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The news came through that Matthew Wright is quitting the Channel 5 morning panel show, The Wright Stuff soon. He’s been doing it since the invention of television and he does a tough job very well and I’ve always enjoyed chatting with him on screen and off on my rare appearances on the show.
But there’s now a vacancy to fill and like many others on Twitter I wondered which person called Wright would step into the breach. Of course it doesn’t have to be someone called Wright, they could, for example get Janette Tough (aka Wee Jimmy Krankie) to do it and call it “The Wright’s Tough†but why would they do that when with that host it could be called “A Little Krankie in the Morningâ€.
Oh man, I love it when jokes present themselves like that, accidentally.
I’d suggest “Am I Herring You Wright?†but I do not think I want the early mornings, especially now that I don’t live a 10 minute cab journey from the studio. In fact I was offered a place on the panel next week, but coming hard on (ha, I said hard on) the end of a tough weekend and with precious little time to write my scripts I turned it down.
Obviously the primary motivation for doing a show like this is as PR for the tour. I am never convinced of the efficacy of any of it. Perhaps if you do loads of TV and radio appearances and radio interviews then that somehow snowballs into ticket sales, but I am never convinced the time expended is paid off. Especially for me. My audience finds me via podcasts and social media and I seem to sell about 2 tickets to the London show each time I tweet about it. So posting on social media probably beats travelling into London to take to some people on the radio.
But that’s what I did today, losing an afternoon where I might have got some writing done (but let’s face itI might not) and spending a fair bit of money on travel (much more than I expected in the end). It’s always fun to be on Hawksbee and Jacobs’ show on TalkSport. Is it my demographic? Probably not. Did it sell any tickets? Certainly not immediately. Then over to Broadcasting House in a slow moving cab to talk to a journalist in Gloucester and Teeside Local Radio: both very affable chats, but ones that I felt I could probably have done from home.
I am not an easy person to do PR for. My appeal is selective (as this week’s gigs probably show - I’ve sold about 80 tickets in Scarborough, more like 450 in Leeds and over 600 in London - and people aren’t falling over themselves to interview me. I don’t think it’s arrogant to say I have a better idea how to publicise myself than anyone else could do.
I headed home feeling annoyed about the possibly wasted day, but looking forward to a date night with my wife. But when I got to Kings Cross the concourse was full (and not of people wanting a photo of themselves at the Harry Potter wall) and the boards showed that all the trains were delayed. It was just before rush hour. What was about to happen was not going to be pleasant and I was full of doubt that I could make it to the Tapas restaurant in time.
But I got a tube to Cockfosters in the hope I could get an Uber from there. The traffic already looked bad and the queue for the minicab was long. I did manage to get an Uber but at 2 times the usual cost because of demand. Now I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to make my day economically viable. But I was more upset that I was going to miss the kids’ bath time (my last one until Monday) and possibly my date.
I calculated that I need to sell about 22 tickets to the London show to offset my travel for the day (it’s hard to work out just how much money I will see from every ticket - there’s VAT and venue commission and then my management and PR take a chunk of the gross, before expenses come off. I reckoned maybe £5 per ticket might be mine, but mainly landed on that figure to make the maths easy). I did a social media blitz to see if people would be caught up in the story of the well-off comedian hoping to sell tickets on the back of his tax deductible cab as he headed to Hertfordshire for Tapas> Weirdly it didn’t catch fire like International Women’s Day. I probably sold 2 more tickets though. So the day was not a waste.
Amazingly I made it home in time to read my daughter a story about a dinosaur pooing and travelling through time. My wife doesn’t like this book and to some extent I agree that it’s a little derivative and crude, but my daughter and I laughed a lot reading it, and it led to loads of discussions about volcanoes and what things that were in the poo were a bad idea to eat, so it’s a winner in my book. At dinner my wife argued that I shouldn’t like it because it breaks the rules of time travel that I am pedantic about in other time travel fiction. Dinosaurs are brought forward from the past and the main dinosaur poos all through history and over the pyramids, which, she argued, should have implications on all future events.
However I pointed out to her that early in the book the dinosaur eats the child’s entire dinner and his gran thinks that the child has eaten it, which proves that she can’t see the dinosaur, implying that the dinosaur and all the adventures it has are just happening in the imagination of the child and thus the inconsistencies are acceptable.
It’s called “The Dinosaur That Pooped the Past†if you want to join in with the literary discussion. If Twitter is representative it’s a series that divides parents between great and shit.
My daughter was enamoured enough to point at the other books on the back and say she wanted to read “The Dinosaur That Pooped A Planet.†I said we didn’t have it and she said, “But you can buy it from the shop.†She is getting a bit too smart for her own good. That’s what reading does fro you.
The Tapas was ace. I had two pints of lager and a whiskey and was quite drunk.
Still a bit afeared about how much writing i’ve got to get done and when I am going to do it. If I die in the next two months I am going to be mightily pissed off about the life/work balance I have been putting myself through. But if I survive then the see-saw is going to be balanced differently.
