The problem with staying in and working (comparatively) hard is that very little amusing happens to me. I am about halfway through the radio script of Gorgeous with two days to try and cobble together the rest. It feels like a big improvement already, but I have little idea what will be happening next. I prefer to write this way, though it's an inefficient use of time. I like to be surprised by what comes next rather than plotting it out in advance. But in a half hour opening episode it's hard to do too much more than introduce the characters and a bit of jeopardy. I am having fun channeling the 18 year old me for one of the characters and continue to read my diaries from the time to remind myself of what I was like.
And I see that today is the 29th anniversary of the first time I properly snogged my first girlfriend. Incredibly we were four months into our relationship at this stage - we used to wait in those days. And when I say we, I mean me and my girlfriend, everyone else was at it like rabbits. And when I say me and my girlfriend I really mean my girlfriend. I was keen to do as much kissing and touching as possible, but she had somehow managed to resist the temptation, for the best part of the whole 3 year relationship. I admire her resolve. It must have been tough for her due to how highly attractive I was.
But on 13th November 1983 we sat in the back row of the Wells Odeon- the same cinema where a year or so earlier my friends and I
had somehow snuck into a soft porn film (coincidentally the subject of the coming Friday's Metro column). I see from my diary that we were there to watch Octopussy (which sounds much more like a porn film than the unimaginatively titled "The Other Cinderella"). For any 16 year old awkward and virginal Romeos out there it appears the key to my success was that I had given my girlfriend a red rose from my dad's garden. Let's just say that romance works. As I report "we kept kissing for long times and it was absolutely terrific." I hope I didn't say that to her at the time. I haven't learned too much else about romance in the last three decades but I don't think girls would like to be kissed and then told that that was absolutely terrific. Maybe I am wrong, maybe they'd enjoy such Famous Five like enthusiasm.
My diary from the mid-80s is pretty much obsessed with this frustrating, yet sweet relationship. It lasted nearly three more years, on and off and I did not get close to losing my virginity (and I assume she didn't either but you never know). My shallowness throughout is not even slightly hidden. I talk about us nearly breaking up whenever she's holding back on the light petting stakes and am hopelessly happy and optimistic about our future when we've been fooling around. As I say in this entry, "I can't really see us splitting up now. Whoopee!" Again, whoopee probably not a word that women want to hear. The rose was a cool move. I should just have kept quiet and who knows what might have happened.
It makes me feel both happy and sad to be reading this stuff back. But I am thankful that I wrote about it all at the time and annoyed that I stopped writing the diary at some crucial times (presumably when I was actually doing some other stuff so didn't really have time). And I am thankful that the teenage me was such a hopeless fool because I don't have to do any work on inventing a character. I wish I was less of a fool now, but then maybe I should be grateful that this self-indulgent gravy train continues onward.
And after a little bit of back and forth with BBC Worldwide and a few editorial cuts at their insistence
Fist of Fun series 2 is now available from Go Faster Stripe. It's packed with extras and fills four discs. Be lovely if you wanted to buy it.
You can also get
Fist of Fun series 1 from the same website, plus all of my other DVDs, including
What is Love, Anyway?.
We're hoping to get the second volume of Warming Up: The Box Lady and Other Pesticles printed up in time for Christmas, but it will also be available on Kindle. I'll let you know about that.
