It's awards season and nominations for extremely important accolades are being announced. Unsurprisingly I did not manage to get a nod from the British Comedy Awards as they have no radio or internet awards and for some reason I have hardly been on TV at all this year (slash century). It is now twenty years since I have even been invited along to this event - and as I've mentioned before last time I went I got very drunk, heckled Angus Deayton and ended up spilling red wine and my own blood all over my dress shirt. When you look at some of the people who've managed to garner a nomination in the last two decades it's actually quite a remarkable achievement to have remained off the radar of this self-congratulatory ceremony (not that I am bitter or spend the night watching the awards on TV wearing my pants shouting obscenities at the winners and spilling red wine and my own blood on myself), so either I am a comedy maverick whose material is too edgy and strange for this mainstream competition or I am just really, really shit. I've got through twenty years of assuming it was the former (I am not a crowd-pleasing, fame-seeking comedian like last year's double award winning sell-out Stewart Lee), but maybe it's time to accept that it's the latter. To miss ten British Comedy Award ceremonies might be seen as unfortunate, but after twenty it's probably time to accept that I am terrible and should give up.
Instead though I am going to accept that I am terrible and carry on. Fuck the British Comedy Awards anyway. You're not even
one of my COBNOBs (though I'd still say I am more likely to win a BCA than a Booker or a BAFTA so maybe I should think again or at least make it the COBNOBBs).
Anyway, I am not bothered by any of this obviously, mainly because I am not a TV comedian, I am a live comedian and you just have to look at all the awards I've got for my 25 years in Edinburgh to see how much value I really have..... oh.
The thing that really upsets me is that Sports Personality of the Year has totally ignored me and my 2012 achievements. Given that they nominate a dozen sportspersons for the main award I was pretty certain that at least Me2 would get a nod (he may not be as good a player as Me1, but he is certainly the bigger character) and that there was a good chance that Me1 might be on the list too. And it's not like this was even that interesting a year in UK sport. But they've shown how out of date and reactionary they are by selecting people who have all participated in sports where they play against other people. Maybe Me vs Me snooker will be acknowledged in one of the other awards of the night, or maybe it will take a generation or two before people take self-playing snooker seriously. And every British Comedy Award will also be given to a self-playing snooker comedian. You'll see that I am right.
And if at the end of my life I am not acknowledged as the greatest comedian and sportsperson that this country has ever produced and all the producers and judges of the British Comedy Award and the Sports Personality do not come to me and personally apologise for the mistakes that they have ALL made, then I will consider my life a failure.
For how can a man judge the success of his life without a cabinet full of awards? That's better than being surrounded by friends and children and grandchildren. Of course I don't have any of those things either. Shit. I have nothing either on a shallow or a deep level. I have wasted my life.
For the moment I will just have to continue operating in isolation in stuff that I am producing myself, wondering what it was that I did wrong. I was drunk through most of the 1990s so I have no idea. if you have any ideas who I have to apologise to then please let me know. I just want to be seen as the equal of Jack Whitehall and Morgana Robinson. That's all.
Fuck it, awards are for losers anyway, right?
Oh no, hold on, I think I've got that the wrong way round.
Thanks very much to the 176 people who have donated over £2000 in total to SCOPE via
my justgiving page in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the blog. Thanks for helping me mark this meaningless anniversary. If you haven't donated yet and would like to join the 175 cool kids then that would be lovely. If you'd prefer to wait until I've managed 25 years then that is understandable.
