Green screen excitement!

We've not updated the blog for a while. This is nothing to do with LAZINESS, which we ABHOR, and everything to do with the fact that we've been busy devising wonderful new sketches we can use to keep you SUBDUED and DISTRACTED while we plot to KILL YOU ALL. I mean, to ENTERTAIN you. All that other stuff about killing you all was a typo.

Last weekend all our plans came together when we herded a group of actors into a room with a green screen and forced them by any means necessary to perform some of our sketches. In case you don't believe me, here's photographic evidence, and as no one's said for about fifteen years, the camera never lies.

And if you're thinking "But only one member of popular comedy double act Clever Dicks is in any of those pictures! What's happened to the other one? Has she been horribly murdered by Czechoslovakian orthodontists? Has she been fed into a blender and reconstituted into Findus Crispy Pancakes? Is she the one taking the photos?" then I can tell you that one of those hypotheses is correct.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish eating this Findus Crispy Pancake. Delicious.

I Think They’ve Got Him…

I’ve been alone for almost ten minutes now… it’s too long. Far too long to go without contact.

They say it was his abuse that cause them to block him, they say that he is possibly ‘spam’ – I cannot confirm if this is true, if Simon Goodway really is just… spam… but even so, DOES HIS LIFE COUNT FOR NOTHING!?!?!

Facebook have taken him away… his life, his drawings, the photos he took of himself dressed as a woman, they say I can’t speak to him… he hasn’t even been allowed a phone call!! NOT EVEN A STATUS UPDATE!

How can I procrastinate now?

I don’t know what they are doing to him, all I know is that where he once was there is nothing now but a void.

I don’t know if I will be next, I’m waiting for the knock on the door… its all I can do… wait.

But I’m letting you know! YOU! You precious people of the world! If you know the treachery, the violations inherent in the system then you can do something about it!

Rebel! Violate their violations!

Simon has been taken from us, simply for sharing an image from this web-series:

By watching, and even sharing this web-series perhaps you can make sure his sacrifice was not in vain….

Finding Jesus

Well it wasn’t so much ‘finding’ as slapping a beard on a woman and going ‘blimey you look like a typical renaissance depiction of the founder of Christianity! We must use this to our advantage.’

At first the hibernating Holly, the person to be beard slapped, was reluctant to leave her dark and dingy cave, so Simon had to invent a supermegabiggerburger, which is the biggest burger around, it is so big that it is not only mega big, it is super mega big, but not as big as those ones on man versus food because they are just silly. After wafting the scent of the supermegabiggerburger outside Holly’s cave for about twenty minutes, there came a sound. A sort of roaring, yawning sound, and a bit of burping, and she emerged, all hair and rage, heading straight for the supermegabiggerburger.

Brave hero that he is, Simon backed off slowly, using a large brush to fend off her clumsy attempts to get hold of the supermegabiggerburger, and eventually he was able to get Holly in front of the green screen where she put on a white sheet and a curtain to take some hilarious photos.

She was then rewarded with the supermegabiggerburger! WOOT!

“What does all this mean?” you ask!

WELL!

IT IS NEWS!!!! This announcement means that COMING SOON will be a new little series of webisodes featuring a very convincing Jesus Christ!

“What will it be called?” I hear you asked excitedly!

Why, JESUS IN SPACE, of course!

New stuff and that

I suppose you want to know what awesome things we've been doing with our green screen. Well frankly that's none of your business, but I will say that as well as the sketch in which a nameless interviewer interviewed an art critic that we'd just put out the last time we bothered to write anything on this blog, we've also done a sketch in which a nameless interviewer interviews a footballer

and a sketch in which a nameless interviewer interviews a moon landing conspiracy nutter.

As you can see, we've embraced this technology that allows us to produce pretty much any sketch we can think of, and used it to produce three that are almost identical.

Forgive Me Father continues, of course, and is hurtling towards its gripping finale - honestly, it's a good one, you won't be disappointed, unless you've got your heart set on it all being a dream in which case you're in for a bitter blow. And there are only two episodes left, so if you haven't even started watching it yet, this would be a good time to start. I've given you the link, I can't make it easier than that.

"I'm not watching three and a half hours of your face with only your word that it's any good," is probably what you're thinking. Well, now you can have someone else's word, because it's only gone and had a review! A proper one on a proper website and everything! Go and read it now. Did you read it? Did you read the bit that said it's "genuinely gripping and Goodway’s heartfelt performance is frankly touching"? Yes, I thought you'd like that bit.

And that's all that's happened.

Going green

Two whole weeks we've left you bereft of blog posts! It's terribly cruel, I know, and probably violates the Geneva Convention, and we should be ashamed (we're not) but we've been busy filming wonderful new things for you. We even spent actual money and bought a green screen, so now our sketches can have more interesting backgrounds than a wall! Look, here it is:

You see? You didn't believe me, and now you look like a fool! Unless you did believe me, in which case you just look normal. Now I come to think about it I'm not sure why you wouldn't. Anyway, it has greatly improved our capabilities. If you want to see the difference - and I don't know why you would, but it's a clever way of segueing into showing you our new sketches so let's pretend you do - here's the last one we put out before we got the green screen:

And here's the first one we've put out since:

Money well spent, I'm sure you'll agree. Of course you will, it wasn't your money.

Meanwhile, Forgive Me Father continues and is getting very close to its spectacular finale. If you aren't up to date, you should probably go and catch up with all the episodes at the Forgive Me Father website. Do it. Do it now! Then you should probably tell your friends about it. And your enemies. And random people you see in the street. It's fine, they won't think you're a weirdo or anything.

Week

Let's cut to the chase this week, shall we? Here's a sketch.

