I had breakfast with, amongst other people, a Russian defector who had got on the wrong side of the crime lords in that country, back in the 1980s. Like I had said, I was a bit out of place at this literary occasion. Luckily he wasn't really interested in what I was doing there. I could have told him about the time that I was beaten in a fight by a girl at school....
But I was whisked away from it all pretty sharpish as I was getting the 10.14 train back to London and leaving behind this pastoral idyll to do more work on my Keynote presentation and then gig a little bit closer to home. Well, a lot closer to home. In Bush Hall. Always a lovely gig.
I got to eat lunch in my own lounge and Devon and dissidents seemed like a distant dream. I watched the Channel 4 documentary about Bruce Forsyth, which only served to make me angry, as a sarcastic voiced man, weakly commentated on the life of a man who had allowed him into his home. It was a cynical and not very effective attempt to make an 82 year old man look a bit silly, mainly through the incredibly daring tactic (you need to read that llast bit in the voice of a detached, sarcastic voiced man) of including the bits where Bruce dared to question where his mark was, or helpfully did retakes of bits he fucked up or got ready to pretend that something artificial was a genuine occurrence. Bruce was being helpful and professional, after a life time of doing this stuff and the film maker (whose name I meant to look up so I could plaster it all over the world to shame him, but forgot) was able to pretend that he wasn't part of the artifice and to put wry commentary over bits where Bruce was talking. It was a horrible and pathetic attempt to do a Louis Theroux, with no understanding of what made Louis Theroux good at his job. And ignoring the fact that for a man of his age Bruce Forsyth is something of a wonder. I don't particularly like Bruce's stuff myself, though I have fond childhood memories of the Generation Game, but I don't think he has done anything to deserve this disrespect. Maybe Channel 4 should look for some real targets for its documentaries, like maybe whoever it was who arranged the release of that Lockerbie bomber fella on the pretence that he was about to die, in order, allegedly to set up an oil contract with Libya.
No, let's let that go and laugh at an old man washing his own socks and keeping fit (Bruce has really taken my plan 2 of outliving everyone else to heart) and having a wife who is much younger than him and an ex beauty queen because he has a funny face and so there must be something going on there, hey? Like the power of love to look beyond outward appearances (in at least one direction), perhaps.
Seriously Channel 4, are you just letting the Lockerbie thing go? Is no one going to pick up on the fact that it's not right to let out a convicted mass murderer however much money it might bring in for already wealthy people. Would people have sat back and let the Yorkshire Ripper walk free if it had allowed a multi-billion pound contract to be signed? I don't think so. Yet, Peter Sutcliffe only killed a tenth of the number of people that this other guy did. He killed hundreds of women and children and men and destroyed a plane and half a town, if the courts are to be believed. Is it less bad because he did it all at once? If he'd done it gradually with a hammer whilst wearing a wanking suit under his clothes would the press have had more to say about it? Does there not come a point where money is not the most important factor in a decision? Shall we bring the people who made this happen to book, rather than Bruce Forsyth for shouting at a man from a golfing cart?
Do your jobs investigative journalists. Grow some fucking balls. And if you decide that you still want to devote months of your life to being rude to an old man with a pretty, younger (though now in her fifties) wife, then at least have the decency to do it to his face, rather than waiting to slip your redundant barbs into the voice over.
Why is TV so fucked up? Why are we so concerned about celebrity rather than anything else? I am part of the problem. I probably wouldn't have taped a programme about Lockerbie. I suspect that planes are being blown up all the time these days, but because there's no one from Hollyoaks or the X Factor on them, the press no longer gives a fuck.
I went out to give even more money to Ian Apple buying some stuff to make my macbook hook up to my projector and some software to make the thing run and a clicker so I can control the slides myself. I had a frustrating hour trying to make the clicker work with my computer, with the help and hinderance of Twitter. It's wonderful that you can ask questions like this on there (after first checking Google of course -as you should if you want to know what time a gig starts or where my podcast is), but for every useful response you get maybe twenty stupid, funny or unhelpful ones. I still enjoy the unhelpful ones, but it got a bit wearing to be told for the fortieth time that I was holding the clicker wrong (in reference to the iPhone 4 problems). Finally I worked out that the computer somehow thought it was already paired with another remote control device (it hadn't been by me) and then the clicker worked. The slide show (or at least the first version of it) is nearly ready. I will be trying it out for the first time in Maidenhead tomorrow.
And the Bush Hall gig was, as always, a joy. I had a lot of fun making a 23 year old man feel incredibly uncomfortable for a) coming out to a comedy night with his mum and b) sitting on the front row with her. They were very good sports about it and it was a lot of fun for the rest of us. I am really getting somewhere with my ambition to come on stage and create comedy out of what is presented to me. And with the bill being made up of fantastic comics Ed Aczel and Josie Long, as well as some bloke called Stewart Lee, it was an electric night. And I could walk home easily. And know that I wasn't going to wake up and have to have breakfast with a man who might suddenly find some plutonium in his porridge.
What a life I lead.
I like it.
You didn't think you'd see me saying that after the way Monday started. But I think I might have managed to puke out all my pessimism too.
