jon's mash-ups page 2
david attenborough v dragons' den
As soon as I saw an Attenborough documentary on Komodo dragons I knew that this clip was gagging to be made. Other people have tried a similar trick since but I'm still chuffed with the way this sketch plays out. It was made for BBC Comedy Online.
shark attack on game show
'Hole in the Wall' was a silly Noughties BBC game show in which celebrities had to contort themselves into odd shapes or get pushed into a swimming pool. Which would have been a lot more satisfying if said pool was shark-infested...
hero the hedgehog: epic stadium mascot battle
I filmed this at the 2017 World Athletics Championships and London, and caught this brilliant bit of tomfoolery between the games mascot Hero and an unsuspecting marshal (or brilliant plant). Either way I captured it for posterity.
world's best left-hanging moments
I made this after I saw Prince Charles refusing to shake a war veteran's hand and instead waving him on. This supercut includes a few I've found over the years mixed with some crackers from around the internet, to the tune of Pick of the Pops.
barack obama sings Heroes by David Bowie
These days the combination of Autotune and speech recognition software means anyone can make this kind of mash-up, but I did this manually in 2008 and managed to recut a single Obama campaign speech into a new version of Heroes, which (believe me) is a much trickier feat. In the age of Trump, it just reminds me how lucky we all were to have Barack.
planet earth: an inconvenient spoof
The BBC's epic nature series came complete with a suitably dynamic trailer with music by Sigur Ros, so it seemed like an open goal to recut a version with clips of the human side of Planet Earth, full of apocalyptic disasters from films. The clip spread through the BBC and the controller of BBC1 played it at his Christmas party. It led to a bit of a breakthrough for me...
planet earth trailer: broadcast version
In January 2007 BBC head of comedy Jon Plowman commissioned a version of the Planet Earth sketch for a BBC3 show called 'Comedy Shuffle'. To make it work every movie clip needed to be replaced with clearable TV footage, which wasn't easy but I think it pretty much still works.
Life on Marr's
In 2007, when Life on Mars (about a policeman in a coma who thinks he's in the 1970s) was the BBC's big hit drama, I managed to take footage of news presenter Andrew Marr from his British history series and put him in a remake. Andrew liked my previous work and very kindly provided the voiceover!
kylie shows off her bottom end
Repeating my Blockbusters trick, I found a version of jazz track Come on Strong by male singer Tony de Sare and managed to cut Kylie's live performance on Later with Jools Holland to Tony's version. There are some instrumental moments which sync up really well.
The art of politics No.1: George Osborne
I spotted this brilliant moment of actuality on The Andrew Marr Show and added subtitles to explain the silliness of it. The clip spread and eventually got featured in the Mail Online.
university challenge students react to 'Spectre' by sam smith
This must be in the bottom two of Bond theme songs (just above Die Another Day), and as a long-time University Challenge devotee I love the weird faces that contestants pull during the music round, so I blended the two, as you do.
world's strangest ever quiz team
As a writer for TV's self-styled hardest quiz show, I've sat through a lit of Only Connect, and fortunately for me the host Victoria Coren also appears on many more scurrilous shows, so I pinched some audio and created this unlikely intro for one of the quiz teams on OC...
spot the difference: cameron v partridge
When David Cameron walked into 10 Downing Street after announcing his resignation, he was caught on microphone humming strangely. I cooked up a quick edit of Alan Partridge to show the similarity and it spread well on Twitter/Youtube.
the star wars apprentice
Once upon a time I was a fan of The Apprentice (before the US host became president and the UK version plagiarised my honest subtitles sketches), so I took the opening titles audio and recut it to pictures from Star Wars. It works a treat.
pope francis declares war on lord sugar
On a similar note, years later I noticed a strangely funny pronunciation by his holiness Lord Francis and used it to create this happy alternate reality. Short but sweet...
hardest quiz show ever
John Humphrys presents both the most high-brow news show in Britain (Today on Radio 4) and a dumbed-down celebrity quiz (Celebrity Mastermind). It was too tempting not to take audio from the former to create spicy questions in the latter. The contestant is one-time radio football phone-in presenter Spoony.
ipad is... silly
This iPad advert got on my nerves a bit, so I just tweaked it so the slogans are more accurate and some of the footage is more accurate to how people really use them. Not sure if the clip requires a Youtube login to be viewed (I took footage from a BBC drama so it's not exactly porn, but makes the point).
john sergeant dances to firestarter
Ex-journalist John Sergeant is the worst dancer to ever appear on Strictly Come Dancing, but viewers decided to take the piss and vote for him in droves. I recut him to Firestarter and put him in-time so it looked like he was actually good. BBC comedy bosses loved it but the Strictly execs didn't use it because they snootily said that it's the sort of track they would actually use and so not funny. Haha!
biggest news events ever - bbc news advert
In the wake of the John Sergeant 'crisis' at the BBC, this characteristically over-the-top trailer for the news channel was receiving a lot of airtime, so I popped the big story of the day into a new edit alongside the other (almost as) important events of the century. The woman's face says it all.
Nigel Farage really lets his mask slip
UKIP politician Nigel Farage uses a 'cheeky English gent' persona to mask a deleteriously right-wing political agenda, and it didn't take much tweaking to make this interview (allegedly ) a more accurate representation of his real views.