Remember to say  book was written in C18th, people just don't do Eng Lit these days. 

Virginia Woolf (a Womb with a View?)
James Joyce
Len Shackleton, whose book had a blank page to express what football directors know about football, was maybe (footballers do read books sometimes) echoing the blank, black page which conveys the death of Yorick the parson. 
In the film this is rendered as a few seconds of blank, black screen.
Why does sitting in front of a blank screen make one feel vaguely shifty and embarrassed?
 
Filming the unfilmable. Writing the unwritable. I spend a lot of my life editing people's autobiographies, so I know how impossible it is.  Press together all the thoughts and happenings of a life minute by minute and they won't go into any kind of container, least of all a book. Like one of those crisp packets that won't be scrunched up in the bin, but creeps back into its shape making funny noises. Sterne knew that.  Tristram's life keeps expanding out into different directions, any of which we could follow along.
Uncle Toby
Battle of Namur
Dr Slop & his forceps
The Widow whatshername
Trismagistus
Winding up clocks
 
Should I talk about the performances?
All good, I would say, that's enough, all themselves acting characters, all themselves acting the characters of themselves. All appearing to have a whale of a time.
At the screening I watched, it seemed that the whole audience was in stitches [They didn't like the nappy changing scene, though, it sorted out the parents from the non-parents. Very authentic it looked too], but coming out I heard the words arrogant, horribly self-regarding, up themselves... But don't you have to be at least part of the way up yourself, to act, to write a book, to write your own story, to write out your own thoughts in a review and send it floating out into the world?  Remember Alan Bennett said recently that writers are not nice people, because they put themselves at the centre of things.
 
Never beyond the infancy of Tristram in the book.
Never beyond the rushes of the film in the film - we never get to see anything like the finished article, which of course doesn't really exist. Any more than Tristram Shandy the character really existed beyond the bits of him Sterne gives us. He's really a big empty hole there in the middle of the book, self effacing, well, not even enough ego there to self-efface, the still centre, the light by which we see the rest of the teeming world, so it's as near to actually presenting the strangeness of being aware of being oneself as a mere centre for the life around one as anyone had got in the C18th. The first existentialist? 
 
Steve Coogan acting himself acting an C18th man acting his own father.
Are performances like Coogan's totally arrogant, or totally humble, because they show themselves up in a very unpleasant light. Or are they actually very clever saying - look what a sense of humour I have about myself, see how awful I am, don't you just love me? Compare with Coogan/Fred Molina section in Coffee & Cigarettes. And why are Freds always nice people? Can you think of a nasty Fred?
 
Don't want to go into the performances, or the plot - will people really want to know what I think about them, or the strengths or weaknesses, what succeeds, what fails...  they can watch it all in the film, goddammit. They can decide for themselves. They will probably find it funny. If they like Steve Coogan they will. If they don't particularly like him (I don't) they will. If they liked 24 hour Party People they will - this film takes that kind of knowing jokiness a step further. 
 
So much energy.
All so busy living, filming, talking, bickering, cheating, laughing, drinking, they seem like a great shapeless rather frightening organism that can't be stopped.
 
Why am I bothering with this? Time for some early morning toast and tea.  Then I shall have to type this up. If I can read it. If  I'd known how much I was going to write I wouldn't have written it by hand. My writing is appalling, but it's all the fault of Miss Chappell at St Helen's St School Chesterfield, yes, I'll name names, who forced me to write with my right (i.e. wrong) hand for a whole year. She taught my Dad, too. She was his teacher when he nearly set the school on fire playing some game that involved sending bits of burning paper up the drainpipes (wooden).  So here you are, Miss Chappell, your moment has come, up here with Uncle Toby and Gillian Anderson.(whom I hadn't even mentioned yet. But I have now). It's a wonder I ever took to the written word at all.
 
I sit at my desk and the magpies are cawing outside and there's the sound of a car attempting to start up in the street. The kids next door are thumping about getting ready for school. Autumn in suburbia. The unstoppable minute, the unfathomability of experience, is that what the book/film's all about, the book about creating itself, the film about filming itself, the review about writing itself? 
 
But en route to my breakfast I pick up the Guardian and there's a feature about the film. Do I read it, and risk getting good ideas which I might be tempted to use in my own review? I won't, I try hard not to do this kind of thing. I'd be so easily seduced into taking things on board... But my eye runs over it & I see the words 'hot chestnuts' -  ah, the hot chestnuts! I'd forgotten all about that scene, yet it made a deep impression on me at the time. See how random the memory of a reviewer - this reviewer - is in its recall - Coogan wants to practise acting the scene where a hot chestnut drops down inside his flies. He fairly convincingly jumps around and grimaces, then a real hot chestnut gets stuck down there, and we see a real reaction to a burning in the privates... except of course it isn't real, he's acting again, this time acting himself acting reality. Rather than acting himself acting Tristram...Oh stop it!
 
Phew. So now I'm typing this up. And it doesn't amount to much. But by the time anyone's reading it I'll be off doing something else. Like watching another film. Or writing another review. Or despairing over another impossible autobiography. But I hope lots of people go to see the film.  It's on at the London Film Festival and on general release from 30 December.
And if I get round to writing a proper review, it will appear here below:

Seen at Cinema Days, Cineworld, Milton Keynes October 2005