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Sky Potato Ltd is now an official thing and today we had a business lunch to discuss our forthcoming series of AIOTM and how we are going to spend your money. I wanted to go to the Ritz and take a photo of us eating diamonds and tweet it, saying “Thanks for the free money”, but we just went to the pub and had a celebratory beer and burger as we mapped out roughly what might be possible and what our budget would be - we lose some of the kickstarter money to commission and tax, but also inevitably a few backers have their credit card declined, so we will have significantly less than the total raised. On the plus side we have the slowly accruing money from the monthly badges (though that has paid for one series of filming RHLSTP and also some of the costs of Meaning of Life). Also of course the ticket money will give us a bit more cash to play with (Book now and avoid the rush) Hopefully we can call in some favours and encourage some talented new people to get involved with the promise of showcasing their work and we will squeeze the value out of every penny you’ve given us. But it’s amazing how quickly £100,000 can be spent when trying to make a TV quality sketch show. I am confident we can make something exciting and groundbreaking and I envisage it as a patchwork quilt of stuff where some things will be shot on cinema quality cameras and some bits will be done on my iPhone, some stuff performed by brilliant actors and some of it being shoddily made puppets or Emma Kennedy in a poor wig. I have broadened the brief a bit so that it can include ideas that have occurred to me at any point (not just not on the week of recording) so that I can have a go at reimagining some old blog entries and stand up routines in a new setting, but I am going to try and keep up the original last minute feel of panic and madness for the studio bits. I had collected up the scripts we’re sending out as a reward to backers today and read one of them and was surprised about how good it was, given that I wrote all these in about 36 hours. It really explored some interesting concepts, had a cohesive feel and picked around with the format in a much more sophisticated way than I remembered (I liked a bit where we confusingly kept turning back time during one sketch so we could erase the last 30 seconds of action). I really don’t remember much about AIOTM as it passed in such a blur, but I am impressed by the invention and hard work of the me of 5 years ago. I know he tried to destroy the franchise to prevent the rubbish old me of the future from getting his hands on it, but whilst there are going to be some changes that might annoy some devotees (but other devotees would be annoyed if things were the same and other devotees will be annoyed that I resurrect old ideas even if I do them differently) I think we can make something that I can be proud of. My aim is to make the best programme possible, so I will be drawing on a lot of different things but exploring them in a new medium, whilst ditching a lot of the characters and tropes that people loved from the previous series.
Ultimately I will just try to make myself happy and hope that it makes most of you happy too. Because anything else will drive me insane. You already drive me insane. With all your why can’t everything be exactly what I want it to be madness.
Anyway, it’s all happening and really we won’t know what we can do until I have written some scripts. Which I am trying to get on with.
Just after lunch my phone beeped and told me that Victoria Wood had died. Well played 2016, I thought I was prepared for your next celebrity death, but didn’t see that coming. What a fucking cunt of a year it’s been. And to all the revolutionary comedians who set out to be revolutionary and change the world, she proved that you can be more revolutionary just getting on with what you do and doing it well. So horribly young and so horribly a surprise, but typical of her not to allow any wallowing in her illness. This year makes “I didn’t tell you I was ill” the epitaph of choice for the discerning celebrity.
My favourite one liner of hers “We’d just like to apologise to viewers in the North… it must be awful for you."
To turn this round to myself, as seems de rigour these days, I had been plucking up the courage to see if I could ask her to do RHLSTP (though I am not sure she would have done it, my feeling is that she might not have liked comedians of my ilk), but given I was too shy to talk to her the one time I was in the same room as her , I doubt I would have. You would think I had learned from standing behind Rik Mayall at the BP on Shepherd’s Bush Green. But I hadn’t. I am glad my wife was bolder than I.
A few of the guests I would love to have interviewed have died recently, but producer Ben pointed out none of the guests I have had on have ever died. Which would seem to suggest that appearing on RHLSTP makes you impervious to death. Something the big celebs that I am about to approach to be in the next series might want to consider.
