Happy St George's Day! To celebrate someone sent me a link to
this Histor's Eye sketch. I think Pliny might genuinely be the funniest thing Stewart Lee has ever done. How these two are not the most beloved comedy characters of the last twenty years I have no idea.
Ei-dear, like an ei, which is German for egg.
I recall filming these all very quickly in the same day, when we were already quite weary from a week of filming, arm aching from holding up the heavy puppets, hot and hoarse. If you watch some others you can hear the fatigue in my voice, which varies wildly in accent and see my poor puppeteering- in one when Histor is meant to be beating Pliny his wing is about a foot away from his body and he usually is facing in the wrong direction. I'd like to claim that was deliberate, me brilliantly acting the amateurishness required, but it's not. But sometimes when you need to get someone to act something that is meant to be shit it's better to get someone who is genuinely shit, rather than someone good who is pretending.
My car was in for MOT today and I used the waiting time to have a coffee and do some thinking about a film idea. It took longer than expected as I needed new tyres and I'd finished my coffee and needed a wee so popped into a nearby pub. A strange pub in a small town in the middle of the afternoon is a weird place. Partly because you don't know what kind of place it will be - might be welcoming and friendly or it might be one where they don't care for strangers coming in and ordering a glass of fizzy mineral water and might pummel him to death. The barmaid seemed to have some difficulty finding my drink on her till, which suggests it's not a favourite of the clientele, so maybe a pummeling was on the way.
Mainly though, of course, a pub in the middle of the afternoon is pretty much empty, because most people are either working, or understand that in general drinking is something to save for the evening. So it feels strange and wrong to be in this place of sociability when there is practically no one around, but also curious as to what brings the other two or three men here at this time.
I have worked in pubs and always liked the diehard regulars, whilst still being intrigued about how and why they spent most of their life sitting on the same stool drinking the same drink. Is it sad, is it brilliant or is it none of my business? A bit of all of these things. But it was certainly something that I was thinking about as we wrote "Time Gentlemen Please", which featured a pub with five customers who were pretty much always there and chose to sit in the same seats even though there was always a choice. Everyone is trying to ignore the pervasive smell of tragedy under it all, acting as if this is normality and yet there's always the chance that the tragedy is in fact everywhere other than the pub. After all, whilst all those other chumps are working, you're in here getting slowly drunk.
This afternoon in this pub in Harpenden there were only two or three other customers, but I think they were only popping in for one drink rather than permanent residents - and I am really just observing not judging here, after all I work at unusual times so know that not everyone's days run 9 to 5.
Whilst writers might fancifully hope that men drinking in a pub in the afternoon would be full of philosophy and wisdom, the disparate chat this afternoon was mainly about football and how Chelsea would obviously get beaten in Europe. There was a man cleaning the windows who had noticed that there were a lot of teenage kids loitering around in town today and was asking the barmaids if their kids had a day off from school. But one of the barmaids' kids were off sick and the other's were at school, so the mystery of the more kids than usual loitering around the chip shop was never solved.
I had hoped that by sitting in this pub for 40 minutes I might get enough material for a brilliant drama, but the fact is that if most plays exactly emulated life they'd be even more shit than the ones that people make up.
There was more life in the swimming pool where I went once my car was ready, in fact a bit too much. Although lane swimming was in operation when I arrived, within two minutes I had to move to the family part of the pool as there was some kind of after school thing for kids (why couldn't they all have been skiving?). This seemed a poor state of affairs as the other half of the pool was full of kids who weren't part of the more official club and so I had to swim in zig zags to avoid the annoying brats who were jumping and swimming in circles with no regard for anyone else. But I remember when I was a kid I used to be annoyed by the huffing adults who thought they owned the pool asking, "Don't they remember what it was like to be a kid?"
Well, I do remember, clearly, but it doesn't make me any more predisposed to be forgiving. I only managed 15 minutes.
This was my first swim since I got married and I was alarmed to realise that the motion of my strokes along with the lubrication of the water meant my wedding ring moved effortlessly up my finger and had I not been paying attention would have fallen into the child clogged water. I managed to hold on to it, but now had even more sympathy for my mum who lost her wedding ring in a swimming pool. I am not confident that I am going to manage to hold on to this thing for life.
But it gave me a new Dragon's Den invention idea for a massive full finger thimble that you slip over your ring finger when you're swimming - they could come in all kinds of designs, like iPhone covers and look really cool. And off the top of my head I'd call them Fingbles. Anyone want to invest?
