Collings and me (but mainly me) have made the news. Last night at the theatre I was interviewed about my thoughts on internet comedy. It came in light of Lee Hurst complaining about people (apparently) filming his gigs, putting them on Youtube and (possibly) stealing his jokes. Because of my long running blog and quite long running podcast, and appearance with
the heckler on Youtube, Channel 4 wanted to talk to me about the positive side of comedy ending up on the web and whether it was a help or a hindrance.
It seems to me that giving away all this stuff for free and having some of my stand up and old TV shows on Youtube has only helped me. People who want to steal jokes can do so with a pen and paper or even their memory, just as well as they can with a cameraphone. Certainly from comments at the gigs I know that some people at least are paying to see me live because of what they've seen or heard for free via the internet.
In any case, money isn't everything (whatever we claim in the podcast) and it's good to do things because they are fun or because they are good and not worry about getting financial rewards. Which is all well and good until you run out of food. But I think my current surplus of paid work is at least partly down to the stuff I have given away for free.
Anyway, they had filmed me at the theatre yesterday and today wanted to film Andrew and me recording the podcast in my attic. It would have been too disruptive to have them there during the real thing so we did a little pretend podcast for their benefit. They asked Collings for a few comments too. He was so excited to be on telly talking about something that hadn't happened in 1983 was a delightful thing to see. I hope he gets edited out.
It should be on the Channel 4 news on Friday evening and apparently will be on the More 4 news at 8pm. Once we just talked about the news, now we are the news. Though we are slightly concerned that the whole thing was just a set up and really Channel 4 are doing an item about how we fund our podcast buns. It's a murky world where the occasional idiot slips us a fiver which we buy coffee and treats with in return for getting theri name mentioned and Channel 4 could blow the whole thing open.
The
actual podcast was rather a good one, I think, despite the fact that we couldn't get the podcast studio working and suspect that last week's podcast was recorded on the computer internal mike anyway, so all those of you who thought it sounded better are shown to be suggestible fucking idiots.
We had fun talking about various forms of unacceptable peeping tommery, including a new perversion that I would have been unaware of if it were not for the sterling pervert spreading work of Guardian Women called
Upskirting. Collings seemed suspiciously anxious to defend the practice, but then he is nearly 44 and a strange and twisted man. I also managed to completely libel my nephew, but I don't think he listens to the podcast, so suspect I will get away with it. He reads the blog, but luckily he's too stupid to make the connection. And too busy smashing all my favourite mugs. Given my own stories of childhood hole boring and downblousing then I don't suppose I can be too critical of other perverts.
See us on the news tomorrow.
It will be the only time Collings gets on the news. Until he is caught upskirting.
