Another good show, with an audience of nearly 250. On a Tuesday? What's going on? The guy who runs the theatre told me that he had wanted to extend the run, but that can't happen due to the tour, which is a little bit of a shame, but I can't deny the people of Keswick just because everyone in London is clamouring to see me here (and let's not start thinking about what percentage of the population of this city have attended the show so far, because suddenly my "success" looks less impressive).
So only four more days to see me the show if you are a cockerney. And unprepared to travel to Windsor.
Doing this run is like a mini version of Edinburgh in that I find myself slipping into the kind of days I have up there. It's surprisingly tiring (though most of this might be down to the socialising I have been doing with the friends who are good enough to show up) and it is hard to get to sleep before about 2am on a show night, so I spent today in a slightly comatose state, watching TV, playing dominoes on my Nintendo DS and trying to go back to sleep. I have anotherf script to write and the first deadline has already whooshed past my ears and yet it's very hard to get up the required energy.
I thought the show might suffer tonight, but of course performing totally recuperates me and by the end of it I am unable to sleep for a good four hours. Tonight lots of friends came along and I didn't go too crazy on the wine and had a very pleasant time. The audience was packed with celebrities. When I say packed, there was the bloke in the pink kilt from Balamory (he always wears those clothes, Balamory is a documentary), Janet Ellis from Blue Peter and Ted Danson faced pianist, Richard Thomas from TMWRNJ (what's he done since then? Absolutely nothing. The loser). And Ben Moor from Planet Mirth. Plus one of the people in the new series "Rush Hour". OK, so I am hardly in the Ricky Gervais league yet, but surely this is just the start of things and I'll be hob-nobbing with Bob De Niro and David Bowie soon. I fully intend to give up all my non-famous friends when I am famous. Because I prefer the shallow world of hanging around with people who I am slightly in awe of and who I have nothing in common with except money and exposure.
Ben Moor and Archie from Balamory will not be famous enough for me then and they will go on the rubbish heap with all the other non-celebrity friends. Don't tell them that, because at the moment I am enjoying the relative glamour of being seen in their company. But soon I will be moving on to hanging about with David Dickinson and Patrick Marber and then up to the next division where Jason Orange and Ade Edmondson are kings. But before long I will be up in the premiership with Jude Law and Elton John and all the other people who are only friends with other people of a similar fame to them. Because nothing is better than playing tennis with Jonathan Ross and that is the kind of peak I am hopeful of getting to. I might joke around about this when I am famous, pretending that I am not really swayed by it and that it's all ironic. But the thing is I will still be doing it. And enjoying it. And not be friends with any of the people I used to be friends with. Only the empty-headed monsters of the show-biz A list.
Janet Ellis will stay my friend throughout, partly as a thank you for all the good work she did in the
O for Oranges episode of Jigsaw. Also if I hang around her long enough I will have a chance to get to know Sophie and then in 20 years time, any daughter she might have.
Don't think I have changed with all my celebrity friends. I may be moving up in the world, but I haven't changed. And the reason I am keen to drop all my non-celebrity friends is that they are all idiots. I hate them all and have been forced to hang around with them to save me from the dreaded grasp of loneliness. But as you can see the good times are about to roll. And I won't forget about any of you lot either. To forget about something you have to have given it a moment's thought at some point in my life. And I don't think about you. You aren't even close to celebrity, why would I want to be your friend? Yeah, so your dad knew Science from Big Brother's history teacher. Big deal! I need more than that. I am very good friends with someone from Planet Mirth.
Two people in fact. It is in many ways Emma Kennedy's finest hour. It will be on her gravestone. Not that it's good, just that she hasn't done anything better in her life, either personally or professionally.
But now is not the time for Kennedy-bating. It is time for me to say that in a town of 20 million people, I sold 250 tickets tonight, meaning one in every hundred thousand Londoners was in the audience. And about one in 50 of those people was the kind of celebrity that people might have looked at and said, "I know him from somewhere, isn't he my dad's accountant? My dad knows Science from Big Brother's history teacher, by the way. Yes it would be a better story if he had been his science teacher. What of it?"
I am the king of the world.
