Another full day.
In the morning me and Andrew Collings recorded two podcasts -
Number 23 is up now and then we did another one for next week, when I'll be in Edinburgh and Andrew won't be. Talking for over two hours can be a bit too much and we got mildly hysterical in the second one, but I think it is still pretty funny. You'll have to wait til next Friday to find out.
The next podcast we record will be live at the Underbelly in front of an audience at 10.30am on 6th August. Tickets are free (although apparently you might have to pay 80p administration fee - might not be the case if you phone) and you can book them
here. Please only book if you are definitely going to come. I am looking forward to doing it with an audience. Will be interesting to see how it changes the dynamic.
Anyway, on podcast 23 I had fun rubbishing homeopathy, which Collings loves and believes in and told my stories about being cajoled into some alternative medicine stuff by a former girlfriend. I had an allergy test in which I had to hold glass vials containing a certain food, then had an electric current passed through me and a dial moved one way of the other to indicate if I was allergic to the substance or not. Which is pretty ridiculous on many levels. Not least of which, glass does not conduct electricity and so even if electricity was capable of magically discerning allergies, how does it know what is inside a vial that it can not penetrate. To be honest I have a bit of a problem with believing that electricity has any cognitive abilities in any case. I mainly didn't like the test as it told me I was allergic to all the things I like, so it was convenient to rubbish it. Madman Collings (someone describes him on iTunes as "a slightly demented librarian" which is brilliant) sent me
this link which apparently explains the "science". But I think the oat milk quaffing, otherwise fairly rational guru has his tongue slightly in his cheek over this one.
I was slightly worried that we might get into a genuine argument over this, as we are very much on different sides of the fence on this one and I would never really want to offend him (or his mother), but he took my ranting quite well and with patience. I like it when you have a friend who you can disagree with and still remain civil with and not take umbrage. But Collings is not my friend. He is merely my colleague. My slightly demented colleague, who believe electricity can make judgement an that water has a memory. Like mother, like son.
And I must be right. Look at my angelic halo!
In the afternoon I headed over to my friend Al Murray's house to record the intro for my show. Al, an exceptionally busy man, has done this for me every year since Christ on a Bike. He has software on his computer that enables him to mix music and speech. I could probably do this on my Mac, but don't understand the first thing about it. Plus he has a proper microphone, which we all know must trump my internal one!
We had a pint to celebrate his birthday (which was a while ago, but I haven) - the barman recognising Al, the Pub Landlord and refusing to take payment. If only I had thought of doing that character then I could be enjoying free drinks for life. What a brilliant perk.
But no time to enjoy more than one free drink as I had to drive over to Croydon (I don't really like to drive if I have drunk at all, but one pint is allowed) for my penultimate preview at the Warehouse Theatre.
I have previewed most of my shows here since "Playing Hide and Seek With Jesus", which I realise with a jolt was ten years ago. (We might have done Punk's Not Dead here too - but I don't think so and it was too small to do Excavating Rita)
It was very hot in there and before I went on, Graham the guy doing the tech opened the fire escape doors to let in some air. I stepped out on to the fire escape and experienced another time quake. It seemed like only yesterday that I'd been sitting out there with the "Jesus" cast, waiting to go on to do the show. As usual there was that slight discombobulation of being somewhere that you'd been so long ago, but which seemed so recent. But it made me happy to think of those days. I made some really good friends amongst that cast and though I usually wasn't in the play, I did sometimes substitute for Paul Putner, as I did at the Warehouse I believe. It was a lot of fun doing shows with a big cast in Edinburgh. Expensive though. There are advantages to being a one man band, but I miss the camaraderie.
It was another solid performance, still too long, but I will deal with that next week. Then I walked back to the slightly scary multi-storey car park, passing intimidating men who looked like that might stab me as soon as look at me. I couldn't find a ticket machine that worked and thought I might be trapped in this desolate place forever. Then the one I found wouldn't accept my two pound coin. I had a bucket of change in the car (literally - I could have borrowed from the SCOPE collection), but my ticket was in the machine along with part of my payment and I was worried that by the time I had returned someone might have used the machine and taken my ticket and then I would have been properly stuck.
Luckily I managed to get it to take a fiver on the third time of trying.
I was home just before midnight. What a lot I had got done.
