Like Tweedledum in the 1970s BBC drama Colditz (a universal reference that needs no further explanation) I continue to experiment with pretending to have lost my mind. He did it to try and escape a prisoner of war camp, I am doing it... for what on the surface seems to be no good reason. But if you get below the surface you will find that it is confirmed it is for no good reason. The jeopardy is that if you pretend something hard enough it can become true. And I am hoping that if I do this long enough I will literally divide into two different versions of myself and be able to live a double life.
Playing snooker against myself is my job and it is a job that I don't get directly paid for (though you can change that
by buying my latest DVD, What is Love, Anyway? and then only watching the live snooker frame).
I had been planning to do this frame in the nude as a tribute to Prince Harry's Las Vegas pool playing escapade, but that idea was given extra topicality today by a French magazine publishing pictures of Kate Middleton-Windsor with her top off (the French killed Diana and now this, how much provocation does the Queen need before she declares war on our old enemy? - this deserves a TWO hundred year war). So as the King of Edinburgh I had to jump on the nudity bandwagon and so I headed down to my basement in my pants - which were then removed. I was going to play snooker against myself, whilst commentating on the game, wearing no clothing, making an audio tape of what I was doing. If anyone else was acting in this way I think their family might call in a therapist. My wife just shook her head and left me to it.
For extra jeopardy the basement doesn't yet have any curtains, though you can't see into it from the street. But if one of the new bap-paps (paparazzi who specialise in taking clandestine photos of boobs - if a man hiding in a bush did this for his own entertainment he'd be locked up as a pervert, but if you're doing it to put the pictures in a magazine you get paid thousands. Who is the real pervert?) snuck through my gate they could get a picture of my asterisk and also my colon and explanation mark and it could be all over the newspapers.
Of course I didn't have to really be naked. This was an audio podcast and I could just pretend. But I didn't want to pretend. Me 2 was very keen to do the Full Monty and Me 1 was surprisingly up for it as well. Referee 2 didn't even wear his white gloves. I played myself at snooker in the nude and barely mentioned the fact or noticed. I was too entranced by the balls on the table to worry about the ones dangling around it.
If I stopped and thought about what I was doing I would perhaps have worried a little bit. But all that worried about me was that neither me was playing very well and the commentators were being sloppy. It was a useless podcast, but no matter. It exists.
It's on the British Comedy Guide or subscribe
on iTunes. But if you're a newbie then start from the beginning. It will make no sense if you go straight in to frame 15. I can't promise it will make much sense if you listen to all 15 though.
But fans of audio snooker, mental breakdown and imagining nudity will love it.
