Tag: Falcon Boy
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Each week, Concrete Superstar challenged three celebrities to lay the perfect concrete patio. Aided by experts, a whole range of stars of stage, screen (both big and small), music and anywhere else mixed, shovelled, poured, levelled, screed, bull-floated, hand-floated, rounded (if required), cut-in, and broomed their concrete in a race against both the clock and the other contestants.
The locations chosen were both indoor and outdoor and for the second season, it had been proposed that the programme go to different locations around the world so that factors like local building customs, union regulations and temperature extremes could be brought into play. Sadly, however, this was never to be.
Like many other people (but sadly, as it turns out, ultimately not enough other people), Bewilder Bird found Concrete Superstar really exciting because you could never really tell which one of the chosen celebrities would be the best at pouring concrete just by looking.
For example, who could have known that Dame Circular Rosetwine, opera singer and biscuit entrepreneur, would beat upper body muscle model and self-confessed DIY enthusiast Flint Roland in the first episode?
‘I thought I had it in the bag,’ said Flint afterwards, ‘until one of the production crew told me that I had poured the concrete upside down. It wasn’t until I had ripped everything out and started again that I realised they had been pulling my leg.’
In the second episode, renowned aristocratic bad-boy ventriloquist Sheridan Shaw and his foul-breathed puffer fish puppet, Puff the Puffer Fish, lost out to one-time pop sensation Dorothy Sister, lead singer of the reasonably-famous (and reasonably-named) Dorothy Sisters.
Puff the Puffer Fish refused to cooperate during the aggregate mixing phase and allowed Dorothy Sister to win by a technical default, even though she had managed to bury one of her high heels beneath a crazy-paving slab.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelesshero
She couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwell
If universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknow
For the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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‘It really is hard work trying to be a superhero,’ said Falcon Boy to Ellis, ‘and I didn’t realize just how hard this hard work was until I started working hard to be a hard-working one.’
Ellis heard him sigh. Listen carefully and you’ll hear me sighing as well. Falcon Boy does go on a bit.
‘While I was working hard at being a superhero, Bewilder Bird was watching television. I prefer the radio but the Building Channel was showing the season finale of Bewilder Bird’s favourite show, Paint Tales.’
‘Paint Tales?’ said Ellis. ‘What kind of show is that?’
‘A badly-boring one,’ replied Falcon Boy.
He’s not wrong.
Now in its twelfth season, the premise of Paint Tales is a simple one: a single tin of paint is followed from the factory where it is made to the place where it is used, via the shop where it is sold.
For enthusiasts of the programme, the joy of the journey is immense and somehow almost immeasurable. As a result, Paint Tales has now become a global, if somewhat esoteric, phenomenon. Discovering that the tin of paint you thought was going to be used as a humble undercoat turns out instead to be the final flourish of a ceiling in a converted bathroom can be close to life-changing for aficionados of the programme.
For anyone else, the premise of the programme is almost as disturbing as actually watching an episode and both the existence and continuance of Paint Tales has become a major topic of cultural debate. For some it is the ultimate guilty pleasure, for others it is the producers who should be feeling guilty.
Falcon Boy laughed quietly.
‘The season finale of Paint Tales was about a tin of red paint, Bewilder Bird’s favourite colour, and he had been looking forward to watching it all day. He had even left a note on the fridge to remind himself that it was on that evening.’
For future reference, interest, or indeed, warning, depending on what it is that you like to watch or not watch on television or any other screen, Paint Tales is from the same production company that created Concrete Superstar.
Many media experts believed that Concrete Superstar was going to be the next big thing in format television but the programme only ran for a single season. As a result, the five episodes that do exist have achieved cult status.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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World Savers Wanted™ works on the same principles as any other online agency. You complete a questionnaire, upload a current image of yourself and pay an annual membership fee.
Once your application is processed, World Savers Wanted™ will seek to match your profile with the most appropriate tasks contained in its vast and ever-increasing database.
