What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’
What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’
‘Gee, that’s sweet,’ says Homer, or words to that effect.
‘She says I do, and I say she does…’
Mind you, working on the show does sound fun. When they have guest stars they try to get them to come to Los Angeles in person, though some, such as Tony Blair, are allowed to do it long-distance. (The scripts are read out first, as if for radio, then the cartoons fitted around the speech.) It’s the team’s pleasure to book these celebrities into a cheap motel near the studio. One time Mick Jagger’s assistant phoned to complain. ‘Sir Mick expects at least a Jacuzzi,’ she said. So they put him in a room with a Jacuzzi, but you had to feed in quarters to make it work.
Sky has been celebrating 20 years of the show all this week. They kicked off the festivities with a behind-the-scenes documentary called The Simpsons: Access All Areas (Sky, Monday), which turned out, disappointingly, to be one of those bland American booster shows, an extended plug even though it was narrated by Ricky Gervais. Apparently, it takes a lot of talent and a lot of work. Who’d have thought it?
We did learn some interesting things. Once they had decided to colour the characters yellow they could not use that colour anywhere else in shot.
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