It's been another busy week with lots of dashing around from place to place and I had to get up early and a bit hungover from Cheddar ale to drive home to London to write AIOTM.
My brain though was not playing ball and I was getting nowhere with the script. There wasn't much that had grabbed my attention in the news this week and though I have had a week full of incident none of the stuff was seeming to lend itself to working in sketch or stand up form. I managed to put together a skit based on my brief meeting with Neve Campbell, but nothing else was sticking or working. It felt very much like this could be the first week where I majorly failed to get a script together.
But for once I didn't have a gig in the evening and finally the fug started to clear at about 8. I watched some telly and was a little bit inspired both by the fact that Jedward on the X Factor reminded me of the ghosts of Victorian chimney sweeps (look in their eyes as they sing - they seem confused by our world) and also by Danni Minogue seeming to have only just realised after all this time what the X Factor is about. "Is this a singing competition?" she kept asking. I wondered if perhaps Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap had just leapt into her, hence her confusion and there was at last, the beginnings of an idea for the show.
I also saw a clip of Peter Kay on Children in Need and whilst one must admire him for all the work he has put in for charity, there was something a bit galling about the self-promotion he insisted on crow-barring in. He reminded people that tickets for his Manchester MEN arena gig would be on sale on Saturday morning (not that he needed to publicise himself, inevitably he sold out tickets for 20 nights in this massive venue in just an hour on Saturday morning) and then promised to give a pound from every piece of merchandise sold to Children in Need. Which seemed a bit like a cynical ploy to sell more merch, which he is presumably making a lot of money off himself (as if selling out an arena for 20 nights and bringing out a DVD would not net him enough money as it is). I felt churlish being angry about it given that he was doing something for charity, but in many ways that made it the perfect subject for comedy. I could slag him off whilst at the same time revealing my own pettiness and jealousy. Things were slowly taking shape. But I still had a long way to go and had to hope that in the morning I would wake with a clearer head and a jolt of inspiration.
