On my radar: Jemaine Clement’s cultural highlights

The comedian and actor on one of history’s worst films, a touching British drama and Australia’s answer to Thunderbirds



The comedian and actor Jemaine Clement was born in New Zealand and studied drama and film at Victoria University of Wellington. There, he met Bret McKenzie and together they created the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, which later became a BBC radio series and, in 2007, an HBO TV series. Clement created another double act with Taika Waititi, the Humourbeasts, and won the New Zealand Billy T award for comedy in 1999. In 2007, he starred in Waititi’s film Eagle vs Shark, and in 2014 the pair co-directed and starred in the comedy horror mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, out now on DVD.


Film: Yellowbeard
I think this film from 1983 is underappreciated. It’s got a transatlantic mega-cast –with Cheech and Chong, Peter Cook, John Cleese, Graham Chapman – so it looks like one of those films that you would have seen at the time that was terrible. And John Cleese did describe it as one of the worst films ever made, but I love it. It’s truly silly, like a Python film that you didn’t know was made. The plot is basically just about a mad pirate, a “blond Blackbeard”. There’s more antics than plot. I found it by accident, but I fell in love with it and I’ve watched it a few times.


Theatre: Every Brilliant Thing
This is on in New York at the moment, but it’s a British production. I found it very touching and funny. It’s a one-man show about a boy, from the point of view of an adult looking back. The story starts off with him talking about how, when he was a child, his mother attempted suicide, so he compiled a list of all the great things to live for and the list just became huge over the years. He describes how he started the list and how in different times of his life he’s needed that list.


Website: The Fox Is Black
This is a compilation of art, music and design. It’s one of the few places you can go on the net that is free of cynicism;
everything that’s shared on it is positive. But it also shows you amazing buildings from around the world and art pieces … and they compile music playlists that you can download and listen to. They have designers to put in things like desktop wallpaper with interesting designs that you can use on your computer.


Danger 5
This is such an unusual show, but I’m trying to let as many people as I can know about it. It’s an Australian show about a squad of international spies, sort of, and in every episode their mission is to kill Hitler. It’s shot as though it was made in the 1960s, but it’s from 2012 and set during the second world war. It’s almost like a live action Thunderbirds, the way it looks. It’s very strange and brightly coloured, but it’s very funny. And it’s out in the UK, on Netflix, so you can watch it there now.


First Fossil Hunters
I bore people at parties with things I learned from this book. Adrienne Mayor is a palaeontologist and is kind of the first person who popularised the connection between mythology and fossils. So in places such as northern Africa, people would describe gryphons, which guarded gold in caves, as having the body of a mammal but the beak of a bird. And in this area they found the skeletons of Protoceratops: dinosaurs with bodies that look like a mammal and with a beak. Actually, these people weren’t making these things up: they were finding these fossils and explaining them in their own way.


Album: Laura Veirs – July Flame
Laura Veirs performs on the indoor stage during day two of the tenth Summer Sundae Weekender in Leicester.
I’ve been listening to this a lot. It’s an album that passed me by at the time, when it came out in 2010. I was aware of her and I had her albums, but I didn’t notice this one come out. It has these beautiful melodies. I really enjoyed the guitar playing on it, that’s one of the things that appealed to me. Yeah, pretty guitars and beautiful melodies. My favourite song on the album is I Can See Your Tracks. It’s pretty.