I did a gig in Chalk Farm for BBC London Radio's Children in Need (they're organising a week of live gigs - I don't think there will be more than snippets on the actual radio). I was the last comic on a long night. I started by pointing out that it was nice for comics to do something for Children In Need, especially on the day that Chris Langham had been released from prison. That's why there were so many of us on tonight as an attempt to balance some of the bad done by comedians to children. It didn't go down very well. People have a lot of sympathy for the child porn downloading, giving acting lessons to a 15 year old in a hotel room actor. Good to know he'll be home for Christmas, but at least they kept him in for Halloween. Better safe than sorry.
The gig picked up a bit, but we were competing with a music gig in the pub below and it was late and there had been a lot of comedy already. I told the audience that it was important that they suffered a bit so they could put themselves in the shoes of the children in need and threatened to do 40 minutes to really punish them.
Earlier I had been on the Robert Elms show to publicise the event (though I asked at the gig how many people had heard me on the programme - about five, though I think they may have worked for the BBC - and then how many people had come down as a result of hearing me - none - I am convinced this kind of promotion is a total waste of time). I am not sure if I have met Robert before. He's one of those familiar faces from his various TV work and so it's hard to remember if I have actually been face to face with him. When I came into the studio before we were on air he hardly looked up and only gave a very minimal greeting and I thought the interview might be a bit stilted and hard work. In cases like this I always wonder if I have taken the piss out of a person at some point in the past and they are bearing a grudge.
Then again in my experience of radio presenters, some of them are just interested in getting the job done and don't care about engaging with their guests off air. They will be perfectly affable on air, but when they're nor broadcasting you sense that they are maybe bored with their job or have just done it for so long that they don't see any point in establishing a personal relationship with the next idiot on the conveyor belt of fools who are paraded in front of them.
I think this is a shame and makes it harder to do the interview if there is no chemistry. And I wondered if this was the case with Elms.
However, I think that he was just preoccupied when I came in, or maybe he is just a more laidback and reserved man, because after a moment of silence he asked me where I had come from today, we then had a rather pleasant off air conversation about Shepherd's Bush. It turns out that Robert was born here and that the house he lived in has since been demolished to make way for the short stretch of road leading from the Shepherd's Bush roundabout to the A40. "It means I can tell people that I was born in the fast lane!" he smiled. I thought it was rather sad to think of the home you had grown up in being knocked down, especially to facilitate such a non-descript piece of tarmac. Of course that is life and nothing lasts forever, but I will now think of the ghosts of Robert Elms' past whenever I drive up there.
So I don't know if we mainly engaged because of our love for the Bush or whether he would have been as charming whatever I had replied, but good to have my preconceptions confounded.
After the interview he admitted he was tired as he'd had a bit of a heavy night out the night before, and was cheerfully worried as he had another night out with an old friend tonight. I sympathised as I was still not quite over my hangover from Monday (though didn't have a drink at all yesterday, mum - just four heroins) and we laughed about getting older. I think the off air stuff was a lot better than the interview, which was a little bit boring. But that's often the way with radio. Although our on air stuff was good too, I often wished listeners could hear what Andrew Collings and me talked about when the records were on (and occasionally feared that the mikes might accidentally have gone live, meaning we would never have worked again). If there was an alternate channel where you could listen in to the off air conversations then I bet they would be a lot more popular than the actual proper programmes. Though you'd have to sort of set it up secretly, because if the people in the studio knew they were being recorded then they wouldn't say the same stuff. There's probably some kind of comedy show in the idea though, where you only hear the off air chats of some fictional radio show. Maybe not.