A similar principle applies if you have some work for a superhero to do. Once the registration process is complete, you are free to upload your superhero task request. Your task request is offered to the most appropriate superheroes and they then choose to accept the task or not.
Feedback is given on the completion of each task, whether successful or otherwise, and as you gain more and more positive feedback, so you become eligible to receive more and more difficult task requests. In this way the system always hopes to match the right hero to the right task.
World Savers Wanted™ allows you to define your choice of tasks by selecting from a drop-down menu. Falcon Boy had ambitiously registered himself and Bewilder Bird in the ‘Heroic Duo Seeking to Save the World’ section but as you can imagine, they hadn’t yet accumulated enough positive feedback to be eligible for that category. Not that Falcon Boy was in any way perturbed.
‘Ambition is one of the many things that I wish to be known for,’ said Falcon Boy ambitiously to his friend. ‘Without ambition, you have no real desire to do things,’ he concluded grandly.
Bewilder Bird silently nodded as usual. Falcon Boy opened his inbox again.
Dear Superhero,
Thank you for recently registering with World Savers Wanted™. Your application has now been approved and you are now eligible to be matched with tasks that require superheroic attention.
Please note that you will only be sent task requests appropriate to your feedback status. Your current feedback status is ‘Cat Rescuer’.
If you have any questions please refer to our FAQ page.
Alternatively, you can contact us on our premium rate telephone number, where one of our advisers will be happy to help you.
We hope that you have a long and successful career with World Savers Wanted™ but if no task requests are received within the space of one calendar year, we guarantee to return your half of your registration fee.
Yours Sincerely
World Savers Wanted™
‘You won’t be sending half of my fee back,’ said Falcon Boy to himself.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Ellis thought some more.
‘What do you remember about being kidnapped? Where were you? What were you doing? How did it happen?’ This was a lot of questions and Ellis waited for Falcon Boy to reply. Ellis felt sure that she could hear him thinking.
‘We were both at home as usual,’ said Falcon Boy. ‘Even superheroes have quiet days, and so I had the laptop on my lap and was busy checking my inbox for any new messages from World Savers Wanted™.’
World Savers Wanted™ can be found at http://www.worldsaverswanted.hero and is a listed company created by a twelve-year-old boy called Mulvey Cavell, who saw a gap in the market for matching superheroes looking for things to do with things that needed doing by superheroes.
Mulvey realised that for every superhero being summoned by an enormous searchlight whenever they were needed, there would be many other equally-deserving superheroes that didn’t have such a high profile and therefore probably needed a helping hand when it came to finding suitable things to do.
Mulvey also understood that not all superheroes wanted to try and save the world. Some were just happy doing things like opening supermarkets, posing for photographs or putting on action displays at garden fetes.
Working from his bedroom, Mulvey built the website and devised the marketing campaign. Things were slow to begin with but once the mass exodus from SuperHeroVerse™ started, World Savers Wanted™ began to get very busy – so busy, in fact, that Mulvey Cavell became a multi-millionaire at thirteen and retired from public life.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Inspired by Pearly Stockwell, Ellis began to ask some questions.
‘Are you underwater?’ she began. ‘Can you hear fish swimming, dolphins talking or the secret singing of crabs?’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Falcon Boy. And even though he strained really hard, it was true, he couldn’t. Ellis tried again.
‘Are you really hot like you would be in the desert? Or if you were buried at the earth’s core?’
‘I don’t think so,’ replied Falcon Boy. ‘It is getting a bit stuffy in here, but I think that is due more to the fact that me and Bewilder Bird are piled in on top of each other than because we are somewhere ferociously hot.’
Ellis thought again.
‘Are you really cold?’ she continued. ‘Do you think you might be at the South Pole or floating in deep dark outer space?’
To Ellis, like all children everywhere and hopefully some adults as well, the world is a never-filled box that overflows with the most marvellous, magical, wonderful and amazing all kinds of everything. All you have to do is be alive to the possibility that there is always more to know.
