Objective part 3 tonight and the worry was that the tube strike might have an impact on the audience size. Plus it also meant I had to find some other way into town and I decided to bike it. If God wanted to take me I was making it easy for him. It was quite a hairy 40 minute ride into town - you certainly have to keep your wits about you as a cyclist in London, but I managed to find a slightly less fraught back street route for the second half of the journey and although it got a bit hot and sweaty I was impressed with my fitness levels. Door to door it was probably quicker than the tube and the return journey was like an 80 minute gym trip into the bargain. I have mainly used my bike for 2 or 3 mile trips before, but maybe I will do this a bit more from now on.
I was tired enough without the stress and exercise though and worried that I might not be on top form for the recording. We headed out to do some vox pops to find out if English people knew when St George's Day was. On the way out we bumped into Nicholas Parsons who was at the Beeb doing some interviews for his new book. Coincidentally I had just that morning watched a clip of Nicholas on
The Arthur Haynes show and yet here he was forty or fifty years later, still on the go. He is 87 next week and yet has a work ethic and a schedule that seems to put even me to shame. But he remembered me (asking about my moustache) and asked me what I was up to. I told him about the series and that we'd already done the moustache and the hoodie. "What did you do about the Goodies?" he asked. I wished I had been trying to reclaim the Goodies, but corrected his mishearing. He slightly sadly recalled that the Goodies (amongst many others) had joked about him in their series. "I am sure it was affectionate," I said.
"Oh no, it wasn't!" replied Mr Parsons.
I laughed, because he was almost certainly correct, but said "Yes, but where are the Goodies now, Nicholas? And you're still going strong."
He is a remarkable man and although he has certainly had his knockers if you listen to him on Just a Minute or are lucky enough to get a chance to have a chat with him, you will know how lively his mind is. Even though he had been complaining mildly about all the interviews his publisher was putting him through, he had a lot to say on the subject of Englishness and pretty much insisted that we interview him about it. In the end we couldn't use this in the show, but he made some good points about how he saw himself as British - despite seeming like the epitome of the Englishman he also has Scottish heritage. His book, if you're interested,
is available here.
Sheila Stefel also passed by as we sat and chatted, just to help me with my iSpy book of British comedy greats.
The Radio theatre was packed with the biggest audience of the series, so the tube strike hadn't put people off and they were very much up for the show, even if tiredness meant that I made quite a lot of slip ups. There was a great atmosphere and the show whizzed by and after all the effort and strain and worry turned out to be a good one. There was some very rude and offensive banter that won't make it into the show, but the work on getting the argument in the right order had all been worth it. I tried not to think about the week that lies ahead of me or even of the bike ride home - I wasn't sure I had enough energy left to make it, but that's another one down and I am sure I will manage to pull off the two shows that I have to write from scratch in the next seven days!
I got home OK to the news that another of our elder comedy statesmen Norman Wisdom had died, though in a sense this just made my meeting with Nicholas, one of the last men standing from that important time for comedy, all the more poignant. We had tried to get Norman Wisdom on This Morning With Richard Not Judy, to appear in our Norman Wisdom on acid sketch. He would have been in his eighties then, so it's not a massive surprise that he didn't want to and he might have found the sketch a bit racy or difficult to understand or perhaps he worried (incorrectly) that we were mocking him. But we did it anyway and somehow it seems like a fitting tribute evenso.
Watch it here.
