Is Mark Lamaar goin thru a midlife crisis?

yeh Stand Up America ended on a kind of despondent/laissez-faire mood didnt it? he also seems incredibly jaded on Never Mind The Buzzcocks and his material has become lacklustre, obvious and predictable as has that show in general. unfortunately i didnt catch his show for late night ITV about Soul music (not sure its still going) but he also did the Reggae one on BBC 2 a few months back and he seems as passionate as ever about music at least. dont listen to his radio show either. as much as Lamarr is disliked by many people (including most people on this board) i still got respect for the man who stood up to Shabba Ranks regarding homosexuality on The Word all those aeons ago.

I haven't seen or heard much by him for a long while, but I always got this strong impression that he was a very strong radio presenter, but a really, REALLY weak TV personality. about the only thing I ever enjoyed w/him in on TV was "Shooting Stars". i remember him depping for mark Radcliffe in the evenings, and he was wonderful.... "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" has always been, as far as I recollect, a complete dismal laughter vacuum.

the aforementioned shtick is present on NMTB, btw.

I like Lamarr on NMTB whenever the humour seems to be motivated by enthusiasm more than it does irony, although I have just made that rule up and thus I am unsure about it. It sounds about right.

I absolutely do not get the approaching-the-camera thing.

Something I was wondering the last time I watched it: who WAS Lamarr? yes yes he was on The Word, but how did he get to that, were the presenters just plucked out of nothingness and given the show?

He was a writer for the NME back in the 80s/90s, wasn't he?

I've only seen him in Shooting Stars - he reminds me of a British Red Symons (Aussies will know what I mean by this). Cynical bugger :) But cute.

Ron Mael from Sparks wiped the floor with him the other night. If any TV company had any sense they'd sign him up and produce a vehicle for him.

Lamarr pulling up Ranks on The Word - undone by the tiresome misogyny and homophobia in which he has indulged on NMTB over recent years. And his curt brushing aside of Bill Hicks on Stand Up America proves he knows fuck all about that area of artistic endeavour either.

he did the soul series on ITV, but I've only seen the one that was on last friday, on Northern, he was barely in it and I didn't even notice his voiceover. It's a shame as I do like him, Pash is otm about the covering for Mark and lard though, that was his best moment, that and the shabba thing.

Mark Lamarr is not funny, has not ever been funny and will never be funny. For someone who makes a living trying to make people laugh, his utter lack of comic timing or any ability to deliver a punchline whatsoever is getting embarassing.

...and NMTB is the smuggest programme on TV.

There is something just naturally funny about Bill Bailey though - shame he's wasted on NMTB, really.

I haven't seen much of it since he joined. But BB is great, especially in "Black Books".

Bill Bailey is fantastic, yes a tad wasted on NMTB and on TV in general - his live shows look a lot better.

Lamarr is an astute, observant and occasionally witty writer, but never stood out as a stand-up or performer - still i think he did well on The Word in the face of no competition at all from Terry Christian (remember the two were alleged to have had bitter confrontations during the show's time?).

Marcello is right in that its a shame Bill Hicks was somewhat brushed aside on the Stand Up America, but you knew they were running out of time and Lamarr just managed to shove in the 'particularly appealed to indiekid students' - meanwhile Sam Kineson, who I can't believe I'd never even heard of until seeing this programme, took up a whopping 10-15 minutes.

on the subject of stand up america -
that show tried to reason that kinison was
all comedy of hate just before his death,
but the funiest thing ever years prior.
which is the best representation
(video/dvd/tape/album) of the early good stuff ?
he was pretty underexposed over here in either era
so it's all a bit of a mystery

Hicks certainly took the odd bit of inspiration from Kinison (and they tried rather cattily to illustrate that by picking a Hicks clip with the same subject matter to one of the Kinison clips that had just been shown), but it did seem bitter of Lamarr to brush him aside in that way. They were both important, but I think Hicks developed what he was doing a lot further.

As for the supposed lack of impact by Hicks in the States, well he was certainly bigger over here but there was a massive outcry when Letterman pulled his abortion routine from the air. (And that was about his 17th appearance on Letterman - hardly making him an unknown comedian.)

I've only got one Kinison record, and by all accounts it's the worst - 'Leader of the banned'. There's some good stuff, a very cowardly routine about phoning up a bloke's girlfriend and shouting "BITCH" at her, and some rather pointless covers of rock tunes (AC/DC, the Stones) on the other side. 'Have you seen me lately' is supposed to be better.

NMTB is disgusting these days, the worst part is the part where they have to guess the popstar out of the lineup of 5 lookalikes. They make a smart assed conformist dig at anyone who has an odd physical trait or a haircut of any type and then they top it all off with the same old same old "hahaha what were we thinking back then" nonsense, yeah we're so much wiser now!

post-quiff Lamarr = naff, basically

mark s nails NMTB:

"So here, late the same autumn, are irrepressible duo Daphne and Celeste on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, BBC2’s comedy-celebrity pop panel-game, which features two teams of current off-mainstream stars, defensively mocking pop. The host is acerbic stand-up Mark Lamarr, formerly third-string presenter of unlamented crappy Friday night pop-variety show The Word: team captains are fat stand-up Phill Jupitus (formerly ranting punk-ish bill-filler Porky the Poet) and gangling stand-up Sean Hughes, kind of a Dublin slacker Garry Shandling w/o the material. With two guests each, usually one old-school and one new-school popstar, the teams are fired what-happened-next, complete-the-lyrics, name-this-tune and other undemanding diversions.
The overall tone is a rancid broth of smugly hip break-the-frame gamesmanship, and everything-in-pop-is-worthless-including-us pre-emptive ragging. In its nastiest moment, a former celebrity (the singer from Rose Royce, say) is invited to take part in a usual-suspects-style lineup, along with four lookalikes. Lamarr tags each one of the five with a ‘witty’ insult: the panels then guess which is the genuine "has-been". This can be breathtakingly demeaning: current micro-celebrities sneering at their peers for the crime of not currently being famous.
So welcome as guests Brooklyn teen duo Daphne and Celeste! And it’s the Pistols on Bill Grundy, only better! D&C, motormouth muppetoid sweethearts with a couple of UK chart hits (‘Ooh, Stick You!’ and ‘U-G-L-Y’ "you could make an onion cry!") and little sense of alt.rock propriety, turned Lamarr into Grundy, with Jupitus his disheartened sidekick.
The script goes like this: the girls don’t stop talking. Lamarr is visibly annoyed, as if anyone cares who ‘wins’ or ‘loses’ ; as if the rules of this quiz matter to a single watcher. They talk over his carefully prepared ‘anti-industry’ gags. Then they talk some more, at helium pitch and Paglia speed. Old man Lamarr tries to police them, to shut them up. They find his pompous rudeness funny, the whole situation funny. Two irrepressible Brooklyn-Jersey girls, they join in with vivid abandon: they take too long acting out songs. It’s all a game. Their subversion is to refuse to sneer: they love Gwen Dickie, they love Graham Gould of 10cc (another guest), they love everything.
Jupitus, hack purveyor of Unearned Attitude, visibly deflates. It’s as if he’s been faced with the ghost of his own youthful rebellion: he sees himself in a mirror, plump fraud of a cog, faking revolt against the machine even as he smoothly contributes to its runnings. Lamarr isn’t even this perceptive — he’s simply too angry at these whippersnappers making a mockery of his micro-celeb laziness: he doesn’t notice how reactionary his anti-industry cool has become, what a hypocrite he is."

God I wish I'd seen the show he describes (and another one where Chris Moyles was seemingly hacked apart) - 'cos yeah, Lamarr's attitude towards most women guests on this show went through a phase of being really nasty - hardly watch it anymore so don't know if he's still like that.

(When Lamarr presented BBC2's Edinburgh-Festival-coverage progs for a year or two there were cringe-inducing moments where he would make little Jerry Springer Summation type paragraph-speeches about what was/wasn't Important or Art.)