On Bill From Bala.
Apr. 10th, 2015 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2I should think that most of you have at one point or another watched an episode of the Red Green Show on PBS and have noticed that despite the fact that most of it is recorded on video tape, there's always a black-and-white silent film segment called "Adventures with Bill" and wondered why Red had Harold use a film camera with a poor-quality microphone. As it turns out, the reason for this is that Adventure Bill didn't always hang out at Possum Lodge; he started out as someone named "Bill From Bala" that the actor had created for an improv troupe called "The Frantics."
Back then, he wasn't there to be a human cartoon character getting injured for our amusement; back when he was live on stage, he was established as something of a rocket-jawed small-town irritant who used any sort of opening to waste people's time blathering away witlessly about every thought he'd ever had since he figured out which end of his digestive tract smelled worse and what he mostly wanted to talk about is his home town of Bala, Ontario. This being a pub bore sucking the oxygen out of the room by going on a torrent-of-consciousness rant about the minor doings of average people in a sleepy little place where nothing spectacular ever happens or ever will would be bad enough in and of itself were it not for Bill's insistence that his victim had to know and love the place as much as he does. Until the person inevitably blows up and bellows about how little he cares about a place he's never heard of, it doesn't seem to occur to Bill that no, the person might not even have actually heard about Bala and might not actually care and above all might actually like to be left in peace instead of listening to a boring old git who doesn't shut up because he's too stupid to realize he's being a pain in the arse. This turns him into the male equivalent of a mother who insists that her adult daughter MUST have gone to a wedding she never attended, met people she doesn't know exist and done any number of other things that she never did and is simply being difficult and perverse merely to aggravate her poor, long-suffering mother.
The reason that I told you about Bill is that his failure to quite get that merely because he knows about Bala, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone else in the world wants to listen to a non-stop rant about the place is that it not only explains why Red bought a camera with a broken microphone to save his sanity, it seems to me that most of the characters in the strip have his major malfunction. As by way of example, most of the reason that tetchy idiot Phil thinks Mike is tricking him is that he simply cannot seem to understand that Mike wasn't born knowing what his uncle is talking about.
Back then, he wasn't there to be a human cartoon character getting injured for our amusement; back when he was live on stage, he was established as something of a rocket-jawed small-town irritant who used any sort of opening to waste people's time blathering away witlessly about every thought he'd ever had since he figured out which end of his digestive tract smelled worse and what he mostly wanted to talk about is his home town of Bala, Ontario. This being a pub bore sucking the oxygen out of the room by going on a torrent-of-consciousness rant about the minor doings of average people in a sleepy little place where nothing spectacular ever happens or ever will would be bad enough in and of itself were it not for Bill's insistence that his victim had to know and love the place as much as he does. Until the person inevitably blows up and bellows about how little he cares about a place he's never heard of, it doesn't seem to occur to Bill that no, the person might not even have actually heard about Bala and might not actually care and above all might actually like to be left in peace instead of listening to a boring old git who doesn't shut up because he's too stupid to realize he's being a pain in the arse. This turns him into the male equivalent of a mother who insists that her adult daughter MUST have gone to a wedding she never attended, met people she doesn't know exist and done any number of other things that she never did and is simply being difficult and perverse merely to aggravate her poor, long-suffering mother.
The reason that I told you about Bill is that his failure to quite get that merely because he knows about Bala, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone else in the world wants to listen to a non-stop rant about the place is that it not only explains why Red bought a camera with a broken microphone to save his sanity, it seems to me that most of the characters in the strip have his major malfunction. As by way of example, most of the reason that tetchy idiot Phil thinks Mike is tricking him is that he simply cannot seem to understand that Mike wasn't born knowing what his uncle is talking about.
