Retro Blog The Interweb

If I was a PC user, I'd find one of those pony, fist-shaking emoticons and ftp* it right into the webmastery turret of the Big British Castle.

They've completely revamped their interfaces over the last week or so and are behaving like a middle-aged woman trying to squeeze into those jeans that looked so good when she was 25.
The main omission to the Adam and Joe page is in the gallery area but at the point of writing this, most of the stuff is still sitting on the server.

While I'm dissecting their page, I should say it now has one of those ludicrous alpha-numeric mumbo-jumbo addresses that doesn't so much trip off the tongue as dribble onto the floor like some weirdly named sweet from abroad that you thought would be good but actually had a strange aftertaste.

Furthermore, if it weren't for a hole full of idiots like me, you'd have to Google for the link because they are not showing up in the list of 6Music presenters at the moment. I suppose we should be encouraged that they have made a page for them at all and the artwork is double plus fun.


They've also linked this page in the tabs at the new Mixtape page and Collins and Herring have their own page at last. Richard doesn't have a castle email addy and his Twitter isn't listed but it's a start, isn't it?

I've been trawling the cached pages to gather and preserve links for as long as stuff is still stored on their servers. I saved a page last night which has subsequently gone from Google but happily, other search engines with cached pages are available.

The new format does still have a photo gallery but only seven sections have been retained so I'm listing the older links below.

The new video section points to a list of blog posts with 'video' tagged in them, similarly with the Song Wars link. Happily they've retained an area for the Video Wars which showcases A-Salt with a deadly Chris-p's wonderful Lego film for Jane's Brain and also gives a link to the runner-ups'. I still love to watch Stuart Lanceley's, by the way.

Their biography is in dire need of an update. Apparently, Joe is doing some other thing for Film4.....chortle. When will he finish writing that?

The contact page is only showing an address for Adam which sent me into a downward spiral of depression but I have to remind myself that they made this page, didn't they?

If you happen upon some of the tabbed links, you'll see a right-hand side bar that will hot you over to Adam and Garth's downloads but it's not in the top menu tabs.

They have finally removed Joe's Myspace link and replaced it with an IMDB clicker. They're still linking Adam's Blog and one of his YouTube channels. The lovely fansite is only linked on the Blog homepage now.

The tracklisting section has been tidying itself up nicely throughout the domain over the last few months and it's a really good resource these days.

My opening gambit was not intended as a complaint about the new website format as it's impossibly sexy. It was more an exasperated exhalation because it prompted a time-draining click around the endless nettosphere.

Black Squadron Have a look at members of the Black Squadron elite following their commands... Tinsel Undies Front Room Festival Human Christmas Tree Prehistoric People Bin Bag Fashion Fun Bath Sit In Bin Felt Pen Tattoo Problem Biscuits In Pants, In Street Lavvy Paper Egyptian Mummy Attack Toast Bracelets Backwards Clothes Poltergeist Attack Pan Hat Division Poltergeist Attack Old gallery Juvenilia Adam And Joe (from Nerd Army) Camden Crawl

WARNING: SEVERAL LINKS ON THIS PAGE ARE OLD CACHED DATA AND WILL EVENTUALLY TAKE YOU DOWN A BLIND ALLEY FROM WHICH YOU MAY NEVER RETURN.

So I poodled around some other cached pages and it was like unpacking that box you brought with you when you moved home but never got around to opening. It's going to take a long time to go through it all as I stop to reminisce.


Things like the Guardian Webchat, Joe's Big Jaffa and this short animation.


If you're like me, you've been horribly frightened by a great big MALWARE WARNING shouting at you when you try to access the old Adam&Joe.co.uk website and whilst it looks rather old fashioned nowadays, it's got some tempting little nuggets. You can splash around a pool of cached pages if you go in through this little keyhole. There are all kinds of silly memories there, like a thingumy they did for the Might Boosh website.

In the early to mid-noughties, David Buxton used to keep Adam and Joe's net presence organised (sort of) with various incarnations. I think I'm right in saying all these are his: The Poo Pages, www.doctormacintosh.co.uk and latterly, Reliably Broken where much of the blind alley data you've been frustrating yourself with, now resides.

The Poo Pages has an entertaining piece from Adam about why there would never be a fourth series of the tv show.....erm.

Other long-since-gone sources are Martyn Gilbert's comfortingly retro site (possibly the first ever Adam and Joe fansite), The Adam And Joe Zone, and The Toy Factory with it's gigglesome profiles here.

Finally, a site that is very much alive and kicking but was brought into my memory vortex via one of David's old links is The Idler. It has the Cooking with Toothpaste Guide, list of Very Bad Things and Joe's breakdown of twenty years of Bounty bar ad campaigns.

Otherwhere around the web was a little bit in the trade mag Televisual about BUG and an addition to the Attack the Block IMDB entry about some video effects.

I know various people got a bit antsy about the current John Smith's ad featuring Peter Kay which reminded us of a Text The Nation submission and also the Graham Norton Show featuring the Lost Kawfay British accent tutorial woman.

For what it's worth, I don't have the energy to be frisked by this kind of thing. Our lovely radio munchkins and their impossibly clever brains also have an area of cosseted naiveté (how many makes a score, again?) and I'm pretty sure the John Smith's line has been knocking around the circuit long before someone submitted it to the 6Music show. That's not to say the ad wasn't written by some agency peeps who heard it on 6Music but it doesn't really have a genuine ownership. Without wishing to shock anyone of a delicate nature, ads thrive on current trends and tip-toe on just the right side of plaguerism ninety per cent of the time.

By his own admission, Adam was sent that link to the silly accent lady and it may well have been doing the rounds. For my money, Adam's presentation of the material was in another stratosphere to Mr Norton's but it's usually the researchers that find this stuff and even if they knew what Adam had done with it, I still think it's fair game to put it on a tv show - it's a visual on YouTube, after all.

Life is too short to let this stuff get you down. Adam and Joe delight in recycling their own material and I hope they're chuffed when other people pick up on stuff they've used. If we weren't so invested in these idiotholes, we'd realise it's par for the course throughout the media.

Apropos of very little at all, this idiothole gathered a lifetime of experience and came up with the brilliant discovery that "Adams big mix tape" is an anagram of "Database Gimp Mix". Priceless, if it weren't for my OCD problem with the repetition of 'mix' and the potential insult contained therein.

Adam was showing this wonderful film at BUG this month and like a heavenly, timely meteorite, he plopped it all over us on the morning of The Great Launch


Other stuff has happened this week but the main thrust (if I may be so base on a Saturday night) of this post was to preserve a few dusty old corpses before they were interred forever.

Don't miss your chance to see Richard Herring's Sony Nominated show As It Occurs To Me at the Leicester Square Theatre.

* fling to pillory (not to be confused with ftb)