00:00Hello, I'm Richard Gad and this is my starter pack of Cultural Essentials.
00:04I'll start with movie, yeah.
00:06The movie that I've chosen is an old Laurel and Hardy film called The Music Box,
00:11which is essentially just the story of Laurel and Hardy trying to get a piano up the stairs.
00:19I think I was introduced to Laurel and Hardy at a very young age
00:22and my mom always says that some of our happiest memories as a mother
00:26was sitting at the bottom of the stairs while I watched The Music Box
00:28and she would just listen to me howling and howling and howling with laughter.
00:33It's like ultimate escapism to me.
00:34I almost feel like a sort of painful nostalgia almost in a way watching it.
00:38It makes me very moved even though it doesn't set out to kind of move you.
00:42There's a beautiful simplicity to that comedy which perhaps doesn't exist anymore
00:46and probably can never exist even if it was attempted.
00:50The TV show that I recommend is The Office, The UK Office, of course.
00:56Not only is every line an absolute banger, a historical sort of line
01:00where subreddit's devoted to quoting it left, right and centre, still now over 20 years on.
01:05But the humanity in it is incredible.
01:07The central character played by a brickage of a face, David Brent,
01:09I think it's one of the greatest on-screen performances of all time
01:11because fundamentally David Brent is someone who just really, really is looking for love and affirmation.
01:16I'm not used to public squeaking, I piss-pronunciate a lot of my worms.
01:20And I think behind all of David Brent's hilarious mannerisms and the dances and all this stuff
01:24is a human desperation which is probably the most accurate portrait of human desperation I have ever seen.
01:30Yes, I am.
01:31Like Springsteen, born to run, the slow bars.
01:33There you go.
01:34That's your education didn't help you that, did it?
01:36Now, let that be a lesson to you.
01:38My music recommendation, without a doubt, is Pogue's very first album, Red Roses For Me.
01:44The Pogues are a Celtic sort of punk band, but they kind of exist in their own genre in a
01:48lot of ways.
01:49I probably know almost off by heart.
01:50In the rosy parks of England, we'll sit and have a drink.
02:01And kick up bloody murder in the town we love so well.
02:04And I just remember thinking, like I'm there with them, you know, rocking about like the city, like carefree.
02:11The front man was a man called Shane McGowan, secondhandedly the biggest influence of my life ever.
02:17There's so many times in my life where I felt kind of lost, like there was kind of no way
02:20out of situations.
02:22And then his music would just offer me a lifeline because it was, it just speaks to me in a
02:28way no other music could.
02:31I could talk and talk about plays as well.
02:33One of my, my sort of coming of age and sort of literature was playing Macbeth in the school play.
02:38So it was like comical to even try and compliment Shakespeare.
02:40Not only because I think it's like everything that's been said has been said.
02:43But I was very influenced by Shakespeare.
02:45There was a play I saw a long time ago called Black Watch,
02:49which is basically a story about a battalion from, from Fife, funnily enough, which is where I grew up.
02:53And it's this remarkable sort of story about the Iraq war.
02:57It was like a beautiful adrenaline rush of, of dance, movement, energy, sign language, amazing, hilarious dialogue, camaraderie, perfectly drawn
03:06characters.
03:07What it did most of all was it, it showed the kind of tragedy of the whole thing.
03:11these men that had been carted off to an illegal war and all they had was each other.
03:16It's one of the great Edinburgh Fringe success stories, really.
03:20You know, there's always the talk about fleabag, of course, and baby reindeer and everything like that.
03:24But Black Watch, you know, it doesn't have to make it onto TV just to be a success story.
03:29Thanks for listening. I've been Richard Gerd and I hope you enjoy. Thank you.
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