Danny Dyer

Danny Dyer is probably the greatest actor of his generation. Born Danial Dandy Dan D Dyer on his birthday in 1977, he rose to fame. His first big film appearance was as one half of the title role in Human Traffic. But he is probably best known for his tear-breaking performance as landlord Mick Carter in the never-ending TV drama EastEnders. Dyer brings his tremendous sensitivity and range to his work. In the epic romantic film Run for Your Wife, he brings everything you’d expect to the character of John Smith. And when he appeared as Danny Dyer in Who Do You Think You Are?, critics praised the moving scenes in which he discovered that he had ancestors. He is also known as a fiercely outspoken commentator, and has famously suggested that cocaine is an excellent reward for a job well done, that cutting your ex’s face is a good way of getting over her and that breaking Mark Kermode’s nose is a good way of getting over him. He should definitely be the next James Bond.

Games of Throne

Games of Throne is an epic and exciting programme on the television and computers and your phone which is based on the play King Lord of the Rings by William Shakespeare. It’s set in sort of series one Black Adder times, before dragons became extinct. It’s weird watching it because most of the time it’s like medieval Made in Chelsea or something, just all these people getting pissed off with each other and looking serious saying loads of made up stuff in old language. It’s so old-fashioned the script is probably given to them in the form of a tapestry. Then, just as you’re getting bored with them talking and talking and walking about and talking, they have a huge spectacular fight with some zombie monsters, or a dragon monster flies down and starts having a go at them and you think maybe it was worth sitting through all the talking and then it all starts again.

You might think it’s for kids, like Harry Potter, because of the dragons, but the thing is it’s also got loads of tits in it, so you know it’s grown-up. If there’s one thing you can say about tits, it’s that they’re not for babies. There’s so much tits in the programme it’s a bit like a hanging around in the ladies’ changing room of some historical re-enactment society. Some people say it’s gratuitous but I think it’s important to know women’s tits looked roughly the same in fictional medieval times as they do now. They must have spent ages researching it, but it’s good that someone was that thorough. It shows. One of the main characters is called Jon Snow, but before he did the news. When he was younger he was this tortured soldier man with really nice hair, which is quite an achievement when you think about how hard it must be to maintain a half-decent male grooming regime by candlelight in a violent fantasy realm when you’re constantly being distracted by dragons and tits.

Games of Throne doesn’t just tell the story of Jon Snow off the news when he was in medieval fantastic times, it does that for loads of people. It’s mainly British actors you’ve seen in Midsomer Murders and Morse and that, but what they were doing before, when there were dragons. So it’s quite educational. If you were doing a history degree at University about what the suspects in Midsomer Murders were doing when they were goblins, it’d be a great way to revise. The show is so popular, that that’ll probably be a round on University Challenge one day, or a one-off special, with Jeremy Paxman in a smock.

Mozart

Of all the composers who have ever lived, none has written quite as many tunes as Wolfgang Rock Me “Amadeus” Mozart. Mozart was born in 1756 in Austria, though it wasn’t called Austria then. By the age of three, he was playing the piano, though it wasn’t called the piano then. People thought he was the Prodigy, but the Prodigy wouldn’t be born for over 200 years, so he could go about his everyday composing business without people mistaking him for the angry one and asking him to play Firestarter on the harpsichord, which left him more time to invent hit songs like The Marriage of Fig Roll and Concerto No 21, which he did. Little Tiny Mozart wrote his first tunes aged five, and his first symphony aged eight. This is amazing, because he could have been out on his bike or climbing a tree like a normal kid. His parents sent Mozart and his sister out on tour around Europe performing their hits before the courts of Prague, Vienna, Paris, Munich and London. Why they did their tunes in court is a mystery, but probably because there were judges there, and they were hoping to get through to the judges’ houses, where they’d have a better chance of a record deal.

