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I can't believe how much stuff I have at the old house still. After another personal training session (where I managed to do a plank with a 20kg bag on my back for 60 seconds and it was pimpsy) I went to get more stuff from my office and see if I could find my missing puppets, including Cocky Carrot, Birthday Donkey, whatever that weird rotten carrot character is, Marmite Lid and Brian the Wasp (if that was his name - I found a fucking huge one just before I packed up so I might have to bring him back).
I checked inside a few shoe boxes before I thankfully found my missing puppets. Birthday Donkey has been with me for well over 50 years and as much as he wants to die so the pain of his missing ears can end, I would be devastated to lose him.
So does this mean I might finally get to the 100th episode of Twitch of Fun? I hope so. Though now the kids go to bed a bit later, evenings are tricky to do and I am usually falling asleep by 8pm, but there's nothing to stop me doing the shows in the daytime. I might lose some of my audience. But half of nothing is nothing.
I also collected my Taskmaster Champion of Champions trophy and the sword I tried to kill the Loch Ness Monster with and the oar that commemorates my victory in the Other Boat Race (
from 20 years ago! What?)
What a life I've led. Though those are the only 3 things that have happened to me.
Anyway, what a relief to have found my lost friends!
Seedy E on Bluesky linked to an old TMWRNJ cold open that occasionally comes up on social media. On our live BBC2 show, on the day of the London Marathon we'd dressed up as twin Jimmy Savile's, deliberately done the worst impressions ever and heavily implied that the DJ superstar had some kind of interest in corpses. I ended up by saying "How's about that then guys and GIRLS?" which might also be taken to imply that he had some interest in female children.
I don't think that latter one was my intention (though can't be sure as it's certainly odd). I just wanted to do the worst impression possible and maybe point out how crap Savile's patter was.
It's often suggested that we and others knew more about what was going on than was being said, but the truth is that Savile was dogged by all sorts of rumours - the main one I'd heard was about necrophilia more than the paedo version of philia (and the negative connotations of the phile suffix have really wrecked it for people with an innocent interest in France or books). For people to say they had no idea about anything surrounding this man is ridiculous as these were stories you could pick up in any school playground (again the only thing you should be picking up from a school playground). I assumed these stories were similar to the ones about Marc Almond or Jim Bowen. I would later find I had one attached to me - that I supposedly liked to get women back to my hotel room and make them dance for me whilst I sat in a high-backed armchair pleasuring myself. I might have added the high-backed armchair bit myself and certainly the addition of a semi-circular toilet mat.
No smoke without fire?
I can promise you, as much as I wanted to get women to come to my hotel room with me, on the occasions when they agreed to do so I wasn't going to waste time (or anything else) watching them dance.
So just as I assumed no hospital would pump a man's stomach of sperm, then send the sperm to the laboratory so that scientists could determine how many different men (and dog)'s sperm had been ingested, I assumed that the rumours about Savile were similarly grossly comedic. Especially the having sex with corpses one as that is literally a crime where the victim can never tell, so how would people know?
I didn't like Jimmy Savile and he certainly gave off vibes, but none of us knew any more than we'd heard in the school playground. What I do remember is that if we ever wrote jokes about him that implied anything scurrilous that our producer would say it wasn't worth putting them in the show because Savile was so litigious that the BBC couldn't afford to take the chance. And I think that's the real reason that he got away with it all. A mixture of made-up rumours diluted the terrible truth and people assumed it was an urban myth. Certainly some people might well have had a better idea of what was happening, but not us. I got my info from Fairlands playground (when I was also a child, I wasn't hanging around playgrounds).
I don't know how we got away with doing it in TMWRNJ. It was a different producer so maybe he didn't care or know about Savile's litigious nature or maybe because we were oblique enough about it all or maybe no one was watching so we could say what we like. Ironically that producer would later be embroiled in his own scandal. Perhaps it's true that everyone who works in TV is a monster.
And the fact that I can not get on TV proves I am not one. Or that I am so monstrous that even the monsters don't want to be associated with me.
It's not proof that people knew what was going on, but it is proof that it's ridiculous for anyone to claim that they'd heard nothing. Everyone had heard rumours of some kind. If we'd thought they were definitely true then I am not sure we'd have been making jokes.
That high-backed armchair thing is rubbish though....
No, it really is.
The more I deny it the truer it looks.
Birmingham date added to the Can I Have My Ball Back? tour second leg.
All the dates are here. Perfect Christmas gift. As always every ticket sale is both appreciated and fought for. If you saw the show and liked it, please let your friends know. If you didn't see it - COME AND SEE IT!
