(Language warning) The animated short film of Tim Minchin's beat poem Storm. Directed by DC Turner and produced by Tracy King.
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00:00In a North London top floor flat, all white walls, white carpet, white cat, rice paper
00:21partitions, modern art and ambition.
00:23The host's a physician, bright bloke, has his own practice, his girlfriend's an actress,
00:28an old mate of ours from home, and they're always great fun, so to dinner we've come.
00:35The fifth guest is an unknown, the hosts have just thrown us together for a favour, cause
00:39this girl's just arrived from Australia and she's moved to North London and she's the
00:43sister of someone or has some connection.
00:46As we make introductions I'm struck by her beauty, she's irrefutably fair, with dark
00:52eyes and dark hair, but as she sits I admit I'm a little bit wary, cause I notice the
00:57tip of the wing of a fairy tattooed on that popular area just above the derriere, and
01:03when she says, I'm Sagittarian, I confess a pigeon hole starts to form, and is immediately
01:09filled with pigeon when she says her name is Storm.
01:15Conversation is initially bright and light hearted, but it's not long before Storm gets
01:20started.
01:21You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion, she opines over her Cabernet Sauvignon
01:27vis-a-vis some unhippily empirical comment made by me.
01:32Not a good start I think, we're only on pre-dinner drinks and across the room my wife widens
01:36her eyes, silently begs me be nice, a matrimonial warning not worth ignoring, so I resist the
01:43urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose weave of a morning, when deciding whether
01:48to leave her apartment by the front door, or the window on her second floor.
01:55The food is delicious and Storm, whilst avoiding all meat, happily sits and eats, as the good
02:00doctor, slightly pissedly, holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history,
02:06when Storm suddenly insists, but the human body is a mystery, science just falls in a
02:13hole when it tries to explain the nature of the soul.
02:16My hostess throws me a glance, she, like my wife, knows there's a chance I'll be off on
02:21one of my rare but fun rants, but I shan't, my lips are sealed, I just want to enjoy the
02:26meal, and although Storm is starting to get my goat, I have no intention of rocking the
02:30boat, although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle, because like her meteorological namesake,
02:35Storm has no such concerns for our vessel.
02:38Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy, they promote drug dependency at the cost of the
02:43natural remedies that all our bodies need, they are immoral and driven by greed, why
02:48take drugs when herbs can solve it, why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve
02:53it, I think it's time we all returned to live with natural medical alternatives, and try
02:59as I like, a small crack appears in my diplomacy dike.
03:06By definition, I begin, alternative medicine, I continue, has either not been proved to
03:11work, or been proved not to work, do you know what they call alternative medicine that's
03:16been proved to work?
03:19Medicine.
03:20So you don't believe in any natural remedies?
03:23On the contrary Storm, actually, before I came to tea, I took a remedy derived from
03:28the bark of a willow tree, a painkiller that's virtually side effect free, it's got a weird
03:33name, darling what was it again, masprin, basprin, oh yes, aspirin, which I paid about
03:39a buck for down at the local drug store.
03:42The debate briefly abates as my hosts collect plates, but when they return with desserts,
03:47Storm pertly asserts, Shakespeare said it first, there are more things in heaven and
03:51earth than exist in your philosophy, science is just how we're trained to look at reality,
03:57it doesn't explain love or spirituality, how does science explain psychics, auras, the
04:03afterlife, the power of prayer, I'm becoming aware that I'm staring, I'm like a rabbit
04:09suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap, maybe it's the hamlet she
04:14just misquothed or the fifth glass of wine I just quothed, but my diplomacy diet groans
04:19and the arsehole held back by its stones can be held back no more.
04:23Look Storm, sorry I don't mean to bore you, but there's no such thing as an aura, reading
04:28auras is like reading minds or tea leaves or star signs or meridian lines, these people
04:33aren't applying a skill, they're either lying or mentally ill, same goes for people
04:38who claim they can hear God's demands or spiritual healers who think they've got magic hands,
04:43by the way, why do we think it's okay for people to pretend they can talk to the dead,
04:47isn't that totally fucked in the head, lying to some crying woman whose child has died
04:53and telling her you're in touch with the other side, I think that's fundamentally sick,
04:57do we need to clarify here that there's no such thing as a psychic, what are we fucking
05:02to, do we actually think that Horton heard a who, do we still believe that Santa brings
05:07us gifts, that Michael Jackson didn't have facelifts, are we still so stunned by circus
05:12tricks that we think the dead would want to talk to pricks like John Edward?
05:18Storm, to her credit, despite my derision, keeps firing off cliches with startling precision,
05:24like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition, you're so sure of your position but you're
05:29just closed minded, I think you'll find that your faith in science and tests is just as
05:35blind as the faith of any fundamentalist, wow, that's a good point, let me think for a bit,
05:41oh wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit, science adjusts its views based on what's
05:49observed, faith is the denial of observations so that belief can be preserved, if you show me that
05:55say homeopathy works then I will change my mind, I will spin on a fucking dime, I'll be as embarrassed
06:02as hell yet I will run through the streets yelling it's a miracle, take physics and bin it,
06:07water has memory and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow
06:14forgets all the poo it's had in it, you show me that it works and how it works and when I've
06:18recovered from the shock I will take a compass and car fancy that on the side of my cock,
06:24everyone's just staring now but I'm pretty pissed and I've dug this far down so I figure in for a
06:30penny in for a pound, life is full of mysteries yeah but there are answers out there and they
06:37won't be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying isn't life mysterious, let's
06:43sit here and hope, let's call up the fucking pope, let's go watch Oprah interview Deepak Chopra,
06:49if you want to watch telly you should watch Scooby-Doo, that show was so cool because every
06:54time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school they looked beneath the mask and what
07:00was inside the fucking janitor or the dude who ran the water slide because throughout history
07:07every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic, does the idea that there might be
07:15knowledge frighten you, does the idea that one afternoon on wikifuckingpedia might enlighten you
07:21frighten you, does the notion that there might not be a supernatural so blow your
07:26hippie noodle that you'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to google, isn't this enough
07:35just this world, just this beautiful complex wonderfully unfathomable natural world
07:51how does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of
07:56cheap man-made myths and monsters, if you're so into your Shakespeare lend me your ear
08:07to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet is just fucking silly
08:16or something like that, or what about Satchmo, I'll see trees of green, red roses too, and fine
08:24if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial condescending bottled up and
08:30labeled kind of way then whatever that's okay but here's what gives me a hard-on, I am a tiny
08:38insignificant ignorant bit of carbon, I have one life and it is short and unimportant
08:47but thanks to recent scientific advances I get to live twice as long as my great great
08:54great great uncles and aunts, twice as long to live this life of mine, twice as long to
09:04love this wife of mine, twice as many years of friends and wine of sharing curries and
09:13getting shitty at good-looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties
09:22and if perchance I have offended, think but this and all is mended,
09:29we'd as well be 10 minutes back in time for all the chance you'll change your mind
10:34you