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Well if you’d told me earlier in the week that I’d end up bidding against Louis Spence to see which of us could put the most elastic bands on our faces, I’d have said that I found that unlikely, unless I ended up as a last minute booking on some new panel show.
But you didn’t tell me that, did you? Though it’s feasible that you might have had some suspicion about it if you work on the production team of Celebrity Game Night.
Though if you do work on Celebrity Game Night and earlier in the week someone had said, “Richard Herring will be a guest on this on Thursday,” I think you would have said “Who’s Richard Herring?” And not be reading this blog.
Anyway, somehow and who knows the reasons, yesterday I got an email asking if I’d like to be a contestant on the show. I assume they book the less important people first and then save the real big names for the last possible second.
But, as you know, I love going on TV to be on the losing side in quiz shows and I like these fun silly shows like House of Games and Taskmaster where you got paid for doing stupid things, like letting Louis Spence put the elastic bands on his face, because you think he can’t do 18 in 30 seconds like he claims, but also, you don’t really want to do it anyway (though I have to say, both the attempt and the aftermath might be some of the funniest moments I’ve seen on a show like this). So I said I’d do it.
The wonderful Liza Tarbuck was hosting and team captains were ex-RHLSTPs Danny Baker and Susan Calman (maybe one of them had put in a word for me) and I briefly spied the actor Kevin Eldon who was working on the script side of things. It was the participation of these people that made me think it might be a good laugh. And indeed it was. I was on Danny’s team with Denise Van Outen and Kimberley Wyatt. I am sure the fact was mutual, but I didn’t really know who Kimberley was (but my fame is so small that the sound man guessed I was another guest and one of the make-up people asked if I’d been in yet, when I was sitting in the chair being made up). I mean, Jesus Christ, I was sitting next to a Pussycat Doll all night and had no idea! I liked her, she looked shy and quiet, but had a great sense of fun and once we’d played a game where we had to mime words whilst wearing big wooden hands, we were firm friends. I’d say, has my career come to this? Except in a way it’s sort of wonderful.
On the other team along with Louis were Iain Stirling (a RHEFP guest) and Amanda Abbington who I will be seeing again on Monday on RHLSTP. Strange that fate had thrown us together, but it gives us something to discuss on my show too.
There was even a bar on the set, so I was encouraged to get drunk as we played. How is this something that a grown man can get paid for? I don’t know, but I am not questioning it. I don’t have much of a social life any more, so I am happy to party with some people I don’t know very well for money, like some kind of party prostitute.
And I am fairly good value on these things due to my competitive nature and inability to win in spite of being the best at everything. There was a moment though when I got up to exuberantly argue a point at the same time as Denise and she banged her head into my arm. And she’s recovering from quite a nasty broken foot so it’d have been a shame if I’d broken her head too. Luckily she was fine. But in an alternate universe I have woken up in prison charged with her manslaughter. But I am innocent. Innocent I tell you.
So a surreal and tipsy night, but to find out if my team won, or obviously lost and to find out if this show is as much fun to watch as it is to play (I suspect not, but most of the audience stayed in the studio, even though things over ran badly) then tune into Channel 5 next March!
Oh and we're doing some speical edition Emergency Questions books. If you want one that I've drawn a rude snowman (all slightly different) and written Happy Christmas and signed, then you're in luck. And we're also doing a limited run of 100 books which are signed, numbered and will have an exclusive new hand-written emergency question in. £5 of each sale goes towards the podcast fund.