Like the most satisfying drink you have ever tasted, one that you can’t stop gulping down, Ellis is simply consumed by the desire to learn and she drinks eagerly, heartily and regularly.
As a result, her head is full of facts and figures and pictures and faces and ideas and theories and notions and fantasies and sightings and soundings and it goes without saying that (I like it so much when people say this that I wrote it and then put a line through it to somehow prove a point) some of these are very real and some of these are not so real. Some of these are imagined and some are made-up. Others are half-remembered or almost-forgotten, but all of these ideas and things are completely compelling and absolutely, undoubtedly and utterly her own.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero Volume 1: 23
‘And Grimdulf Rides a Giant Talking Lion’
The ((extra)ordinary) Ellis thought for a minute.
‘What would Pearly Stockwell do?’ she wondered. ‘How would she go about going about it?’ Ellis tapped her lip with her finger. ‘Pearly would probably start by asking lots of questions and then use the answers to find out what to do.’
As Ellis thought about this, she remembered one of the less original and least satisfying of the Pearly Stockwell adventures, Pearly and the Missing Magic Ring.
The Pearly Stockwell adventure series is published by IT Comics and in their early days the company really struggled. Pearly and the Missing Magic Ring was a desperately misguided attempt to reach a wider audience with the Pearly Stockwell series.
Without even the slightest hint of professional shame, Pearly is ‘allowed’ to discover a magical kingdom while clearing out one of her wardrobes. Never one to refuse a challenge, Pearly sets off to see what she can find.
Unsurprisingly, Pearly finds a world gripped by a struggle between the forces of good and evil. Grimdulf Gloompants leads the good guys. He is a long-bearded wizard who rides a giant talking lion. A one-eyed witch called Sharon is in charge of the bad guys.
As the plot thickens, Pearly and the Interesting Twins are asked to deliver an important message to someone important quite far away. On the way, they are captured by a gang of nasty Noblins and imprisoned.
Everyone manages to escape but Pearly gets separated and begins to wander lost in an underground network of caves.
Even loyal readers of the comic book series found it hard not to consider cancelling their subscription at the moment that Pearly stumbles upon a ring and, without thinking, puts it in her pocket.
Unbeknown to her, the ring is the property of a pathetic-looking creature called Gallop who manages to trap Pearly in his dank, dismal, fish-stinking lair.
‘You have something that is very precious to me,’ says the pathetic-looking Gallop to Pearly, without even a faint glimmer of irony. ‘It is mine, it is.’
‘Is it?’ replies Pearly quick-wittedly, stunning the pathetic creature with the authority in her voice. ‘How precious exactly?’
Gallop isn’t sure what to say.
‘Very precious,’ he ventures, ‘very precious, indeed.’
But Pearly has the upper hand now and probes the pathetic creature further with her penetrating questions.
‘Just how precious?’
‘Very!’
‘How precious is very precious?’
‘Very, very!’
‘But is that precious enough?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you know? I thought you said it was precious?’
‘I did!’
‘Then why don’t you know?’
‘I do! I do! I do!’
Gallop gets very angry and it is at this point that Pearly knows she has him.
‘You don’t know, do you?’ she says.
‘No,’ says the pathetic-looking creature pathetically.
‘I’m going now,’ says Pearly firmly. ‘Don’t try and follow me.’
Gallop says nothing. He sits snivelling on a slimy rock. Pearly leaves to find her friends and continue the great adventure.
It was only by sacking the writing team, promising faithfully to never ever do anything like this again (and also offering a year’s free subscription to every reader) that IT Comics survived the fallout from Pearly and the Missing Magic Ring.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero Volume 1: 22
‘Introducing Erica ‘Neck Brace’ Larkin’
Who is ordinary and who isn’t ordinary? Who decides who is extraordinary and who isn’t extraordinary? Perhaps these questions make more sense when we consider the possibility that the central character of this adventure could easily have been someone else.For example, we could be reading about the adventures of a small ingenious boy called Dunstable Johnson who is very handy in tight situations. Or, we could all be thrilling to the adventures of a swashbuckling amateur wrestler called Erica ‘Neck Brace’ Larkin. Erica investigates local mysteries in between wrestling bouts. This is just for starters.
