Warming Up

I had the morning and early afternoon to work today and made a tiny bit of progress with the new plot for the sitcom script, but mainly tried to book some guests for RHLSTP.  The new series is only three weeks away and at the start of the day I only had one pencilled guest in. I am aiming high as always, but that means waiting for responses from the big names first and it’s a bit of a game of chicken - how late dare I leave it to hear from Don Estelle’s agent? He hasn’t responded to any of my emails.

Dripsters and Badgers already know about one guest for the 11th February, though I was perhaps a bit premature in letting them know as by the end of the day I had three more guests confirmed, including another for 11th February, which is a VERY strong line-up. I've also booked one of the guests for the Bath Komedia on the 15ht February now. I’ll be sending out another email to the subscribers on Monday and will let the rest of you non-badge scum know who we’ve got so far soon after.

I listened to Relativity on Radio 4 as I worked and for the second week in a row the wonderful Fenella Woolgar made my eyes leak a bit. Though to be fair, she’s working off a brilliant script. I did manage to get quite a few rude words in this one, given it goes out on Radio 4 before lunchtime, including fart, sod, motherfucker and cloaca. Though one of those words was only thought by one of the characters. I think the subject matter is quite daring though. One tweeter said he was disappointed that Radio 4 had taken away my “edge”, but it was always my intention, even if the BBC had gone mad and given carte blanche to its early morning programming, to make this a gentle and honest show, with a few hidden spikes in it. But if you require proper swearing and offensiveness in your comedy then may I direct you to every other fucking thing I’ve done in my career. 

It’s nice to remind people (and myself) that I am a writer and that the zany character I portray on stage and in 90% of my daily life is not the real me.

You can listen to the first two episodes of the series on the Radio Player. 

Now we’re in the countryside we do most of our shopping online. It’s an amazing (though not entirely positive) service that makes our lives easier, though presumably creates a lot more cardboard waste than we had before and has a few other troubling aspects for the environment and the people doing the delivery…. But it’s so convenient that it’s hard to give up. Also I am not trying to give it up.

My wife ordered some toothpaste and toothbrushes for the kids (in the midst of sleep deprivation to be fair) and though she’d bought 4 toothbrushes and 4 tubes of toothpaste (to keep us going for a while). What she’d failed to notice was she was actually buying multi packs. There is now a huge pile of maybe 20 of each outside our bathroom. I guess we might get through the toothpaste eventually, but the toothbrushes are age appropriate and it might mean Erie is still using a 0-2 year old toothbrush when he is 13. 

It makes me really laugh to see them though. Obviously we could send some of them back, but is it worth the hassle? We can donate them to a worthy cause I am sure.