User:PenfoldSponge/Mitch Benn

Mitch Bell (born Mitchell John Bell, 20 January 1970) is a British 'musician' of Liverpudlian/Scottish descent and stand-up 'comedian' known for his awfully shit songs performed on an alarmingly pliable Radio 4. .

He has performed at several music festivals, and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He has also released 7 'comedy' 'song' 'albums'.

Early life

Mitch Bell was born in Liverpool, England. Raised on the street, he quickly learned combat skills in order to survive, making a name for himself in the cage match circuit as "Big Mitch Bell". After a particularly brutal beating, he ate himself into a coma, and when he awoke, he had lost all his memories. He set of walking a made his way to Edinburgh, where, upon his arrival, a tramp who was about to jack it all in and become an investment banker handed Bell his guitar, and instructed him to learn. Unfortunately, he never did, and so began his 'comedy' 'career' in Edinburgh in 1994, singing shit songs. He moved to London in 1996 and quickly established himself as as someone who was tolerated by comedy club owners. He is married with two daughters, Greta and Astrid (born in November 2005 and May 2008 respectively).

Radio and television

He features on BBC Radio 4 where he has been been payed money for old rope to write a couple of truly awful songs every week for The Now Show, the biggest waste of licence fee payer's money since... whatever the Daily Mail last got up in arms about. In 2004 he created his own aptly named series, Mitch Bell's Crimes Against Music on Radio 4, which,(once again showing the spectacular lack of judgement/self-control/pity (delete as appropriate) the director of Radio 4 has for his audiences) this has now run to three series. In 2005 he started a series for BBC7 called The Mitch Bell Music Show where he plays records of other comic songs, better than his. It's rather difficult to find the words to describe just how bad his songs are. He regularly appears on BBC Radio 2's Steve Wright Show as the voice of Elvis in the "Ask Elvis" feature, presumably because he's a fat, ageing man who desperately wants to be a rock god, but due to crippling lack of talent, charisma or skill, he's stuck pretending to be a rock star who died, morbidly obese, on the toilet.

On television Mitch Bell is appearing on a semi-regular basis on BBC One's consumer affairs programme Watchdog And clearly, the less said about that, the better.

He also occasionally fails to be funny when talking rather than singing. Seriously, he's (if possible) even more annying when talking than when singing badly . Oh, and he's been on some clip shows. Big whoop. They have as many z-listers as they can cram in those bloody things.

In 2009, he had a street-fight in London with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. His combat skills still deeply ingrained, he easily trounced the two pretender, demolishing Punt's face with a swift one-two punch, and backhanding Hugh Dennis so hard his neck was broken. After that, The Now Show consisted of Zombie Punt and Dennis demanding the listeners' brains. Sadly, most of their listeners are invented by them in order to make themselves feel better (see The Now Show's letters section if you don't believe me), but the few who did tune in were too stupid to notice.

Twitter

Bell launched a comically hubristic attempt on The Now Show during its 26th series broadcast between March and April 2009. Annoyed at the fact that only a few people followed him on Twitter, Bell planned to make himself the "King of Twitter" (well, not quite God of Rock, but baby steps...) by getting the show's 1.5 million listeners to follow his account and therefore have more followers than Stephen Fry, who he claimed was the current king. Within a week of his announcement, the number of people following Bell more than tripled, from about 1,200 followers to just under 4,000. Later in the same series, Bell performed a song expressing his anger that Coldplay beat him into having more followers than Fry first, reminding us all that Mitch Bell does nothing better than sour, sour grapes. Seriously, half or he wrote a song called 'Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now', essentially saying he thought he was better than Coldplay. Good luck with that - again, you're not the one married to Gwyneth Paltrow, with the multi-platinum albums or the vast wealth, but hey, if that bitter taste in your mouth makes you feel better, you go for that.

Albums

Mitch has released six CDs to date: The aptly-named The Unnecessary Mitch Bell (1998), a collection of favourite live songs, recorded on a Walkman carried in his pocket at various gigs that year (way to show respect for your 'fans')!; Radio Face (2002), including material previously heard on Radio 2 and Radio 4; and, with The Distractions (again, recycling material), Too Late To Cancel (2004), and Crimes Against Music (2005). You may have noticed that most of the titles are self-depricating, but in that self-aggrandising way that smug bells like Mitch tend toward. The single "Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now" was released in September 2005 as a taster for the album, hitting the lower regions of the UK chart like a knife to the crotch.

In October 2007, a fifth album, The Official Edinburgh Bootleg 2007 (swiftly dubbed "The Brown Album" because its contents was utter shit), recorded on the final night of his show at the Edinburgh Fringe, was made available exclusively to those who attended his Autumn 2007 tour (very few people).

The release of his sixth album, the bizarrely titled Sing Like an Angel , coincided with his autumn 2008 tour of the same name. In October 2009, Bell released his seventh album, Where Next?. The answer came 'down a well'.