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Once again the news was moving so fast that jokes that I had written in my notebook this afternoon were already way out of date by the time I was on stage with the first opportunity to tell them. Exciting and terrifying and incredibly depressing. The left pulls itself apart, there is a vacuum of uselessness in the centre and the only question is how right wing will our government turn out to be? I won’t compare anyone to Hitler, because that would be glib, but if he were around today he’d be rubbing his hands at his prospects in getting into power in this brave new world. He might not want to though. The UK might well be a spent force.
I had RHLSTP to distract me from the shit-storm, though inevitably it was discussed (though I was aware that that was odd as these shows won’t go out until September and God knows what the political situation will be by then). Graham Linehan was my first guest and was opinionated and funny and went into some detail about the writing process. There had been a man in the audience doing a sort of super villain slow clap at regular intervals (usually I think when he liked something, but once, rather inappropriately as Graham discussed Ireland’s abortion laws). He also seemed keen to interject, but was far back enough that I could just ignore him. Unbeknownst to us, towards the end of the interview the clapping man, somewhat worse for wear from drink had collapsed and a paramedic had to be called. It seems he was OK, thankfully (though that’s not what I told the audience at the start of the second podcast) but it was another moment of drama in an unpredictable month.
The interval was a bit longer as a result, but the show must go on and it’s much easier to do it once the weird clapping man has gone, so then I chatted to the very funny Sofie Hagen, attempting to whip up some xenophobia against Denmark (where she’s from) and then chatting about obsessed fans (Sofie has been one and experienced having them, which is a rare situation I suppose). I also gave her a lesson in our Royal Family, though most of it will be cut or beeped as it was incredibly libellous (though all completely true). Another thoroughly enjoyable Monday night. I will miss these when they stop again.
Tim Minchin and Russell Kane next week and then a double bill of mystery guests (even a mystery to me at the moment) to bring the series to a close.
My cab driver home managed to live up to stereotype by saying “I am not a racist, but…” within the first five minutes. But it turned out he was only slightly racist and driven more by his anger about minicabs than anything else. And he had some interesting insights into why roadworks take so long and why taxi drivers should be brought in to advise the best time to do them. He was an OK bloke and I enjoyed listening to him. But he told me that last week he’d passed the petrol station on Shepherd’s Bush Green and it had been on fire. At least a motorcyclist had been filling up his tank and somehow the bike and the pump had gone up in flames that shot 10 feet into the air. Weirdly, last week, I had been thinking about petrol stations and the fire hazard they pose and how it’s sort of surprising that there aren’t more massive explosions. Had the BP garage gone up then I would certainly have known about it. The motorcyclist bravely tackled the blaze before the fire brigade arrived and saved the centre of the Bush from an explosion which would have been devastating. I wondered why petrol stations weren’t a terrorist target and we tried to work out why the fire hadn’t resulted in disaster (our guess was that the pumps are designed to stop fire travelling down them somehow).
