical engineers. I’ve performed on that stage before and because of the distance between the stage and the audience plus the acoustics of the atrium, it’s sometimes difficult to gauge the reaction. I knew they had enjoyed the show (I did about 40 minutes) as they clapped spontaneously throughout, but it was a real bonus when people came up to me after to shake my hand and say how much they enjoyed it. One woman said that she usually hates stand up, but loved what I did. I must be doing something right.

I went home feeling pretty good about myself, the only disappointment was that I wasn’t offered any dessert by the Konsert and Kongress catering staff… maybe they are the real critics? Still, dessert aside, it was a great warm up for next week’s show at Sagateatern with Ankan Johansson from Anders och Måns. If you are in the Linköping area (and speak Swedish) please come along! More details here

Stayed up late to watch the UK election. I managed to stay up till about 2am, late enough to enjoy Paxman and Ken Clarke exchange banter on the BBC, but only late enough to watch a few seats in the North East stay predictably red. Not sure what result I wanted, but would have been nice if the Lib Dems had made enough of an impact to force political reform, instead of now facing politicians politicking over pieces of the same old pie. The only real pluses are that the Greens got a seat and that the BNP have reassumed their position in British politics as a joke party full of lunatics. If only the same could be said of Sverige Demokraterna in Sweden.

I took it easy today, apart from an interview with Corren about the show. Hopefully we’ll get the front cover of next Friday’s ‘Culture’ supplement. One week to wait to see if I should have combed my hair, held in my double chin or picked the broccoli out of my teeth. It’s all about image… maybe I should go into politics…

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Tags: Comedy, Corporate, Corren, Gigs, Stand Up
Posted in Comedy, LinkÃ¶ping, Stand Up | 2 comments »

Snip snip snip

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

On Wednesday at around midday, I had a hot towel wrapped around my face and was being massaged by the man who had just cut and washed my hair, trimmed my eyebrows and singed the hair off my earlobes with a paraffin soaked swab. I was back in my old neighbourhood in London and having the best Turkish haircut this side of Istanbul and paying a lot less than I would pay for the most basic trim in Sweden.

I had needed to get my haircut several days earlier and should have got it done back in Sweden. The reason, other than facing up to my post New Year slovenliness, and shaping up for 2010, was that I had been asked to be on the telly. OK, let’s not get too excited. It was local telly, but telly nonetheless; a medium that, if nothing else, allows the viewer to make judgement on the subject’s ability to dress and groom himself. But as I knew I was just days away from a Dalston Turkish cut I went on fluffy and curly.

You can watch the clip here. The show is a magazine programme called ‘30 Minuter’ and I had been asked to comment on a recent article from Corren about how Swedes are so much less polite than Americans. I think they wanted me to say that the British are genetically more polite than anyone in the whole wide world, but unfortunately I think that Americans win when it comes to being polite/civil to strangers.

In fact, in London, newly cut and back in the altogether more middle class Crouch End, I saw a sight that I can’t imagine seeing in Sweden. A young mother, pushing a pram, had the audacity to start crossing the road when the green man had already started flashing. The lights changed and the (female) driver being held up (for 3 seconds) let rip both verbally and on her horn.

The roads of Linköping are much more passive, but would I settle for a bit more aggression if the town had at least one decent Turkish barber? After seeing my mop on ‘30 Minuter’, the answer is probably ‘yes’.

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, LinkÃ¶ping, Sweden
Posted in Comedy, LinkÃ¶ping | 2 comments »

World class night with ‘The Swede’

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

There’s stand up comedy club in Greenwich, London called ‘Up The Creek’ which was started by the one and only Malcolm Hardee (not so much the father of alternative comedy in the UK, more the crazed drunken uncle who had shaken off his probation officer). In its early days, Malcolm Hardee’s club was infamous: the chairs and tables were nailed to the floor and drink was served in plastic glasses… all for the safety of the comedians brave enough to stand on stage.

Legend has it that there was once a Swede who took to the stage and was promptly booed off. The apocryphal story goes that it was a tap dancing act on a carpeted floor. However, in the years that followed, any act that was not appreciated by the audience would be heckled by the baying crowd, shouting in unison “Bring back the Swede! Bring back the Swede!” as though to suggest that the act on stage was so bad it made the Swede look good.

On Thursday, I had my club, LKPG HA HA! and was chatting away to one of the comedians, Pontus Ströbaek. We started talking about the difference between the club scene here and in London and he starts telling me that about twenty years ago, he tried his luck in London at a club called ‘Up The Creek’ which was one of the most frightening experiences of his life. I ask him how it went.. all those years ago… “terrible” he says “they booed me off”… I put two and two together and realised that I was sitting opposite ‘The Swede’… a small unwitting part of British comedy history. I knew this was going to be a special night in Linköping.

