Bad Magazine

Monday June 21st sees our return to the Green Man with Bad Magazine, a sitcom by James Gill.
By day, James ( Or rather Gill, because that's what he calls himself - a bit like Sting, Madonna, and Stalin ) works for Metal Hammer Magazine. It's the usual sordid stuff - trading licks with Slash and sniffing cocaine off groupie's breasts - but at night Gill gets to work on his sensitive side and pens tv sitcoms.

Bad Magazine is his first shot. Also, being a believer in "Write About What You Know", Gill has settled for the perennial theme of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Let me quote the man himself:

"What do you do for fun when your hobby becomes your job? What happens to a teenage dream when you cram a cynical thirty-something into it? Bad Magazine is a brutally honest skit-com that pulls back the velvet façade to reveal the hilarious nature of life in the media.

What’s working at rock ‘n’ roll magazine magazine Bad like? It depends who you ask: it’s a school, a prison and a play pen. While the magazine’s motley staff tries desperately to create stories out of nothing the biggest controversies are going on in the office itself: plagiarism, celebrity-stalking, extortion, bullying, fraud, sexism and violence.
Once they had dreams of peer recognition, accolades and meeting their heroes: now they’d settle for a cup of tea, a steady paycheck and the occasional wriggle with a real, live woman. It’s a dream they could achieve… if they weren’t always on deadline.
We’ve all been there: out of our depth while doing something that’s beneath us, passing ourselves off as cool, keen and knowledgeable and when actually we’re bored, tired and underpaid. It’s not the insider joke that counts; it’s the outsider joke.There have been sitcoms about offices, about newspapers and about music: but there’s never been one about all three – and none as honest as this. Almost all of Bad Magazine is based on real people and real life events. Especially the stuff that paints the media as a bunch of clueless, cynical mercenaries. And the stuff that makes no sense".

I'm afraid I had to edit out some swearing. Still, it will all be there on Monday, two episodes unexpurgated and in full. Be there.