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Another early morning with my baby and after an hour or so I stuck on CBeebies to give me a break. But actually it’s more of a mind fuck to have that stuff on. All the channel controllers are in bed at this time of the morning so the staff can show anything they want and so the programmes are all acid fuelled craziness that will entrance a baby, but blow out the brains of any sane adult and leave them a gibbering wreck. There was a show about a massive family that live in a lighthouse, but then only two of the characters that are introduced at the beginning really play any part in it and it turned into a strange photo montage cartoon of a scary baby turning into a butterfly. I presume all the other actors are the family of the writer and they’re just trying to give them some money. It was very unsettling. back in my 30s when I was getting drunk every night and waking up in the early hours full of night terrors and hangovers I would watch Balamory and Big Cook Little Cook and the Tweenies and feel what little of my sanity remained drifting away from me. I was fixated on these ridiculous shows, but I was a supposedly grown man, without any children, wondering about the relationship between the big cook and the little cook and which one was actually the same size as a regular human, whilst enjoying the repetitive nature of these shows and getting into all the songs.
So maybe the nausea I feel is a flashback to those times, when I really shouldn’t have been watching early morning kids’s TV. At least now I have a reason. Phoebe loved this show though (it’s called Baby Jake if you want to look it up), so God knows what’s going on in her brain. It’s at least partly my brain and I am sorry for having given her those parts. It’s going to make life a challenge.
I was made to consider my odd life choices when I was interviewed by (Collings and Herrin safe word) Geoff Lloyd this afternoon (the interview will be out on Absolute in a week or so). I mean I’ve done some dumbass things at least ostensibly for comedy - I spent two or so years looking at number plates and the best part of a year with a toothbrush moustache. But some of the “real life†decisions I made now seem inexplicable to me. In 2002 or 2003 I didn’t wash my hair for about a year. I think I believed that if I stopped using shampoo that my hair would become self-cleaning. I believe that is a theory, but I am not sure it worked out that way. And I can’t understand why I’d be the kind of person to attempt that. It doesn’t feel like something I’d do. And I did manage to dates a few (admittedly strange) women during that period, so who knows what was going on in their heads. But why did I do that? What was I thinking?
I mean there’s nothing that I do now that I will look back on and question - I assume I will play Me1 Vs Me2 Snooker forever- but maybe I will. The past is a foreign country and I know nearly all our cells change every seven years or so, so the me of last decade is a different person to me, but how could he be so stupid for so long and why can I, seemingly the same person, not fathom his awful decisions. They have got me where I am and yet he’s not around to accept the punishment.
Some restricted view tickets released for Happy Now? at lowry, salford on 19th Feb. Call 0843 208 6000 - only available by phone. To be honest it’s a better show if you can only partly see me (I imagine some bits of the stage aren’t visible but I pretty much stay in the middle so you should be fine).