The night kicked off with Niklas Folkegård, a very animated performer who brings his jokes to life. Then straight in with the first act’s headliner, Pontus ‘The Swede’ Ströbaek. Thankfully, he has used the intervening 20 years since his 5 minutes at Up The Creek to create a hilarious, largely improvised, stand up act, that unlike many Swedish acts, has a real sense of anarchy and danger.

After the break, Kjell Nyholm took the stage with a short set in his local dialect Kisamål. Then it was time for one of my favourite Swedish comedians, Henrik Elmér, who blew the audience away. It’s the second time in a week I’ve watched Henrik perform and both times there has been at least one person in uncontrollable hysterics. You can’t ask for more than that from a comedian..

I was pleased with my compèring. I tried out some new stuff about trying to make Linköping more of a Hip Hop town. It worked, mainly because the local crowd (myself included) are so un-Hip Hop. Linköping ain’t no Brap Brap town. I was most pleased that the night was consistently funny and that the crowd left happy (apart from one lady who complained it was too loud… but you can’t please all of the people all of the time….). Of course, don’t take my word for it – you can read it in Linköping’s very own Pravda Corren, who sent a reviewer with such exceptional good taste, he gave the night CCCC (top marks) with the headline ‘världsklass’. Read it here:

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, Gigs, Press, Stand Up
Posted in Comedy, Stand Up | 4 comments »

On my radio….

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

If one thing has changed the quality of my life in the last month it was buying an Internet Radio. Finally, I can listen to the BBC through decent speakers as I do the washing up rather than strain to listen to a laptop precariously balanced on the draining board.

One huge difference between Sweden and the UK is the quality of radio. Just looking at comedy, Swedish radio doesn’t offer a quarter of the possibilities that BBC Radio 4, 2 and 7 offer. (Plus Adam and Joe on BBC 6Music). There is comedy on the radio in Sweden, but the format is unimaginative - A long programme with comedy chat and sketches squeezed between music. It’s fun and I enjoyed having a small part on P3 Appelsin last year, but the limited format means there’s much less room for experimentation and therefore development of new ideas. There’s no comedy drama, proper sketch shows or sitcoms on the radio, let alone dedicated programmes for stand up.

Of course, I’d like to change this… and I am happy to say that, fuelled by Lady Grey tea and chocolate, Palle and I finished the script for the podcast pilot last night. Next step is to find a date to record.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally got a link to the article in Corren where they wanted me lying down. Read and Enjoy.

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Tags: Comedy, Corren, radio
Posted in Comedy | 2 comments »

Midnight mechanics

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Last night at around midnight, my phone rang.

I had gone to bed early with Alex James from Blur…. or at least his autobiography, every page of which makes me reassess my life as a sober, monogamous, low volume, run of the mill existence. He didn’t sleep for days at a time and estimates that he spent over a million quid on champagne and cocaine. Meanwhile, I spend my Friday evening under IKEA sheets, drinking herbal tea and reading about other people’s hedonistic excess. What a waste!

I was trying to console myself with the fact that I had spent the afternoon doing a photo shoot and being interviewed by Corren, Sweden’s regional newspaper of the year… I bet Blur never did that. Psyche.

Incidentally, the ‘rak lång’ photo worked out well… my suggestions were rejected as largely impractical and they wanted to do something simple on a park bench…. I looked at the driving rain, thought quickly and came up with an alternative…. In the end I got them to photograph me through the library windows reading a book about Sweden (i.e. me: inside, warm and dry; them: outside, cold and wet…. Clever, huh?)

The midnight phone call got my hopes up slightly that it was an invite to a wild and crazy rock and roll orgy… but instead it was my friend Ben (yes, another Ben). He was ringing to confess to me that he had got to his late 30’s and did not know how to change a wheel on a car. He had come to this realisation several seconds after getting a puncture in the middle of Linköping on a Friday night. Could I help?

I did what any good friend would do: Laughed uproariously at his mechanical inadequacy and went back to bed…. Obviously, a sense of guilt is a hard thing to ignore, but not as hard as a phone that won’t stop ringing, so twenty minutes later I found myself in town ready to change a tyre.

Changing tyres is one of those things that any ‘real’ man knows instinctively how to do. I have to admit that I am not that good at it as it is something that I only learnt when I was in my mid-twenties, and as chance would have it, I was taught by the comedian Marcus Brigstocke. In Sweden, when it comes to changing from summer to winter tyres, it is usually my girlfriend’s dad who does most of the graft.

Luckily, by the time I got there, Ben had befriended some passers by who also happened to be mechanics. They were quicker and more efficient than I would have been, so I was quite grateful that I only had to watch. It made me think that we all have our roles in life. Ben is a nurse who doesn’t know how to change a tyre, and I would rather have him around in a medical emergency than the mechanics who knew how to jack up a V70.

Me, I’m a chancer who stands on stage and tells jokes, but at least I know how to change a tyre.

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Tags: Corren, LinkÃ¶ping
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