BBC New Sitcom of the Year 2016 Awards

Good Evening and welcome to the very exciting but very poorly worded ‘BBC New Sitcom of the Year 2016 Awards’. We are judging the suggestions for sitcoms provided by you, the general public, and we are down to the last three.

There will, of course, be a very extensive and elaborate voting process which will commence once the three entries have been revealed. All you need to do is press one of the conveniently-placed buttons on your remote control to vote for your favourite.

Here are the final three entries for your consideration:

BookChop

Deirdre Hanginglass has a dream. Her dream is to own her very own bookshop in the centre of Ipswich. After gaining a wealth of knowledge following her stint in other shops, and with a hefty loan from the bank, she thinks she has found the ideal place. The only problem is that she can only afford half the rent.

Enter Leanne Pandonberry. Leanne is an aspiring butcher who has worked her way through butcher college to gain the qualifications needed. After her Auntie Maeve passed away, leaving a handsome gift, Leanne too seeks shelter within the confines of Ipswich city centre only to find prices just a little too much. Deirdre and Leanne decide to join forces and open the UK’s very first joint butcher book shop.

How can they possibly hope to cope working in opposite ends of the work spectrum? Can uptight Leanne ever hope to mesh with the laid-back antics of Deirdre? And who owns the mysterious milk crate in the back alley?

Dracu-later

Dracula is dead; killed by Jonathan Harker, crumbled to dust. Only he’s not. It was all an act to make everyone go away and leave him alone.

The outside world just wasn’t made for the Count and his crazy hoardes. All he wanted was to suck a couple of necks and nothing more. And with this in mind, he disappears into the shadowy forests surrounding his castle.

That is until he returns. The year is 1987 and life has moved on. The relatives of Van Helsing live on, unaware of Dracula’s continued life. The Count has met a most fortunate woman, Mabel, and following a successful romance moved in with her in a comfy semi-detached hovel in Middlesbrough. The house next door is up for sale and following a successful bid at a local auction the property is sold to… Milo and Janice Van Helsing!

Dracula now not only has to struggle with living in suburbia, and keep his job at Rumbelows, but also keep his true identity hidden from his new neighbours. Can he maintain his begonias and stop himself from sucking the local cats dry?

It would appear as though our final entry, ‘Apple Jews’, about a group of sexy young Jewish men and women working in an Apple store, has had to be disqualified for blatant product placement.

That therefore leaves only two entries in the running.

If you would like to vote for ‘BookChop’ please press the ‘slow’ button on your remote. If you would prefer to opt for ‘Dracu-later’ then please caress the button that looks like a meteor crashing into the sea.

A History of Westpoint

When we moved into our new flat, we were moving into one of several blocks of privately-owned flats set in landscaped grounds, which are all inside a gated compound. At the time we thought there was nothing special about it – until the Westpoint Resident Management Association Steering Committee posted a welcome pack through our front door. The welcome pack told us what day the bins were collected and some other practical information, but by far the most useful thing was the history of the flats.

So that we can all share in this learning experience, here is the history of the building in which I now live inside there.

144 million years BC

A 60-metre layer of impermeable Gault clay is deposited on earlier Paeleozoic rocks, forming the geological basis of the ground on which Shortlands now stands. It is this clay that continues to support Westpoint today and stops it being some 60 metres closer to the centre of the earth.

AD 862

Ethelbert, the king of Kent, grants land for a new manor to be called Bromleag. The manor becomes a prosperous market town over the following centuries, known as Bromley.

1858

Shortlands railway station is opened on the new railway line to Bromley. It is not called Shortlands yet and there are no houses nearby for it to serve. Nobody knows why a railway station was built here.

1974

Local building company Arkwright Masonry Erectors Ltd. purchase three handsome Victorian villas in extensive gardens and with fetching period detailing, and demolish them in order to build three big box-shaped blocks of flats and a car park.

1996

Arkwright Masonry Erectors Ltd. go bust when the owner is sued by his own daughter for embezzling company funds to construct a large fiberglass model of the Coliseum encasing her house. The residents of Westpoint buy out the freehold on the site and begin a new era in which there are no grown ups to tell them what to do. The Westpoint Resident Management Association Steering Committee is established as a not-for-profit commercial community joint enterprise partnership.

2002

The front doors to all buildings at Westpoint are carefully sanded down and coated with a slightly darker shade of varnish than before.

2015

Benches are installed in the grounds so that residents can sit outdoors at an uncomfortable slope and in close proximity to parked cars or the bins.

2016

Chris finds himself getting on a train at Shortlands with Chris Addison, stand-up comedian and star of The Thick of It, who apparently lives nearby and sometimes gets a train from the same station as Chris at about 9am.

A desperate plea

It has now been many months since we last saw The Book, and understandably all those of us who care deeply about it are becoming concerned for its safety.

Today, Pouring Beans launches a major publicity campaign to alert the British public to the plight of The Book in the hope of seeing it safely returned home. We are now less than ten pages from the end and with a concerted effort the whole damn thing could be finished and out of our lives by Christmas. Isn’t that something we all want to see?