By the time Mozart wrote his first opera at the age of 14, it was clear he wasn’t normal at all. For a start, he was 14 and could sit through an opera. Something had to be done. So he got a job as an organist. But that didn’t stop his compulsive tune-writing, and he just kept forcing more and more music out of himself, like he had the shits, but with notes. Eventually, poor and exhausted, he took to his bed to die. Even then, he couldn’t do it without music, so he wrote his most famous last work, the Requiem, which is a very long song in Latin about dying. It’s very much the East 17’s Stay Another Day of its day, and would have been on a John Lewis ad if Christmas had been invented back then. But he didn’t finish it, and it died along with him in 1791. He was 33, the same age as Guy Fawkes was when he died, leaving his greatest work – blowing up parliament – also unfinished.

Films

Films are a sort of television that’s longer than one television programme (say, Bargain Hunt) but not as long as watching all of, say, Bargain Hunt. Unlike normal television, films don’t come to your house if you’re not interested in them any more. You have to go and visit films where they live, which is this really big hot dog kiosk called a cinema. The hot dogs here are bigger and not as nice as the ones you can make at home using real sausages, so they take longer to eat. This means they have to give you somewhere to sit down, but because nobody likes watching strangers eat, they make all the seats face away from each other, and then, to give you something to look at, they put on a film. Here are some films that exist …

Jaws

Some men go to sea to chase after some barrels, probably because they think there might be beer in them. The twist is that hiding under the barrels is a shark who has learned that the men love barrels and is using them as bait. The clever shark tries to kill the men by exploding when they get near, but the men hide under the water and die, which is a lucky escape for everyone, except one of them, who luckily escapes.

Four Weddings and a Funeral
Hard-to-follow drama about posh people who have lots of things to go to in a row, but fortunately have loads of suits and frocks anyway, so nothing’s in the cleaners, and it’s not really a problem. Looked it up and apparently it’s actually three weddings and a funeral and then another wedding, which makes it a bit easier to follow.

The Cannonball Run
Only seen the end. Which was brilliant. On one side of the screen is a poem made out of people’s names, and on the other side of the screen is a sort of You’ve Been Framed with sex offenders. I should make clear I don’t know who any of them are in the clips, and they’re probably not sex offenders, but it was the 1970s and we’ve learned not to make assumptions.

Citizen Kane
Black and white.

Nuns on the Run
If you’ve seen The Sound of Music or Sister Act, you’ll know how annoying it is when a nun starts singing in a film, because it holds up the story, and the nun never gets to do a good bit like push Alan Rickman off a ledge or fight dinosaurs. This is an interesting film because it has no singing in it, but it also doesn’t have any good bits, so maybe it just proves that nuns and films don’t mix. A warning from God.

Star Wars 2: Star Wars Strikes Back
If you’ve seen the first one, The Star Wars Menace, this probably makes sense, but someone told me that one was hopeless, so fuck that, and I’ve gone straight in at what they say is the best one, and it’s not. For a start, Fozzie Bear is really old in this one, and doesn’t do any jokes, and they’ve given him Kermit’s face by mistake. So someone really isn’t paying attention. It ends really weird, with this Jeremy Kyle bit about who’s whose dad, and then he falls down a hole, and they catch him and that’s meant to be the end, even though they don’t say what happens to any of them. They should do one of those bits at the end they sometimes do with old photos and some words that say which ones went to prison and who died. That or outtakes, like in The Cannonball Run.

The Exorcist
Not seen it.

Cannonball Run II
Not seen it.

Manon Des Sources
Foreign. Not seen it.

Ice Age 3: The Nut Job
Cartoon. Not seen it.

The Braun Elegance Hair Straighteners Demonstration Video
Seen this loads. Hard to talk about without spoilers, but well worth getting a copy. It’s never on at the cinema, but I found mine on video cassette down Barnardo’s. It’s my favourite film apart from Norbit.

Norbit
No. Hang about. Not Norbit. I’m thinking of Big Momma’s House. Not seen it.

Big Momma’s House
Pretty good film.

Edward Penishands
This is dead, dead good. Avoid the remake.

Cunk on Everything is out on Thursday 1 November, published by Two Roads. Written by Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley