I was on the panel show "Never Mind The Full Stops" this afternoon. I had done a TV pilot with the host Julian Fellows a couple of weeks ago and knew he was a posh and opinionated fellow, but I quite liked him. I assumed he had asked for me to be on the show, but I might have been wrong. But the connection made me keener to do it than I might otherwise have been. I didn't want to seem rude.
NMTFS is a BBC4 show and takes language and grammar as its themes. Grammar is not my strong point, but I figured that I had been asked on to be amusing rather than to educate anyone about anything.
The other panellists on my show were Vanessa Feltz (who I met in reception and who was fuming about her treatment when she recently appeared on "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" - don't know if she just does quiz shows with names which are puns of Sex Pistols album titles), Sharon Foster who wrote "BabyFather" and Paddy someone O'Connell?) who is on "Working Lunch".
As is often the case with these shows there was a writer who went through some of the questions with us. He gave us a notebook with samples of some of the stuff we could expect to come up. I didn't really see the point of this as if we didn't know the answers then having them in advance wouldn't help. I wasn't really bothered about winning or getting things right anyway, again assuming my job was to be funny, so I didn't think too hard about anything. Vanessa was a bit keener to fish for clues and certainly got substantial help on at least two things she didn't know.
The show itself though was a weirdly humiliating experience. It was me and Sharon versus Paddy and Vanessa. There was a very tiny studio audience and quite a weird atmosphere on set already. There was a woman fussing around about the buzzers which they'd had some problems with.
The first round involved having to correct the grammar in a sentence up on the screen. I couldn't really see all that much wrong with it immediately, but Fellows barked at us telling us how pathetic we were being and Feltz was immediately trying to butt in, putting up her hand and saying she knew the answer. It was very much like being at school and I was slightly overwhelmed by the speed we were expected to come up with answers and the amount of disdain the host seemed to have for us. I was aware that this was part of the point of the show, so didn't mind too much and made a few jokes about thinking I was going to be on Buzzcocks and the fact that I didn't really know much about grammar because I preferred to spend my time going out with women.
School swot Feltz tried to tell us where we were going wrong, but it seemed that any attempt to mess around got immediately stamped on. It was very reminiscent of my appearance on
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The next round was on the buzzer and was about the titles people give themselves to make their job sound more interesting. I can't even think of any of them now. It's kind of "occular enhancement engineer" is a window cleaner. I have always found that kind of thing irritating and didn't really know any of them.
But the round was on the buzzer and Sharon pressed early and her buzzer didn't work properly. At which Julian Fellows blew up chasitising the producers for not having sorted this out. It was quite an angry diatribe about how this happened on four shows out of four and how it wasn't good enough. It was hard to tell to begin with if he was joking, but it became clear he meant it. It's not something you see too often in TV. People are generally quite polite and patient over technical errors and whilst it must be annoying for the buzzers not to work, it didn't really take much to retake the moment. But the already tense atmosphere was made worse. Feltz, the keen-o was buzzing in fast and the other team were streaking ahead, so I tried to have a crack at a couple of the questions, but got them wrong and was again made to feel as if I was stupid. I can be competitive but I was surprised that this was being taken so seriously. I had sort of assumed that we'd be messing around a bit before coming up with the real answer, but there was no room for that. I decided to sit back and let the others get on with it.
After the next round where I managed to get one of the questions right, though was nervous by now and messed up my attempt to give the answer "Reverend Spooner" as "Speverend Rooner" so even looked stupid when I knew something. Sharon looked more lost than me through most of this, whilst Feltz got both her questions, though they were both ones that she hadn't known until she got some clues. If you watch the show and I sincerely hope that you won't, then you'll be able to tell the ones they didn't know, because they went through quite a funny pantomime of making it look like they were working it out at the time!
A woman came over to say that we weren't coming in enough. "Remember you've got hints in your notebooks," she said.
"No we haven't," I told her, "We've just got some of the questions written down. But if we don't know the answers then that's not much help is it?"
I tried some self deprecating humour about our pitiful failure, trying to claim that this was the kind of the show where you are actually probably a better person if you don't know the answers, but again I felt a bit closed down each time I tried to be funny. Fellows was certainly enjoying presenting a curmudgeonly persona, but it was embarrassing to be on the end of the hectoring and didn't make for a great performance or a very funny show. I wasn't enjoying it at all, but I think we may have been unlucky to be in a show where the host was particularly fractious.
We had to do a few retakes at the end of our complete defeat.
"That was an appalling display," quipped Fellows. I allowed the remark some room so my riposte could be edited out. "Oh fuck you" I spat back with a little venom. The audience laughed. I think even they felt that things had been unnecessarily unpleasant. Then I slightly blotted my copybook by saying that we'd have done better if we'd been given all the answers like Vanessa. This was ungentlemanly and not entirely the reason for our defeat, but I was just trying to be funny. Which was something I hadn't really had the opportunity to do.
It's certainly not my finest half hour and I left the building feeling a bit dirty. I think I have been spoiled by being on such a fun show as "Banter".
All TV is lies though. Remember that my friends.