MISSING

THE BOOK

Last seen: at Kev’s house, awaiting another page of the story

Age: Knocking on for eight bloody years old

Reward: An end to being nagged about it

If you have any information about the whereabouts of The Book, or if you can disclose the identity of the person who is currently detaining it, call the Beans Helpline on 0800-HURRY-UP-KEV.

Dear Beans… But Is It A Good Invention?

Dear Beans,

I have been facing a big question for some time now, or at least what I consider to be a big question. It’s been playing at the back of mind on an extended loop for as long as I can remember and even after a long day of whistle pops and candy whistles I lie in bed at night, eyes wide open, pondering how to answer my own query.

In an attempt to bring the matter to a close I asked an endless supply of friends, close friends, family friends, work colleagues and hermits the same thing. The results were inconclusive as far as I’m concerned so I now turn to you in this, my darkest hour.

Is it… is it a good invention?

Why should I feel the need to question myself now? I’ve been an inventor for the best part of twenty years and it is only now that something is so amiss that I cannot decide if it is or is not.

The invention in particular is something I’ve been tinkering with for a couple of months and only recently put into practise. It’s a new style of shoe that is somewhere between the relaxed yet trendy Converse Hi Tops and the relaxed yet trendy debonair of the classic Vans. If you really had to boil it down to the most basic of ideas, however, I would have to describe it as having glued some Quavers to the sides of my trainers.

As you can tell, they’re very understated yet ostentatious. At first I was convinced they were magic but now… there is a rumbling in my gut which isn’t the pork vestibules I had for lunch. Then it made me think that possibly my other recent inventions also weren’t good enough either.

Perhaps nobody needs a pocket antelope.
Perhaps the world isn’t quite ready for the under-trunk over-pants.
Maybe odour eater foot injections are ahead of their time.

What do you think? Is it or are they good inventions?

Yours fluently

HAMM .BSc

Chimneys

It’s one of the big unsolved questions of the 1990s. What’s she going to look like with a chimney on her? The Tamperer featuring Maya plaintively asked this question over and over again in their number one hit “Feel It” but to no avail. Nobody could answer the question.

Fortunately, the dark days of the 90s are behind us and modern science can finally offer an answer to this seemingly impossible conundrum.

Newsboost – Showbiz Rumor Mill

Over in that there showbiz land, rumors are floating about that Legendary music producer Nizzle has been in pre-production meetings with none other than PB’s own Smidge Manly.

Nobody is really sure what the secret project could turn out to be, but the pair collaborating on an album would seem to be the likely outcome.

Showbiz land reporting scumbag Barney Gristle, recently found a discarded USB stick when he tripped and fell gloved hands first into Nizzle’s trash can. He claims contains early drafts of the pairs’ work. Newsboost has a secured a world wide exclusive reveal of a clip, right here:

I think we can all agree that this is truly exciting news.

Up Close and Personal

Following the recent startling relevation that former news reader Nicholas Witchell is a decent guy who will allow himself to be winched into a sewer to check on the wellbeing of a former 80’s puppet celebrity, it was also revealed the unique complexities of his complexion.

Nicholas Witchell’s face contains smaller versions of his face, and on each of those faces is another collection of faces.

It has not been checked thoroughly but scientists have theorised that the “face phenomena” could go on forever. It could easily rival the ever-expanding universe as the thing that nobody can really comprehend fully because if you did you might hide in a yurt and eat tv guides due to the fact that you’d lost you mind.

It’s dangerous out there.

Lemon Doberman

Do you want a dog?

Really? Do you really, really want a dog? Of course you do you’re a human being, and a human being can’t be a being without a doing. As in you cannot spell the word ‘doing’ without the word ‘dog’.

Hi, I’m Blemish Tuneraft and I’m owner and founder of Lemon Doberman. Lemon Doberman is exactly what you think it is. And it does. We breed and produce dobermans that smell of lemons in a pure and natural way. You may think that science has stuck its big, ugly, man-shaped oars into our processes however it just isn’t true. Everything about our lemony dobermans is legitimate. We have a proven track record.

It isn’t as if we found that the smell of dogs was unpleasant. Not in the slightest. In fact, we are attempting to rustle up some dog-scented aftershave for the first quarter of 2017. No, what we set out to do at Lemon Doberman was to improve on an already well-established and much-loved sanctuary.

Everyone loves a doberman.
Everyone loves the smell of lemons.
Why not combine the two?

The feedback we’ve received has been phenomenal so far. We are looking to send our sweet-smelling doggies into the furthest reaches of the UK and possibly even abroad. If all goes well then who knows? We are hoping that if our rate of success continues to increase at an exponential rate then it will only be a matter of time before Belgian Chocolate Mastiffs and Lavender German Shepherds are available to the general public.

If you’ve got a big heart, a large house and a desire for citrus fruits then you know what you need is a Lemon Doberman.