Introducing Helen and Harriet
This week Rachel is having a little break from typing and instead command of the keyboard has been handed over to the Laundry’s latest recruits, the hottest double act in town: Harriet and Helen! You might have spoken to us on the phone, if so we hope you liked us.
This week, we have been learning about famous double acts. It turns out there are lots, but most of them are all male or couples. Since we’re neither of these, we’ve been trying to work out which double act we’re most like.
Ant and Dec: except we’re not Geordies, Harriet’s a Londoner and Helen’s apparently very posh,
Laurel and Hardy: except no one wants to volunteer to be the fat one,
Torvill and Dean: except there’s absolutely no ice skating involved in our job and we’re unlikely to win an Olympic medal anytime soon (although Harriet did win the egg and spoon race once, a highlight of her childhood),
Mulder and Scully: hmmm, better, we do occassionally have to solve mysteries although they normally involve stray blue bags rather than aliens. Although the ability of blue bags to wander round London does sometimes make us wonder if larger forces are at work…
Facts about double acts:
1) In Japan, In Japan the manzai tradition parallels that of the double act although it is more formulaic. Here there is a distinguished straight man (tsukkomi) and funny man (boke) and the humor consists of quick jokes full of slapstick humor and social misunderstandings. This just sounds like a normal day in the office to us.
2) Morecambe and Wise are regularly hailed as the greatest British comedy double act, and their 1977 Christmas Special drew an audience of 28 million people. One day The Laundry will draw such audiences, but in the mean time we’re very proud of our 800 or so customers - you’re ace!
3) According to the BBC, Dalziel and Pascoe are the most popular detective duo of the last decade. We don’t know of any other recycling duos, so we’re going to award ourselves the title of most popular recycling duo of the last decade.
Well, we hope we’ve managed to be at least almost as funny as Rachel. She feels a bit left out at the moment as her name doesn’t begin with H, so make sure you send her lots of emails or phone calls if you have any questions.