I spent most of the morning watching and rewatching Adam Buxton's very funny new video
"In Your Face". I can't quite explain why I found it so amusing, but it made me laugh more every time I saw it. It must be hard to be a comedy executive:
Adam: What I want to do is make a short film in which mes of different sizes, dressed in Superman costumes, dance around and sing "In Your Face" aggressively for a few seconds and then disappear.
Executive: I don't really see why that would be funny or a good use of a few hours in a TV studio.
Adam: But it would be funny.
Executive: No, you can't film it at our expense.
Of course nowadays we don't need the stuffy old TV execs in their suits and ties (apart from for my latest project- all the ones who are working on that are cool) and Adam can just film that idea himself, put it up on the internet and prove that inexplicably it is ridiculously funny (to some people - people with their sense of humour extracted might just think it is silly [funny how many of them end up working at TV executives in the comedy department]). Vive La Revolution.
It's hard to know what is going to be funny until you've actually done it sometimes, but that one tickled me. I hope Buxton is back on 6Music again soon! And so does everyone else. Apart from Andrew Collings.
Meanwhile the Oxford Times printed up
its article about me and it turned out the complaints about the show had come from Dr Ken Stallard, a man who had been the spiritual advisor to the Kray twins and who had conducted Reggie Kray's funeral service, saying of the twins "In both of these men were depths of spiritual feeling which the world never saw or knew. So many people preferred to look at the bad rather than the good." So it's saying something that he is so withering about me and it turns out my crime of putting on a show that he has never seen is more reprehensible and less forgivable than being one of the Kray twins! I do "little for the reputation of this country", unlike Reggie Kray. Blimey!
You will see that the journalist chose to ignore all the stuff I said about the show not really being very blasphemous and decided not to make the point that the complainant hadn't seen the show and just quote me saying the more confrontational part of my long email. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised that a journalist would try to make the issue more sensationalist rather than report it in a clear and fair way, but I have noticed a few of the people I have talked to on the phone attempting to create a story here, without really being too bothered about the truth of what is in the show. I think it's faintly irresponsible for them to give this much credence to one person, who seems to have an agenda and who has no real idea what I actually say or do in the 90 minutes I am on stage. Much as I suspect he might not like some of it, I would prefer that the people writing and talking about it all had at least given the script a cursory look before they open their mouths or their laptops. But in the pursuit and creation of a story they would probably just write about me talking about Jesus' cock or breaking the Unforgivable Sin (tonight I explained about that and said given that I was already damned I might as well really lay into the Holy Ghost and accused him of some of the nastier and more notorious unsolved crimes of recent years) or daring to crucify Jesus on stage, rather than providing any kind of context. After all, the story is all that matters. Never mind your responsibility if that story then gets whipped up by more people who haven't seen the show and escalates.
I got a good laugh tonight reading out the story, especially the bit where it describes me as a TV comic. That's how little research has gone into all this.
Anyway, aside from all this it was a really lovely show tonight - a smart audience in a tightly packed venue enabled me to depart from the script on several occasions and come up with some interesting avenues for exploration in the next few shows. Might have been the best one of the tour so far, though surprisingly it's only the 5th gig (it feels like way more). Very encouraged by the number of tickets I am selling, so do book ahead folks if you're coming. I think there are still 64 more gigs to go (including the DVD record on 18th May at the Leicester Square Theatre) so there is a long way to go in every sense, but I am still looking forward to it and still finding new stuff in the show even after the number of times I have done it already. But if you include the London dates I am about a third of the way through the tour, and feel remarkably fresh given that fact.
