6244/19174
The day got off to a good start. Having driven across the horrible highways and byways of London I arrived a few minutes late and tried to find somewhere to park. The one space I could find was pretty small and I realised I wasn’t going to quite get in to it, so reversed without looking behind me. It’s a pretty quiet place and I would have been able to hear any traffic. Sadly I forgot that pedestrians had to cross the road behind me and I nearly ran over a man walking towards the studio.
I don’t know how close I got as I didn’t see him til much too late, but he looked pretty annoyed at nearly being hit by a car. And he had a point. It was a terrible bit of driving. He looked like an actor, and to be fair they are pretty disposable, but it would have been an inconvenience to me if I’d had to dispose off his corpse. But I was also aware that this man would be working in the next studio to me. Usually the atmosphere outside the studios is jovial as different actors chat and share stories, but when one of them has almost killed another it can be awkward.
I tweeted about the incident, pretending to think it was off of him to be annoyed with me and wondering why he was scowling at me all day. And pointing out I didn’t even know who he was. I was aware it was likely that he’d see the tweets and hoped he’d find it funny. Luckily he seemed to and later sat down with me to say he hadn’t been angry just surprised that he’d nearly been dispatched by Richard Herring. He also revealed he’d almost run over Ian Hislop on two occasions. So this was payback.
He joined in the joke on Twitter.
Also he looked pretty tough (and not just for a actor) so I was worried he might kill me. I should have taken him out when I had the chance.
So it was fun in the end. Would have been less fun if I had hit him in the car. Which I could easily have down.
It was a great day of recording - I wasn’t doing any acting, so could just watch the experts at work. And there was a scene that certainly seems like the funniest thing we’ve done on this show so far. We had tears of laughter running down our faces in the booth as Phil Davis hit all the right notes. But it was also a nice bit of writing and a scene that had just appeared from nowhere when I was really struggling early on and had no plot for episode 2 and then became the heart of the episode. I had come into this week not quite sure if I’d be happy with the scripts or not and suspecting there would be some hasty rewriting to do, but so far it’s pretty much been fine to good and I have been laughing A LOT.
Though we’ve only done stuff from the first three scripts so far and those are the ones that I had a proper second run at, so it might get more depressing as the week progresses.
Was all the pain and torment and fretting worth it? Is your happiness worth my pain? I guess that’s the trade off. And I get happiness and something like euphoria at the end of it, so maybe it’s not a terrible trade off.