The battle to rescue Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird from the clutches of the evil Dr Don’t Know and, by doing so, save the world from apparent destruction could have centred around the players and coaching staff of Wolseley Street F.C, an U12s amateur football team.
Football has all the hallmarks of great adventure as players grapple with triumph and adversity as they seek to win a championship or avoid being relegated. There is plenty of drama in an adventure like this.
If you don’t like stories about footballers, then what about a rather nifty and exciting robot called Rocky Random? Rocky has a propulsion unit in his boots and can cross oceans if necessary. He is handy to know in a global emergency.
No? How about Eucalyptus McKenzie, the cartoon koala bear and government agent? The adventures of Eucalyptus McKenzie are yet to be written but I am pretty sure that this isn’t the last we will hear about this daring koala bear.
Anyway, what I am trying to clumsily get at here is that it is Ellis who has been chosen by me to be chosen by Falcon Boy to help save the world from the devilish scheme of Dr Don’t Know. With this in mind, the best thing to do here is to stop worrying about whether or not Ellis is ordinary, extraordinary or somewhere in between. Instead, why don’t we just find out how she gets on with getting on with it?
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero Volume 1: 21
‘Hairy Top Lips and Homemade Boots’ Part 2
Some people might think it very unfair that Falcon Boy had placed the responsibility for saving the entire world from some kind of as-yet undisclosed, but nonetheless, evil fate on Ellis. After all, she’s only young, what does she know about saving the world?
Ellis is an ordinary little girl who lives an ordinary life and likes to do ordinary things with her very ordinary parents, but even though she is probably based upon a real girl who does live a very ordinary (but hopefully wonderful) life with her definitely very ordinary parents, Ellis is still a character in a story and therefore is not quite as ordinary as this paragraph might suggest.
This is all further complicated by the fact that it wasn’t actually Falcon Boy who chose Ellis in the first place. It was me. I was the one who allowed Dr Don’t Know to kidnap Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird. I made the decision to give Falcon Boy a superpower, even though he lives in a world in a world where superpowers clearly don’t exist.
It was also me that allowed Falcon Boy to use his narratively-spurious superpower to make contact with an ordinary girl busily minding her own business. Of course, it is the fact of Ellis being chosen that makes her extraordinary, but again, this was entirely down to me.
I hope you are not too confused here. This whole ordinary/extraordinary thing is easily explained.
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
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Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero Volume 1: 21
‘Hairy Top Lips and Homemade Boots’ Part 1
Ellis knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. Even though they were trying to hide it from her, Ellis also knew that her Mum and Dad were very concerned about the situation. She had heard them over breakfast.
‘I heard that he’s a right old loony,’ said Mum.
‘I heard that too,’ said Dad, ‘but the two of them are hardly first-rate heroes, are they?’ Dad looked out of the kitchen window. ‘I can’t understand why on earth he would bother to kidnap those two losers anyway.’
‘They’re not losers,’ said Mum, ‘just untried on the public stage.’ She smiled. ‘For all we know they could be the vanguard of a brand-new future…’
‘Whaaaaat?’ scoffed Dad, ‘that little fool with the hairy top lip and his mate who can’t walk in his homemade bird boots?’ He scoffed again. ‘In any case, if that’s how they want the future to look then I’m telling you now, I’m not growing a moustache for anyone.’
Ellis knew that underneath all of his bluster, Dad was as worried as Mum.
‘You could always shave the moustache off again,’ said Mum, ‘but preventing the destruction of the entire universe is a bit more complicated.’
He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelessheroShe couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwellIf universal destruction is more like your business then why not follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter @drdontknowFor the full FREE adventures of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird why not download Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets now.Share this:
BARNABY TAYLOR 