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This afternoon I headed down to Barnes for an interview with a magazine journalist. Knowing of my love of Addams Family Pinball he had tracked down a table and I was going to tell him what was so great about the game, as well as discuss my upcoming tour and so on.
The pub the table was in was called
“The Bear Kick”, which I thought was a bit of a coincidence as that’s one of the features of this particular pinball machine. As it turned out it wasn’t a coincidence. The owner was more of an obsessive than me, claiming he’d bought the pub because he didn’t have room for the machine at home. He’d done a beautiful job of preserving the machine too. When you come across old pinball machines (and indeed even when they were quite new) something was usually wrong with them, but this one had all the bits and everything worked. I was looking forward to playing the table for real after so many years (I think the last time I played it might have been
the one in the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street in 2003). Sadly I had been spoiled by my continual iPad Pinball Arcade app. The real machine was much trickier to play than the pretend one, requiring strength and guile and a readjustment in tactics. Had I had all day and not had a journalist talking to me as I tried to play I might have got back to my old school mastery of the table, but alas in the 15 or so games I played I struggled and got nowhere near even earning an extra ball, let alone a credit. It was a pleasure to see a table in such great condition though and it’s only a walk and a bus ride away, so who knows, I may return to see if I can get back to form.
I felt like the journalist must have thought I was a phoney Addams Family Pinball fan, so weak was I at the game. As impressed as I am that I can play the game in the bath thanks to modern technology, nothing can compare to the challenge of the huge real object.
Then I dashed across town for a meeting about a potentially fun charity gig that I will let you know more about very soon and then I went to see
Shappi Khorsandi at the Soho Theatre, which was very enjoyable. She skilfully gets to the nub of the ridiculous opinion that any progression for a female or ethnic comedian is positive discrimination, by pretending that show business is full of Iranian female comedians as a result. She’s a very engaging and relaxed performer and she speaks without bluster or anger, but that makes her political points all the more hard-hitting. What makes us British? It seems that many British people do not fit the stereotype of politeness, tolerance and acceptance.
And if you want about four hours of video stuff and 38 hours of audio stuff for £10 AND to help us fund future podcasts, we're getting rid of some surplus
kickstarter DVDs fro RHLSTP and AIOTM right now. £10 for the pair. And all that money will be spent on producing even more free content.