Here's an episode of Forgive Me Father.

And here - because we're now three quarters of the way through the story - is another little recap of the story so far.

That's your lot. Now leave me alone, I'm busy.

The onion gods are here!

Yes, yes, I know our weekly round-up blog usually appears on the Friday, and I realise that its absence has presumably caused great despondency throughout the land and rumours of our slaughter at the hands of, oh I don't know, evil ninja capuchin monkeys or something. Well we're just a bit late. Get over it.

The things that have happened this week, as if you didn't know, are thus:

We released a new sketch! I don't know why I felt that warranted an exclamation mark, we do it every week. Anyway, here it is.

And, obviously, a new episode of Forgive Me Father. Get your face round this.

But most thrillingly of all, if anything could be more thrilling than both of those things, which is doubtful, we released a book! Onion Gods is available now! You should probably just click on the 'Books' tab at the top of this page to find the links to it in its various formats. What, that's too much like hard work for you? Fine. Here it is.

The onion gods are nearly here!

Do I really have to tell you what we've been doing this week? Every bloody week I do this, and what thanks do I get? Does one single person read this and think "What a wonderful gift to the world this is, I must show my thanks by sending them a little present, such as a cabbage or half a million pounds"? No, they don't.

And yet here I am, telling you out of the goodness of my heart about the new sketch we released this week, which looks like this:

And then, undeterred by the total lack of gratitude you've shown for that, nevertheless also telling you about the new episode of Forgive Me Father, which really is getting terribly exciting now, and has got a murder in it. So you'll be wanting to watch that.

And then... well actually that's it. We didn't even release a book reading to plug Onion Gods, which is coming out on Wednesday. I KNOW! IT'S EXCITING! Instead, we linked to a radio play of the title story which some clever people made.

That's it. Go and do something else now.

The onion gods are still coming!

There can be few things in life more exciting than the release of a new Customer Service sketch. Jumping out of a helicopter strapped to a shark comes close, and doing that thing where you prop one foot on the wheel arch of a supermarket trolley and use the other foot to propel you down the aisle is basically the most exciting thing in the world, but a new Customer Service sketch is a definite second. So prepare to be excited, because there's a new Customer Service sketch!

There's also a new episode of Forgive Me Father, which is almost as exciting but probably less surprising given that there's one every week. But it might be the most exciting one so far. What do YOU think?

Of course to make an informed opinion, or to really understand what's going on at all, you should watch all the other episodes first. Which you can do by clicking on the link at the top of this very page! No, not that far up. That's the Clever Dicks logo. Down a bit. Where it says Forgive Me Father. No, now you're on the link to our books. Right a bit. That's it. Now click on that and spend the next two and a half hours watching all 17 episodes. I'm certain that you haven't got anything better to do.

Meanwhile, there's only a week and a bit until the release of our book Onion Gods! Here's an extract from one of the stories in it.

The onion gods are coming!

I bet you think we couldn't possibly have any news this week that's more exciting than we had last week. Well, you're wrong! I bet you can't even remember what last week's news was. You're useless.

This week's news is that we're releasing a book! Not that that should be too surprising because we've already got three books out there. Well, this is another one.

That's pretty much all the information you need on that there picture. So I don't really need to tell you anything else about it. Just, you know, get it. On the 5th of February. Because that's when it comes out. Oh and just for you, here's a free story out of it.

Elsewhere in the news we released our shortest sketch yet

and another episode of Forgive Me Father.

That should be enough to keep you busy for now.

Customer Service Live!

Another week closer to the heat death of the universe means another week of exciting releases from Clever Dicks, but not only have the usual things been happening - which I'll get to in a minute - but there are two additional exciting things to tell you about, both of which are so wonderful you'll probably want to throw yourself off a tall building at the realisation that your life will never be as exciting as ours!

The first exciting thing is that the Clever Dicks did our first ever live performance! On Wednesday night, Brenda and Marge of Customer Service fame stood in front of, oh, at least twenty people - maybe even as many as thirty! - and talked a load of old rubbish. I think it's safe to say that it was a triumph, with everyone laughing much more than we were expecting, and in all the right places. In the wake of this triumph you can expect us to get carried away and plan some sort of ridiculously ambitious live show which goes catastrophically wrong and destroys Norway or something. Which will be a shame. I like Norway.

The second exciting thing is that our thrilling drama serial Forgive Me Father now has its own website! Here it is. But in case you can't be bothered to click on that, you can watch the new episode without even leaving this page.

And of course we also released another wonderful sketch. If you're the sort of person who gets offended by very rude jokes and religious mockery, then quite frankly you shouldn't be watching our sketches to begin with, so you've only got yourself to blame.

Pigs in blankets

Right well let's have none of that "Happy new year!" nonsense, I'm sure you've had quite enough of that already. But as it happens you probably will have a brilliant year, thanks to all the wonderful things we've got lined up for you. We have lots more sketches and series and short films and probably some competitions and, who knows, maybe even one or two book launches for when you can neither access the internet nor live without some Clever Dicks goodness.

But before we get started on all those things we'd better do a quick catch up on what you might have missed over Christmas if you were too busy stuffing yourself with pigs in blankets.

There was the Customer Service Christmas special, which now seems rather out of season but you should watch it anyway, because it's good.

And then there's our first post-Christmas sketch, which is another historical one that's completely accurate and educational.

Which only leaves Forgive Me Father, which unlike our outpouring of sketches didn't take a break over Christmas, so there are THREE WHOLE NEW EPISODES since last we banged on about it on the blog. They also happen to be the three episodes in which there's a great big twist that turns the story around and sends it off in a completely different direction, so you really don't want to miss them. I'll just link to the playlist.