Warming Up

The Waitrose flowers have revived and look absolutely beautiful. Am thinking of letting Ian Waitrose have what he wants from me. Flattery will get you everywhere.

The kindle offer on The Problem With Men seems to have been a success. The book got to number 8 in the kindle chart (it’s 6th as I write) and topped the kindle humour chart and got to 3rd in overall humour through all formats of Amazon books. 

You can also get it for 99p on Apple Books by the way (where it is 40th in the chart). 

Don’t know how long this madness will last, so snap them up. Apparently it works as a business model somehow, but if you feel bad about essentially shop lifting my ebook then make a donation to Movember here.

I have never sold enough copies of any of my books to earn royalties, but I’ve been paid for writing it and really just want as many people to see it as possible. 

Very excitingly Twitch of Fun has been rescheduled to prime time on Twitch - 7.30pm on Friday. I was hoping we could justify Ian Twitch’s confidence in the show. Amazingly it was the 20th episode tonight (I was only 52 when I started) so good to see it getting this kind of recognition. What audience share could I steal from the One Show? 

Chris Evans (not that one) had sent me a couple more puppets that we’d made for AIOTM, but decided didn’t really work in that show. Originally they were Tam Dyell and King Midas, but when I got the latter puppet out of the box he had other ideas and immediately shouted “I’m the King of the World” in a very specific voice. I had no choice over this. This is how he came out of the box. My kids were with me at the time and they found it funny that this little guy just seemed to want to shout “I’m the King of the World!”

I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to include this in tonight’s show, but after a slightly lack lustre appearance from Tam, the King of the World decided he wanted to strut his stuff and he was off. And it was, for some reason, pretty good. He ran with it, created his own jingle, complained about Leo de Caprio thinking he is the king of the world, when the king of the world is and then sang a bit more about being King of the World before leaving everyone wanting more. It was amazing. How did this puppet know that just shouting “I’m the King of the World” would be that funny? He’s just a puppet. 

I am finding this a very exciting show to do. In spite of having all those writers on board the best bits of the show seem to appear, as if by magic and as much as I take all day looking at stories and putting together the slide show, I always wonder how I will fill even 30 minutes and yet somehow it goes on for 80 minutes.

This one  felt like a good episode of Twitch from my point of view. There was another writers’ room sketch in which Lou Sanders made the decision to eat (I think) a kiwi fruit. It was a good decision. And a lively discussion about whether we should change the lyrics to A Fairytale of New York led to another moving finale. You can catch up on Twitch videos, or it will be out as a podcast and YouTube video very soon.

Sadly the viewing figures didn’t match the energy of the show, so we’re back to Thursday at 7.30pm next week. But hoping to have a new sketch for you by then. Will Marmite Lid and Brian Wasp (though he was in the writers’ room bit) be edged out? Or will the show just become four hours long. We’ll see.